Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century by Philip McFarland

Author:Philip McFarland [McFarland, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography
ISBN: 9781442212275
Google: SlCiB2hceVAC
Amazon: 1442212276
Barnesnoble: 1442212276
Goodreads: 13344618
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2012-07-15T21:00:00+00:00

Figure 27.1. The Haymarket Riot, May 4, 1886. Pictured across the top are the slain policemen.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

To protest such terms, a general walkout was called for May 1. Tens of thousands of laborers participated nationwide. Two days later, workers in Chicago coming together clashed with scabs—nonunion workers—filling the jobs of strikers locked out since February at the nearby McCormick reaper factory. In the melee two workers were killed. Broadsides went up announcing a subsequent meeting tomorrow evening, Tuesday, May 4, to protest such treatment as McCormick doled out. During the course of that second meeting some 175 policemen moved to disperse the crowd. Out of the darkness somebody—no one ever found out who—threw a bomb into the policemen’s midst. In the confusion, patrolmen fired weapons and clubbed heads. It was all over in minutes; but seven policemen died from their wounds, some of them victims of the wild shots of other officers. And when the guns fell silent, at least four workers lay dead.

In the hysteria of the public reaction, nine agitators were hauled to court and convicted of the death of the one policeman inarguably killed by the bomb. All of the accused were anarchists—authorities had rounded up anarchists—most of them German immigrants. Some of those charged were not even on the premises when the bomb was thrown, and none of the accused could be linked to the act itself. Still, four defendants were hanged, on November 11, 1887, after a trial that has since then been widely condemned as a travesty of justice. Not at the time, however. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt expressed the popular sentiment when he wrote that America would benefit if all nine “Chicago dynamiters” were put to death, adding that if, instead of being out West at his ranch, he had been on hand at Haymarket Square that fatal night, he would have shot the rioters on the spot, never mind that some of those hanged hadn’t even been at the site, and others who were had left before the bomb was thrown.

Dynamite—that new, terrifying weapon—struck fear in the hearts of law-abiding citizens anyway, because of its explosive power, the ease with which an agitator could get a stick of the stuff to toss, and his relative safety from harm while handling it; so that all through these years, with this Haymarket affair of 1886, with the wildcat Pullman strike of 1894, with all the other instances of unrest and protest through these not only turbulent but, for labor, often grindingly hard two decades at century’s end, newspapers went on reinforcing the perception in an anxious middle class that unions were foreign imports, socialistic, under the thumb of bomb-throwing anarchists, and un-American.

An anarchist bearing the unpronounceable name of Czolgosz would murder William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt, meanwhile, felt his inherent distrust of extremes strengthened by all this that appeared to threaten social order: mobs gathering, agitators exhorting in their broken English from atop wagons or barrels, stirring up workers to walk out, strike, boycott.

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