“You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows…”
May 4, 1886…
A lit bomb sailing out of the darkness.
An explosion.
Chaos. Screaming. Blood. By the time the smoke cleared 7 police officers were killed and 60 others were wounded. civilian casualties have been estimated at 4 to 8 dead and 30 to 40 injured.
Later 8 radical anarchist labor activists would be rounded up.
Coincidentally, the meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket that night was about the battle for the 8 hour workday.
The trial was a sham. A frame up. A mockery of justice. More than this, it was a chance for the captains of the “gilded age” to get rid of agitators and to send a clear message to those who would stand up and fight for their rights.
On November 11, 1887 - 4 of the 8 defendants were executed by hanging.
George Engel had been at home playing cards on the day of the bombing.
Adolph Fischer was at a local saloon called Zepf's Hall when the bomb went off.
Zepf's Hall at 630 W. Lake Street
Before he was hanged, August Spies shouted, "the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."
Albert Parsons left as the crowd dispersed and before the bomb exploded.
The executions were botched, some believe intentionally.
The Chicago Tribune reported the next day:
… Then begins a scene of horror that freezes the blood. The loosely-adjusted nooses remain behind the left ear and do not slip to the back of the neck. Not a single neck is broken, and the horrors of a death by strangulation begin.
Louis Lingg, perhaps predicting this fate, tried to circumvent it. On November 6, 1887 He used a blasting cap smuggled to him by a fellow prisoner. He put it in his mouth and lit it at 9:00 AM. The explosion blew off his lower jaw and damaged a large portion of his face. He wrote "Hoch die anarchie!" (Hurrah for anarchy!) on the cell stones in his own blood before the guards came. He survived in agonizing pain for another 6 hours before expiring around 3 in the afternoon. He was 23 years old.
In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert was raised at Waldheim Cemetery. It was dedicated on June 25, of that year.
Utah Phillips spoke at Waldheim Cemetery in May 1986 during ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket affair.
Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, continued to fight for labor causes well into her 80’s. She died in a Chicago house fire on March 7, 1942. After her death, police seized her library of 1500 books and all her personal papers.
Haymarket Memorial
175 N. Desplaines St.
Chicago, IL 60661
There is, of course, another monument…
In 1889, a commemorative nine-foot bronze statue of a Chicago policeman by sculptor Johannes Gelert was erected in the middle of Haymarket Square.
It was contentious from the start.
On May 4, 1927, the 41st anniversary anniversary of the Haymarket affair, a streetcar crashed into the monument. The driver said he was “sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.”
In 1956, the statue was moved to a pedestal overlooking the newly constructed Kennedy Expressway. It was not far from the original location.
The Haymarket statue was vandalized with black paint on May 4, 1968, the 82nd anniversary of the Haymarket affair, following a confrontation between police and demonstrators at a protest against the Vietnam War.
On October 6, 1969, shortly before the "Days of Rage" protests, the statue was destroyed when a bomb was placed between its legs.
The Weathermen, a radical offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took credit for the blast, which broke nearly 100 windows in the neighborhood and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below.
No one was injured.
The Weathermen took their name from a line in the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.
“You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows…”
The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970…
only to be blown up yet again by Weathermen on October 6, 1970.
The statue-less pedestal of the police monument.
The pedestal has since been removed.
The location where the pedestal stood, a block west of Desplaines Street at 700 West Randolph Street, just to the east of the Kennedy Expressway.
After the statue was blown up again, Mayor Daley posted a 24 hour guard. When that became too costly, it was moved to a secure interior courtyard in the Chicago Police Education and Training Division facility on West Jackson Street.
On June 1, 2007 the statue was rededicated at Chicago Police Headquarters located at 3501 South State Street, where it resides today.
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