Rhyming History

Here's an apt quote for the day, one often mis-attributed like so many others, to Samuel Clemmons, aka Mark Twain:

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The following is an even better quote which is in fact from Mark Twain:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Re-examinging one of the most famous and significant chapters in Chicago history in preparation for a forward to a book I have been asked to write, I've been struck by how issues that tore our city and country apart almost one and one half centuries ago, still resonate today. Not that we re-construct history brick by brick, but it's clear that we create the same problems for ourselves over and over and over again.

The event is the Haymarket Affair, the late nineteenth century struggle for workers' rights which led to a disastrous confrontation between workers and the police on May 4th, 1886. Eight police officers and an untold number of protestors died as a result of a bomb thrown toward a phalanx of officers as they tried to break up an otherwise peaceful rally in Haymarket Square on the near west side of the city. The business community as well as the general public, who were influenced by biased and incendiary coverage in the local media, were shocked and appalled by the deaths and demanded that the organizers of the event, most of whom were not even present when the bomb went off, pay with their lives for the deaths of the police officers. Even though the identity of the bomb thrower was never known, four men, all well known leaders of the workers' rights movement, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer, went to the gallows on November 11th of the following year. A fifth defendant, Louis Lingg, cheated the hangman by committing suicide the night before his scheduled execution. Three other defendants had their sentences commuted and were eventually pardonned.

Today the trial that condemned the five men known to this day the world over as the Haymarket Martyrs, is by and large considered a sham, a show trial, and a gross miscarriage of justice, with neither the judge nor the jury making any attempt to disguise their prejudice against the defendants and their cause.

Obviously we don't hang people anymore for allegedly inciting riots, so we're not, literally at least, repeating that part of history. Yet reading about the buildup to the Haymarket Affair, one cannot help but see the connection to current events such as pitting the rights of one group of people against another, the role and the mistrust of police in society, and most important, the resentment, fear and sometimes outright hatred of newly arrived immigrants to this country. In fact the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by prominent members of nineteenth century society, while perhaps a trfile more bellicose, seems to hauntingly reflect the statements of some current day pundits on the subject .

Consider these words from lead States Attorney Julius Grinnell in his closing argument at the Haymarket trial. Describing how scores of working people in Chicago, mostly German and Bohemian immigrants would react should the "jurymen unjustly acquit the anarchists", Grinnell told the jury...

...all the slimy vermin who have taken cover in the holes and byways of the city during this trial, will flock out again like a lot of rats.

That statement was met by a cheer of approval from spectators at the trial as well as from members of the jury.

A particularly vocal critic of the workers movement was former Chicago mayor and owner of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill who once wrote in an editorial in his paper about the day when he joyfully imagined:

...communistic carcasses decorating the lamp-posts of Chicago.

Granted the threat of violence from the workers as witnessed by the Haymarket Riot was real, but much of it was a reaction to violence committed agaisnt striking workers by the police and by private security companies hired by the companies they were striking against. In fact the May 4th  Haymarket rally was a direct response to the killing of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works complex on the south side the day before. Parsons and Spies, who had both been radicalized by the brutal treament of striking workers, spoke at the rally. It is said that Spies only agreed to speak if the mention of protestors arming themselves was deleted from pamphlets advertising the event. After Parsons spoke to the assembled crowd, he left the rally and was not present at the time of the bomb blast. One of the condemned, George Engel, was at home playing cards during the entire event. Only two of the Haymarket defendants, Spies and Samuel Felden who was speaking at the time the police began their advance on the crowd, were present at the time of the blast.

So what was all the fuss about? The issue was fairly simple; the over-riding concern of the workers was the enofcement of a state law banning companies from forcing their employees to work more than eight hours per day. That law which was put into the books in 1867 had no teeth, and was consequently all but ignored. The argument of the industrialists was that no one was forced to work for them and there were plenty of people in those economically depressed times willing to replace striking workers. The argument of the workers, who were paid on average $1.50 per day which was cut by 25 cents during particularly difficult times, was that such demanding hours, often 12 to 15 hour days, six days a week, essentially enslaved the wage earner to his job which didn't provide him the time to develop other skills in which he could enrich his life and better his situation. In other words, the struggle was between the rights of the capitalists to make the rules in their own compnies and the rights of the workers to earn a fair and living wage under reasonable and humane conditions.

Like Spies and Parsons, the newly arrived immigrants from central Europe and Scandinavia, many of whom were already aquainted with the work of Karl Marx and other writers promoting radical change, were deeply concerend by the over-zealous reaction of the powers-that-be, and the ruthless sometimes deadly force used against them by the police. The few who chose to arm themselves, admittedly encouraged by people like Spies and Parsons, did so for their own self-defense.

Not surprisingly, native born Americans, many of whom could only claim one or two generations of American ancestry themselves, reacted bitterly to this new wave of immigrants. Because of the relative few who committed violent acts, they painted all immigrants who came to these shores with the simple intent to better their lives, with a very broad brush, protraying them as  interlopers who seemed hell-bent on destroying the American way of life.

Sound at all familiar?