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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." P
olice 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.
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.
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.
© 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.
Literally and metaphorically,
these images blind us and challenge from the outset any attempt to produce a
tidy, coherent story. Before the explosion of the bomb that repeatedly blows up
on these covers, I think that this chaos suggests that there is another poetic
approach to the Haymarket affair, as valid as any other: rather than the
chronological narrative, well organized, another approach would play its cards only
on splinters of truth; splinters caught on the fly at the very instant of the
explosion. Such a story could just as well have only one recognizable
organizing principle: the obsession that could
cast us into the whirlwind of that story. This research would then be ruled
by the anarchist principle of any explosion: splintered truths, and slivers of
truth caught in an image, in a fleeting
gesture, in a face, in rumors, as well as in the so-called historical facts. Each
sliver itself must suffice as a signifying force, and of course, it will
eventually become apparent for the readers that nonetheless each one of them,
as well as each twist and detour we will take is strongly interconnected. Yet,
this has to be achieved without following any predictable map. Therefore, let
us light the fuse. Where will the explosion throw us? We don’t know yet. 
