August 19, 1886
The summations are almost finished. The jury will retire this afternoon and after sham deliberations will reach a decision. Tomorrow morning they will find the defendants all guilty of murder, even Nebbe, whom Grinnell wants to release because there is not the slightest hint of evidence against him. However, the General has heard that Gary will insist on twenty-five years in prison and Oscar with a very sick wife at home. Then Gary will adjourn till October to continue sentencing. The adjournment is not out of any consideration for the Anarchists but because of the intolerable heat in the courthouse on Michigan Street. None of the wealthy people in Chicago can be expected to postpone any longer their jaunts to Wisconsin or the Indiana and Michigan Dunes.
I ate lunch with the General, who was in one of his rare melancholy moods.
“What will they think of us in the next century, lad? It’s only fourteen years way, you know?”
“They’ll think we’re savages and barbarians who are prepared to execute innocent men after a sham trial.”
“All of us?”
“There might be a few footnotes about those who resisted the rush to judgment, sir. Not much else, not unless we achieve some sort of clemency or pardon.”
“Bill Black has done a fine job. I think you’ll like the end of his summation this afternoon. It’s difficult to reply to Julie Grinnell when he announces as he did yesterday, that even if these men are not killers personally, they are Anarchists and that makes them murderers.”
“It’s too bad that they have said and written enough foolishness, sir, to lend some plausibility to that line of reasoning.”
“Ah, well, if it wasn’t that it would be something else… What will they say about all our immigrants who are under attack especially by that bigot Joe Medil over at the Trib, as much as are your friends over in the Michigan Street Jail?”
“They might wonder why the immigrants didn’t realize what was being done to them, even the Germans, who are by far the more sophisticated of the immigrants.”
“You have the right of it, Ned.” He sighed. “As always.”
“I don’t know whether we’re doing enough,” I said, slipping into Nora’s habit of sighing.
“What else can we do?”
On that uncertain note our lugubrious lunch ended. I hiked across the city to the River under the implacable August sun. There was a huge throng of people, horses, carriages, carts, wagons waiting at the Rush Street bridge as tugs escorted a line of lumber schooners up the River to Wolf Point. The dust of the lumberyards, the smoke from factories, the sickening stench of people, animals and manure made me wish I was back at Geneva Lake. Why had I ever left it?
Chicago is the busiest port in the world. On many days during the shipping season a hundred schooners appear at the mouth of the River, which is as crowded as streets on either side of the River.
Trade in the lumber schooners is declining, despite the denial from the shipping companies and the lumberyards. The demand for milled lumber is greater than ever but the supply is vanishing. No one had bothered to think that Michigan might run out of trees.
The lumberyards, up and down the River, are dangerous places. Men die when cranes fail and tons of wood fall on them. Others collapse from the heat and the dust. Anyone with a tendency to tuberculosis might take sick at the yards and be dead before they arrive at the hospital.
As I waited for the bridge to come down, I thought of the lumber shover who had moved to the fringes of our family. He wanted to be a lawyer, not necessarily a mortal sin. Why could he not work at the General’s office next summer and read the law? He was a bright and quick young man. He could pick up enough law to pass the bar examination the same year he graduated from college (which is what I did). He wouldn’t risk another year in the hell of the lumberyards.
There were problems in such a solution. He didn’t seem given to any excessive pride. Yet he might still resent the offer of a decent summer job. The General, master of blarney that he is, could make it look like Timmy was doing us a favor.
There remained the more serious problem of Josie. Would she feel we were putting undue pressure on her if we brought Timmy into the family business with the hint of a hint that we were bringing him into the family. There was no telling how a strong-willed young woman like Josie might react. I would ask Nora what she thought…
No, that wouldn’t be right. I should ask Josie directly. Not for the first time did I tell myself that I was much too young to have a daughter Josie’s age.
The line of schooners finally passed, followed by the noisy curses of those who had been waiting. I was grateful for the time to think about something besides the trial.
Inside the oven of the courtroom on Michigan Street, William Black was finishing his defense summation. The General, who had written much of it, had as usual been correct. It was a carefully reasoned argument that you could not have a conspiracy to murder unless you knew who the murderer was. Since the police had let Schnaubult, the alleged bomb thrower, slip through their fingers, Julie Grinnell could not link the defendants with him as a murderer. It was an elementary point of law on the basis of which an honorable judge would have had to dismiss the indictment.
The judge did not listen. He was busy drawing pictures of birds for the young ladies on the bench with him. Several of the jurors were asleep. The crowd in the courtroom was bored. They wanted fire. Earlier in the day Julie had told the jury that anarchy itself was murder and that it was their duty to convict the murderers.
This was legal nonsense. I assume Julie knew it. Perhaps Judge Gary knew it too. Neither of them cared. Their masters in the plutocracy and the newspapers demanded hanging. So hanging there would be.
Interestingly enough, Julie had in the morning suggested that Oscar Nebbe might be released as there was not a “preponderance of evidence” against him. The Judge seemed hostile to the suggestion.
“We will see what the jury has to say about Herr Nebbe,” he observed pontifically.
There wasn’t a “preponderance of evidence” against anyone. Nebbe looked less like an anarchist than any of the others. Perhaps Julie hoped that by freeing one of them he would create an illusion of judicious fairness, for which the press would praise him. I doubted that my friend Cy McCormick would be pleased.
“Everyone wants to get this over with,” one of my colleagues yawned. “Save the hangings for November.”
“It will take longer than that,” I replied. “After the sentences, there will be appeals to the circuit courts and the Illinois Supreme Court and maybe even the United States Supreme Court. I hear there’s going to be a clemency movement too. There’ll be news in this trial for years to come.”
“Just so long as there’s no more summer trials.”
I ignored the comment.
“You really think these guys didn’t do it, Ned?”
“There’s not a shred of evidence against them that would stand up in a fair courtroom.”
“I know that. Everyone knows that. Julie’s argument comes to that we know they did it anyway and we don’t need evidence.”
“Would you want to be convicted that way?”
“Hell, no! But I don’t throw bombs at cops!”
“I was there, Hank. They didn’t either.”
He grunted, not caring much one way or another.
He was a working journalist. He wrote what his editors wanted him to write. He couldn’t afford, if he wanted to keep his job, to ask himself too many ethical questions.
I, on the other hand, was a “gentleman journalist” with a lot of clout. Hank and the others did not enjoy the freedom I took for granted. Somehow they didn’t resent me. They even praised my work. Not fair.
“What’s your lead going to be?” he asked me.
“Captain Black: No proof of conspiracy!”
“That will stir the boys up. How long do you think it will take them to reach a verdict?”
“They won’t let it interfere with a dinner over at the Revere House.”
“Probably not… Well, they’ll be able to tell their grandchildren that they were on the jury that convicted the Haymarket Anarchists and lived in the finest hotel in the city while they were doing it.”
“In years to come that might not be a matter of pride.”
JURORS NAP DURING BLACK’S SUMMATION.
I wrote the story during Judge Gary’s extravagant charge to the jury. Marshall Field could not have done a better job of warning them that a failure to convict the defendants would lead to a wave of explosions all over America. Conviction, on the other hand, would destroy anarchism for fifty years.
That gave me a lead for tomorrow’s story:
JUDGE URGES CONVICTION OF DEFENDANTS
At least some of my readers would know enough about law to catch the irony.
My editor did.
“Ned, you are either the bravest or the craziest reporter in Chicago.”
“Perhaps both.”
“As well as being the only sober one.”
“That may be my problem.”
“You infuriate Field and Pullman and McCormick.”
“At least they read me.”
“That’s a point well taken… Still you have to live and work in this city.”
“So do they.”
He laughed.
Gently, as was his custom (strange in an editor), he was trying to warn me that eventually the pressure of the plutocrats might outweigh whatever appeal my writing might have and the clout of the General.
If that happened, then I’d practice law and write for the national magazines. Law is not the most honorable of professions, but it is marginally more honorable than journalism.
As I walked back to the River, sickened by the stench and the heat and the corruption, I told myself that someday Chicago would be a beautiful city. The Lake invited the city to turn it into a playground. Someday the children of that 70 percent of the city who were immigrants would run the city. Someday men like Cy McCormick would not be able to think they owned it.
Then I thought of the women—Lucy Parsons, Nina VanZandt, Metta Nebbe, even the pretty German girl with gold cuff links for Louis Lingg—except for Nina they would return to their suffocating little hovels, hot and exhausted like the rest of us, yearn for their men, hope for justice, and begin to resign themselves to lives of loneliness and the struggle to keep alive the memories of their martyred heroes.
Martyrs!
Yes surely that’s what they would be called. I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down.
Finally, the Clark Street bridge opened, and we poured across it. I faced a mile and a half walk home. I was desperate to hug Nora, remove my vest and waistcoat, and relax in the garden with a single glass of Irish whiskey. Yet I lacked the energy to hurry.
Even my magical Irish Princess, I thought, could not blot out the ugliness of what this city is doing.
Later in the garden in summer garb and with a glass of lemonade—Nora said that whiskey would only depress me more—I began to relax. I was not a hero, not a crusader for justice, certainly not a martyr. Yet I was doing what I could. Please God, I hope that is enough.
Nora went into the house for another pitcher of lemonade. A touch of a breeze drifted in from the Lake. Maybe tomorrow there would be rain. I was half-asleep.
“Well, Ned,” said my mysterious friend through the wooden fence around the garden, “you do know how to take your ease, don’t you now?”
“You again.”
“Meself indeed. That was a disgrace in the court today, wasn’t it?”
“Especially since we both know who did throw the bomb.”
“We couldn’t prove it, could we now?”
“We certainly couldn’t.”
“Did you recognize him when the idiot stumbled across your path?”
That was the question I feared. Might the answer be my death warrant?
“I know he’s from Galway. He was on the edge of things over there, watching. I didn’t know his name then and I still don’t.”
“Ay. His name doesn’t matter much. He has a lot of them. He’s always on the edge of things, a great one for watching.”
Silence.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of him, Ned. We’re on your side. You’re the man who saved Myles Joyce’s widow and child.,”
Fenians of some sort.
“I love them both,” I said fervently.
“All the better. Don’t try to find him. He’s not worth your trouble. I wouldn’t tell you that if I thought that finding him might save their lives. We both know that it wouldn’t.”
Suddenly I understood everything as though a streak of lightning that had exploded in my brain. Then the light faded and with it my insight. It would come back, however. I would know the answer, for whatever that would be worth.
“Why do you bother telling me these things?”
“Because we think we ought to.”
Then he wasn’t there anymore.
Because I was the husband of Myles Joyce’s widow.
And General Fitzpatrick’s son.
You took your blessings where you could find them.
Nora came back with the pitcher of lemonade.
“Now that the trial is over,” I said, “we might go back to the Camp.”
“Won’t there be more to write about?”
“The Tribune will start a campaign to raise a hundred thousand dollars to pay the jurors for their verdict.”
“How terrible!”
“The public will lose interest until Judge Gary pronounces sentence. Then there will be much to write about. If we can present them and their families in a sympathetic light, it might help the campaign for clemency.”
“Save some of them?”
“The General thinks so.”
“Then”—she smiled as she did when making affectionate fun of her father-in-law—“it must be true!”
After a pause, she asked, “You’re sure they’re innocent, Ned?”
“They’re guilty of many things, Nora—of misreading the temper of Chicago workers, of idiotic rhetoric, of Germanic stubbornness, of lack of concern for their wives and children, of sweet innocence, of blind zeal, and a host of other crimes I could think of were it not so hot, but of murder, no. None of them are capable of murder, with the possible exception of Lingg and he didn’t kill anyone.”
“No more guilty than my Myles.”
Nora rarely spoke of her first husband. He was in a walled-off but not forgotten part of her life. I refused to intrude into her privacy unless and until she wanted me to.
“A lot more stupid and probably not as brave, but no more guilty. Myles would have lived if he could have. They would rather die for their cause than live for their families.”
We then sat there in silence until darkness slipped in over the Lake.
“I’ll make you a bite of tea,” she said softly.
Afterwards, when I was in my study writing in this diary, Josie bounced by.
“Young woman!”
“Yes, Uncle Neddie,” she said, with an entirely false tone of obedient docility.
“Could I have a word with you?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong, Uncle Ned, not a thing. At least nothing you know about.”
The first time I had seen Josie she was an ill-clad, undernourished urchin with a dirty face and sad, winsome smile who acted as the royal court for her aunt who was surely an Irish queen—or would have been if England had left Ireland alone. She also seemed to know unerringly when I would ride up to Nora’s cottage. She would appear on the road at exactly the same moment I would, whether to protect her aunt or to make clear her fealty I did not know at first. As time went on we conspired to provide food and clothing for Nora and then for the infant Mary Elizabeth. Nora knew of these conspiracies but pretended she did not. Josie was not only sly about protecting Nora from the truth, she was also sly about pretending that Nora didn’t know whatever truth at which she had guessed.
It was difficult to link that shy, elfin little waif with the beautiful young woman she had become—until she smiled.
In my study she sat down, without being asked, something none of us would have thought of doing if we were called into the General’s study.
I was not, however, the General.
“I wanted to talk about Timmy Hardiman.”
“That toad!”
“Are we mad at him now?”
“Well, not really.”
“I am concerned about him.”
Sudden Josie was very serious.
“Is there something wrong?” she said anxiously. “Has he done something wrong?”
I am making a mess of it. I am too young to have a daughter this old.
“Certainly not. He’s a fine young man.”
“I don’t like the idea of him working in the yards again next summer.” She sighed as her aunt would.
“Neither do I, Josie. That’s what I want to talk about.”
“We’re going to conspire!” she clapped her hands. “How wonderful! Just like in Ireland.”
“I understand he wants to be a lawyer.”
“You yourself said, Uncle Ned, that there are less honorable professions!”
“To do that he must study law, either in a law school or in a law office—like the General’s, beginning next summer.”
Her eyes flooded with tears.
“O, Uncle Ned, you’re so sweet!”
“That is perhaps debatable. Regardless of what may or may not happen between you two, he would be, I am convinced, a strong asset to the office.”
“Did Nora speak to you?”
“She speaks to me a lot, Josie, as you may have noticed. But not about Timmy.”
“I wanted to ask you and I was afraid to and she said I should and I’m glad I didn’t because it’s nicer this way.”
So little do I understand women!
“We could ask the General if he’d invite him in that embarrassed way of his which would make Timmy think he’s doing the General a favor.”
“Perfect,” she exploded. “I have to tell Nora.”
She bounded out of my study, then bounded back in and hugged me.
“Uncle Ned, you’re a real angel. You saved Nora, and you saved me, and now you’re going to save my poor dear Timmy. God sent you into the world to save people.”
Then she dashed out again to seek her aunt.
I had never been called an angel before. I am certainly not a messenger for God. So far in life the people I have saved have been grace for me.
Nora would be very pleased with me.
She would say how wonderful I had been with poor dear Josie.
I was pleased with myself
Until I began to think again about the Haymarket Martyrs.