Haymarket (28 page)

Bonfield whirled around, tempted for a moment to march back down and give Lingg a thorough beating. “Not worth my time,” he told himself,
and without another word he turned and left the cellblock. He would remember, too.

Lingg had landed at the Harrison Street lockup through a series of unpredictable circumstances. That morning, at the barrel factory where he worked, he’d refused to take over the job of a striking worker and had been discharged on the spot, his paycheck for the week withheld. Unable to pay the rent to his landlord, William Selinger—a fellow carpenter who’d once befriended Lingg but had now turned ugly—he found himself on the street. The bitterly cold weather had forced Lingg to seek shelter for the night at the police station.

He cursed himself afterward for not having known better, since his girlfriend, Ida Miller, had warned him never to accept “public charity.” When a newcomer to Chicago, Ida had worked for a tailor on the North Side sewing buttonholes at two cents a piece. But when the slack season came, she’d been laid off and was unable to come up with her three-dollar weekly rent. The landlady had thrown her out.

Penniless, Ida had gone to the Atheneum, a refuge for homeless women, but after one night was denied lodging because when she washed up, they told her, she “made the towels too wet.” She then tried the Home for the Friendless but was told it only took in children and old people. For the following ten days, she slept on a bench in Lincoln Park. Then she found work at three dollars a week as a clerk in a fancy-goods shop, which allowed her to secure a room at the Working Woman’s Industrial Home on Fulton Street. Since room and board was $2.50 a week, she agreed, as a way of getting a reduced rent, to sleep on a mattress in the corridor and to get up at 5:00
A.M
. to help prepare breakfast. “So much for refuge,” she later told Lingg bitterly. “If I’d known what I do now, I would have worked the streets as a prostitute instead.”

Chicago’s august West Side Philosophical Society, aware of the agitation throughout the land, decided that the time had come to schedule an open debate at Princeton Hall on “Socialism.” Albert Parsons was invited to present the case.

“That’s like the Pope opening the Vatican to the Pharisees,” Lizzie said when she heard the news.

“Don’t go,” Lucy said, “You’ll be Exhibit A at the freak show.”

“I have to go,” Albert said, “it’s a unique opportunity to speak my mind to people who are convinced I don’t have one. Don’t worry: I have no illusions that anything I could say will find favor, or even comprehension, among the stuffed shirts.”

“Good,” Lucy said, “because you won’t change a single person’s mind.”

On the night of the debate, a sizeable contingent of
IWPA
comrades, including Lucy, Lizzie and William, Spies, Fielden, and Neebe, grouped tautly together at the front of the imposing and packed auditorium. The seats immediately surrounding them remained unfilled; though it was a standing-room only crowd, none of the fashionable attendees would dream of sitting in proximity to such notorious rabble-rousers.

Reacting to a tap on her shoulder, Lucy turned around to find herself staring into the smiling face of Nina Van Zandt.

“I just wanted to say a quick hello,” Nina offered. “I’m so looking forward to hearing your husband speak. So is my mother.” Nina pointed to a woman seated in the middle of the audience, dressed in a full-length gown with shirr pleats across her right shoulder and velvet trimming on her left—the latest word in Continental elegance. Mrs. Van Zandt waved cordially—she and Lucy had briefly met during Nina’s fittings—and Lucy, still open-mouthed at Nina’s audacity in publicly acknowledging her, waved back.

“Thank you for … for coming,” Lucy managed to stammer.

“I’ll see you very soon,” Nina said over her shoulder as she went to rejoin her mother.

At just that moment, Albert mounted the podium. He paused for a moment to survey the sea of satins and shawls, felt top hats and Prince Albert long coats, the members of the audience spread out before his eyes like a sea of long-necked albatrosses.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, his voice benign and melodious, “it very seldom happens that I have a chance to speak before a meeting composed of so many gentlemen with nice white shirts and ladies wearing elegant and costly toilets. I am the notorious Parsons, the fellow with the long horns, as you know him from the daily press. Well, I am from Texas,
where longhorns—cattle, that is—are indeed common, so perhaps the image is not entirely inappropriate.”

That produced a few titters, and some unease. The ladies tended to think Parsons’s smile uncommonly sweet; the men found his emphasis on longhorns vaguely threatening, somehow conjuring up the image of heads on pikes.

“I’m in the habit,” Albert continued, “of speaking before meetings composed of people who by their labor supply you with all these nice things you wear while they themselves are forced to dress in coarse and common garments; of such people who build your fine palaces, with all those comfortable fixtures, while they themselves dwell in hovels or on the street. Are not these charitable people—these
sans culottes
—very generous to you?”

The only response was some low hissing. The ladies made a quick reevaluation: the sweet smile belonged to a villain—just as they’d been warned.

“We’ve often heard,” Albert said, “that in this country fifty-five million people live in ease and plenty. Yet in its last issue,
Bradstreet’s
states that two million heads of families are in enforced idleness and without any means of support—and
Bradstreet’s
is certainly not a lying communistic sheet.” There was a renewed, louder wave of hissing.

Motioning for quiet, his voice less mellow, Albert moved directly—he knew this audience wouldn’t listen for long—to his charge: “Here in this city of Chicago alone, there are thirty-five thousand men, women, and children living in a condition of starvation, driven to—”

He was again interrupted, this time by loud booing from several different sections of the audience. Albert’s voice rose insistently above the din: “You may choose to deny that so many in your midst are starving to death, but that will not make the fact less true.”

“Give us proof!” a man shouted from the back rows. “Prove that what you say is fact!”

“Proof? Do you lack eyes and ears, sir? Or do you employ them only when guaranteed sylvan sights and sounds? Proof, my dear sir, is easily come by. Take yourself to a police station on a bitter winter night and you will see what passes for charity in Chicago—cold, bare flagstones for sleep, a 5:00
A.M
. slice of bread for breakfast, or none at all. Or if you fear visiting a police station lest you be detained for
real
crimes, have
a look in the city’s damp tunnels at night, where you’ll see men—yes, and many women, too, and they are not prostitutes, as you may prefer to believe—trotting up and down all night to keep from freezing to death. If none of that persuades you as proof, then you might try—”

Dozens of men in the audience were now on their feet, stamping and shouting insults at the platform. The chairman of the event hastened to the podium, banged the gavel, and called for order. As the frenzy began slowly to subside, the chairman gestured frantically toward the wings, and two frightened young ladies, with their musical accompanist, timidly appeared on the stage. But before they could begin to sing, Albert, taking advantage of the lull, managed to yell out a few final words:

“You are driving the people to revolution. I do not advocate force, I merely predict it. Violence will come not because we want it, but because you make it inevitable!”

As the auditorium broke into an uproar, Lucy, Spies, and the other comrades rushed Albert through the back exit behind the stage. Once on the street, they quickly dispersed—but not before Lucy caught a glimpse of Nina and her mother standing silently on the sidewalk, alone.

In late March 1886, Mayor Carter Harrison announced that as of May 1, all city employees would work no more than eight hours a day. “May first” instantly became a national rallying cry, and labor organizations across the ideological spectrum united in endorsing a general strike on that date to pressure for an extended compliance with the eight-hour day.

When the long-awaited day arrived, it dawned cloudless and cool. Across the country, some three hundred thousand people left their jobs and answered the call to march. In Chicago, eighty thousand gathered and exuberantly wound their way through the city’s downtown area. Armed police, Pinkertons, and militiamen lined the rooftops, and rumor had it that 1,350 National Guardsmen had been put on alert in the city’s armories. The Parsons family—Albert Jr., now six, and Lulu Eda, four—marched at the head of the line. The children soon became tired, but Lucy and Albert took turns carrying them, and periodic purchases of ice cream and soda water from street-side vendors stifled their yawns and refueled their energy.

The Citizens Association, which Albert had once hoped might prove a progressive force, became convinced that the march marked the onset of revolution and that Chicago might “fall to communism.” Accordingly, leading Association members placed themselves at strategic points along the line of march where, at the first sign of trouble, they could instantly alert the police. But the members found startlingly little to report. All was brass bands and exultant singing, high spirits and smiling faces, the happy crowd dispersing at Ogden’s Grove to enjoy a round of picnics, sporting events, and inspirational speeches.

Spies and Parsons gave the keynote addresses. Intoxicated at the size and liveliness of the crowd, Albert rose to passionate heights: “After evolving for 109 years under the Republic, the people are about to throw off their economic bondage!” The crowd roared its approval and a group of men, to deafening cheers, hoisted Albert on their shoulders and carried him from the platform through the crowd.

That same evening, he left Chicago for Cincinnati, insistent, though exhausted, on fulfilling his pledge to speak at the eight-hour rally there the following day. That duty performed, Albert then headed straight back to Chicago, arriving home in the early morning hours. He fell into a deep sleep on the couch, only to be shaken awake by Lucy at noon. She and Lizzie, who’d come down from Geneva to stay with them for the duration of the May demonstrations, were “worried, very worried,” she told a groggy Albert. He propped himself up on one elbow, hoping to get the blood circulating in his befogged brain.

Lucy agitatedly paced back and forth. “The momentum’s fading. I can feel it,” she said. “People are signing up for the trade unions or the Knights, not the International. That means it’s all going to end with our rulers tossing us a few token reforms.”

Lucy now had Albert’s full attention. She’d touched a raw spot he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge. He’d long feared—and once in a great while had publicly said—that a major barrier to progress lay in the passivity and conservatism of the American working-class itself.

“I know what you mean,” he said grimly. “In Cincinnati, one worker denounced me, and all revolutionary socialists—as
enemies
of the working class! ‘I want nothing to do with communists and anarchists!’ the man shouted. I have no idea how he was defining either,” Albert wearily added, “since
we
can’t! He got some applause, too.”

“It makes me crazy,” Lucy said. “Here, for the first time, we have the opportunity for real insurgency, a time that may never come again, and it’s slipping away. If the sewing girls are any gauge, it may already have passed. They’re frightened and wavering, terrified of losing their livelihood. We must convene a meeting of the American Group for tonight, before another day is lost, to try and figure out some way to bolster the girls’ fighting spirit. Please, Albert, we must!”

Though bone-weary and desperate for sleep, Albert agreed. He threw some cold water on his face, downed a quick breakfast, and headed out to place an announcement in the afternoon editions calling for a 7:00
P.M
. meeting at 107 Fifth Avenue, home of both the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
.