Haymarket (12 page)

June 24

We can forget about the farmers and the Granger movement as potential allies. The prospects all across the country are for bumper crops. There’s talk of wheat and corn yields going higher than any in history, and the Grangers have rapidly traded in political rallies for pie socials and oyster suppers. It puzzles me how the smell of money can turn men away from a just cause. Once their own agony’s passed, fellow feeling seems to pass with it. Lucy says that’s what fellow feeling is: commiserating with
someone who shares your plight. I don’t accept that, and Lucy herself is a good example of why. Now that word of her dressmaking skills has spread and her earnings are up to nearly five dollars a week, she’s busy giving most of it away to families in greater need than us. If she hears of a family that can’t put food on the table or whose child is sick, she’s the first to help—and does it anonymously, slipping cash in an envelope under a door. She likes to play the cynic, but like most cynics, her sarcasm is protective covering for a tender heart.

Lucy recently got her first commission from a private client. And a wealthy one, which is why she almost refused it. It all came about through Lizzie. A distant relation of hers is a woman of some means, and she periodically asks Lizzie to duplicate a dress she’s seen in a shop or in
Godey’s
. This time around, Lizzie was overburdened with piecework and enlisted Lucy’s help in constructing the bustle. The woman was amazed at how skillfully Lucy interwove two fabrics, silk and organdy, and two shades of magenta as well. She declared Lucy a “seamstress of genius.”

The relative recommended Lucy to a Mrs. L. B. Risberg, wife of a prominent Astor Street physician. Mrs. Risberg promptly sent her carriage, and Lucy reluctantly agreed to go. She wanted to satisfy her curiosity, she said, about what the inside of a Prairie Street mansion looked like, but swore she’d never lend her skills to making the upper class look attractive.

We’d all seen pictures of the Risberg mansion in the newspapers during the various stages of construction, but Lucy, after she got back from the place, said the pictures don’t begin to do it justice. She was a mess of conflicted feelings. “No one can gainsay the beauty of the house,” she said, her eyes a warring mix of admiration and anger. “And I have to give Mrs. Risberg her due—though aloof and formal, she was polite enough to show me around most of the main floor. And Lord, what a sight it was! The mahogany entrance hall alone nearly took my breath away. You’ve never seen such fine woodwork, floor to ceiling. Missing, of course, was a plaque with the names of the Czech and German artisans who worked their fingers to the bone creating it. The Risbergs probably paid them five dollars a week and made them eat their lunch in the stables.”

“If they got a lunch break,” I said.

“Oh—and the front parlor!” Lucy exclaimed. “You wouldn’t believe it! Tapestries, a red-and-gold ceiling, flowered carpets, and, above the
fireplace, a stained-glass overmantel depicting the five Muses in various poses—like bathing beauties!”

To compensate for her guilty excitement, Lucy ended with a proper dose of indignation: “They live like European barons!” she bellowed. “While all over Chicago children are going to bed hungry, clutching some pathetic rag doll for comfort! And I’m supposed to make glamorous clothes for such creatures? I’ll never do it! Never!”

“Don’t be so high and mighty!” I said. “Making money through honest labor is no crime.”

Lucy gave me a withering look. “Of course you feel that way with the
Chicago Times
paying your salary.”

I swallowed hard, and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Short of forming a printers’ collective,” Lizzie chimed in, “which would fail of course, thanks to the huge type foundries, exactly where
can
one find untainted, ‘honorable’ work? I’d love to know so I can put in an application myself.”

“Spies has found it,” Lucy said quietly. “He’s self-employed. And Fielden is trying to buy his own team of horses.”

“But they still have to rely on
customers,”
Lizzie mildly pointed out, not sure whether she was trying to convince me or Lucy. “And they can’t afford to pick and choose among them on the basis of their political opinions. I tell you, in this society, there’s no such thing as an honorable living. To survive, we all have to participate in the corruption.”

Eventually, after several more go-rounds about the “morality” of the thing, Lucy finally decided to accept Mrs. Risberg’s commission. Since then, the Risberg carriage has been arriving regularly to carry her off for fittings. Lucy’s guiltily proud of her black silk dress. Even in its unfinished state, Mrs. Risberg has pronounced it a “triumph,” commending Lucy for incorporating whalebone to bind the waist (the latest word in fashion, I gather) and a bustle of iron that requires a cushion of fifteen yards of cloth. Lucy triumphantly insists that the dress is in fact a “monstrosity,” constricting breathing and movement. “It’s better suited to a medieval soldier than a modern woman,” she huffed one day to Lizzie, who shrugged. “The more misery it causes her the better,” Lizzie said. “Only well-to-do women can afford to torture their bodies in this way.” Their giggling reached me in the kitchen.

June 25

Ammon is in Chicago. We met at Fielden’s place. A fourth man was there, invited by Fielden. Name of George Engel. He’s older than the rest of us—at least forty, I would say. German born. He’s had a hard life. Lost both his parents when just a boy, and was hungry all the time. Says nobody ever cared about him. Finally got himself apprenticed to a house painter, and that’s how he survived. He immigrated to America at a time when there wasn’t any work in Germany and he’d “given up all hope.” He’s married with two children, and until last year worked in a wagon factory. Now he and his wife run a small toy store. Says it’s a poor living, but it gives him more time for reading. I’ve written this much about Engel, because I find him compelling, in a fierce, direct sort of way. He’s not an easy man to warm up to, though. Serious and silent.

But easier to like than Ammon, a blustering type. Talks so much you can’t tell what he’s feeling. What a contrast to Fielden, who’s undisguised in all his dealings. The more I see of him, the more I admire him. He’s a truly frank and pure fellow; a deep goodness radiates from him. Lucy told me she got angry at Fielden back when we all first met because of a remark he made about “Sambo,” but she’s come to feel that he said it in innocence and cares deeply about the plight of negroes.

Ammon told us that Tom Scott and the other railroad magnates have refused to even meet with a committee to hear worker grievances. He believes there will be a general strike sooner or later, probably sooner. Many of the brakemen are refusing to go out on “double-headers,” a term I didn’t know. It means having to handle twice as many cars as is usual. As it is, he says, brakemen have the most dangerous job. Not that anybody has it easy. The firemen shovel coal for hours on end into furnaces “hot enough to melt glass,” as Ammon puts it. And even the engineers, who have it the best, face plenty of drudgery and danger. They have to stay alert for every blind curve and grade crossing during shifts that last twelve hours—and are paid three dollars and twenty-five cents. That’s “down to hard pan,” to use Ammon’s railroad lingo.

But the brakemen, he says, risk actual loss of life or limb. Most companies refuse to spend money on safer equipment like the new air brake or automatic coupler. A brakeman has to climb up the side of a car using handholds that are never inspected and sometimes break off; and
as he moves between cars, he runs the constant risk of catching his foot in a switch frog and often can’t free himself before the rolling wheels have sliced off a leg. As he races along the top of a car to spin the brake wheels or guide a coupling link into place, he can get his head chopped off by a low bridge. “There aren’t many brakemen,” Ammon said angrily—holding up his own right hand, which showed a stub where the index finger should have been—“who have both hands or all their fingers. If they do, they’re new on the job.” In Massachusetts alone, some fifty railroad men die every year from one kind of accident or another. The widows get nothing. And if you’re maimed, not killed? Their regular pay must cover all liability, with no added compensation for injury. “We’re scum to them,” Ammon told me. “And now they want us to go out on double-headers. Now they’ve found a quicker way to murder us.”

July 7

There’s been a strange lull these past two weeks, and I figured there was no point filling up these pages with idle talk. Maybe it’s the heat. Its been blazing, day after day. Some of the old brick sewers are backed up and the stench in the streets has got everybody worried about another outbreak of typhus or cholera. In Baltimore 150 children died of typhus just last week. The rich, of course, are off to the cool breezes of White Sulphur Springs or the Adirondacks. For a change of pace, they’re hunting bears instead of workers.

To protect against disease, Lizzie and Spies both urge us to purge once a week, but I can’t stand prunes and bran, and as for Spies’s recommendation of sauerkraut, I’d rather have a torpid liver than an upset stomach. The peddlers are selling so many different kinds of syrups, elixirs, and tonics, and making equal claims for all of them, my guess is they’re equally worthless. But to humor Lizzie, I let her pour Fletcher’s Castoria down my throat—once!

July 11

The lull has ended. President Garrett of the Baltimore & Ohio has announced yet another reduction in wages for employees, this time a full 10 percent. What does he expect the men to live on—old shoe leather? A storm is brewing.

July 17

The storm has broken. And where? In Martinsburg, West Virginia! Who would have dreamed it? Ammon organized a small
TU
lodge there last month, but told me it was probably for naught, that the men were too passive ever to engage in a walk-out. And now they’ve done it! Lightning does strike in unexpected places.

The news we have is sketchy. Apparently some firemen began deserting freight trains, word of their action quickly spread, and a crowd gathered to urge the men on. They uncoupled train engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and told the local B&O officials that not another train would leave Martinsburg until the pay cut was rescinded. President Garrett demanded that Governor Henry Mathews provide military protection, and he’s dutifully dispatched the Berkeley Light Guards.

July 18

The strike is spreading over other divisions of the B&O. Conductors, brakemen and engineers are joining the firemen. Seventy engines and six hundred freight cars are now jammed into the Martinsburg yards, though the strikers are letting passenger and mail cars go through. They’re behaving in an orderly, restrained way, refraining from threats of violence. Yet the
New York Times
has come out with an editorial condemning the strike as “a rash and spiteful demonstration of resentment by men too ignorant or too reckless to understand their own interests.”

July 19

Governor Mathews telegraphed President Hayes requesting troops “to suppress this insurrection” and “protect the law-abiding citizens of the State” from the “unlawful combinations and domestic violence” of the strikers. All of which stands reality on its head. Federal troops will create violence not currently in evidence.

July 20

Hayes has sent the Second United States Artillery to Martinsburg—more than three hundred troops. Today freight trains are moving freely out of the yards, staffed by strikebreakers brought in from Baltimore. Governor Mathews announced, “The insurrection may be regarded as suppressed.”

Sam Fielden came by with some sad tidings. His middle child, Ephraim, has succumbed to dysentery after an illness so brief no one realized the child was in serious danger. Fielden couldn’t hold back the tears. His wife, of course, is utterly bereft. She’s taken to consulting a medium. Spiritualism has grown exceedingly popular but thus far our rational-minded crowd has been immune to it. At first Fielden tried to dissuade his wife from such “nonsense” but soon realized that any comfort would be a blessing. She’s become convinced that their son will “pass back over” and “materialize” if she follows the medium’s strict instructions. These include burning locks of hair, carrying the child’s portrait over her heart day and night, and paying for “treatments” that utilize the “positive magnetic energy” of the right hand. Poor soul.

July 21

Though all remains quiet in Martinsburg, new protests are breaking out elsewhere. It’s as if a dying ember leapt into a nearby thicket of parched woodlands. The boatmen of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal have docked their vessels and shut down all canal traffic. Thousands of coal miners have gone out and railroad workers in various locales have been boarding and detaining trains, taking off the crews and pulling out coupling pins. Only one of the sixteen freights sent west from Martinsburg has gotten through; the rest were stopped at Cumberland, Maryland, where the rolling mill is idle, many unemployed, and some starving. The crowd there displayed a real fury. Shots were fired and a trainman hit.

In Baltimore, a mob formed in front of the regimental armory, hurling rocks at the doors, shattering nearly every pane of glass, and panicking the 180 soldiers inside. When three companies tried to get out and were met with brickbats, the soldiers leveled their breechloaders and began firing directly into the crowd, which fell back and scattered. Before the shooting was over, ten men and boys had died—none of them strikers. The enraged crowd, now grown to fifteen thousand, turned its fury on the B&O depot, setting passenger cars afire and exchanging pistol shots with the police.

And in Pittsburgh, the state militia has committed outright slaughter, firing into a crowd of people gathered in the Twenty-eighth Street area, killing a dozen and seriously wounding more than fifty, several of them small children. The city’s gone mad with grief and anger. Scores of loaded
oil and coal cars have been torched, creating an immense inferno. Violence doesn’t shock the American people—not after the everyday carnage of the Civil War.