May 5, 1886.
The police came to our house on Dearborn Street tonight as I was sitting before this blank book, wondering how to begin. The General had warned me at lunch that they would come. They were arresting “Anarchists” and “radicals” all over the city, hundreds of them. They’re trying to terrorize everyone, he said. They don’t like you, naturally enough. But they wouldn’t dare arrest you. Even if they were not afraid of the Chicago Daily News, they’d be afraid of me.
I knew he was right. Yet, the least brave of men that I am, I was momentarily frightened when Nora came into my study and, her face pale, her eyes dark with fear, gasped, “The police are here, Ned.”
The police in Galway had come for her first husband, a police no worse than the Chicago police for a man no more guilty than I. He had never returned to their cottage and now his bones had dissolved in limestone in Galway Prison.
Suddenly I was more furious than frightened. Anger gives even weaklings courage.
I strode into the parlor and encountered Captain Michael Schaack, the most crooked police officer in Chicago. From his fortress at the Chicago Avenue Police Station, just off Dearborn Street, he had stormed around the city, dragging innocent men and women out of their beds and herding them into jails.
“Get out of my house!” I ordered him.
“I am Captain Michael Schaack.”
He is a big man with broad shoulders, a long handlebar mustache, and a shaven head. He carries a long billy club which he caresses affectionately. A .45 caliber revolver is strapped to his belt. He might well be one of Genghis Khan’s viziers.
“I know damn well who you are. I do not want a parasite who lives off money stolen from prostitutes and saloonkeepers frightening my family and befouling my home”.
My beautiful young niece Josie had pressed herself against the wall of the parlor and, eyes filled with hate, was glaring at the Captain and the three cops, all clearly Irish, as they stood just inside the doorway. She remembered the arrest of her uncle too. When Josie stares that way, one could think she was putting on a hex. I was never quite sure myself.
The police had all taken too much drink.
“Six police officers were killed last night by Anarchists,” Schaack began.
“All but my neighbor, poor Matt Degen, were killed by other police whose discipline collapsed at the sound of gunfire.”
“That’s what you say.”
“Get out,” I repeated my order. “I will have nothing to do with you”.
“You said in your story that you knew who the bomb thrower was”.
“You misquote me. Get out!”
“We want to question you.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant.”
“Yes you do!”
“We want you to tell us who threw the bomb!”
I sensed my terrified Nora behind me.
“If I find out who it was, you’ll read about it on the front page of the Chicago Daily News. Now for the last time get out before I throw you out.”
I’m not a large man like my father the General. However, I have some small and undeserved reputation as a boxer. Whether I would have hit Captain Schaack or not I don’t know. Probably not. If I had, he would have fallen with one punch. Fortunately, muttering unimaginative curses, he and his cronies departed.
“Good on you, Uncle Ned,” Josie cried out.
“I think they were more afraid of your hexes, Josie, than of my fists.”
She laughed as she always did when I alluded to her fey propensities.
When I had carried off Nora and Mary Elizabeth, her daughter by the murdered Myles Joyce from Ireland, I also invited Josie, at that time a thinly clad, dirty-faced urchin to join us. I came home therefore with a family, to which we soon added our own daughter Grace. All these women in the house overwhelmed me.
Standing behind me, Nora wrapped her arms around me. I turned to mush as I always do under such circumstances.
“Will they be back, Ned dearest?”
“No, Nora.” I sighed. “They won’t. They’re afraid of the Daily News and of the General”.
“And of your fists,” she said, burying her face in my back.
I didn’t deserve her worship. I never have. However, at that moment, as at many other moments in my life, I gladly accepted it.
As soon as I finish this first entry, I will join her in our bedroom.
I had lunched with the General at the Union League Club, a place at which neither he nor I would be welcome but they couldn’t keep him out. If he wanted to eat lunch with his son there, no one was likely to stop him, even if the son was nothing more than a lowly journalist.
At nineteen, my father, a raw and very strong immigrant from County Mayo, enlisted in the Union Army, married the seventeen-year-old down the street, and went off to defend the Union. Having come back twice on sick leave and sired two children, myself one of them, he fought from Fort Donaldson to Appomattox Courthouse and risen to the rank of Lt. Colonel. He marched in the victory parade in Washington, was mustered out, and walked home to us. He stayed on as a member of an inactive reserve regiment and rose to the rank of general and became a lawyer by sitting in a law office for a year. At forty-five, a big, handsome man with a strong Irish brogue and powerful intellect, he was one of the most important members of the Illinois bar and if not exactly rich, wealthy enough.
“I don’t sit down at the table very often with Cyrus McCormick or Potter Palmer,” he said once, “but they listen to me when I do. Then I go out and wash my hands to get rid of their dust.”
My father and mother were both just a little bit daft and viewed me as kind of an anomaly—a white sheep in their daft family, a quiet, sober and responsible young man. They modified their judgment somewhat when I brought Nora and Josie and Mary Elizabeth—Myles Joyce’s daughter—home from Ireland with me. They love me greatly and are proud of me for my work, which isn’t all that much.
“Great story!” the General bellowed as I joined him at the lunch table. “That’ll show them!”
His blond hair was now tinged with a little gray but it was wild as ever in contrast to my carefully pasted-down and short-cut blond hair.
It wasn’t clear to me whom it would show, but I did not pursue the subject.
He ate a hearty meal. If he noticed I was only picking at my roast beef, he did not comment.
“What’s happening?”
The General rarely gave a straight answer to anything, which may have been why he was such a good lawyer. Rather he approached any and every subject in an indirect and roundabout way, during his walk on which he would provide background for what he was about to say.
“Do you know what proportion of Chicagoans are immigrants, Neddie?”
“Half?”
“Seventy percent. Now if you’re good Yankee stock like Potter Palmer or Marshall Field or Cyrus McCormick think they are, that scares you. These immigrants talk strange tongues, look sneaky, and glare at you. They remember what the Communards did in Paris fifteen years ago and have anticipatory pains in their necks.”
“The government murdered most of the Communards.”
“Indeed they did, but a few wealthy people were guillotined too. So the powerful in this city live in mortal terror of bomb-throwing Anarchists and their hordes of followers.”
“The local German Anarchists are harmless, sir. They make a lot of noise and even talk about bombs, but the only one I know of who makes them is a young organizer for the Carpenters named Louis Lingg.”
“I take your word for it, Neddie. My point is that the plutocrats in this city are afraid of them. They think the Germans will lead the Poles and the Italians in an uprising against them. They see this ‘riot’ as an excuse to get rid of them.”
“I understand, sir.”
I tried a bite of potato and gave it up.
“Their second fear is unions. They’ve won every battle so far. They are afraid that in the long run Chicago will become a union town.”
“That’s impossible, sir!”
“No, it’s not, Ned. Once the Irish take some time off from scheming against England, they’ll organize the city. It may take years, but it will happen. There’s just too many workers in this city. Anyway, the people around us here in this dining room also want to throw a spoke into the union wagons. Kill off a bunch of Anarchists and that will happen too or so they think.”
“I agree that the strikes will continue.”
“Then there’s the police,” he said, ticking off the count on his strong, workman’s fingers. “Their bosses generally do what the wealthy want them to do. Now the ordinary cops want revenge.”
“They’ve already arrested poor Lucy Parsons, who was sitting in a carriage with her two children behind the speaker’s stand when the bomb went off.”
“That’s the former slave?”
“I doubt it. Like her husband she’s from Texas. More probably Mexican and Indian as well as some Negro.”
He nodded.
“Kind of woman cops love to abuse… Her husband’s gone into hiding, I understand.”
“He’s a tough man, sir. Not a killer, not with his wife and kids near the bomb.”
“Ned, men are going to die for this, most likely innocent men because the powerful people in Chicago want them to die.”
I nodded.
“I see your point, sir, and don’t dispute it. Just like Nora’s husband, Myles Joyce, died in Ireland.”
“That’s right, son. Just like Myles Joyce. Right here in Chicago and the United States of America and only after the rich and the powerful and the ambitious have made of the affair all they can.”
“It wasn’t even a major riot, Dad. A man threw a bomb. It blew open the leg of a man I consider a friend and a neighbor. The cops lost their heads and fired their guns, killing one another. It was all over in a couple of minutes.”
He shook his head sadly, his solid, honest face sad for a moment.
“I read your story, Ned. Most people around the world won’t read it. The Haymarket in Chicago is the place where the Anarchists threw a bomb which killed a half dozen police.”
“Most of them Irish at that.”
He sighed loudly.
“I know that, Ned.”
We were both silent for a moment.
“I assume,” the General renewed the conversation, “that you will continue to write your version of events.”
I looked up surprised.
“Of course, sir.”
“More power to you… Will your editor support you?”
“He will. He likes me. My stories stir things up. That sells papers. He likes that too.”
The General pondered for a moment.
“The police will leave you alone for the most part. So will the prosecutors. They will fear the Daily News…”
“And they will fear you too, sir.”
My father grinned broadly. “Well they might, Neddie lad. Well they might.”
“I appreciate your support”.
“And if ever there is any threat against that family of yours…”
“You will break the necks of those who make the threats!”
“Something like that.”
The General always astonishes me. In effect he had told me that I was to have free rein in pursuing the truth of the awful affair with his guaranteed protection.
“It was awful last night,” I continued as they brought the bowls for us to cleanse our fingers. “During the war did you ever get used to seeing men die violently?”
“Never, Ned. Never.”
So I walked home to North Dearborn Street and was morose and solemn at the dinner table. Nora and Josie knew why and tried to keep Mary Elizabeth and Grace Ann quiet. What a trial I am to the women I love.
Then I went to my study without much of an explanation and the police arrived.
Well the fight has begun.
May 7, 1886.
Having attended Matt Degen’s wake last night I took the carriage over to St. Patrick’s for the funeral mass of two other policemen. The parish has slipped since the days of the Great Fire. There are still some elegant homes over on Jackson and Monroe but on Desplaines Street there are factories and warehouses, including the area where the “riot” occurred. The rich Irish have moved farther west to Our Lady of Sorrows, where my parents and brothers and sisters live.
The church was filled. Both policemen were young and their widows and children are young. The anger among the police officers in church was palpable. They wanted to get out of the hot and cramped building and continue on their quest for revenge.
Under the circumstances, Father Galligan acquitted himself well. There was no place, he said, for vengeance in the hearts of Catholics. We mourn those who are gone. We expect to see them again. Though we pursue justice, we strive to do so with calm hearts. We leave it to God to punish those who are to blame. Vengeance is mine, He has said, I will repay. He meant that, Father Galligan insisted.
Some of the police officers seemed thoughtful, his words having hit them hard. Most squirmed in their seats, eager to be out on the streets tormenting union leaders and Germans.
I wrote an incendiary piece in which I described the grief of the widows, the Catholicism of the sermon, and the responsibility of men like Captain Bonfield and Captain Ward who marched into a dispersing crowd where their presence was not needed and against the explicit orders of Mayor Carter Harrison.
My editor grinned happily after he had read it.
“There’ll be hell to pay over this one, Ned. Cyrus McCormick will send his footman over with a strong note.”
“Which you will publish!”
“Certainly! To tell you the truth, Ned, he’s not the writer you are.”
“That’s hardly a compliment.”
Then I went up to Lucy Parsons’s house on Larrabee Street. She had just been released from jail, but not for long. The police were hoping she would lead them to her husband.
They did not know Lucy if they believed that.
She peeped out of the corner of the door, saw me, and opened it.
“Ned,” she said, “it is good to see you. Please come in.”
Their apartment was no more than a couple of bare rooms with a few sticks of old furniture. The Parsonses, a man and woman of considerable intelligence and industry, lived in abject poverty.
Lizzy Holmes, her good friend and ally in the Seamstress Union, was with her. Her two little children, dark and lovely but haggard and undernourished, sat quietly in the corner.
“Albert is not here.” She sighed. “He thought it best to go into hiding temporarily. He expects there to be battles in the street.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Ned, would you please put to rest the rumor that we plan to blow up St. Michael’s Church. The story is designed to turn German Catholics against us.”
“I’ll do what I can… This is a difficult time in Chicago for the Germans.”
“I understand.”
Lucy Parsons is a beautiful woman, dark and exotic with a lovely body and bright eyes. She’s in her early or middle thirties. I don’t know what blood is in her veins and I don’t care.
“Would it be possible to interview Albert?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“I’m afraid not, Ned. We trust you, of course. Everyone in the labor movement does. The police are outside now watching my every visitor. They will follow you, hoping you will lead them to Albert.”
“Is he safe?”
She sighed. “For the moment. We hope he can move shortly to a safer place where Captain Schaack will never find him.”
“That is very wise. I hope he stays there. They are looking for men to hang.”
“If others are to hang, he will insist on hanging with them. The working class must stand together against its oppressors”.
“The city is hysterical now, Lucy. The hysteria will pass eventually. People understand there was no conspiracy, especially not from a man who had brought his wife and children in harm’s way. It will be safe then for him to return and he can resume his work.”
“Who will they want to hang?”
“Lingg, certainly. They have bomb materials in his room. Spies probably and Fielden because they were there…”
“And hence targets for the bomber and the police pistols?”
“They’ll probably pick up a few more harmless innocents.”
“And Albert? If he should return to Chicago?”
“He’s been too articulate, too prominent, just the man they’re looking for as the ringleader… Lucy, don’t let him return.”
“We have often spoken”—she pursed her lips thoughtfully—“of the possibility of death. In our work it is always a present reality. We have agreed that if necessary we would find it an honor to die for our cause. Our blood would win thousands to the cause of workingmen and -women.”
“Blood of martyrs the seed of the faith,” I mused.
“Who said that, Ned?”
“St. Augustine, I think.”
“For Albert and me, the only God we can worship is humanity itself. Willingly we would die for that God.”
The humanity which wanted to hang her husband just as it had hung Myles Joyce in Galway Prison.
The rich and powerful in Chicago wanted blood. So did the Anarchists—their own.
“Perhaps, but only if there is no other way. Both of you will do more for the workingmen and -women alive than dead.”
I was not sure of that. Yet I had to say it.
“As you say, Ned, perhaps.”
“At least tell Albert my opinion.”
“Naturally. However,” she said, her eyes shining even more brightly, “I must inform you that Albert will not let others die alone.”
“I do not question his courage,” I managed to say.
“I know you don’t, Ned.” Tears formed in her eyes. “Please continue to report the truth about the oppression of the workingmen and -women of Chicago, in your ironic Irish way.”
I promised I would, not altogether sure that her description was accurate.
Brave people, I thought as I left their old house which had somehow survived the Fire. Foolish perhaps but brave.
Outside rain clouds were gathering. Two policemen across Larrabee Street glared at me suspiciously. I was so angry that I almost started a fight with them. There would be some relief in knocking them both down. Since I was General Fitzpatrick’s son and a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, I could get away with it.
Naturally I did not do so and indeed feel ashamed of myself for the thought.
Tomorrow I will write a story about Lucy and Albert Parsons. I will try to present them for what they are—a dedicated man and woman who would not step on an errant ant. In the temper of Chicago today it would do little good. Yet one must do what one can.
I wanted desperately to return to our comfortable home on Dearborn and bask in the warmth of my wife and family. There was, however, work to be done.
At North Avenue and Sedgwick I entered Laddy’s Saloon, a gathering place for the working-class Irish—teamsters, sewer diggers, sailors, longshoremen, boatwrights from the yards on Goose Island, where they were still building schooners. My elegant white clothes and bowler hat were utterly inappropriate for such a place. Yet I was always welcome, whether because I was the General’s son or a reporter I do not know.
I found myself at a table with some of the men from Goose Island who told me that plans were being made to build “iron” boats with steam engines there, yet another revolution in the always dangerous Lake shipping trade. I let the conversation drift to the “riot.”
What do I think? I was there. The meeting was over. People were going home. Bonfield sent in his police looking for trouble. Someone threw a bomb which killed a policeman who was a friend of mine. The police panicked and killed one another and a few of the protesters. It was all over in a few minutes. The term riot doesn’t apply.
“Do you know who it was, Ned?”
“No, he came rushing out of Crane’s alley, pushed me aside and threw it. It was a long throw. Only moments before the protesters were there. My guess is that he wanted to throw a bomb and didn’t much care who it hit.”
Silence around the table and indeed around the whole saloon as they listened to the journalist tell his tale.
“Would you be thinking, Neddie lad,” a young redhaired giant asked with a wink of his eye, “that Bonfield and Ward and Schaack were looking for a little riot bloodshed.”
I stared into the darkness of my beer.
“That’s certainly possible. Yet why march your own men into it? They could have waited fifty yards back.”
“What was the man like?”
“Big fellow, shrouded, strong. In a great hurry. There was only the one gaslight at the corner of the alley. He didn’t take time to aim. He just threw”.
“Crazy man?” a little sail rigger named Higgins asked.
“I’ve thought of that. His behavior certainly seemed crazy. I don’t think he cared whom he hit”.
“They’re out to hang them German Anarchists, ain’t they Ned?”
“They’re saying there was a conspiracy. That’s complete nonsense.”
“They’ll swing anyway, won’t they?”
I nodded solemnly.
“The papers want it, the rich people want it, the police want it. Innocent people will indeed swing.”
“That ain’t fair,” the big redhead said. Everyone around the table murmured agreement.
The Irish working class would not rise in the streets to save the Anarchists, much less to punish the police force on which many of their fathers and brothers and cousins served. They could, however, recognize unfairness when they saw it.
Then one of our regulars came in. He limped, his eyes were black, his face swollen.
“Vaclav! Who hit you!”
“Cops come to my house in middle of night, screamed at me and wife, hit us both, woke kids, ransacked house, tore bed apart, dragged me to Chicago Avenue station, choked me, kicked me, beat me, clubbed me. I ask what I do. They said I part of conspiracy to kill cops. I say I’m just working stiff in yards, no Anarchist. They tell me I turn state’s evidence against Anarchists they let me go. I say I don’t know nothing. They beat me some more and then let me go.”
“Bastards!” one of the lumber shovers shouted.
“Maybe the Anarchists are right!”
“Maybe we should hang the cops!”
Perhaps, I reflected, the situation is more volatile than I thought. The denizens of Laddy’s were not revolutionaries. However, they hated the bosses and the rich. It would take more than a spark to bring them into the streets. Still it could happen. Then the city would have a mob on its hands far more dangerous than a few German theorists.
As I left Laddy’s a big, solid, bearded man ambled out with me, probably a stevedore from the river docks. His face was hidden by a cap.
“Aren’t there some folk saying, Ned, that it was all a balls-up?”
A Mick.
“Are they now?”
“They’re whispering that no one who died was supposed to die, if you take my meaning.”
“Ah.”
“I hear that they’re saying the amadon that threw the bomb panicked and threw it at the wrong time”.
“Very interesting… An Irishman threw it?”
He laughed.
“I’m not saying that he did and I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m only saying that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“I usually don’t”.
“This time, don’t believe anything you hear.”
He turned away and walked up Clark Street.
There were perhaps fifty Irish groups in the city dedicated to the expulsion of the English from Ireland, some of them armed, and some of those more than a little daft. Why might they get in a fight between the Anarchists and the police?
The man who had spoken to me was trying to influence what I wrote tomorrow. Maybe he was merely throwing sand in my eyes and in the eyes of the police. I could write about rumors without playing the game of those who wanted to create more confusion. I might learn something more.
I did not, however, think that would be the case.
Nora hugged me when I came in the door of our house, her radiance banishing some of my gloom.
“It was only one beer, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”
She laughed enthusiastically.
“The last thing I fear is that Mr. Fitzpatrick will ever become a drunk.”
“I think Uncle Neddie would be very funny as a drunk,” Josie observed. “He’d cry a lot because he’s such a sentimentalist.”
“We should have left you on that hill, young woman!”
“And you would have if you didn’t know that she wouldn’t come along without me.”
We all laughed. The truth of the matter, however, was that when God (or some good angel) inspired me to say that of course Josie would come along, Nora decided to surrender.
My wife put her arm around me as she led me to the dining room.
“When you do that,” I said, “I melt.”
“That’s why I do it.”
Here in my study, where I try to make sense out of this dark and terrible day, I think of Lucy Parsons and Nora Joyce. Like Nora, Lucy would lose her husband to the gallows, a victim of the gross miscarriage of justice. There would, however, be no one to save Lucy because she would not want to be saved.
Where should I be in all this? I play a coward’s role, that of an outsider who reports and comments on the struggle between the workers and the bosses. I am not part of the struggle despite my sympathy for the workers. I tell myself that now is not yet the time, that anarchy will not work, that when this vast immigrant population of our city begins to vote, there will be change. Until then, however, people will live in misery and injustice and brave men and women like Albert and Lucy Parsons may lose one another just as Nora and Myles lost one another.
It is raining hard now, perhaps washing away some of the blood on Desplaines Street. A chill in the air. I am tired. I cannot answer my questions. Nora waits for me in our bedroom.