6-16-05,9:20am
In its recent summer issue, Labor History has published articles that have surprised and dismayed some labor scholars. The articles raised questions about the Haymarket massacre of 1886, used quotation marks around the term Haymarket Martyrs, and introduced “forensic evidence based on a 119 year old bomb fragment to suggest that the prosecution’s case of a labor anarchist bomb conspiracy may have had some validity.” Furthermore, the editor introducing the articles suggested that the present concern with terrorism would lead to renewed interest in Haymarket.
What happened at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886 was a mass demonstration led by the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA) the leading labor anarchist group in the city, to protest police opening fire on workers striking at the McCormick Reaper Company the day before. The Chicago strikes were part of a series of strikes throughout the nation launched by the Knights of Labor, and other labor groups on May 1st to demand the eight hour day. When the rally was nearly over, 180 Chicago policemen marched in military formation to break it up. A bomb was then thrown, leading to a police riot. Eight of the demonstration organizers were then arrested and placed on trial, even though there was no connection between them and the bomb thrower who was never found. They were charged with the murder of one policeman who died as a result of the bomb attack. All eight were found guilty in the face of a national and international campaign of protest, which included the young George Bernard Shaw. Four of the defendants were hanged. One killed himself under questionable circumstances and three others, given life sentences were pardoned in 1893 by a new governor, John Peter Altgeld, a progressive sympathetic to the labor movement.
The capitalist class used its interpretation of the Haymarket riot to launch a massive red scare against class conscious trade unionists and their progressive supporters. It was in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs that labor and socialist representatives at a conference in 1889, the 100th anniversary of the French revolution, planned international demonstrations for the eight-hour day and labor’s rights for May 1, 1890, the historical beginning of May Day as the labor and socialist movement day of global solidarity. So why, in the leading US historical journal dealing with labor, would such articles be published today? Also, is there any conceivable truth in them?
On the first question, this is the sort of playing to the academic marketplace that one sees over and over again, in times when right reactionary forces seem to be on the ascendancy, the “safe” revisionism of challenging popular left and civil libertarian views with “new evidence,” that can of course be interpreted in a variety of ways. Historians look at primary documents as their most important source. But such documents can themselves be conscious distortions of events produced by individuals to achieve support for their own political agendas, or they can be interpreted in narrow and faulty ways be scholars either using a limited framework or searching for evidence to support their own academic careerist agenda.
In the 1960s, Francis Russell sought to score some points by questioning the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist victims of the 1919 Red Scare who were framed for an armed robbery in Massachusetts. They were executed seven years later after an international protest movement in which Communist Party USA activists and people from many nations played important roles. Vanzetti, whose prison letters were translated in many languages, Russell conceded, was innocent but Sacco was guilty based on “ballistic” evidence. The “evidence” hardly proved anything like that, but fortunately for Sacco and Vanzetti, the 1960s was the wrong time to float such interpretations, even though Senator Barry Goldwater agreed with Russell.
The Hiss and Rosenberg “espionage cases,” the two “sacred cows” of the cold war political establishment of the 1950s, were subjected to trenchant revisionist criticisms. Particularly Walter and Miriam Schneir’s 1967 reevaluation of the evidence in the Rosenberg Case, Invitation to an Inquest exposed the huge distortions and omissions of the prosecution in the trials. However, both cases were “re-re-interpreted” in the Reagan era, (the right time for the media marketplace and corporatizing academe). Ronald Reagan even awarded Judge Irving Kaufman, who had given the Rosenbergs the death sentence the Medal of Freedom, even though documents released earlier by the FBI showed that Kaufman had violated judicial ethics by improperly contacting the Bureau to work against the Rosenbergs’ appeal and any possibility that his sentence would be overturned.
The “Venona files,” decodings of Soviet intelligence messages, were released and genuflected to in the 1990s as the “end of all debate” on the political nature of espionage and intelligence (just as history itself was proclaimed to have ended with the downfall of the Soviet Union). Even though many of the revelations sold by former Soviet intelligence figures concerning high New Deal officials were discredited and even though Kim Philby was around to tell the Soviets about Venona and a great many things culled from them are questionable, historians are expected to add to scholarship which portrays positively the contributions of Communist party members to labor, civil rights, and other campaigns the caveat that “some Communist party members” were spies, a contemporary version of a loyalty oath. This is of course the way conventional wisdom gets created, by being repeated uncritically again and again. Of course, the massive espionage and sabotage carried out against the CPUSA, labor and the left isn’t factored into this equation.
If the rightwing has its way, perhaps all great political show trials and conspiracies will be vindicated, except of course those carried out in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in other socialist countries. What will the next “great breakthrough “be? Perhaps an Allen Weinstein of tomorrow or a clone of the present one will take some selected scraps from Comintern archives to prove the Van Der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag as part of a Soviet conspiracy and that Adolf and his storm troopers did save Germany from a bloody Communist revolution, even though the ensuing Nazi dictatorship may have gone a little too far in the war against Red Terrorism.
In the present political climate, where there has been a sharp rise in anti-Semitic posturing in France, the US, the UK, and other countries, perhaps there will be a “cutting edge” study to prove that Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French Army officer framed by a right-wing Catholic military establishment because he was a handy scapegoat, really was a German spy. Perhaps Mel Gibson will make a movie about the “new” Dreyfus case portraying Emile Zola as a limousine liberal (played by Howard Dean), Dreyfus as sinister spy (played by Barbara Streisand in drag), and the assorted right-wing officers, politicians, and political anti-Semites as good patriotic Frenchmen (there might even be a role for Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he could fake a French accent).
There is even another “revisionist” interpretation of history (and I am serious) that I doubt Gibson would turn into a movie, although it might sell. A German scholar has made something of a splash in the academic marketplace the contention that the Christians may have really been responsible for the great fire of Rome, using very circumstantial evidence in the extreme. I doubt that Berlusconi, Italy’s billionaire rightwing premier would push Nero revisionism on Italian television, which he either owns (private) or controls (public), but if there was political capital to be made he probably would.
Revising the historical record, though, is not only necessary to the advance of knowledge and understanding, but also necessary to gain a clearer understanding of the present and the developments that are producing the future. But that which is “new” and critical of existing interpretations, is not necessarily an advance. It can be a step backward, one that loses perspective on history as it seeks to sell itself based on new evidence gathering techniques and new documentation, as if the techniques and the documents themselves are somehow neutral and, as they used to say in the 1950s, “value free.”
Unless there is very serious evidence, not speculation based on re-interpretation of existing evidence, or presentation of “new evidence” ala the “Venona Files” not available to be analyzed by scholars who hold different interpretations of the evidence, and a clear analytical framework in which the evidence is interpreted that can be held up to scrutiny, revisionist scholarship should be looked at in the same critical way that it looks at the work that it is challenging. In the case of the Haymarket “riot,” I think that the “revisionists” are really asking the wrong questions.
Who would or really could claim that that the trial was not a travesty? No real evidence existed at the time that the individuals charged had conspired in the event, and most of them had left when the bomb was thrown. The rhetoric of labor anarchism, the threats of revolutionary violence interacted with the “official story” of the bomb throwing bearded, crazed foreign anarchist fighting a perpetual war against God, Country, Family, and Order. For the press, the rhetoric became the reality that demonized and dehumanized Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer, the four who were hanged, and made them interchangeable with each other and every other labor anarchist everywhere.
What would Haymarket have to do with the present “war against terrorism” logically? The labor anarchists were not funded by the new Robber Barons and the US government the way that the rightwing Muslim guerilla fighters who became Al Qaeda were funded by the Reagan administration out of the war in Afghanistan. Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons wife, wasn’t given safe train passage out of Chicago the way bin Laden relatives were out of Boston while working class people of Muslim background were being arrested and held because they happened to belong to a specific Mosque. The bomb was thrown at police seeking to break up a rally, not at any major building or any general thoroughfare. The only legitimate comparison is one of consequences. Haymarket was used as a pretext by corporations, local governments, and the wealthy generally to build armories, beef up local police and military forces to fight labor, and restrict civil liberties. The 9/11 attack has been used to establish new agencies with broad police powers that threaten labor rights and civil liberties far more than they threaten real Al Qaeda conspirators, who have been aided by Bush’s invasion of Iraq and by the climate of fear that his administration has enhanced and manipulated on the issue of “international terrorism.”
Also, what sort of “bomb fragment” evidence from 119 years ago can be conclusive of anything as complicated as these events. (There is a cult of forensics that television has played a leading role in developing, similar I think to the post war crime films which portrayed the police as using wiretapping, finger printing, radio cars, etc., to honestly and “scientifically” catch criminals, which encourages people to see things as readily provable and answerable. As they say all the time on the CSI shows, “I am not speaking. The evidence is speaking,” as if the “evidence” exists outside of theoretical frameworks and political-social contexts. That way of thinking is not only an enormous step backward for learning and culture but the basis for the manufactured evidence on which frame-ups like the Haymarket trial have always been based.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
