The Emblem of Hunger Unfolded by the Proletarians of Chicago.—The Red Flag Borne Aloft by Thousands of Workingmen on Thanksgiving Day.—The Poverty of the Poor is Created by the Robbery of the Rich.—Speeches, Resolutions and a Grand Demonstration of the Unemployed, the Tramps and Miserables of the City.—Significant Incidents.
Shortly before Thanksgiving Day some of the working people, after consultation, issued the following circular to wage-workers and tramps:
The Governor has ordained next Thursday for Thanksgiving. You are to give thanks because your masters refuse you employment; because you are hungry and without home or shelter, and your masters have taken away what you have created, and arranged to shoot you by the police or militia if you refuse to die in your hovels, in due observation of Law and Order. You must give thanks that you face the blizzards without an overcoat; without fit shoes and clothes, while abundant clothing made by you spoils in the storehouses; that you suffer hunger while millions of bushels of grain rots in the elevators. For this purpose a thanksgiving meeting will be held on Market Square at 2:30 o’clock, to be followed by a demonstration to express our thanks to our “Christian brothers on Michigan Avenue.” Every one that feels the mockery of this Thanksgiving order should be present. Signed, the Committee of the Grateful Workingpeople’s International Association.
Thursday opened with sleet and rain, cold and miserable. At 2:30 over three thousand people assembled on Market Street, under the unpitying rain and sleet. A stranger said, “What you want is guns; you don’t want to be heard talking.” He was stopped for the regular arrangements. The meeting being called to order, A. R. Parsons said: “We assemble as representatives of the disinherited, to speak in the name of forty thousand unemployed workingmen of Chicago—two millions in the United States and fifteen millions in the civilized world.” He compared the Thanksgiving feast to that of Belshazzar, and said the champagne wrung from the blood of the poor ought to strangle the rich. He then read as follows: “St. James, chapter 5, says, ‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries which are to come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last days.
AN ANARCHIST PROCESSION.
Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which ye have kept back by fraud, crieth: ‘Woe to them that bring about iniquity by law.’ The prophet Habakkuk says: ‘Woe to him that buildeth a town by blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity.’ The prophet Amos says: ‘Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor to fail from the land, that I may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes.’ The prophet Isaiah says: ‘Woe unto them that chain house to house, and lay field to field, till there is no place, that they may be alone in the midst of the earth.’ Solomon says: ‘There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed of their filthiness; a generation, O, how lifted are their eyes, and how their eyelids are lifted up: A generation whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw-teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.’”
And, concluding, he said: “We did not intend to wait for a future existence, but to do something for ourselves in this.”