AT THE Chicago Historical Society I found a book on Haymarket which had the clip of a story in the Chicago Daily News of May 1886, written by our old friend Ned Fitzpatrick, whose diary had recounted the story of the Maamtrasna murders and of the hanging of six innocent men for the crime.1 It had also told how Ned had married the young widow of Myles Joyce, a clan leader who, in a free Ireland, would have been a king.
QUIET MEETING TURNS BLOODY
Special to the Chicago Daily News
By Ned Fitzpatrick
May 4
A quiet protest on Desplaines Street last night turned into a bloody riot as police clashed with the remnants of a relatively quiet anarchist protest. Seven people were killed, six of them police officers.
There was supposed to be great rage among this city’s workers because of the shooting yesterday over at the McCormick Works on Black Street. This rage was not visible, however, on Desplaines Street between Lake and Randolph early in the evening, a gentle touch of spring in the air. A crowd of perhaps a hundred and fifty people milled around like sheep without a shepherd until August Spies appeared. He was plainly shocked that there were no speakers.
“There are no speakers,” he said to me at my outpost in Crane’s alley. “We distributed twenty thousand broadsides and we have no speakers.”
“You’re a speaker,” I replied.
“I am supposed to speak in German at the end. Were there more people here before I came?”
“No.”
“People do not care about the innocents killed at the McCormick Works.” He sighed.
Spies had spoken in German to the workers at the Lumber Shovers strike the day before. Some of his listeners rushed over to McCormick to join the strikers there in heckling the scabs. There was no violence until the police appeared with guns and clubs and killed two workers.
Spies, the editor of the Workers Times, a German-language newspaper, is better-looking, better-dressed, and more articulate than most Chicago journalists. He does not act like a revolutionary. Most of the so-called Anarchists in Chicago appear to be respectable German bourgeoisie, far less dangerous than their Irish counterparts you might encounter in the local saloon. Until they start to talk, especially with strong German accents. Then in a city wracked by labor strife, beset by violence, and fearful of “foreigners,” they appear to be very dangerous indeed.
Organizer that he is, August Spies found a wagon on Desplaines, just above the Haymarket, which he turned into a speakers’ platform. There would be no obstacle to the streetcar that came through the Hay market, hardly a consideration which would have troubled a real revolutionary.
Spies cried out against the terrible oppression of the workers by the “slavemasters” of the giant companies like McCormick. Yet his rhetoric was extremely mild, compared to what more radical Anarchists around the city were saying.
“Not very strong, is he, Ned?” Mayor Carter Harrison whispered to me.
“He never is, sir.”
“Looks like a peaceful night.”
“It usually is, sir, until Black Jack shows up with his cops.”
“Whose side are you on, Ned?” he asks me, puffing on his cigar.
“The Constitution, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I’m told Black Jack has summoned in cops from all over the city.”
“Oh? I was unaware of that… Well perhaps while I’m riding back to Union Park, I’ll stop by the station down the street and have a word with him.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waved his cigar at me and slipped off into the darkness.
Albert Parsons replaced Spies on the wagon, his rich Texas accent in sharp contrast to Spies’s heavy Teutonic sound. Onetime secretary of the Texas Senate, onetime employee of the Grant Administration, firm believer in the eight-hour working day as a solution to the problems caused by the Panic of 1873, he sounded even more harmless than Spies.
I noted that his wife and two children were waiting for him in a carriage behind the speakers stand.
The crowd cheered for Parsons’s tightly packed logic, but not very loudly.
An anticlimax, I reasoned. Everyone is tired of the violence and the inflammatory rhetoric.
The wind changed. A cold chill crept down Desplaines Street and with it the smell of rain.
Young Samuel Fielden was talking, a burly, bearded young Englishman who was once a Methodist preacher. He didn’t have much to say, but he said it beautifully. The diminishing crowd yelled its appreciation.
Then Black Jack Bonfield and a hundred and seventy-five cops appeared out of Waldo Court next to the police station a block away and, their way illumined by torchlight, marched heavily up the street. Bonfield had waited till he was certain that Mayor Harrison had left the scene before he disobeyed orders. There were as many police as there were protesters. The police held pistols in their hands. Black Jack trailed behind the leading rows of police.
In the front row, Captain William Ward, Black Jack’s stooge, shouted, “In the name of the people of the state of Illinois disperse, immediately and peacefully.”
“Why, Captain,” the sweet-tempered Fielden replied, “this is a peaceful meeting.”
Willy Ward, perhaps the least intelligent cop in the city, repeated the order. His men shoved most of the crowd up Desplaines and now behind the speaker’s wagon. Fielden climbed down off the wagon.
Then it happened.
I heard someone running behind me in the dark of Crane’s alley. A tall, strong man, heavily cloaked, pushed me out of the way. I thought I knew him. He had something in his hand, about the size of a baseball, with a sputtering fire on it. For a moment he stopped in the gaslight of Desplaines Street. Then he hurled the bomb into the crowd and turned to run back up Crane’s alley. I lunged at him, but he brushed me aside.
Then the bomb exploded with a deep, wrenching roar and dark orange burst of flame in the midst of the police. I saw a man collapse, his leg torn open. Shocked by the sound and paralyzed by the carnage, I was surprised that the bomb had hit the police lines. Only a moment before the protesters had stood on that spot.
Then the police began to fire their guns at the crowd. And at one another. They fell over like ninepins.
No discipline, I thought. They panicked.
Who wouldn’t panic under such circumstances?
The shooting ended. Bodies littered the streets on both sides of the speaker’s wagon. The crowd had disappeared. The police did not pursue them. Instead they gathered their dead and wounded and carried them back to the police station.
In the station the large room on the first floor was a scene of chaos and carnage. The dead, the dying, the wounded, the maimed were scattered about on the floor. Other officers were slumped against the wall, heads buried in their arms. Doctors were already at work. Some men were carried out on their way to County Hospital or to the morgue. Father Galligan, the handsome and popular young pastor from St. Patrick’s down the street, stole around his neck, was rushing from one dying man to another. I tried to answer his prayers.
I knew most of the men, some of them from my parish—Barrett, Flavin, Sullivan, Sheehan, Degen. Irish cops caught between the German Anarchists and the English titans of business.
“Don’t worry, lads,” Bonfield yelled. “We’ll get them, every last one of them!”
No one cheered.
“They’re cursing the Germans,” the priest said to me. “Why blame a whole group for what one man did?”
“All but poor Matt Degen were shot by frightened police,” I replied.
Willy Ward wandered about in a trance, muttering over and over again, “It almost hit me! Degen saved my life!”
Not intentionally, I thought.
“What happened, Ned?” Father Galligan asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever know. None of us will.”