August Spies

August Spies
"The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Anarchist Within: Introduction to the Research Project


© Francisco Morán and Back to Haymarket: Notes from the Gallows, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Francisco Morán and Back to Haymarket: Notes from the Gallows with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Francisco Morán, Southern Methodist University

In his 2011 monograph The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists Timothy Messer-Kreuse concluded that "Chicago’s anarchists were part on an international terrorist network and did hatch a conspiracy to attack police with bombs and guns that May day weekend." Not only this, but he also concludes that "by the standards of the age, the trial was fair, the jury representative, and the evidence establishing most of the defendants' guilt overwhelming" (The Trial... 8). This would mean that Messer-Kreuse finally established "the truth" about the Haymarket affair because unlike the historians who preceded him, he worked with rigor and objectivity. "The leading historians who have written comprehensive accounts of the Haymarket bombing," he writes, "drew their facts not from the full verbatim transcript of the trial, a daunting record thousands of page long [...] but from the widely available Record of Abstract, a brief version of the proceedings accommodated in just two volumes." On the other hand, while "nearly all of our contemporary knowledge of this event [i.e., the knowledge produced by the most outstanding historians] rests on sources and accounts produced by the defenders of the anarchists themselves" (7). Messer-Kreuse mostly based his findings on the evidence found in the "entire transcript of the trial" which, as he says, is available on the internet. In other words, the rigor of his work is evident – or should be for us – in his supposedly unbiased research, even though if – as just happens to be the case – most of his sources are markedly anti-anarchists. It should be noted at this point that the strength of the author’s conclusions  mirrors his implicitly claims of unbiased research. Rhetorically, each statement falls with the weight of the gavel with which a judge rules:

I spent days reading through the compelling testimony, and to my astonishment, discovered verbatim to trial unlike any I have ever read about. […] I found a judge very different from the bigoted and corrupt hanging judge who had been described as having open contempt for the defense and favoritism toward the prosecutors at every turn. I read the testimony of eyewitnesses who alleged firsthand knowledge of a bomb conspiracy [...] I read the reports of chemists [...] I was astonished to find obvious and glaring contradictions in the testimony of defense witnesses [...] (6-7) (emphasis added).

            The truth, transparent and crystalline, appears before us as it rises so we can see it… for the first time. Yes, the truth just as it lies undisputed in the transcripts of the trial. Messer-Kruse presents a kind of phonographic record of truth. His authorial intervention itself almost disappears of the narrative always returning first person, under the weight of the verbs: I spent, I found, I read – repeated – I was astonished. He is unwilling to leave room for doubts. He only finds what was already there. Interestingly, in moving forward the historian dismisses the need for trained detective-like intuition, a perspective trained in suspicion: "No new troves of forgotten papers discovered in some dusty attic were needed to completely rewrite the history of this most-written-about event” (8). His "rigor" is such and such is his self-confidence, that he is not willing to consider any other evidence that could certainly be found in the "forgotten papers" in any "dusty attic." The paradox of all this, however, is that when the time comes for the summary execution of historians that preceded him, Messer-Kruse cannot help but resort to the same war plan colored of anarchism: “All the combustible material needed to put the torch to a century of scholarship was there lying about in plain sight, simply ignored" (8). His eyes must have turned red in seeing all the fuel that he thought was available for him to reduce other scholars’ works to a handful of ashes.
            One of the most unique aspects of Messer-Kruse argument is his assertion that "[i] n describing the legal process that condemned seven men to the gallows and one other to 15 years in the state prison" he did not intended  "to apply contemporary standards of justice and criminal procedure to an era that had not yet adopted them," for "in order to truly understand what the trial meant to people at that time, it is necessary to interpret it by the legal standards of their own day" (8). He believes then that by applying his method not only he will not produce a biased interpretation of the Haymarket affair but also, and more importantly, that people – whatever he may understand by people – at that time understood the trial in a single, very specific clear way, and to which he is sure to have access. No, Messer-Kruse will not rely mainly on anarchist propaganda as historian Paul Avrich did, nor he will be equally biased as James Green. But, doesn’t Messer-Kruse himself accept both the prosecution and the police’s versions almost to the letter? It is not difficult to see what is behind his claims of objectivity. If as he tells us, the guilt of the anarchists had been sufficiently demonstrated it would not have been necessary to resort to this argument whose purpose, obviously, is an attempt to disqualify previous criticisms to the way the trial was conducted from start to end, for those criticisms judged it with other standards other than those used in 1880s. What Messer-Kruse forgets is whether in the 1880s or today laws – and more importantly their enforcement – have never been completely unbiased. And if ever there was a trial markedly biased, it was the one that condemned and sentenced the Chicago anarchists to die on the gallows.
Now, the starting point of this study is the argument – previously  proposed by Carl Smith and Kristin Boudreau – that the anarchists’ trial in the court as well in the mainstream press, and even in the pulpit, was first and foremost of all a dispute over the interpretation of certain signifiers that the trial only enhanced. The debates surrounding  them had already a long history.  Smith’s approach is particularly revealing because of the problem of interpretation, of how to make intelligible the urban space that was perceived as chaotic. This approach allows him to establish a convincing symbolic continuity between the Great Chicago Fire (1871), Haymarket’s bombing (1886) and the Pullman strike (1894). The fire, Smith argues that "seemed to both expose and represent some disturbing aspects of the culture of newly dominant cities like Chicago." The matter at hand was that "the development of the city, even apart from this particular disastrous event, had its own incendiary quality," and that "[t] he social order of Chicago was inherently volatile, and it might burst into flame at any moment." So, the Haymarket’s bomb "hit a cultural nerve" and was "[i]mmediately perceived as a critically representative event at this time of social conflict" (2). As stated by Smith, "[t] he passion that characterized the discussion of the meaning of urban life in this period reveals how important the establishing of imaginative control over the city was thought to be" (7). Hence for him the fire, the bomb and the strike, even though they are not literary phenomena properly stated, they also belong to literature "in the sense that they were meant to express, and were taken to be expressing certain meanings" (9). [1]  In fact, my own approach to the Haymarket affair will certainly be based as strongly on literature as on history and other disciplines like labor relations, be labor history, psychoanalysis, visual arts, high and popular culture, publicity, etc. For I argue that we can only advance in the understanding of the event that took place on May 4, 1886 and of its subsequent trial and execution by taking a truly inter-disciplinary approach and bring into the discussion as many voices as possible.
            I consider the emphasis useful that Smith places on the influence that exerted "[a] uthors of every kind, including politicians, business and labor leaders, reformers, and radicals." All of these figures "conspired with professional writers in fashioning urban disorder for an eager public at a time when the most engaging news story was the life in the modern city" (10) (emphasis added). The public eager for news about urban life, as much as those writers who contributed to satisfy this desire made the disorder both a source of fear and uncertainty. Moreover, the writing-reading of the chaotic city spurred the most heavily repressed desires. The possibility of "organizing" the chaos of the city in writing, of the social volcano that was active on a horizon that, depending on the case, approached or distanced itself from the reader, allowed the illusion that the threat could be mastered. In the end writers and readers were bedfellows that shared fear and desire. If we fail to understand this complicity we will also fail in realize that as much a source of fear, the incendiary speech about anarchists was also a source of desire. There was at the time of the Haymarket’s bombing – and I will demonstrated it – an intense fascination with explosives and explosives and detonations. Moreover, it must be added anarchists were not the only ones who had access to dynamite. At the time, it was inexpensive, easily fabricated and legal. I dare to say that Chicago’s mainstream press found in anarchists an endless source of sensationalism in anarchists. The press sold fear – doesn’t this ring a bell? – to a scared and desiring readership. Fear became a commodity which in no way was exclusively linked to reports of anarchist meetings and parades. The bomb-throwing anarchist was the other that however sat comfortably within his very enemies. Thus we can understand why Messer-Kruse resorted to what we may consider an anarchist metaphor in dreaming about setting on fire a  whole century of academic studies. But a still more eloquent
example of the importance that the symbolic it should be accorded in the debate over Haymarket is A. R. Cassidy’s engraving, published in The Graphic News on June 5, 1886 and entitled: "Justice hurling a bomb." On the website chicagohistory.org a comment admirably sums up the reversal of the signifier anarchism, representing nothing less than the State of Illinois as the anarchist in the engraving:

This is one of the multitudes of publishing contemporary drawings and cartoons relating to Haymarket. Published a month after the bombing and a little more than two weeks before the trial began, it can be read as an unintentional validation of the defendants' frequent charge that it was the state and representatives of "civilization" and "order" who were the real anarchists.

Here a determined female figure representing the state and standing on what appears to be an anarchist flag or banner seems to behave like a stereotypical anarchist. She hurls a fizzing bomb labeled "law" at the fleeing crowd. While at least two men carry guns, this "mob" looks more like middle-class Chicagoans than working people. In the upper right is an uncannily prophetic vision of the current police monument that would be unveiled three years later. [2]


           It is not, of course, that the drawing can be read as an involuntary legitimization of the defendants’ frequent allegation that the real anarchists were the State and representatives of the "civilization" and "order," but that it is impossible not to arrive at this conclusion upon seeing this cartoon. The commentary is excellent, but still it is worth adding something of the utmost importance. The cartoon in question, also re-stages, but in reverse, what happened in Haymarket. Thus, the State of Illinois is identified and denounced publicly as the author of the bloody deed, that is, as the true bomb-throwing anarchist. On the other hand, the image of the monument to the police that would be built in 1889, in addition to being ominously prophetic as it is a deictic pointing to the presence of the absence of the monument to come and of the dead police it represents, in turn implicates police as an accomplice of what happened. Indeed, the gesture of the policeman with his arm raised, wielding the baton evokes the order given by Captain William Ward to the anarchists in the Haymarket meeting of "[i] n the name of the people of the state of Illinois," disperse "immediately and peaceably" (Smith 121). The caricature, just as deliberately
anti-anarchist, it  unconsciously subverts the official story of what happened when only one month after the Haymarket bombing.

            II

In his opening remarks before the jury in the trial of Chicago anarchists, the Prosecutor of the State of Illinois Julius Grinnell stated: "In the light of 4th of May we now know that the preachings of Anarchy, the suggestions of these defendants hourly and daily for years, have been sapping our institutions, and that where they have cried murder, bloodshed, Anarchy and dynamite, they have meant what they said, and proposed to do what they threatened" (AST 26) (my emphasis). Messer-Kruse continues the same line of thought: "Though no one took them seriously at the time..."(The Trial 58; emphasis added) (my emphasis). It is not true that the anarchists were not taken seriously, or was not given importance to what they preached. To return Grinnell’s affirmation, supposedly what was known was linked more to what it was not know: anarchist ideas were undermining the institutions of the State. Indeed, it was perfectly possible that they were taken seriously – and we will offer abundant examples of that this was the case – but for mysterious reasons the forces of law and order did not act. Here is the heart of the matter: why weren’t the anarchists repressed when Chicago’s mainstream newspapers since at least 1884 increased the publications of sensationalist chronicles, reports and opinion pieces about the danger, ever more imminent, posed by the anarchists preaching? [3]  Among the many examples that show that the anarchists had been taken seriously and that authorities had a plan of action beforehand long before the Haymarket affair is this passage from a long article entitled "Nihilism in Russia and Canada" published by The Inter-Ocean on October 12, 1884:

            One point will be probably discovered by these anarchists as their efforts grow formidable. As an American militia is far more prompt and merciless than an imperial army in the suppression of riots, so if the American people become alarmed at the movements of anarchists will their action be infinitely more condign and vengeful, sharp and decisive. The tone of American opinion has therefore been that these ebullitions of social lunacy, if allowed to effervesce, will work their gas off harmlessly. Let this hope be widely dispelled, and the public mind made certain that anarchism means malicious and deadly force, endangering the useful, the innocent, the helpless, and those anarchists will find that Russian despotism will be less effective for their suppression than American law -such as would be evoked by such an occasion (12) (emphasis added, including underlined text).

            The sinister connotations of the warning are evident. We are one year and seven months away from May 4, 1886, and here the immediate consequences of that day for the anarchists of the United States (Chicago’s specially) are ominously and publicly  announced. But there are details that require still greater attention. It should be noted that, according to the article, this action would suffice only if movements of the anarchists arrived to such an extent that they constitute a true alarm for the public to make it react with force, vengeful mood and firmly to give them their due. This is explained by the author’s conviction that the anarchists meant what they proposed, that is, the use of "malicious and deadly force." In due time, I will show that, at least throughout 1885 the press made sure that the public was continuously alarmed through the relentless publishing of articles, news, and incendiary chronicles on the activities of and what the anarchists said – both at home and abroad. Anarchists were depicted as monsters and lunatics, so there is the possibility that if the announced strong and vengeful response did not occur before May 4th It was perhaps due to the fact that authorities were waiting for the right time to deliver the blow that would silence the anarchists and, in doing so, undermine the achievements of the organized labor, especially the eight-hour workday movement and the demands for wage increase. Another point that is worth noting in the quoted text is the use of the passive voice in "if the American people become alarmed." Alarmed, by whom? Was it the joint work of the press, the private sector, the pulpit, and in general the forces of law and order in the service of the status to alarm the public? For this reason, we should critically interrogate notions such as "American people" and "American opinion" and not simply assume that they meant something precise, easily verifiable. Moreover, and no less important, is the anticipation of what was to come in the expression "in such occasion" in reference to the event - the occasion - that the law would be invoked to legitimize violence against the anarchists.

One of my main hypotheses is that we cannot separate the discussion of anarchism in the United States, and more specifically the Haymarket affair, from the advances that through various routes were carried out rapidly by organized labor. Anarchism was not, I contend, what most concerned the forces and institutions of law and order. Seeing things from the distance of time it is possible to say – and evidence so permitted it – that the execution of the Chicago anarchists was meant to be and send a serious warning to workers and to the organizers of the labor movement. It must be said plainly that what was implemented in the country after the Haymarket affair was, or at least came very close to being so, a fascist State. When the Chicago newspapers are reviewed one can see and feel both the repression that followed immediately, and its natural corollary: fear. Messer-Kruse didn't think it twice to confirm the existence of an anarchist conspiracy. I then propose a proper and quite plausible counter-thesis: there was a conspiracy, but it was hatched by the interests of businessmen with the support of the Chicago police, famous already for its repressive character.
            As I said before, Timothy Messer-Kruse criticizes the historians that preceded him for their bias, Avrich above all: "In the four chapters of Avrich book that primarily deal with the facts of the Haymarket trial, 93 of his 229 citations, or 40 percent of the total, cite contemporary anarchist publications, the memoirs of the accused, the accounts of the trial by defendants' attorneys"", or the history of the trial published by Dyer Lum" (The Trial 7-8). Regarding the book Death in the Haymarket by James Green, he says that its title "even casts into the passive voice the murderous act itself" (5). But what would we then say about the subtitle of Messer-Kruse’s book itself: "Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age"? Doesn’t its author incur in the same bias for which he censors his other colleagues? Doesn’t the subtitle transparently distinguish terrorism (anarchists) justice (the State of Illinois) and thus legitimates the hanging? And in spite of his clear alignment with the police, Messer-Kruse still declares that: "My aim is not to prove that the police and the courts were right and the anarchists and their supporters wrong" (8). He denies what is clear to any reader, namely, that his study is not less biased than that of those who he criticizes. In the long run he is possibly the most biased of all the historians that have addressed the Haymarket affair, since to my knowledge, he is the only one suggesting that his interpretation is not ideologically charged. In his view, besides the anarchists’ conspiracy and the irrefutable proofs that were examined in the court, there were also the "legal many misjudgments on the part of the anarchists' inexperienced and politically motivated lawyers that greatly aided the prosecution"(The Haymarket, 2). Does Messer-Kruse believe that the Prosecutor and the judge were perhaps less politically motivated? Is he himself any less? And I want to make clear that in my opinion not a few criticisms made by Messer-Kruse to the historians already mentioned are valid, especially in regard to the insufficient attention paid to the transcripts of the trial. Nonetheless, he is to be criticized even more since he boasts himself of his academic rigor. For example, other evidence of the author’s bias can be found in his two allusions to John Bonfield. In The Trial... he refers to him as "the anarchists' most reviled police commander" (11), and repeats this in The Haymarket...: "Captain John Bonfield, a cop who may've been the officer most hated and reviled by the anarchists in all the city" (17). What is most revealing is not the insistence in the
anarchists' animosity against John Bonfield, but that by being anarchists – i.e., subjects that were simplified to the cartoonish level as the epitome of an irrational contempt for law and order – is not necessary to explain the cause of their criticisms of Bonfield. But this is nothing more than a gross misrepresentation of the truth, because the rejection of Bonfield was not exclusive of the anarchists, nor were the allegations groundless. In July 1885 the Chicago West Division Railway Company workers went on strike to protest the dismissal of the trade union leaders. It is important to add that the strike had broad popular support. Mayor Carter Harrison sent in the police to suppress the strike. Historian Sam Mitrani tells us that the police officers "beat their way through a throng of strikers and their supporters. They clubbed and then arrested anyone congregating near the tracks as well as anyone shouting the words 'scab' or 'rat.' The police inflicted many serious injuries as they moved at a slow pace in front of the streetcars." Police violence put an end to the strike, and after breaking the strike, "Harrison promoted Captain Bonfield to the position of inspector." Mitrani adds that "[t]he Chicago labor movement was split in its reaction to the clubbing movement. While the anarchists criticized the entire police force and Mayor Harrison, a section of the unions led by the Trades and Labor Assembly was unwilling to break with Harrison and instead laid the entire blame for the incident on Bonfield"(Mitrani 160-1; emphasis added).
There are too many examples we could to cite to demonstrate that Messer-Kruse re-tries Chicago anarchists from the side of the Prosecutor for the State of Illinois, the police, and the businessmen of Chicago. [4]  "Suspects were coaxed and cajoled into turning informants," he tells us, but adds that "the beatings and tortures that would come to be associated with the 'third degree' in the early twentieth century appear not to have been employed in this case" (emphasis added). While coaxed and cajoled suggest pressure police, and therefore a certain level of violence, even if only psychological to force certain individuals to cooperate as informants, the use of explicitly physical violence on the bodies is implied by use of the doubtful word appear. Messer-Kruse shows that he is not interested in the least in pursuing that line of evidence, and chooses instead to praise and condone the conduct of police. Thus, he quotes the anarchist John A. Henry who, after having been in prison for about three days "had nothing but warm words for his jailors and interrogators", and adds that "described the officer who escorted him, Lieutenant George Hubbard, as a 'gentleman' (unlike 'some of the police force of this city who would be honored by kinship with savages')..."(The Trial...) (26). The anarchist’s comment suggests that the treatment which Hubbard dispensed was the exception to the rule. However, in the context in which Messer-Kruse quoted it, Hubbard seems to embody the actions of the Chicago police. Hence his arrives at his conclusion that police abuse was not involved claiming that "there were two documented cases of police abuse" (26). At the end of that paragraph appears note 57 which directs us to page 193. There we find the sources of the Declaration: "Chicago News, May 22, 1886, p. 1;" Testimony of James Bonfield, HADC, vol I, pp. 375, 379." If these are his only sources regarding police brutality, how he can disqualify the findings of other historians as biased? This is important for two reasons. In the first place because to not vary, in that same note he criticizes Avrich because of the sources he used to make his "extravagant claim" of abuses committed by detectives in the police station came from an article published by Lucy Parsons on May 17, 1886 and the short memories of the anarchist Attorney Sigmund Zeisler. But Messer-Kruse conveniently forgets that Avrich acknowledged the nobility with which some police officers treated the imprisoned anarchists. Indeed, after expressing that "[n]or could the [condemned anarchists] complain of ill-treatment by their warders," Avrich says that "[t]he head jailer, Captain Folz, an elderly man with a grizzled beard was unfailingly kind and considerate, and his deputies on the whole followed suit" (Avrich 314).
            The study of the Haymarket affair that I undertake today is as personal as it is academic. In addition to the tools of historiography, I use literary analysis, the detective intuition, psychoanalysis, and all the theoretical frameworks I may deem useful and necessary. While, again, I agree with Messer-Kruse that the careful examination of the transcripts of the trial is of the utmost importance, no less is – if it is no more – the careful study of  transcripts as they appeared in Chicago newspapers, and even the articles of opinion, illustrations, jokes, and even advertising that commented the trial, as well anarchism, strikes, the fight for the day of an eight-hour workday, free speech, patriotism, etc. It would be a mistake to think that the trial was limited to the space of the courtroom, for it overflowed it and unfolded in newspapers that devoted entire pages to (re)produce it. And it is not the same to read the trial transcript isolated from the process of its reception, than to read it in the newspapers. The Prosecutor’s interventions, the statements of witnesses, etc., appeared highly dramatized. Chroniclers described the audience, characterized certain subjects, i.e., they re-stage the trial for the eager readers who could not be present. The importance of this fact cannot be overestimated: reporters were not impartial transmitters of the sessions of the trial, but rather contributed to give it a meaning, and conditioned the public’s reception. At this point I want to clarify one key issue. Almost all historians have agreed that the country’s public opinion, at least during the judicial process, was hostile to the anarchists on trial. But none of them has explained us, what exactly they meant by 'public opinion'; nor have they has given us evidence of such hostility. One has to wonder, first of all, how could it be possible to talk about public opinion, or for that matter of any kind of consensus, in a climate of fear, suspicion and surveillance. Likewise, it has to be explained why the death of the policemen became so important for public opinion – if this was the case, if it were possible to find it – while none of the previous repressive actions of the police in the past, which had caused death among strikers, and not only strikers, had never elicited such an outpouring of sorrow and anger.   The issue at hand is what is that that in those circumstances the press called “public opinion” and how did it make itself felt. That is why I think important to consider at least Kristin Boudreau’s assertion in the sense that "[t]he trial and execution were heavily reported in the press and widely followed by an attentive public, among whom no clear consensus emerged" (68) (emphasis added). I wonder if the historians have not taken by public opinion which was not but the reaction of the main newspapers: "As for the Haymarket meeting itself, the mainstream press spoke with one voice in describing the meeting as an 'unscrupulous cold-blooded massacre', and popular images like one that appeared in Harper's helped to propagate the myth" (Boudreau 69).
            But there is still something more important. The Chicago Press not only interpreted the trial sessions for its readership. It also helped to create the political and even legal framework that sided with the accusers of the anarchists. Through numerous articles of opinion and editorials from the outset, and even before the jury was selected, the press was the judge, jury and executioner of the anarchists. I will show that even advertising played an important role in the plot of what today I cannot see but as the chronicle of  deaths foretold. I aim at recreating the symbolic universe that framed and gave rise to an intense debate on various fronts on the meaning of the three events: the bomb, the trial and the execution. The debate is anything but over.

José Martí: "The Great Unknown New Yorker"    José Martí in PBS

In the interview she gave to Francisco Goldman for Bomb magazine (No. 88, 2004),
Esther Allen comments that "[m]ore than a century after his death, José Martí [s' equestrian statue in New York] exerts a magnetic force strong enough to make Canal street intersect Central Park south." Allen tells us that the Cuban José Martí "lived in New York for 16 years and is one of the greatest chroniclers of life in the United States during the late nineteenth century" (75). It is worth noticing what Goldman comments about Martí himself writing in the context of his stay in New York:

Once Walt Whitman moved to Jersey, Marti was clearly the most historically significant figure and greatest writer living in New York from 1880 to 1895. And his continued obscurity says a lot about our own culture in this country and how impossible it was for anyone writing in English in the nineteenth century to be recognized as a great New Yorker. Nobody, absolutely nobody, wrote more brilliantly and evocatively about New York at that time (80) (emphasis added).

Likewise, in the "Preface" to Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism (1975) - an anthology of Martí writings on the U.S., translated by Elinor Randall - Philip S. Foner writes that

in the Journal of inter-American Studies of April 1963, Richard B. Gray observed on Martí writings on the United States: '... if his work were as well-known as that of Baron Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, and Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth, his significance to the United States would place him above these other writers. For with consummate skill and sensitivity, Martí probed the depths of social, economic and political change in the United States in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses with rare understanding ("Preface" 10).

Esther Allen, who edited and translated what I consider the best compilation of texts by Martí, also says that

Virtually no aspect of life in the United States was left unexamined: news events were reported alongside the doing of high society, the struggles of the working classes, profiles of the leading men and women of the day, descriptions of elections, sporting events, famous trials, plays, buildings, education, family life, murders and snatches of conversation overheard in the street. Taken together, the articles comprise one of the most sustained, detailed, and perceptive portrayals of life in the United States ever written by an outside observer (Selected Writings 89; my emphasis).

It remains to be seen to what extent Martí wrote as an observer from outside the United States. But as stated by Allen, even though some of the articles from Martí “were clearly based on his personal experience, other derived largely from information gleaned in the New York newspapers, then shaped by Martí’s unique and unmistakable narrative style." Martí developed, Allen, continues "a kaleidoscopic new form of journalism that juxtaposed a dizzying diversity of stories – sometimes within a single sentence – and mingled fact and poetry, the personal and the political, the heroic and the banal, the colossal and the petty, admiration and alarm" (Selected Writings 89). There is, therefore, a substantial difference, however, between the vision of the United States of Tocqueville and Bryce, on the one hand, and that of Martí, on the other. The latter developed his ideas through his activity as a chronicler, and as such he readjusted his gaze according to the development of the events. This does not mean, of course, that one cannot find a more or less coherent thinking about the United States in his work, but rather that we also find in the contradictions and ambiguities. What is so fascinating Martí’s American journalism is the way that it captures the vertigo of the life of the country, and by extension of modernity. In the beautiful essay "The time in the American Chronicle of José Martí", Fina García Marruz says rightly we see Martí “utilize cinematographic language avant la lettre: the techniques of flashbacks, giving an air of presence to the past, a simultaneity” (242). To García Marruz, in the American prose of Martí "the images are the ones that speak now, like in cinema and painting, [it is with these] that Martí approaches things in his Central American diaries and [it is with this] much more dynamic form [that] the actual images appear in his Noth American prose… […]… This transition from the imagen-object to the dynamic image is very comparable to the transition from the pictorial to the cinematographic image” (2043). It is suggested, therefore, that there is an immediacy that makes a present, somehow, to speak to the event, the character, to the place. What is the emblematic of Martí’s prose in his American scenes is style, which is precisely where I pursue the politics in his writings, in his comments on and accounts of strikes, immigrants, anarchists, and of course, the Haymarket affair.
It is impossible, therefore to make a truly comprehensive study of his journalism of the social, cultural and political life of the United States – at least during the period 1880-1892 – if these subjects are not included in his "North-American scenes" Martí. And this cannot be done until we have a good translation into English, not a tight selection, but the same corpus of those scenes.
We have a handful of good anthologies, some even excellent. Here I should mention the first one: The America of José Marti: Selected Writings (1953), with selection and translation of Juan de Onís. In 1966, Luis A. Baralt edited and translated the texts collected in Martí on the USA. A few years later, in 1975, Foner wrote the introduction and edited the anthology mentioned - Inside the Monster -translations mainly from Elinor Randall, but also of Luis A. Baralt, Juan de Onis and Roslyn Held Foner. It was not until 1999 that another anthology of Martí appeared in English – Writing on the Americas – edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz. Esther Allen published her anthology José Martí in 2002. Selected Writings (2002) with an introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. [5]  Allen’s is the best translation of Martí to the English that we have today. It's a careful edition that includes numerous notes, as well as brief introductions to each of the sections, and even to texts by Martí.
As I said before, it is desirable that someone capable of this colossal work, undertake the translation of Martí’s Nort-American scenes. Only then we will understand why neither Francisco Goldman, nor Richard B. Gray exaggerate on their assessment of the importance of Martí’s writings when it comes to taking the pulse to the American nation in the last two decades of the 19th century. Why would the translation of those texts would constitute a work colossal? First of all, because of the voluminous space those texts occupy, whether we take them individually or in their entirety. Individually, the chronicles are certainly extensive, and mostly deal with various issues. Suffice to say that the only time they were collected in a single volume – in Bible paper – the work reached the one thousand seven hundred fifty pages approximately. And then there is the extreme difficulty of the translation itself, given the challenge posed by the Cuban’s style. In her "Translator's Note" to the anthology published by Foner, Elinor Randall gives us an idea of how difficult is to translate Martí: "His style varies from brief, pithy, and at times incomplete sentences to page-long, highly intricate ones, and it is these last named which have presented the greatest difficulties" (13-14).One cannot help but wonder then the ease with which most of the specialists have reached almost always compelling conclusions about what Martí thought or didn’t think, what he meant or didn’t mean about the United States, Cuba, and the anarchists of Chicago. It is not that Martí cannot be read, that a coherent thought cannot be revealed through these difficulties, but rather that his intricate style demands a tireless, meticulous reader.

José Martí and Haymarket

Martí wrote extensively about social questions like those of the anarchists and European immigration in the United States. For the purposes of this investigation, I will focus on the following texts: "The Revolution of Labor" published in La Nación of Buenos Aires, on May 7th , 1886); "The Strikes in the United States" in La Nación, on May 9th, 1886; "Private Correspondence for El Partido Liberal," published in Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal on May 29th, 1886; "Large Strikes in the United States" in La Nación, on June 4th and 6th, 1886; "Las Grandes Huelgas en Estados Unidos" in La Nación, on July 2, 1886; "New York in June" in La Nación, on August 15, 1886; "The Trial of the Seven Anarchists of Chicago" in La Nación, on October 21, 1886; "Private Correspondence for El Partido Liberal” in El Partido Liberal, on November 4th, 5th and 6th; "Private Correspondence for El Partido Liberal” in El Partido Liberal, on November 12th, 1886; "The Christ of Munkácsy" in La Nación, on January 28, 1887; "The Country Fairs" in El Partido Liberal, on October 7th, 1887; and "A Terrible Drama" in La Nación, on January 1th, 1888). Not all these letters (North-American scenes) are related in the same way to the Haymarket affair, and some of them only relate to it in a tangencial fashion. For this reason I will not give them all the same attention to all. They are useful, however, to illuminate the extent to which Martí’s journalism participates in the issues being elucidated in the American press, such as immigration, strikes, organized labor, anarchism, unionism. Martí’s texts are frequently in tune with the mainstream American press on those issues. However, Martí’s journalism in U.S. also is also exceptional as it were for his critical view of American imperialism. Regardless the issue or the author’s stand on it, his style is unique and his prose is truly remarkable. I risk even to say that none of the accounts of the three central events of Haymarket – the bombing, the trial and the execution of the anarchists – reported in the Chicago and New York newspapers has the intensity, nor the dynamism, almost cinematic, which one finds in the narratives of Martí. This fact is somewhat more astonishing, since he worked with the American press material, and yet, his seems to be the account of an eyewitness, someone who was present at the scene. As we will see this feature of Martí’s style has political implications.
The challenge is not revisiting Haymarket from Martí’s journalism, but to weave it into the reports in the press of New York and Chicago, so finally his work as correspondent that should report on life and events in the United States for many of the most important Latin American newspapers, finally take its most deserved place in American journalism. I trie to demonstrate that Martí’s identity is constituted by a split: he is a subject Cuban/Latin American, as well as a New Yorker/American subject. This I took in Martí, the Infinite Justice (2024), but this single study has been published in Spanish.

To conclude for now, suffice to say that I foresee the daunting risks and difficulties ahead, since I have never before tried to write at length in English, and given the challenge that is impossible to circumvent of having to take on the task of translating most of the quotes from Martí’s texts myself – let us not forget the entanglements of his style. For this reason I would appreciate the comments and suggestions from the readers, not only reviews, about my work, and any suggestion that allow me to correct, change and improve a translation, o rethink an idea.

I thank my colleague and friend James Pancrazio for reviewing the English text and for translating Fina García Marruz's quotations.
         
Bibliography

Allen, Esther and Francisco Goldman. "Francisco Goldman." Bomb. No. 88, Summer, 2004. pp. 75-80.

Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Boudreau, Kristin. "The Haymarket Anarchist Trial of 1886" in The Spectacle of Death. Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Classes. New York: Prometheus Books, 2006.

Chicago Daily Tribune . "The Anarchists. "Herr Most's Gang." April 2, 1884, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune . "The Anarchists. American Confederates." April 10, 1884, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune . "The Anarchists." July 25, 1885, p. 5.

Dimock, James . "Advocate for the prosecution / Revisiting the Haymarket affair." International Socialist Review (ISR). WEB SITE. http://isreview.org/issue/89/advocate-prosecution

García Marruz, fine. "El tiempo en la crónica americana de José Martí." En los Estados Unidos. Periodismo de 1881 a 1892. pp. 2038-50.

Grinnell, Julius. "Mr. Grinnell's opening for the prosecution." July 15." "The Chicago Anarchists." American State Trials. With Notes and Annotations. John D. Lawson, LL.D., editor. Volume XII. St. Louis: F. H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1919.

Martí, José. The America of José Martí. Selected Writings. Edited by Juan de Onís. New York: Noonday Press, 1953.

----. Martí on the USA. Selected and translated, with introduction by Luis A. Baralt and. Foreword by J. Cary Davis. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.

----. Inside the Monster: Writing on the United States and American Imperialism. Translated by Elinor Randall. With additional translations by Luis A. Baralt, Juan de Onís and Roslyn Held Foner. Edited, with an Introduction and notes, by Philip S. Foner. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

----. Political Parties and Elections in the United States. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Philip S. Foner. Translated by Elinor Randall. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

----. José Martí Reader: Writing on the Americas. New York: Ocean Press, 1999. Edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz. Introduction by Ivan Schulman. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1999.

----. Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Esther Allen. Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

----. En los Estados Unidos. Periodismo de 1881 a 1892. Ed. critical. Roberto Fernández Retamar and Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, coord. Collection files. Barcelona: UNESCO, 2003.

Timothy Messer-Kruse. The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists . Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

----. The Haymarket Conspiracy. Urbana, Springfield and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Mitrani, Sam. The Rise of the Chicago Police Department. Class and Conflict, 1850-1894. Urbana, Springfield and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Morán, Francisco. Marti, the infinite justice. Madrid: Verbum, 2014.

Smith, Carl. Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief. Second Ed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

----. The Haymarket Conspiracy. Transatlantic Anarchist Networks. Urbana, Springfield and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

The Inter-Ocean . "Austrian Oficials Claim the Recent Vienna Assassinations Were Planned in America." "An Appeal to Be Made to the United States to Squelch John Most." April 4, 1884, p. 1.

----. "Nihilism in Russia and Canada." October 12, 1884, p. 12.



[1] Kristin Boudreau writes: "Were they rabble or martyrs, traitors or patriots?" "During the eighteen months between their arrests and their executions, the five who died and the three who remained in prison became the focus of a struggle for the interpretation of the Haymarket tragedy" (72)

[3] On March 25, 1884 a dispatch from New York published in the Sunday Tribune and reproduced by the Chicago Daily Tribune informed that "some of the bonds stolen in Vienna at the time of the murder of the banker Eisert had been offered for sale in New York." The statement was also made that some of the bonds had been sent to New York by agents of the Anarchists of Chicago." The note added that a reporter "called upon several foreign brokers in this city, but all denied that any of the stolen securities had come within their notice." Then, on April 2, the same Chicago newspaper reported that in Vienna, "[t]he official police report just published state[d] that the assassins Kammerer and Stellnacher acted under orders issued by the Central Committee of the Anarchists at New York, of which Herr Most is the head" (5). Only two days later, i.e., on  April 4, The Inter-Ocean of Chicago published a cable from London making an urgent appeal: "Another appeal is to be made to America to-morrow for help to enable the monarchies of Europe to avert the explosion of the Socialistic vulcanoes over which they are reposing. This time it is Austria which is in trouble, and she is appealing to England to make common cause against the terrible anarchists, who, she thinks, are supplied with brains and leadership from the United States." First of all, let’s keep in mind first of all the sensationalism of the headline in the journalistic text: «Austrian Oficials Claim the Recent Vienna Assassinations Were Planned in America» and «An Appeal to Be Made to the United States to Squelch John Most». So, on April 10, 1884 the Chicago Daily Tribune published a cable dated in London that stated that "[a] positive proof of the connection existing between the Anarchists of Europe and their confederates in the United States ha[d] been obtained by the Swiss authorities. The Prefect of Berne recently opened a letter which had been received at the post office addressed to the expelled Anarchist, Kennel. It proved to be from New York, and was without signature except that of the 'Comite'.…” [sic] (5) (emphasis added). Well, little more than one year later, on July 23, 1885 the Chicago Daily Tribune reproduced a dispatch from Berne which said: "The report of Federal Procureur Mulle on the Anarchists in Switzerland states that [...] [a]n inquiry proved that the crimes committed at Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Franckfort, Vienna, and Niederwald were arranged in Switzerland; also that Herr and Most other German-American Anarchists were in communication" (5).
[4] In his review of The Haymarket Conspiracy posted in International Socialist Review (ISR) – significantly  entitled "Advocate for the prosecution / Revisiting the Haymarket affair"- James Dimock says poignantly: "Messer-Kruse repeatedly stresses (although he fails to provide any evidence) the thoroughness of the police's investigation of the bombing." He asserts, for example, that, "It took weeks to piece together a case that could make someone legally responsible for the tragedy." The wording here is curious and revealing. Messer-Kruse does not say that the police spent weeks to piece together who was responsible. Rather, their efforts were directed at coming up with a case by which they could hold someone legally responsible. The distinction is important. "The "someone"- or rather "someones"- had already been identified." Dimock adds that: "In his prior work on the Haymarket, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (hereafter, Trial), Messer-Kruse claims that the police began their "intense investigation" that led to the conviction of eight Chicago labor activists in the early morning hours of May 5, only hours after the bombing," with the assumption that the attack was the result of the coordinated efforts of several conspirators and not the act of a lone terrorist"(my emphasis). How is this anything but a rush to judgment? Messer-Kruse's own accounting provides us with ample reason to believe that, far from conducting a careful, reasoned, and objective investigation, police and prosecutors from the start decided to use the bombing to go after not just one bomb thrower, but the anarchist movement as a whole. Before any intense investigation could possibly have been done, the Chicago police were arresting the city's anarchist leadership in masse." See: http://isreview.org/issue/89/advocate-prosecution
     
[5] There are other translations of Martí in English, but here I only mention those that include his North American scenes.


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2 comments:

  1. Interesting approach. I wonder if Messer's reading of the counterterrorism has been colored by the 9-11 events and the US response to its suspected foes. Also curious how the Cuban journalist is related to the events.

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  2. Thanks, Jimmy. All I have to say is that I have asked myself the same question.

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