In Our Time - The Haymarket Affair

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious attack of 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago when somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, Mathias J. Degan. The chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an eight hour working day following a call for a general strike and the police killing of striking workers the day before, at a time when labour relations in America were marked by violent conflict. The bomber was never identified but two of the speakers at the rally, both of then anarchists and six of their supporters were accused of inciting murder. Four of them, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and August Spies were hanged on 11th November 1887 only to be pardoned in the following years while a fifth, Louis Ling, had killed himself after he was convicted. The May International Workers Day was created in their memory.With Ruth Kinna Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough UniversityChristopher Phelps Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of NottinghamAnd Gary Gerstle Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 1984)Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (Collier Books, 1963)James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon, 2006)Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), especially 'Haymarket and the Rise of Syndicalism' by Kenyon Zimmer Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, Haymarket Scrapbook: 125th Anniversary Edition (AK Press, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, on the 4th of May, 1886,

at a workers' rally in Chicago, somebody through a bomb that killed a policeman. And the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an eight-hour working day following a call for a general strike. The bomber was never identified.

But two of the speakers at the rally, anarchists and six of their supporters were blamed as inciting murder, and four of them were hanged. The May International Workers Day was created in their memory. When we did discuss the Haymarket affair are Ruth Kinner,

Professor of Political Theory at Loughbury University. Christopher Phelps, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Gary Gostel, Paul Millen Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gary, there have been tensions growing in America between workers and industry for some time. Can you highlight how it had arrived at the point we're talking about? Well, the 19th century was the century of industrialization, led by Britain and the world. America began that century on the periphery, but during and after the Civil War began to industrialize at a ferocious rate. Capitalist development was unregulated. It was raw. It was rapid. And if you leave capitalists and their industries to their own devices, you get a cycle of boom and bust.

Inequality is spreading. Capitalists are able to take care of themselves. Workers were often unemployed. No welfare state provisions. to fall back on. And so what happens after the Civil War is that there's an increasing turn to protest to unions. There was a very severe depression in the 1870s, beginning in 1873, lasting until 1877. There was a national railroad strike that became violent. In 1886, the year began as the great upheaval general strike across the country. Many of these strikes were led by railroad unions, which worked for the biggest corporations of the time. But by spring of 1886, Chicago was engulfed by protests, by strikes, and Chicago had grown at an unbelievable rate. It was 50,000 in 1850. It was 500,000 in the 1880s. It was 1.7 million by

1900. It had become the hub of American manufacturing trade. All railroads went through Chicago. This was the epicenter of American employer and labor conflict. And at the time, there were no easy mechanisms for resolving disputes peacefully. And so workers and employers increasingly resorted to armed self-defense, violence, private police hired by employers, and workers, many of them own guns. And so increasingly, violence broke out at labor disputes. And by the late 19th century, America had become the most violent theater of industrial relations in the world. Where was the growth coming from? It was coming from trade. All railroads ended up going through Chicago. It sat on Lake Michigan, so it had access to the Great Lakes. And so it could receive and send all kinds of iron ore and other goods from the north and send goods to the east. And because of all that traffic and trade, it also became a center of manufacturing, many, many industries, steel, meatpacking, furniture, agricultural implements, other kinds of machinery, all concentrated in this one.

city. And the provisions guarding life and property were insufficient in this rapidly growing city in 1871. Almost the entire city burned to the ground. Wood housing, poor fire regulation. They rebuilt it incredibly quickly, but that gives you a sense of the raucous nature of an explosive nature of growth in the city. Adding to that, where all the workers are going to come from? Because even though the United States had a very rapid rate of natural increase, the population and multiplying in a rapid rate. This kind of expansion of capitalism cannot be supported just by local or national labor supply.

So vast numbers of immigrants were coming to the United States, many of them from Germany, many of them from Ireland, late in the 19th century, increasingly from Eastern Europe. So it became a popery of languages, cultures, many people living at variance with what were held to be the best American values and cultures, Protestantism, republicanism, bringing what was thought to be dangerous religions and ideologies with them.

And this became part of the combustible mix waiting for someone to light a torch to set it off. So in Chicago, we not only have wealth versus poverty and power versus people who have no power at all, but in the mix itself, conflicts from different religious backgrounds. And also those coming from Europe were bringing particular ideologies with them. Many of the Germans have been refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, and they had been disillusioned with liberalism. They were looking for more radicalism. Some found it in Marx.

Some would find it in anarchism. And they became key elements of the Labour movement in Chicago. Thank you very much. Ruth. Ruth, can I let's get to the Haymarket rally. Who was calling it and why? The rally is called. I mean, there are two related incidents, I think. The first is the national strike on May 1st. So this is the general strike that's called across the country

and it's called by workers in support of an eight-hour day. And in Chicago, something like 40,000 workers went out and the tensions in the city were very high and the expectation was that there would be violence because of the way that, as we've just heard, because of the way that the relationships between the workers and the employers had soured over the years. but in the event it went off without incident.

The second event takes place on the 3rd of May and this is a local dispute and it's in a Chicago factory which has been involved in a long strike and a lockout and the employers have brought in the Pinkerton's, the armed security in order to bring in relief labour and in the event that the labourers are being brought in the Pinkerton's fire on the picketers and they kill four workers.

So the immediate cause of the call for the protest meeting is this 3rd of May shooting of the workers. But the background to the meeting is this broader struggle for the eight-hour day and it plays into a whole kind of tense labour relations in the city. So the people who call for the action, the lead person I suppose is August Spies. Now he's a member of the International Working People's Association. which is the organisation, the Federation that was set up in the early 1880s,

to coordinate anarchist actions. Anarchist actions. Anarchist. It's a specifically anarchist group, and it was set up to coordinate anarchism across the US. So he's a member of this organisation. He's also the editor of a German language newspaper called the Arbiter Zaitung. And the Arbiter Zaitung has been supporting workers' rights for a number of years. But one of the things it's also been doing is calling on the workers

or urging the workers to arm themselves against the police violence and against the employer's violence. So precisely to use the kind of armed self-defense in order to protect themselves from the hostility that they're faced with. I was going to ask whether the police came in because they've seen you've taken the positive and active part, don't they? The police in Chicago, from the point of view of the anarchists, certainly, and a lot of the union movement, I mean, the police are notorious in Chicago

for their oppressive force. There's one person who becomes very important in the trial, which is Captain Bonfield, and Michael Schack, who are deeply conservative forces in the city, and who really have no truck with the workers' movements. So they send in the police to quiet it down by whatever means? The protest in Haymarket is called at very short notice, but the police deployed 200 officers and surround the square because they think that there's going to be trouble.

One of the men there was Albert Parsons, What was his background? So Albert Parsons, he's also a member of the International Working People's Association and he's also a prominent labour activist and anarchist in Chicago. And he's the editor of a newspaper called The Alarm, which is an English language anarchist paper. He's important in the group because he's the only member of the anarchist group who's arrested, who's born and bred in America.

He can trace his family's ancestry back to the 60s. to the original settlers. He was born in Alabama. He was raised in Texas when the Civil War broke out in 1863. He was a teenager, but he was itching to join the Confederates, which he did. He served as a scout in the Civil War. And he comes out of the Civil War radicalized. So it comes out of the Civil War as deeply opposed to slavery.

And it kind of breaks with the traditions of the South. He was apprenticed as a printer. He worked as a journalist. He met and married Lucy Parsons, who was a, she'd been born into slavery. Her mother was a former slave. She was also a militant in her own right and an organiser. And in 1872, they go to Chicago, where they get involved in labour politics. And they do so from the perspective of anti-slavery.

So they look at the condition of the working class in Chicago, and they compare it to the condition of the chattel slaves in the South. And what they argue is that although the experience of slavery, wage slavery and chattel slavery is very different. Actually, the forces of exploitation and oppression are constant across those two experiences. And so Parsons becomes involved in labour activism as a militant, as a radical.

He attends the Pittsburgh Conference in 1883. Now, this is a really important meeting, which really is the sort of the launch event for the International Working People's Association. It's the moment, I suppose, at which the anarchists sort of come up with a statement of their goals and their aims. Thank you very much, Christopher. What was meant by anarchists to these people at that time?

Anarchism means literally without rule. That is those who advocate a society without domination and authority. And instead a self-governing free society, a cooperative society. These anarchists in particular, there had been a long American individualistic libertarian anarchist current free thinking, the Chicago milieu, though, was distinct because they were surrounded by the environment that Gary described of industrial conflict and industrial development. They were implanted in the working class. And their view was proto-anarcho-sindicalist. In other words, the strain of anarchism that sees the way we're going to achieve that free society as through

the organization and self-governance of the working class itself, which can take over industry, transform things so that there's no longer class exploitation so that there's workers' control of industry. And they called that the Chicago idea. They understood themselves as a distinctive within the anarchist world for having emphasized that. What reach did they have? Who read their work and followed their lead? The two most important Haymarket defendants were Albert Parsons, the Texan, and August Schippes, the German. And each of them were both mass leaders of the labor movement, and at the same time were editors of their respective newspapers. Parsons paper was tiny. 2000 circulation, something like that. They had only a few hundred

members of the American group part of the movement. The Arbiter Zeitung, which simply means workers' newspaper, was 22,000. It was the largest at points German circulation newspaper in Chicago, which was all the immigrants pouring in, half German at the time. So it was, it was influential in the German community. It was popular. Was it decisive in getting its way? They came to anarchism through first trying to win electoral office. And they came to the conclusion that because of campaign financing,

which in the 19th century was deeply corrupt in a place like Chicago. In fact, it would be all the way up into the 20th century. And then the very fact structurally that workers don't have the free time to participate in civic life because they're working these 10,000, to 12-hour days in the factories, that politics is not going to ever be accountable to a labor agenda. This is why they came to the anarchist point of view. They were skeptical about the ability of them to achieve political reforms, and particularly the eight-hour day, which people had tried to get legislated, but were unable to get legislated. So they thought

we're going to have to fight for it through strikes. We're going to have to fight for it with the employers. We're going to have to win it ourselves. Thank you very much. Gary, what happened on the 4th of May? I'm going to be specific here, to turn a peaceful rally. It seemed to be peaceful, almost at the very end it was peaceful, into the Taurus Haymarket affair. It was not the huge demonstration that they were expecting. It was winding down by the evening. Most of the speakers had left. There were only two of the people who would be arrested who were still at the rally. And what touched off the violence was first regiments of police marching down the street abreast and a kind of military. formation. And into that regiment, someone tossed a bomb. The bomb went off. It was a shock to everyone.

It immediately killed one policeman. And in that moment of violence, other police began shooting, not knowing who had thrown the bomb, but being very terrified at this act of violence. And so the shooting began, and many people were killed and wounded. Will you have any idea how many? Six other police would die, four civilians. would die, and scores of people were wounded. This terrified the city. The assumption was that the anarchists had been responsible for this bomb throwing, and despite all the investigations into that moment, the identity of the bomb thrower has never been proven. One of the eight anarchists arrested a man by the name of Louis Ling was known as a bomb maker, especially committed to the

making of dynamite, which was a new technology at the time. There were some anarchists who were perhaps a little too enthralled with dynamite and the possibilities of revolutionary violence. Albert Parsons says at one point that dynamite is democracy. And what he meant by that is that it put power in the hands of individual anarchists in ways that it had not been put in their hands before. So there was a lot of discussion about this, and this increased the sense of terror. eight anarchists were imprisoned, and the city and then the entire nation was engulfed with fear by this moment of violence. So it spread right across America this? Immediately, right through Chicago, right across a nation, and then internationally. And it mattered in this instance

that this was occurring in a moment of very vexed employer, worker conflict. And in a country in which violence had already been woven into the texture of industrial relations, So what was new about this was not the violence, but the specific kind of violence that had occurred. And that was the throwing of a bomb into phalanx of police. Thank you very much. Ruth, Ruth Kinner, one man who wasn't there, but was in the minds of many were there, was Johann Most. How did he fit in? Moss was probably before Haymarket, the most famous anarchist in America.

and he was typically depicted as sort of mouth foaming maniac. He was an orator and a pamphleteer. He'd come to America in 1882, having served a sentence in Britain. He'd been given hard labour in 1881 after the assassination of Zara and Exander II. And he wrote a piece in his paper and he called it a triumph. So when he was released from hard labour, he came to America. He set up in New York where he started to publish his, or continue publishing. his paper which was called Freihite, which is another German language paper,

and it circulated amongst the German speakers in America, and it also got smuggled into Bismarck's Germany. So Moss is an advocate of propaganda by the deed, and he understands that doctrine to mean the right of physical force against state violence. So he doesn't associate it with targeted assassination, which is how it later became known. But he thinks it's legitimate for workers to arm themselves against police force, against the military who are deployed against them.

And to that end, he writes a pamphlet, which is also in German, called the Science of Revolutionary Warfare, which is basically an instruction guide on how to make bombs. He's the leading force behind the International Working People's Association. I mean, he's the man who really gets this organisation going, and he's the man who writes its manifesto, the Pittsburgh manifesto. He's the lead author. So Parsons has a hand in that, and so does Spees, but he's really the main place. So he's known to Parsons and he's known to Speeds, and this is brought up in the trial,

that Moss's featuring in this organisation enables the prosecution to start building this case about conspiracy. But it also allows them to paint a picture of anarchism as something that's foreign. It's an import. It's deeply, profoundly un-American. And that's what Moss enables them to do to demonise the anarchists. were put on trial. Thank you. Christopher. Christopher Phelps. So arrests were made. Who was arrested and why? Initially there are 10 people arrested. It includes Spies, Parsons and Ling, who you've heard about. It includes some sub-editors on the Arbiter's Eitong and sort of ordinary people involved in the movement. One of the people arrested turns states evidence and testifies against his comrades.

And another of them, whose name is Rudolf Schnabel, flees after being arrested and released twice. And the prosecution would insinuate that perhaps he was the bomber, but there's no evidence whatsoever that he really was. He probably just got a sense that this isn't going to be a fair trial, and I'm going back to Germany as fast as I can. So eight were left to be tried. The evidence against them was circumstantial, contradictory, dubious. But the charge was never that any one of the eight had thrown the bomb. The charge was never that they were directly responsible for the murder of any policeman. The charge, rather, was that they were accessories to murder through a conspiracy.

And the conspiracy was simply their advocacy. It was that in their newspaper they had said that the police and the Pinkertons and the militia are attacking the workers and workers' arm yourselves, that they had published articles about dynamite and how this marvelous technology could possibly counteract cannons, for example. The strongest evidence, perhaps, was against Ling because Ling was indeed found to have manufactured bombs and, in fact, proclaimed it. There was nothing illegal at the time about having dynamite, miners had it, construction workers had it. There's nothing illegal about even manufacturing bombs under the law. And there was no solid evidence that it was one of the law. Lings bombs that had actually been thrown. The trial, by the way, had a jury of people who were

selected, even though many of the citizens who were prospective jurors said, I'm prejudiced against anarchists. I don't like socialists. I read in the newspapers, these guys probably did it. They should be hung. Thank you. Can I ask you to take that on, Gary? Who was so determined that they would be put on trial? This reflects on the deep conflict. between employers and workers in Chicago. The forces of order, the forces of property, most middle class opinion, was deeply alarmed at the violence that had occurred,

found it intolerable, and was persuaded that speech about violence was the same as an act of violence. It also mattered... On the one hand, the prosecution persuaded the jury. On the other hand, opinion was swayed by fear of foreign radicals who were seen as profoundly un-American and profoundly threatening to the American way of life, which was committed to a process of democratic change.

If you wanted politics to change, if you wanted industry to change, there were regular elections, there were procedures, there were institutions. And in the minds of many citizens in the city of Chicago, this resort to violence was seen as unacceptable. and un-American. Ruth, you want to come in. Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, one of the things that the prosecution do is they introduce countless articles and essays that have been published in the Arbiter Zeitung and the alarm. And so they select these, you know, in order to show that the anarchists are hell-bent on violence.

And so the picture they build is not really about who threw the bomb. It's about the literature that the anarchists were putting out. And because they detach all of this from the literature that's being put out by the mainstream media at the time which is also incredibly violent and speaks in terms about how to deal with the workers. I mean one of the articles that the defendants talk about on the stand to try and contextualise what's going on here is a piece that was published, I think, in the Chicago Tribune where the author says the way to solve the street homelessness problem

is to give the homeless bread and make sure it's laced with. with strickenine. So this was the kind of the atmosphere at the time. So it was deeply, deeply partial to introduce material that was highly selective, frighten the jury, sway public opinion, and basically convict the people, these people on the stand, not for what they'd done, but really for just publishing what they'd said. Yes. And this was also a moment where the realm of free speech as a right that Americans have was not clearly delineated. This trial occurred under state law, not under federal law, which would have been protected by the Bill of Rights. And so what exactly constituted the freedom to say what you wanted to say was not what we consider

it to be today. And I should also say that this began a long process in the United States of revolutionary groups being tried for the beliefs rather than for their acts. And this process continues through the 20th century. And I would say that Haymarket marks a very important moment and the development of that and the efforts of the judiciary in America to draw that line in the right place between what you can think and what you are doing,

this marks a very important moment in that process. Could you come in that, Christopher? It was shocking. There had never been a dynamite bomb thrown. It horrified everyone, and hysteria erupted because there could be anarchists anywhere. All these immigrants could be anarchists.

All these Czech and German immigrants could be anarchists. Bombs could be thrown at anybody. Here are the police. Well, who are they going to throw it at next? Right. And so getting the anarchists, stamping out anarchism became the issue and not just these particular defendants. In fact, the prosecution said at the beginning of the trial, anarchy is on trial here.

Could you come in in like, Gary? Well, let me first say in response to Christopher, not only was the labor question national, it was international. and the labor question how to solve the inequalities that capitalism was producing was being discussed throughout what we today would call the global north. This fear began with the Paris Commune in the early 1870s, and one of the consequences of the Paris Commune, and you can see this in American cities today, the building of armories that follows the Paris Commune

to guard future property holders against assaults on their property and against the resort to violence. And so this is a country, this is a moment already prepped by events that are going on elsewhere. And so some people are saying in 1886, oh my God, the French commune has come to America. And this is something we absolutely cannot tolerate. How did anarchists see themselves when they were being attacked across the continent? We have to probably distinguish between different groups of anarchists because not all of them have the same orientation to propaganda of the deed and the resort to. violence. But Parsons, when he's asked to make his final comments before the sentence is imposed,

and one of the questions is, is he going to plead for clemency? No, but he's defiant. This is where he says, dynamite is democracy. Dynamite puts means of violence heretofore controlled by elites into the hands of the masses. That's his first statement. And what it does is to reaffirm the justice of a certain kind of revolutionary violence in certain situations. Then he goes, not to say, nothing said in this courtroom over these weeks and months has proven anything about my involvement in this particular violent act. But it's so interesting and I think so revealing that he begins his last word and his last testament, not with that statement, not by saying I'm innocent, but by reaffirming the necessity upon certain occasions to use revolutionary

violence for the sake of defending the working class. And anarchists would struggle with this issue, because the resort to violence did not die among anarchists in the United States, but among some groups of anarchists, they began to say, in order to protect their vision of a humane life, which they had, which Christopher articulated earlier, a world of small groups of people governing themselves without outside force. In order to protect that dream, some do begin to renounce violence. And one of them becomes the most famous anarchists of the early 20th century in the United States, and that is Emma Goldman. She believes in the general strike. She believes in confrontations between employers and employees.

She believes in a conjuncture that might bring capitalism down, but she does not believe in the propaganda of the deed. Although she does, actually, she is involved in the attempted assassination of Henry Frick, and she does say, the revolution is not going to come in kick gloves. So, you know, she says everyone, we'd all like to be Tolstoyans, but the truth is, you know, if we just stand here, we're going to get shot. And I think that was Parsons' view too, and, you know, on the other side of that, I mean, he's, he appeals to American traditions to make this arguments. I mean, the, you know, the language of the Pittsburgh manifesto evokes the Declaration of Independence. They talk about Jefferson. They talk about the duty of workers to rise against tyranny. And one of the things, I mean, he speaks on the stand for, for two days, over eight hours, over two days, where he takes apart the arguments that are being put about, about anarchism. And he's, I mean, he speaks on the stand for, for two days, for two days, and he speaks on the stand for two days, and he speaks. He speaks. And he speaks. And he speaks. And he speaks, he speaks, he speaks, he speaks says, you know, we're living in a state which has no freedom. There is no emancipation. We're being conned by what happened in the civil war. The difference is that in the old days, it was the master who chose the slave, and now it's the slave who has to choose the master. You know, that's not freedom. You know, what they wanted, I mean, they attacked property and they attacked

the property. They wanted the destruction of the ruling class. They wanted a cooperative society with free exchange between producers and federalism. They wanted universal secular education for men and women. They wanted equality irrespective of race or sex. So these ideas were, they were radical in the sense that the conclusion they came to was that you wouldn't be able to achieve this within the constitution because the constitution was rigged in favour of the property owners. So you had to destroy the constitution in order to get the freedom. And that was what was radical about them. But one of the things that the defense introduced in the trial were essays by John Stuart Mill and Victor Hugo to show that what the anarchists were arguing for was not so remote

from some of the leading intellectuals and philosophers in Europe. I mean, their ideas were for all of the principles of the Constitution, what the anarchists were saying was the Constitution was betraying them. Guy, would you realize you come in? There are profoundly attractive elements of anarchist philosophy and ideology. But I would say, on balance, the refusal to renounce revolutionary violence in the United States, hurt radicalism more than it helped it. And by the early 20th century, the exclusion of anarchists from coming to the United States, later the exclusion of communists from coming to the United States, special penalties erected. My own judgment is that the anarchists would have been better off renouncing this

tool of violence. It's not to say their analysis was wrong, but I would say their strategy was misconceived in a country like the United States. Christopher, you? There's a tension, which is that the main bulk of the movement's focus is on achieving the eight-hour day, on winning gains for working-class people, on transforming the conditions of labor, and doing so through a social transformation that they call a revolution. But because they're being met, just for striking, just for having a union, there's no law that says you can have a union and no law that says you have the right to strike at that time.

In fact, the state comes in and defends the employer's right to fire you. So they're getting clubbed and they're getting shot and they're getting killed. And because of that, they come to the idea that force is going to be inevitable in this process, that you can't get around force. It's a class war. And then there's a problem because under what circumstances precisely is force justifiable. And they're very elastic. They write in moments of passion.

They write in moments of anger. And sometimes it seems indiscriminate the kind of force that they might countenance. At other times, it's quite clear, contextually, that what they're advocating is armed self-defense. But that then gets them into trouble and becomes their Achilles heel in the trial because it seems like they're just celebrating dynamite. When that wasn't really what they were about, what they were really about, was social equality. Yeah, and I think that's... So, I mean, the case that's being made against them

is that anarchism isn't a doctrine at all. Anachism is for people who just want to kill people. And that was pretty much what the prosecution were arguing. And what the anarchists were trying to say on the stand, and they all took the stand, and they all defended what they were doing. And they didn't try and hide the fact that they were advocating physical force in their defense.

So they didn't try and conceal this. But what they tried to explain was what the doctrine meant. And, you know, their testament is still available, and they take apart capitalism, and that's what they do. And on November the 11th, 1887, four of them, including Parsons and Spees, were hanged. Ling had already killed himself. Can I come back to you, Christopher? What about this trial gave it the impetus to be so internationally significant?

At the time of the bombing, The labor movement virtually collapsed in the United States. There was tremendous repression, hundreds of labor activists arrested in Chicago. There was a red scare. There was an anarchist scare. But it takes about a year before the conviction gets passed down. And once it becomes clear that they will hang and that there wasn't actually anything proving they had anything to do with the throwing of the bomb. It becomes an international cause celebrity.

people like Oscar Wild and George Bernard Shaw and William Morris send a telegram from London appealing to the governor for clemency. There are demonstrations in Vienna, demonstrations in London. All around the world, the labor movement knows that these men are going to die. They have very little sympathy for anarchists and none for the propaganda of the deed, but they know that these men are innocent of murder. and yet going to hang. And then when the four men are hung,

it's felt deeply as a tragedy. And they're felt to be martyrs, not to anarchism, not to propaganda of the deed, not to murder, but to labor and its cause. And that's when you get the creation of May Day as an international workers holiday. Now, ironically, that day is not really celebrated in the United States. You know, there's no real May Day Labor Day in the United States.

But internationally, it becomes the international. workers' holiday because of the activity of the international labor movement and intellectuals and writers who are sympathetic. So, Mark, to you, guide. Well, it did not do anything to dampen labor capital conflict in the United States. It breaks out with a fury again in the 1890s. Employers with the allied with the state, the government, which is inclined to call in the troops to repress strikes, leads to violent encounters during the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1893,

and the Homestead Strike, Steelworks, Andrew Carnegie of 1894. And this pattern of violence extends through the first decade and a half of the 20th century. So what the trial exposes is not just the injustice of these men being hung for a crime they didn't commit. It exposes the repressive character of labor relations in the United States. And it exposes the fact that instruments are not available to manage. these conflicts in a non-violent way. So the legacy is profound in the form of workers and their union saying we will not rest until a better system of industrial relations comes to the United States. When did that come to the United States?

1930s and 40s. It takes half a century after the Haymarket for that to happen. Can you tell us a bit more, to follow that up, Ruth, of the longer legacy of the Haymarket Affair? The immediate effect on a lot of radicals and socialists is to really radicalise people, to draw people to anarchism. I mean, it exposes not only the repressiveness of labour relations, but also the brokenness of American institutions. So, you know, people begin to question that, you know, how different the new world is from the old world.

I mean, it just seems very arbitrary. People like Emma Goldman are brought into anarchism because of the Haymarket affair. One of the things that happens in Chicago is a monument is put up to commemorate the police. which gets blown up in 1969 by the weathermen. But the other sort of main line comes through Lucy Parsons, who's the widow of Albert Parsons,

and she's the link between the Chicago idea that's articulated in Haymarket and the Industrial Workers of the World. So she's at the founding conference of the Industrial Workers of the World. It's not an explicitly anarchist organisation, but it's packed with anarchists, and it meets the same kinds of repressive violence as the Haymarket anarchists had met.

Did you just eventually die, way. Gary? I would say it declined pretty significantly in the first three quarters of the 20th century. What occasioned that decline? The reluctance of anarchists to lay out a strategy of governance that was bigger and broader than small communities of workers governing themselves. It did not really have an answer to the state. It wanted to abolish the state. And, the 20th century is a story of the state triumphing on both the left and the right and the major movement of radicalism, socialism moving into state building in the form of socialism and communism. Anarchism has been reborn in the late 20th and early 21st century, in part

in reaction to the destruction of the dream of communism, concentrating all power onto the state. And as radicals began to rethink what should be the role of state power and constructing the lives of ordinary people. A process of rediscovering anarchism has unfolded in the United States, beginning in the movement in Seattle in 1999 and then blossoming in Occupy Wall Street in 2011. So I think what we're seeing now is the quite interesting and significant rebirth of interest in anarchist ideals and programs after a long half century where they, I would say, fell to the margins. Christopher. The ideas that they're talking about persisting are the notion of a self-governing free society

and of autonomous collectives pursuing that rather than the propaganda of the deed of Johann most. I would say Haymarket, and there were subsequent attempts, was a good example of how the so-called propaganda of the deed, i.e., in a revolutionary situation, revolutionary violence can inspire the masses to rise up, is actually completely wrong, that it only strengthens the state. It only invites tremendous repression against the whole of the movement. It discredits the cause. So the propaganda of the deed, ironically, the propaganda effect is to popularize the notion that that's a dead end and that that's not the way to go. That, you know, we lose our parsons and our speeds if we do that. You know, we lose our radical leaders and give the state a pretext to suppress them.

We're coming to the end of the program now. Ruth? November the 11th is still a big day for people connected with the anarchist movement and people on the left. And I think the reason that it is is because the group that were put on trial and executed and ultimately had the verdicts quashed. So the verdicts were quashed in 1893, by which time they were dead. Four of them were dead, five of them were dead. But I think the reason that they become so important is because they're standing.

status, the way they present themselves on the stand is so impressive. And I think they encapsulate all that's best, if you like, in labor activism and anti-capitalist resistance. I mean, they don't have the profile of someone like Joe Hill, but that's where they sit. Gary? As I look over the last 150 years in say market, what I think of is the role of the left in influencing discussion and debate on labor in America and the need to address the inequalities of capitalism. I've spent a lot of times studying and thinking about the left and labor relations. I have difficulty imagining a time when the left will actually triumph in the United States. But at the same time, the moments of greatest social progress have occurred when there's been

a vigorous left to present the case, to make the case, and to influence those further to the right, those in the center, about the necessity of reform. A youngish political science professor at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s, a man by the name of Woodrow Wilson, was profoundly upset about the violence and labor disorder in American society. He did not like anarchists, but when he came into office and when he went to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he said, the labor question is the most urgent question that confronts us in the world. And unless we resolve that, nothing else will happen. That is where I find. the legacy of Haymarket.

Christopher? I think it might be worth just us ending by speaking a little about the dignity they had on the gallows, the four men. They came down. Traditionally, somebody who's about to be hung gets to speak a last word. They clearly had that in their minds. And yet the hangmen just put the hood over their heads right away and put the noose on right away. And Spies said something to the effect.

of the voices you silence today will be the ones heard in history. And Parsons began to say, won't you let us speak, the voice to the people must be heard, and then the news dropped in the four men, came through the trapdoor. It took seven full minutes. The operation was done so poorly that they didn't have their necks snapped. And the gruesomeness of that is part of the emotion that it caused globally. And there's a way in which their deaths demonstrate what they stood for. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks to Ruth Kinnair, Gary Gersel and Christopher Phelps. Next week, the poet, soldier, and novelist Robert Gray, who's known for his war poetry, his mythology of the white goddess, and for I Claudius. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes. of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I start up by asking you, what didn't you say you'd like to have said? Would you like to say, Ruth? So there's one thing I think that we didn't touch on, which is the fact that when the day after Haymarket, Parsons also left town. He was told that, you know, he was...

This is such a great story. Yeah, in fact, I mean, in the railroad strike, he'd been arrested then, and he'd been told that he ought to leave Chicago, otherwise he was going to get lynched, because he was deemed to be such a threat to the employers. But he stayed. But after Haymarket, he left town.

And he spent quite a long time away. And he came back. He came back once the trial had started. And he makes this entrance into the room. And it doesn't have quite the effect, I think, that they were hoping that Captain Black, who is his lawyer, was hoping it would have, that this would be the sort of the moment

that everyone would realize. is that they were innocent and that this man was going to come and plead not guilty and stand his ground. And because he was, you know, who he was, this American-born, unimpeachable sort of had this pedigree of being American, you know, he comes back to face the music and in the hope that this is going to change the atmosphere

of the conduct of the trial, but of course it doesn't. But it's a brave thing for him to do. The other thing is that he, in the, interval between the sentencing and the actual passing of the sentence, the execution, the Haymarket anarchists are all given the opportunity to plead for clemency. Parsons refuses. Spies does and then withdraws. Christopher, yeah.

Just another Parsons angle is that even though the American cluster of radical labor activists in the anarchist movement was tiny, he was a mass leader who would speak to 20,000, workers at a time. He was known all over the city of Chicago. He was much more famous than any of the Germans. And it's worth noting that he had a theory about who threw the bomb. We will never know who threw the bomb. We would all love to know who threw the bomb. It wasn't clarified by the trial at all. But Parsons posited that it was actually either Pinkertons or police agents who had themselves thrown the bomb to discredit the labor movement. Perhaps we're trying to throw it at the wagon to kill the anarchist, so forth. Now, actually, from all I've read, don't myself think that this

likely holds up, but it's worth just throwing out there that there were people, and not just Parsons, who sincerely believed at the time that this was actually a kind of a jean provocateur, rather than an anarchist throwing the bomb. It's much more likely that it was some young, excitable person angered at the killing of the workers at the McCormick Reaper works the day before who did it precipitously and without knowledge of all the rest of the so-called conspirators. And that's what, for instance, the historian Paul Average, who's a superb historian of anarchism, after his long book concluded that it was somebody like that. Anyway, there are various theories for who threw the bomb.

Average had a confession, didn't he? So after he published the Haymarket tragedy, someone, a granddaughter of an anarchist, got in touch with him and said, I think it's my grandfather. Uh-huh. And an Average went and checked his notes to see who he had listed at the Pittsburgh conference. And this guy's name was on the list. So the last thing that Average had to say about the bomb thrower was it was this guy called George Meng. Yeah.

But that's never been proven. No, we have to say there's like layer and layer and layer of rumor about this and nobody will ever know. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I would make two points. First, there's a view about. America that didn't need socialism, didn't need anarchism, a classless society. Socialism

always weaker there. Anarchism always weaker there than in Europe, unions often smaller than in other industrialized countries. It's also true that in the late 19th century, the United States has the bloodiest history of industrial relations of any industrializing country. And in that respect, Haymarket is not a unique event. It's part of a pattern of industrial relations, which dominates in America for 30 or 40 years. And I think it's important to understand that because it gives one a different view about America in the late 19th century. The other point I would make is that even though majority opinion after Haymarket turned against the anarchists, there were other people who were radicalized by their anger. One was that the governor

of Illinois who came into office and who commuted the sentences, John Peter Alckel. And at a somewhat later time, a man by the name of Eugene Victor Debs, who in the 1880s was a quite conservative railway man, becomes the leader of the American Railroad Union in 1993. And is a great believer in America, Jefferson, Liberty, is hauled off to jail. for engaging in a strike, and while in jail says that America is not the true America, one can't understand America without reading and understanding Karl Marx. And Eugene Victor Debs comes out of that jail, another form of violence, a socialist,

and will go on to become the most important socialist in American history. This is, his story is related to the Haymarket story. another unionist confronting the heavy hand of repression in America. Can you tell us about the man called Fielden? Yeah, Samuel Fielden. He's the only English member of the group that's put on trial. And he's one of the people who eventually manages to avoid execution. He's brought up in Lancashire. He's the son of a chartist and supporter of Irish home rule,

so he comes from a sort of fairly radical background. He's sent to work in the mill from Angershire Mills from about the age of eight. His mother who dies when he's very young, introduced him to Methodism, and he becomes a Methodist preacher. He goes to America quite late on, so I don't think he's, I mean, he's not been in Chicago for very long before Haymarket, maybe a year, maybe two. But he's, I mean, he's someone who is already radicalised before he gets there.

He comes from this sort of very strong tradition of British justice, if you like, of the working people's rights and he gets involved in the labour struggles and he's an amazing speaker and orator. And so he becomes, or he comes under the radar of Schbees and it's Schbees who invites him to go and speak at Haymarket. And he's the man who's standing on the cart

right at the end of the meeting talking to the workers when the police come in. And when the bomb's thrown, he's just coming down from the platform and he runs out of the square and he gets shot, so he gets shot through the leg. And he's rounded up just as an ordinary Labour leader. And he also gives an amazing testimony on the stand,

which is all about his early childhood in Lancashire, the process of his radicalisation and why it is that he supports the workers' cause in America. They're given a chance when they're convicted to renounce violence, and he's one of the ones who does, and then later Altgede pardons. So Fielden inherits a little bit of English money and moves to Colorado and never seen again on a farm until he dies in his 70s.

He keeps in touch with Lizzie Swank. Yeah, but not active in the movement. No, he's not active in the movement. I think he had been sobered by the entire matter and didn't want to get mixed up in such things again. That's true. And he comes at it from a different sort of tradition, I guess, in terms of his. But the irony is that at the moment he,

He's on the wagon, and the police come and say, we're giving you an order to disperse. He says to them, we are peaceable. And right then the bomb is thrown. Yeah. Well, thank you again very much. I think Simon our producer is waiting to enter the fray. Ah, cookies.

Does anyone want to your coffee? Tea, Melvin? I love it. I'd take a cup of tea. Tea, please. Terry. Thank you very much, everybody. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson,

and it's a BBC Studios' audio. production. It's election time in the United States, but this is social media's world, and the election is just living in it. Accurate information about elections. Unfortunately, that is as entertaining? As false information? Join me, Marianna Spring, as I uncover how life online is shaping American people and American

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