Haymarket (19 page)

Where was I? Oh yes, the new items we’ve purchased. I think the bookcase completes the list. We firmly ignored the landlord’s sniffy “suggestions” that we cover the mantels with lace paper, put doilies on the backs of chairs “to protect your fabrics from greasy pomades,” and fill a dozen vases with bouquets of homemade paper flowers. He was annoyed at our failure to heed what he called his “discerning eye for fashion,” but we were hardly going to spend our hard-earned money on such silly stuff. Our flat remains sparsely furnished, but it’s been filling up enough for Fielden to comment that “the landlord’s petit bourgeois ways seem to be climbing up the stairs.” I doubt that Lucy and I are in serious danger of contamination. Neither of us cares much about possessions, maybe because we never had many. But we’re not puritans about it, either. I believe it feeds the soul to have a few beautiful objects around—would that we could afford a few—but it destroys the soul to fill one’s space with fashionable clutter.

The single drawback we’ve discovered to the new flat is that the police department has installed an alarm box right in front of our tenement. It’s one of the multiplying pine boxes, about seven feet high by three feet in diameter, being installed all around the city as part of a police “call system.”
Inside each box is a telephone and an alarm dial with a pointer that can be moved to one of eleven choices—such as “riot,” “thievery,” “murder,” etc. The boxes are fastened to telegraph poles with a direct line to the police station; when the alarm sounds, a wagon and two policemen are rushed to the site. And guess who gets to have a key to the alarm box? “Citizens of good standing.” As defined by the police, that is. Which means that ward bosses and their flunkeys are far more likely to get keys than ordinary citizens. No one’s offered Lucy and me one, nor anybody we know in the neighborhood. Lucy says the police might as well have put the box in our living room.

I confess that I thought the telephone would be one of those wonders of the world, like the velocipede bicycle, that fades away overnight. But the gadget seems to be spreading like wildfire. I read in the paper yesterday that in just two years the city of New Haven has already gotten enough subscribers to install a switchboard (though the article said that the young men employed as operators are so rude and rambunctious to callers that “hello girls” are going to replace them). In Chicago the telephone is still a plaything of the rich; there aren’t more than a thousand of them—telephones, I mean.

June 1

The new apartment finally feels like home. Since we’re still in the same neighborhood, it wasn’t that much of an adjustment—except for getting used to the damned alarm box going off in our ears day and night. We’ve now turned our full attention to the pending Greenback convention, just a few weeks off. Those of us who will be representing the
SLP
are determined to pass a platform with real socialist teeth in it; otherwise, we won’t consider any kind of merger. But what we’re hearing from various quarters is that the only labor planks the Greenbackers are likely to support are watered-down, vague calls for “better working conditions.” Spies says they’re basically “heartland patriots,” who don’t want to acknowledge how much is wrong with our economic system and so have put their faith in an unsound cheap money scheme that won’t do a thing to help the poor. What it would do is produce inflation, and the country’s farmers are eager to see a rise in food prices. But how would inflation benefit the city worker, who has trouble affording a decent diet as it is? We’ll see what the convention brings …

June 10

Great news!—Spies has been elected superintendent of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
, with the likelihood that he’ll soon be asked to become its editor as well! The paper’s been on the verge of bankruptcy due to mismanagement. Saving it, and I’m certain Spies will, means saving an important voice for the movement. We have too few labor papers, and even fewer with staying power.
The Socialist
, in which we had such high hopes and which was hospitable to women writers like Lucy and Lizzie, has given up the ghost—and we are now without a single paper for English-speaking socialists.

June 20

We’ve had a terrifying two days, which fortunately have ended happily. On Friday, Albert Jr. suddenly started to run a high fever. Lucy immediately gave him our tried-and-true home remedy, a compound of willow and meadowsweet, which produced some improvement. But it proved temporary; within a few hours, the fever had returned full force, he had difficulty swallowing, and the glands in his neck appeared swollen. The sounds from his tiny throat were awful to hear, a deep, gurgling noise. Lucy and I became frantic. We felt there was no alternative but to seek medical help at the hospital dispensary, though like all people without money we’ve long known that staying at home usually provides better odds for survival.

We rushed him to the Central Free Dispensary, and were fortunate enough to land in the hands of a Dr. John Zeigler. He immediately diagnosed Albert Jr. as having diphtheria and told us that it was essential to dissolve the “pseudo-membrane” that had formed in his throat. He warned us that should his efforts fail, he’d have to intervene surgically and insert a small tube into Albert Jr.’s throat—at which point Lucy burst into tears, as I nearly did myself.

The next twenty-four hours were a grim vigil. Zeigler first tried a spray of limewater and pepsin, but it had no effect. Nor did chloride of iron. Lucy became terrified, inconsolable; her lamentations filled the corridor, rending my heart. Then, just as we were about to give up hope, Zeigler decided to give the baby a dose of calomel and bichloride of mercury, and within minutes, miraculously, the hideous sounds issuing from his throat eased. Within a few hours, he was breathing far more easily, though he continued for some time to regurgitate a vile-smelling viscous substance.

With Albert Jr. out of danger, Dr. Zeigler kindly sat with us a little while to explain what had happened. He ended up telling us far more, in our exhaustion, than we wanted to hear. The good doctor, it became clear, is exceedingly proud of his up-to-the-minute medical knowledge and was determined to display it at length. We felt so much gratitude towards him for saving our boy that we felt obliged to sit still for what turned into a considerable lecture. At least I did; Lucy was still so distraught that after a few minutes she excused herself, saying she felt faint and needed to find a place where she could lie down.

Dr. Zeigler, it seems, has recently studied in Germany and is a convert to the new “germ theory,” derived from the work of a Frenchman named Louis Pasteur. Zeigler predicts that “germ theory” will soon produce a revolution in how we explain and treat disease. Unfortunately, he says, it’s being met with strong resistance within the medical profession, with many doctors holding firmly to earlier ideas, like glandular theory or spontaneous generation. As for diphtheria itself, they continue to ascribe it to “miasma”—to the odors of putrefaction that are the bane of Chicago and other large cities. But miasma, Zeigler explained, his eyes alight with excitement, isn’t the root cause of diphtheria, or of most other diseases, either—“though it’s certainly true,” he said, “that the lack of pure water and air, as well as decent sanitary disposal, do create ideal breeding grounds for germs.” Although I admired the doctor’s passion, I was still too consumed by the ordeal we’d passed through to feel much of anything at the moment, other than apprehension and relief.

But the next day, with our boy safely home, I did think back on what Zeigler had said, and especially about how little the city does to correct the conditions that carry off so many young lives. Yes, health inspectors dutifully make the rounds and dutifully issue detailed reports on the “horrendous” conditions in poor areas of the city—the widespread use of oil lamps because the city hasn’t provided the needed connections for gas lighting, the polluted backyard wells, the use of unlicensed plumbers who “upgrade” antiquated wooden pipes, the toilet facilities that consist of little more than a pit in the basement floor: the “sewer” in the Nineteenth Ward literally pours into a hole in the ground. I could go on.

Yet nothing is done. About the foul air, either. For years citizens’ groups have been lobbying for the passage of an ordinance that would force factories to install high-heat furnaces or add smoke-consuming devices to
inefficient boilers (since they refuse to shift from bituminous coal to the less polluting—and more expensive—anthracite). The response of the city and the press, unbelievably, is to place primary blame on the poor themselves, accusing them of “vicious, slovenly habits” and a “peasant” mentality that indifferently cohabits with filth. And in the meantime, the city continues to herd people like cattle into packed tenements (in truth, we never confined cattle that closely in Texas) where disease rages, and children die. On a day like today, the air full of choking smoke, the streets full of shoving, unconcerned people, I can still get to feeling a little homesick for the open spaces of Waco. I’ve become a city boy for certain, but now and then the pure breezes of the Brazos will sweep across my mind’s eye, carrying me back to another time, a freer time …

The city’s health problems never seem to affect the rich or inhibit their pleasures. The papers have proudly announced that the “sporting crowd” may now savor live lobster at the Boston Oyster House or dine on the wonders of Viennese cooking at Henrici’s. And our grand hotels are outdoing each other in pampering their wealthy guests. Potter Palmer has inaugurated a private coach line to greet arrivals at the railway station and deliver them safely to his hotel’s splendid entryway—thereby avoiding unnecessary contact with the hoi polloi.

Our precious baby, at least, has been saved. He’s now entirely free of fever and has quickly rebounded. Would that all the afflicted were as fortunate. I was afraid the ordeal might endanger Lucy’s pregnancy, but fortunately she seems unaffected.

June 28

The new mayor, Carter Harrison, has unexpectedly chosen William McGarigle to head the police department, a man with some reputation as a reformer. After the City Council finally voted Hickey out of office two years ago—running a bail-bonding racket out of the Armory Station proved too much of a scandal for even the Council to swallow—we had a series of temporary incompetents (meaning minor rather than major thieves). McGarigle has ten years’ police experience and a college education. I still have this habit of thinking that an education guarantees a certain level of wisdom, or at least rectitude. “No,” says Lucy, “a college education provides a larger vocabulary with which to justify one’s crimes.”

July 3

A few of us met in our flat last night. Spies, Fielden, Lucy, Lizzie, and that toy store owner George Engel, who both Spies and I met through Fielden. In his quiet way, Engel is a fierce fellow. He insists that the notion of a “free ballot-box,” which he once believed in, is a dupe and a delusion. He looked straight at me when he said this, as if I was the Leading Dupe.

At the end of the evening Lizzie surprised us with a big birthday cake to celebrate Lucy’s birthday—and Lucy announced to all gathered that she is again with child. She told everyone that she’s hoping for a girl and has already picked out a name: Lula Eda
(very
Southern). We fussed and hollered over her, and she sat there looking like the shyest little twelve-year-old, so happy she might burst into tears. Then adult Lucy reemerged and mockingly accused us of making her far older than she was. “So how old are you?” the literal-minded Engel asked. Lucy flushed and said, “That’s none of your business, sir.” Of course she hasn’t but the vaguest notion herself …

July 12

The Greenback convention is over. Our group was put politely but firmly on the sidelines—and with Van Patten’s help. Now that the
SLP’S
in decline, he’s apparently decided to save himself by jumping on the Greenback bandwagon. Lucy and I were on the platform committee, and it refused even to consider our resolution in support of women’s suffrage. When Lucy tried to gain the floor to argue for the measure, the “points of order” and “questions of privilege” were thicker than whortleberries in fly time, and she never even got recognized.

When the forty-four
SLP
delegates caucused to discuss the final platform, Lucy and I both raised hell about the absence of any socialistic planks, other than a few absurdly vague phrases like “the divine right of every laborer to the results of his toil.” I offered a formal resolution that the
SLP
withdraw from the convention and field an independent ticket in the coming election. The caucus sided with Van Patten.

What now? Do we resign from the
SLP
? And if so, to go where? Spies counsels patience a while longer. He doesn’t feel that the argument within the
SLP
is concluded.

August 1

In the midst of all this turmoil, parties rising and falling, old friends denouncing each other, confusion on all sides, the Knights of Labor—with its call for “one big union”—has emerged from its recent dormancy. For years, it’s been chugging along, a secret little band of true believers, with grand rhetoric and next to no influence, constantly skirting extinction. But now people are beginning to say, “Hey, maybe the answer’s been under our noses all the while,” maybe it’s time to chuck all our fine-spun ideological differences, which have given us more parties than members, and gather under a banner that emphasizes the one basic truth: that we’re all working folks, skilled and unskilled, and must unite to fight a common oppressor.

A slew of small splinter groups have already begun to fold themselves into the Knights. And its membership is slowly changing, too. Most Knights used to be native-born, skilled city workers. Now some mine laborers are signing up, particularly in the coal fields of central Pennsylvania, and even a few agricultural workers are joining. Women, too, are being cordially welcomed; Frances Willard, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have all been Knighted, and the first all-female chapter is getting under way among Philadelphia shoe operatives. Lucy disapproves of separate locals for women, and I agree with her. We’ve heard rumors of a few all-negro locals as well, especially in the coal pits around Ottumwa, Iowa. The
KOL
has long proclaimed a belief in racial solidarity as a prime aspect of Universal Brotherhood, but rhetoric and practice haven’t much coincided.