August Spies spoke. Pointing to the black flag, he said it was the first time the emblem of hunger and starvation had been unfurled on American soil. He said we had got to strike down these robbers who were robbing the working people.
In answer to a call from the Germans, Mr. Schwab spoke in German a few minutes. A stranger said: “Get your guns out and go for them. That is all I have got to say.” Three cheers were given for the social revolution. The audience then formed a procession three thousand strong.
THE BOARD OF TRADE.
From a Photograph.
Another notable procession was on the evening of the opening of the new Board of Trade building. The Anarchists gathered in front of the Arbeiter-Zeitung office and were addressed by Parsons and Fielden. The speeches were highly inflammatory. Parsons insisted that they ought to blow up the institution, and urged them to arm themselves “to meet their oppressors with weapons.” The Board of Trade, he said, was a robbers’ roost, and they were reveling on the proceeds of the workingmen. “How many,” he asked, “of my hearers could give twenty dollars for a supper to-night? We will never gain anything by arguments and words. While those men are enjoying a sumptuous supper, workingmen are starving.” He characterized the police as bloodhounds and servants of the robbing capitalists, and suggested that the mob loot Marshall Field’s dry-goods store and other places and secure such things as they needed. It was apparent that these sentiments appealed strongly to the inclinations of the assembled rabble, and when Parsons had concluded the mob was ready for an even more violent harangue.
Fielden went as far as to urge the mob to follow him and rob those places, and, like Parsons, held that the Board of Trade building had been built out of money of which they had been robbed, and that all who transacted business in that place were “robbers, and thieves, and ought to be killed.”
There were hundreds of tramps in the throng addressed, and naturally all allusions to capitalists as robbers, and all suggestions to plunder, were greeted with applause. A procession was formed, with Oscar W. Neebe, Parsons and Fielden at the head, and with two women following next carrying the red and black flags. They marched down to the Board of Trade, but, arriving at the street leading to the building, a company of police headed them off. Thus balked, they had to content themselves with marching through the streets back to their starting-point, where they separated without further exhibition of violence than subsequently hurling a stone through the window of a carriage occupied by a prominent West Side resident and his wife, whom they took to be a millionaire on his way to the Board of Trade reception. A tougher-looking lot of men than those who composed the procession it would be difficult to find, and, once started in the direction of violence at the building, there is no telling the extent of damage they might have inflicted. The toleration of such a parade by the municipal authorities was severely criticised by the community, for, had it not been for the action of the late Col. Welter, then Inspector of Police, in intercepting the procession, a serious riot would have occurred.
Parsons, when asked subsequently why they had not blown up the Board of Trade building, replied that they had not looked for police interference and were not prepared. “The next time,” he said, “we will be prepared to meet them with bombs and dynamite.” Fielden reiterated the same sentiments and expressed the opinion that in the course of a year they might be ready for the police.
Now what is the Socialism or Anarchy they seek to establish? In his speech before Judge Gary in the Criminal Court, when asked why sentence of death should not be imposed upon him, Anarchist Parsons, among other things, thus described the condition of affairs when Socialism should obtain sway: