Three American Radicals by Sender Garlin

Author:Sender Garlin [Garlin, Sender]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000612325
Google: gsuqDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-08-22T15:57:10+00:00

Henry David, in The History of the Haymarket Affair, has noted that not all liberals were equally courageous: "Many gave way before the pressure of the press and the hysteria of fear.... Their property sense dulled their social conscience, and they slipped behind the comforting wall of legality which the courts had erected." Haymarket "brought about the first major 'red scare,' which has rarely been equalled."20 (David was writing after the Palmer raids of the nineteen-twenties but before the McCarthyite cold-war terror of the nineteen-fifties, with its Smith Act prosecutions, witch-hunts, and blacklists.)

Howells's decision to appeal to the governor of Illinois has been described by George J. Becker as "a revolution in American literature":

William Dean Howells, who had succeeded Lowell as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had been offered the succession to the Harvard chair occupied by the exalted figures of Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell, and who was already settling into the dignity of dean of American letters which he was to hold for the next thirty years—William Dean Howells, archpriest of the genteel tradition, deserted the study for the arena and published an open letter defending the Chicago anarchists.21

"A file of newspaper and magazine clippings in the Howells Papers at Harvard University," Kenneth S. Lynn has commented, "gives a fair indication of the coast-to-coast abuse the novelist sustained as a result of his lonely act of courage."22 Acutely aware of the risks he was taking, he jeopardized not only his reputation but his livelihood as well.* His wife, Elinor, fully supported his stand.

But he did not remain entirely alone. He was soon joined by others, among them Robert Ingersoll, noted lawyer and exponent of agnosticism; Henry Demarest Lloyd; General Matthew M. Trumbull, a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War; John Brown, Jr., one of the sons of the great anti-slavery fighter; the radical journalist John Swinton;* and Joseph R. Buchanan, editor of the Denver Labor Enquirer. "Ingersoll publicly declared that 'the men were tried during a period of great excitement,' when a fair trial was an impossibility. He said that the court's rulings were wrong. Under the instructions given to the jury by Judge Gary, any man who spoke in favor of a change of government would have been convicted of murder," Henry David writes.23

In England the campaign was led by the Socialist artist and writer William Morris. On November 7, he appealed to the poet Robert Browning: "I venture to write you and ask you to sign the enclosed appeal for mercy and so to do what you can to save the lives of seven men who had been condemned to death for a deed of which they were not guilty, after a mere mockery of a trial." On the same day, he told the artist Ford Madox Brown: "In plain words, what they are really to be hanged for is the crime of leading the strikers in their attempt to get the hours of labour shortened. I confess my grief and anger are

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