Death in the Haymarket by James Green

Author:James Green [Green, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425478
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Patrolman Mathias J. Degan

Unaware of the hurricane developing outside the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, the anarchists seemed unprepared for what happened next. As Spies and Schwab composed copy for their afternoon newspaper, a police detail arrived to arrest them. August Spies’s youngest brother, Christian, a furniture worker who happened to be in the building, was also taken to jail. The police detective who led the raid later admitted that he searched the editors and their premises without a warrant.7

When Spies and Schwab arrived at the Central Police Station, they were confronted by Police Superintendent Frederick Ebersold, who was at his wit’s end. He had placed 350 men at McCormick’s disposal to keep the peace on the Black Road, but the result was a riot that left civilians dead. He had commanded Bonfield to assemble a large squad at Desplaines Street to keep order there, and now three policemen were dead and others lay dying at Cook County Hospital. He leapt at Schwab and at Spies, who recalled the scene this way: “ ‘You dirty Dutch sons of bitches, you dirty hounds, you rascals, we will choke you, we will kill you,’ ” Ebersold screamed, “forgetting in his rage that he was himself a German.” Then the officers “jumped upon us, tore us from one end to the other, went through our pockets,” Spies wrote. They took his money and everything he had, but he remained silent, fearing far worse abuse.8

After their German comrades were taken away from the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes nervously resumed work on the Alarm. In a short time, another detail of police burst up the stairs to their office and confronted the two women. When one of them grabbed Lizzie, she resisted. When Lucy protested, an officer pushed Lucy and called her “a black bitch.” The police then marched the two anarchist women to the city jail for questioning. After the interrogation the officers released Lucy, hoping they could follow her to Albert, now the target of an intense dragnet. When she did not lead them to her husband, she was arrested and questioned two more times. The second time she was apprehended, the police arrested her in front of her children, who were staying in a friend’s flat near Grief’s Hall. They ransacked the place while Lucy kept up a running stream of protest. It was the beginning of a forty-year ordeal of episodic jailings for Mrs. Albert Parsons, whose activities would become an obsession with the Chicago Police Department.9

As soon as Albert Parsons and William Holmes learned of these arrests, they knew the Holmes house in Geneva would soon be searched. So Parsons disguised himself by shaving off his long mustache and washing out the shoe black that he normally used to dye his gray hair. He took off the waistcoat, shirt collar and necktie he always wore and dressed like a tramping worker before leaving on foot for the little city of Elgin, where he would catch a train to Waukesha, Wisconsin, and there take refuge in the home of a socialist comrade.

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