Haymarket (32 page)

Albert took her in his arms and kissed her. “Lucy …” he whispered.

They held on to each other tightly, until Lucy, who had started to cry, pushed Albert away. “Now hug the children, quickly,” she said, between tears. “You mustn’t tarry a minute longer.” Albert gathered the children into his arms, squeezing them tightly.

“Ow!” Albert Jr. yelled. “That hurt!”

“Oh, my poor boy,” Albert said, “I’m so sorry … it’s just that papa loves you and Lulu so …” Lulu giggled and ran to her mother’s arms, with Albert Jr. close behind. Lucy gave Albert one last, fierce embrace, then, without looking back, hurried off with the children.

Albert and Lizzie headed directly to the depot of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, where Lizzie purchased one ticket for Turner Junction, the nearest point to her home in Geneva. They waited nervously in a dark corner of the platform for the train to arrive. When it finally did, and Albert boarded, Lizzie, her face covered in tears, stood waving good-bye as the cars pulled slowly out of the station.

By the next morning, a tide of hysteria had spread across the country: Chicago’s City Hall had been dynamited! Half the city was in flames! Anarchists were looting and pillaging at will! A plot had been revealed to seize control of the government in Washington! The Red Revolution was sweeping the country!

The panic was fanned by the press. Newspapers everywhere denounced Mayor Harrison for “misguided liberality” in allowing fanatics like Spies
and Parsons to speak freely in public. Invective that poured from the editorial pages matched, in slightly more decorous form, that from the pulpits. Editors and preachers vied to outdo each other in vilifying the ill-defined horde of socialists and anarchists as “assassins,” “fanatical brutes,” “inhuman rubbish,” “rag-tail cutthroats.” Neither publishers nor preachers paused to mention possible police culpability for the Haymarket carnage, but instead filled their pages and podiums with praise for the officers’ extraordinary valor. The fact that many ordinary citizens—not revolutionaries, not police officers—had also died in the skirmish was skimmed over.

The
Chicago Times
singled out Parsons for special vituperation, calling him a “fiend, who for months past has advocated the torch and dagger,” mentioning as well that he “is the husband of a negress, and a most arrant coward withal.” The only part of the attack that surprised Lucy was being described as a “negress”; she hadn’t realized the matter had become grist for public discussion—and she didn’t like it.

There were other shocks to come. Within twenty-four hours of the bloodshed, Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly issued a statement to the effect that no
honest
workingman could or should be found marching under the red flag, “the emblem of blood and destruction.” When Lucy learned of Powderly’s statement, she spat on the ground in indignation. “The Grand Master
Traitor
!” she hissed.

She next learned that Albert’s own union, Typographical Number 16, had adopted a resolution denouncing “the heinous acts of the mob at the Haymarket,” making no mention of the gratuitous provocation by the police. Lucy decided that if possible, she’d conceal the resolution from Albert. He would be gloomy enough about the misunderstandings and self-sabotage common among working people.

Bonfield was up early the following morning. Determined to use his new status to maximum advantage, he gathered his men together and sent them off across the city with explicit instructions to run as many labor activists to ground as possible and to ransack their meeting places. Bothering with neither warrants nor itemized charges, Bonfield soon had his jails bursting with hundreds of prisoners, cuffed and beaten at will.

Zepf’s Hall was among the first places locked and bolted, followed by Greif’s, where a raiding party, led by Bonfield himself, discovered a
meeting of striking freight handlers in progress. He demanded that the presiding officer have everyone present raise his right hand and pledge that he had “no sympathy with the socialists who committed the dreadful crime of last night.” Every hand went up. Grinning, Bonfield then closed the place down.

Sam Fielden took a bullet in the knee soon after the police opened fire in Haymarket. It passed through his leg, and he was in severe pain as he escaped from the square and hobbled home. The next morning the police roused him from bed, declared his wound superficial, and marched him to Central Station. As Fielden was being booked, the officers taunted him as “a murder-preaching devil” and made jokes about his “ratty eyes” and “moss-filled whiskers.” Chief Ebersold decided that Fielden was faking his wound and ordered him to remove the bandage on his knee. When Ebersold saw the torn flesh, he quickly looked away; then, pointing to Fielden’s forehead, he told him that the bullet should have gone in
there
. Fielden was removed to the basement lockup.

George Engel had been at home playing cards on the night of the Haymarket meeting. Certain that Spies, Fielden, and Parsons would make what Engel liked to call “their usual bland, cautionary remarks,” he decided that he’d heard enough of their prudent clichés. He and Spies were in fact no longer even on speaking terms, having squabbled bitterly about the advisability of armed struggle. Yet when a friend burst into Engel’s home that night with the news that a bomb had been thrown, Engels expressed disdain for the act. “Violence is admissible,” he said, “only when it emanates from the masses, not from a maverick individual.”

When the police arrived to search the Engels’s apartment, an officer discovered a portable furnace made of galvanized iron. It resembled a plumber’s furnace, yet was suspiciously odd in shape. Engel claimed he had no knowledge of where it had come from—“I currently work as a painter in a wagon factory”—or what it was used for. They decided to take the furnace along to the station. Chief Ebersold thought it might be a “blasting machine” used for the manufacture of dynamite. On inspection, though, the mysterious contraption turned out never to have been fired, and in any case was clearly not designed to produce explosives. Engel was arrested anyway.

At 8:30
A.M
. on May 5, a contingent of seven plainclothesmen, led by Detective James Bonfield, Black Jack’s younger brother, came bounding up the stairs at 107 Fifth Avenue, home to the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
. Lucy and Lizzie had gone there at dawn, after a few hours of restless sleep, determined to print a refutation of the official lies circulating in the city. Schwab, Fischer, and Spies had also arrived early at the
Arbeiter
, with the same goal in mind.

Recognizing Spies, Detective Bonfield turned directly on him: “Are you not the fiend named August Spies?”

“That is my name,” Spies answered quietly, “but not my disposition.”

“Look here, men!” Bonfield shouted to the other officers, while pointing at Spies’s face. “Look at that grimace, that row of wolfish teeth! And he claims not to be one of Satan’s fiends—ha!”

Trying to maintain his composure, Spies blandly asked what he could do for “our unexpected visitors.”

“You can get yourself ready to accompany us,” James Bonfield shouted. “We’re officers of the law. You’re under arrest.” At this, according to the
Times
account the next day, “the faces of the cowering wretches, whose utterances and writings have caused so much misery and recent bloodshed, paled to the color of ashes … Fischer stood perfectly still, as if frozen in Hell. Michael Schwab trembled like an aspen and could hardly button his coat. This office was performed for him in no very gentle manner by the justly incensed officials.”

Bonfield ostentatiously picked his nose, then walked up to Spies and rubbed his encrusted finger on the arm of Spies’s jacket. The three men were then dragged to the street, thrown into the waiting police van, and taken to Central Station at City Hall for booking.

Neither Lucy nor Lizzie was arrested. After their friends had been taken away, and though fighting back tears, the two women immediately went back to getting out an emergency issue of the
Alarm
. They’d been at it for about an hour when Oscar Neebe suddenly appeared in the doorway. He’d been working on the outskirts of the city and had only just heard about the chaos of the night before. He rushed over to the
Alarm
immediately.

Lucy and Lizzie had barely begun to catch Neebe up on events when they were interrupted by the sound of a second contingent of officers bounding back up the stairs. This time they were accompanied by Julius Grinnell, State’s Attorney for Cook County (who had earlier advised
Inspector Bonfield to “make the raids first and look up the law afterward”) and Mayor Harrison, who, given the pressure of public opinion, had decided to modify his previous stance, or at the least to go on a raid. His face was ashen but determined.

Five of the officers raced up to the third floor, which hadn’t been inspected during the prior raid, and finding several printers still at work there, immediately arrested them. Meanwhile Mayor Harrison was sternly demanding that Neebe give an account of himself and his connection to the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter
.

“I am a friend of August Spies,” Neebe said simply. “I do not work for either paper.”

“How do you support yourself?”

“I was once a tinsmith, and a good one, but when I supported the railroad strike in 1877, I was fired.”

“And now?” Harrison asked impatiently.

“My brother and I started a small yeast company. That is my current livelihood.”

“Do you have employees?”

“No, sir. But if we did, they’d work an eight-hour day.”

Harrison, a decent man under indecent pressure, felt Neebe was being pointlessly provocative.

“As you may be aware,” he said, with some annoyance, “I am a supporter of the eight-hour day.”

“Yes, sir, I am aware. You are known as a friend of working people.”

Harrison’s features relaxed slightly. “I’ve tried to be. But you people don’t always make it easy.” Lucy and Lizzie exchanged a furious glance.

The officers and State’s Attorney Grinnell had by this time made their way down the narrow flight of stairs with their prisoners in tow. Harrison turned to follow them, then took a step back into the room.

“I want your word,” he said, “that your press will not publish any more inflammatory articles.”

“The truth is often inflammatory,” Lucy shot back. “Are you asking us not to publish the truth?”

“Do not push me too far, Mrs. Parsons,” Harrison answered evenly. “I stand between you and those howling for your immediate imprisonment.”

Neebe quickly stepped forward. “I give you my word, sir, that I’ll personally read this morning’s edition, if we can manage to get one out,
now that you’ve arrested our typesetters. You have my guarantee that nothing incendiary will appear.”

“Well then,” Lucy said, almost under her breath, “that means either a newspaper of blank pages, or ones filled with glowing tributes to the brave officers who filled Haymarket Square with blood. Perhaps we should invite Inspector Bonfield to write for us.”

Neebe beseeched her with his eyes to hold her tongue, an appeal Lizzie reinforced by silently squeezing Lucy’s arm.

Harrison, ignoring Lucy, spoke directly to Neebe. “I will hold you to your word,” he said sternly. “Should you break it, the consequences, as you must realize, will be severe.” With that, Harrison turned his back and departed.

“Let’s get to work at once,” Lucy said, preempting any discussion of her exchange with Harrison. “Given our constraints, we should focus on getting out the
Arbeiter
in circular form.”

“Can we do even that?” Neebe asked. He was on the board of the Socialistic Publishing Society, which sponsored the
Arbeiter
, but had no hands-on experience with newspaper work. “I mean, the entire staff, even the printer’s devil in the composing room, has been arrested. There are only the three of us left.”

“We
must
do it,” Lizzie said. “We must show that we can’t be crushed.”

“What about the
Alarm?
” Neebe asked.

Lucy laughed. “From worrying about being able to get out one paper, you now want to publish two?! No, Neebe, for the moment we must put the
Alarm
aside. I only hope,” she added sadly, “that it
is
for the moment.”

Just then, the racket on the stairs announced that the police had returned yet again. But this time, it was an entirely different group of officers who barged into the room seething with determination. The detective at their head immediately set his men to work breaking into files, drawers, and boxes, scattering their contents on the floor and rummaging through the piles to pick out “inflammatory” material that could be taken back to Central Station and used as “proof” of the “terroristic intentions of the conspirators.”

While his men were at work, the detective abruptly wheeled on Lizzie and, without explanation, told her she was being placed under arrest. When she protested, he told her he’d knock her down if she didn’t shut
up. When Lucy tried to intervene, another officer pushed her into a chair, called her a “black bitch,” and threatened to knock her to the floor too. The raiding party, with Lizzie in tow, then left.

Lucy was furious, Neebe stunned.

“I don’t understand,” he said hesitantly. “Why did they take Lizzie and not us?”

“It’s simple,” Lucy said, as she paced angrily among the heaps of manuscripts, letters, and galley proofs scattered over the office floor. “They’d have too much trouble concocting a case against you as an extremist. That simply isn’t your reputation, or history.”

Neebe felt slightly offended, as if Lucy had told him he wasn’t a true activist, not important enough for the police to bother with. “I’ve been one of the leading organizers for the bakers and the brewery workers,” Neebe said, feeling sheepish about his own defensiveness.

Lucy was barely listening. Her thoughts were with Lizzie. Who could help, who should she notify? Should she telegraph William in Geneva, or would that jeopardize Albert’s hiding place?