Figure 3.1 Larry Spivak of ILHS speaking at the Haymarket Monument, courtesy of David Graver.
Continuity, Conflict, and the Right to the City—Lessons From Haymarket Square
Loren Kruger
Focusing on the politics of space, this volume of essays deploys the linked concepts of topology, location, and boundary-marking to situate theatre and other performative practices in particular places. While several contributors attend to changes in their chosen locations, none appears to address directly the politics of time. The politics of time—conflicts between continuity and change; battles about preservation, renovation, or radical demolition; and the ideological weight of claims for the apparently timeless character of particular sites—require attention if we are fully to comprehend the space for and the place of performance. In What Time Is This Place? urbanist Kevin Lynch highlights the temporal dimension of spatial practices that shape our experience of space and our sense of the durability or transience of that space. In his view, the past cannot be simply excavated, uncovered, or reconstructed “as it really was”; rather “the past must be chosen and made in the present”; the preservationist desire to “arrest the past” by “restoration” alone “cannot easily reconstruct the circumstance that created it.”1 Although Lynch addressed his book primarily to architects, urban planners, and lay as well as professional preservationists, his call to choose the past on which to construct the present speaks to performance practitioners, researchers, and audiences as well, especially those engaged not only in excavating traces of past performances but in reanimating those traces and their places in the present and the future.
This chapter examines embodied practices on contested urban sites and highlights the temporal dimension of this contestation by excavating structures and performance from distinct historical moments whose traces, linked or incompatible, lie juxtaposed in a particular space. As part of a project on writing and performance in upstart cities, by which I mean urban formations characterized by social contradictions provoked by sudden growth, as well as by innovation alongside lawlessness, I will be examining Chicago's Haymarket Square, which, even though it no longer appears on city maps, continues to spark controversy about its local, national, and international significance.2 This controversy has focused for over a hundred years on the Haymarket site and its conflicted association with “riot,” “anarchism,” and the commemoration of “martyrs” to the struggle for social change. It received its most recent expression in 2011 in a performance reenacting the 125th anniversary of the violent confrontation between protestors and police on May 4, 1886, in which an unknown anarchist's bomb provoked a police riot, a trial and execution that condemned anarchists for their views rather than for any responsibility for the bomb, and a fight to exonerate the survivors and rehabilitate their legacy.3 This reenactment resonates beyond Chicago not only because it commemorates a historically significant moment but also because it reanimates ongoing struggles for what Henri Lefebvre called the “right to the city.”4 The conflict over the production and experience of the modern city has in Chicago, as in other globalized conurbations, repeatedly been enacted through performance and assembly in places that the state does not always acknowledge as public. Innovation in the built environment has, in turn, highlighted both the symbolic and civic dimensions of these structures as sites or spaces of performance. This conflict has not, however, addressed the question of choosing the past, or of making the past of and in the present, through performance. Before looking at either historical or reenacted events on this particular site, we should therefore outline the key terms that define these events.
“Performance” here includes not only the theatrical representation of dramatic fictions but also marches and parades and the reaction of audiences both intentional and inadvertent to participants who claim their rights as citizens often in conditions of civic conflict. The concept also has a largely unacknowledged place in urban studies. Urbanists since Louis Mumford, who in 1937 saw the city as “the scene of social drama,” have used the language of theatre, from tragedy to playfulness, to describe urban spatial practices but do not ground their metaphors in performance and its contexts. Even those such as Lefebvre, who avows interest in both politics and playfulness in “structures of enchantment” that constitute claims of “rights to the city,” do not elaborate.5 The persistence of performance in urbanist discourse highlights not only the contribution of embodied practices to the life and meaning of the city but also the tension between order and disruption, between the modern civility of urban planners and what I call the “uncivil modernity” of upstart cities like Chicago. Investigating this tension calls for the excavation of multiple environments and practices embedded in the foundations of present structures and thus for the productive juxtaposition of different, perhaps incompatible but nonetheless related structures and embodiments from distinct strata or historical moments. Even if the built environment is not alive in the ecological sense with which Richard Schechner begins his discussion of performance environments in Environmental Theater, the structures of the urban scape are not only repositories of traces of life in the past but shaping environments of life as it is now.6 As Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks argue in Theatre/Archeology, the excavation of buried structures, as well as the reconstruction of performances that inhabited, shaped, and contested those structures, is controversial because it undoes the appearance of continuity by exposing the history of conflict. Performance may be, as Pearson and Shanks suggest, “inevitably in the past and therefore enigmatic” but even “unwritten happenings” can be reconstructed by investigating material traces as well as the written and oral record.7
Because the ideological representation of conflict as though it were continuity involves burying inconvenient histories as well as the structures that housed them, the full understanding of the politics of space requires attention to the politics of time and, in particular, to the politics of choosing the past that might shape the present. Before turning to Haymarket Square, I might illustrate the salience of Lynch's question for the politics of time as well as place by pausing briefly with a site that provoked a contested response in Berlin, which shares with Chicago nineteenth-century growth in inhospitable marshy terrain and a twentieth-century reputation for creativity and criminality as well as the radical transformation of the built environment.8 The Palast der Republik, discussed by Jens Roselt in this volume, was erected in Berlin-Mitte in 1973 on the site of a nineteenth-century replica of a fifteenth-century castle that had largely been destroyed at the end of World War II. Alongside its official function housing the largely symbolic Volkskammer (National Assembly) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it also contained venues for theatre, cabaret, and, perhaps surprisingly for the GDR, informal gatherings. After German unification in 1990, local memory of this informality in an otherwise restricted public sphere provoked responses to the central government's plan to demolish the building which were so sharply critical as to amount to “civil war” through competing memorialization, even class war between allegedly Western capitalism and the remnants of proletarian culture in eastern Germany, and thus conflict over the legitimacy of GDR history in officially united Germany.9
The tension between conflict and continuity underlies even durable structures whose continuity with the past appears to escape controversy. Mumford's conception of the urban site as “scene” can illuminate the social and imaginative acts that represent conflict as though it were continuity, even when there is no obviously performative element to this representation. To take an example whose seemingly unproblematic presence belies a controversial past, the Art Institute, Chicago's premier art museum, was completed in 1892 before the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, on the site once occupied by the Interstate Exposition Building. It was constructed like its predecessor in Beaux Arts style but erected despite the city's legal obligation to keep the lakefront “open, clear and free of … any obstruction whatever.”10 The Exposition Building (1872–1892) had been designed by William Boyington, architect of Chicago's water tower, reputedly the only public building to survive the Great Fire of 1871. In addition to industrial products and later the Illinois National Guard, it housed a gathering of forty thousand socialists in 1879. Here the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA), the same organization that would challenge the police at Haymarket Square in 1886, commemorated the Paris Commune, which, like the fire, took place in 1871, but which, unlike the fire, received only dissident commemoration. While the Art Institute in its current form betrays no trace of the exposition building or the conflicted history of claims on the lakefront, the old water tower has been reverently preserved and now houses not only displays of old water pumps under glass but also Lookingglass Theatre, which has produced several works dedicated to Chicago history.
These sites in Chicago and elsewhere show us that only through the excavation and reanimation of historical performance in juxtaposition with present acts can we understand the full meaning of these places and times, and only through understanding urban performance as social and political as well as theatrical enactment can we measure the impact of performance in the city. For this reason, the customary emphasis in performance studies on the ephemeral nature of performance and thus on performance as disappearance, as expressed in Peggy Phelan's dictum “Performance's being … becomes itself through disappearance” and reiterated by Pearson and Shanks's assertion that “performance is inevitably in the past and therefore enigmatic” (emphasis added) invites the rejoinder implied also by Pearson and Shanks, that the excavation and reanimation of traces can recall performance even if it cannot be recovered completely.11 As Baz Kershaw suggests, performance is thus constituted less by disappearance than by reappearance.12 If the investigation of past performance makes any sense, it is because performance from the past is neither inevitably nor wholly in the past. As my analysis of the Haymarket record and its reenactment will show, the recovery of traces and their reanimation in present performance is necessary not only to understand the past but also to understand our understanding as an active performance of a usable past in the present that might help us illuminate the way to the future.
The Utopian force of these practices draws on what Raymond Williams called the subjunctive dimension of performance as the imagination through enactment of possible futures against the oppressive weight of inherited conditions in the indicative present.13 Williams's conception of subjunctive enactments illuminates formal dramatic fictions that represent Chicago's recorded and unrecorded history, such as Lookingglass Theatre's Chicago works The Jungle (1990) based on Upton Sinclair's novel of the same name, They All Fall Down (2002) on the legacy of architect Louis Sullivan, and The Great Fire (1999; 2011), as well as more explicitly political plays performed by independent companies, such as Warren Leming's Cold Chicago, which responded to the Haymarket centennial of 1986 by challenging official amnesia.14 But subjunctive enactment also applies to the performance of social agency in the streets that has the potential to reanimate the politics of bygone times to challenge the pieties of the present. The specter of class war, until recently dismissed in the West as a quaint nineteenth-century hangover, has become topical again as the convulsions of twenty-first-century capitalism have left millions without livelihood and have brought thousands to protest in the world's financial centers. Provoked by this social upheaval whose enactment recalls the general tenor and, in some cases, specific places and times of anti-capitalist protest of a century ago, I would like to return to the site of Haymarket Square, the events that occurred there on May 4, 1886, and the reenactment of these events on April 30, 2011. Although neither date coincides with May Day, the day commemorated worldwide (but not officially in the United States) as International Labor Day, and the place itself no longer exists as Haymarket Square but only as the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines streets, the Haymarket Monument erected in 2004 now marks the spot on the corner of Crane's Alley and Desplaines, facing Randolph Street, where the incident took place and provided the gathering point for the 125th anniversary reenactment, which draws attention to the multiple temporal and spatial coordinates that make sense of this site as well as the ongoing conflict over its meaning.
Since the Haymarket incident is not well known beyond the socialist and anarchist groups that have maintained this legacy, a review of the historical context is necessary to highlight links between past and present conditions of performance. In 1871, the Great Fire destroyed much of the city that had been a bustling, disorderly nexus of Civil War–era growth, but also stimulated the radical transformation of its built environment and social demography and made fortunes for a small minority of speculators. Also in 1871, the Paris Commune, a short-lived but influential experiment in socialist revolution, inspired annual commemorations by workers in Chicago, New York, and also in Europe. In response to elite concentration of wealth and their own impoverishment, working-class activists advocated the abolition of capitalism in favor of workers' cooperatives, but their ranks included outright anarchists who called for dynamite against authority, arguing that police brutality and the violent tactics of employers who paid the police left them no other options. Called anarchist in the first place by the Chicago Tribune, the IWPA, a radicalized offshoot of the Socialist Labor Party, defiantly reclaimed the label at the Haymarket Trial after they had, for a decade, agitated for economic rights in the Eight Hour Day movement, combining anarchist anti-statism with class-conscious mobilization modeled on the Marxist Second International.15
The IWPA and its fellows treated the Paris Commune as a foundational moment as well as an instructive tragedy. Every March until World War I, workers commemorated the Commune in streets, taverns, lakefront parks, and, as mentioned above, on one occasion in the Interstate Exposition Building. Further performances of choral music, tableaux vivants, and drama took place in buildings owned or rented by unions or gymnastic associations (Turnvereine) in working-class districts. In 1882, firstand second-generation German speakers made up a third of the Chicago's population of more than 500,000, and it was in one of the more durable of their venues, the Nordseite Turnhalle, that 2,000 people gathered for the Commune commemoration on March 18, 1882.16 Written by Wilhelm Rosenberg, mason-journalist Paul Grottkau and upholster-editor August Spies, the “commemorative play” (Festspiel) for the occasion, Die Nihilisten, depicted Russian anarchists convicted of treason on the basis of false testimony; it was serialized in Die Fackel (The Torch), and revived at 1884 commemorations in Chicago and New York.17 The performers were activists rather than professional actors; Spies played the nihilist leader. The didactic thrust of the speeches, the casting of well-known political players, and the deployment of the local Lehr- und Wehr-Verein (Educational and Defence Association) to portray the dissidents reinforced the immediate political import of the action. The review in the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Paper) argued that the play showed audiences the relevance of revolution for “humanity [die Sache der Menschheit]” while Die Fackel (The Torch) argued that it would draw audiences into the revolutionary project of “disarming prevailing injustice.”18 Die Nihilisten's direct presentation of political ideas and actions would find an echo in the speeches of the Haymarket defenders themselves at the 1886 trial.
Direct address and overt militancy characterized performance not only in proletarian locations but also on public streets as the working majority's claimed “rights to the city” dominated by the elites. Demonstrations in front of the Board of Trade highlight the historical and present-day force of this claim. Like the Exposition Building, the Board of Trade, designed also by Boyington, occupied a prominent position. It was erected at the southern end of La Salle Street after this street was closed off to the south, and thus dominated the view framed by the facades of the new tall office buildings on either side of La Salle to the north like wings framing a stage. It was the site of strikes by building workers and a parade organized in April 1885 by the IWPA, who protested the inaugural dinner of the “Board of Thieves” who feasted while workers starved.19 The strikers' performance, the eclectic ornament of Boyington's building, and its cost as the most expensive of its day led architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler to suggest in 1891 that anarchist disdain for this building and its sponsors cast anarchists in a better light than the press allowed: “It is difficult to contemplate its … uneasy facade without feeling a certain sympathy with the mob of anarchists that demonstrated under its windows.”20 Schuyler's irony inadvertently anticipated the building's instability, the demolition of the tower in 1895, and the replacement of the entire structure with the present Holabird and Roche building in 1929, but missed the arguments of working-class protestors against dangerous living and working conditions and extreme inequity.21 In October 2011, close to the anniversary of the world-wide crash in October 1929, new protesters appeared in the shadow of the Board of Trade. While not explicitly quoting the 1885 protest, the demonstrators, characterizing themselves as representative of the 99% harmed by the reckless dealings of the wealthy 1%, declared their aim to Occupy Chicago and challenged the U.S. government's subsidy of speculators who increased their wealth while dispossessing millions of citizens. The demonstration thus drew attention to conditions, from the deregulation of capital to the degradation of the built environment and of public institutions, that led both to the crash of 1929 and to the ongoing crisis that became visible in 2008.22
Although less prominent than the Board of Trade, the Haymarket monument commemorates the ongoing struggle of the working majority to gain the right to the city and to citizenship more broadly. Excavating the historical links between these sites and their reanimation in the 125th anniversary helps to give an apparently disconnected series of events their rightful place in a long history of struggle by rendering visible signs of significant time, place, and action that have been ignored or erased. The map provided by the International Labor History Society (ILHS) shows a few elements remaining from the 1886 built environment. Previously accommodating light manufacture, trade, and workers' housing, the district today has condominium buildings but little manufacturing apart from a locally famous chocolate factory. The site of the speakers' wagon, now the Haymarket Monument, abuts Crane's Alley, whose nineteenth-century cobblestones were restored for the Haymarket centennial in 1986. Zepf's Tavern, one of many meeting places serving workers, in a building that now houses a theatrical lighting wholesaler, was two blocks north. On the evening of May 4, Zepf welcomed the avowed “social revolutionist” Albert Parson, the only native-born American to be tried after the Haymarket incident, his wife and fellow activist Lucy, and their children, were there when the bomb went off. Although the current built environment represents multiple points in time from the 1880s to the present without visible conflict, the claims on the place and on multiple occasions have been expressed more contentiously.
On the corner of Crane's Alley and Desplaines Street, on Thursday, May 4, 1886, IWPA members and allies came to protest assaults on strikers that had left two dead on May 3 at Cyrus McCormick Jr's Harvester plant and to debate ongoing police violence funded by McCormick, Marshall Field, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, and others in the elite Citizens Association. Mayor Carter Harrison considered the protest peaceful and left the scene, telling the police to do likewise, but the police instead demanded that the remaining five hundred disperse. The bomb that then exploded killed one policeman and provoked others to open fire, which in turn left several demonstrators and seven more policemen dead. The bomb-thrower was never found, but eight “social revolutionists”—in particular the American Parsons, editor of the Alarm, and the bilingual Spies, editor of the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung and of the Socialistic Publishing Society responsible for both papers—endured a hasty trial where a partial judge and jury condemned the men for their political views even though no evidence supported the state's attempt to blame them for the bomb. Despite appeals from local and international socialists and native defenders of the rule of law, five perished: Louis Lingg, the only bomb-maker among the accused, died by a bomb smuggled into prison, and Spies, Parsons, Georg Engel, and Adolf Fischer were hanged on “Black Friday,” November 11, 1887. Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe were pardoned in 1893. In 1889, the site was claimed by the police who erected a statue representing their dead. For the rest of the nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth century, the martyrs' monument that had been erected in 1893 in Waldheim Cemetery in suburban Forest Park was the only substantial counterpart to the series of police statues on the Haymarket site itself. To track Haymarket history, visitors had to rely on the ILHS and the anarchist publishing house Charles H. Kerr (founded in 1886) whose Haymarket Scrapbook (1986) documented the event and its legacy in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), which was founded in 1905 with the support of Lucy Parsons and other former IWPA members.23
Although Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor and the most progressive mayor to date, was responsive to those who wanted at least a plaque acknowledging the injustice of the trial, it was not until 2004, under the less progressive but more powerful Richard M. Daley, that a monument was erected. On the spot where a hay-wagon had served as speaker's platform in 1886 on a street of light industrial structures giving way to condominiums, the bronze sculpture, designed by Mary Brogger, resembles wheels and planks in disarray, which two figures attempt to repair while a third, perhaps the speaker, balances precariously above them and a fourth appears to be emerging from the plinth. Read by labor historian William Adelman as a representation of “the speaker's platform on the night of May 4, 1886” and a “symbol” of “free speech destroyed” that the workers apparently rising “from the base” are “attempting to rebuild.”24 Although the plaque dubs the 2004 structure a monument to “a tragedy of international significance,” its unveiling lacked a mass commemoration of the significance of the Haymarket. Nonetheless, it has attracted international attention. May Day 2006 brought four hundred thousand to place a new plaque on the plinth and to call for legislation to secure the rights of workers and immigrants; every May Day since then, a new plaque has appeared, including one in solidarity with Iraqi unionists killed by the old regime and the new.
On April 30, 2011, scheduled the day before May Day so as to accommodate the rededication of the martyr's monument in Forest Park and a May Day march from Union Park to Plaza Tenochtitlan in the formerly Bohemian and now Mexican district of Pilsen in near-south Chicago, the ILHS and Pocket Guide to Hell Tours, a group fostering events on less familiar sites of Chicago history, hosted a reenactment that combined elements from the meeting on May 4, the trial that began in July and concluded in October 1886, and the execution in 1887.25 It was to be presented in three parts: the dedication of the anniversary plaque by ILHS president at 2 p.m. (Figure 3.1), through City of Chicago historian Tim Samuelson's summary account of the events, to the reenactment scheduled at 3 p.m. The performance in turn had three parts, each identified by a black placard with the date written in white: the Haymarket meeting on May 4 1886, the trial in June and July, and the execution on Friday, November 11, 1887. In addition, the newly opened Haymarket Brewery, part of the nearby Randolph Street row of restaurants, hosted a party thereafter. Next to the bronze monument stood a temporary wooden “wagon” constructed for this occasion by Michelle Faust and Kevin Morrison. Morrison also played Georg Engel, who had worked in a wagon factory before opening the toy store that he
Figure 3.1 Larry Spivak of ILHS speaking at the Haymarket Monument, courtesy of David Graver.
ran at the time of the incident and, in keeping with his character's militant anarchism, also built the stage bomb. The assembly around this speaker's platform was facilitated on this occasion by a friendlier Chicago police force, whose officers blocked traffic on both Randolph and Desplaines to turn the corner into a temporary public square.
While orderly, this program differed from government-sponsored reenactments in several respects. Unlike the scenarios staged by the National Parks Service at historic places like Plimouth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg, which employ professional actors to enact a representation of historical events or daily life for tourists who are discouraged from asking questions about performance, the Haymarket organizers, led by Pocket Guide to Hell Tours director Paul Durica, actively solicited participation from people willing to impersonate anarchists, passersby, or the Chicago police. Unlike other nonprofessional reenactments in commemorations of, for instance, key events in the American Civil War, which assemble performers loyal to a prior interpretation of the event, whether in defense of the Union or of residual Confederate sentiment, this one had no systematic precedent. In an interview before the event, Durica invited comparison between the Haymarket and Civil War reenactments by remarking that Haymarket was as much “part of our past as the Civil War” and thus deserved more visible commemoration.26 Finally, the title of this reenactment, Let the Voice of the People Be Heard, highlights the collective agency of both activists and performers. Although these are the words of a charismatic individual, Albert Parson, as the last words uttered by the last defendant to be executed, they invite reanimation and reinvention in the present for an event that has no clear precedent.
This lack of precedent, or at least the lack of memory of precedent, lent an edge of unpredictability to the commemoration. Even before the reenactment began, as ILHS president Spivak attached the 125th anniversary plaque to the plinth, members of the IWW volubly contested the authority of America's mainstream union federation, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) whose leaders had until recently ignored the history of the Haymarket and the resonances of May Day for labor, immigrant, and human rights across the world. While friendly, this competition set the stage for the planned but unpredictable confrontation between those gathered in support of the speakers and those who had answered the organizers' call for people willing to impersonate nineteenth-century Chicago policemen. While many participants sported items of clothing reminiscent of the period, even those impersonating policemen, who had received costumes from the organizers, suggested sartorial quotation rather than full naturalistic absorption in their roles, leaving open the possibility that performers might move between the nineteenth- and the twenty-first-century moment as the occasion required. The languages represented by the crowd in 1886 (Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic as well as diverse dialects of English) differed from those at the 125th anniversary (Latin American Spanish, Polish, English, and others); these languages were audible in the crowd and visible in the placards carried by individuals and groups, but the formal reenactment was, apart from a brief speech in German, conducted in English.
Before the formal reenactment, those performers who were to play major roles moved through the crowd, responding to questions in character. Matt LaPierre as Albert Parsons and Alma Washington as his wife Lucy introduced their characters in a matter-of-fact way, making brief connections between those falsely condemned to death then and the abuse of the death penalty now. Against the background of marching band Environmental Encroachment playing brass music that sounded more whimsical than martial, Kevin Robinson's Mayor Carter Harrison was more playful. Harrison had historically observed the crowd while on horseback and then told the police to disperse as the meeting was winding down. Robinson quoted Harrison's self-characterization as “a friend of the working man.” but his earnest defense was somewhat offset by his carnivalesque attire, including a long, white, evidently fake beard and the aluminum shell of a toy horse fixed about his middle, which made him look like a figure from a carousel. In contrast, Alma Washington as Lucy Parsons in nineteenth-century widow's weeds (Figure 3.2), was the only performer who had played her
Figure 3.2 Alma Washington as Lucy Parsons, courtesy of David Graver.
role on several other occasions, including the 1986 centennial and appearances at Independence Day events on Bughouse Square, Chicago's Hyde Park Corner, outside the Newberry Library, which houses newspapers and other documents on the Haymarket legacy. Washington used her experience and knowledge of Lucy's lifelong agitation and publication on behalf of the IWW, to fill out the historical context both in informal comment and on the platform.
The formal performance brought together in one place and time historical figures who had not in fact stood on the speakers platform at the same time and whose absence had been the core of their legal defense. While certainly fictional, this assembly allowed performers to highlight the collective impact of these historical actors and to point out the historical ironies of their legacy. Despite the absence of all but one of the accused (Fielden) when the bomb exploded, all eight were convicted for murder and conspiracy; the trial, conviction, and execution brought this diverse group of men and women, martyrs and survivors, closer together as exemplary figures in the minds of mourners and agitators than in their lifetimes. Spies, one of the youngest but also one of the most influential in the group, had published a call to arms in German that was translated in the English-language Alarm, announcing the meeting for May 4 at 7 p.m. Lhe historical Spies did not arrive until 8 p.m., but his impersonator, Drew Dir, began the formal performance with the call to arms from the papers, to be joined on the platform by Alma Washington as Lucy, although the historical Lucy had in fact left for Zepf's Lavern without addressing the assembly. On this April 30, Washington drew on her performance memory as well as historical knowledge, shifting in and out of her role and between historical and present time. She began as Alma by thanking everyone for “coming to this important anniversary” and then spoke as Lucy's spirit reviewing history from 1886 to the present in cadence and accent reminiscent of the 1880s: “Lhere is not a day goes by that I do not think back to that night in May. So many have forgotten—but I remember—and you remember—and we need now more than ever to remember. … We wanted an 8 hour work day, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what you will.” Washington handled these shifts between past and present and between her impersonation of Lucy and her recontextualization of Lucy's message in the here and now with more aplomb than other performers, but she nonetheless set an example for the punctual estrangement that would remind participants, in Brechtian terms, both of the distance of history and of its relevance to all that is “close and proper to ourselves.”27
While the Brechtian turn in Washington's performance was doubtless deliberate, given her work with avowed Brechtian playwright Leming in the centennial commemorations of 1986 and 1987, Lim Samuelson, city of Chicago historian, was an inadvertent but nonetheless effectively disillusioned (as the first translation of Brecht's verfremdet had it) street-scene observer.28 He appeared as himself in twenty-first-century garb, armed only with a binder full of notes from which he read the report: “Nothing happened as planned but it all happened so quickly. By 7.30 that Thursday evening, people were gathering on Randolph St at Haymarket [pointing at the crowd]…. August Spies arrived at 8pm … amazed to find that he was the only speaker that was here…. He was afraid that the police … might break up the meeting. The wagon became the impromptu speakers' platform.” Samuelson paused and added: “Nobody knows for certain just how many people were here that night. Some say 3000; some say 1500.” This sentence was the cue for the police. Clad in varying approximations of the historical police uniform and marching in groups identified with Chicago alternative culture groups like Quimby's Comics or the Hideout music club, they pushed the crowd northward as in the historical record but, as some people in the crowd turned back to photograph the police, Durica had to step in with the prompt “and the crowd moved north,” and, more emphatically, “please move north along Desplaines,” to which the crowd responded by jeering the police in Spanish as well as English. Durica's direction to the crowd and to himself “Please move—I need to have a confrontation with that man” cued the response from Matthias Deacon (owner of the Haymarket Brewery), acting as police officer Pete Conley demanding the crowd disperse. Nat Ward as Fielden descended from the wagon insisting “we are peaceable” but he was interrupted by the staged explosion.29 Samuelson's matter-of-fact narration turned dramatic: “At this moment a device flew through the sky—and the police began to shoot,” as his words were followed by theatrical effects: boom—as the device resembling a nineteenth-century bomb spewed flour and gray particulate debris—followed by the clicking noise of the policemen's “clubs” (flexible plastic rather than hard and dangerous rubber) punctuated by Environmental Encroachment's brass staccato. The brief theatricality of this interlude dissipated as the crowd moved against the police, and participants collided with one another. The melee lasted only a few moments, and subsided as the next episode on the podium drew the attention of the crowd, but the turbulence suggested the formal distinction between performers and audience had to earn the audience's consent.
Moving briskly to represent the trial and execution, the group on the podium did not reproduce the court proceedings in detail but rather drew on the speeches of the accused, which were published soon after the trial, and especially on their statements before the hanging in November 1887. Although key historical actors, especially Spies and the Parsons family, had left the scene before the bomb exploded and although the trial and the hanging took place in a court building a kilometer away, reenacting even abbreviated extracts of the later events in the space memorialized by the former highlighted the claims to historical authority of those representing the Haymarket legacy against the state.30 Drew, as Spies, led with the words now carved on the Forest Park monument, “[t]he day will come when our silence will be more powerful than our voices you seek to strangle today,” at which he was silenced by a white hood over the head. Morrison as Engel, the oldest among the accused, spoke in (a somewhat eccentric recollection of his character's) German: “Ich bin stolz, dass ich ein Anarchist bin. Dieser Tag ist der beste Tag in meinem Leben,” with the translation, “or-in English—I am proud to be an anarchist. This is the best day of my life,” followed by Durica as Fischer “Hurrah for anarchy. This is the happiest moment of my life.” LaPierre as Parsons, the sole native-born American among the condemned, spoke last, beginning what might have been a longer speech that was cut short by the hanging: “Will I be allowed to speak, oh, ye men of America? Let the voice of the people be heard, Oh….”31 After Parson's execution, Durica removed his own hood to resume his role as director, standing behind Washington, who recalled Lucy's experience, “My children and I were not allowed to see Albert on the morning that he was murdered. We were arrested outside the court house” as well as her account of the aftermath: “on the day of the funeral, thousands lined the streets as the bodies of the five men made the journey to Waldheim cemetery. On June 25 1893, the Haymarket martyrs monument was dedicated to them. The next day, Governor Altgeld pardoned Fielden, Schwab and Neebe but the fight for the eight-hour day continued,” thus concluding the formal reenactment. In this last sentence in the past tense, Washington spoke as Lucy Parsons would have done at the dedication of the monument in 1893 and on other occasions thereafter.32 In her final words on the podium, “and the fight for a just and better world continues today,” Washington spoke simultaneously in historical character and to the crowd assembled in 2011. Thus embodying the past in the present, Washington exemplified the reenactment's overall project: to make the Haymarket contemporary to and compelling for people today. While Washington certainly invoked the charisma of her character, the event as a whole took its meaning from the combination of formal performance and unpredictable acts.
Notwithstanding its capacity to promote discussion of the Haymarket legacy, this 125th anniversary reenactment had some limits. While the reenactment of the Haymarket events certainly made this history more visible to audiences that may not have previously known much about history or legacy, it might have done more to link the struggles of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European migrants to Chicago and elsewhere in Midwest America, with the present moment, in which Chicago, the United States, Europe, and other developed parts of the world face the challenges posed by migrants from less fortunate parts. The Haymarket monument bears plaques in Arabic, Spanish, and Japanese but, although there were some in the crowd at the reenactment speaking Spanish and the organizers reminded participants about the May Day march to Plaza Tenochtitlan, there was no acknowledgment of the historical presence of Mexicans who joined the IWW as early as 1920 and no formal incorporation of these and other latter-day participants from Chicago's transnational communities into the April 30 event.
This omission is understandable given the logistics of organizing such an event, but it nonetheless missed the opportunity to imagine the future in a present shaped more than ever by global flows of people, goods, and ideas. By animating the history behind the Haymarket monument, the reenact-ment contributed to ongoing efforts to undo a century of willed amnesia about socialist, anarchist, and other challenges to transnational capital. Further, by creating an event whose multiple meanings emerged from unscripted behavior by individuals and groups in the crowd as well as the historical script spoken by charismatic leaders, this event goes beyond the abstract imagination of a transnational future to show concretely, albeit on a modest scale, how collaboration can harness common energies in a particular space and time to conjure eutopia, or the “good place.” Grounded in its locality as well as an understanding of its transnational resonances, this particular act has made no claims to have generated the Chicago iteration of the Occupy Movement that began in September 2011 with Occupy Wall Street in New York or to generate global scale models for social change. Nonetheless, with the caveat that anything written here and now may be moot when this volume appears in print, I would suggest, less in conclusion than in a call for further investigation, that the Haymarket reenactment speaks to the Occupy Movement in three important ways: first, by enabling the recovery of past precedents and thus a legitimating history for present and future actions of the groups that identify as the 99%; second, by demonstrating in this era of maximal mediation that subjunctive enactment in particular places and times still captures the imagination and inspires further political action on site; and, third, that this enactment, in its unpredictable hospitality toward dissent as well as common experience or fellow feeling, challenges the politics of austerity with the performance of generosity, ephemeral, leaderless but still tenaciously enduring.33
1. Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 64, 32.
2. “Upstart city” is William Plomer's epithet for Johannesburg in The South African Autobiography (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984), 94, but the term applies also to Chicago, which, like Johannesburg, sprung from nothing in a place inhospitable to settlement, and grew rapidly fueled by capitalist speculation.
3. James Green's Death at the Haymarket (New York: Random House, 2006), offers a fair-minded account of the events. He writes that the crowd of about three thousand was deemed too “tame” by Mayor Carter Harrison to warrant surveillance (184). Inspector John Bonfield, who had profited by shaking down dissidents (121–122; 168), demanded that the remaining five hundred disperse. The bomb exploded as the crowd was moving out, but the rioting police were described even by the pro-police Chicago Tribune as “dangerous as any mob of Communists … unable to distinguish between peaceful citizen and the Nihilist assassin” (qtd: Green, Death at the Haymarket, 189).
4. Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); trans. Eleanore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Lefebvre's defense of democratic urban rights challenged top-down urban planning that imposed modernist towers on distressed marginal districts, and, together with the Situationists, anticipated the student activism that surfaced in 1967 in Nanterre where the university's modernist citadel abutted migrant slums, before moving to the Sorbonne in 1968.
5. Lewis Mumford, “What Is a City?” in Richard Le Gates and Frederic Stout (eds.), The City Reader, London: Routledge, 1996, 183–188, 185; Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville, 139/Writings on Cities, 173.
6. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theatre, 2nd ed. (New York: Applause, 1994), 4.
7. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archeology (London: Routledge, 2001), 5.
8. Mark Twain's comparison between Berlin and Chicago “The German Chicago,” in The 1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other Stories (Freeport 1893, rpt: New York: Books for Libraries, 1970), 200–232, was echoed by Walter Rathenau, “Die schönste Stadt der Welt,” Die Zukunft 26 (1899), 36–48, and, in the next generation, by Bertolt Brecht in theatre and Martin Wagner in urban planning. In the late twentieth century, the contributions of architects like Helmut Jahn to the transformation of both cities also deserves note.
9. In Berlin chantier: essais sur les passés fragiles (Paris: Stock, 2001), 200, Régine Robin uses the phrase “la guerre civile des mémoires”; I have modified the translation to highlight the struggle through memorialization, lost in the weaker “of memory.” For Berliner views of the controversy, see Kirsten Heidler (ed.), Von Erichs Lampenladen zur Asbestruine (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1998).
10. In 1836, Illinois Canal commissioners declared the lakefront “public ground—a common to be forever clear, open and free of any buildings and obstructions whatever” (Timothy Garfoyle, Millennium Bark: Creating a Chicago Landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4). After the Art Institute was built in defiance of this declaration, the merchant Montgomery Ward sued to prevent further building in the lakefront parks but the matter remains contentious to this day, more than a century later.
11. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146; Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, 5.
12. Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 117.
13. Raymond Williams, “Brecht and Beyond,” in Bolitics and Letters (London: Verso, 1981), 219.
14. Loren Kruger, “Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form and Performance in the Upstart City,” TDR-journal of Performance Studies 53:3 (2009), 10–36 and, for discussion of the written record of the Haymarket actors, “Literary? Public? Proletarian: Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs,” Telos 159 (2012), 65–77.
15. This combination was known as the “Chicago idea” from the IWPA's 1881 Chicago Conference; see Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 55–71. Contemporary commentators on all sides used the term “anarchist” but revealed their colors by associating it either with “communist” (in the Tribune) or “socialist” in the Alarm and the Arbeiter-Zeitung. With hindsight on the twentieth century split between state socialism and anarcho-syndicalism, historians have taken several positions. Avrich describes IWPA leaders Albert Parsons and August Spies as social revolutionaries bent on the transformation of capitalist states into workers' communities and thus distinguishes them from “intransigent anarchists” such as Louis Lingg, the bomb-maker (157). Bruce Nelson argues in Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988) that the leaders were socialists rather than anarchists of the volatile Bakunin variety (153–173). Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, avowedly anarchist editors of The Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), on the other hand, celebrate the martyrs as anti-statist individualists who inspired anarchists the world over.
16. For the German population in this period, see Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 16. Turnverein means “gymnastic association” but American historians tend to use the imitation “turner society.” William Adelman, Haymarket Revisited, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 2004), 60, notes that the hall operated even when German institutions retreated after World War I. The building housed a Radical Bookshop in 1924.
17. Christine Heiss identifies Rosenberg as sole author in “Popular and Working Class German Theatre in Chicago: 1870–1910,” in Hartmut Keil (ed.), German Workers Culture in the United States, (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 194, but Die Nihilisten (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Society, 1883; New York Public Library) lists only the publisher. Nelson (131) lists all three names. Alexeivich's defense of social revolution echoes in Spies's “Autobiography”; see Philip Foner (ed.), The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Monad 1969), 68–71. By contrast, Rosenberg's Die Tochter des Proletariers (1883) appeared at the commercial McVickers Theatre and expresses melodramatic class sentiment rather than class analysis.
18. For the playbill, see Die Fackel, March 5, 1882, 11; for the review, see “Die Sache der Menschheit,” Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung, March 20, 1882, 7; for the role of the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein, see “Die Nihilisten,” Die Fackel, March 11, 15. Source: Chicago History Museum.
19. Green, Death at the Haymarket, 127.
20. Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture and Other Writings (New York: Athenaeum, 1964), 89.
21. Chicago's population doubled in the decade 1880–1890 from five hundred thousand to over one million (Green, Death at the Haymarket, 93). Strikes every year in the 1880s were met by police violence, dismissals, and other punitive responses. For the controversy around the Board of Trade, see Joseph Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 117–118.
22. For comparisons between 1929 and 2008, see The Economic Crisis Reader, ed. by Dollars and Sense editorial collective (Boston: Economic Affairs Bureau, 2009) and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize winner in Economics), Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2010).
23. See notes 3 and 15.
24. Adelman, Haymarket Revisited, iv.
25. In addition to these principals, the program also lists Version 11: The Community, Drinking and Writing Theatre, the University of Chicago, and several other nonprofits, as well as commercial enterprises: Fulton River District Association and Haymarket Brewery.
26. Paul Durica, quoted by Liz Robinson, “Solidarity Forever: The 125th Anniversary of the Haymarket Riot,” http://www.readymade.com/blog/ culture/2011/04/07/solidarity_forever_a_historical_reenactment_of_the_ haymarket_riot (accessed February 6, 2012).
27. Bertolt Brecht, “Nachträge zum kleinen Organon,” in Werke: Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), vol. 23, 290 (hereafter BFA); trans. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 276.
28. Eric Walker White's translation of “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” appeared as “The Fourth Wall of China: Dis-illusion Effects in the Chinese Theatre” in 1936; rpt: Brecht, BFA 22, 960.
29. Ward also helped to design the stage bomb, even though Fielden was one of the more peaceable defendants; he pleaded for clemency and was pardoned in 1893.
30. Albert Parsons, “Address,” in The Accused and the Accusers: Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court (1886; rpt: New York: Arno 1969), 149, reminded the court that six of the eight accused had not been present when the bomb went off.
31. For the condemned men's last words, see Rosemont and Roediger, The Haymarket Scrapbook, 21, 27, 40, 43. Engel's last words were “Ich bin stolz, Anarchist zu sein. Dieser Tag ist der glücklichste meines Lebens.”
32. See Lucy Parsons, Freedom, Equality & Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878–1937, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004). Parsons died in 1942, twenty years after Fielden, the longest lived Haymarket defendant, who died in 1922.
33. See Bernard Harcourt, “Occupy's New Grammar of Political Disobedience,” The Guardian, November 30,2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/30/occupy-new-grammar-political-disobedience?CMP=twt_gu (accessed February 6, 2012). While the leaderless character of the Occupy movement may appear to differ from the reanimation of Haymarket leaders, the Haymarket reenactment asserted the rights of all participants to shape the meaning of the event. Further, Harcourt's argument that the movement has forged a new grammar of political contestation that requires the presence of occupiers rather than a single message, intersects with my emphasis on the performance of new ways of contesting power, even as the powerful respond with old ways— arrests, prohibitions, and police violence—to curb the expression of dissent through presence.
Adelman, William, Haymarket Revisited, 3rd ed., Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 2004.
Avrich, Paul, The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and transl. by John Willet, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
————, Werke: Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998.
“Die Nihilisten,” Die Fackel, March 5, 1882, 11.
“Die Nihilisten,” Die Fackel, March 11, 1882, 15.
“Die Sache der Menschheit,” Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung, March 20, 1882, 7.
Dollars and Sense Editorial Collective (ed.), The Economic Crisis Reader, Boston: Economic Affairs Bureau, 2009.
Foner, Philip (ed.), The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, New York: Monad, 1969.
Garfoyle, Timothy, Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Harcourt, Bernard, “Occupy's New Grammar of Political Disobedience,” The Guardian, November 30, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/30/occupy-new-grammar-political-disobedience?CMP=twt_gu (accessed February 6, 2012).
Heidler, Kirsten (ed.), Von Erichs Lampenladen zur Asbestruine, Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1998.
Heiss, Christine, “Popular and Working Class German Theatre in Chicago: 1870– 1910,” in Hartmut Keil (ed.), German Workers Culture in the United States, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988, 181–202.
Kershaw, Baz, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Kruger, Loren, “Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form and Performance in the Upstart City,” TDR-journal of Performance Studies 53:3, 2009, 10–36.
————. “Literary? Public? Proletarian: : Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs,” Telos 159 (2012), 65–77
Lefebvre, Henri, Le droit à la ville, Paris: Anthropos, 1968,trans. Eleanore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Lynch, Kevin, What Time Is This Place? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.
Mumford, Lewis, “What Is a City?” in Richard Le Gates and Frederic Stout (eds.), The City Reader, London: Routledge, 1996 (1937), 183–188.
Nelson, Bruce, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Parsons, Albert, “Address,” in The Accused and the Accusers: Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court, 1886, rpt: New York: Arno, 1969.
Parsons, Lucy, Freedom, Equality & Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878– 1937, ed. Gale Ahrens, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004.
Pearson, Mike and Shanks, Michael, Theatre/Archeology, London: Routledge, 2001.
Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993.
Plomer, William, The South African Autobiography, Cape Town: David Philip, 1984.
Rathenau, Walter, “Die schönste Stadt der Welt,” Die Zukunft 26, 1899, 36–48.
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Robinson, Liz, “Solidarity Forever: A Historical Renactment of the Haymarket Riot,” http://www.readymade.com/blog/culture/2011/04/07/solidarity_forever_a_historical_reenactment_of_the_haymarket_riot (accessed February 6, 2012).
Rosemont, Franklin and Roediger, David (eds.), The Haymarket Scrapbook, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.
Rosenberg, Wilhelm, [Grottkau, Paul and Spies, August], Die Nihilisten. Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Society, 1883
Schechner, Richard, Environmental Theatre, 2nd ed., New York: Applause, 1994.
Schuyler, Montgomery, American Architecture and Other Writings, New York: Athenaeum1964.
Siry, Joseph, The Chicago Auditorium Building, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Spies, August, “Autobiography”, The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs Philip Foner (ed), New York: Monad 1969, 68–71
Stiglitz, Joseph, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, New York: Norton, 2010.
Twain, Mark, “The German Chicago,” in Mark Twain, The 1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other Stories, Freeport, 1893, rpt: New York: Books for Libraries, 1970, 200–232.
Williams, Raymond, Politics and Letters, London: Verso, 1981.