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Review
| Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America, by James Green. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. 400 pages. $26.95, cloth
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| The subtitle of this fine new book nicely signals the author's approach to his subject. James Green, deftly retells in chronological fashion the oft-told story of Chicago's 1886 Haymarket bombing in terms of that event's relationship to the broader class divisions and labor-capital violence that rocked and shocked post-Civil War, urban-industrial America, and Chicago in particular. This richly textured situating of the Haymarket affair in its larger social context, and the author's penetrating understanding of that event as a major turning point in United States history, constitute the book's most important and distinctive contributions. Green devotes the first ten of the sixteen total chapters to setting the stage for the bombing and its aftermath. With a literary sense of irony, employed to good effect throughout, he begins with the seemingly auspicious victory of the city's labor movement in 1867 when, through legislation, Illinois became the first eight-hour day state in the land. He then turns to booming, postwar industrial Chicago, with its burgeoning working-class immigrant population, its growing chasm between rich and poor, and the worsening relations between workers and employers precipitated by the latter's successful resistance to the new eight-hour law. |
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The middle chapters take the story from the uprising along the nation's railway lines in 1877 to the Great Upheaval strike wave in 1886, which, like the former, also climaxed violently in Chicago in the Haymarket Square labor rally bombing and subsequent hail of police gunfire. The incident claimed the lives of seven policemen and at least several civilians. Along the way Green seamlessly introduces the eight anarchist labor activists who would be tried for murder in connection with the police fatalities, focusing on the two most prominent among them—the Texan, Albert Parsons, and the German-born August Spies—while also illuminating the anarchist-labor milieu all eight inhabited. |
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The last chapters deal with the bombing's aftermath, both immediate and long term. Topics include the nation's first red scare; the sensational, unjust trial in which the defendants were tried and convicted for murder "without proof that they had direct connection to the perpetrator" (p. 292); the campaign for clemency within the United States and abroad; the execution by hanging of Parsons, Spies, and two of their codefendants, Adolph Fischer and George Engel; and the courageous pardon in 1893 of the three surviving and imprisoned anarchists by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who was appalled by both the trial's miscarriage of justice and the red scare's assault on immigrants' civil liberties. An Epilogue traces the memory of Haymarket from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. Certainly by the book's end, if not before, Green's assertion in the Prologue that, "In retrospect, the Haymarket affair marked a juncture in our history when many Americans came to fear radicals and reformers as dangerous subversives and to view trade unionists as irresponsible troublemakers," (p. 11) seems, if anything, understated. |
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The book is clearly written, generally well paced, solidly researched, extensively illustrated with contemporary images, and acutely attuned to the fear and hatred that played so important a role in the high levels class hostility and violence of the Gilded Age, never more evident than in Chicago. It deserves and will find wide readership. Instructors of specialized undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with the labor, immigration, urban, and/or economic history of late-nineteenth century America will want to assign all or part of it. Instructors of the undergraduate post-Civil War survey course will find much illuminating and gripping lecture material along with thorny and relevant issues for class discussion. For example, as the author himself suggests, such issues include what the limits to free speech are and to what extent the era's extreme economic inequality squared with "the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all." (p. 12) |
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Green's discussion of Chicago's labor and anarchist organizations might reasonably strike undergraduate and even general readers as a case of too much information delivered too matter-of-factly. And those expecting an extensive treatment of the language and thought of the city's anarchists must still look to Paul Avrich's older and invaluable The Haymarket Tragedy (1984). Nevertheless, though informed by Avrich's study, Green's work is distinct from it and will long be the standard scholarly work on Haymarket, its social context, and its legacy. Because it has appeared at a time in American history of wrenching economic change, extreme social inequality, fears about immigrants, and subordination of civil liberties to national security, the book can remind us, as the author concludes, that, "in some sense, we are living with the legacy of those long-ago events" (p. 320). |
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| Gustavus Adolphus College |
Gregory l. Kaster |
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