"THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES YOU ARE THROTTLING TODAY", August Spies. Fascinating! The famous Haymarket monument, rallying point for the international labor movement, was dedicated on June 25,1893.The monument was named a National Historic Landmark by the US. Department of the Interior in 1997, and is the nation’s only cemetery monument to receive such designation. German Waldheim was the only cemetery that would accept the bodies of the convicted men -- Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Albert Parsons, and August Spies -- and over 15,000 people attended the funeral. The Haymarket bombing occurred in strike-ridden Chicago on May 4,1886, at a mass meeting called to protest police brutality. On the previous day, at the McCormick Reaper Plant, police intervened in a fight between strikers and strikebreakers who were operating the plant, and several people were killed. The gathering at Haymarket Square was peaceful until the police ordered the crowd to disperse. A bomb was thrown and the shooting began. Seven policemen were killed, as well as four workers, and more than sixty people were wounded. Eight labor activists were brought to trial and charged with inciting the bomb-throwing incident. The identity of the bomb-thrower was never established, but the eight were found guilty even though several of them were not present at the Haymarket meeting, nor even in Chicago. Four of the men were hanged on Nov. 11, 1887, and one committed suicide in his cell. The other three were imprisoned. In 1893, lawyer Clarence Darrow and others approached Governor John Peter Altgeld about a pardon for the three remaining prisoners, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab. After reviewing the case, Altgeld became convinced that the trial had been unfair and granted the pardons. For this, Altgeld was burned in effigy and vilified in the press, particularly by Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune. When the three died, they were also buried around the marker. The Haymarket monument was designed by the sculptor Albert Weinert and is held in trust by the Illinois Labor History Society. Justice is represented by a woman placing a laurel wreath on the head of a fallen worker. She is marching into the future, ready to draw the sword if she must, to win a better life for generations to come.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 11:33:12 +0000
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