Anarchy and Anarchists / A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators

by Michael J. Schaack

Ignatz Urban.————————Joseph Sugar.
SPECIMEN RIOTERS—IV. From Photographs taken by the Police Department.

Parsons and Schwab also took a hand in the McCormick “lock-out,” but they used the platform to arouse the people to force. On the 2d of March a mass-meeting of Anarchists and hot-headed strikers was held at the West Twelfth Street Turner Hall. Parsons and Schwab were the chief speakers. They were particularly abusive of the owners and the superintendent of the works, and advised the use of violence against the police. So incendiary were the speeches that E. E. Sanderson, a member of the strikers’ standing committee, took occasion to denounce the proceedings.

“Such speakers,” he declared, “cause every spark of sympathy to disappear and bring us into disrepute.” If he had had the power, he said, he would have stopped the gathering. He belonged to the true laboring class, and to properly voice its sentiments he hired another hall for the next day.

The continued presence of the police at the works finally restored order in the vicinity, and it seemed as if the Anarchists had abandoned any further intention of violence. But they were secretly at work, biding their time and watching their opportunity. It came on the afternoon of May 3. At this time between 40,000 and 50,000 men in Chicago were out of employment by reason of the eight-hour strike. Excitement ran high throughout the city. The reaper works were now almost in full operation, and, led by the Anarchists, some of the hot-headed strikers, grown impatient over the apparent failure of their plan, made an assault upon the “scabs” at work in the shops. The instigators of this attack and the principal assailants were Anarchists, who exerted themselves to the utmost to bring on a deadly conflict between the police and the unemployed.

For the day in question a meeting of the Lumber-shovers’ Union had been called in the vicinity to receive the report of a committee who had waited on their employers with reference to the eight-hour question. The Socialists, learning of this, determined to make use of the opportunity. The union was composed of over six thousand lumber workingmen, three thousand Bohemians and over three thousand Germans, and had no connection with the McCormick strike, but it occurred to the Central Labor Union that, inasmuch as many of them were adherents of Socialism, it would be no difficult matter to incite them to riotous demonstrations. On the day preceding, Spies had been delegated by his union to address the gathering. The president of the Lumber Union, Frank Haraster, had become cognizant of the Anarchists’ intentions, and had taken occasion to warn the men against either listening to Socialistic orators or participating in a riot. But there were mutterings of discontent, and the crowd was in a revengeful mood. There were no less than 8,000 people at the gathering—some estimated the number as high as 15,000. Some were intent on revolution, and others had been drawn to the scene through idle curiosity.

It only needed a spark to create a tremendous conflagration. Anarchists were busy among the various groups that had collected. For several days they had labored early and late in the locality to stimulate revolutionary action. Their plans had been carefully concocted, and their network of conspiracy extended in every direction. They had opened channels of subterranean communication, and so arranged their mines of Socialistic powder that at the appointed time they hoped to produce an explosion that would reverberate throughout the globe. That appointed time, they figured, had arrived with the inauguration of the eight-hour movement, and in the lock-out at McCormick’s the first opportunity was presented for a general upheaval. This was their hope and the burden of their care.

When, therefore, a coterie of trained Anarchists appeared on the scene of trouble,—evidently by a preconcerted arrangement,—with the Nation’s flag reversed and trailing in mud and muck, the wildest excitement was aroused, and only a leader was necessary to connect the electric currents of suppressed hostility to start an outburst of violent deeds.

The occasion brought forth that leader in the person of the impulsive and impetuous Spies. He, with some trusted lieutenants, mounted a box-car in the vicinity of the meeting of the lumber-shovers and the McCormick works. He gathered about him an immense crowd, and, speaking in German, called the attention of his auditors to the “brutalities of capital, its selfishness and its grinding oppression” of wage-workers, rendering their condition worse than that of slaves. With fiery invective he wrought up the feelings of the mob to a pitch of reckless frenzy. In the climaxes of his envenomed utterances, he held the multitude with a charmed spell, and he evoked their highest plaudits when he counseled violence as a means to redress their grievances.

Before the termination of this lurid speech, many hitherto apparently apathetic had caught the infection, and when some of the non-union men emerged from the gate at the McCormick foundry, on the conclusion of their day’s labor,—the hour being three o’clock,—many of the mob rushed to the establishment, bent on wreaking vengeance. They had hardly begun to move when some one on the box-car shouted: “Go up and kill the d——d scabs!” The identity of this person has never been disclosed, but it is no rash conclusion to suppose that it was a confidant of Spies, as well as of Lingg, who had secret charge of fomenting disturbances in that district. Lingg was present at this gathering, and, as he subsequently claimed that he had been clubbed by the police in the riot that followed, he may possibly have raised the cry himself.

The mob reached the works in short order, hurling stones and firing shots into the windows of the guard-house, which they finally demolished. The non-union men, seeing the approaching mob, took to flight, some seeking shelter in the works and others scampering across the prairie beyond reach. There were at this time only two policemen on duty. One of them, J. A. West, endeavored to pacify the crowd, but received in response bricks and mud. The other for awhile, as well as he could, held the mob at bay at the gate. West finally worked his way through the crowd to a patrol box, and turned in an alarm for reinforcements. Meanwhile the mob disported itself in throwing stones and firing revolvers, and finally forced an entrance through the gate to the yards.