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Hellraisers Journal – Friday November 11, 1910
Martyrs of Chicago’s Great Eight-Hour Movement Remembered
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of November 9, 1910:
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[Detail:]
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Twenty-three years have elapsed since the execution of the four men in the county jail at Chicago. Twenty-three years, ample time for the world to correct its errors of misinformation. And yet, only a comparatively small portion of the people as a whole; yes, it may be safely said that only a minority of the so-called “revolutionists” are possessed of the true status of the affair. It is for the purpose of briefly outlining the facts of the Haymarket “riot” and the resulting murder of four innocent men, and to commemorate their death that this Anniversary Number is issued. The facts are as follows:
The years 1884-1886 were years of industrial anarchy, commonly known as “hard times.” Among the working men and women were found extreme hunger and want. Thousands of destitute and desperate workers out of a job thronged the city streets and wandered over the country hoping against hope that SOMEWHERE there was a place where a worker might have a chance to produce a living. The tramp was not the established functionary that he is today, and men who had been accustomed to having the chance as well as the “right” to work were indeed desperate and in despair.
This more or less new state of affairs, where many workers were forced to tramp the streets and tracks while others labored an unbearable number of hours gave impetus to the movement toward the reduction of the hours of labor, this action being the logical one for a state of affairs in which some worked overtime while others starved from lack of work.
In 1884, the convention of the Federated Trades and Labor Unions had decided to revive the agitation for an eight-hour work day, and later, the first of May, 1886, was set for the inauguration of the new time scale. As the momentous day approached, the movement grew like a morning glory over night. The labor unions doubled and trebled their membership. Eight-Hour Leagues were formed, while the labor press and other means of propaganda strenuously furthered the agitation.
During this time, the capitalists of the country had seen the trend of affairs, and became seriously alarmed over the militant attitude of the organized workers. Their magazines, newspapers and other periodicals spat forth a perfect torrent of venom and calumny upon the heads of the workers who dared to try to better conditions where the boss had made a miserable failure.
On the first of May, the international holiday of labor, many factories were tied up by strikes, the employees attempting to inaugurate the eight-hour system. Chicago being in a sense the representative industrial city, was the center of the movement. In militant figures that the labor movement has yet developed. Naturally, therefore, the struggle was more acute in the city in Illinois than elsewhere. Furthermore, capital had tasted the fruits of unlimited exploitation in this city that had grown like a mushroom and in the money lust passion, they were reckless and merciless in their efforts to get even more of their blood money.
When the strikers in the city of Chicago attempted a demonstration showing the solidarity of labor, the police were ordered out and men, women and children were shot down and trampled under foot. This happened on the 1st and 2nd of May, 1886.
One of the principal figures in the eight-hour movement was August Spies. Spies was the editor of the “Arbeiter Zeitung,” at that time a revolutionary paper and an ardent supporter of the eight-hour movement. Spies was the speaker at a meeting where the police brutally opened fire on unarmed citizens and in desperation and outraged by this cold-blooded slaughter, Spies hastened to his office and wrote and article advising the workers to resent being shot down like dogs, and if the police were murderers, that they , the workers, would have every justification for protecting themselves, even to the extent of arming themselves. On the 4th of May there was a mass meeting at the Haymarket, at which August Spies, Albert R. Parsons and Samuel Fielden spoke.
Carter Harrison, mayor Chicago, was present ad seeing that the meeting was a peaceful one, left the place, satisfied that no mischief was intended. After he had left, a squadron of police charged the crowd of three or four thousand people, shooting and clubbing indiscriminately. At this time some unknown person, but supposed to be an agent of the ruling classes, threw a bomb into the ranks of the blue-coated murderers, which exploded, killing and wounding several, and in the riot that followed several more, both police and civilians, were hurt.
Immediately the ruling powers seized the opportunity to create a psychology of blood hunger by means of the press and vicious misrepresentations and distortions of the truth. All the prominent members of the eight-hour movement were seized and jailed. At all costs the eight-hour movement must be crushed. This was the cry of the boss.
Among the men seized were August Spies, Albert R. Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe and Louis Lingg. Parsons was the editor of a revolutionary paper called the ALARM. He was a most militant worker in the cause for the eight-hour movement, had published a paper defending the rights of the negroes after the close of the Civil War, organized the Chicago Trades Assembly of the Knights of Labor and had been prominent in the foremost ranks of the revolutionary works for many years.
Schwab was a German who assisted Spies on the ARBEITER ZEITUNG. He had been known as one of the most devoted workers in the cause of freedom and lived but for the revolution.
Engel, a man fifty years old, had spent a lifetime of bitter suffering in the class struggle and as a result of this had a wholesome hatred for existing society.
Oscar Neebe was a well known labor organizer of Chicago and had been instrumental in establishing the ARBEITER ZEITUNG. He was and is a thorough-going and class conscious rebel against conditions as they are and against the rule of the boss.
Lingg was an enthusiastic boy of twenty-two years and while young in the movement was known as one of the most ardent workers for the cause.
Fielden and Fischer were likewise feared and hated by the ruling class for their efforts toward educating the workers and toward establishing the eight-hour day.
These seven men (Lingg committed suicide in jail), therefore, were indicted on the charge of conspiracy to murder the police. It was not claimed that they threw the bomb, or even that they knew that it was to be thrown or that they conspired to murder any particular party. All that was claimed and that constituted the indictment was, as in the case of Francisco Ferrer, that ther writings and speeches tended to make the workers resentful of the yoke of the boss and therefore liable to take action against their oppressors. It was shown that the capitalistic papers had been far more guilty of advocating violence than had the most revolutionary papers, but inasmuch as the trial was a farce and its purpose to take the lives of the prominent agitators of the eight-hour movement…..The following, taken from the speech of Parsons before the court, is an indictment of the state that was strangling these martyrs of the working class:
Only yesterday the packing house bosses, who employ 25,000 men, called for an army of Pinkerton men to go down there, and advertised for them to come. That was before the [Great Eight-Hour] strike-in mere contemplation of it, your honor. This is America-the United States! Why, is it surprising that the working people should feel indignant about these things and say to Mr. Gould or to Tom Scott: “If you are going to give us a rifle diet instead of bread diet, as was asked of Christ, when we ask for bread you give us a stone, and not only give us a stone, but at the point of the bayonet compel us to swallow it, where is the constitutional right of resistance to these outrages?”
If I am to be deprived of my right of defense against he administration of a rifle diet, and strychnine put upon my bread and food, which was advocated by the Chicago Tribune; if I am to be deprived of my right, what shall I do? Are not such expressions as this calculated to exasperate men? Is there no justification for that which you denominate violent speeches? Did not these monopolists bring about the inception of this language? Did they not originate it?
Were they not the first to say: “Throw dynamite bombs among the strikers, and thereby make a warning to others?” Was it not Tom Scott who first said, “Give them a rifle diet?” Was it not the Tribune which first said, “Give them strychnine?”
And they have done it. Since that time they have administered a rifle diet; they have administered strychnine. They have thrown hand grenades, and the hand grenade upon the Haymarket on the night of the 4th of May conspirator sent from the city of New York for that specific purpose, to break up the eight-hour movement and bring these men to the gallows in this court.
Your honor, we are the victims of the foulest and blackest conspiracy that ever disgraced the annals of time. If these men will preach these things; if the Tribune thinks that strychnine is good enough for us; if the Times thinks that hand grenades are good enough for us, why have we not got a right to say they will use it? They say they believe in it. They say they think it. What right have we to say that they will not hire some mercenary to carry out what they think, and put into practice that which they believe?
Then follows a long list of evidences showing the VIOLENT methods the boss used to suppress the workers and keep them in subjection. In the trial the judge by every means in his power showed partiality to the prosecution and by insinuations and direct remarks indicated to the jury that they were to bring in a verdict of guilty, which they did in October of the year 1886. One year later, on the 11th of November, 1887, four of our fellow workers were hanged in the county jail at Chicago. The others were sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. The men who met death that day faced the ordeal unflinchingly, defying their murderers to the last and declaring their faith in the working class movement.
The last words of August Spies, as he stood on the scaffold, were: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,” while Albert Parsons said, “Let the voice of the people be heard.”
These human fiends, these blue coated assassins, were killed as a direct result of the psychology bred by the ravings of the capitalistic editors and by their own deeds of violence, having shot in cold blood several men, women and children on the day previous. But, as usual, the advanced thinkers of the day were slated to martyrdom, being condemned because they were the heralds of better things and of the dawn of a brighter day.
Yet today the prophecy of August Spies, made while he was standing with the hangman’s noose around his neck, has come to be. Truly, their silence booms like the thunder of an approaching storm, and while their voices are stilled by death, their memory is the grim nemesis of the rule of despotism and the sway of the boss.
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[Emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Albert Parsons, Chicago, Nov 11, Alarm p1, Nov 19, 1887
https://www.worldcat.org/title/alarm/oclc/10478576
Note: article reprinted in full here:
The Agitator of Nov 15, 1911, page 1
“Day of Martyrdom” from The Alarm of Nov 19, 1887
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/agitator/v2n01-nov-15-1911-agitator.pdf
Industrial Worker
(Spokane, Washington)
-Nov 9, 1910
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v2n34-w86-nov-09-1910-IW.pdf
See also:
Industrial Worker, Nov 9, 1910, page 2:
“Twenty-Three Years After”
-by Fred W. Heslewood
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v2n34-w86-nov-09-1910-IW.pdf
From Barbarism to Socialism
The Great Sociological Crisis in a New Light: the Light of Evolution, Reason, and Moderation. Adapted for Students of Socialism
-by W. C. Bowman
Caxton, 1906
(search: “rifle diet”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=jUBDAAAAIAAJ
Life of Albert R. Parsons,
with brief history of the labor movement in America
-by Lucy E. Parsons
Chicago, 1889
https://archive.org/stream/lifeofalbertrpar00pars#page/n7/mode/2up
The Chicago martyrs: the famous speeches
of the eight anarchists in Judge Gary’s court,
October 7, 8, 9, 1886;
and Altgeld’s Reasons for pardoning
Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab
Free Society, 1899
https://books.google.com/books?id=thkXAAAAYAAJ
Gov. John P. Altgeld’s pardon of the anarchists
and his masterly review of the Haymarket Riot
-Preface by Lucy E. Parsons
Lucy E Parsons, 1915
https://archive.org/stream/govjohnpaltgelds00illi#mode/2up
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Annie Laurie – John McDermott
This song was sung by Alert Parsons for Lucy Parsons
on the eve of his execution: