The Funeral of the Haymarket Martyrs: A Terrible Drama

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded during a peaceful labor demonstration against police brutality in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In a wave of hysteria, a number of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists and alleged anarchists were rounded up, and eight men were tried. Four of these, Albert R. Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer, were subsequently executed for this crime. A fifth (Louis Lingg) apparently committed suicide. Three others were convicted and imprisoned. Martí’s article, excerpted here, was published in La Nación, Buenos Aires, January 1, 1888.

Neither fear of social justice, nor blind sympathy on the part of those who initiate it, must guide nations in their crises, or the reporter of those crises. Freedom is well served only by the one who, at the risk of being taken for its enemy, is calmly preserving it from those whose mistakes are endangering it. He who excuses their wrongs and crimes because of an effeminate fear of appearing lukewarm in its defense does not deserve the title of defender of freedom. Nor should we pardon anyone who is incapable of controlling the hatred and antipathy that the crime inspires, or who passes judgment on social ills without knowing and weighing the historic causes from which they come, or the generous impulses they produce.

In a solemn procession of mourning followers, the flower-covered coffins containing the bodies of the four anarchists Chicago had sentenced to the gallows, and the man who, because he preferred not to die that way, exploded a dynamite bomb concealed in the thick curls of his young head of chestnut hair, have just been taken to their graves.

Accused of instigating or being a party to the frightful death of one of the policemen who suggested dispersing the group, these men were gathered to protest the death of six workers at the hands of the police, in an attack on the only factory to break the strike. Accused of having made and helped to throw — even if it were not thrown — the orange-sized bomb that knocked down the rear ranks of the police and left one dead, later caused the death of six more, and seriously wounded 50 others, the judge, in accord with the verdict of the jury, condemned one of the criminals to 15 years in the penitentiary and seven others to death by hanging.

Never since the War of the South, since the tragic days when John Brown died like a criminal for attempting single-handed at Harper’s Ferry what the nation, inspired by his bravery, attempted later as a crown of glory — never was there such interest in or such a hue and cry about a hanging in the United States.

Furious as a wolf, the entire Republic engaged in the fight to prevent the efforts of a benevolent lawyer, a girl in love with one of the prisoners and a Spanish-Indian half-breed mother of another — alone against an enraged country — from robbing the gallows of the seven human bodies it believed essential to the gallows’ perpetuation.

The nation is terrified by the increased organization among the lower classes, by the sudden agreement among the working masses, who restrain themselves only in the presence of the rivalries of their employers. It is frightened of the impending separation of the country’s population into the same two classes of privileged and discontented that cause so much ferment in European society. Therefore the Republic decided, by tacit agreement resembling complicity, to use a crime born of its own transgressions as much as of the fanaticism of the criminals in order to strike terror by holding them up as an example — not to the doleful rabble that will never triumph in a country of reason but to the tremendous emerging strata. The free man’s natural aversion to crime, together with the harsh ill will of the despotic Irishman who regards this country as his own and the German and Slav as the intruder, gained on the part of the privileged sector — in this trial which has been a battle, an unfair hypocritical battle — the sympathies and almost inhuman aid of those who suffer from the same wrongs, the same desertion, the same bestial working conditions, the same heartbreaking misery whose constant spectacle fired the Chicago anarchists with such eagerness to right those wrongs that it dulled their judgment.

When the carpenters were already at work setting up the timbers for the scaffold, some who felt ashamed and others who dreaded a barbarous retribution went to plead for mercy to the governor, a feeble old man subservient to the supplications and flattery of the moneyed classes who were asking him, even at the risk of his life, to save the threatened society.

Until that time only three voices, not counting the professional defenders and natural friends of the victims, had dared to intercede for those unfortunate men who, on the pretext of a specific accusation that was never proved, and on the pretext of their having tried to establish a reign of terror, were dying as the prey of social terror. These voices be longed to Howells, the Boston novelist whose generosity caused him to sacrifice reputation and friends; Adler, the strong but cautious thinker who discerns a new world in the travail of our century; and Train, a monomaniac who spends all his time in the public square feeding the birds and talking with children.

Finally, in a horrible dance of death, turning and twisting and crammed into their white tunics, the accused men died.

Finally, without having been able to put more fire into the stoves, more bread into the pantries, more social justice into the distribution of wealth; without having instituted more safeguards against hunger for the useful members of society; without having been able to secure more light and hope for the hovels of the poor, or more relief for all that seethes and suffers, the nearly disjointed body of the man who, believing he was giving men a sublime example of love, tossed away his life with the weapon he thought was revealed to redeem them, was placed in a wooden coffin. Because of its unconscionable cult of wealth, and lacking any of the shackles of tradition, this Republic has fallen into monarchical inequality, injustice and violence.

The revolutionary theories of the European worker in the United States were like drops of blood carried away by the sea, whereas life in a spacious land and under a republican form of government enabled the recent arrival to earn his bread and lay aside a portion of his earnings for his old age, and in his own house.

But then came the corrupting war and the habit of authority and domination which is its bitter aftereffect. Then came the credit that stimulated the creation of colossal fortunes and the disorderly foreign influx. Then came the leisure of the war’s unemployed, always ready, because of the need to maintain their wellbeing and because of the fatal inclination of those who have smelled blood, to serve the impure interests resulting from it.

The Republic changed from a wonderfully desirable village to a monarchy in disguise.

European immigrants denounced with renewed anger the wrongs they thought they had left behind in their own repressive countries.

The ill will of the nation’s workers, recognizing themselves to be the victims of the greed and inequality of a feudal people, exploded with a greater faith in the freedom they hoped to see succeed in the social realm as it was succeeding in the political.

Since the country’s inhabitants are accustomed to winning without bloodshed through the power of the vote, and since they neither understand nor excuse those who were born in nations where suffrage is a tool of repression, they see nothing in the apathetic work of those of foreign birth but a new aspect of the old abuse that scourges their thinkers, challenges their heroes and curses their poets. But although the essential differences in political practices, and the disagreements and rivalries of the races already arguing about supremacy in this part of the continent, might have stood in the way of the immediate formation of a formidable labor party with identical methods and purposes, the common denominator of pain has accelerated the concerted action of all who suffer. A horrendous act was needed, no matter how much it might be a natural consequence of inflamed passions, so that those who hasten indomitably from the identical misfortune can interrupt their efforts to eradicate and repair, while their bloody re courses are condemned for being ineffective by men who, because of an insane love of justice, seize those who have lost their faith in free dom.

In the recently emerging West, where the commanding influence of an old society like that of the East, reflected in its literature and customs, puts fewer restrictions on the new elements; where a somewhat more rudimentary kind of life facilitates close relationships among men, more harassed and scattered in the larger and more cultured cities; where the same astounding rapidity of growth, accumulating mansions and factories on the one hand, and wretched masses of people on the other, clearly reveals the evils of a system that punishes the most industrious with hunger, the most generous with persecution, the useful father with the misery of his children — there the unhappy working man has been making his voice heard. In the West, where the impoverished day laborer is joined by wife and children in reading books that teach the causes of, and the cures for, their unhappiness; where the industrialists, justified in their own eyes by the success of their grand and glorious factories, are carrying to extremes, prejudiced by prosperity, the unjust methods and harsh treatment that keep them prosperous — there both the workers and their friends have been able to speak their minds. In the West, where German leaven coming out of the imperial country is keeping in ferment the harassed and intelligent laboring masses, putting upon the iniquitous land the three terrible curses of Heine; in the West, and especially in its major city Chicago, the discontented among the working masses, the ardent counsel of their friends, and the rage piled up by the effrontery and inclemency of their bosses, have found living expression.

Since everything tends toward the great and the small at the same time, just as water rises from the sea as mist and then condenses and returns to the sea again, so the human problem — condensed in Chicago because of its free institutions at the same time as it infused the Republic and the world with fear or hope, due to events in the city and the passions of its men — changed into a bitter and angry local problem.

Hatred for injustice changed into hatred for its representatives. Secular fury, enfeebled by inheritance, eating away and consuming like lava, is inherited by men who, out of their deep compassion, see themselves as holy beings, and this fury is concentrated upon those who persist in the abuses provoking it. When the mind starts working, it never stops; when anguish reaches the boiling point, it explodes; when speech begins to become inflammatory, it bursts its bounds; when vanity starts boasting, it acts as a spur; when hope is put into action, it ends in either triumph or catastrophe. “For the revolutionary,” said Saint-Just,¹ “the only rest is the grave!”

What man motivated by ideas fails to realize that the harmony of all harmonies, where love presides over passion, is scarcely revealed to those great thinkers who, seated on the crest of time and blocking out the sun with their hands, see the world at the boiling point? What man who deals with men is unaware that, since they are more flesh than enlightenment, they barely recognize what seems self-evident; scarcely discern the surface; are hardly aware of anything but their own desires or threats; can scarcely conceive of anything but a frontal attack from the wind, or the apparent and therefore not always real expedient that can stop people from shutting the door on their hatred, pride or appetites? What man suffering from human wrongs, no matter how much he restrains his reason, fails to feel inflamed and misled by one of those social evils which might well keep in a state of constant madness those who watch their wives and children rotting in those social evils, especially when he examines them closely, as if they were slapping him in the face, burying him in the mud and staining his hands with blood.

Once those wrongs are recognized, the generous soul goes out to seek a remedy. Once the peaceful means are exhausted, the liberal soul resorts to violence for that remedy. Another person’s pain works in the generous soul the way a worm works in an open wound.

Was it not Desmoulins² who said: “As long as one embraces freedom, what matter if it be upon heaps of corpses?”

Blinded by generosity, dazzled by vanity, drunk on popularity, demented by constant transgression, by their apparent impotence in the struggle for suffrage, by the hope of being able to establish in an emerging region their ideal nation, the diligent leaders of these angry masses — educated in lands where the vote has barely commenced — do not stray from the present, do not dare to appear weak in the eyes of their followers, do not see that in this free nation the only obstacle to sincerely desired social change lies in the lack of agreement on the part of those who seek that change. These diligent leaders, weary of suffering and with a vision of a universal phalanstery in their minds, do not believe that world justice can ever be brought about by peaceful means.

They pass judgment like cornered animals. All that is in process of growth they consider as growing against them. “My daughter slaves 15 hours a day to earn 15 cents.” “I haven’t had any work this winter because I belong to a labor union.”

The judge sentences them.

The police, proud of the authority and uniforms that put fear into the hearts of the uncultured, manhandle and murder them.

The impoverished are cold and hungry, live in stinking houses.

America, then, is the same as Europe!

These wretched people fail to understand that they are merely cogs in the gears of society; if they are to change, all the gears must change. The hunted wild boar is deaf to the joyous music of the wind, to the song of the universe and to the grandiose movement of the cosmos. The wild boar braces its rump against the trunk of an obscure tree, sinks its fangs into the belly of its pursuer, and turns its victim’s entrails inside out.

Where will those tired masses, suffering more and more each day, find that divine state of greatness to which the thinker must ascend to control the rage their unnecessary misery causes? They have tried every conceivable recourse. It is that reign of terror depicted by Carlyle: “Man’s dismal and desperate battle against his condition and all that sur rounds him.”

Just as the life of man is concentrated in his spinal cord, and the life of the earth in its molten mass, there emerges from among those hordes of people swelling with pride and vomiting fire beings in whom all of life’s horror, desperation and sorrow seems to have been fused.

They come from hell; what language must they speak but the language of hell?

Their speeches, even when read, throw sparks, mouths full of smoke, food but half digested, reddish vapors.

This is a horrible world; create another, as on Sinai amid the roar of thunder; as in ‘93, from a sea of blood! “Better to blow up 10 men with dynamite than let 10 men starve slowly, as they are doing in the factories!”

Montezuma’s³ pronouncement sounds again: “The gods are thirsty!”

A handsome youth, who has himself painted against a background of clouds, with the sun on his face, sits at a writing desk surrounded by bombs, crosses his legs and lights a cigar. As one fits pieces of wood together to make a doll’s house, he explains the world of justice that will flower over the land when the impact of Chicago’s social revolution, symbol of worldwide oppression, bursts forth.

But everything was words, meetings in corners, gun drills in one or another cellar, three rival newspapers circulating among 2,000 desperate readers, and dissemination of the most recent methods of killing. The guiltiest are those who, through the vainglory of freedom, permitted men to exercise it by means of the violence of their generosity!

When the workers showed a stronger will to better their condition, their employers showed an even stronger determination to resist them.

The worker believes he has a right to a certain security for the future, a certain amount of comfort and cleanliness for his house, a right to feed without worry the children he begets, a fairer share in the products of the work of which he is an indispensable factor, some time in the sun for helping his wife plant a rosebush in his yard, some corner in which to live that is not a stinking hole one cannot enter without nausea, as in the city of New York. And every time the Chicago workers asked for this in some way, the capitalists banded together and punished them by denying them the work that means their meat, their heat and their light. The bosses set the police on them, the police who are always eager to let their nightsticks fall upon the heads of the shoddily clothed. At times a policeman would kill some daring soul who resisted with stones, or some child. The workers were finally starved into returning to their jobs, spirits grim, misery further irritated, decency offended, meditating vengeance.

Heard only by their few partisans, the anarchists have been meeting year after year, organized into groups each of which kept a section under arms. In their three quite distinct newspapers they publicly preached social revolution, declaring in the name of humanity a war on existing society. They decided that a radical conversion could not be brought about by peaceful means, and recommended the use of dynamite as the holy weapon of the disinherited as well as methods of preparing it.

It was not in the treacherous shadows but in a direct confrontation with those whom they considered their enemies that they proclaimed themselves free and rebellious in order to emancipate mankind. They recognized that they were in a state of war, gave their blessings to the discovery of a substance which through its unique power was to equalize forces and save bloodshed, and strongly encouraged the study and manufacture of the new weapon with the same cool horror and diabolical calm as if they were writing a regulation treatise on ballistics. Reading these instructions, one sees bone-white circles in a sea of smoke; into the darkened room comes a ghost, gnawing on a human rib and sharpening its nails. To measure the entire depths of man’s desperation, one must see if the horror that generally makes preparations calmly is getting the upper hand over that against which it is rebelling with a centuries-old fury; one must live in exile from one’s homeland or from humanity…

New York, November 13, 1887