![]() ![]() Many viewed the city's workers as the "dangerous classes." Immediately after the strike leading citizens professionalized the state militia, built new armories, and restricted the private militias of the socialists in their public drilling. ![]() secured us the public ear.'" 3īordering on an insurrection, the great strike - and the violence necessary to defeat it - left employers and the middle classes feeling isolated, anxious, and fearful. Our influence as a (Socialist) party both in Chicago and elsewhere was very limited until the 'Great Railroad Strike of 1877. ![]() Socialist George Schilling wrote that the 1877 strike "was the calcium light that illumined the skies of our social and industrial life. In the aftermath of the strike, socialism became part of the city's public discourse. Though the strike was largely spontaneous, the new Workingmen's Party, a socialist organization, had come closest to providing it with leadership. The ensuing violent confrontation with police led to approximately thirty deaths and two hundred wounded. Then, in July 1877 a national railroad strike precipitated a general strike in the city involving tens of thousands of workers of all occupations, nationalities, and religions. The event sent shivers of foreboding through the city's business and civic leaders, who recalled the Paris Commune, a revolutionary upheaval in 1871 that was crushed by the French government with great bloodshed. Their target was the upper class-controlled Relief and Aid Society, which had hoarded fire relief funds. In December 1873 thousands of foreign-born workers, many attracted to the city by its rebuilding following the 1871 Chicago Fire, marched under Socialist leadership demanding bread or work. It was during the 1873-1878 depression that Chicago gained its deserved reputation for class conflict and working-class radicalism. In the late nineteenth century nowhere else was the yawning gulf between social classes so evident as in Chicago where a largely Catholic and Lutheran - or in many cases free thinking - foreign-born working class faced off against a native-born capitalist class. To numerous outside observers Chicago seemed to be given over to vulgar moneymaking, ruthless competition, and parvenu manners. ![]() But, the city lacked the leavening of a pre-industrial class structure or the political glue provided by a centralized party machine that in Eastern cities buffered, moderated or diverted class hostility and conflict. It was the quintessential industrial city of the era, a nexus of Eastern capital attracted by proximity to markets and raw materials and a labor supply consisting largely of workers of immigrant background attracted by relatively high wages and cheap transportation. The events surrounding Haymarket are impossible to make sense of without understanding that they were part of what late nineteenth-century observers called the "social" or "labor question." Chicago, more than any other city, embodied the conditions that made American labor into a burning social problem. That juxtaposition of symbols more than any words suggests that the silence of the four anarchists hanged on that dark November day in 1887 has become simply deafening.īack to top Chicago: Storm Center of Class Conflict The base of the monument is marked with words that reinterpret Haymarket as a symbol for progressive movements in favor of "free speech, the right of public assembly, organized labor, the fight for the eight-hour workday, law enforcement, justice, anarchy, and the right of human beings to pursue an equitable and prosperous life." 2 Meanwhile, the statue of the policeman, having been bombed twice during 1969-70, stands out of public view inside Chicago police headquarters. But, since 2004 the Haymarket site has been commemorated by a set of neutral bronze figures atop and beside a wagon. 1Īt one time, a large statue of a policeman with a raised hand commanding law and order marked Haymarket's memory. Since the 1930s, the Haymarket events, once known pejoratively as the "Haymarket Riot," have been viewed more benignly by historians, first as an "affair" and more recently as a "tragedy." Historians now routinely refer to the trial of the anarchists arrested for the Haymarket deaths as one of the greatest travesties of justice in the nation's history and as the nation's first "red scare." Three of the best recent studies of Haymarket - an online document collection sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University and books by Paul Avrich and James Green-retell the story of Haymarket from a vantage point sympathetic to the anarchists - though without endorsing their views on violence. Spies' prophetic words are truer today than ever before. "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." - August Spies last words before his hanging, November 11, 1887. ![]()
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