Haymarket (25 page)

“Could we have dinner first?”

“I suppose I can hold off for an hour. But let’s eat quickly …”

Two days later, Lucy burst in on Albert as he was cleaning out a nook in the small
Alarm
office. She was brandishing a newspaper over her head with one hand and holding on to Lulu with the other.

“I can’t believe it!” she shouted, “It’s an invitation to murder!”

“What is?” Albert asked, as he took Lulu in his arms.

“The
Chicago Times
. About the most villainous thing I’ve ever read!”

“Try and be calm, dear.” He motioned her to a chair. “Sit and read it to me.” Albert sat down opposite her and put Lulu on his lap.

“You’ve never heard anything like this: ‘The best meal that can be given a ragged tramp is a leaden one. When a tramp asks you for bread, put strychnine or arsenic on it and he will not trouble you any more, and others will keep out of the neighborhood.’ ” She looked up in triumphant fury.

“Good lord!” Albert said, “that’s monstrous. And they accuse
us
of fomenting violence.”

“And for once,” Lucy said, removing a piece of paper from her pocket with a flourish, “they’re going to be right.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve written a response. I don’t expect you to publish it in the
Alarm
, but I’ll see if the
Labor Standard
will take it. Steel yourself,” she said, picking up the page. “Throughout the bitter winter of 1884, you, the homeless and unemployed, have had to keep bonfires lit all night long to avoid freezing to death. Many of you have died of exposure anyway. Others have drowned themselves in Lake Michigan. I beg of you: Stay your hand! If you decide to kill yourself, take with you a few of the rich. It’s their heartlessness that’s made you so desperate. Every hungry tramp who reads these lines should avail himself of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor … 
You must learn the use of explosives!”

Lucy put down the page and glared defiantly at Albert.

“Lucy,” he said, “I beg you to reconsider. This will confirm every stereotype our enemies have of us.”

“Predictable.”

“This isn’t you speaking,” Albert said, raising his voice. “It’s Johann Most. A part of you has always been secretly drawn to his views. I’ve long known that. But you must get it under control. Self-defense is one thing, individual terror, precipitating violence, is another. It’s wrong, Lucy, it’s plain and simply wrong!”

“Yes sir, Mr. White Man,” Lucy spat out. “Next time they lynch a nigger I’ll climb up the tree as the noose tightens, and whisper in his ear, ‘Congratulations, my man, for never having
precipitated
violence. It’s a bit late now for self-defense, but at least you go to heaven with clean hands!’ ” She hovered above Albert for a second, then like a tornado abruptly veering off, grabbed Lulu and swept from the room.

Lucy’s Manifesto ended up a month later on the front page of the
Alarm
, When Albert called in his two assistant editors to tell them his decision to feature it, his tone was matter-of-fact and the words he chose clearly designed to forestall discussion. He simply said, “The reigning policy of the
Alarm
must be to print the full range of views held within the International, thereby allowing readers to make their own informed judgments.”

Lucy bit her lip and said nothing. Lizzie, smiling broadly and deliberately interjecting a non sequitur, said she’d been meaning to ask Albert for some time now what their salaries were going to be.

“The International has fixed my salary at eight dollars a week and both of yours at four dollars. Is that acceptable? Frankly, it doesn’t seem fair to me, since you’ll probably put in as many hours as I will.”

“It’s acceptable to me,” Lizzie said. Seeing that Lucy was still speechless at hearing that Albert would print her piece, Lizzie added with a grin, “It’s acceptable to Lucy, too.” That made them all laugh, and there was a round of hugs and tears.

South Bend, Indiana
October 12, 1884

My Dear Wife,

This is such a short trip that I had no intention of writing, but I’m so shaken up at what’s happened here that I wanted to put words to paper while the experience was fresh.

Little did I know that the local chapter of the Knights here is underground. And with good reason. Any person daring to join a labor organization, or suspected of being connected with one, is instantly discharged. This town is the property of the Studebakers, Ollivers, and Singers. Those who still have jobs are working for eighty cents a day, and hundreds are walking the streets without employment of any kind.

Despite the reigning terror, more than
one thousand
men and women gathered to hear me speak. An astonishing show of courage—and desperation. Mr. Frank Avery, who lives outside the jurisdiction of the Studebakers, introduced me. He told the crowd that he was sure they’d heard terrible things about Anarchists, Communists, and Socialists. “Well,” he said, “tonight you can see and hear a man who is all three and judge for yourselves.”

Picking up on his theme, I began by saying that no single label could adequately represent the whirlpool of ideas swirling through our movement. Some in our ranks, I said, believe that the “purification” of our republican institutions is all that’s needed to set the country to rights. Others emphasize the need for government ownership of the railroads. Still others put their faith in a general strike. And so forth—you know the lengthy litany. What we all share in common, I told the crowd, is the belief that the average person deserves a better life, that the paradise of
the rich is made out of the hells of the poor. We believe too, I said, that if the current desperation continues, the working class will be driven, against its will, to outright revolt.

Then I turned to conditions right here in South Bend. “I’ve been told,” I said, “that just two months ago armed men with whips and lashes drove seventeen so-called tramps out of town.” (“It’s true! It’s true!” various voices called out.) “And I know it as a fact,” I went on, “that at the Olliver Plow Works steel filings and sand dust can destroy a man’s lungs within a year.” That wasn’t exactly news to them, either. “Olliver consumption,” they called out. “It’s killed hundreds.”

At this point I called up one Valentine Ruter, who’d volunteered himself to me earlier, and who now jumped up on the platform and stood next to me. “Look at this man,” I said. “Along with his four able-bodied brothers, he worked in the Olliver grinding mill for three years. During that time all four of his brothers died of consumption. When Valentine’s health also broke down this year, Olliver put him on the streets. Awaiting death, he’s fed his wife and three children on the
one dollar and fifty cents per week
given him, as a charity case, by the town trustee.”

“Nor do these horrors happen only at Olliver,” I said. At which point I called up another volunteer, Martin Pauliski, who replaced Ruter at my side. “This man,” I said, “worked for the Studebakers’ wagon and carriage factory for eight years. When exposure and overwork brought on rheumatism and he was unable to stand for more than short periods, the company discharged him. Last winter, his family nearly froze to death, and his wife, in desperation, went directly to the Studebakers. They gave her a cord of wood. Soon after, Pauliski was told that he could come back to work. Though in considerable pain, he did so—only to be again discharged as soon as his labor had paid for the wood. Both Olliver and Studebaker gave large sums last year for the erection of a new church in town. The gospel they preach to you there is that you must be content with the station in life to which it has pleased God to call you. Is that what God wants for his children—mutilation and early death?”

My words, and the terrible visages of the two broken men, produced a sensation. The crowd pressed in close, and on the outskirts a cry went up that I was a lying atheist and should be made to answer for it. Somebody yelled out, “Lynch him!” A workman jumped to my side and shouted at the crowd, “If you try to harm this man, then you, not him, will dangle
from a tree limb.” Shouts and applause went up from the crowd.

When order was more or less restored and I was able to continue, I assured them I was speaking the truth, that they all knew the examples of Ruter and Pauliski could be multiplied many times over. What they might not know, I went on, is that the Grand Army of the Republic is at this very moment also being employed in Wyoming Territory, in East Saginaw, and in Cleveland to break skulls and bust strikes—that the power of the State was being employed wherever and whenever the capitalists called for it. “The result,” I said, “is that workers are being robbed of any peaceful way to present their grievances.”

By now, the crowd was pretty fired up, and so was I. “The people,” I told them, “are being
driven
to violence as their sole recourse. A storm is brewing, a storm that will break forth before long and destroy forever the right of a few men to exploit and enslave the majority of their fellows. Agitate!” I shouted. “Agitate! Organize! Revolt!”

Suddenly a man in police uniform stepped up behind me, laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “Sir, if you continue to incite the people, I will arrest you.” I asked the officer what his name was, and he answered, “It is none of your business, sir.” At this point pandemonium ensued, the crowd erupting in a kind of frenzy. Before I knew what was happening, a phalanx of wagon and plow workers had formed a protective wedge around me and had swiftly removed me from the officer’s grasp. On the sidewalk, a group of armed men—no one recognized them—attempted to assault me, but my stalwart bodyguards saw me safely to the hotel. Three of these noble men insisted on sleeping on the floor of my room throughout the night.

I’m exhausted and exhilarated. The workers do understand what must be done.

Soon after you get this, I’ll be home and holding you in my arms.

Your loving Albert

In a police department notorious throughout the country for its free use of the club, Captain John Bonfield, commander of the Des Plaines Street Station, had become the first among equals. He proudly declared that he’d rather slug a few bystanders than run the risk of a striker getting away unbloodied. When asked, as rarely happened, to justify his innumerable raids on
IWPA
and union meetings, Bonfield laughingly cited the “absence of a visible American flag” or the “flaunting of a red one.”

He’d recently led fifty policemen in breaking down the door and storming Greif’s Hall in order to terrorize a gathering of the members of a socialist publishing society. The police smashed cabinets, ripped the society’s silk flag to shreds, and, with clubs flailing, seriously injured half a dozen men. The publishing society brought suit. The presiding judge decreed that “the police had acted without prejudice, in the staunch belief that these people belonged to the dangerous group known as anarchists.”

A few months prior to the Greif Hall incident, Bonfield broke up a strike of streetcar conductors by ordering his men to charge the crowd gathered at the corner of Madison and Western and to club everyone in sight, whether strikers, onlookers, store owners, or passersby. The police assaulted the crowd with zeal, and Bonfield personally beat two men, neither of them strikers, into unconsciousness. The assault directly defied Mayor Harrison’s standing order to avoid unnecessary confrontations with the citizenry, and he promptly called Bonfield into his office for an explanation. During the interview, Bonfield refused a proffered chair and throughout stood threateningly erect over the seated Mayor. Before being asked a question, Bonfield delivered an answer: “I did it,” he said, “in mercy of the people. A club today to make them scatter may save use
of the pistol tomorrow.” Harrison angrily terminated the interview and decided on the spot not to yield to the intense pressure building among the group of police officers loyal to Bonfield to appoint him to the vacant Superintendent’s job. He would offer it instead to Frederick Ebersold.

But Bonfield was a hero to the cabal of police officers he led. Like him, they were entirely out of sympathy with working-class grievances—though themselves of working-class background—and were deeply beholden to certain allies in the business community for a generous array of gifts and a host of opportunities for graft to augment their meager salaries. Ebersold knew all this, knew of the cabal, the bribes, the graft, and the endemic brutality when he accepted the position of Superintendent, and he decided to do as little as possible to antagonize Bonfield and his supporters.

Ebersold was no coward. He’d fought with Sherman at the battle of Shiloh, and before that had been a decorated soldier in his native Bavaria. And he had no doubt, when he got the nod from Mayor Harrison, that he was more deserving than Bonfield. After all, he told himself, Bonfield was a man who’d failed twice over in business, at running a grocery store and a small fertilizing company, and had become a policeman by default at age forty-one. Ebersold had a report on his desk that, if he decided to use it, would have a devastating impact on Bonfield’s reputation. It contained eye-witness affidavits and detailed complaints itemizing Bonfield’s excesses, as well as a petition—a copy of which the signatories had sent directly to Harrison—from a thousand citizens demanding that Bonfield be dismissed from the force. The most startling of the letters came from Captain Michael J. Schaack, a member of Bonfield’s own inner circle, directly accusing his fellow officer of “needless brutality.”