{"product_id":"death-in-the-haymarket-isbn-9781400033225","title":"Death in the Haymarket","description":"On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country,  leading to a sensational trial, that culminated in four controversial executions, and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic twenty-year struggle for the eight-hour workday. Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, \u003ci\u003eDeath in the Haymarket\u003c\/i\u003e is an important addition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.“Definitive. . . . Green’s dramatic narrative tells a powerful story about injustice, passion, prejudice and fanaticism.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Chicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e“Though a number of prominent historians have written about the Haymarket Affair, no one has told the story more thoroughly, incisively and elegantly than Green. . . . He has reconstructed both the context and the events of the Haymarket tragedy with the fine hand of a novelist. The book is rich in plot development and thick characterization, and its interpretations and drama leave the reader both informed and drained.”—\u003ci\u003eThe San Diego Union-Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e“Absorbing. . . .Green . . .brings this tale to vivid life [and] does a wonderful job of delineating the cross currents of labor, capital, politics, and terrorism. . . fascinating and deeply American.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e“It tells the tale with extraordinary grace. Its simplicity of expression carries an understated dramatic charge that stays with you long after finishing.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003eJames Green is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  He grew up outside of Chicago and now lives with his family in Somerville, Massachusetts.\u003cb\u003e   For Once in Common Front\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    MAY 1, 1865-MAY 1, 1867\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THE FIRST OF MAY was by custom a day of hope that marked the coming of   spring, a day when children danced and twirled streamers around a   Maypole. But in 1865 it was the gloomiest day Chicago had ever seen.   For on that occasion \"the merry May pole gaily wreathed for the holiday   festivities of exuberant life\" yielded its place to the \"funeral   catafalque draped with Death's sad relics.\" So wrote Abraham Lincoln's   friend and ally Joseph Medill in the Chicago Tribune that morning of   the day when the multitudes would assemble \"to do honor to the great   and good King of men,\" severed from his people when he was \"slain so   ruthlessly.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the dark hours of the early morning, crowds gathered all along the   Illinois Central tracks on the lakeside. A light rain fell as the   funeral train entered Chicago that morning; it hissed to a stop at   Michigan Avenue and 12th Street, where 36,000 citizens had gathered to   meet it. An honor guard loaded the presidential coffin onto an   elaborate horse-drawn hearse, and citizens formed in military rank   behind it. A group of thirty-six \"maidens dressed in white\" surrounded   the carriage as it passed through an imposing Gothic arch dedicated to   the \"Martyr for Justice.\" After each young woman placed a red rose on   the president's coffin, the carriage pulled away, followed by the   column of Chicagoans who marched four abreast up Michigan Avenue toward   the courthouse, where their martyred president's remains would lie in   state. The procession grew to 50,000 as it moved slowly up the   lakeside. Along the way twice that many people lined the streets. From   all over the Northwest they came-by train, in wagons and buggies and on   horseback, all united in silent grief. \"In the line of march and   looking on, sharing something in common,\" Carl Sandburg wrote, were   native-born Yankees and foreign-born Catholics, blacks and whites,   German Lutherans and German Jews-all \"for once in common front.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Up Michigan Avenue they trod in rhythm to the sound of drums beating in   solemn tribute to Lincoln's memory, expressing, as the Tribune put it,   \"the devotion with which all classes looked up to him.\" A military band   led the funeral procession of five divisions: first came the Board of   Education and 5,000 schoolchildren, and then military officers and   enlisted men, the combat troops of the Grand Army of the Republic led   by the Old Batteries of the Chicago Light Artillery, whose cannon had   laid siege to Atlanta. The black-coated men of the Board of Trade   headed the next division, which also featured groups from various   ethnic lodges, including 200 of the Turner gymnasts dressed in white   linen. Contingents of workingmen followed, paying their respects to a   president who said he was not ashamed that he had once been \"a hired   laborer, mauling rails, on a flatboat-just what might happen to any   poor man's son!\" Nearly 300 members from the Journeymen Stonecutters'   Association walked behind a banner with two sides, one reading in union   there is strength and the other proclaiming we unite to protect not to   injure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All through that night of May 1 and well into the next day, mourners   stood in the mud and drizzle waiting to file through the courthouse for   a last look at the man whose storied path to the White House had so   often passed through their city. On May 2, after 125,000 people had   gazed upon the face of their departed president, his coffin was   escorted to St. Louis Depot on Canal Street by another elaborately   organized procession led by a chorus of 250 Germans singing dirges.   Lincoln's corpse was placed inside its specially built car, and at 9:30   a.m. the funeral train pulled out of the depot carrying Illinois's   \"noblest son\" to his final destination in Springfield, leaving behind a   city whose people he had unified in life and, far more so, in death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After its journey through the cornfields and little prairie towns   Lincoln had visited as a lawyer and campaigner, the funeral train   arrived in Springfield. The president's body was buried the next day in   Oak Ridge Cemetery, where the eulogist recalled the late Civil War as a   momentous \"contest for human freedom . . . not for this Republic   merely, not for the Union simply, but to decide whether the people, as   a people, were destined . . . to be subject to tyrants or aristocrats   or class rule of any kind.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leading Illinois Republicans who gathered at Lincoln's grave on May 4,   1865, rejoiced that free labor had triumphed over the slave system in   that great war now won. They believed a new nation had emerged from the   bloody conflict, new because now all of its people were \"wholly free.\"   The 4 million bondsmen the \"martyred emancipator\" had liberated were,   said the Tribune, a living epistle to Lincoln's immortality. But were   all the people now wholly free?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    IN THE YEARS after Lincoln's death, emancipated slaves found many   compelling reasons to question the meaning of their new freedom in the   face of the reign of white terror that descended upon them. At the same   time, for quite different reasons, workingmen, the very mechanics who   benefited most from the free labor system Lincoln had extolled, began   to doubt the nature of their liberty. A few months before the war   ended, the nation's most influential trade union leader, William H.   Sylvis, came to Chicago and sounded an alarm that echoed in many labor   newspapers in the closing months of the war. The president of the   powerful Iron Molders' International Union excoriated employers who   took advantage of the war emergency to fatten their profits while   keeping their employees on lean wages. When union workers protested   with strikes, politicians called them traitors, soldiers drove them   back to work, and many loyal union men were fired and blacklisted by   their bosses in retaliation. How, Sylvis asked, could a republic at war   with the principle of slavery make it a felony for a workingman to   exercise his right to protest, a right President Lincoln had once   celebrated as the emblem of free labor? \"What would it profit us, as a   nation,\" the labor leader wondered, if the Union and its Constitution   were preserved but essential republican principles were violated? If   the \"greasy mechanics and horny-handed sons of toil\" who elected Abe   Lincoln became slaves to work instead of self-educated citizens and   producers, what would become of the Republic?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sylvis told his iron molders that tyranny was based upon ignorance   compounded by \"long hours, low wages and few privileges,\" while liberty   was founded on education and free association among workingmen. Only   when wage earners united could they achieve individual competence and   independence. Only then would they exercise a voice in determining   their share of the increased wealth and the expanded freedom that would   come to the nation after the war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    America had never produced a labor leader as intelligent, articulate   and effective as William Sylvis. Born in western Pennsylvania to   parents in humble circumstances, young William was let out as a servant   to a wealthy neighbor who sent him to school and gave him the key to a   good library. Later, after helping in his father's wagon shop, Sylvis   apprenticed himself to a local iron foundry owner, a master craftsman   who taught his young helper the ancient arts of smelting and smithing   and the methods of making molten iron flow into wooden molds to shape   the iron products he had designed. After he married, the young molder   moved to Philadelphia to ply his trade, but he found it a struggle   working long hours every day to provide for his family and failing to   rise above the level of manual laborer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    William Sylvis found another way to raise himself up. He became   secretary of his local union in 1859, and then two years later   secretary of the new National Union of Iron Molders. By this time   Sylvis had decided that mechanics were losing their independence and   respectability because certain owners monopolized branches of industry   and used their power to reduce wages. The rugged individualist was no   match against these men who used money and political clout to advance   themselves at the expense of their employees. \"Single-handed, we can   accomplish nothing,\" he wrote, \"but united there is no power of wrong   we may not openly defy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In these years before the Civil War, however, prospects for a united   labor movement were bleak. Only a few unions, like those of printers,   machinists and locomotive engineers, had created national   organizations. Most trade unions functioned within local settings where   they had been formed by craftsmen who still dreamed of being masters   and proprietors of their own shops and employers of their own helpers.   These artisans often used radical language to denounce the merchant   capitalists, bankers and monopolists, the \"purse proud aristocrats\" and   \"blood sucking parasites\" who lived off the honest producers. Yet   antebellum labor unionists, even radicals, tended to be craft-conscious   more than class-conscious, barring females and free blacks from their   associations and turning their backs on the women, children and   immigrant \"wage slaves\" who toiled in factories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Before 1860 common laborers and factory workers rarely formed lasting   unions, and when they took concerted action, it was usually to resist   wage cuts rather than to force employers to recognize their   organizations. Their strikes were often ritualistic protests that   rarely involved violent conflicts. The one cause that brought diverse   groups of workers together was the campaign to shorten the workday to   ten hours. Initiated by journeymen carpenters and women textile workers   in 1835, the crusade gained thousands of adherents in northern shops   and factories and then faded in the 1850s. Middle-class reformers and   politicians took up the cause and lobbied for ten-hour laws in   legislative halls, but their moderate arguments for shorter hours   failed to produce effective laws. At the onset of the Civil War the   ten-hour movement was dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When northern artisans and mechanics left the shops to join the federal   armed forces in 1861, trade unions all but disappeared. The largest   group of Union soldiers consisted of farmers, but as more and more   troops were conscripted, workingmen constituted a growing proportion of   the northern armed forces, so that by the end of the war 421 of every   1,000 soldiers who served in the northern ranks were wage workers, as   compared to 35 of every 1,000 who listed business and commercial   occupations. With their sons, brothers, cousins and neighbors dying on   southern battlefields, those mechanics who remained at work fashioning   and feeding the Union war machine found themselves working shorthanded   and toiling harder than ever for greenback wages that could not keep up   with astounding increases in the cost of fuel, rent and foodstuffs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    William Sylvis was well aware of these conditions when he became his   union's national president in 1863. And so, as the War Between the   States raged on, he decided it was time to bring the union back to the   foundries, even if he had to do it single-handedly. He was thirty-six   years old by then, \"a medium-sized man, strongly built, of florid   complexion, light beard and moustache, and a face and eyes beaming with   intelligence,\" wrote one reporter. Still lean from his days at the   forge, he drove himself mercilessly, giving speech after speech in a   passionate style of oratory. That year he visited more than 100   foundries and organized many new locals. He wore the same suit until it   became threadbare, and the scarf he wore was filled with little holes   burned in it by the splashing of molten iron.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With tenacity and boundless energy, William Sylvis rebuilt the Molders'   Union into the strongest in the country, creating the first effectively   administered national organization in history, with a dues-collection   system, a real treasury and a strike fund. \"From a mere pigmy, our   union has grown in one short year to be a giant,\" he reported, \"like a   mighty oak with branches stretching out in every direction.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By 1865, when Sylvis addressed his national convention in Chicago, he   reported that nearly all the foundry owners in the nation had agreed to   employ only molders who held a union card. One of the strongest local   unions of iron molders flourished at Chicago's premier manufacturing   plant, the farm reaper works owned and operated by Cyrus and Leander   McCormick. Their employees struck four times for wage increases in 1863   and 1864, and won each time. Plant managers reported feeling powerless   to resist the well-organized molders. When the Civil War ended,   Sylvis's molders constituted the vanguard of what promised to become   the nation's first coordinated union movement, a new army of labor.   Trade union officers like Sylvis were painfully aware, however, that   powerful forces had already been mobilized to block their advance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    DURING THE WAR the iron molders and other trade unionists encountered   new employers' associations formed to resist any union demands for wage   increases or reduced hours; these groups usually succeeded in   destroying the fledgling labor unions by imposing lockouts and breaking   strikes. Once they gained the upper hand, united employers fired and   blacklisted union men and demanded that those who returned to work sign   \"yellow-dog contracts\" promising not to rejoin the union. This   coordinated opposition from employers frightened Sylvis and convinced   him that a violent collision between labor and capital was coming. He   concluded that union workers needed a national labor federation \"to   protect the rights of mechanics from being trammeled throughout the   length and breadth of the land.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In charting a new course for the postbellum era, William Sylvis needed   the help of a good navigator. He found one in Andrew C. Cameron of   Chicago, the editor of a feisty labor newspaper called the Workingman's   Advocate. Cameron had already been a combatant in early skirmishes with   employers that broke out in Chicago while the Civil War still raged. He   had come to America from Scotland as a young printer's apprentice,   having learned the trade from his father in Berwick-on-Tweed, a   historic center of Scottish resistance to English rule. He grew up   during a time when the North Country was awash with a great mass   movement for a People's Charter that would democratize the English   Parliament and legalize universal manhood suffrage. The Chartist   movement left a legacy that many English and Scottish workers carried   to America: a tradition of questioning the new industrialism and of   proposing checks on the free play of the market-all this based on an   outlook with a \"dangerous tenet: that production must be, not for   profit, but for use.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After securing a position as a printer for the Chicago Times in 1860,   Cameron emerged as the leader of a wartime strike against the paper's   imperious publisher, Wilbur F. Storey, who had dismissed his union   printers in order to hire cheaper hands. Unable to state their case in   the city's daily papers, the strikers formed their own opposition   newspaper, the Workingman's Advocate, \"devoted exclusively to the   interests of the producing classes,\" and asked Andrew Cameron to be its   editor. It was a task he performed with all the \"vim and independence   characteristic of a Scotch Covenanter who hated tyranny and oppression   from what ever source.\"","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304403587301,"sku":"NP9781400033225","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400033225.jpg?v=1767724899","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/death-in-the-haymarket-isbn-9781400033225","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}