Haymarket (38 page)

When Captain Schaack testified, he managed to drag Johann Most into the picture, knowing that the mere mention of the leading advocate of terror would frighten the jurors. Schaack claimed on the stand that Lingg told him, when incarcerated at Central Station, that he’d learned to make bombs from Most’s pamphlet,
The Science of Revolutionary Warfare
. Which may or may not be true, but the whole point of saying so was to allow Mr. Grinnell to read the
entire
pamphlet aloud to
the jury—without bothering to establish whether the rest of the defendants had ever seen it (I, for one, have not).

July 25

The trial’s become the leading attraction in the social calendar. Even during jury selection, the courtroom was packed, but now fashionable young ladies are attending in droves, delighted to put aside their needlecraft and dancing lessons in favor of this modern-day Coliseum, where dangerous heretics and foreigners are forced to fight for their lives to amuse a dulled aristocracy. And there they sit in the front rows, dressed in their finery, munching candy, giggling among themselves as they inspect the defendants and call each other’s attention to this one’s depraved lower jaw or that one’s shifty eyes. If they catch one of their number staring overlong at the handsome Spies or Lingg, the giggling redoubles as they mock her.

Judge Gary often invites several of the more socially prominent, or attractive, young matrons to sit with him on the bench, and he chats away with them even while testimony is in progress. Today he outdid himself. A particularly comely woman sat beside him and he entertained her as if the two were fellow guests at a seaside resort, drawing pictures for her amusement and then helping her complete a puzzle that had been vexing her!

On Sundays, special guests of the court are allowed to wander among the jail cells, to inspect the beasts at close range. Lingg has found the perfect strategy for dealing with the parade of visitors: when they approach his cage, he uses his gymnastic skills to swing from the cell bars, grunting and scratching himself like an orangutan.

Meanwhile the jury members, in contrast to the prisoners, are being treated with the utmost deference and courtesy. They’re living in an expensive hotel directly across from the courthouse and on Sundays are given carriage rides along the promenades of the rich. If they want to visit home, all they need say is that a family member is feeling indisposed.

July 26

I know perfectly well from my own experience that even among the rich there are a few of exceptional sensitivity. After all, we’ve had two prominent men of property willing to testify to the utter unreliability of Gilmer as a witness, despite likely retribution from members of their
class. And our own Captain Black, who long traveled in the highest social circles, has jeopardized his standing and income in defending us. Mrs. Black, who rumor has it was initially against her husband accepting the assignment, has shown profound concern for our plight and, at the cost of increasing social isolation, openly expresses her sympathy for us to her privileged circle. Good and compassionate people are to be found everywhere, yes, even among the upper crust. Most of the young women who appear in court do so infrequently, and sometimes but once. But a few attend the sessions regularly, and follow the proceedings with the utmost attention and seriousness. One such is Miss Nina Van Zandt, who’s been here nearly every day, often accompanied by her elegant mother, Mrs. James K. Van Zandt.

On one of the first days of the trial, I scanned the room, as I always do, for Lucy. And there she was seated between two of the more fashionably gowned female spectators, who looked to be mother and daughter. I noticed that the seats directly next to the three were unoccupied, though such is the size of the crowd that there aren’t ever enough seats to go round. Then it suddenly dawned on me that this must be Lucy’s client Nina Van Zandt and her mother, about whom she’s told me so much.

I’m amazed at the audacity of the Van Zandt women, seating themselves so visibly at Lucy’s side. During an adjournment, moreover, they came up to the docket with Lucy to be introduced to me. Mrs. Van Zandt did seem somewhat ill at ease, but Nina chatted away as breezily as if we’d all just met at a fancy dress ball.

Then this evening, still accompanied by her mother, Nina (as she insists we call her) visited the prison for the first time. Since they’re not relatives of the defendants, they were allotted only a few minutes. But the daughter managed to exchange pleasantries with several of us, and she sat alone for a brief spell with Spies, who later told us how sincere she seemed in her determination to help.

July 27

Since six of us were not even present at Haymarket at the time the bomb was thrown, the prosecution has been leaning hard on Spies and Fielden. Having failed in his earlier effort to identify Spies as the man who tossed or at least lit the bomb, Grinnell is now trying to portray Fielden, the gentlest of men, as determinedly bent on violence that night. One witness
has claimed that Fielden called outright in his speech for the killing of policemen, and Lieutenant Quinn has sworn on the stand that as the police approached, Fielden cried out, “Here they come now, the bloodhounds! Do your duty men, and I’ll do mine!”—a claim that three eyewitnesses, and Fielden himself, emphatically deny. Several other officers have insisted that Fielden fired directly at the police, but State’s Attorney Grinnell has been notably sloppy in getting them to coordinate their stories: One officer has Fielden firing
before
the bomb exploded, another immediately afterwards; one has him firing while still on top of the wagon, another after having taken cover behind it. As if all this wasn’t muddle enough, two police lieutenants have categorically stated that “no shot was fired before the explosion of the bomb.”

In any reasonable mind such vagaries and contradictions would be regarded as a mockery of jurisprudence, an indelible stain on the veracity of Grinnell and his motley array of witnesses. The case would by this time have been thrown—or laughed—out of court. But instead Judge Gary has occupied himself with the strenuous demands of playing host to fashionable Chicago, and to mechanically overruling all of Captain Black’s objections on points of law. The prosecution, knowing it has in Judge Gary an automatic ally, has marched blithely on, treating an unmasked bit of perjury here, an exposed set of contradictions there, as mere peccadilloes, acting much as a chipper schoolboy might when reprimanded for poor penmanship.

As each of the prosecution’s tactics has backfired—“exploded” would be the more apt description—it’s simply proceeded on to the next, like a patent medicine salesman quick to suggest calomel when the patient throws up the previously touted Castoria. Having to date failed to prove that any of us threw the bomb, or fired at the police, or suggested in speeches from the wagon that anyone else do so (in this regard, Mayor Harrison himself took the stand to reaffirm what he’s now said many times over: that the speeches given at Haymarket that night were “tame”), Grinnell has perforce fallen back on his last hope for making a case against us: that through our earlier speeches and writings we urged and abetted violence. Captain Black tells us that over the next few days, before the prosecution begins its summation, it will try to convince the jury that our persistent advocacy of force in the years prior to the throwing of the bomb in Haymarket makes us as guilty of murder as the person
who actually threw it. He warns us that this latest shift in tactics could prove more formidable than anything preceding. “I have been reading consecutive runs of the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter,”
he told us gravely, “and I must say to you in all frankness, gentlemen, that they contain numerous sentiments that I do not personally share and which, more importantly, can be used to prejudicial effect against you.”

Spies, in his sardonic way, asked Captain Black if the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech, had recently been abolished without his having noticed.

“No, Mr. Spies,” Black gently answered, “but nor has it ever been consistently applied.”

July 28

After a dozen years apart, William and I saw each other this morning. The change in him is marked. He’s grown bald and portly, and more than a little blustery. But I’m deeply grateful to him for standing by me. He’s already paying the price, he tells me: shunned by neighbors, hints passed that his post as inspector of customs at Newport News may be in jeopardy. But he feels it’s his duty to defend me—not my views, most of which he finds “grievously wrongheaded,” but my right to express them. An old states-rights man, he’s grown concerned in recent years over the proliferating power of the corporations. “Nobody else is standing up to Jay Gould,” is how he puts it. We talked about all sorts of matters, and at some length; the guards tend to be permissive when the visitor is a bona fide relative. Having practiced law for a time, William is keenly interested in the judicial procedures of the trial. He’s been astounded, he says, at the flagrant bias of the proceedings, and is utterly confident of an outright acquittal. Seeing William again has moved me deeply, flooding me with memories.

July 30

For three full days, the prosecution has been relentlessly reading aloud excerpts from the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter
into the official record, along with portions of our other writings and speeches. They’ve done their homework. They seem to have found every reference any of us ever made to violence in any form, and they heighten the negative effect by taking words out of context. They even read Lucy’s “To Tramps,” and Lizzie’s article, “Dynamite!” into the record, despite the fact that neither has
been indicted or is on trial. The prosecution drags them and others in because it’s trying to establish the existence of a widespread and vicious conspiracy of which the eight of us who are actual defendants constitute but a small part.

Both Lucy and Lizzie, at the time they wrote those pieces, were mesmerized by Johann Most, and I remember trying to get them to tone down certain sections. But they would have none of it, and the articles appeared in the
Alarm
, to my discomfort, as originally written. I’d pretty much forgotten the contents and was startled at some of it, especially Lucy’s assertion that tramps who couldn’t find work and were in danger of perishing from exposure and hunger should remember that “the voice of force is the only voice which tyranny has ever been able to understand.” But this heated rhetoric came at times of great public excitement, when hyperbole was the national style. Lucy’s article had been in direct response to the 1885 events at Lemont—which went unmentioned in the courtroom—when the militia had bayoneted and shot quarry workers who’d gone out on strike for a living wage.

Just as we hear nothing in the courtroom of the murderous action of the soldiery against the people, so we’ve heard nothing of the violent rhetoric—more than a match for anything Lucy or Lizzie ever said or wrote—with which the propertied classes and the press have egged the troops on. None of us can forget, even if the court has managed to, the
Chicago Tribune
’s suggestion that when a tramp asks for bread, “put strychnine or arsenic on it and he will trouble you no more.” Or the blunt prescription offered by Tom Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, during the 1877 strike: “Give them the rifle diet.”

Why aren’t these people being tried for murder, or its incitement? They advocated and
initiated
violence, yet remain at liberty. The prosecution wants to convict us of murder on the basis of our opposition to the current social order—for our political views—yet hails the Captain Bonfields, who have committed actual deeds of murder, as “saviors of law and order.”

Yesterday, the prosecution inflamed the jury, without interruption or caution from Judge Gary, with a display of the dead Officer Mathias Degan’s torn and bloodied vestments. Grinnell was allowed to play the role of Marc Anthony pointing to the rent in Caesar’s garment where Brutus “plucked his cursed steel away.” But there’s no dispute whatever
about the cause and place of Degan’s death, only as to who committed the deed, and the vengeful, prejudicial display of his sadly stained raiments did nothing to solve that mystery, nor was it intended to.

Why not exhibit the tattered garments I saw young girls wearing in Canton when I spoke in the Ohio coal region last February?—show the jury pictures of those tiny, emaciated little children scraping snow from the railroad tracks, hunting for a few nuggets of coal that a passing train might have dropped?

Why not display the bodies of the strikers barbarously killed at Martinsburg by militia bullets during the Great Railroad Strike? Or the body of the teenage boy, his brains oozing out of his head, shot dead by the Chicago police on the Halsted Street viaduct for the crime of happening to be on the street during a police rampage?

Why not hear the testimony of the mill workers I talked to in Allegheny, hear how they’re kept running twelve hours a day firing six boilers at a time while regulating the steam in them, knowing that the least oversight could cause a boiler explosion that would kill forty or fifty mill workers—which has happened more than once. Why haven’t they put on the stand the widows of the brakemen whose heads have been lopped off by bridges because the railroad barons refuse to install proper safety equipment?

July 31

For the fourth day, the prosecution drones on, reading a mountain of words from the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter
into the record in an effort to prove that we inspired the bomb-throwing through our writings, befuddling the minds of honest workingmen with our crafty prose and arguments. In short, we’re “accessories” to murder and, by Illinois law, thereby subject to the same punishment as the murderer himself. But the reasoning is utterly circular: without knowing who the man is, how can one claim what did or did not influence him?

The prosecution’s also trying to persuade the jury that we, the eight defendants, are the leaders of a well-organized conspiracy that settled on the specific date of May 1, 1886, for the commencement of a reign of terror (and here
we
thought we were inaugurating a drive for the eight-hour day!). But as Lucy eloquently argued in the
Labor Enquirer
, the fact that only one bomb was thrown itself disproves the notion of any sort of
widespread conspiracy or coordinated uprising—the bombing of police stations and the like—that the prosecution insists was part of the “plot.” The singularity of the Haymarket bomb argues instead for a maverick act, perhaps of a man demented, or of one beaten by the police and determined on revenge—or, for that matter, of an
agent provocateur
. With the identity of the man unknown, how can the prosecution persist in arguing that he was part of a conspiracy, or that he knew any of us or that we were together involved in such a plot? Yet persist it does, and with every sign of confidence that its garbled logic will be believed.