Review, James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon Books, 2006)

This review originally was written for the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, but it got lost with a change in editors, so it appears here for the first time. I recycled some of it for an opinion piece I wrote on the history of May Day, which appears elsewhere on this site.

The events have a contemporary feel: business magnates earning fabulous wealth which, in turn, exacerbated the era’s widespread political corruption; large numbers of workers displaced by economic and technological changes; waves of immigrants prompting debates over whether such outsiders could be absorbed into the larger American society; a public fearful of conspirators in their midst planning destruction and mayhem; fanatics advocating violence as a political weapon; and—in the aftermath of the conflagration—a widespread disregard for basic civil liberties. But, though James Green’s retelling of the tragic events surrounding the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square bombing obviously has been written with a post-9/11 understanding of such recurrent American motifs as xenophobia and the frailty of civil liberties in times of national panic, this book’s major emphasis places these events in context of Gilded Age social relations and the long struggle by workers to assert their rights in an age of rapid economic change. As he did in his superb Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (1978), Green deftly juggles a large cast of characters in recapturing a period when radical ideas played a significant role in the broader American discourse.

The Haymarket riot took place in the midst of a resurgent labor movement animated by the issue of the eight-hour workday. The eight-hour movement had originally developed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, only to be crushed by the united opposition of business. But in the 1880s, especially in Chicago, the issue was revived by a group of militant socialist and anarchist labor organizers. Many of these radicals were immigrants, though the most prominent was Albert Parsons, a Texas-born former Confederate soldier turned Reconstruction-era Radical Republican turned anarchist labor organizer. Though the eight-hour issue enjoyed widespread appeal among workers, the anarchists saw it as part of a broader strategy later to be known as the “Chicago Idea,” which saw craftsmen’s control of workshops as the creation “self-governing communities of equal producers," thus serving as models of the freedom that would follow the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. To bring about this revolution, some anarchists preached the concept of “propaganda by the deed”—the idea that “a violent act planned by a secret conspiracy and committed by a dedicated militant, could impress the world with the evil of the despotic state and with the fearless determination of those who intended to destroy it.”

As part of this strategy, anarchists engaged in a great deal of loose talk about the use of dynamite. In a period when capitalists could increasingly count on the armed support of the police, National Guard and U.S. military to defend their interests in labor struggles, anarchists saw dynamite as an opportunity to level the field. In Parsons’ words, “Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal.”

Led by its socialist and anarchist wing, organized labor called a general strike for the eight-hour day to begin on May 1, 1886, and the call drew strong support in Chicago, where estimates are that between 40,000 and 60,000 workers walked off the job. Business interests responded by setting aside their competitive tendencies and drawing together against the common threat of an increasingly radicalized working class. The anarchists’ talk of dynamite fueled a growing trepidation, especially among Chicago’s middle- and upper-classes, of secret anarchist cabals. But, as Green argues, “the city’s most powerful men were less afraid of bomb talk than they were of the large working-class following the anarchist-led Central Labor Union had attracted in various immigrant districts." Thus, Green says quoting historian Sven Beckert, the period culminated in “the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie.”

Green provides a detailed narrative of the events of May 4, in which police moved to break up a rally of workers prompting someone to throw a bomb killing seven policemen and at least three civilians in the ensuing melee, as well as the subsequent widespread police crackdown on labor activists, the trial of eight anarchists—resulting in the execution of four and the suicide of one—and the campaign for amnesty for the remaining three. But throughout this narrative runs a melancholy sense of something potentially great being lost. Green emphasizes the disastrous impact the Haymarket bombing had on the eight-hour movement and American labor generally, especially in light of the initial success of the May 1 general strike. “Indeed,” he says, “for visionary workers and labor reformers . . . Haymarket was an unmitigated disaster; it sounded a death knell for the great hopes they shared in the spring of 1886 when they imagined their movement to be on the brink of achieving a new cooperative social order that would replace the wage system.” Even some anarchists recognized the counterproductive effects of their rhetoric of violence. As George Schilling, one of those convicted, though not executed, wrote from prison to Parsons’ widow, labor activist Lucy Parsons, “The open espousal of physical force—especially when advocated by foreigners—as a remedy for social maladjustments can only lead to greater despotism.”

Death in the Haymarket excels in portraying the complex clash of social classes, ethnic groups and ideologies in a period of rapid changes, when the country’s future seemed very much at stake, filled with, depending on one’s vantage point, hope or terror—or, quite possibly, some of both. The book is a must-read for those interested in the history of Chicago, the American labor movement, or the Gilded Age.