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By Root 186 0

a century later, it’s a controversy that still rages. On May 4, 1886, a few hundred men and women gathered at a corner just west of downtown in support of workers locked out at the McCormick Harvester Works (two workers had been killed by the police the previous day), and as the crowd was breaking up, someone threw a bomb into the police lines, killing seven policemen. Eight activists, seven of them foreign-born, were convicted on flimsy evidence, and five were sentenced to death, partly at the insistence of business leaders including Marshall Field, the founder of the department store of the same name. Field also supplied the National Guard with Gatling guns and urged the construction of nearby Fort Sheridan to hold off any future uprisings. Despite protests from around the world, four of the anarchists were eventually hanged. (One killed himself before going to the gallows by biting down on a dynamite cap.) An estimated two hundred thousand people—a quarter of the city’s population—lined the streets to view the funeral procession. Seven years later, at the urging of Clarence Darrow, Governor John P. Altgeld, the first foreign-born man chosen to lead the state, pardoned the men posthumously, to which the Chicago Tribune responded: “Governor Altgeld has apparently not a drop of pure American blood in his veins.”

Three years after the Haymarket incident, the city erected a monument to the police officers who were killed by the bomb. Nearly a century later, in 1969, during the tumult of that time, someone placed a stick of dynamite between the legs of the bronze policeman, which toppled it. The city recast it. A year later, someone blew it up again. So the city placed a twenty-four-hour police guard at the statue, and when that proved too costly moved it to the courtyard of the Police Academy, where it stands today, well protected. Memories die hard here. As William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”

Sadlowski herds the students back on the bus and has the driver motor along the river, past what used to be Acme Steel; along the fence is a FOR SALE sign that notes the property’s assets: “89 acres on Calumet River with dockage.” In the distance is the blast furnace upon which the company had painted a large yellow smiley face. “You work on the fuckin’ thing, it wasn’t smiles,” Sadlowski tells me. If there was a place close to hell, it was the blast furnace, where men would shovel coke and limestone into the furnace; it would get so hot that men had to wear asbestos-lined coats. During his 1976 campaign, Sadlowski had told the Penthouse interviewer that no one in this country should have to work in a coke oven, a place even harder on workers than the blast furnace; there, the tar was extracted from the coal, and noxious gases and fumes were spewed into the factory air. It was a remark that his opposition used in its campaign to suggest that Sadlowski would encourage plant closings. Sadlowski may be a romantic, but not about the work.

We then head west, across the river, to the preserved Pullman community, which at the end of the nineteenth century was built to be a workingman’s paradise but soon became a workingman’s prison. George Pullman made his money producing the Pullman Palace Car, the equivalent of a hotel on wheels. In 1880 he built the town, a collection of handsome brick townhouses with indoor plumbing, a luxury at the time. The town also had a European-style market square, an exquisite hotel (named after Pullman’s daughter, Florence), and its own school and a church, which was meant to be shared by all denominations. Pullman’s workers became unwitting participants in his ambitious—and misguided—social experiment.

During the recession of the 1890s, Pullman cut the wages of his workers, but their rents remained unchanged. “He was a ruthless son of a bitch,” Sadlowski tells his students. “But cunning. He’d cut the carpenters’ wages two to five percent, and nobody would come to their aid. It’s not me, they’d say. Then a few months later, he’d cut the tinsmiths two to five percent. Creating