By Ted Kleine
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On other occasions over its 16-year history the picnic has drawn as many as 20 people, and games of Frisbee and softball have broken out. But at this picnic the five faithful lounging under the oak tree were most interested in talking about Haymarket. Not about the hangings, which historians now maintain were political executions of innocent men, but about a later outrage: a new National Park Service plaque naming the Haymarket Martyrs’ Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery a National Historic Landmark. “We just don’t think the government should have anything to do with these people who were antistate,” said Major, a bearded, ponytailed construction worker who’s well into middle age. “America killed these people!”
For years the Haymarket martyrs have been icons not just for anarchists but for the international labor movement. They died for preaching a cause that is now unassailably American: the eight-hour workday. In the first week of May 1886, 80,000 Chicago workers went on strike to demand a shorter workweek. The strike remained peaceful until May 3, when police fired into a crowd of unionists outside the McCormick Harvester Works, killing four. The next night 3,000 outraged workers gathered at Haymarket Square, at the corner of Randolph and Desplaines, to protest the killings. After speeches by well-known anarchists Albert Parsons and August Spies, 180 police moved in to disperse the crowd. As they advanced, someone hurled a bomb into their ranks.
The monument was built by the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, set up by Parsons’s widow, Lucy, to provide for the martyrs’ families. In 1971 it was deeded to the Illinois Labor History Society, which a few years ago began lobbying the Park Service to have it named a landmark. “The monument is not a federal intrusion on the martyrs at all,” says Leslie Orear, president of the society. “It is merely a recognition that the people of the world have made it a landmark.”
“They think their ideas are buried,” Major says. “They think they can make them into Americans, liberal Democrats. A lot of politicians and labor hacks were out there speaking. They were trying to make them into Samuel Gompers mainstream Americans.”
“It’s mostly going to be quotations to bring up the fact that the guys buried there would be very upset about this, because they can’t speak for themselves,” Major says. This time, he vows, the anarchists are going to beat the U.S. government. “In almost 30 years of doing this stuff I can’t think of any times that we’ve won. But I say, that plaque’s not going to be here two or three years from now.” o
