The Autobiography of Mother Jones | Page 3

day was, they said, an
enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of
government were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was
bitter. The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people
on one side hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs
with bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither
hunger nor cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the
power of the great state itself.
The anarchists took advantage of the widespread discontent to preach
their doctrines. Orators used to address huge crowds on the windy,
barren shore of Lake Michigan. Although I never endorsed the
philosophy of anarchism, I often attended the meetings on the lake

shore, listening to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the
workers.
Meanwhile Vile employers were meeting. They met in the mansion of
George M. Pullman on Prairie Avenue or in the residence of Wirt
Dexter, an able corporation lawyer. They discussed means of killing the
eight-hour movement which was to be ushered in by a general strike.
They discussed methods of dispersing the meetings of the anarchists.
A bitterly cold winter set in. Long unemployment resulted in terrible
suffering. Bread lines increased. Soup kitchens could not handle the
applicants. Thousands knew actual misery.
On Christmas day, hundreds of poverty stricken people in rags and
tatters, in thin clothes, in wretched shoes paraded on fashionable Prairie
Avenue before the mansions of the rich, before their employers,
carrying the black flag. I thought the parade an insane move on the part
of the anarchists, as it only served to make feeling more bitter. As a
matter of fact, it had no educational value whatever and only served to
increase the employers' fear, to make the police more savage, and the
public less sympathetic to the real distress of the workers
The first of May, which was to usher in the eight-hour day uprising,
came. The newspapers had done everything to alarm the people. All
over the city there were strikes and walkouts. employers quaked in their
boots. They saw revolution. The workers in the McCormick Harvester
Works gathered outside the factory. Those inside who did not join the
strikers were called scabs. Bricks were thrown. Windows were broken.
The scabs were threatened. Some one turned in a riot call.
The police without warning charged down upon the workers, shooting
into their midst, clubbing right and left. Many were trampled under
horses' feet. Numbers were shot dead. Skulls were broken. Young men
and young girls were clubbed to death.
The Pinkerton agency formed armed bands of ex-convicts and
hoodlums and hired them to capitalists at eight dollars a day, to picket
the factories and incite trouble.

On the evening of May 4th, the anarchists held a meeting in the shabby,
dirty district known to later history as Haymarket Square. All about
were railway tracks, dingy saloons and the dirty tenements of the poor.
A half a block away was the Desplaines Street Police Station presided
over by John Bonfield, a man without tact or discretion or sympathy, a
most brutal believer in suppression as the method to settle industrial
unrest.
Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, attended the meeting of the
anarchists and moved in and about the crowds in the square. After
leaving, he went to the Chief of Police and instructed him to send no
mounted police to the meeting, as it was being peacefully conducted
and the presence of mounted police would only add fuel to fires already
burning red in the workers' hearts. But orders perhaps came from other
quarters, for disregarding the report of the mayor, the chief of police
sent mounted policemen in large numbers to the meeting.
One of the anarchist speakers was addressing the crowd. A bomb was
dropped from a window overlooking the square. A number of the
police were killed in the explosion that followed.
The city went insane and the newspapers did everything to keep it like
a madhouse. The workers' cry for justice was drowned in the shriek for
revenge. Bombs were "found" every five minutes. Men went armed and
gun stores kept open nights. Hundreds were arrested. Only those who
had agitated for an eight-hour day, however, were brought to trial and a
few months later hanged. But the man, Schnaubelt, who actually threw
the bomb was never brought into the case, nor was his part in the
terrible drama ever officially made clear.
The leaders in the eight hour day movement were hanged Friday,
November the 11th. That day Chicago's rich had chills and fever. Rope
stretched in all directions from the jail. Police men were stationed along
the ropes armed with riot rifles. Special patrols watched all approaches
to the jail. The roofs