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Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America Hardcover – March 7, 2006

by James Green (Author)

128

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On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. Coming in the midst of the largest national strike Americans had ever seen, the bombing created mass hysteria and led to a sensational trial, which culminated in four controversial executions. The trial seized headlines across the country, created the nation’s first red scare and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover.

Death in the Haymarket brings these remarkable events to life, re-creating a tempestuous moment in American social history. James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life the epic twenty-year battle for the eight-hour workday. He shows how the movement overcame numerous setbacks to orchestrate a series of strikes that swept the country in 1886, positioning the unions for a hard-won victory on the eve of the Haymarket tragedy.

As he captures the frustrations, tensions and heady victories, Green also gives us a rich portrait of Chicago, the Midwestern powerhouse of the Gilded Age. We see the great factories and their wealthy owners, including men such as George Pullman, and we get an intimate view of the communities of immigrant employees who worked for them. Throughout, we are reminded of the increasing power of newspapers as, led by the legendary Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, they stirred up popular fears of the immigrants and radicals who led the unions.

Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, Death in the Haymarket is an important addition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

March 7, 2006
Dimensions

6.47 x 1.43 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

0375422374
ISBN-13

978-0375422379
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Green thoroughly documents, the bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) "radicals and reformers" and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others. Shortly after, labor leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons, along with six more alleged anarchists, stood convicted of murder on sparse evidence. Four of them went to the gallows in 1887; another committed suicide. The surviving three received pardons in 1893. The Knights of Labor, at that time America's largest and most energetic union, received the blame for the riot, despite a lack of conclusive evidence , and many Knights locals migrated to the less radical American Federation of Labor. Labor historian Green (Taking History to Heart) eloquently chronicles all this, producing what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation. Green is particularly strong in documenting the episode's long aftermath, especially the decades-long efforts of the white Parsons's black wife to exonerate her husband. B&w illus. (Mar. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Green, an academic, offers a narrative history of Chicago's Haymarket bombing in 1886, the infamous trial that followed, and the hanging of subsequently determined innocent men. Chicago was then at the heart of the labor struggle for the eight-hour day, and we learn that "workers' struggles had often been met with shocking repression, and that when violence bred violence, when powerless laboring people struck back in anger, they often paid with their lives." The Haymarket episode became a seminal moment for the American labor movement, and Green takes us inside the personal, social, and cultural elements of this tragic event. Evaluation of Haymarket includes the contention that a conservative bias against radicals, labor organizers, immigrants, and minorities was fundamental to the conflict as well as the view that execution of the anarchists saved the country from anarchy and was a moral and political victory for law and order. The author notes that after Haymarket, social peace among the various classes in Chicago was impossible, and grudges continued for decades. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“James Green tells a powerful story of Chicago, America and the industrial world of the nineteenth century. His talents as a historian and a writer bring to life social and political struggles that helped make modern American society.”
—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Nation Under our Feet

“Green’s re–creation of this terrible moment exposes the deep divisions that marred America at the dawn of the industrial age. As the nation again struggles with wrenching economic change, we need to hear the story that Death in the Haymarket so passionately tells.”
—Kevin Boyle, National Book Award winning author of Arc of Justice

“The Haymarket affair was a pivotal event in United States history. Green explains its significance with a scholar’s sure grasp of context and a storyteller’s skill at weaving a dramatic narrative.”
—Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

“Armed with the research tools of the historian and the literary skill of the novelist, Green tells the dramatic story of Haymarket and of the world of Chicago labor in the late nineteenth century better than it has ever been told before.”
—Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom

“It’s about time that the great dramas in the rise of an American labor movement earned center stage in the history of American capitalism. Death in the Haymarket is a great read—and a required one.”
—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic

“Filled with the suspense of a good novel, Death in the Haymarket vividly illuminates the shifting industrial terrain of late nineteenth-century America. This is a work of art as well as history.”
—Alice Kessler-Harris, Bancroft Prize winning author of In Pursuit of Equity

About the Author

James Green is a professor of labor history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He grew up outside Chicago and now lives with his family in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

For Once in Common Front

MAY 1, 1865-MAY 1, 1867

THE FIRST OF MAY was by custom a day of hope that marked the coming of spring, a day when children danced and twirled streamers around a Maypole. But in 1865 it was the gloomiest day Chicago had ever seen. For on that occasion "the merry May pole gaily wreathed for the holiday festivities of exuberant life" yielded its place to the "funeral catafalque draped with Death's sad relics." So wrote Abraham Lincoln's friend and ally Joseph Medill in the Chicago Tribune that morning of the day when the multitudes would assemble "to do honor to the great and good King of men," severed from his people when he was "slain so ruthlessly."

In the dark hours of the early morning, crowds gathered all along the Illinois Central tracks on the lakeside. A light rain fell as the funeral train entered Chicago that morning; it hissed to a stop at Michigan Avenue and 12th Street, where 36,000 citizens had gathered to meet it. An honor guard loaded the presidential coffin onto an elaborate horse-drawn hearse, and citizens formed in military rank behind it. A group of thirty-six "maidens dressed in white" surrounded the carriage as it passed through an imposing Gothic arch dedicated to the "Martyr for Justice." After each young woman placed a red rose on the president's coffin, the carriage pulled away, followed by the column of Chicagoans who marched four abreast up Michigan Avenue toward the courthouse, where their martyred president's remains would lie in state. The procession grew to 50,000 as it moved slowly up the lakeside. Along the way twice that many people lined the streets. From all over the Northwest they came-by train, in wagons and buggies and on horseback, all united in silent grief. "In the line of march and looking on, sharing something in common," Carl Sandburg wrote, were native-born Yankees and foreign-born Catholics, blacks and whites, German Lutherans and German Jews-all "for once in common front."

Up Michigan Avenue they trod in rhythm to the sound of drums beating in solemn tribute to Lincoln's memory, expressing, as the Tribune put it, "the devotion with which all classes looked up to him." A military band led the funeral procession of five divisions: first came the Board of Education and 5,000 schoolchildren, and then military officers and enlisted men, the combat troops of the Grand Army of the Republic led by the Old Batteries of the Chicago Light Artillery, whose cannon had laid siege to Atlanta. The black-coated men of the Board of Trade headed the next division, which also featured groups from various ethnic lodges, including 200 of the Turner gymnasts dressed in white linen. Contingents of workingmen followed, paying their respects to a president who said he was not ashamed that he had once been "a hired laborer, mauling rails, on a flatboat-just what might happen to any poor man's son!" Nearly 300 members from the Journeymen Stonecutters' Association walked behind a banner with two sides, one reading in union there is strength and the other proclaiming we unite to protect not to injure.

All through that night of May 1 and well into the next day, mourners stood in the mud and drizzle waiting to file through the courthouse for a last look at the man whose storied path to the White House had so often passed through their city. On May 2, after 125,000 people had gazed upon the face of their departed president, his coffin was escorted to St. Louis Depot on Canal Street by another elaborately organized procession led by a chorus of 250 Germans singing dirges. Lincoln's corpse was placed inside its specially built car, and at 9:30 a.m. the funeral train pulled out of the depot carrying Illinois's "noblest son" to his final destination in Springfield, leaving behind a city whose people he had unified in life and, far more so, in death.

After its journey through the cornfields and little prairie towns Lincoln had visited as a lawyer and campaigner, the funeral train arrived in Springfield. The president's body was buried the next day in Oak Ridge Cemetery, where the eulogist recalled the late Civil War as a momentous "contest for human freedom . . . not for this Republic merely, not for the Union simply, but to decide whether the people, as a people, were destined . . . to be subject to tyrants or aristocrats or class rule of any kind."

Leading Illinois Republicans who gathered at Lincoln's grave on May 4, 1865, rejoiced that free labor had triumphed over the slave system in that great war now won. They believed a new nation had emerged from the bloody conflict, new because now all of its people were "wholly free." The 4 million bondsmen the "martyred emancipator" had liberated were, said the Tribune, a living epistle to Lincoln's immortality. But were all the people now wholly free?

IN THE YEARS after Lincoln's death, emancipated slaves found many compelling reasons to question the meaning of their new freedom in the face of the reign of white terror that descended upon them. At the same time, for quite different reasons, workingmen, the very mechanics who benefited most from the free labor system Lincoln had extolled, began to doubt the nature of their liberty. A few months before the war ended, the nation's most influential trade union leader, William H. Sylvis, came to Chicago and sounded an alarm that echoed in many labor newspapers in the closing months of the war. The president of the powerful Iron Molders' International Union excoriated employers who took advantage of the war emergency to fatten their profits while keeping their employees on lean wages. When union workers protested with strikes, politicians called them traitors, soldiers drove them back to work, and many loyal union men were fired and blacklisted by their bosses in retaliation. How, Sylvis asked, could a republic at war with the principle of slavery make it a felony for a workingman to exercise his right to protest, a right President Lincoln had once celebrated as the emblem of free labor? "What would it profit us, as a nation," the labor leader wondered, if the Union and its Constitution were preserved but essential republican principles were violated? If the "greasy mechanics and horny-handed sons of toil" who elected Abe Lincoln became slaves to work instead of self-educated citizens and producers, what would become of the Republic?

Sylvis told his iron molders that tyranny was based upon ignorance compounded by "long hours, low wages and few privileges," while liberty was founded on education and free association among workingmen. Only when wage earners united could they achieve individual competence and independence. Only then would they exercise a voice in determining their share of the increased wealth and the expanded freedom that would come to the nation after the war.

America had never produced a labor leader as intelligent, articulate and effective as William Sylvis. Born in western Pennsylvania to parents in humble circumstances, young William was let out as a servant to a wealthy neighbor who sent him to school and gave him the key to a good library. Later, after helping in his father's wagon shop, Sylvis apprenticed himself to a local iron foundry owner, a master craftsman who taught his young helper the ancient arts of smelting and smithing and the methods of making molten iron flow into wooden molds to shape the iron products he had designed. After he married, the young molder moved to Philadelphia to ply his trade, but he found it a struggle working long hours every day to provide for his family and failing to rise above the level of manual laborer.

William Sylvis found another way to raise himself up. He became secretary of his local union in 1859, and then two years later secretary of the new National Union of Iron Molders. By this time Sylvis had decided that mechanics were losing their independence and respectability because certain owners monopolized branches of industry and used their power to reduce wages. The rugged individualist was no match against these men who used money and political clout to advance themselves at the expense of their employees. "Single-handed, we can accomplish nothing," he wrote, "but united there is no power of wrong we may not openly defy."

In these years before the Civil War, however, prospects for a united labor movement were bleak. Only a few unions, like those of printers, machinists and locomotive engineers, had created national organizations. Most trade unions functioned within local settings where they had been formed by craftsmen who still dreamed of being masters and proprietors of their own shops and employers of their own helpers. These artisans often used radical language to denounce the merchant capitalists, bankers and monopolists, the "purse proud aristocrats" and "blood sucking parasites" who lived off the honest producers. Yet antebellum labor unionists, even radicals, tended to be craft-conscious more than class-conscious, barring females and free blacks from their associations and turning their backs on the women, children and immigrant "wage slaves" who toiled in factories.

Before 1860 common laborers and factory workers rarely formed lasting unions, and when they took concerted action, it was usually to resist wage cuts rather than to force employers to recognize their organizations. Their strikes were often ritualistic protests that rarely involved violent conflicts. The one cause that brought diverse groups of workers together was the campaign to shorten the workday to ten hours. Initiated by journeymen carpenters and women t...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; First Edition, First Printing (March 7, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375422374
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375422379
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.43 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,225,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21,602 in U.S. State & Local History

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T. Rodgers

Haymarket themes still resonate in 2016

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2016

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James’ Green’s Death in the Haymarket tells the tale of the Haymarket Affair. The introduction gives a peak into the morning of May 5, 1886, the day after the eponymous Haymarket Affair, a bombing that killed seven police officers. The first chapter begins after the death of Lincoln in 1865. We follow the labor movement in Chicago for the next twenty-one years, through massive change and upheaval. Chicago more than quadrupled in size during this time period, burned in 1871, and went through two depressions. Immigrants composed more than 40% of the population during this time, and the industrial revolution led to capitalization and massive changes in labor practices.

Death in the Haymarket contains a lot of startlingly relevant themes: police brutality, terrorism, income inequality, xenophobia, protests that sometimes contain violence, political corruption, and economic turmoil. Interpretations of the Haymarket Affair have swung wildly more than once since they occurred 130 years ago. The Haymarket bombing was the first red scare (at this time, referring to anarchists rather than communists); four men were hung for their connections to the event. Green presents a humanizing thought-provoking narrative that suggests his sympathy to the men of the 1880s labor movement, but gives the reader plenty of tools to come to other conclusions.

WHY THIS BOOK?

I didn’t know anything about the labor movement. I certainly like my 40 hour work week and my safe working conditions, but I didn’t know how they came about. Haymarket doesn’t get into those details, but it certainly demonstrates what a long and bloody fight it was.

Between criticisms of teachers unions, passage of right-to-work legislation, and the increase of anti-employee policies like contractor status and cuts to benefits, we are seeing the erosion of some accomplishments of the labor movement. I knew that people were once passionate about these issues. I wanted to step back into that time. Haymarket fulfilled this goal.

THE GOOD

There’s a lot of great stuff to say about Haymarket. It tackles a boatload of complicated topics in a modest 320 pages. It introduces compelling and exciting characters, heros and villains and a lot of in between. It practically follows a novelistic arc; we begin with the optimism of the post Civil War labor movement, followed by political engagement, the suppression of that engagement by monied interests, the radicalization of the movement, the tragedy of police brutalities and slaughters at protests, the retaliation through terrorism, closing with further suppression following the bombing, and regrouping.

Haymarket tells a story of humans through individuals; my favorites were Lucy and Albert Parsons. Albert was orphaned a young age, raised by an enslaved woman, and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War at the age of 15. After the war, he went to Texas as a Republican enacting Reconstruction. There, he married Lucy, who appears and was believed to be African American; she always maintained that she was Native American. Albert worked for a printing press in Texas. Albert lost his job and faced violence numerous times fighting for the rights of freed slaves in Texas. Eventually, he moved to Chicago and fought for the rights of workers. He and Lucy became famed speakers. Lucy continued for over 50 years.

THE BAD

Haymarket introduces a dizzying array of characters. I couldn’t keep track of them all. We meet politicians, police officers, German anarchists, American anarchists, various socialists, wives, rich men, judges, writers and more. Green creates such good characters, and I was annoyed to keep forgetting. A reference would have be really helpful.

Secondly, I found the early chapters spent in the 1860s and 1870s less interesting. They mostly didn’t contain the characters that occupied the later chapters. Although they were really helpful for context later on, they were slow for me.

Finally and most substantially, Green carefully tells how perception of the Haymarket Affair morphed with time, swinging back and forth a couple of times. But although Green is clear about his own contemporary feelings of the events, he does not give voice to other contemporaries. Is Green’s opinion the widely held one? If not, what faults does Green suggest in the evaluations of his contemporaries? We learn that the event is still fraught enough with symbolism that commemoration of the Haymarket Affair remains thorny today. But we also learn that the “Chicago Martyrs,” the men hung for the Haymarket Affair, are still remembered by laborers around the world. Part of understanding an argument is the refutation of counter-arguments; this is absent in Haymarket.

OVERALL

This is a solid, well-written book about a topic you probably don’t know well. As our country debates over the relationship between employer and employee, this glimpse into the past offers insight into today’s arguments. Haymarket is an exciting nonfiction read with a great set of characters and a strong sense of place.

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Jeff Miller

Makes Labor History Interesting

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

The tragic events of May 4, 1886 and in the Haymarket in Chicago and the aftermath of those events have left more questions than answers for historians. Who threw the bomb that killed six policemen? Was there a conspiracy to commit violent acts that night or was the protest truly peaceful? Were the right men arrested for the crime or were they scapegoated because of their affiliations with radical organizations? Did they receive a fair trial or were they doomed by a biased press, judge, and jury? Were the men that went to the gallows "the foulest of murderers" as described by Teddy Roosevelt years later or were they martyrs, heroes to working class people everywhere? These are the questions that historians still debate today. These are the questions that UMass-Boston professor James Green attempts to answer in this book.
Green starts with a look at the growing labor movement at the end of the Civil War and details the major events and leaders of that movement up through the Haymarket bombing. In covering over twenty years of labor history (a topic I have never found to be very interesting), Green writes fluidly and in a manner that makes the history come alive for the reader. He does an excellent job of detailing the growth and divisions within the labor movement locally, nationally, and internationally. Chicago becomes a flashpoint for the labor struggle not just because of its rapid emergence as the commercial heart of the United States but also because of its diverse immigrant population. In describing Chicago's different ethnic neighborhoods and their populations like the Bohemians in Pilsen, the Irish in Bridgeport, and the Germans on the North Side, Green brings the reader into the melting pot aspect of the labor movement while at the same time explaining one of the reasons why the labor movement had such difficulty unifying against big business.
Interspersed within struggles between labor and capital that emerge in the Gilded Age, Green includes brief biographies of all the major labor leaders in Haymarket. Organizing the book in this manner effectively draws the reader into the story and makes them feel as though they know men like August Spies and Albert Parsons. Green is at his strongest when detailing the lives of the labor leaders involved directly and indirectly with Haymarket and the workers themselves. The story of Albert and Lucy Parsons is especially fascinating. Albert, a Confederate veteran turned Southern Republican who moves to Chicago to escape violence in Texas, and Lucy, a Mexican/African/Native American?? beauty who joins Albert rallying for workers rights in Chicago even while pregnant, both come across as heroes in the struggle between labor and business. The story of the Parsons' radicalization, particularly Albert, mirrors that of the labor movement. At first, he was optimistic about the prospects of organizing laborers and accomplish change via political channels. However, as he became increasingly more aware of the political power of the big business owners he recognized this path was futile. The key event of this radicalization occurred when he lost his job as a printer and was summoned into the Rookery by the Chicago Board of Trade. The scene is brilliantly described by Green as Albert is led into this dark room with suits all around threatening to kill him if he does not stop organizing laborers. Green then describes Albert being tossed out of the room into a dark, dingy hallway, alone, not knowing how to get out. The whole episode plays out like a movie scene.
It is noteworthy, however, to point out the fact that villains in Green's interpretation of Haymarket do not get the same detailed biographical treatment. Instead, men like Inspector John Bonfield emerge as evil, power-hungry xenophobes who target the working class in an effort to elevate their own status. Aside from the fact that he was a "failed businessman" and "humiliated" by an earlier run-in with workers, the reader knows nothing of Bonfield's background. By contrast, Parsons' radicalization and inflammatory rhetoric advocating the use of violence is tempered by Green's portrait of him as a man who fought his entire life for people's rights even when it was unpopular to do so. Thus, Parsons emerges as a complex individual who ultimately only wanted to make things right while Bonfield is a simple minded bully who cared nothing for anyone but himself.
Green's research is extensively cited and an examination of the sources in the notes section at the back of the book reveals a heavy reliance on sources sympathetic to the plight of the Haymarket defendants. One source heavily cited throughout the book is John Peter Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning the Haymarket Anarchists. Altgeld was the Democratic governor of Illinois who pardoned three of the Haymarket defendants. The motivations for Altgeld's pardon have come under scrutiny in recent years due to the efforts of historian Timothy Messer-Kruse who points out that Altgeld published Reasons during an election year and had a personal grudge against the judge who presided over the Haymarket Trial. It is Green's depiction of that trial as a sham and the subsequent appeals that mark the weakest part of the book. Here, the Haymarket defendants receive reverent treatment from Green who buys into their own beliefs that they followed in the footsteps of men like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. A more critical assessment of their role, even indirectly, in inciting violent action would have given the book a more balanced feel at the end.
Despite its shortcomings, Green's Death in the Haymarket is a fast-paced book that makes labor history interesting. It brings to life the violent struggle between labor and capital at a time when the United States was growing at a pace that few seemed to be able to handle. The book reads like a movie script with fascinating characters and heart pounding action scenes. This movie-like feel is at once the strength and weakness of Death in the Haymarket. All great movies have heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys and Green's book certainly has that. However, in real life controversial events rarely play out in black and white. It is the shades of grey that Green fails to convey when dealing with the trial and its aftermath that is the books biggest shortfall.

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Laura O'Reilly

A good book to understand how far the worker has come

Reviewed in Canada on October 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

Now this is a book everyone should read. I understand why we have unions and why we celebrate Labour Day. It was very fascinating to read the real players of the true Labour movement, and how they were demonized. It too so long for their ideas to become apart of the American idea - shorter working hours and better pay.

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