Good Read, Old Story

Abstract

We have so many studies of the [Haymarket] riot and the trial that it would be impossible to justify another, wrote Bruce Nelson in 1988.1 Certainly the literature on the subject has been copious. Immediately following the trial in 1886 anarchist Dyer Lum published concise of the event, attacking the prosecution's case. Two years later George McLean answered with a withering assault on the defendants in The Rise and Fall of Anarchy, followed in 1889 by Chicago police captain Michael Schaack's account of the purported anarchist conspiracy that had left at least seven of the author's fellow officers dead. Lucy Parsons, the widow of one of the executed offered a predictably laudatory biography of her martyred husband, and each of the convicted anarchists also penned autobiographies prior to their death that were collected in a volume edited by Philip Foner and published in 1969. Meanwhile in 1936, fifty years after the riot, Henry David presented a scholarly volume on the affair, superseded in 1984 by Paul Avrich's The Haymarket Tragedy, a 535-page tome of masterful research and synthesis that promised to be the definitive work on the subject. Yet in 1988 Bruce Nelson took a different tact by composing social history of Chicago's anarchists, that explored the rank and file of the movement and not just the Haymarket defendants. And in 2003 historian Martin Duberman authored a novel focusing on the executed anarchist Albert Parsons and his wife Lucy..2 Despite this plethora of literature and Nelson's 1988 judgment, readers are now confronted with yet another book on the Haymarket Affair, this one by labor historian James Green. A highly readable narrative account, Green's work surpasses all previous volumes in its accessibility to the general public. Yet the historian will find little new in this latest rendering of the well-known incident. It is a good read of an old story. Green begins his account in the late 1860s, examining the first struggle for the 8-hour day that emerged during those years. From that failure he proceeds to the mounting labor tensions of the 1870s, introducing the anarchist lead-