Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America
Author: James R Green
On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. Coming in the midst of the largest national strike Americans had ever seen, the bombing created mass hysteria and led to a sensational trial, which culminated in four controversial executions. The trial seized headlines across the country, created the nation’s first red scare and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover.
Death in the Haymarket brings these remarkable events to life, re-creating a tempestuous moment in American social history. James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life the epic twenty-year battle for the eight-hour workday. He shows how the movement overcame numerous setbacks to orchestrate a series of strikes that swept the country in 1886, positioning the unions for a hard-won victory on the eve of the Haymarket tragedy.
As he captures the frustrations, tensions and heady victories, Green also gives us a rich portrait of Chicago, the Midwestern powerhouse of the Gilded Age. We see the great factories and their wealthy owners, including men such as George Pullman, and we get an intimate view of the communities of immigrant employees who worked for them. Throughout, we are reminded of the increasing power of newspapers as, led by the legendary Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, they stirred up popular fears of the immigrants and radicals who led the unions.
Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, Death in the Haymarket is an importantaddition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.
Publishers Weekly
As Green thoroughly documents, the bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) "radicals and reformers" and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others. Shortly after, labor leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons, along with six more alleged anarchists, stood convicted of murder on sparse evidence. Four of them went to the gallows in 1887; another committed suicide. The surviving three received pardons in 1893. The Knights of Labor, at that time America's largest and most energetic union, received the blame for the riot, despite a lack of conclusive evidence , and many Knights locals migrated to the less radical American Federation of Labor. Labor historian Green (Taking History to Heart) eloquently chronicles all this, producing what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation. Green is particularly strong in documenting the episode's long aftermath, especially the decades-long efforts of the white Parsons's black wife to exonerate her husband. B&w illus. (Mar. 7) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
KLIATT
Good books about Haymarket have been written before, but University of Massachusetts professor Green has written a book with several important virtues: it's engaging to read, historically careful and thorough, not too long, and attractively packaged. First, as one newspaper review explained, "no one has told the story more thoroughly, incisively or elegantly than Green." Green's story of domestic terrorism and class discontent is political and social history with contemporary relevance—relevance that he surely but subtly draws our attention to (see the long subtitle). His judgments are thoughtful and carefully tied to historical evidence and context. The endnotes help set a model for student research and writing; the index is nicely organized as well. Also, this book fits comfortably in the hand and the many small b/w illustrations are thoughtfully integrated into the text. The book has been written and assembled to engage and educate student as well as adult readers. My one quibble for student research use is something many history books today do, stressing narrative over chronology with chapter titles that don't help guide students to the elements they most need to access.
Library Journal
Green (history, Univ. of Massachusetts; Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements) writes of the post-Civil War labor agitation in Chicago that culminated in the May 1886 Haymarket Square riot, when an incendiary device tossed by a still-unidentified individual caused police to open fire and led to the death of several people, including eight policemen. The bombing fueled criticism of the dissenting press by the powers that be in a class-divided polity and produced a rallying cry for the labor movement, which was seeking, among other things, an eight-hour workday. Eight mostly foreign-born anarchists were convicted of the crime, because of their speeches and writings. Four of them were hanged, one's sentence was commuted, and three were famously pardoned by Gov. John Peter Altgeld because of lack of evidence. Green tells readers little that is new, instead mining printed sources and offering the accepted and only logical interpretation of the conspiracy-driven trial as a miscarriage of justice. He states that "the memory of the Haymarket anarchists [has] endured" as a tale about labor folk heroes, so he does not bring these figures to life. Recommended for labor history collections that would benefit from a recent monograph on this seminal event and for those seeking to expand their holdings in Chicago studies.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
List of Maps ixPrologue 3
For Once in Common Front 15
A Paradise for Workers and Speculators 28
We May Not Always Be So Secure 39
A Liberty-Thirsty People 53
The Inevitable Uprising 69
The Flame That Makes the Kettle Boil 85
A Brutal and Inventive Vitality 102
The International 126
The Great Upheaval 145
A Storm of Strikes 160
A Night of Terror 174
The Strangest Frenzy 192
Every Man on the Jury Was an American 209
You Are Being Weighed in the Balance 231
The Law Is Vindicated 247
The Judgment of History 274
Epilogue 301
Notes 321
Acknowledgments 363
Illustration Credits 367
Index 369
See also: Introdução para Saúde pública
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House
Author: Valerie Plame Wilson
On 14 July 2003 in his syndicated column in The Washington Post, Robert Novak identified "Wilson's wife" publicly as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" named "Valerie Plame". The column was a response to another, published by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which Ambassador Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake to support the administration's arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.
Novak's public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's classified covert CIA identity led to a CIA leak grand jury investigation, resulting in the indictment and successful prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- Assistant to the President of the United States, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005 -- for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators.
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House is a memoir that covers Mrs. Wilson tenure in the CIA, the leak of her secret identity, and the subsequent scandal. The book provoked a lawsuit even before its launching. In May, the publisher and Valerie Wilson sued J. Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, Director of the CIA, arguing that the CIA was "unconstitutionally interfering with the publication of her memoir, Fair Game, which is set to be published in October, by not allowing Plame to mention the dates she served in the CIA, even though those dates are public information."
The agency insisted that her dates of service remained classified and were not mentioned in the book, in spite of a letter published in the Congressional Record and available on the Library of Congress website from the C.I.A. to Ms. Wilson about her retirement benefits saying that she had worked for the agency since November 1985. The judged decided in favor of the agency. The CIA publication review board explained that the manuscript was "replete with statements" that "become classified when they are linked with a specific time frame", but cleared the way for the memoir to be published.
Publishers Weekly
The government redacted much of the significant information in the first section of Wilson's memoir, which concerns her career in the CIA. In print, a black bar omitted the words and passages; on audio, a tone does the deleting. Once the novelty of the beeps wears off, the incompleteness of Wilson's narrative, at first tantalizing, becomes frustrating. The constant interruptions make it difficult for a listener to assemble a coherent story. Once Wilson's identity is leaked by White House insiders, the memoir's redactions cease for the most part. Unfortunately, her distress over the attempted destruction of her and her husband's professional reputations is considerably less riveting than her spy career. Whiles neither a prose stylist or an actress, Wilson reads clearly, with immediacy and sincerity and a note of barely suppressed anger. Laura Rozen's afterword (occupying the last two CDs) fills in the gaps removed by the CIA. It's intriguing and considerably more polished. The two narratives create an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, account of a disturbing contemporary scandal. Simultaneous release with the Simon & Schuster hardcover (reviewed online). (Nov.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
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