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Haymarket Riot... four "anarchists" hanged...
Haymarket Riot... four "anarchists" hanged...
Item # 563120
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FRIENDSHIP WEEKLY REGISTER, Friendship, Allegany County, N.Y., November 17, 1887* re. Haymarket Affair riots
* Execution by hanging
Page 2 one column head: "Chicago's Anarchists" & subheads: "Four of the Seven Condemned Men to Die on the Gallows" "Two Have Their Lives Spared, and One Commits Suicide".
Includes one column portraits of the seven defendants. Report takes 2 3/4 columns.
Margins are a bit pulpish causing a few minor tears, otherwise good. 4 pages.
wikipedia notes: Eight people connected directly or indirectly with the rally and its anarchist organizers were arrested afterward and charged with Degan's murder: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe. Five (Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg and Schwab) were German immigrants while a sixth, Neebe, was a U.S. citizen of German descent. The other men, Parsons and Fielden, were born in the U.S. and England respectively. Two other individuals, William Seliger and Rudolph Schnaubelt, were indicted, but never brought to trial. Seliger turned state's evidence and testified for the prosecution, and Schnaubelt fled the country before he could be brought to trial.
The trial started on June 21 and was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary. The defense counsel included Sigmund Zeisler, William Perkins Black, William Foster and Moses Salomon. The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing but argued that the person who had thrown the bomb was not discouraged to do so by the defendants, who as conspirators were therefore equally responsible. Albert Parsons' brother claimed there was evidence linking the Pinkertons to the bomb.
The jury returned guilty verdicts for all eight defendants – death sentences for seven of the men, and a sentence of 15 years in prison for Neebe. The sentencing sparked outrage from budding labor and workers movements, resulted in protests around the world and made the defendants international political celebrities and heroes within labor and radical political circles. Meanwhile the press published often sensationalized accounts and opinions about the Haymarket affair which polarized public reaction. In an article titled "Anarchy’s Red Hand", The New York Times, described the incident as the "bloody fruit" of "the villainous teachings of the Anarchists". The Chicago Times described the defendants as "arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism and murder"; to other newspapers they were "bloody brutes", "red ruffians", "dynamarchists", "bloody monsters", "cowards", "cutthroats", "thieves", "assassins", and "fiends". Journalist George Frederic Parsons wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly articulating the fears of middle-class Americans concerning labor radicalism, asserting workers had only themselves to blame for their troubles. Edward Aveling, Karl Marx's son-in-law, remarked, "If these men are ultimately hanged, it will be the Chicago Tribune that has done it".
The case was appealed in 1887 to the Supreme Court of Illinois, then to the United States Supreme Court where the defendants were represented by John Randolph Tucker, Roger Atkinson Pryor, General Benjamin F. Butler and William P. Black. The petition for certiorari was denied.
Utah Phillips speaking at Waldheim Cemetery, Forest Park (outside Chicago) in May 1986 during ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket affair.
After the appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden's and Schwab's sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887. On the eve of his scheduled execution Lingg committed suicide in his cell with a smuggled dynamite cap which he reportedly held in his mouth like a cigar (the blast blew off half his face and he survived in agony for six hours).
The next day (November 11, 1887) Spies, Parsons, Fischer and Engel were taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods. They sang the Marseillaise, the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members including Lucy Parsons who attempted to see them for the last time were arrested and searched for bombs (none were found). According to witnesses, in the moments before the men were hanged, Spies shouted, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" Witnesses reported that the condemned did not die when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the audience visibly shaken.
Lingg, Spies, Fischer, Engel and Parsons were buried at the German Waldheim Cemetery (later merged with Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Schwab and Neebe were also buried at Waldheim when they died, reuniting the "Martyrs." In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert was raised at Waldheim. Over a century later it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior, the only cemetery memorial to be noted as such.
The trial has been characterized as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in United States history. Most working people believed Pinkerton agents had provoked the incident. On June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe and Schwab after having concluded all eight defendants were innocent. The governor said the real reason for the bombing was the city of Chicago's failure to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for shooting workers. The pardons ended his political career.
The police commander who ordered the dispersal was later convicted of corruption. The bomb thrower was never identified.
Category: Post-Civil War
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