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These militants were not content with piecemeal, incremental improvements in the conditions of the working class, but instead advanced the need for a revolutionary transformation of society that would result in a “cooperative commonwealth” where workers would democratically determine their working conditions.Ĭhief among the leaders of this vocal revolutionary left current were August Spies, a recent immigrant from Germany, and Albert Parsons, a former Confederate Army soldier from Texas, who had been a partisan of the freed Black slaves fighting racist oppression during Reconstruction. Portraits of the Haymarket Martyrs, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1897. Within the newly organized working class, a wide variety of political views emerged, including those of socialists influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and a smaller, but more vocal, current of radical militants who became known as anarchists. As the 1880s unfolded, many of these workers were organized by the first significant national labor union in the United States, the Knights of Labor. Green describes the formation of the new industrial working class, comprised in the rapidly growing new industrial cities, such as Chicago, of hundreds of thousands of recently arrived immigrants from Europe - most from Germany, Bohemia and Scandinavia. These methods included the extensive use of scabs drawn from the large unemployed reserve pool of labor the use of brute force by state militias, federal troops, private armies of hired thugs and the police the use of the law and the courts and the middle classes’ inflamed fear of the working class promulgated by pro-capitalist newspapers and other molders of public opinion. At the same time, he shows how the working class organized to defend itself by joining and building an unprecedented new labor union movement, hallmarked by the Knights of Labor.ĭrawing upon the pioneering methods of the previous generation of brilliant labor historians, such as Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Edward (E.P.) Thompson, Green describes how, beginning with the great national railroad strike of 1877, the industrial capitalists set in motion a combination of tactics designed to defeat and repress the militant workers’ movement. With the grace and descriptive power of a novelist, Green devotes the first 10 of his 16 chapters to the struggles between labor and capital in Chicago (and elsewhere) in the post-Civil War decades, as the new capitalist class built enormous fortunes by extracting an extraordinarily large amount of surplus value from an increasingly impoverished working class. The two inherently adversarial key components of modern capitalism - the emerging modern industrial capitalist class and the modern industrial working class in formation - engaged in a monumental battle to establish a relationship of forces. Green clearly demonstrates that what happened in Chicago in 18 was a significant expression of the titanic struggle between labor and capital during the last half of the 19th century. He situates the events of Haymarket in a much broader context - the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the working class and their capitalist exploiters and oppressors in Chicago from the end of the Civil War through the events of 1886-87 and beyond.īy so doing, Green enables the reader to grasp the enormity of the social forces in conflict in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States during the two decades that followed the Civil War. Green does much more than recount the story of what happened between and November 11, 1887. They were subsequently framed, convicted, and four martyrs hanged by the judicial system of Cook County on “Black Friday,” November 11, 1887.ĭeath in the Haymarket is clearly one of the very best histories of the working class that has appeared in recent decades. JAMES GREEN’S DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET tells the story of the anarcho-syndicalist militants accused of perpetrating the throwing of a bomb that killed police at a workers’ rally at the Haymarket in Chicago on May 4, 1886. Quinn Depiction of the Haymarket Riot, Harper’s Weekly, 1886ĭeath in the Haymarket:A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movem ent, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America Remembering Dorothy Healey: An Activist with Vision.Latin America to Iraq: Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop.David Roediger's Working Toward Whiteness.Eliizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

New Challenges to Tenant Organizing in New York City.Dual Power or Populist Theater? Mexico's Two Governments.The Post MFA Era and the Rise of China, Part 1.Racist Undercurrents in the "War on Terror".The Profits of War: Planning to Bomb Iran.