THIS STORY is a fictionalized account of the Haymarket controversy. The major players in the Haymarket case are all real. The Fitzpatricks are fictional. I agree with Governor Altgeld that none of the accused was involved in the bomb throwing and that probably it was a work of revenge. The revenge scenario I suggest in the story is, as Ned tells the governor, fantastical. However, given the situation in Chicago in 1886, it is by no means an impossible scenario. It is also possible that the bomb was intended to explode among the protestors. Finally it is also possible that the bomb was thrown by an agent provocateur.
The behavior of the police, the courts, and the press in Chicago in those days is a disgrace to the city. Perhaps the heroism of John Peter Altgeld, also a Chicagoan (and one of the very few of us ever elected governor in this Chicago-hating state). He was viciously denounced on all sides. The immigrant-hating Tribune (which manages often to be on the wrong side of history) declared that he had never become an American. He was not reelected in 1896, though in a national Republican sweep, in Illinois he ran substantially ahead of William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate. Marshall Field led a conspiracy to deprive him of the value of his real estate and forced him into bankruptcy. However, his friend and ally Clarence Darrow took him into his law partnership. He died, before his time, in 1902, as Nora says, one of the great men of American political life.
Oscar Nebbe remarried and had two more children. He opened a shoe store in Chicago. Samuel Fielden, with a surprise inheritance, bought a ranch in the west. Michael Schwab named his daughter, born after his release, Johanna Altgeld Schwab. He worked for two years as a compositor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, but then drifted away from the Anarchists. How, after all, can you be an object of a martyr cult when you are still alive. His wife was reunited with her brother, Rudolph Schnaubult, only very late in life in Argentina, where he had migrated. There was never any proof that he threw the bomb.
Nina Spies died in 1936 in abject poverty, a woman whom others avoided because of her smell. She shared an old house on Monroe Street with cats, dogs, chickens, and even a horse. Her aunt had disinherited her, her parents died, she earned a meager living for many years as a translator, but became increasingly strange. Still, at the end of her life, she still had $3000, which she left to an animal shelter. Lucy Parsons, who preached at her funeral, became furious at Nina when she learned that this money had not been left to the cause.
Lucy’s children died young. The police harassed her for many years. She died at the age of ninety in 1942 in a fire which destroyed her house and killed her partner since 1910, George Markshall. She was part of every organizing drive and march in Chicago until the late nineteen thirties. Her extensive library was not destroyed in the fire but disappeared, according to some confiscated by the “red squad” of the Chicago Police Department.
The monument to the Anarchist Martyrs still stands in Forest Home (as it is now called) Cemetery. The monument to the police was blown up twice in the nineteen sixties and now stands inside the Chicago Police Department headquarters. As Ned remarks, the ordinary police and the Martyrs shared a common enemy—the police leadership of the time, The monument was criticized when it first appeared on the grounds that the cop seemed “too Irish.”
As Ned predicted, Chicago is now a union town. Even the police have a union.
The Chicago Times still lives though as the Sun-Times, the name representing an ironic merger with the Chicago Sun, a left-wing paper founded by Marshall Field III.
Mayor Carter Harrison, after five two-year terms, was assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker the day after the 1893 World’s Fair ended. His son, Carter II, also served five terms.
The sign on the Catholic charities building I quote disappeared (through vandalism) long before Nuala and Dermot visited the Haymarket.
St. Patrick’s parish—now called “Old St. Patrick’s” is alive and well.
The Chicago White Stockings morphed into the Chicago Cubs, a major league baseball franchise in Chicago till 1945. Between 1906 and 1945, they won two world series and ten national league pennants. The White Stockings, despite their name, are no relation to the Chicago White Sox.
Chicago is obsessed with the name of Desplaines—there is a suburb, a river, and two streets, the latter (Des Plaines Avenue), many miles apart, appear in this story. No copy editor would tolerate this abundance unless it were true. Oh, yes we pronounce it like Displanes. Also Goethe Street, which does not appear in this story and was surely named to please the German immigrants, is called Gaythe.
The conversation between Nuala and Dr. Foley is, I believe, an accurate description of the Catholic teaching about extraordinary means to preserve life. Perhaps a Catholic couple would be more likely to take a chance on a very premature child.
Not all such risks work out, hence the warnings that Dr. Foley gives them. The NICUs do wonderful work, but more research is needed before attempts to prolong life at its beginning can be free of most risks.
AG
Feast of the Immaculate Conception December 2000, the last year of the Second Millennium