The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 14, 1926, Page 8

. Arbéiter-Zeitung, j eloquent " - - Thirty-mime years ago, Nov, lath, 1887, the murder of the Chicago Anarchists by the capitalist state de- prived the American working-class movement of revo- futionary leadership that might have immeasurably strengthened the cause of the American proletariat in the Jasi decades. Spies and Parsons, the two leading figures among the men condemned, were of Debs’ gen- eration. They would probably have lived to render as great services to the working class as Debs has done. They both had real. qualities of leadership, and as editors of revolutionary papers—Spies of the German Parsons of the English Alarm—as and energetic organizers, they wielded a powerful revolutionary influence on the American labor movement. Of the others, Bngel, a man forced into the revolutionary movement by the bitter logic of a life of hardship, the oldest, a man of fifty, had done a great deal of effective organization work among the German workers of Chicago; he was a speaker of rugged force. Fischer, a 24-year-old compositor, and the son of socialist parents, was also a thonough-going revolutionist and a man in whom his fellow-workers had confidence. The fifth, Louis Lingg, a strange, brilliant figure, was only 22 years old, and geome nine months out of Germany, but he had a name “tn anarchist circles in his native land and was already doing effective work in Chicago. It is difficult to tell what his line of development in re.ation to the labor movement might have been: he was the stuff of whith the Russian terrorists were made. His extraordinary mental capacity and cold cgurage would probably have made him a force to be reckoned with. Capitalism carried out its purpose efficiently. With the hanging of these men and the breaking up of the Chicago Anarchist group, it left the revolutionary movement in the United States practically leaderless for the time being, and desperately crippled. Capital- fsm had planned to strike a double blew at the revo- jutionary movement, first by depriving it of leader- ship, and secondly by “making an example” of the speakers A. R. Parsons August Vincenz Theodor Spies men brought to iriai thai should strike such terror into the hearts of labor that not only the revolutionary movement but militancy of any sort, and especially the eight-hour movement, then gaining tremendous impetus, would be utterly destroyed. It was as deliberate a move on the part of the capitalist dictatorship to stem the onward surge of the proletariat by violence, as definite a manifestation of the white terror, as any of the deeds perpetrated in Czarist Russia, as the killing ef Liebknecht and Luxemburg in Germany, or the long foll of murders of Communists in “our Marie's” Rou- mania, and the whole Balkan shambles of today. In fact a certain Russian prince, Shastakov, minister of the czarist navy, arriving in the United States at the ‘time of the trial, feeling the homelike atmosphere ‘of eur democracy, poltely inquired of the reporters, “Have you hanged your Nihilists yet?” Anarchism on Trial, There was never any question but that it was an- erchism (used indiscriminately at that time by capital for all radical doctrines, as Bolshevism is today) ghat was on trial. It was openly stated and reiterated by press, prosecuting attorneys, and the judge upon the bench, Elbert H. Gary, who, with his victims four de- eades in their graves, still lives today to invoke vio- lence against his slaves in the steel mills at the first sign of discontent. ; “The state intends,” wrote the Chicago Tribune dur- img the trial “to try the men for anarchism, not mur- der. A jury dvowedly opposed to such doctrines has been secured.” “Anarchy is on trial” declared Ingham, special counsel for the state. “Hang these eight men and save our institutions” shouted States Attorney Grinnell during the trial. “These are the leaders; make examples of them” demanded the prosecution address- img the jury. “These eight defendants,” said the state attorney to the jury “were picked out and indicted by the grand jury. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. They were picked out Secause they were leaders.” Again the prosecution: “Convict them and our society is safe.” Every one of the 1139 men summoned as jurors by the state’s at- torney was asked: “Are you a member of a trade and labor union? Are you a member of the Knights of Labor? Have you any sympathy with communists, an- archists and socialists?” Only those answering 100 per cent in the negative were passed. The Upheaval of the '80s, In a previous article a sketch was given of the great epheaval of the eighties, the rapid increase of class- eonscious feeling among the workers, and the violent @ethods with which capitalism sought to check st. The Four That Were Hang Briefly the main causes of unrest were: the extensive displacement of man-power by machinery in this dec- ade, by which hundreds of thousands of workers were thrown from the class,of ‘skilled into that of unskilled labor; the final expropriation of the last public lands by capital so that the working class, finally “shut up in the wage system,” began to awaken from the dream of “capitalist democracy” which the possibility of escape (however vague) to “free land” had fended to keep alive, the immense immigration of the decade with its attendant increase in unemployment; and to cap it, the acute suffering of the workers during the great crisis of 1884-1886. With all the cards stacked against labor, capital ex- pected to have a submissive lot of wage slaves that would suffer themselves to be used as purely passive and uncomplaining adjuncts to that marvelous new machinery that seemed to promise. such unlimited profits. Instead it found itself confronted with a mili- tant spirit that not only fought bitterly against the { constant wage euts that capital tried to put over, but i —— = hice = (eihisiinitaiaiacacibl CRIES cicero esac SERS actually dared to demand a share in the benefits of the infinitely more productive new machinery con- stantly being installed, in the form of an eight-hour day in place of one of anywhere from ten to twenty hours. The struggle of the classes was openly recognized by both sides. Not only the press, but also the official spokesmen of government and army talked class war —‘‘with cannon and powder, not votes”—and recom- mended violenee in answer to the demands of the working class. This was not merely abstract talk—in strike after strike: on Gould's railroad lines; in the coalfields of Ohio and Pennsylvania, in the lumber mills of the Saginaw valley, in the stockyards of Chi- cago workers were shot down by mine, guards, Pink- ertons and militia. In answer the workers organized to meet force with force and armed detachments were formed in connection with unions and other workers’ organizations. Two leading forces in the workers’ movement capi- talism especially feared and was determined to destroy. Firstly, the Knights of Labor, into which the workers were flocking by the hundreds of thousands and which was essentially an organization of the unskilled worker who previously had been absolutely at the mercy of their employers, and tended to the solidarity of all la- bor, sweeping: aside barriers of race, and color and craft. Secondly, the International Working Peoples’ Association centering in Chicago, which represented revolutionary organization among the workers and was increasingly successful in spreading fts revolutionafy propaganda. The destruction of the Knights of Labor was to be accomplished by widespread blacklisting of K. of L. members, by shutting down factories in which the organization was influential and then offering to take back singly those who would renounce their mem- bership, by violently breaking up K, of L.-strikes, and in not a small measure, by winning over certain of its leaders to become capital’s own lieutenants. The rounding-up and hanging of the anarchist leaders was the method capital employed to exterminate the other force that it considered a menace to its “supremacy. The International Working People’s Association. The International Working People’s Association. of which the Chicago anarchists were leading members | had been organized three years earlier at a Pittsburgh convention attended by social revolutionaries as they called themselves, and anarchist groups from a num- ber of cities. It was not very clear in its principles, combining a good deal of anarchism with some social- ism and syndicalism. But it was definitely militant in outlook in contradistinction to the declining §. L. P. and rallied to itself the most earnest and revolutionary elements in the labor movement. These elements had become disgusted with the S, L, P, which at this. period definitely repudiated the idea of class war and put’its faith in education and above all the ballot box. The waning confidence of militant workers in the S. L. P. had received a bad blow when the national executive committee ordered all its members to withdraw from the Lehr-und Wher Vereine (Education and Ngfense societies) and the ground that affiliation to these socie- ties gave the public the impression “that the socialists were determined to accomplish by force what they could, not obtain by the ballot.” . The Chicago groups of the International which Spies and Parsons founded leaned strongly toward Marxian socialism. Speaking of the program adopted by the or- ganization at Pittsburgh Spies, perhaps the clearest of the leaders theoretically, declared: “The Pittsburgh program is of secondary importance. Our platform is the Communist Manifesto.” And in his writings we: find socialism mostly used to denote the seizure of the it from press and pulpit and made plans for ita destruc- tion, On the evé of May Day Jay Gould, railway mags nate and leader in every anti-labor move, made a state- ment that sounds as though it dated from the time of the wholesale raids on Communists in 192): “The fact is too patent to permit of disguise that the workingmen of the land today are under the leadership, for the most part of loud-speaking demagogues of the worst type who left their native countries for their native country’s good. Men who in Germany or Russia would be locked with their incondiarism within prison walls are heroes here, They are leaders and the blatant outcry of their shameful ideas wins applause. Men who were born of patriotic parents—reared where fear of God was inculcated—such men have been befogged by the shouts and imprecations and fiendish teachings of these imported Communists who preach in the name of suffering humanity doctrines that no man could de- cldre who was Lot mad with the fumes of the meanest dregs of nihilism.” “Mr. Gould,” the awed reporter writes with fervor but he quickly added with a brighter look: “The day for this sort of thing is mearly at an end. There is a great awakening at hand. The spirit that filled the streets of Paris with blood and that developed murder and outrage to a Russian selence has been flaunting means of production by the proletariat, and the soéial | }tself freely along our lines in Missoud, in Kansas and system built upon their social possession; and anarch-. ism, the ethical system obtaining under socialism, al- lowing free development to the individual, The influence of the International grew at a tremen- dous rate. It provided just that energetic revolutionary leadership that men felt inereasing need of in this time of economic upheaval, Capital mveighed against 4 Tilinois, but America is not France, and the Commune has failed. America is not Russia, and nihilism has not deposed those in authority “nor been able to ruin the property of those who presume to disobey.” The Eight-hour Movement and Anarchist Lead: The venom against the Internationalists doubled * when they gave their support to the aighthour move err amreorerrers a a ta