Homeland Page 22

  “Thanks, got other things to do,” Joe Junior said. “Come on, Paul.”

  Benno pulled at his crotch. He looked at Paul without a smile.

  “Teach him good,” he said to Joe Junior as they left.

  Paul had never expected to visit a place as lonely and sad as a graveyard, but that’s where Joe Junior took him after they drank some beer and ate the free lunch in a saloon on Clark Street, then walked south to Harrison Street, west to Desplaines Avenue, and through a gate. “What is the name of this place?” Paul asked as they walked along a winding road between marble monuments.

  “German Waldheim Cemetery. The fancy, respectable cemeteries wouldn’t bury a lot of dirty immigrants, so this one was started. What I want to show you is over there, beyond the chapel.”

  He strode across the bright spring grass and around the cream-colored chapel to an elaborate monument of impressive size. A male figure—a workingman, Paul surmised—reclined in a pose that suggested death, while a female in a robe and cowl reached behind her to place a wreath on his brow; at the same time the woman seemed to be striding forward defiantly. A date, 1887, was carved into the monument and, at the base, a legend.

  THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE

  WILL BE MORE

  POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES YOU ARE

  THROTTLING TODAY

  There were many bunches of flowers at the foot of the memorial. Some were withered, others fresh. Joe Junior locked his hands behind his back and gazed at the sculpted figures with an intense, almost reverent expression. Sunlight falling through newly budded trees threw a pattern of light and shadow on his face.

  “Paul, you have to promise me something. Promise not to mention this place when we get home.”

  “Of course, but why?”

  “Because Papa would kill both of us.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  Joe smacked a fist into his palm. “Because somebody’s got to teach you. Just like Benno said.” There was blue fire in his eyes. “This is the Haymarket memorial. The woman with the wreath is Justice. Which is something the martyrs never got, except here.”

  “But what is the Haymarket? Who are the martyrs?”

  Joe Junior pointed to the base of the monument. “Sit down.”

  The Haymarket (Joe Junior said) is a big public square north of here on Randolph Street, between Desplaines Avenue and Halsted Street. Randolph widens there, so it’s always been a good place for farmers to bring their fruit and vegetables and set up an open-air market. The Haymarket is the place this terrible crime happened.

  Chicago had been boiling with labor trouble for years. Then, in 1886, February, it exploded. The men at McCormick’s reaper factory walked out. All they wanted was fair pay and the eight-hour day. McCormick said go to hell, and started hiring new workers, scabs.

  Workers at other companies struck, even some at Pullman had the guts to go out. For a few weeks everybody thought the factory bosses would be smart, put in the eight-hour day, end the trouble. Benno admits he was telling audiences at rallies that by May day, the great workers’ holiday when all the red flags wave, red for the blood of the downtrodden, the eight-hour day would be the rule.

  I wasn’t there for any of this, you understand, I was still little; I heard all about it from Benno. He was working at McCormick’s then. He was one of the strikers.

  The first of May came and the strike was still on. The leaders called a meeting out on Black Road, close to the McCormick plant. Four or five thousand showed up, pretty angry after three months with no job, no pay envelope, no food for their little ones. The speakers worked them up as usual. Benno spoke that afternoon. He didn’t expect it would get out of hand, the speakers were just supposed to whip up the workers so their nerve wouldn’t buckle. But it did get out of hand. The quitting bell rang at McCormick’s, the gates opened, and a sea of scabs started to flow out. The strikers went wild. They ran like the wind and surrounded the plant, driving the scabs back inside, sending the plant guards to the gun cases.

  The police showed up in patrol wagons, and on horseback. Even so, the crowd wouldn’t disperse. Benno and some others rallied them for another run at the gate. The workers beat on the gates and screamed for the blood of the scabs. The guards opened fire through slits in the wall. The police closed in behind. Six strikers were shot and killed. The mob broke and ran. That riot was over.

  August Spies was editor of the labor paper Arbeiter Zeitung. Most of the strikers, in fact most of the workers in Chicago, were German, and still are. They read papers and listened to speakers in their own language.

  The day after the McCormick riot, Spies printed pamphlets and wrote an editorial. The message in both was the same. “Take arms! Protect yourselves!”

  A protest meeting was called for Tuesday night, May 4, in Haymarket Square. About dusk, people began to gather. The sky was dark, a lot of clouds, thunder muttering, like God knew what was going to happen and was setting the stage. Soon there were about a thousand in the square. A block away, in the Desplaines Avenue station house, companies of police were strapping on revolvers and polishing their extralong billy sticks made out of hickory.

  Before the meeting started, the crowd had to shift out of the square, move north, squeeze into Desplaines Avenue to find a platform for the speakers. All they could find was an empty produce wagon. August Spies spoke standing in the open bed, under a sky ready to rain down buckets. Lightning was flashing and flickering, Benno said. He was near the wagon.

  Albert Parsons spoke next. A good man, the son of a general who fought on the Reb side in the war. Then came Sam Fielden, an Englishman, a Methodist, and devout, they say.

  Mayor Harrison was on the fringe of the crowd; he had plenty of nerve, old Carter. He decided there wasn’t any problem, any danger—any need for the police to march on the listeners—this came out later. He went to the precinct house and said so. One police officer had other ideas. Inspector John Bonfield. He hated unions. He took over.

  He ordered his men out. They formed in a column and came marching up Desplaines, long billy clubs swinging, hands on their revolvers. They met the crowd and pushed, squeezing people closer and closer together. Rain was pattering down. Still nothing happened.

  A police captain shouted an order for the crowd to break up. From the wagon Fielden shouted that they wouldn’t, the meeting was peaceable, violating no law. A great big roar went up, and just then someone threw the bomb with the lighted fuse over the heads of the crowd. No one knows to this day who threw it, or from where.

  The bomb exploded at the head of the police column. Seven officers died, sixteen were hurt. The police broke ranks, crouching to shoot, wading in with swinging clubs. The rain pelted down. God flashed the lightning every other second, Benno said, and the coppers showed no mercy. The riot was over in five minutes.

  It was a crime, that bomb, I wouldn’t deny it. But what followed was a worse crime.

  The next day Albert Spies and his assistant editor, Schwab, were arrested. Parsons surrendered. Fielden was arrested, along with four more suspects—a carpenter, a printer, a house painter, and a beer wagon teamster, like Benno became later.

  The trial was a circus. The police couldn’t offer even one piece of evidence to prove that one of the eight men had thrown the bomb, that one of them had made it, or any of them had touched it, or knew anything about it. They were guilty because they’d made speeches, at the Haymarket and before. They’d given the bomber the idea. Stirred him up—drove him to the brink. For that, the prosecutor, Mills, wanted the death penalty.

  Each defendant made a closing statement for himself. Parsons praised the justice and fairness of bombs and dynamite. He said they were equalizers. He also claimed the jury had been threatened, even bribed. Didn’t do any good, minds were already made up, the eight had been tried and convicted in the papers. After the verdict, Judge Gray sentenced seven of them to hang. Neebe, the beer wagon teamster, got fifteen years.

  It took a long while fo
r the wheels to grind but finally, in November ’87, they hanged Spies. They hanged Parsons. They hanged Fischer, the printer, and Engle, the house painter. Louie Lingg, the man from the carpenters’ union, he beat them. Someone smuggled a dynamite cap into his cell before the hanging. He put it in his teeth and bit it and blew his own head off.

  That left two condemned men, Schwab and Sam Fielden. The governor had had enough; he commuted their sentences. The city was still wild with fear. Businessmen kept cleaning out the gun shops. A bunch of rich people donated six hundred acres on the lake shore to the U.S. Government, trading the land for a promise that the government would put soldiers there to protect the plutocrats from bombers. That’s why we’ve got Fort Sheridan.

  Nothing much has changed in six years. Mrs. Parsons, the widow, she tries to speak about the trial, the injustice of it. Every time there’s a meeting with Mrs. Parsons on the program, the police arrest her the minute she steps to the podium. Disorderly conduct. The plutocrats can’t stand hearing the truth about what they did, or what they are.

  John P. Altgeld always thought the trial was a farce, the hangings a scandal. He wants to pardon the two men left in jail. So a lot of people want to lynch him, just like they lynched Parsons and the rest. My own father hates the idea of a pardon for those two men. Even pardons won’t make a difference. It’s too late. There’s a score to be settled.

  “And you thought we had free speech, didn’t you?” Joe Junior thrust his hands in the pockets of his pants, standing in front of Paul with legs apart; a position of power, authority.

  “There’s another monument to the Haymarket, up in the square. A bronze statue of a noble Chicago copper with his hand raised. I’ll be damned if I’ll show you that, you’ll have to see it on your own. Let’s go.” Grim-faced, Joe Junior wheeled away. He strode rapidly toward the winding road, in and out of sun and shadow. Paul ran after him.

  Just outside the cemetery’s iron gates, Joe Junior grabbed Paul by the shoulders. “Remember, not a damn word. Can I trust you to keep quiet?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “About everything you see, everything I tell you?”

  “Yes, absolutely. But I still do not fully understand—”

  “Because Mr. Joseph E. Crown, Esquire, is a damn capitalist, that’s why.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Bad?” Joe Junior guffawed. “Everything Pop believes in—everything important—is wrong. For instance—there’s no union at the brewery. Unions protect the rights of workers, but Pop’s dead against them.”

  Paul was silent. He didn’t want to endanger the tenuous camaraderie between them. Yet he was confused and even a little angered by Joe Junior’s animosity toward Uncle Joe. He decided he had to say something.

  “Joe, you are very smart, I’m not so smart. But I would say that if your father believes in wrong things, those wrong things have certainly built a fine house, a fine life for everyone.”

  “Listen, kid. What we’ve got on Michigan Avenue is show. A lot of trappings bought with the sweat of poor workingmen who spend their whole lives in dirt and poverty just so men like Pop can wear fancy suits and live in big houses.”

  “Yes, I know about poor men, poor districts, in Berlin I lived in one. But—”

  “I’m talking about here. Right here in Chicago.” Joe Junior grabbed him by the arm. “I’ll show you.”

  They went to a section Joe Junior called the Nineteenth Ward, on the same West Side. It was a district of narrow crowded streets, small dingy shops, ramshackle cottages, each with its wooden box of ashes and refuse out in front. The cottage yards were tiny. Half-naked children played in the bare dirt.

  The sidewalks were worm-eaten planking broken through in place after place. Side streets were dried mud, unpaved. Down one of them, Paul saw pushcarts, heard the peddlers shouting, the shrill housewives haggling. Horse and dog dung and decaying garbage fouled the air. He had seen slums in Berlin, but this one was worse.

  “Working people,” Joe Junior said, waving at open windows where torn lace curtains blew. “Forced to live like this. Any system that allows it is rotten, ready to fall, it—oh, my God.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Joe Junior had blanched and stepped back abruptly.

  “Hymies,” Joe Junior whispered, pointing to the next corner. Paul counted five good-sized boys arguing among themselves. They carried ball bats and bottles.

  “What did you call them?”

  “The Hymies. It’s a gang. One of the worst. The old peddlers around here are always getting beaten up and robbed because they’re Jews, so the gang goes out and gives it to anybody they find, for revenge. Now before they spot us, let’s turn around and walk slowly to—oh, Jesus. Too late. Run!”

  He spun and dashed away. Paul ran after him as yells and oaths came from behind. In a moment Paul risked a look. The gang boys were chasing them full tilt. One, dark-haired and leading the rest, bowled into a shabby old man in the street, knocking him down. No one stopped.

  Joe Junior darted across the street in front of an ice wagon. The horse reared and whinnied. The driver whipped it furiously and screamed curses at the cousins. Arms pumping, Paul looked back a second time. The gang leader was grinning. He knew they were catching up.

  “Here, this way!” Joe Junior hauled him into a narrow passage with shanties on the left, a board fence on the right. He groaned when he saw a pushcart blocking the other end of the passage, at the next street.

  Paul spied something and dug in his heels.

  “Joe, grab that barrel. Pull it over here.”

  “Why the hell—?”

  “Do it, do it, then climb up!”

  They manhandled the old barrel under the low eave of a deserted shanty with a peaked roof. Joe Junior scrambled onto the barrel, then to the roof, with Paul right behind. Paul pushed his cousin up and over the peak to the sloping side away from the passage. They lay on their bellies with their faces against tarpaper shingles. The gang poured into the passage, laughing and yelling. Suddenly, making a low strangled sound in his throat, Joe began to slide.

  Paul flung his left hand over the roof peak and grabbed Joe with his right. Joe slid halfway down, his legs dangling below the eave. Paul ground his teeth together, sweating and wincing against the pain in his shoulder and arm. Out of sight in the passage on the other side, the gang was angry. “What’s going on?” “Where’n hell are they?”

  “I’m slipping,” Joe Junior whispered. His weight threatened to tear both of them off the roof.

  “Hang on,” Paul whispered back. “If we fall they’ll hear and that’s the end.”

  “But—”

  “Be quiet.”

  “They must be runnin’ like the wind, the little bastards,” one of the gang yelled. “Come on, let’s keep going. When we catch ’em we’ll skin ’em.”

  Paul couldn’t hold his cousin any longer. He let go and Joe Junior slid off the roof, landing with a crash in a pile of discarded chicken crates.

  Paul dragged himself back to the peak. At the end of the passage, he saw the gang tip the pushcart over and pummel the helpless man who owned it. Then they ran on, out of sight.

  Shaking and short of breath, Paul climbed over the peak and slid down the roof, landing in the passage. Joe Junior staggered into sight around a corner of the shanty, picking chicken feathers from his hair.

  “Your plan saved the bacon,” he said. Another expression that mystified Paul. “I confess it, I’m not quick enough to come up with something like that.”

  “Joe, excuse me, I think we should stop talking and get out of here while we can.”

  “Right. Good thinking.”

  They hurried out of the passage the way they had come in. Paul was still trembling from their narrow escape. But it had won something for him, something he wanted badly. Joe Junior’s admiration; the beginning of a friendship.

  They rode a horsecar toward the downtown. Relaxing on the hard wicker seats, bathed in the warm spring air blowing t
hrough the window, Paul risked another important question.

  “Do you really not like your father? Aren’t you proud of him? He has done well in America.”

  Joe Junior put his elbow on the window sill. Shadows of telephone poles flitted over his face. “Sure, he’s done well—according to his rich pals.”

  “But, Joe, he came over here by himself, then he fought for the slaves and Abraham Lincoln. Aunt Lotte told me.”

  “I know he did. I know all about it. But after the war, he changed!”

  Joe Junior turned toward his cousin, intense. “Joe Crown is what they call an exploiter. He exploits the working class. Takes advantage of them for gain. Hell, he’d exploit me the rest of my life if I let him. He’d bury me in the brewery in a collar and fancy cravat. Think I want to be like him? Run that God damn place after he’s gone? No, sir. Never.” He smacked the window sill.

  After they crossed the West Branch of the river they left the rattling car. On Adams Street at LaSalle, Joe Junior walked him past an unusual nine-story building, the headquarters of the Home Insurance Company.

  “This is a pretty amazing building. It was put up five or six years ago—first of its kind. There’s a steel-beam skeleton inside. It bears most of the load. That means the outside walls don’t have to be so heavy. If a building is constructed that way, it can go up to twenty, maybe even thirty stories. They call them skyscrapers.”

  “Wolkenkratzer. I heard the word in Berlin. They came from Chicago?”

  “Right.”

  “Who paid for this amazing building, plutocrats?”

  Joe Junior laughed and punched Paul’s shoulder. “Score one for you, kid. Listen, I can love Chicago and still hate the leeches and parasites who live here, I guess.”

  They strolled along through the crowds, enjoying the sunshine. Paul thought about his cousin and Uncle Joe. He had a curious feeling that maybe Joe Junior wasn’t telling the entire truth. Maybe he did admire his father—or had at one time—but couldn’t admit it anymore. What do you suppose caused such a terrible rift? Was it really just those evil capitalist-plutocrats?