Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [53]
An event in Chicago became the touchstone for the era. On May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of striking workers in Chicago's Hay-market Square, killing four. The following day a group of anarchists held a peaceful protest meeting. When the authorities tried to break it up, someone threw a bomb among the police, killing eight officers. The bomb thrower was never identified, but eight anarchists were convicted on conspiracy charges and sentenced to death. By all accounts the trial was a farce: The prosecution proved that the men held radical ideas but not that they had anything to do with the bombing.
In nineteenth-century America, labor violence was not unusual, nor was the gross miscarriage of justice. What made Haymarket unusual was the hysteria it provoked. The New York Times prescribed the Gatling gun as the only remedy for "an acute outbreak of anarchy," while the St. Louis Globe-Democrat announced that "there are no good anarchists but dead anarchists." A Cincinnati paper recommended lynching the prisoners, and—although legal procedures technically were followed—that is more or less what happened. Despite abundant evidence of innocence, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a final appeal, and four of the men were hanged on November n, 1887. All of the prisoners remained defiant to the end, and one shouted "Hurrah for anarchy!" from the scaffold. After the executions, the families held one of the largest public funerals Chicago ever saw, with 20,000 people marching in the funeral procession and 200,000 more lining the streets. One reporter noted that to the crowd the executed men were "martyrs in the cause of the poor against the rich."7
The Haymarket tragedy exposed the deep fears that pervaded the United States in the 1880s. As cities grew uncontrollably large and the working class demanded its rights, many of America's leaders felt as if the country was slipping out of their grasp and into the hands of the rabble. Mob violence, it appeared, had to be met by the measured violence of capital punishment. But the death penalty commissioners recognized that state violence had to be applied carefully, lest it promote rather than quell disorder. They reported that at the funerals of executed men "evil deeds are glorified into acts of heroism." A member of New York's legislature defended the clause forbidding funerals by noting "the insurrectionary funeral of the 121 Chicago Anarchists." The World noted approvingly that with electrical execution there would be "no glory left in execution—nothing, in short, but a cold and quiet death, such as dogs meet in the public pounds."8
Similar motives underlay the press gag provision of the proposed law. "The newspapers are extensively read by the criminal classes," the commissioners wrrote, "who glory in the description of the courage shown by their colleagues undergoing the sentence of death." The result was that "the execution, instead of operating as a deterrent, . . . has been known even to stimulate others to the commission of crime." If newspapers did not report on executions, this danger was removed.9
The execution bill Gerry drafted tried to complete the movement that began with the shift to private executions in the 1830s. Because sheriffs had found ways to skirt the law—and because newspapers always reported on executions—private hangings were not private at all. The hanging ritual still seemed to subvert rather than buttress the social order. By moving executions to central locations and providing for dissection, corpse destruction, and press restrictions, the