Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [869]
Some anarchists were excited by this verbal ferocity, despite, or perhaps because of, its being all talk: Most had never thrown a bomb, placed a charge, or hanged a single capitalist. During the miserable mid-eighties, years of recession and repression, Revolutionary War Science sold like lager at picnics and meetings around town, at ten cents a copy. Serialized in the anarchist press, it roused readers across the country. Young Emma Goldman, a seamstress up in Rochester, decided to move to New York City and ask Most to help her become an anarchist.
Overwhelmingly, however, New York workers were repelled by Most’s posturing. Schwab and the local anarchists broke with him, branding his fulminations dangerous and immoral. The socialists and the Knights would have nothing to do with him. But by matching the levels of rhetorical violence that middle- and upper-class spokesmen had employed routinely since the depression of the 1870s, Most provided an all too convenient symbol for those intent on portraying all challenges to the status quo as lethal menaces.
The press made Most into an archetypal terrorist. Cartoonists like Nast (of anti Tweed fame) pilloried him constantly. Joseph Keppler of Puck used him as model for a bewhiskered foreign-looking anarchist, bomb in one hand, pistol in the other, though Most usually dressed in a business suit and had neatly trimmed hair. These images, along with characterizations of anarchists as “reptiles” and “leeches” worthy of extermination, raised the rhetorical stakes. General Sherman, now a resident of West 71st Street, foresaw an imminent and “armed contest between Capital and Labor” as the “better classes are tired of the insane howlings of the lower strata, and they mean to stop them.”
MAY DAY!
It was in this venomous atmosphere, on May 1, 1886, that organized labor launched a nationwide offensive. The tremendous growth of the Knights of Labor, and a run of successful strikes in 1884 and 1885, had given unionists the idea that perhaps a general strike would win the eight-hour day.
Across the country over three hundred thousand turned out. In New York City forty-five thousand walked off work, including streetcar conductors, cigarmakers, building tradesmen, pianomakers, and machinists. Many of the strikes were swiftly successful. Others were ferociously resisted, particularly after May 3, when in Chicago’s Haymarket Square someone exploded a bomb amid policemen who were attacking an anarchist demonstration. The New York Times blamed the police deaths on the “doctrine of Herr Johann Most”—who was promptly arrested—and called for the application of “hemp, in judicious doses.” The Knights of Labor scrambled to distance itself from the affair, denouncing the anarchists accused of inciting the crime as “wild beasts.” It did them no good; public sympathy was abruptly alienated by the Haymarket bombing, and the eight-hour movement went down to defeat.
More alarming, Central Labor Union organizers were convicted and jailed for using a boycott. The tactic had its roots in the Irish practice—developed during the land wars of 1879-83—of cutting off social intercourse with rack-renting and evicting landlords. New York City’s workers used it against employers, targeting their products rather than their persons. With so many consumer goods locally produced for local sale, working-class boycotts that disciplined businessmen through the marketplace were often more effective than strikes. By the mid-1880s, the CLU had mounted scores of them successfully against recalcitrant employers who made or sold beer, bread, cigars, shoes, hats, clothing, and house furnishings. An alarmed press and pulpit denounced the tactic as (in Harper’s words) a “new form of terrorism.” Businessmen brought criminal prosecutions, and by 1886 over a hundred tailors, bakers, musicians, and waiters had been arrested and indicted.
In the latest instance, Knights of Labor musicians had called