Haymarket (33 page)

“Besides,” Neebe continued, “you
are
known as an extremist. Why didn’t they arrest you?”

“For an obvious reason,” Lucy said evenly. “They’re hoping I’ll lead them to Albert. The public is furious that the Chief Fiend has eluded arrest … I’ll have to be very careful,” she added quietly, as if to herself.

She started to gather up her things. “I must check on my children, Neebe. I wouldn’t put anything past the police.”

“What about the
Arbeiter?
Should we give up any hope of getting it out?”

“Certainly not! The working people of Chicago need to have something to read besides the filth and lies in the
Times
and
Tribune
. I’ll be back as quickly as I can. Probably all we’ll be able to manage is a one-page statement. If you could draw that up while I’m gone, we can then take it to Burgess, our printing contractor, and have several thousand copies run off. I shouldn’t be gone more than two hours.”

By the time Lucy reached home, the police were already there and, despite her arrival, continued, without a word, to ransack the premises. Five-year-old Lulu had apparently been taking it all in stride and was contentedly playing with a rag doll. But a terrified Albert Jr. was cowering
in a corner, tears streaming down his face. When Lucy was finally able to dry his eyes and get him to speak, he told her the police had wrapped him in a rug and spun him around on the floor, all the while shouting at him: “Where’s your father hiding? … You better tell us, kid … Your old man’s a murderer … We’re gonna string him up just like a nigger … You’ll never see him alive again …” An outraged Lucy screamed so ferociously at the officers—“Gangsters! Bandits!”—that they physically restrained her. Yet they still chose, for the moment, not to arrest her, certain she knew Albert’s hiding place and might lead them to it.

The rest of the day was consumed in a grim game of cat and mouse. Lucy, with both children in tow, dodged into untenanted houses and ran through buildings and backyards, trying to shake the police from her trail long enough to allow her to contact comrades. Yet the police never lost the scent. By late afternoon, exhausted, and thinking she’d shaken them off, she decided it was safe to duck into a friend’s flat—only to have the police burst in right behind her and tear the place apart in a frenzy of frustration.

Their efforts at intimidation having failed, the police finally put Lucy under arrest—
four
separate times before the day was over, releasing and rearresting her in a bizarre pattern designed to undermine her caution, and perhaps her reason. During each incarceration, Lucy hurled invective at them, refusing to answer a single question. Yet they kept releasing her, convinced she’d eventually slip up and lead them to Albert.

She never made it back to the
Arbeiter
office, but Oscar Neebe resolutely carried on alone. When he finished writing up the one-page circular, he took it to the Burgess Printing Company, as Lucy had suggested. But they refused to print it. Burgess himself whispered to Neebe that the
Chicago Times
owned the building in which his firm was located and had threatened to cancel his lease if he dared ever again print the
Arbeiter
.

For hours Neebe ran from printing firm to printing firm, everywhere getting the same frightened refusal. Finally a small socialist outfit clandestinely got the circular out, and Neebe hand delivered it to a variety of workers’ clubs and saloons. “We have taken the place,” the circular read, “of our arrested comrades. Should further arrests occur, then will others step into our places … Forward and unceasingly forward will this movement continue, in spite of the chicanery of the ruling classes.” A copy of the circular fell into the hands of the
Chicago Times
, which, in
an editorial on May 8th, pronounced its language “amusing.”

By May 10th, less than a week after the bomb had gone off in Haymarket, hundreds of people were in jail and most of the labor press closed down, much of it permanently. And the raids continued unabated. Captain Michael Schaack outdid even John Bonfield in sustaining the public’s fear, periodically announcing the discovery of yet another cache of arms, the uncovering of yet another anarchist plot to paralyze the city. Schaack was greatly aided in his efforts by a secret fund of one hundred thousand dollars provided by the Chicago business community; immediately after the Haymarket incident, three hundred leading members of the Citizens Association, including Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and Cyrus McCormick, met and put together the purse. Buoyed by his newfound notoriety as Savior of the City, Schaack became obsessed with seeing bombs and daggers everywhere; to keep public anxiety at fever pitch, he even suggested that the police themselves organize new anarchist groups to replace the ones they’d broken up—and then raid them.

His men finally found the evidence of dynamite they’d sought so desperately, when, ten days after the explosion at Haymarket, they surprised the young carpenter Louis Lingg in his tiny hideaway on Ambrose Street, having been tipped off by his ex-landlord, coworker, and purportedly militant comrade, William Seliger (who was given a handsome reward and repatriation to Germany). Lingg had arrived in Chicago from Germany only ten months before, already, as he himself phrased it, a full-blown advocate of “rude force to combat the ruder force of the police.” When the officers burst into his room, Lingg put up a fierce struggle. He very nearly choked one of them into unconsciousness before another managed to land a powerful blow on Lingg’s head with his club, knocking him off his feet and allowing the police to overpower and handcuff him. Searching Lingg’s trunk, the officers found two bombs, two pistols, and a large number of shells and cartridges. The
Chicago Daily News
announced the thrilling news of Lingg’s capture the next day: “The police are confident that at last the man who threw the dynamite bomb into the ranks of the police on the night of May 4th is under arrest.” The paper neglected to mention that Lingg had not attended the Haymarket rally.

Lizzie was held incommunicado for four days after her arrest, during which time no charges were specified and no visitors or legal counsel
allowed. Then on May 9th she was abruptly released, again without explanation. She went straight to Lucy’s flat, where she learned that the police had raided her Geneva home while she’d been imprisoned. Lucy hastily reassured her that William and Albert had earlier vacated the premises, having realized in time that a raid was imminent. Lizzie left for her home within the hour.

Albert had arrived in Geneva midday, the 5th of May. Holmes had greeted him warmly and caught him up on the various reports in the morning papers—that the anarchists had torched Chicago and that they and their allies were being lined up against the wall and shot. Albert’s initial impulse was to return at once to the city. He told Holmes that whatever was going on, his place was in the thick of the action.

Holmes had a difficult time preventing him from rushing back that very night; after hours of pleading and argument, Albert would only agree to delay his departure until morning. If the next day’s papers confirmed the earlier rumors, Holmes assured him, they would go to Chicago together.

The morning papers contravened reports of fire and massacre, but revealed alarming enough news: almost their entire circle, including Lizzie, had been arrested, a massive search for Parsons—who had been declared public enemy number one—was in progress and it was said he would be instantly detained, if not killed, the moment he set foot in Chicago. With Lizzie in custody, they realized it would only be a matter of hours—or minutes—before the police arrived to search the Holmes residence.

Decisions had to be made at once. Albert still tried to argue for a return to Chicago, but Holmes sternly told him that he owed it to his family and his comrades to stay alive, that it was romantic folly to throw his life away when, after the hysteria died down, he might yet play a constructive role. Albert chafed and stormed, but finally yielded. He agreed to go into hiding.

Holmes immediately sent word ahead to a political comrade, Daniel Hoan, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, warning him to expect the arrival of “a friend.” Albert shaved off his mustache, changing his appearance to a remarkable degree: his pale, unlined face made him seem closer in age to eighteen than thirty-eight. He then removed his collar and neck scarf, tucked his pants in his boots, smudged some dirt on his clothing, and,
with a few additional adjustments, managed to make himself over into the archetype of an unemployed young tramp.

Holmes advised him to head for Elgin, where he could catch a train for Waukesha. They warmly embraced, telling each other that they’d soon be reunited. Holmes watched from the doorway as Albert, affecting the hunched, meandering gait of an idler, wandered casually down the empty road. Early the next morning, the county sheriff, his deputy, and a Pinkerton detective arrived at the Holmes residence. They searched it over and over, with mounting fury at finding nothing and no one.

Daniel Hoan, a simple, earnest man in his mid-fifties, was reading when he heard the knock. He knew at once that it must be Parsons. “Come in and God bless you,” he said as he opened the door, his eyes shining, his hands fidgety with excitement. “The Lord sent you here, and you’ve come to the right place. You’re as safe here as if you were my own child.”

Albert thanked him warmly, and gratefully ate the food Hoan soon put before him. Then the two men set about inventing a persona for him. They settled on “Mr. Jackson,” an itinerant carpenter who—so the neighbors would be told—would be staying for some weeks to work at Hoan’s small pump factory and to make repairs on his house. Hoan produced some old clothes, including a big gray coat and a wide-brimmed hat, to lend credence to his visitor’s new identity.

Within a few weeks Parsons’s gray-flecked hair and beard had grown long and he refrained from coloring them with the black dye he’d used for years. Between the baggy clothes and the scraggly steel-gray beard, he soon had the ladies of the village lamenting the strangely unkempt appearance of a man capable of such interesting, articulate conversation. Several of them talked of clubbing together and buying him a nice new jacket.

He mingled freely with the townspeople, on the premise that he’d be far more suspect if perceived as skulking in the shadows, as a man with something to hide. The villagers took an immediate liking to his modest manners and lilting voice, his keen intelligence, and the kind, gentle way he regaled the local children, as he worked to repair the eaves on Hoan’s house, with tales of the hard lives of the slaves and of those who toiled these days in the great factories of the city. Hoan once overheard Parsons telling the children, “Men and women are always as good as their conditions allow them to be.”

Waukesha was a snug, lovely village of green hills, winding paths, and clear springs. Before beginning work in the morning at the pump factory, Parsons would go out for an hour’s ramble and soon found a favorite spot on Spence’s Hill, overlooking the valley, to which he’d return every evening. The tranquility of the place had a double-edged effect on him; even as the quiet soothed his spirit, it allowed his raw emotions, blessedly numbed during the workday by a busy routine, to resurface—his aching longing for Lucy and the children, his anxiety over the unknown fate of his imprisoned friends.

After he’d been in Waukesha for two weeks, Parsons was able (thanks to a string of anonymous emissaries) to get a letter through to William Holmes, and through Holmes a few words of reassurance to Lucy. “I continue to think,” he wrote in the letter, “that I should return to Chicago,” and he asked Lucy to seek counsel among their friends about when his reappearance would most likely prove beneficial.

Word came back, again circuitously, that their friends were divided. Most of them felt that he ought to stay away for the foreseeable future, that his return would jeopardize his own life while doing nothing to alleviate the plight of his comrades. Even those who argued that his return might somehow prove useful, urged him not to be precipitous. A grand jury had been impaneled on May 17th but had not yet handed down indictments. A recently formed Defense Committee had been unable to find a single hall to rent and, on May 22nd, had been forced to hold its first meeting in one member’s private office. The message from Chicago was, in sum: all is in flux; bide your time.

On May 27th, the Grand Jury announced its indictments. Engel, Fielden, Fischer, Lingg, Neebe, Parsons, Schwab, and Spies were named as “accessories before the fact” in the “murder” of Mathias Degan, the policeman who had died instantly when the bomb exploded in Haymarket Square, and in the deaths of the six other officers who had subsequently succumbed to their wounds.

The only name on the list that caused surprise was Neebe’s. Though a tireless labor organizer, he wasn’t affiliated with the
IWPA
and had never spoken in favor of armed self-defense. Only years later did it become known that the owners of one of the breweries whose workers Neebe had helped to organize had spent ninety thousand dollars in persuading members of the grand jury to include him in the indictments. As soon
as they were handed down, Neebe was arrested, but as if in acknowledgment that the case against him was weak, he was allowed to post bail. The other defendants—except Parsons—were already in custody and were promptly transferred from Central Station to the Cook County jail to await trial on June 21st.

A few labor unions and the Defense Committee provided Neebe’s bail and they also hired twenty-eight-year-old Moses Salomon, and his twenty-six-year-old associate, Sigmund Zeisler, who’d just been admitted to the bar, to represent the prisoners. Both were gifted men, but neither had an established reputation, nor the commanding presence in court that might have compensated for it. The Defense Committee was given the responsibility of finding a senior associate to head up the legal team.

William Perkins Black was among the most prominent corporate lawyers in Chicago. A dignified, handsome man of forty-four, Black, at age nineteen, had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Civil War for heroism at the Battle of Pea Ridge. It was widely agreed that he had a brilliant future, even though he’d failed in his initial bid for Congress in 1882; running as a Democrat, he’d lost by a handful of votes after giving what his wealthy friends viewed as an inexplicable and ill-advised speech defending the “generous impulses” of the Russian populist movement. Despite that “misstep,” many predicted that Captain Black (as he was known) would be Governor before his fiftieth birthday.