ANARCHISTS LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS: SPIES.
Special to the Chicago Daily News By Ned Fitzpatrick
August Spies, editor of the now suppressed German paper Arbeiter-Zeitung, said today that despite their incendiary propaganda Anarchists in this city are law-abiding citizens.
“Yes,” he said, “we may demonstrate and protest, but we would never take a human life. If we would do that we are no different from the police or the government.”
But what about the broadsheets posted before the incident at the Haymarket calling for revenge and advising the protestors to bring their arms?
“Most of our people have no arms. No one in the crowd did. All the weapons were fired by the police. None of those posters were hung. I forbade it. The prosecution have not proved that one had been displayed.”
Mr. Spies has a gentle voice and a pleasant smile. He speaks much like a teacher whose students would love him while they were in his class and remember him fondly after they had graduated. Yet there is a certain propensity to argue in his character and an inclination to be swept away by his own rhetoric.
He was a Catholic once, he says. But he saw a bored priest drink too much at a first communion celebration for young people. That priest is now a bishop and has written a book defending papal infallibility. What kind of religion would permit such a thing? He agrees with Albert Parsons that the only God is humanity.
Might it not be wrong, one wonders, to judge the Church by what one priest, even one bishop does?
A church which can do no better than that, he replies, is not a church that can understand workingmen. Yes, he knows what the priest said at St. Patrick’s but most church leaders are on the side of the rich and powerful.
Beneath the sweetness of character there appears a certain Teutonic stubbornness. Does he expect he will be sentenced to death? Of course, he replies. Is not that the whole purpose of the trial, is it not a drama which the plutocrats and the police have designed to reach its fulfillment on the gallows? However, he and his friends have outsmarted them. In fact, the police and the government are on trial. The death of the defendants will be their victory and proof of guilt of the prosecutors. Out of death will come triumph.
Perhaps he is right. That will be a judgment of history. He says that he is willing to stand the judgment of history.
And Miss VanZandt?
The police have forbidden her visits because she is not a member of his family. Therefore they will marry one another. If the police will not permit that marriage in jail, then his brother will act as his proxy. He and Miss VanZandt are very much in love with one another. Then a beatific smile spreads across his face. He has at last found the true love of his life.
Has he thought what will happen to her after his death? Will she not be disowned by her family? Will she not be cast in the role of a martyr’s wife for the rest of her life?
Her parents, he replies, support her decision. The aunt will perhaps cut off the inheritance. He lifts his shoulders in protest. Fortunately Miss VanZandt does not care about money.
One leaves his cell feeling that this scholarly, respectable, definitely bourgeois editor is in fact a romantic. He sees himself as a tenor in one of Signor Verdi’s operas and Nina VanZandt as the soprano. They will suffer tragically but will conquer in the end.
If only life were an opera.
I do not have to note in this diary that the story I have pasted above delighted my editor, despite the pressures he is experiencing against me. I will probably remain on the staff of the Daily News until after the executions, which will take place a year from now after the appeal has failed. Perhaps there will be clemency for some of them. Spies would be an excellent candidate for clemency because of his appearance and his voice. The love of the much admired Nina VanZandt might lure him away from the final aria in the libretto he has imagined for the more earthy and realistic pleasures of marriage. I doubt it, however. Miss VanZandt is not a real woman but the soprano in his opera who will mourn his passing for the rest of her life.
I almost write the word “fool.”
Yet that is not my judgment to make, is it?
I interviewed Albert Parsons today. Like Spies he is not a workingman. Rather he is an educated man, an Anarchist by political conviction and not by personal experience. He is exuberant. He waits eagerly for the death sentence which, like Spies, he defines as a great victory.
Doubts about his decision to turn himself in for trial?
None at all! I could not permit myself to be deprived of my share of our common victory. This trial and our deaths will awaken the workingmen of America. There will be a “general strike” and the whole crumbling edifice of American capitalism will come tumbling down. He will die confident of victory.
I do not tell him that I think this is mad selfdelusion. He and his friends may well be hailed as martyrs. However, there will not be a general strike. The capitalists will have won at least in the short run. I do not tell him that he abandons Lucy and their children to a lonely and impoverished life. Unlike Spies, Parsons is not a tenor on the opera stage. He is rather a tragic hero in a play by Shakespeare. “Good night, sweet prince…”
Neither man, however, is able to imagine what the lifelong role for their women, in which they have cast them, can be like.
He lectures me on the economic wisdom of the eight-hour day. If men work less, more men will be needed to sustain the factories. That will mean more money for workers to spend. That in turn will mean prosperity, no more panics like the one fifteen years ago. Men like McCormick will no longer be able to argue that they have to cut wages. In short order poverty and misery will be eliminated.
I don’t question his economic theories. He may well be right. I merely wonder whether this is Anarchy or even socialism. It sounds like a variation on American capitalism, a more humane, a more profitable, a more successful capitalism.
He laughs. “Perhaps that it’s the truth, Ned. It does not matter after all what we call it. What matters is that the working class will no longer be powerless. The plutocrats, the government, the police will no longer be necessary!”
He was far more pragmatic than his German allies. They had spun out a theory of justice and then tried to apply it whole to American economic life. Al had thought out his thesis pragmatically and then applied it, if necessary piece by piece. Both he and Germans radiated the enthusiast’s gleam in their eyes, but in Al Parsons gleam there was also a smile.
Yet he is willing to die, expects to die, almost hopes to die.
Do you think Judge Gary will sentence you to death?
“Certainly! That’s what the trial is about! The government of Chicago and of the United States wish to sacrifice us as the Romans wished to sacrifice Jesus. We will be a sacrificial ritual, like the Jewish Paschal lamb. We embrace that fate, as Jesus did.”
At some time between now and the execution—within a year unless I am mistaken—I will write this interview as one of my stories. Perhaps it will gain some public sympathy for Parsons, though most of the good Christians of our city will think it blasphemy.
I ask him if he thinks he will rise from the dead as Jesus did.
He laughs exultantly.
“Oh, yes, Ned, I do. In a manner of speaking. As long as workingmen and-women organize and fight with the plutocrats and especially when they begin to win their fights we will be alive and well and fighting with them.”
I cannot gainsay that expectation. I ask him what seems to me to be the critical question: do you believe that your deaths will hasten the day of the victory of the working class?
“Certainly. That’s why I came back from Wauconda, to join forces with my colleagues and friends. I do not doubt that we will notably accelerate the triumph of laborers over the bosses.”
I could ask him by how many years his death will accelerate the triumph. That would not be a fair question. Nor do I point out that the Haymarket “incident” ended the eight-hour day movement across the country. The plutocrats managed to persuade the citizenry of America that the eight-hour day was a sign of bloody anarchism.
Instead I ask him about Lucy and little Albert and Lulu.
His shoulders sag and he leans back against the wall of Cook County Jail. For a moment he is no longer the powerful orator with the deep voice that influences even those who dislike him. He becomes the frail little man with the big forehead and the vast handlebar mustache and the sad eyes that he really is.
“It is very hard on Lucy.” He sighs. “She has had a difficult life, as you might imagine. She was indeed born a slave. Yet she is an indomitable fighter for workingwomen. She would never want me, indeed never permit me, to turn back from the path we have charted for ourselves.”
I think of scatological words to describe what he is saying, but remain silent.
“The police arrest her every time she leaves our tiny apartment, for no other reason than to aggravate the misery in which she lives and the fear she feels for me. But they will not stop her, they cannot stop her. As long as she lives the Haymarket Martyrs will not be forgotten.”
And the children?
He winces with pain.
“They are both in poor health, Ned. I worry about them every night when I try to sleep here in the Cook County Bastille. I wish there was a God I might pray to for them. I know that they will grow up proud of me.”
If they grow up at all, I think to myself.
We chat a little more. He tells me that he can hardly wait till the court reconvenes and he has his opportunity to tell the whole world what he believes.
“And the whole world will be listening, Ned, the whole world will be listening!”
Doubtless it will.
I leave his cell in a daze. I think what a wonderful politician he would make if he had not rejected the political process as worthless. Certainly nothing had happened since the “incident” which would have caused him to change his mind on that subject, not even the honest testimony of Mayor Carter Harrison at the trial, one of the few defense witnesses that Judge Gary did not harass.
The Mayor will lose the next election because of his testimony. He is a shrewd and resilient fellow, however. He will be back.
I should leave the jail, which depresses me, and pay a visit to Laddy’s, which does not depress me, for all its vile smell and foul talk. However, I have to speak with Louis Lingg sometime. It might as well be now.
He is a tall, dark, young man, strong and handsome, vigorous and determined. The General said of him, “He’s a warrior. He’d make a fine Captain of an infantry company, say in Napoleon’s Grand Army. He would not survive more than a couple of battles of course. He would die with honor and pride and we would have to search for another warrior like him. Warriors are interesting people, Ned. They love battle, they love the killing, they don’t seem to mind when someone kills them. Thank God I was never a warrior.”
Amen to that.
“I do not wish to speak with hired agents of the plutocrats,” he snarls at me.
Good beginning.
I compliment him on his cuff links which his girlfriend had shown me when she brought them to the jail.
“Ja,” he melts completely, “my Elise brings them to me. You see the engraving, my initials and hers within a heart. Beautiful, no?”
I wondered how many hours Elise had to work as a maid of all work to buy such jewelry.
She certainly has good taste, I tell him. Probably better than the people for whom she works.
“Ja,” he says, sinking back to his cot. “She is a very simple girl, Catholic peasant from Bavaria. Good girl. Loyal girl. I don’t deserve her.”
Do I see tears in this warrior’s dark and normally angry eyes?
“I tell her,” he goes on, “that I will wear them when they hang me. She says I must wear them to the grave, so that her heart and mine will be buried together. Brave girl.”
Sentimental, romantic Bavarian Catholic girl. Also very brave. We must see that nothing happens to her after the hanging.
Do you have to hang?
“Certainly. I spit on the Judge and the lawyer and the jury. They are defectives. They do me a great honor when they permit me to die for our cause. I am not afraid of them. I am not afraid of death. I laugh at them.”
On paper it looks foolish. However, when one hears Louis Lingg speak those words, one understands that his capacity to hate, no, to despise, his prosecutors knows no limits.
And Elise? I ask.
“She does not understand. Naturally. Women do not understand. If this is what I want, however, then she wants it too.”
Absolute nonsense, Louis Lingg. I don’t know much about women, but I know more than you do. Elise goes along with this nonsense to keep you happy. Yet she prays every night and lights candles every day that somehow you live. She will never tell you that you are a fool. You are, however.
What will happen to her when you and the cuff links are in the ground?
“She will leave Chicago immediately. I tell her not to stay for the funeral. Good, kind German people will take care of her. I tell her that she must forget me. Remember me and forget me. She must have a happy life. She will do as I say.”
Will she now?
Catholic peasant women tend to be pragmatists. Pretty young woman that she is, Elise will have no trouble finding herself a steadfast and reliable husband, perhaps a farmer in Iowa or Wisconsin. She will never tell him about Louis Lingg. Yet he will always have a sacred, secret place in her heart.
Unlike the others, Lingg at least cares what happens to his love when he is dead. All these men are different from Myles Joyce and his relatives and friends. The latter did not want to die. Myles fought it to the bitter end, even on the gallows. They were not Fenian revolutionaries who wanted to die to make their point. Myles Joyce would have thought such ideas to be nonsense. He died because a brutal English government was more interested in saving face than in justice. Yet they are heroes in Ireland, perhaps in a way the Haymarket Martyrs will never be.
What do I know?
It is time for Laddy’s.
Astonishingly the door is open and a gentle autumn breeze blows in. Outside the trees are turning color. A polite warning that another Chicago winter looms ahead.
“So what’s the word, Neddie? Spending time down with them Anarchists on Michigan Street? Did you have fun down there?”
“The jail is not a place to have fun,” I say wearily, doffing my white bowler. “It’s an antechamber to Purgatory.”
I sip my Irish whiskey. Tonight I will have two of them. The admirable Nora will raise her eyes, but say nothing. I don’t know what she would say if I ever came home drunk. I don’t want to find out either.
“Are they going to swing?”
“One of them will get off. Jules Grinnell just wants to let him go. Judge Gary will sentence him to twentyfive years.”
“Why?”
“Because he is Judge Gary and has the power to do that.”
“Bastard!”
“Power is a dangerous possession. Ask Cy McCormick.”
Hoots at that hated name.
“Or Captain Schaack.”
More hoots, some curses this time.
“Will they swing right away?”
Ghouls looking for sights of death?
“No, there’ll be appeals, maybe even to the United States Supreme Court.”
“Will they do any good?”
“Delay the executions for a year. Maybe provide the opportunity for sentiment to change towards them. The verdict will stand, however.”
“Why, Ned, if it’s as bad as you say it is?”
“Because the judges belong to the same clubs as rich people.”
Laughter around the room.
“Maybe we should invite them to join our club!”
“You wouldn’t want them. They’re dull people.”
“It’s wrong,” says a middle-aged teamster, “to hang men for crimes they didn’t commit, even if they are Germans.”
General rumble of agreement, even from the few Germans who are in the saloon.
“They can hang anyone they want,” someone else says. “It isn’t fair.”
“All they did was support the eight-hour day. What’s the crime in that?”
As I expected it would, sentiment among Chicago workers was turning towards the Anarchists. The rich people and their hirelings had taken too long. Another year and there would be strong support for clemency. My colleagues in the press would be ambivalent. The sympathy stories about the families of the condemned men would fill their pages because people wanted to read those stories. On the other hand, the editorials would scream for blood.
No one expects consistency from the press.
What would my friends Gus Spies and Al Parsons do when they were offered the possibility of life which they were now proclaiming they didn’t want.
They would be tempted.
I wondered as I walked home whether my mysterious friend would appear. I hoped he would.
However, there was so sign of him.
As usual I told Nora about the events of the day. I did not want to frighten her. On the other hand she is probably more resilient than I am.
“They’re a bit daft, aren’t they, Ned?”
“They don’t believe everything they’re saying exactly, Nora. The problem is that if they say it often enough they might come to believe it.”
I am concerned about Nora. She is pregnant again. In that condition she is always radiant, glowing with joy over the life that is within her. She is convinced that the child will be a boy because everyone insists that Daddy wants a son.
“Uncle Ned,” says Josie, “is outnumbered.”
“He and the lad will be outnumbered, won’t they?” says Annie, our servant girl, who has made common cause with the other women in the house, especially our Gracie.
“Well,” Josie replies, “at least he’ll have someone to talk to. He wouldn’t mope around all the time feeling sorry for himself.”
So it goes.
I do not care whether it’s a boy or a girl. I agree with my parents’ philosophy that you take the baby as it comes and love the childeen for what it is. I cannot persuade the flock of women in my house that this is true. So I don’t argue.
All I want is a healthy wife. And, secondly, a healthy child. Women die in childbirth, not as often as they do in Ireland, but still too often. Only one in fifty, my mother tells me, and fewer than that when they’re cared for properly.
Somehow those odds don’t seem very good.
Grace’s birth was uncomplicated. She was a paragon of health from her first appearance. Her mother recovered quickly and happily. Still the odds go up, do they not?
From what Josie tells me Nora survived the birth of Mary Elizabeth better than might be expected given the cold and the hunger and her terrible grief because of Myles’s death.
After Grace’s birth we thought we might not have any more children. We had to wait two years before she came. Then two more years in which nothing happened. My mother suggested that perhaps Nora’s hunger during those awful years might be a permanent obstacle to conception.
I hoped it would. Nora wanted more children and I suppose I did in some theoretical way. I did not, however, want my wife to be in danger.
That is foolishness, I tell God. I am sorry. I will rejoice when this child is born just as I rejoiced when Grace was born. If it is a boy, I will suggest we name him Myles Joyce Fitzpatrick in honor of Nora’s first husband.
Nora rarely mentions him. Yet I know she grieves for him and always will. I know nothing about the love between them. Except that she worshiped him totally and completely. I thought they were an odd match, an aging king of an Irish tribe and an orphaned young princess—though that was only an approximation of an Irish-language relationship which was beyond the understanding of anyone who was not part of that ancient and dying culture.
Myles’s first wife had died. His children were either dead (in one or the other of the famines) or in America and Australia. Nora’s parents died of a disease (perhaps influenza) which almost carried her off. Someone had to take care of her. As the king (or whatever he was) of the tribe she was his responsibility and, I suppose, his pleasure. It would be impossible not to enjoy such a beautiful young woman. However the relationship might have started, it had turned into love by the time I rode up the hill to their house with the constables who were to arrest him for a murder he patently did not commit.
His shrewd eyes must have seen my instant—and I confess lascivious—desire for his wife. I tried to hide it immediately, ashamed as I was of my agonized lust for her.
In the Dublin courtroom where they were trying him for murder in a language he did not understand, he caught my eye several times, smiled and nodded. Was he, I wondered, leaving the princess to me? Was he telling me that she was to be my love, my responsibility, my pleasure when he was gone?
I dismissed this fantasy as a product of my fevered desires. Yet Nora would later tell me that he had said to her the last time they had met, “Now, lass, I’ll be leaving you. That good-looking boy with the blond hair in the white suit will be taking care of you. He’ll be a grand husband to you and you must be a good wife to him, like you’ve been to me. I’ll have none of this silly business of rejecting him, do you hear me now?”
She almost rejected me just the same and would have if I hadn’t threatened to come and carry her off. Then in a burst of inspiration (for which I thank God) I added that I wanted Josie to come with us.
Even on our first night together (on a steamship in Kinsale) she was a graceful and generous lover. I couldn’t help but thank Myles for that—and wonder about the mystery of how this love could have developed between them.
It is none of my business, I suppose. I will never ask. I wonder if she compares her two husbands and how she rates me in comparison with him. It is a stupid—and stupidly male—way of thinking. Nora herself would never think that way. She had two husbands. They were very different men and that was that.
Why am I writing all of this down today? Perhaps I have been thinking of leaving wives behind and the possibility of wives’leaving husbands behind.
I must stop this foolish thinking and join Mrs. Fitzpatrick in our bedroom, where she waits for me, overflowing with joy about the prospect of new life coming into the world.
As I should be. As I soon will be, please God.
Just as I had closed this book, Josie bounces up to my door.
“Don’t worry, Uncle Ned. Nora will be fine.”
I am in no mood to argue with my fey niece.
The next morning.
The light was out in our bedroom. I entered quietly, undressed, and slipped into bed with my, as I supposed, sleeping wife.
“You worry too much, Mr. Fitzpatrick.” She sighed. “You should leave the worries to the women in your family. That’s what women are for.”
“They’re for other things too, Mrs. Fitzpatrick,” I said as my bare shoulder touched hers.
“That’s only occasionally. They worry all the time, Mr. Fitzpatrick, to protect their men from worry.”
The intensity of the moment loosened my tongue.
“I’ve been thinking about a name for our son…”
“You surprise me, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Why have you concluded that our baby will be a boy?”
“Josie said so. She usually knows things.”
“ ’Tis true… What names have you decided on, sir?”
Her knee touched mine. Or perhaps mine touched hers.
“I only propose a name. Mothers, at least Irish mothers, always make these decisions.”
“You defame us, sir,” she said with a giggle. Her hand touched my stomach gently. “What names do you propose?”
My power of speech was failing me.
“I had thought of only one name—Moaylmiuhre, Servant of Mary. Myles in English.”
She sobbed, hugged me fiercely, and rolled on top of me. “Mr. Fitzpatrick, you are the sweetest man in all the world… Do you want me to turn on the light?”
“That would be nice,” I gasped.
That’s the least I can do for you, Myles, I whispered. In case you’re listening.