Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [44]
Before the movement burst into renewed bloom in the nineties, a single terrible event which enlarged the stature of Anarchism took place, not in Europe, but in America, in the city of Chicago. There in August, 1886, eight Anarchists were sentenced by Judge Joseph Gary to be hanged for the murder of seven police killed on the previous May 4 by a bomb hurled into the midst of an armed police force who were about to break up a strikers’ meeting in Haymarket Square.
The occasion was the climax of a campaign for the eight-hour day, which in itself was the climax of a decade of industrial war centering on Chicago. In every clash the employers fought with the forces of law—police, militia and courts—as their allies. The workers’ demands were met with live ammunition and lockouts and with strikebreakers protected by Pinkertons who were armed and sworn in as deputy sheriffs. In the war between the classes, the State was not neutral. Driven by misery and injustice, the workers’ anger grew and with it the employers’ fear, their sense of a rising menace and their determination to stamp it out. Even a man as remote as Henry James sensed a “sinister anarchic underworld heaving in its pain, its power and its hate.”
Anarchism was not a labour movement and was no more than one element in the general upheaval of the lower class. But Anarchists saw in the struggles of labour the hot coals of revolution and hoped to blow them into flame. “A pound of dynamite is worth a bushel of bullets,” cried August Spies, editor of Chicago’s German-language Anarchist daily, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung. “Police and militia, the bloodhounds of capitalism, are ready to murder!” In this he was right, for in the course of a clash between workers and strikebreakers, the police fired, killing two. “Revenge! Revenge! Workingmen to arms!” shrieked handbills printed and distributed by Spies that night. He called for a protest meeting the next day. It took place in Haymarket Square, the police marched to break it up, the bomb was thrown. Who threw it has never been discovered.
The defendants’ speeches to the court after sentence, firm in Anarchist principle and throbbing with consciousness of martyrdom, resounded throughout Europe and America and provided the best propaganda Anarchism ever had. In the absence of direct evidence establishing their guilt, they knew and loudly stated that they were being tried and sentenced for the crime, not of murder, but of Anarchism. “Let the world know,” cried August Spies, “that in 1886 in the state of Illinois eight men were sentenced to death because they believed in a better future!” Their belief had included the use of dynamite, and society’s revenge matched its fright. In the end the sentences of three of the condemned were commuted to prison terms. One, Louis Lingg, the youngest, handsomest and most fervent, who was shown by evidence at the trial to have made bombs, blew himself up with a capsule of fulminate of mercury on the night before the execution and wrote in his blood before he died, “Long live anarchy!” His suicide was regarded by many as a confession of guilt. The remaining four, including Spies, were hanged on November 11, 1887.
For years afterward the silhouette of the gallows and its four hanging bodies decorated Anarchist literature, and the anniversary of November 11 was celebrated by Anarchists in Europe and America as a revolutionary memorial. The public conscience, too, was made aware by the gallow’s fruit of the misery, protest and upheaval in the working class.
Men who were Anarchists without knowing it stood on every street corner. Jacob Riis, the New York police reporter who described in 1890 How the Other Half Lives, saw one on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The