Harry Wilkinson, a reporter for the Daily News, testified as follows:
“On Thanksgiving Day, last year, I heard Mr. Parsons speak on the Market Square. He advised the workingmen who were present (there were several hundred there), to stand together, and to use force in procuring their rights. He told them that they were slaves; that out of a certain sum of money the per cent. they got was too small; it ought to be more evenly divided with the man who employed them. I don’t recollect that he said at that time anything as to the means or manner of force to be used, or against whom.
“Last January I had several conversations with Mr. Spies, probably half a dozen. I first saw Mr. Spies a few days after the 1st of January of this year in regard to the matter published in this paper (indicating copy of Chicago Daily News of January 13, 1886). I wrote up the result of my talk with Mr. Spies for that paper; it was not all published. I inquired of Spies about an explosive which had been placed on Judge Lambert Tree’s steps, and one that was placed in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad offices, and he emphatically denied that those machines were either made or placed by Socialists or Anarchists, and proved it by showing me that they were entirely different in character to those used by the Socialists. He showed me this bomb (indicating), which he described as the Czar; I took it with me. He spoke of the wonderful destructive power of the Czar bomb; said it was the same kind that had been used by Nihilists in destroying the Czar. I told him that I thought it was a pretty tall story, and he became somewhat excited and produced this, and said that there were others, larger than that, run by mechanical power—clock-work bombs—and he gave me that in a small room adjoining the counting-room office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He denied that those things were made at the Arbeiter-Zeitung office; he said they were made by other persons and that there were several thousand of them in Chicago distributed, and that at some times they were distributed through the Arbeiter-Zeitung office; that those who could make bombs made more than they could use, and those that could make them gave them to those that could not; that that one was one of the samples. I asked Mr. Spies if I could take that (the bomb) and show it to Mr. Stone, and I took it over there and didn’t bring it back. On another occasion, Mr. Spies and Mr. Gruenhut and myself went to dinner together, and he told us there about the organization of their people in a rather boastful manner; how they had gone out on excursions on nice summer mornings, some miles out of the city, and practiced throwing these bombs; the manner of exploding them; that they had demonstrated that bombs made of compound metal were much better than the other kind, and that a fuse bomb with a detonating cap inside was by far the best; and how at one attempt made in his presence one of their machines had been exploded in the midst of a little grove, and that it had entirely demolished the scenery; blown down four or five trees.
SOCIALISTIC BOMBS,
As illustrated in Daily News of Jan. 14, 1886,
from specimens shown and description given by August Spies.
He further described to me some very tall and very strong men, who could throw a large-size bomb weighing five pounds, fifty paces; and stated how, in case of a conflict with the police or militia, when the latter would come marching up a street, they would be received by the throwers formed in the shape of the letter V in the mouth of the street just crossing the intersection, illustrating this by taking some little toothpicks out of a vase on the table, laying them down and making a street intersection. He stated the militia would probably not stay to see a second or a third bomb go off. If the conflict should occur at any of the principal street intersections in the city, some of those organized men would be on the tops of houses ready to throw bombs overboard among the advancing troops or police. All these matters had been investigated; the men were all thoroughly trained and organized. The means of access to the house-tops of street intersections was a matter of common information among their adherents. He said they had no leaders; one was instructed as well as another, and when the great day came each one would know his duty and do it. I tried to find out when this would probably occur, and he did not fix the date precisely or approximately at that time. At another of those interviews he said it would probably occur in the first conflict between the police and the strikers; that if there would be a universal strike for this eight-hour system there would probably be a conflict of some sort brought about in some way between the First and Second Regiment of the Illinois National Guards and the police, and the dynamite upon the other hand. In trying to get at the probable number of them, I understood him that there were probably eight or ten thousand.
“He spoke of other larger bombs, as large as a cigar-box, to be exploded by electricity, which would be placed under a street in case they decided to barricade any section of the city, that they had experimented with. That certain members of the organization had in their possession a complete detail, maps and plans of the underground system of the city. That these machines would either destroy everybody that was above them when they went off, or so tear up the street as to make it impassable. He told me that the ordinary dynamite of commerce was about a 60 or 66 per cent. dynamite; that they made a finer quality by importing infusorial earth and mixing it themselves; that was about a 90 per cent. quality. He showed me no dynamite. I don’t think he gave me any information about Herr Most’s ‘Science of Revolutionary Warfare.’ I understood that the object of all this was the bettering of the workingmen’s condition by the demolition of their oppressors. He vaguely spoke of a list of prominent citizens who might suddenly be blown up one at a time or all at once. I frequently said that I didn’t believe much in the story he told me. He simply uttered the renewed declarations.
CHART OF STREET WARFARE.
As published in Daily News, Jan. 14, 1886.