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In Our Time
The Haymarket Affair
00:51:39
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1886 bombing in Chicago amid violent labour conflict.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
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Gary Gerstel
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Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music.
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Christopher Phelps
Radio Podcasts this is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. On the 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago, somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman and the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an 8 hour working day following a call for a general strike. The bomber was never identified, but two of the speakers at the rally, anarchists, and six of their supporters were blamed as inciting murder and four of them were hanged. The May International Workers Day was created in their memory. With me to discuss the Haymarket affair are Ruth Kinner, professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University, Christopher Phelps, Associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Gary Gerstel, Paul Mellon professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gary, there have been tensions growing in America between workers and industry for some time. Can you highlight how it had arrived at the point we're talking about?
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Gary Gerstel
Well, the 19th century was the century of industrialization led by Britain and the world. America began that century on the periphery. But during and after the Civil War began to industrialize at a ferocious rate. Capitalist development was unregulated, it was raw, it was rapid. And if you leave capitalists and their industries to their own devices, you get a cycle of boom and bust. Inequality is spreading. Capitalists are able to take care of themselves. Workers were often unemployed, no welfare state provisions left to fall back on. And so what happens after the Civil War is that there's an increasing turn to protest to unions. There was a very severe depression in the 1870s, beginning in 1873, lasting till 1877. There was a national railroad strike that became violent in 1886. The year began as the Great Upheaval general strike across the country. Many of these strikes were led by railroad unions, which worked for the biggest corporations of the time. But by spring of 1886, Chicago was engulfed by protests, by strikes. And Chicago had grown at an unbelievable rate. It was 50,000 in 1850, it was 500,000. In the 1880s, it was 1.7 million. By 1900, it had become the hub of American manufacturing trade. All railroads went through Chicago. This was the epicenter of American employer and labor conflict. And at the time, there were no easy mechanisms for resolving disputes peacefully. And so workers and employers increasingly resorted to armed self defense, violence, Private police hired by employers and workers, Many of them owned guns. And so increasingly, violence broke out at labor disputes. And by the late 19th century, America had become the most violent theater of industrial relations in the world.
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Christopher Phelps
Where was the growth coming from?
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Gary Gerstel
It was coming from trade. All railroads ended up going through Chicago. It sat on Lake Michigan, so it had access to the great lakes, and so it could send, it could receive and send all kinds of iron ore and other goods from the north and send goods to the east. And because of all that traffic and trade, it also became a center of manufacturing. Many, many industries. Steel, meat packing, furniture, agricultural implements, other kinds of machinery, all concentrated in this one city. And the provisions guarding life and property were insufficient in this rapidly growing city. In 1871, almost the entire city burned to the ground. Wood, housing, poor fire regulation. They rebuilt it incredibly quickly. But that gives you a sense of the raucous nature of an explosive nature of growth in the city. Adding to that, where all the workers going to come from. Because even though the United States had a very rapid rate of natural increase, the population multiplying at a rapid rate. This kind of expansion of capitalism cannot be supported just by local or national labor supply. So vast numbers of immigrants were coming to the United States, Many of them from Germany, many of them from Ireland late in the 19th century, increasingly from eastern Europe. So it became a potpourri of languages, cultures, many people living at variance with what were held to be the best American values and cultures, Protestantism, republicanism, Bringing what was thought to be dangerous religions and ideologies with them. And this became part of the combustible mix, waiting for someone to light a torch to set it off.
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Christopher Phelps
So in Chicago, we not only have wealth versus poverty and power versus people who have no power at all, but in. In the mix itself. Conflicts from different religious backgrounds and also.
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Gary Gerstel
Those coming from Europe were bringing particular ideologies with them. Many of the Germans have been refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, and they had been disillusioned with liberalism, they were looking for more radicalism. Some found it in Marx, some would find it in anarchism. And they became key elements of the labor movement in Chicago.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you very much, Ruth. Ruth Kinner, let's get to the Haymarket rally.
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Melvin Bragg
Who was calling it and why the rally is called? I mean there are two related incidents I think the first is the national strike on May 1st. So this is the general strike that's called across the country and it's called by workers in support of an eight hour day. And in Chicago something like 40,000 workers went out and the tensions in the city were very high. And the expectation was that there would be violence because of the way that, as we just heard, because of the way that the relationships between the workers and the employers had soured over the years. But in the event it went off without incident. The second event takes place on the 3rd of May and this is a local dispute and it's in a Chicago factory which has been involved in a long strike and a lockout. And the employers have brought in the Pinkertons, the armed security, in order to bring in relief labour. And in the event that the labourers are being brought in, the Pinkertons fire on the picketers and they kill four workers. So the immediate cause of the call for the protest meeting is this 3rd of May shooting of the workers. But the back background to the meeting is this broader struggle for the eight hour day and it plays into a whole kind of tense labour relations in the city. So the people who call for the action. The lead person I suppose is Auguste Spies. Now he's a member of the International Working People's association, which is the organization, the federation that was set up in the early 1880s to coordinate anarchist actions.
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Christopher Phelps
Anarchist actions?
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Melvin Bragg
Anarchist. It's a specifically anarchist group and it was set up to coordinate anarchism across the us. So he's a member of this organization. He's also the editor of a German language newspaper called the Arbeiter Zeitung. And the Arbeiter Zeitung has been supporting workers rights for a number of years. But one of the things it's also been doing is calling on the workers or urging the workers to arm themselves against the police violence and against the employers violence. So precisely to use the kind of armed self defence in order to protect themselves from the hostility that they're faced with.
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Christopher Phelps
I was going to ask where the police came in because they seem to have taken a positive and active part, don't they?
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Melvin Bragg
The police in Chicago, from the point of view of the anarchists, certainly, and a lot of the union movement. I mean, the police are notorious in Chicago for their repressive force. There's one person who becomes very important in the trial, which is Captain Bonfield and Michael Shack, who are deeply conservative forces in the city and who really have no track with the workers movements.
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Christopher Phelps
So they send in the police to quieten it down by whatever means.
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Melvin Bragg
The protest in Haymarket is called at very short notice, but the police deploy 200 officers and surround the square because they think that there's going to be trouble.
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Christopher Phelps
One of the men there was Albert Parsons. What was his background?
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Melvin Bragg
So Albert Parsons, he's also a member of the International Working People's association. And he's also a prominent labour activist and anarchist in Chicago. And he's the editor of a newspaper called the Alarm, which is an English language anarchist paper. He's important in the group because he's the only member of the anarchist group who's arrested, who's born and bred in America. He can trace his family's ancestry back to the 1630s to the original settlers. He was born in Alabama, he was raised in Texas. When the Civil War broke out in 1863, he was a teenager, but he was itching to join the Confederates, which he did. He served as a scout in the Civil War. And he comes out of the Civil War radicalized. So he comes out of the Civil War as a deeply opposed to slavery and it kind of breaks with the traditions of the South. He was apprenticed as a printer, he worked as a journalist. He met and married Lucy Parsons, who was a. She'd been born into slavery. Her mother was a former slave. She was also a militant in her own right and an organizer. And in 1872 they go to Chicago where they get involved in labor politics and they do so from the perspective of anti slavery. So they look at the condition of the working class in Chicago and they compare it to the condition of the chattel slaves in the South. And what they argue is that although the experience of slavery, wage slavery and chattel slavery is very different, actually the forces of exploitation and oppression are constant across those two experiences. And so Parsons becomes involved in labour activism as a militant, as a radical. He attends the Pittsburgh Conference in 1883. Now this is a really important meeting which really is the sort of the launch event for the International Working People's Association. It's the moment, I suppose, at which the anarchists sort of come up with a statement of their goals and their aims.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you very much, Christopher. What was Meant by anarchists to these.
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Ruth Kinner
People at that time, anarchism means literally without rule. That is those who advocate a society without domination and authority. And instead a self governing free society, a cooperative society. These anarchists in particular there had been a long American individualistic, libertarian, anarchist, current free thinking. The Chicago milieu was distinct because they were surrounded by the environment that Gary described. Of industrial conflict and industrial development. They were implanted in the working class. And their view was proto anarcho syndicalist. In other words, the strain of anarchism that sees the way we're going to achieve that free society as through the organization and self governance of the working class itself. Which can take over industry, transform things so that there's no longer class exploitation. So that there is workers control of industry. And they called that the Chicago idea. They understood themselves as distinctive within the anarchist world. For having emphasized that, what reach did.
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Christopher Phelps
They have who read their work and followed their lead?
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Ruth Kinner
The two most important Haymarket defendants were Albert Parsons, the Texan, and August Spies, the German. And each of them were both mass leaders of the labor movement. And at the same time were editors of their respective newspapers. Parsons paper was tiny 2000 circulation, something like that. They had only a few hundred members of the American group. Part of the movement. The Arbeiter Zeitung, which simply means workers newspaper was 22,000. It was the largest at points German circulation newspaper in Chicago. Which was all the immigrants pouring in half German at the time. So it was influential in the German community.
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Christopher Phelps
It was popular. Was it decisive in getting its way?
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Ruth Kinner
They came to anarchism through first trying to win electoral office. And they came to the conclusion that because of campaign financing, which in the 19th century was deeply corrupt in a place like Chicago, in fact it would be all the way up into the 20th century. And then the very fact structurally that workers don't have the free time to participate in civic life. Because they're working these 10 to 12 hour days in the factories. That politics is not going to ever be accountable to a labor agenda. This is why they came to the anarchist point of view. They were skeptical about the ability of them to achieve political reforms. And particularly the eight hour day which people had tried to get legislated but were unable to get legislated. So they thought we're going to have to fight for it through strikes. We're going to have to fight for it with the employers. We're going to have to win it ourselves.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you very much, Gary. What happened on the 4th of May? Can we specific here to turn A peaceful rally. It seemed to be peaceful almost to the very end. It was peaceful. Into the Taurus Haymarket affair.
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Gary Gerstel
It was not the huge demonstration that they were expecting. It was winding down. By the evening, most of the speakers had left. There were only 2 of the people who would be arrested, who were still at the rally. And what touched off the violence was first regiments of police marching down the street abreast in a kind of military formation. And into that regiment someone tossed a bomb. The bomb went off. It was a shock to everyone. It immediately killed one policeman. And in that moment of violence, other police began shooting, not knowing who had thrown the bomb, but being very terrified at this act of violence. And so the shooting began and many people were killed and wounded.
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Christopher Phelps
What do we have any idea how many?
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Gary Gerstel
Six other police would die, four civilians would die, and scores of people were wounded. This terrified the city. The assumption was that the anarchists had been responsible for this bomb throwing. And despite all the investigations into that moment, the identity of the bomb thrower has never been proven. One of the eight anarchists arrested, a man by the name of Louis Ling, was known as a bomb maker, especially committed to the making of dynamite, which was a new technology at the time. There were some anarchists who were perhaps a little too enthralled with dynamite and the possibilities of revolutionary violence. Albert Parsons says at one point that dynamite is democracy. And what he meant by that is that it put power in the hands of individual anarchists in ways that it had not been put in their hands before. So there was a lot of discussion about this. And this increased the sense of terror. Eight anarchists were imprisoned and the city and then the entire nation was engulfed with fear by this moment of violence.
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Christopher Phelps
So it spread right across America immediately.
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Gary Gerstel
Right through Chicago, right across the nation, and then internationally. And it mattered in this instance that this was occurring in a moment of very vexed employer worker conflict and in a country in which violence had already been woven into the texture of industrial relations. So what was new about this was not the violence, but the specific kind of violence that had occurred. And that was the throwing of a bomb into a phalanx of police.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you very much, Ruth. Ruth Kenner. One man who wasn't there, but was in the minds of many a were there was Johann Most. How did he fit in?
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Melvin Bragg
Most was probably before Haymarket, the most famous anarchist in America. And he was typically depicted as sort of mouth foaming maniac. He was an orator and a pamphleteer. He'd come to America in 1882 having served a sentence in Britain, he'd been given hard labour in 1881 after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. And he wrote a piece in his paper and he called it a triumph. So when he was released from hard labour, he came to America, he set up in New York, where he started to publish his, or continue publishing his paper, which was called Freiheit, which is another German language paper, and it circulated amongst the German speakers in America, and it also got smuggled into Bismarck's Germany. So Most is an advocate of propaganda by the deed, and he understands that doctrine to mean the right of physical force against state violence. So he doesn't associate it with targeted assassination, which is how it later became known, but he thinks it's legitimate for workers to arm themselves against police forces, against the military who are deployed against them. And to that end, he writes a pamphlet which is also in German called the Science of Revolutionary Warfare, which is basically an instruction guide on how to make bombs. He's the leading force behind the International Working People's Association. I mean, he's the man who really gets this organization going, and he's the man who writes its manifesto, the Pittsburgh Manifesto. He's the lead author. So Parsons has a hand in that, and so does Spies, but he's really the main player. So he's known to Parsons and he's known to Spies. And this is brought up in the trial that Most's featuring in this organization enables the prosecution to start building this case about conspiracy, but it also allows them to paint a picture of anarchism as something that's foreign. It's an importance, it's deeply, profoundly un American, and that's what Most enables them to do, to demonize the anarchists who were put on trial.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you, Christopher. Christopher Phelps. So arrests were made. Who was arrested and why?
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Ruth Kinner
Initially, there are 10 people arrested. It includes spies, Parsons and Ling, who you've heard about. It includes some sub editors on the Arbeiter Zeitung and sort of ordinary people involved in the movement. One of the people arrested turns state's evidence and testifies against his comrades. And another of them, whose name is Rudolf Schnaubelt, flees after being arrested and released twice. And the prosecution would insinuate that perhaps he was the bomber, but there's no evidence whatsoever that he really was. He probably just got a sense that this isn't going to be a fair trial, and I'm going back to Germany as fast as I can. So eight were left to be tried. The evidence against them was circumstantial contradictory, dubious. But the charge was never that any one of the eight had thrown the bomb. The charge was never that they were directly responsible for the murder of any policeman. The charge rather was that they were accessories to murder through a conspiracy and the conspiracy was simply their advocacy. It was that in their newspaper they had said that the police and the Pinkertons and the militia are attacking the workers and workers, arm yourselves. That they had published articles about dynamite and how this marvelous technology could possibly counteract cannons, for example. The strongest evidence perhaps was against Ling because Ling was indeed found to have manufactured bombs and in fact proclaimed it. There was nothing illegal at the time about having dynamite. Miners had it, construction workers had it. There's nothing illegal about even manufacturing bombs under the law. And there was no solid evidence that it was one of Ling's bombs that had actually been thrown. The trial, by the way, had a jury of people who were selected, even though many of the citizens who were prospective jurors said, I'm prejudiced against anarchists. I don't like socialists. I read in the newspapers these guys probably did it, they should be hung.
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Christopher Phelps
Thank you. Can I ask you to take that on? Gary, who was so determined that they would be put on trial.
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Gary Gerstel
This reflects on the deep conflict between employers and workers in Chicago. The forces of order, the forces of property. Most middle class opinion was deeply alarmed at the violence that had occurred, found it intolerable and was persuaded that speech about violence was the same as an act of violence. It also mattered.
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Christopher Phelps
Persuaded them.
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Gary Gerstel
On the one hand, the prosecution persuaded the jury. On the other hand, popular opinion was swayed by fear of foreign radicals who were seen as profoundly unamerican and profoundly threatening to the American way of life, which was committed to a process of democratic change. If you wanted politics to change, if you wanted industry to change, there were regular elections, there were procedures, there were institutions. And in the minds of many citizens in the, in the city of Chicago, this resort to violence was seen as unacceptable and un American.
- [22:28]
Christopher Phelps
Ruth, you want to come in?
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Gary Gerstel
Ruth?
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Melvin Bragg
Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, one of the things that the prosecution do is they introduce countless articles and essays that have been published in the Albeit Zeitung and the Alarm. And so they select these, you know, in order to show that the anarchists are hell bent on violence. And so the picture they build is not really about who threw the bomb. It's about the literature that the anarchists were putting out. And of course they, you know, they detach all of this from the literature that's being put out by the mainstream media at the time, which is also incredibly violent and speaks in terms about how to deal with the workers. I mean, one of the articles that the defendants talk about on the stand, to try and contextualize what's going on here, is a piece that was published, I think, in the Chicago Tribune, where the author says, you know, the way to solve the street homelessness problem is to give the homeless bread and make sure it's laced with strychnine. So this was the kind of the atmosphere at the time. So it was deeply, deeply partial to introduce material that was highly selective, frighten the jury, sway public opinion, and basically convict the people, these people on the stand, not for what they'd done, but really for just publishing what they'd said.
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Christopher Phelps
Yes.
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Gary Gerstel
And this was also a moment where the realm of free speech as a right that Americans have was not clearly delineated. This trial occurred under state law, not under federal law, which would have been protected by the Bill of Rights. And so what exactly constituted the freedom to say what you wanted to say was not what we consider it to be today. And I should also say that this began a long process in the United States of revolutionary groups being tried for the beliefs rather than for their acts. And this process continues through the 20th century. And I would say that Haymarket marks a very important moment in the development of that and the efforts of the judiciary in America to draw that line in the right place between what you can think and what you are doing. This marks a very important moment in that process.
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Christopher Phelps
Could you come in and let Christopher.
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Ruth Kinner
It was shocking. There had never been a dynamite bomb thrown. It horrified everyone, and hysteria erupted because there could be anarchists anywhere. All these immigrants could be anarchists. All these Czech and German immigrants could be anarchists. Bombs could be thrown at anybody. Here are the police. Who are they going to throw it at? Next right. And so getting the anarchists stamping out anarchism became the issue, and not just these particular defendants. In fact, the prosecution said at the beginning of the trial, anarchy is on trial here.
- [25:10]
Christopher Phelps
Could you come in and let me.
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Gary Gerstel
First say, in response to Christopher, not only was the labor question national, it was international. And the labor question, how to solve the inequalities that capitalism was producing was being discussed throughout what we today would call the global North. This fear began with the Paris Commune in the early 1870s. And one of the consequences of the Paris Commune, you can see this in American cities today, the building of armories that follows the Paris Commune to guard future property holders against Assaults on their property and against the resort to violence. And so this is a country, this is a moment already prepped by events that are going on elsewhere. And so some people are saying in 1886, oh my God, the French Commune has come to America. And this is something we absolutely cannot tolerate.
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Christopher Phelps
How did anarchists see themselves when they were being attacked across the continent?
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Gary Gerstel
We have to probably distinguish between different groups of anarchists because not all of them have the same orientation to propaganda, the deed and the resort to violence. But Parsons, when he's asked to make his final comments before the sentence is imposed and one of the questions is, is he going to plead for clemency? No. But he's defiant. This is where he says dynamite is democracy. Dynamite puts means of violence heretofore controlled by elites into the hands of the masses. That's his first statement. And what it does is to reaffirm the justice of a certain kind of revolutionary violence in certain situations. Then he goes on to say, nothing said in this courtroom over these weeks and months has proven anything about my involvement in this particular violent act. But it's so interesting and I think so revealing that he begins his last words and his last testament not with that statement, not by saying I'm innocent, but by reaffirming the necessity upon certain occasions to use revolutionary violence for the sake of defending the working class. And anarchists would struggle with this issue because the resort to violence did not die among anarchists in the United States, but among some groups of anarchists. They began to say in order to protect their vision of a humane life, which they had, which Christopher articulated earlier, a world of small groups of people governing themselves without outside force. In order to protect that dream, some do begin to renounce violence. And one of them is becomes the most famous anarchist of the early 20th century in the United States. And that is Emma Goldman. She believes in the general strike. She believes in confrontations between employers and employees. She believes in a conjuncture that might bring capitalism down. But she does not believe in the.
- [27:59]
Melvin Bragg
Propaganda of the deed, although she does actually. She is involved in the attempted assassination of Henry Frick. And she does say the revolution is not going to come in kid gloves. So you know, she says, everyone, we'd all like to be Tolstoyans, but the truth is, you know, if we just stand here, we're going to get shot. And I think that was Parsons view too. And you know, on the other side of that, I mean, he appeals to American traditions to make this argument. I mean, the, you know, the Language of the Pittsburgh Manifesto evokes the Declaration of Independence. They talk about Jefferson, they talk about the duty of workers to rise against tyranny. And one of the things, I mean, he speaks on the stand for two days, eight hours over two days, where he takes apart the arguments that have been put about anarchism. And he says, you know, we're living in a state which has no freedom, there is no emancipation. We're being conned by what happened in the Civil War. The difference is that in the old days, it was the master who chose the slave, and now it's the slave who has to choose the master. That's not freedom. You know what they wanted? I mean, they attacked property and they attacked the properties. They wanted the destruction of the ruling class. They wanted a cooperative society with free exchange between producers and federalism. They wanted universal secular education for men and women. They wanted equality irrespective of race or sex. So these ideas were. They were radical in the sense that the conclusion they came to was that you wouldn't be able to achieve this within the Constitution because the Constitution was rigged in favor of the property owners. So you had to destroy the Constitution in order to get the freedom. And that was what was radical about them. But one of the things that the defence introduced in the trial were essays by John Stuart Mill and Victor Hugo to show that what the anarchists were arguing for was not so remote from some of the leading intellectuals and philosophers in Europe. I mean, their ideas were for all of the principles of the Constitution. What the anarchists were saying was the Constitution was betraying them.
- [30:01]
Christopher Phelps
Gary, would you like to come in?
- [30:03]
Gary Gerstel
There are profoundly attractive elements of anarchist philosophy and ideology. But I would say, on balance, the refusal to renounce revolutionary violence in the United States hurt radicalism more than it helped it. And by the early 20th century, the exclusion of anarchists from coming to the United States, later, the exclusion of communists from coming to the United States, special penalty is erected. My own judgment is that the anarchists would have been better off renouncing this tool of violence. It's not to say their analysis was wrong, but I would say their strategy was misconceived in a country like the United States.
- [30:42]
Christopher Phelps
Christopher, you.
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Ruth Kinner
There's a tension which is that the main bulk of the movement's focus is on achieving the eight hour day, on winning gains for working class people, on transforming the conditions of labor and doing so through a social transformation that they call a revolution. But because they're being met just for striking, just for having a union, there's no law that says you can have a union and no law that says you have the right to strike at that time. In fact, the state comes in and defends the employer's right to fire you. So they're getting clubbed and they're getting shot and they're getting killed. And because of that, they come to the idea that force is going to be inevitable in this process, that you can't get around force. It's a class war. And then there's a problem, because under what circumstances precisely is force justifiable? And they're very elastic. They write in moments of passion, they write in moments of anger. And sometimes it seems indiscriminate, the kind of force that they might countenance at other times. It's quite clear contextually that what they're advocating is armed self defense. But that then gets them into trouble and becomes their Achilles heel in the trial because it seems like they're just celebrating dynamite when that wasn't really what they were about. What they were really about was social equality.
- [32:08]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, that's. And I think that's so. I mean, the, the case that's being made against them is that anarchism isn't a doctrine at all. Anarchism is for people who just want to kill people. And that was pretty much what the, the prosecution were arguing and what the anarchists were trying to say on the stand. And they all took the stand and they all defended what they were doing. And they didn't try and hide the fact that they were advocating physical force in their defense. So they didn't try and conceal this. But what they tried to explain was what the doctrine meant. And you know, you can. Their testimonies are still available and they take apart capitalism and that's what they do.
- [32:42]
Christopher Phelps
And on November 11, 1887, four of them, including Parsons and Spees, were hanged. Ling had already killed himself. Can I come back to you, Christopher? What about this trial gave it the impetus to be so internationally significant?
- [33:02]
Ruth Kinner
At the time of the bombing, the labor movement virtually collapsed in the United States. There was tremendous repression, hundreds of labor activists arrested in Chicago. There was a red scare, there was an anarchist scare. But it takes about a year before the conviction gets passed down. And once it becomes clear that they will hang and that there wasn't actually anything proving they had anything to do with the throwing of the bomb, it becomes an international cause Celebrate. People like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw and William Morris send a telegram from London appealing to the governor for clemency. There are demonstrations in Vienna, demonstrations in London, all around the world. The labor movement knows that these men are going to die. They have very little sympathy for anarchists and none for the propaganda of the deed. But they know that these men are innocent of murder and yet going to hang. And then when the four men are hung, it's felt deeply as a tragedy and they're felt to be martyrs. Not to anarchism, not to propaganda, the deed, not to murder, but to labor and its cause. And that's when you get the creation of Mayday as an international workers holiday. Now, ironically, that day is not really celebrated in the United States. You know, there's no real Mayday, Labor Day in the United States. But internationally it becomes the international workers holiday because of the activity of the international labor movement and intellectuals and writers who are sympathetic.
- [34:37]
Christopher Phelps
So mark to you guide.
- [34:39]
Gary Gerstel
Well, it did not do anything to dampen labor capital conflict in the United States. It breaks out with a fury again in the 1890s. Employers with the allied with the state. The government which is inclined to call on the troops to repress strikes leads to violent encounters during the Pullman railroad strike of 1893 and the Homestead strike. Steelworks Andrew Carnegie of 1894. And this pattern of violence extends through the first decade and a half of the 20th century. So what the trial exposes is not just the injustice of these men being hung for a crime they didn't commit. It exposes the repressive character of labor relations in the United States. And it exposes the fact that instruments are not available to manage these conflicts in a non violent way. So the legacy is profound in the form of workers and their unions saying, we will not rest until a better system of industrial relations comes to the United States.
- [35:43]
Christopher Phelps
When did that come to the United States?
- [35:45]
Gary Gerstel
1930S and 40s. Takes half a century after Haymarket for that to happen.
- [35:50]
Christopher Phelps
Yeah. Can you tell, tell us a bit more to follow that up, Ruth, of the longer legacy of the Haymarket affair.
- [35:58]
Melvin Bragg
The immediate effect on a lot of radicals, I mean, and socialists, is to really radicalize people, to draw people to anarchism. I mean, it exposes not only the repressiveness of labor relations, but also the brokenness of American institutions. So, you know, people begin to question, you know, how different the new world is from the old world. I mean, it just seems very arbitrary. People like Emma Goldman are brought into anarchism because of the Haymarket affair. One of the things that happens in Chicago is a monument is put up to commemorate the police which gets blown up in 1969. By the Weathermen. But the other sort of main line comes through Lucy Parsons, who's the widow of Albert Parsons. And she's the link between the Chicago idea that's articulated in Haymarket and the Industrial Workers of the World. So she's at the founding conference of the Industrial Workers of the World. It's not an explicitly anarchist organization, but it's packed with anarchists and it meets the same kinds of repressive violence as the Haymarket anarchists had met.
- [36:56]
Christopher Phelps
Did you just eventually die away, Gary?
- [36:58]
Gary Gerstel
I would say it declined pretty significantly in the first three quarters of the 20th century.
- [37:04]
Christopher Phelps
What occasioned that decline?
- [37:06]
Gary Gerstel
The reluctance of anarchists to lay out a strategy of governance that was bigger and broader than small communities of workers governing themselves. It did not really have an answer to the state. It wanted to abolish the state. And the 20th century is a story of the state triumphing on both the left and the right, and the major movement of radicalism, socialism, moving into state building in the form of socialism and communism. Anarchism has been reborn in the late 20th and early 21st century, in part in reaction to the destruction of the dream of communism concentrating all power unto the state. And as radicals began to rethink what should be the role of state power in constructing the lives of ordinary people, a process of rediscovering anarchism has unfolded in the United States, beginning in the movement in Seattle in 1999 and then blossoming in Occupy Wall street in 2011. So I think what we're seeing now is a quite interesting and significant rebirth of interest in anarchist ideals and programs after a long half century where they, I would say, fell to the margins.
- [38:25]
Ruth Kinner
Christo the ideas that they're talking about persisting are the notion of a self governing, free society and of autonomous collectives pursuing that rather than the propaganda of the deed of Johann Most. I would say Haymarket, and there were subsequent attempts, was a good example of how the so called propaganda of the deed, that is in a revolutionary situation, revolutionary violence can inspire the masses to rise up, is actually completely wrong. That it only strengthens the state, it only invites tremendous repression against the whole of the movement. It discredits the cause. So the propaganda of the deed, ironically, the propaganda effect is to popularize the notion that that's a dead end and that that's not the way to go, that, you know, we lose our parsons and our spies if we do that. You know, we lose our radical leaders and give the state a pretext to suppress them.
- [39:21]
Christopher Phelps
We're coming to the End of the program now, is it?
- [39:23]
Melvin Bragg
Ruth November 11th is still a big day for people connected with the anarchist movement and people on the left. And I think the reason that it is is because the group that were put on trial and executed and ultimately had the verdicts quashed. So the verdicts were quashed in 1893, by which time they were dead. Four of them were dead, five of them were dead. But I think the reason that they become so important, important is because their standing, their status, the way they present themselves on the stand is so, is so impressive. And I think they encapsulate all that's best, if you like, in labour activism and anti capitalist resistance. I mean, they don't have the profile of someone like Joe Hill, but that's where they sit.
- [40:06]
Gary Gerstel
GARY As I look over the last 150 years since Haymarket, what I think of is the role of the left in influencing discussion and debate on labor in America and the need to address the inequalities of capitalism. I've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the left and labor relations. I have difficulty imagining a time when the left will actually triumph in the United States. But at the same time, the moments of greatest social progress have occurred when there's been a vigorous left to present the case, to make the case, and to influence those further to the right, those in the center, about the necessity of reform. A youngish political science professor at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s, a man by the name of Woodrow Wilson was profoundly upset about the violence and labor disorder in American society. He did not like anarchists. But when he came into office and when he went to the Paris peace Conference in 1919, he said, the labor question is the most urgent question that confronts us in the world, and unless we resolve that, nothing else will happen. That is where I find the legacy of Haymarket.
- [41:23]
Ruth Kinner
CHRISTOPHER I think it might be worth just us ending by speaking a little about the dignity they had on the gallows. The four men, they came down. Traditionally, somebody who's about to be hung gets to speak a last word. They clearly had that in their minds. And yet the hangman just put the hood over their heads right away and put the noose on right away. And spies said something to the effect of the voices you silence today will be the ones heard in history. And Parsons began to say, won't you let us speak? The voice of the people must be heard. And then the noose dropped and the four men came through the trap door. It took seven full minutes. The operation was done. So poorly that they didn't have their necks snapped. And the gruesomeness of that is part of the emotion that it caused globally. And there's a way in which their deaths demonstrate what they stood for.
- [42:27]
Christopher Phelps
Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks to Ruth Kinner, Gary Gerstel, and Christopher Phelps. Next week, the poet, soldier and novelist Robert Gray, who's known for his war poetry, his mythology of the white Goddess, and for I, Claudius. Thanks for listening.
- [42:43]
Melvin Bragg
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:50]
Christopher Phelps
I start off by asking you, what didn't you say you'd like to have said? Would you like to start, Ruth?
- [42:55]
Melvin Bragg
So there's one thing I think that we didn't touch on, which is the fact that when the, the day after Haymarket Parsons also left town, he was told that, you know, he was. Yeah. In fact, I mean, in the railroad strike, he'd been, he'd been arrested then and he'd been told that he ought to leave Chicago, otherwise he was going to get lynched because he was deemed to be such a threat to the employers. But he stayed. But after Haymarket, he left town and he spent quite a long time away. And he came back. He came back once the trial had started, and he makes this entrance into the room and it doesn't have quite the effect. I think that they were hoping that Captain Black, who his lawyer was hoping it would have, that this would be the sort of the moment that everyone would realize that they were innocent and that this man was going to come and plead not guilty and stand his ground. And because he was who he was, this American born, unimpeachable, sort of had this pedigree of being American. You know, he comes back to face the music and in the hope that this is going to change the atmosphere of the conduct of the trial. But of course it doesn't. But it's a brave thing for him to do. The other thing is that he, in the interval between the sentencing and the actual passing of the sentence, the execution, the Haymarket anarchists are all given the opportunity to plead for clemency. Parsons refuses, Spees does, and then withdraws.
- [44:31]
Christopher Phelps
Christopher, you just.
- [44:33]
Ruth Kinner
Another Parsons angle is that even though the American cluster of radical labor activists in the anarchist movement was tiny, he was a mass leader who would speak to 20,000 workers at a time. He was known all over the city of Chicago. He was much more famous than any of the Germans. And it's worth noting that he had a theory about who threw the bomb. We will never know who threw the bomb. We would all love to know who threw the bomb Wasn't clarified by the trial at all, but Parsons posited that it was actually either Pinkerton's or police agents who had themselves thrown the bomb to discredit the labor movement, perhaps were trying to throw it at the wagon to kill the anarchists, so forth. Now I actually, from all I've read, don't myself think that this likely holds up, but it's worth just throwing out there that there were people, and not just Parsons, who sincerely believed at the time that this was actually a kind of agent provocateur rather than an anarchist throwing the bomb. It's much more likely that it was some young excitable person angered at the killing of the workers at the McCormick Reaper Works the day before who did it precipitously and without knowledge of all the rest of the so called conspirators. And that's what for instance, the historian Paul Avery, who's a superb historian of anarchism after his long book, concluded that it was somebody like that. Anyway, there are various theories for who threw the bomb.
- [46:03]
Melvin Bragg
Average had a confession, didn't he? So after he published the Haymarket tragedy, someone, a granddaughter of an anarchist got in touch with him and said, I think it's my grandfather. And an Average went and checked his notes to see who he had listed at the the Pittsburgh conference. And this guy's name was on the list. So the last thing that Average had to say about the bomb thrower was that it was this guy called George Meng. Yeah, but that's never been proven.
- [46:32]
Ruth Kinner
No, we have to say there's like layer on layer and layer of rumor about this and nobody will ever know.
- [46:37]
Melvin Bragg
That's right, yeah. Yeah.
- [46:38]
Gary Gerstel
I would make two points. First, there's a view about America that didn't need socialism, didn't need anarchism, a classless society, socialism always weaker there, anarchism always weaker there than in Europe, unions often smaller than in other industrialized countries. It's also true that in the late 19th century the United States has the bloodiest history of industrial relations of any industrializing country. And in that respect, Haymarket is not a unique event. It's part of a pattern of industrial relations which dominates in America for 30 or 40 years. And I think it's important to understand that because it gives one a different view about America in the late 19th century. The other point I would make is that even though majority opinion after Haymark had turned against the anarchists. There were other people who were radicalized by their anger. One was that the governor of Illinois who came into office and who commuted the sentences, John Peter Alkeld. And at a somewhat late and somewhat later time, a man by the name of Eugene Victor Debs, who in the 1880s was a quite conservative railway man, becomes the leader of the American railroad union in 1893 and is a great believer in America. Jefferson Liberty is hauled off to jail for engaging in a strike and while in jail says that America is not the true America. One can't understand America without reading and understanding Karl Marx. And Eugene Victor Debs comes out of that jail, another form of violence, a socialist, and will go on to become the most important socialist in American history. This is. His story is related to the Haymarket story. Another unionist confronting the heavy hand of repression in America.
- [48:43]
Christopher Phelps
Can you tell us about a man called Fielden?
- [48:46]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, Samuel Fielden. He's the only English member of the group that's put on trial, and he's one of the people who eventually manages to avoid execution. He's brought up in Lancashire. He's the son of a Chartist and supporter of Irish Home Rule. So he comes from a sort of fairly radical background. He's sent to work in the mill from Lancashire mills from about the age of eight. His mother, who dies when he's very young, introduces him to Methodism and he becomes a Methodist preacher. He goes to America quite late on, so I don't think he's. I mean, he's not been in Chicago for very long before Haymarket. Maybe a year, maybe two. But he's. I mean, he's. He's someone who is already radicalized before he gets there. He comes from this sort of very strong tradition of British justice, if you like, of the working people's rights, and he gets involved in the labour struggles. And he's an amazing speaker and orator. And so he becomes. Or he comes under the radar of spies, and it's spies who invites him to go and speak at Haymarket. And he's the man who's standing on the cart right at the end of the meeting, talking to the workers when the police come in. And when the bomb's thrown, he's just coming down from the platform and he runs out of the square and he gets shot. So he gets shot through the leg and he's rounded up just as an ordinary labour leader. And he also gives an amazing testimony on the stand, which is all about his early childhood in Lancashire, the process of his radicalisation. And why it is that he supported the workers cause in America.
- [50:24]
Ruth Kinner
They're given a chance when they're convicted to renounce violence. And he's one of the ones who does. And then later, Altgeid pardons. So Fielden inherits a little bit of English money and moves to Colorado and never seen again on a farm until he dies in his 70s.
- [50:43]
Melvin Bragg
He keeps in touch with Lizzie Swank.
- [50:47]
Ruth Kinner
Yeah. But not active in the movement.
- [50:49]
Melvin Bragg
No, he's not active in the movement.
- [50:50]
Ruth Kinner
I think he had been sobered by the entire matter and didn't want to get mixed up in such things again.
- [50:55]
Melvin Bragg
That's true. And he comes at it from a different sort of tradition, I guess, in terms of his.
- [51:02]
Ruth Kinner
But the irony is that the moment he's on the wagon and the police come and say, we're giving you an order to disperse, he says to them, we are peaceable. And right then, the bomb is thrown.
- [51:12]
Melvin Bragg
Yep.
- [51:13]
Christopher Phelps
Well, thank you again very much. I think Simon Producer is waiting to enter the fray.
- [51:19]
Ruth Kinner
Ah, cook, please.
- [51:20]
Melvin Bragg
Does anyone want tea or coffee? Tea, Melvin? I'd love a cup of tea.
- [51:23]
Christopher Phelps
I love a tea.
- [51:24]
Ruth Kinner
I'd take a cup of tea, thank you.
- [51:25]
Christopher Phelps
Tea, please, Gary.
- [51:26]
Gary Gerstel
Tea?
- [51:27]
Christopher Phelps
Yeah.
- [51:27]
Melvin Bragg
Brilliant.
- [51:27]
Gary Gerstel
Thank you very much, everybody.
- [51:29]
Melvin Bragg
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. It's election time in the United States, but this is social media's world and the election is just living in it. Accurate information about elections, unfortunately, it is.
- [51:46]
Gary Gerstel
Not as entertaining as false information.
- [51:49]
Melvin Bragg
Join me, Marianna Spring, as I uncover how Life Online is shaping American people and American politics. None of us know what's going on, but we do all know that something isn't right. Deepfakes, polarizing algorithms, hate and conspiracy theories. To me, there's no other logical explanation. That entire thing was staged. Why do You Hate Me? USA from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.