| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books 2006)

THE HUMAN SCALE of James Green's well-constructed and solid narrative transforms this dramatic confrontation into a vivid tableau of the social tensions and aspirations of the Gilded Age. The title centres on the death in Haymarket Square in Chicago, and also those associated with the events that took place there. On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded in the ranks of the Chicago Police Department then engaged in trying to dissolve an anarchist-led rally for a nation-wide wave of strikes to establish the eight-hour workday. The damage of the bomb to the police was what mattered officially, as did the execution of anarchist labour leaders for conspiracy to bring about an atmosphere of violence leading to the death of police officers. The extent of death beyond becomes less tangible. The bombing and subsequent gunfire in the square certainly killed or mortally wounded an indeterminate number of demonstrators and bystanders and left many more injured, but the evidence grows weaker as we move away from the official sources. There were also four deaths that led to the calling of the rally, but these, too, seem to be difficult to prove.

In short, the case illustrates how the very sources on which the historian depends necessarily reflect the social and institutional priorities of the society that generated them. Much of Green's book traces the emergence and escalation of what created those priorities, the social tensions in Chicago that emerged from the unifying experience of the Civil War to the polarizing realities of 1886. Most immediately, the mass responses to the official suppression of the general strike movement of 1877 – particularly brutal in Chicago – inspired a political insurgency around labour and socialist candidates. This coincided with the emergence of similar mass movements across the country and in other industrial nations, but the efforts of the city fathers in Chicago to dismantle the movement suppressed the possibility of a less violent resolution of the issues at stake. In Chicago, the Socialistic Labor Party drew off enough immigrant voters to tilt the balance of power to the Democrats.

Green details how the city fathers sought to demobilize the insurgency. Patronage courted leaders of the discontented, while vote fraud minimized the chances for electoral success, along with the outright refusal of the government to accept socialist victories. All this capped the successive use of federal troops, the state militia, and an expanded and armed city police force against the working class and immigrant residents of the city. Understandably, many of the most active radicals and labour militants began to despair of any peaceful solution to the innately hierarchic and undemocratic system.

Moreover, these developments coincided internationally with the response of the German government to the rise of a mass socialist party by simply banning it. This inspired the rise of a new kind of anarchism that rejected hopes for electoral change in favor of "propaganda by the deed." The synchrony of these experiences brought many of the more radical proponents of electoral action to what scholars would later label "anarcho-communism." Green rightly avoids drawing the reader into ideological conflicts that seemed important at the time but can now leave the reader stranded in a dark labyrinth.

One conflict involved the Greenback-Labor Party which built a united third party campaign in 1880 that included the SLP with results that provided another reason for the radicals to abandon electoral politics. After the GLP raised issues like black disenfranchisement, the Democratic press published an "exposé" allegedly proving the third party to have been mere pawns of the Republicans, using this as justification for ending all coverage of the insurgent campaign. (The disturbed Dyer D. Lum penned this pro-Democratic "exposé," subsequently meandering through the socialists to the anarchists before taking his own life.)

The centerpiece of Green's book is the national push to impose an eight-hour limit on the workday as of May 1, 1886. This offered a common focus to a fragmented movement. It brought together anarchists, socialists, the new American Federation of Labor, the declining Knights of Labor, and various other bodies to focus on a goal for which organized workers had been agitating since the close of the Civil War. That first May Day mobilized three or four times as many workers nationally as the 1877 strike wave, and the movement closed hundreds of factories and workplaces across Chicago. When strike leaders heard on May 3 that the police had killed four workers locked out at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, they called for a protest rally the next day on Desplaines Street, near where Randolph Street emerged from downtown and widened into Haymarket Square.

In the wake of the bomb, an extensive official repression also aimed at breaking the eight-hour movement and the unity it briefly inspired. The police swept up hundreds for questioning but focused on removing eight anarchist labour leaders, convicting all of them, and hanging four on November 11, 1887. Although sections of the movement initially backed away from the charged men, what became an extensive defence campaign blossomed into an amnesty movement that, among other things, inspired the new Socialist International to declare May Day an international labour day. In contrast, the city created an official view (which almost nobody ever believed) that the police essentially turned back an imminent revolution at the "Haymarket Riot."

Although Henry David, Bruce Nelson, Paul Avrich and others have told this tale of an uphill fight against the forces of power and authority, Green does this in a particularly engaging and expert fashion. With other scholars, he shares the contemporary liberal assessment that the authorities had behaved miserably, inflicting "judicial murder" on labour leaders, inaugurating a wave of repression that further fragmented the labour movement and postponed the serious drive towards industrial unionism for decades. Green's narrative required no more than a simple recitation of theories as to what brought death to the Haymarket, though Avrich had no real doubts but that one or another of these understandably frustrated workingmen actually made and threw the bomb.

Green's epilogue describes the aftermath of Haymarket and its impact on the labour and radical movements in the familiar terms of defeat and demise, starting with the repression of labour and radicalism in Chicago. The authorities and the press would fan its flare into a fullblown panic that reached far beyond Chicago. Police officials (with assistance by the Pinkerton detectives) began regularly finding explosives in the hands of strikers and radicals, although, when closely examined, there is often little of what we would today call a chain of evidence. Interestingly, Avrich took issue with this view of defeat in the wake of Haymarket and discussed the mass labour parties of 1886–87 and the revived radicalism of the 1890s as an extension of what he saw as the gains of the Haymarket episode.

Green's assumptions are more traditional than those of Avrich, but he aims for a much broader readership and covers this terrain without cultivating the almost unavoidable nostalgia for radical movements lost. It is recommended as a sound introduction to the labour issues of the period and a demonstration of why Haymarket is a subject worth frequently revisiting.


MARK A. LAUSE University of Cincinnati

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