Haymarket (13 page)

The mainstream press uniformly condemns the strikers and exonerates the soldiers. Hardly a surprise, since most of the papers are owned outright by the monopolists—Jay Gould controls the
New York Tribune
, Tom Scott, head of the Penn Central, dictates policy to the
New York World
 … The railroads, the editorialists proclaim, are essential to the nation’s economic health—though the health of those who work on them goes unmentioned—and a general stoppage, therefore, cannot be tolerated. For those among the “unpropertied rabble” who dare to trespass on railroad property, the proper response, according to the
New York Tribune
, is the Gatling gun. When asked about hungry strikers, Tom Scott is quoted as saying, “Give them a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” He said it shamelessly, as if talking about killing off diseased livestock. The
Chicago Tribune
has managed to top him, calling for the use of hand grenades against the “mob.”

The strike is rapidly spreading westward, and with mounting bitterness and determination. Capital and labor have collided with greater speed and force than any of us thought possible. We can thank the monopolists for speeding up the process, for insisting—for the first time in the nation’s history—that federal troops be called out in peacetime, and to attack its own citizens. Spies says it is sheer folly on their part, that they’ve succeeded where we have failed in mobilizing the working class against them. We’re all holding our breath for what might follow.

July 22

The escalation continues. Our private lives hardly seem to exist, or matter, any more. Franklin Gowen’s arrogant boast that his Philadelphia & Reading would never be touched by the Great Strike (as people are calling it), has been made a laughing-stock now that the city of Reading is in an uproar. Some fifty men in work clothes, faces blackened with coal dust, have torn up the tracks, jammed switches and, joined by a larger crowd, burnt down the Lebanon Valley Bridge, choking the Schuylkill and Union Canals. The country is being shaken to its roots. And with no end in sight.

July 23

The Workingmen’s Party has assumed the lead. I’m just back from seeing Philip Van Patten, the
WP
’s national secretary, to plan a mass meeting in Market Square. We drafted a flyer. Like me, Van Patten’s in his late twenties and one of the few prominent party leaders of “old native stock.” (I put that in quotes because when Lucy heard me use it last week, she rightly derided me. “Well bless my stars! Here I’ve been living with you going on six years and I never knew you were an American Indian. Who would have guessed it, what with that pale face of yours!”).

Van Patten is certainly prepossessing, with deep-set eyes, long black hair, stand-up collar, and flowing necktie. He carries himself with the air of a poet but is as practical and straightforward as a horse trader. We got right down to it. He says a violent eruption in Chicago is imminent, since this is the railroad capital of the country and some thirty thousand unemployed men are walking the streets in search of work and food. The railroad owners know the city is a tinderbox, despite their nonchalant statements to the press.

July 24

How can I begin to re-create the feverish excitement of last night?! A huge crowd—some estimates go as high as thirty thousand—gathered at the intersection of Market and Madison in response to our call. Torchlit processions marched in from every section of the city. A thrilling sight. Lucy held my hand so tightly I thought I’d be crippled.

During the speeches, I had to leave her and mount the platform, but she was in good hands, surrounded by Lizzie, Spies, and Fielden. John McAuliffe spoke first. He was going at it with a white-hot fury, announcing that this strike was “labor’s Fort Sumter” and vowing to raise his “voice, thought, and arm for bloody, remorseless war!” That sort of talk, in my view, is foolishly inflammatory. I caught the disapproval in Van Patten’s eyes, and he moved quickly to take McAuliffe’s place at the podium and lower the crowd’s temperature.

Then it was my turn. It made my knees shake to hear Van Patten announce me as “the main speaker of the evening”—that’s a first! But fortunately my mouth opened before my brain had a chance to shut down. Mostly I argued against the use of violence, championed an eight-hour day, and emphasized the importance of using the ballot-box to gain our rights.
McAuliffe looked disgusted, and spat out a glob that damned near landed on my shoe. But the crowd seemed with me, yelling out their approval over and over. Van Patten later congratulated me for “setting the right tone” but then added, his eyes darkening, “I must tell you in all honesty, however, that at several points in your speech you sounded more like McAuliffe than I should have liked.”

My guess is that he disliked my saying—it was my most heated moment, but I don’t regret it—“If the proprietor has a right to fix the wages and say what labor is worth, then we are slaves, bound hand and foot, and we should be perfectly content with a bowl of rice and a rat a week apiece.” I have the words exact because Lucy, standing in the crowd, immediately grabbed a pen from Fielden and scribbled them down—says she’s going to sew them as a sampler and hang it in the living room.

For once, she said, I sounded fiery enough to suit her, didn’t lurch back and forth in my usual “fair-minded” fashion.

Her sarcasm annoyed me. Some people, I thought to myself, would praise me for remaining open-minded. I do share some of McAuliffe’s views, but that doesn’t mean I have to swallow all of them whole. I told Lucy that she’s too quick to make up her mind and then to hold her ground no matter how much circumstances change.

“It
is
bloody war!” she responded. “McAuliffe’s got it right!”

“Is that so?” I said, feeling my anger rise. “Maybe you wouldn’t think ‘bloody war’ is so desirable when you get your first look at a teenage boy with his face blown away, as I did many a time, during the War.”

“Hey, mister, you ain’t the only one’s seen atrocities,” she fired back. “I’ve seen plenty of blood spilt, most of it spurtin’ out of negro bodies.”

I had no recourse to that, other than to feel ashamed …

July 26

A whole day has gone by, one of the most momentous of my life. I’m exhausted and ill, but before getting some sleep—it’s 2:00
A.M
.—I have to try and get down at least an outline of what’s happened.

Early yesterday morning I met with Van Patten to work on our “Manifesto to the Workingmen of Chicago.” We’re aiming to strike a balance between caution and determination, urging the avoidance of rash action during the current crisis while also urging a nationwide general strike for the eight-hour day and a 20 percent increase in wages.

I managed to arrive on time again at the
Times
, knowing I’d be allowed no leeway. It turned out not to matter. I found that my name had been stricken from the roll of employees. I’m not only discharged, but blacklisted—apparently for the crime of speaking at the rally. In today’s editorial, the
Times
makes its position clear: it refers to the Michigan Central switchmen out on strike as “an uncombed, unwashed mob of guttersnipes and loafers.”

The wonder, I suppose, is that the
Times
kept me on as long as it did. I ascribe it to my job performance. I read every issue of the
Paper and Printing Trades Journal
and stayed abreast of all the new graphic innovations. Trying to make myself indispensable, I even mastered the Nonpareil six-point type! Yet in the end, they’ve turned me out anyway; better to do without a skilled worker than to have an “agitator” on the premises. I gathered my few things quickly, got some hearty pats on the back from the fellows, and there I suddenly was—standing in a daze in front of the
Times
building. Feeling numb, I started to walk home, heavy with the thought of having to tell Lucy the news. With two-thirds of our income gone, and me blacklisted from finding work on another paper, I don’t know how we’ll pay the rent, let alone afford to have the children we’re so eager for. Lucy’s dressmaking business continues to pick up, but it’s not at the point where we can look to it as our main source of income.

July 27

When I pushed open the door to
Der Vorbote
, I found a beehive of activity. The room was crammed with strikers, many of them asking how they could sign up for the Workingmen’s Party. I took off my coat straightaway and started taking down names and addresses.

I soon learned that the strike had spread throughout the city. The
Tribune
’s headline this morning says it all:
IT IS HERE
. Freight stoppage is general. The crews of several lake vessels have struck for a dollar fifty a day, forcing the North Chicago rolling mill to shut down for lack of coke. Crowds are moving about the city closing down the rail yards, shutting factories, even succeeding in calling out workers from several packing houses. Business is at a standstill. Gun stores are reporting brisk sales and Mayor Heath has—wisely, I think—closed the saloons. He—unwisely—called on all “upright” citizens to organize patrols and has authorized issuing the new Remington breechloaders to volunteers, most of whom are Civil War
veterans. And he’s accepted the offer of an anonymous “private citizen” to pay for extra policemen; as a result several hundred “specials,” with even less training than the regulars, have been sworn in.

At noon, I was still enrolling
WP
members when suddenly two threatening-looking men yanked me up from the desk. They’d been sent, they brusquely informed me, to take me to Mayor Heath’s office: “He wants to speak to you.” Startled, I decided not to resist, thinking that just possibly the Mayor was genuinely interested in working with us to prevent violence (even if his messengers seemed to personify it).

I accompanied them to the street, where they set a brisk pace, one on either side of me. The wind was strong and their flapping coat-tails flying revealed that both were armed. This flustered me, and I was relieved when we arrived at City Hall; until, that is, they took me not to the Mayor but to Chief of Police Hickey. His office was filled with prominent citizens, several of whom I recognized, plus a large number of unfamiliar police officials. Hickey I knew.

Everyone in Chicago knows Hickey, given the number of times he’s been brought up on charges for everything from running bail-bonding rackets to protecting Mike McDonald’s deluxe gambling emporium, The Store, to personally stealing the collection of diamonds owned by Lizzie Moore, proprietor of a leading bagnio. Just last year the City Council launched an investigation of him that turned up evidence of shady real estate deals and bribe-taking from a slew of fences and thieves, and from the penny-ante faro games that operate out of second-floor storerooms along the wharf. Mayor Heath “studied” the evidence, pronounced it flimsy, and retained Hickey in office.

No, I didn’t like for one moment finding myself in that man’s office, surrounded by scowling faces. Hickey is capable of anything. I held fast to the sides of the chair they’d deposited me in, and tried to prepare myself to stand tall against the bullies. Hickey started right in on me. His bulky body looming over me, he accused me of bringing “great trouble” to Chicago, of having “come up here from Texas to incite the working people to insurrection,” of the Workingmen’s Party having been responsible for starting the strike—and so on. My voice still hoarse from speaking outdoors two nights ago, I croaked out the facts as best I could. The strike, I told him, had erupted from the same conditions that produced the Workingmen’s Party—from exploitation and poverty.

I could hear some loud muttering from others in the room. “What’re we waiting for?” one man yelled, “Let’s lock him up and get it over with.” Another actually shouted, “Let’s lynch the bastard!” Fortunately, a third man replied that any harm done to me would incite the “revolutionaries” to further violence. That calmed things down, and Hickey went back to grilling me. Where was I born, where were my folks from, did I have a wife, children? I’m sure he had all that information already. I did my best to stay calm, but felt several times that I might pass out.

Hickey finally left my chair and went to consult with several of the notables in the room. Eventually, he strode back, pulled me up, and snarled in my face, “We’ve decided to let you go—this time.” He grabbed me hard by the arm and moved me toward the door. “Let this be a warning, Parsons,” he said, his voice thick with rage. “From this moment on, consider your life in danger. If you had a drop of sense, you’d leave Chicago on the next train. Don’t fool yourself: our men will be at your back from this hour on, trailing your every movement. Everything you do, every word you say, will be made immediately known to me.”

With that, Hickey turned the spring latch, shoved me through the door into the hallway, and yelled after me, “You’ve been warned!” The door slammed in my face.

I felt suddenly dizzy and wobbled like a drunk down the vast corridor, trying to find a way out of the building.

This terrible day was not yet over.

Once downtown, I passed a news hawker and my eye caught the huge headline in the afternoon
Times
: “
PARSONS, LEADER OF STRIKE, ARRESTED
!” I felt paralyzed, unable to put one foot in front of the other. Was I on the street or in a jail cell? Am I a Famous Revolutionary or an unemployed typesetter? I finally tottered onward, feeling I might collapse at any moment. I must have been walking in that aimless fashion for more than an hour when I looked up and saw that I was in front of the
Tribune
building.

I abruptly snapped out of my trance, rescued by a concrete thought: perhaps I could get a night’s work in the composing room. I went up to the fifth floor and was warmly greeted by the men, who had seen the headlines and were amazed to find me in their midst. By now it was nearing eight o’clock. Suddenly, as I was talking to Mr. Manion, chairman of our typesetters union, three men grabbed me from behind, spun me around, and asked if I was Parsons. When I said I was, two of the men
took hold of my arms, the third held on to the back of my shirt, and they shoved me toward the door. This time I felt angry, not befogged, and I loudly protested that I had come in the door as a gentleman and refused to be dragged out like a dog. They responded with curses, pushed me through the door, and started to lead me down the interior staircase. One of them suddenly put a pistol to my head and said, “I have a mind to blow your brains out right here and now—if I thought you had any.” As we passed a window on one of the landings, the second man threatened to throw me out of it to the pavement below. When we reached the bottom of the five flights, the men loomed threateningly over me for a minute or two, then kicked me into the gutter. Expecting a bullet in my back, I ran down the street, but this time rage, not fear, propelled me, rage at the easy violence these people commit against us even as they denounce us for violence we haven’t committed.