Relevant History welcomes back Judy Alter, a native of Chicago who lives in Texas but never lost her love for the Windy City and its lake. She is the author of over seventy books, fiction and nonfiction, adult and young-adult, including fictional biographies Libbie (Elizabeth Bacon Custer); Jessie (Jessie Benton Frémont); Cherokee Rose (Lucille Mulhall, first rodeo girl roper); and Sundance, Butch and Me (Etta Place). Today she writes contemporary cozy mysteries. She is the single parent of four children and the grandmother of seven. To learn more about her and her books, visit her web site and blog, and follow her on Facebook and Goodreads.
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In many ways, Chicago in the 1880s was a mirror image of industrial cities across the nation. It was a city of circles with the business district at the core, ringed by slums—hastily thrown up shacks and shanties, even places like the Patches where people lived outdoors on the river bank. Then came “the suburbs,” grand homes of the business barons. To the west were the Stockyards, where families lived in Packingtown with filthy streets and oppressive odors, infested in summer by mosquitoes.
Like the rest of the country, Chicago was threatened by worker unrest as laborers demanded an eight-hour day and better wages. There were 20,000 active anarchists in Chicago, led by a man named Parsons who had run for office to change the system from within. Defeated by ballot stuffing, he vowed to destroy the system, and called for strikes in his newspaper, The Alarm.
Prelude to violence
Trouble began in Chicago with the 1886 strike at the McCormick reaper plant. On 1 May 1886, a German anarchist named August Spies led 80,000 men up Michigan Avenue, where they laid down their tools. Factories were silent and empty. The city was prepared for violence, but the demonstration was peaceful. Still, nerves were on edge.
On 3 May, Cyrus McCormick used police and strikebreakers to prevent returning strikers from going back to work. They used Billy clubs and rifle butts to crack skulls and injured several, some severely. August Spies gathered the uninjured a distance away and began exhorting them about their rights. When the shift bell rang, striking workers drove the strikebreakers back inside and began smashing windows. Spies called for a peaceful meeting the following evening in Haymarket Square.
Again, the city was prepared for violence, expecting perhaps a bomb. Spies attracted only 2500 men this time. Mayor Carter Harrison asked riot troops to be on alert at the nearby police station but clearly ordered Police Chief Bonfield not to order his men to fire. A decade earlier Bonfield had ordered his men to fire at strikers, and Harrison did not want a repeat of the violence.
The mayor himself attended the rally, standing near Spies and ostentatiously lighting a cigarette over and over to call attention to his presence. Satisfied that the gathering was peaceful, he went by the police station to tell Bonfield to send his troops home. There would be no violence in Chicago that night.
The Haymarket Riot
Bonfield disobeyed. He marched his troops to the meeting, which had now dwindled to about 300 men whom he ordered to disband. Instead someone threw a bomb, Bonfield yelled “Fire,” and the police fired wildly into the crowd. At least seven policemen and one civilian died; many more were injured as men scrambled to avoid the bullets.
August Spies and seven other anarchists were arrested; seven sentenced to be hung, one to fifteen years. Two later had their sentences commuted to life in prison, and one cheated the hangman through suicide. But four men were hung. The Haymarket Riot became a landmark event in the history of America’s labor relations.
What does it have to do with the story of Cissy and Potter Palmer in my book The Gilded Cage? It is woven into the novel partly as the historical background and partly because it shows the difference in their reactions. Palmer condemned the protestors and claimed they should have stayed home. Cissy believed in taking philanthropy to those who need it. In the novel she bundles food and blankets to take to the families of the arrested men. Police, she told her son, would take care of their own—the families of those officers who died.
To me, this story has remarkable relevance in this day of social discontent and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. It was either Edmund Burke or George Santayana (sources differ) who wrote, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” That’s one of the major themes of The Gilded Cage.
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A big thanks to Judy Alter. She’ll give away a trade paperback copy of The Gilded Cage to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available in the U.S. only.
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