If the opinions of the court were good, Spies held there was “no person in this country who could not be lawfully hanged,” and maintained that they ought to be exempted from responsibility because they had sought to bring about reforms. Then he turned to the labor movement and pronounced his anathema against the wealthy classes.
“If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement—the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery—the wage slaves—expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand. You can’t understand it. You don’t believe in magical arts, as your grandfathers did, who burned witches at the stake, but you do believe in conspiracies; you believe that all these occurrences of late are the work of conspirators! You resemble the child that is looking for his picture behind the mirror. What you see and what you try to grasp is nothing but the deceptive reflex of the stings of your bad conscience. You want to ‘stamp out the conspirators’—the agitators? Ah! stamp out every factory lord who has grown wealthy upon the unpaid labor of his employés. Stamp out every landlord who has amassed fortunes from the rent of overburdened workingmen and farmers. Stamp out every machine that is revolutionizing industry and agriculture, that intensifies the production, ruins the producer, that increases the national wealth, while the creator of all these things stands amidst them, tantalized with hunger! Stamp out the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, steam and yourselves—for everything breathes the revolutionary spirit. You, gentlemen, are the revolutionists. You rebel against the effects of social conditions which have tossed you, by the fair hand of fortune, into a magnificent paradise. Without inquiring, you imagine that no one else has a right in that place. You insist that you are the chosen ones, the sole proprietors. The forces that tossed you into the paradise, the industrial forces, are still at work. They are growing more active and intense from day to day. Their tendency is to elevate all mankind to the same level, to have all humanity share in the paradise you now monopolize. You, in your blindness, think you can stop the tidal wave of civilization and human emancipation by placing a few policemen, a few Gatling guns and some regiments of militia on the shore—you think you can frighten the rising waves back into the unfathomable depths whence they have arisen, by erecting a few gallows in the perspective. You, who oppose the natural course of things, you are the real revolutionists. You and you alone are the conspirators and destructionists!
“Said the court yesterday, in referring to the Board of Trade demonstration: ‘These men started out with the express purpose of sacking the Board of Trade building.’ While I can’t see what sense there would have been in such an undertaking, and while I know that the said demonstration was arranged simply as a means of propaganda against the system that legalizes the respectable business carried on there, I will assume that the three thousand workingmen who marched in that procession really intended to sack the building. In this case they would have differed from the respectable Board of Trade men only in this—that they sought to recover property in an unlawful way, while the others sack the entire country lawfully and unlawfully—this being their highly respectable profession. This court of ‘justice and equity’ proclaims the principle that when two persons do the same thing, it is not the same thing. I thank the court for this confession. It contains all that we have taught, and for which we are to be hanged, in a nutshell. Theft is a respectable profession when practiced by the privileged class. It is a felony when resorted to in self-preservation by the other class.”
He then scored the capitalistic class, and referred to the strikes in the Hocking Valley, East St. Louis, Milwaukee and Chicago. Reverting again to the prosecution, he continued:
“‘These men,’ Grinnell said repeatedly, ‘have no principle; they are common murderers, assassins, robbers,’ etc. I admit that our aspirations and objects are incomprehensible to some, but surely for this we are not to be blamed. The assertion, if I mistake not, was based on the ground that we sought to destroy property. Whether this perversion of facts was intentional, I know not. But in justification of our doctrines I will say that the assertion is an infamous falsehood. Articles have been read here from the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Alarm to show the dangerous character of the defendants. The files of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Alarm have been searched for the past years. Those articles which generally commented upon some atrocity committed by the authorities upon striking workingmen were picked out and read to you. Other articles were not read to the court. Other articles were not what was wanted. The State’s Attorney, upon those articles (who well knows that he tells a falsehood when he says it), asserts that ‘these men have no principle.’”
What a perversion of facts! Some of the articles did comment on some alleged atrocity, but those taken at various dates and published in a preceding chapter show that force by the use of dynamite was continually being agitated. However, in his criticism of the prosecution Spies seemed to overlook a great many points. He repeated what he had said to the Congregational ministers at the Grand Pacific Hotel, on the 9th of January, 1886, with reference to Socialism, and then stated that he had seen Lingg only twice before he was arrested, but had never spoken to him. With Engel he had not been on speaking terms for at least a year, and Fischer had gone about making speeches against him. The article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung with reference to the Board of Trade demonstration, he claimed, he had not seen until he had read it in the paper. In conclusion he said:
“Now, if we cannot be directly implicated with this affair, connected with the throwing of the bomb, where is the law that says that ‘these men shall be picked out to suffer’? Show me that law if you have it! If the position of the court is correct, then half of this city—half of the population of this city—ought to be hanged, because they are responsible the same as we are for that act on May 4th. And if not half of the population of Chicago is hanged, then show me the law that says, ‘Eight men shall be picked out and hanged, as scapegoats’? You have no good law. Your decision, your verdict, our conviction is nothing but an arbitrary will of this lawless court. It is true there is no precedent in jurisprudence in this case! It is true that we have called upon the people to arm themselves. It is true that we have told them time and again that the great day of change was coming. It was not our desire to have bloodshed. We are not beasts. We would not be Socialists if we were beasts. It is because of our sensitiveness that we have gone into this movement for the emancipation of the oppressed and suffering. It is true that we have called upon the people to arm and prepare for the stormy times before us. This seems to be the ground upon which the verdict is to be sustained. ‘But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future safety.’ This is a quotation from the ‘Declaration of Independence.’ Have we broken any laws by showing to the people how the abuses that have occurred for the last twenty years are invariably pursuing one object, viz.: to establish an oligarchy in this country as strong and powerful and monstrous as never before has existed in any country? I can well understand why that man Grinnell did not urge upon the grand jury to charge us with treason. I can well understand it. You cannot try and convict a man for treason who has upheld the Constitution against those who try to trample it under their feet. It would not have been as easy a job to do that, Mr. Grinnell, as to charge ‘these men’ with murder.
“Now these are my ideas. They constitute a part of myself. I cannot divest myself of them, nor would I if I could. And if you think that you can crush out these ideas that are gaining ground more and more every day, if you think you can crush them out by sending us to the gallows—if you would once more have people suffer the penalty of death because they have dared to tell the truth—and I defy you to show us where we have told a lie—I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Call your hangman! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, Galileo, still lives—they and others whose number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow.”
Michael Schwab had very little to say, but what he did say was that it was “idle and hypocritical to think about justice” having been done to them. He criticised the acts of the prosecution in securing his conviction “for writing newspaper articles and making speeches,” and contended that they had engaged in no conspiracy, as “all they did was done in open daylight.” He seemed rather vindictive toward Mr. Furthmann for having had the articles in the Arbeiter-Zeitung translated, and excused his own inflammatory utterances by holding that after the mayoralty election, in the spring of 1885, Edwin Lee Brown, president of the Citizens’ Association, had urged the people, in a public speech, “to take possession of the Court-house by force, even if they had to wade in blood.” Schwab touched on the labor problem, drawing largely from his own experience while living among the poor in Europe, and then spoke of the condition of laborers in Chicago, holding that they lived in miserable, dilapidated hovels, owned by greedy landlords. He continued:
“What these common laborers are to-day, the skilled laborer will be to-morrow. Improved machinery, that ought to be a blessing for the workingman, under the existing conditions turns for him to a curse. Machinery multiplies the army of unskilled laborers, makes the laborer more dependent upon the men who own the land and the machines. And that is the reason that Socialism and Communism got a foothold in this country. The outcry that Socialism, Communism and Anarchism are the creed of foreigners, is a big mistake. There are more Socialists of American birth in this country than foreigners, and that is much, if we consider that nearly half of all industrial workingmen are not native Americans. There are Socialistic papers in a great many States, edited by Americans for Americans. The capitalistic newspapers conceal that fact very carefully.”