The American: A Middle Western Legend (11 page)

—Spies was feeling that way. You've been in politics long enough to know that the best man will go to pieces when the audience goes, not one by one, but in clumps. Well, it was nine o'clock when Parsons stood up to speak, and he held them. Think of what the man had been through, almost no sleep in about thirty hours, straight from another meeting to this one, seeing everything he fought for being smashed, knocked out. Still, he spoke—he spoke well too. He started in with the eight-hour movement, then he told about the workers. I don't think anybody in America knows as much about the working people as Parsons. He spoke about the growth of monopoly—all right. You've read his statement; you know what he spoke about. But those transcripts of his speech, lies! He had no written speech; he said the things that came to mind, and no one took down his words. Yes, the next day they invented a speech for him, but that was not Parsons'.

—And then he finished, and then he introduced Sam Fielden. It's interesting, in the way of my sitting here and talking to you, to recall what Fielden said, just to mention that Fielden spoke about law. The rich man's law, but not the poor man's; the rich man's courts but not the poor man's. All right, I'll tell about Parsons. You sit and listen to me, or maybe you don't listen to me, and think, this fool carpenter is wasting your time, but he has political influence in the labor party, and you should listen to him, not hurt his feelings. Very well. Then let me tell it my own way, all of it.

—Parsons walked over to the wagon as Fielden began to speak and picked up the little one. Then it began to rain. One of the children began to cry. Now mark this—in the light of what happened. With the child in his arms, Parsons walked over to the other platform, where Fielden spoke, and said, with the rain coming down, shouldn't they go to the hall, Zepf's Hall, where they hold a lot of their meetings? He thought that way because he had the baby in his arm, because he was so tired. But how can you move two thousand people through the streets, then get them orderly into a hall? “I'll be through in a few minutes,” Fielden said. Parsons nodded, but he couldn't stand there in the rain with the children. Also, the crowd was breaking up. By this time there were maybe six, seven hundred people, still standing in the rain and listening.

—So Parsons, Lucy, the two children, and a friend walked away from the meeting to Zepf's Hall. They went to the hall only for a moment, to see a few people, and after that they were to go home. But it was there they heard the explosion.

—And the explosion, the bomb—you know how that happened, or maybe not. It is so long ago that maybe my good friend has forgotten. It was while Fielden spoke that almost two hundred police, led by Ward and Bonfield, came storming into the street. Why? How? What for, with this very quiet, peaceful meeting, that was already breaking up of its own accord, maybe five hundred people left by now? And Ward, at the head of his police ranks, screaming out that they should disperse, immediately. What was there for Fielden to do? He broke off his speech and began to climb down from the wagon. The crowd began to move toward the other end of the street. And then the bomb came, thrown from God knows where, falling in front of the police, killing one of them and wounding so many others. Who threw the bomb? For a year and a half, we have heard nothing in this city of sorrow but who threw the bomb? I swear to you, Judge, by whatever God or force or destiny there is, that no one of our people threw the bomb. Yes, that is my opinion, and I am prejudiced; I am a workingman, of course I am prejudiced. But now, a few hours before Parsons is going to die, I swear that. I hate violence; I hate men of violence; that you know. So I swear what I believe. They—our enemies—they threw the bomb. Look at all that has happened since, and see if it could have been any other way. Think of what happened a moment after the bomb was thrown, how the police drew their guns and began to shoot; it made what happened at McCormick's the day before seem like nothing! They shot like men gone mad. They shot down workingmen and their wives and children. We weren't armed; no shots came from our side. But the police kept on shooting, and the crowd broke up and ran screaming in all directions.

“That is the truth,” the little carpenter said. “From a hundred people who were there, I heard the story. That is the truth.”

XI

To himself, Judge Altgeld, staring at the window of his study and the morning sunshine outside, said, “That is the truth, and this is the truth, and were there ever two men who were agreed on what is and what is not the truth?” For he had recalled the very ancient legend of the four blind men who were taken to an elephant, so that, they might know this very unusual and wonderful manifestation of nature. These four blind men circled the elephant warily, attracted yet repelled by its strange scent, by its grumbling noises, and by its hoarse breathing. Urged on by their friends, they presently approached closer and closer, until each had laid hands upon the elephant in one fashion or another. Then they came away, wiser men, more experienced and learned in the things nature does. However, when they began to discuss their great experience, no agreement could be reached; for the first blind man declared, most confidently, This elephant is very like unto a rope. Which is not strange, since he had felt only the elephant's tail. The second blind man indignantly declared, How can you speak of the elephant as a rope, when it is most certainly like a tree-trunk! Which was also understandable, for the second blind man had felt the elephant's leg. The third blind man only sneered, for, having felt the trunk, he knew that this whole business of an elephant was a hoax, and that they had merely been shown a snake. The fourth blind man, however, refrained from argument, muttering and puzzling over the wonder of an animal being like a wall, for he had felt the elephant's side.

This legend came into the Judge's mind as he listened to Schilling speak of Parsons, and other things came into his mind too; for already he was overdue at court. The accusers and the accused waited, and the great body of man's rationalization, the law, waited with them. The law would be a tool given into his hand, and he would use the tool, not as he saw fit, but as those before him had used it. Considering now the prospect of his lateness, the fact that he should already be on his way, he was overcome by a wave of depression; and he turned to Schilling a face that was tired and bleak and gray. For now, as if only now coming out of sleep, he realized that Parsons and the others would surely die; nothing Schilling said could change that; nothing he, the Judge, did could change that: yet when Schilling looked at him, hesitantly now, Altgeld said:

“Go ahead. You haven't told me all you want to tell me. You told me what I know. Go ahead then, and if you believe something to be the truth, you're entitled to such a belief; but don't give me oaths. Yours are no better than mine, and God knows I have sworn to this and that enough times.”

XII

Schilling said:

—I told you how Parsons, his wife, and the two children were in Zepf's Hall when they heard the noise the bomb made, exploding. A good many people were there in the hall. The meeting had just broken up. But when the explosion came, it was the same with all of us, tight and silent, and afraid, too. A black thing hung over the city. War had already been declared. We had talked too much about organized labor; we had asked for the right to work no more than eight hours each day. We were organizing those whom no one had ever dreamed. of organizing, and men were saying aloud that it was right for them to live and not starve to death; so for that we had to be broken; we had to be taught a lesson; we had to be whipped back into the sewers from which we had crawled. Yes—that was our reaction when we heard the explosion. And so, for a little while, we were silent and afraid, and nobody dared to go outside.

—And then the first of them came running from Desplaines to tell what had happened. Do you want truth? No one could tell a clear story then; some were wounded, some beaten and bleeding, some hysterical. A nine-year-old boy had his scalp laid open. A big stout woman, Mrs. Crane, had a bullet hole in her neck, and yet she had run all the way. And more than that—no, it' was not nice.

—But even if no one knew exactly what had happened, we knew it meant sorrow; we knew it meant a witch hunt and a pig hunt all together, and that they would be after us. Hadn't there been enough wild talk of dynamite? Hadn't Gould said that hand grenades were the right medicine for us? Hadn't the City of Chicago been presented with a beautiful, shiny new Gatling gun which, as the
Tribune
informed us, could chew up workers faster than a dog chews sausage? A bomb had exploded; no one knew who threw it, even now no one knows; but it was enough that a bomb had exploded.

—I think Lucy realized first that Parsons had to get away. Then others found themselves looking at Parsons. Whatever it was, large or small, they would go after Parsons first. He knew it; his wife knew it. It did not matter that he wasn't there, that he had not even known that such a meeting had been scheduled; Parsons was marked. You sit in a court of law—you wait for a jury's decision; yet I tell you that five years ago this man Albert Parsons had been condemned to death, and they were only waiting to execute sentence upon him.

—I tell you this, that even as he realized that he must go away, get out of Chicago, hide somewhere, he remembered that he had no money. I speak of the literal, Judge Peter Altgeld. We would sit sometimes with a glass of beer and talk of the old days, when we were boys on the road; then you know what it is to be without money. I mean without money. Without five cents, without ten cents, without even two pennies. Yes, a man, a wife, two children. How did they live? I told you that before. You are a rich man in a graystone house, but I ask for understanding even while I insult you. They had no money. Parsons whispered with his wife for a few minutes, then with some of his friends, and then he had to borrow. He wouldn't have borrowed to eat, but he borrowed to save his life. Don't you think that the man was afraid; I told you enough about him before for you to know differently, and I will tell you more later. He had to live because he felt he had work to do. So he borrowed five dollars, the price of freedom, and he went home with his wife and children, and then he disappeared.

—What will you say?—that Parsons shouldn't have gone? Then I say that everyone who spoke at that meeting or showed his face there should have gone. Or perhaps you've forgotten what happened in Chicago during the next few days. I wasn't at the meeting—I was no anarchist, as you know well enough, yet within a week they were screaming for my blood too. Schilling should die; Schilling should be strung to the highest lamppost! Of course, we all knew that they would be after Parsons first; whatever happened in those few days after the first of May, it would have been an excuse to get Parsons. But in our wildest dreams and fears, we never thought it would be such a witch hunt. Yes, we knew they were organized better than we were, but we thought that truth was a force. Well, we know better now; truth is no force; the force is in men. You read the stories they printed, the crazy distortion of fact, how they accused the few hundred citizens left around the speaker's stand that night of being a bloodthirsty, armed mob.

—But did you read what they did to the workers in their homes? The police went mad, but it was a planned madness. This was what they wanted. They held meetings with the businessmen, and demanded money, money—and they got it, by the thousands. Then they went through Chicago like a whirlwind, beating, murdering, torturing, dragging people out of their homes in the middle of the night, arresting anyone and everyone whom they called suspicious. A workingman's shirt was all you needed. They filled their jails. My God, it was like nothing ever seen in this land, and maybe like nothing ever seen in any other land either.

—And you ask why Parsons fled. At least Parsons was tried; if he had stayed in Chicago, they would have shot him down on the streets like a dog.

—But to get back to Parsons. He and Lucy left Zepf's Hall and went home, still carrying the children, who had finally cried themselves to sleep. It might be noted that most of the men at Zepf's Hall that night were not anarchists, not socialists, but members of the Furniture Workers' Union, and they thought it was right for Parsons to go, they covered him. Mrs. Holmes went with them, and that was a good thing, because by now Lucy was going to pieces. Parsons himself was half dead from weariness, lack of sleep. And when he saw how Lucy was, he changed his mind and said he would stay. Then, after they put the children to bed, the women pleaded with him. Well, they convinced him that he should go. Lucy stayed with the kids, and Lizzie Holmes walked with him to the depot, and bought him a ticket for Turner Junction. She lived there, and her husband was at home. I know this isn't important. I just want to tell you, in the best way I can, about people who loved Parsons enough to risk their lives for him.

—You know what happened in the next few days. Every Pinkerton in the middle west was thrown into Chicago. They arrested maybe a thousand, but it was Parsons they wanted, and a Pinkerton who turned him up could have had ten thousand dollars from the businessmen's association alone. And when the charge against Parsons became murder, then anyone who sheltered him became an accessory. But just look at the whole thing again, just briefly, just with a little more patience, my friend, before I go on to finish my story of Parsons. First, they indict thirty-one men for this bomb-throwing from which one policeman died and God know how many workers. Then a dozen are selected to be charged with wilful murder. But one of them has escaped and never returns. Three become witnesses for the state. Eight are left, Parsons, August Spies, Michael Schwab, Sam Fielden, who learned from me, remember that, my friend, Sam Fielden whom I taught to fight for his people, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Oscar Neebe, Louis Lingg—those eight are charged with murder.