May Day Rerun Part One: The Haymarket Affair: The Bomb & the Eight-Hour Workday

Margaret's taking a week off post mouth surgery and wants to celebrate May Day! Here's a throwback to the first episode where Margaret sat down with journalist and podcast host Robert Evans to talk about the anarchists who were hanged in Chicago in the 1860s for fighting for the rights of the working class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that once every now and then is
rerun episode like today, I took a week off so
that someone could cut into my face to remove teeth
at my request, and so I'm running a rerun. But
it's a very special week because it's Mayday week, my

(00:26):
favorite holiday besides the other holidays that I really like,
which I also talk about a lot on this show,
but this one is May Day. Well, not today as
this is released, but this week as it's released, the
international workers holiday that comes from a really cool background,
a little bit tragic. They do call it the Haymarket tragedy,

(00:49):
but if you've listened to the show before, you know
that I'm not afraid of thinking tragedy is cool. That
sounds weird, But this is the first ever episode that
I ever recorded of this show that we're rerunning, and
it's about May Day. Here you go, Hello and welcome

(01:12):
to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is a
podcast about cool stuff that people did stuff cool. I
suppose this is the very first episode, which means I
should probably tell you what the show is. Okay, So
there's bad stuff, right and fighting against bad stuff is cool.
Cool people fight against bad stuff, so you should be cool.
You should fight against bad stuff. And every week on

(01:33):
this podcast, I bring you a new story about cool
people who did cool stuff like fight against bad stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today our
first guest is Robert Evans.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's right. I am the opposite of you, and my
podcast is the opposite of yours. And if we were
to ever make physical contact, it would create a nuclear
explosion that would destroy all life in the universe.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
That's true. Yes, So okay, So I'm looking at your
your bio and it says that you're a podcaster, a
war correspondent, a novelist, and you're the proud owner of
the world's largest collection of please bleep this out.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yes, yes, I used to belong to Jay Leno, but
I bested him in a fight to the death, and
now an impostor lives his life and I have taken
over that collection. So really really been a good year
for me?

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Allegedly, sure, allegedly a good year. And that voice that
you'll hear from time to time, disembodied in commanding is Sophie,
our producer. Hello. Okay, so today I'm feeling the spirit
for a holiday that has not happened by the time
I'm recording this, but will have happened by the time
you listen to this, which is May Day, the workers

(02:46):
Rights Day everywhere in the world except the US. Today,
we're going to talk about where that comes from deciding
to start the whole podcast series off with a bang,
which is the best pun I will ever use on
the show, and hopefully the last pun I ever use
on the show. We're going to talk about the bomb
that brought us the modern labor movement. Robert, are you
familiar with the Haymarket riot, affair, massacre, or tragedy, depending

(03:06):
on whatever people want to call it.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, So, a bunch of like anarchists and other people
who didn't want there to be an eight hour or
wanted there to be an eight hour workday were organizing
and there were some cops, and then someone threw a
bomb and it killed some of those cops, and then
the cops arrested a bunch of anarchists, most of whom
probably didn't have anything to do with the bomb, but
a bunch of them got executed, and then we got
an eight hour workday, right that's the gist.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
That is the rough strokes.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, although we didn't necessarily get the eight hour work
day at the end of it, not to ruin the
end of the episode, but that is yes, And we're
going to be talking about the cool people and the
mostly cool people and the like cool with caveat people
who were busy fighting against capitalism and for immigrants, and
they got very and labor and they got very not

(03:56):
cool murdered by the state for it. Talking about a
mystery person who chucked a bomb at some cops a
few days after cops gunned down striking workers, which is
a tale as old as time, or at least a
tale as old as eighteen eighty six. Yeah, thanks for
laughing at my joke. It's the story of a fight

(04:18):
for the eight hour workday.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
But it's also a story about a huge immigrant subculture
that developed in Chicago and started off believing in the
ballot box and wounded up believing only in revolution, and
how the whole thing came crashing down in a moment,
only to grow into something even bigger later. And it's
a story about people who are put on trial for
their beliefs, not their actions or really even their words.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Well, that all just sounds cool.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, that's the show.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
I want to start this with a story from folk
singer Utah Phillips. It's about one of the stars of
this week's episode, Lucy Parsons. One time she was speaking
at a big May Day rally back in the Haymarket
in the middle of the nineteen thirties, during the depression.
She was incredibly old. She was led carefully up to
the rostrum a multitude of people there. She had her
hair tied back in a tight white bun, her face

(05:05):
a mass of deeply incised lines, deep set, beady black eyes.
She was the image of everybody's great grandmother. She hunched
over that podium hawklike and fixed that multitude with those
beady black eyes and said, what I want is for
every greasy, grimy tramp to arm himself with a knife

(05:26):
or a gun and stationing himself at the doorways of
the rich, shoot or stab them as they come out.
And then Utah, describing it, goes on to say, now
I'm a pacifist by admire her spunk. And this wasn't
the first time that Lucy Parson said anything like this.
The first time had been like fifty years earlier, in

(05:46):
the eighteen eighties, and she was remarkably consistent her entire life.
There's a park named after her in Chicago, and a
little bit we'll talk about how she reached the conclusions
that she reached more famous than her dead husband Albert Parsons.
But he gets to steal the show a bunch today
because it's the story about how he died and he

(06:07):
becomes one of the Haymarket martyrs, and sorry and give
me a second. Well, most of the story is not
about stabbing or the shooting of the rich, and it's
not even really at its core a story about violence

(06:30):
and the bombs and the stuff they just grab the
most attention. I would argue that history teachers know that
the good ones. Newspapers know it, at least at the time.
The newspapers definitely knew that the bombs and the guns
got the most attention, and as a podcaster, I know it.
So that's why I'm starting with some stabbing and shooting
of the rich. And this is as a personal story

(06:53):
for me, right, I wanted to start the whole series
off with this episode because it's so personal to me.
I have a tattoo on my arm of one of
the martyrs, not not Albert Parsons, but George Engel, who
was a toy shop owner and the oldest of the bunch.
He met his aunt calmly after a life lived trying
to improve the conditions of his fellow workers. And his
last words were in German it was hawk the anarchy

(07:14):
or Hurrah for anarchy. And there's a there's a graveyard
in Chicago with a big monument to these folks. And
I've been a few times. I cry every time I go, oh,
there were really nice people, some of them, most of them.
They were cool people. I'll stop saying cool every single time.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
They're cool people who did cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
They did actually mostly mostly cool stuff. Cool. Yeah, Okay,
so now we get to talk about them. Lucy Parsons
she was born Lucy Ella Gonzalez Waller, or maybe Lucy
Elding Gathering's or maybe Lucia Carter, it depends on who
you ask. Like, she was remarkably cagey about her history.

(07:56):
She was maybe born enslaved in Texas, or maybe she
was born enslaved in sometime around eighteen fifty one to
eighteen fifty three, and she was Black Mexican in Creek.
I actually kind of feel guilty talking to There's so
much work modern historians have put into trying to discern
her heritage, and her whole thing was that she did
not want to talk about her heritage. She said itself

(08:16):
one point, she said, I am not a candidate for office,
and the public has no right to my past. But
because being who she was would have been fundamentally illegal
if she were if she claimed her black heritage, she
maintained throughout her entire life that she was indigenous in
Mexican and not African, though really no one believed her
then or now. And you know, so it's interesting how

(08:38):
she becomes like this very important early figure in black anarchism,
and yet you know, because of the conditions that she
was living in or whatever decisions that she made that
I'm not really in a good place to judge. She
didn't really talk about it much. In eighteen seventy two,
she married a traveling journalist named Albert Parsons, and for
fifteen years they were one of the biggest power couples
in the American left.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, she gets to be powerful after that. But you
can probably guess what happens in fifteen years to Albert
A big spoiler alert that has already happened.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
Okay, technically I spoiled it.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
That's true. He spoiled the whole episode. I was thinking
we could just end it there.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
But you know, a nice people got married hooray.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, exactly, and their marriage wasn't legal, but I'll get
to that, Okay. So then there's Albert, and we have
way more information about Albert because he was really forthcoming,
like this guy wouldn't shut up. Honestly, by the end
of all this, I don't actually like Albert all that much,
not because he's like a bad person, but because he
just doesn't shut up. But we have a lot more

(09:43):
information about him because his wife wrote his biography after
he died, and so he was one of ten kids
born in Alabama to a shoe factory owner. And the
Parsons family goes really far back, you know that like
meme where it's like, if you go to a famous
artist's Wikipedia page, all their parents name are always in
blue because their parents of Wikipedia pages two. Yes, yeah,

(10:05):
that's Albert Parsons, only it's not his parents, it's like
his great great everyone there's so many Parsons.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
From a long line of people who wanted to function
up for the state.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah. Well yes, and no, I mean some of them
fought in the Revolutionary War. But he doesn't necessarily come
from a line of it.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
Was a state.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah that's true. Yeah, his family definitely was Southern slave
owners at this point. And okay, but when he was two,
his mom died, and then when he was four or
five is his dad died? And this is going to
be a running theme for all of these people, very
early parent deaths. He was raised by his brother, who

(10:43):
was like twenty years.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Older than I have a running theme for that century too.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, I get that impression a lot of these people,
even if they like they lived a long and happy
life and died at fifty seven, And I'm like, huh, well, yeah,
I'm hoping to do better than that.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Ancient dogged I mean, if you're a parent and your
kids make it to eighteen, you nailed it in this
period of time. That's really the only no matter how
drunk you were, like, they don't die before they're legally adults.
You have hid it out of the park in the
eighteen fifties.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, or if you survive long enough to see them
grow up.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Oh now that's like, yeah, that's a little bit of
an unreasonable expectation.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Okay. Well, so when he's eleven, he moved to a
town that you've probably never heard of, a town called Waco, Texas.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Oh Waco, I mean, of all of the towns in Texas,
it is in my bottom three. Okay, not the worst
because it's not Lufkin, but bottom three.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well, I mean, I think it's only famous because Albert
Parsons lived there. Right, That's the only thing that's ever
happened in Waco. That and the Confederacy fled there when
the war went bad.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
A couple of other things. But hey, Waco beats out
Amarillo and Lufkin in my Texas list.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, no, it's okay, we're going to get to the
Confederacy in a minute.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Oh good. Yeah, I was worried we wouldn't get to
the Confederacy, I know.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
So when he's twelve, he goes and he gets an
apprenticeship at his local paper, which is the job that
he takes with him the rest of his life is
that he works on newspapers. His employer was an upstanding
leader of the pro slavery movement whose nickname was Old Whitey.
Then the Civil War broke out, and so Albert Parsons
runs away at thirteen years old, lies about his age

(12:37):
to join the Confederate Army. He fought in the infantry,
then the artillery, then the cavalry, like he was just dumb,
young teen, all in on the whole Confederacy thing. Fought
the entire length of the war. When the war ended,
he was seventeen, and he went back to Texas, which is,

(12:57):
you know, a choice to have made.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, I wouldn't have made that call. I didn't make
that call.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
But yeah, okay, interesting, Yeah, but okay. So over the
next two years he has a change of heart and
he becomes this like very active person fighting for the
rights of formally enslaved people. He starts his own Republican
newspaper called The Spectator, which ooh wait.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Is that the same as The Spectator today?

Speaker 2 (13:27):
I don't know, and I kind of doubt it.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yeah, it couldn't be.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
I feel like newspapers all have the same name as
each other.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
Yeah, there's like four diffame things you could call, like
and now, although you were the old shit we used
to like pick a yune like, we don't use those
words anymore, but they used to be all over newspapers, Ah,
the good old days.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Mark. I just remember that there's there's multiple newspapers in
this story called the Tribune and the Times, and so
there being a lot of spectators makes a lot of
sense to me. And so it's during this time that
he starts to understand how capitalism is also a problem, right,

(14:07):
because he's seen the people who are formally enslaved are
still just totally screwed over. And so he cruise up
with a bunch of black speakers and they tore around
Texas teaching tolerance and acceptance. And you want to guess
how popular that made him in eighteen sixties Texas, very
a lot of people were paying attention to him, that's true.

(14:30):
And everyone he knew stopped speaking to him. He was
completely shut out of society, except occasionally they said things
to him like they said to him, we're going to
lynch you. And then one of them said I'm going
to shoot you in the leg. Now, actually they might
not have said that, but they did it. They shot
him in the leg. And then a different time some
people kicked him down the stairs, so people were including

(14:52):
him in society, but not incredibly politely. And he's still like,
I'm going to be this upstanding guy. So he gets
himself elected secretary of the state Senate. He becomes a
tax collector. He's basically had every terrible job, like, wow,
state senator, tax collector collector, guy, Confederate soldier. Yeah. Yeah,

(15:15):
though he's an interesting guy to start with. And then
he uh, and then he serves as an officer in
the state militia, specifically to try and protect black citizens
against white harassment. But then he married Lucy, and their
marriage was not legally recognized because white people weren't allowed
to marry black people in Texas at that time because
of anti missid I hate. This were so much annoutrounds. Yeah,

(15:40):
anti miscegenation laws.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
I mean, I'm sure were they allowed to marry anywhere
in the US at this point. There must have been
some places.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
So when they moved to Illinois, their marriage is not
legal until the next year.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Okay, well that's something.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
In eighteen seventy four, and Texas didn't repeal their laws
until nineteen sixty seven when the Supreme Court made everyone
do it.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
Hey, it's the same thing with their sodomy laws except
two thousand and three.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Well, do you want to guess what year Alabama finally,
the place that Parsons was born, finally got their shit
together and got rid of those laws.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Oh, have they done it yet?

Speaker 2 (16:18):
The year two thousand, the year two thousand they held
on thirty three years after.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
A Wow, they made it out of the twentieth century. Yeah,
you know what was. By the way, this is random,
but do you remember that period of time after the
year two thousand, but before two thousand and one, when
a bunch of very frustrating people were like, well, actually
it's not the twenty first century until two thousand and one.
That's the millennium hasn't changed. You remember that being like

(16:44):
a thing.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
That actually played into how I wrote this script, because
I almost wrote a thing about they made it into
the next millennia. And then I was like Pedance, I
don't want to deal with Pedance.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
I fuck them, you're wrong, you're wrong. Yeah, I don't
care about the Pluto discourse. Who gets a shit? What
a plan? And it is? But like the year two thousand,
that's when the millennium changed. I'm not going to hear
anything else.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
About it, the numbers rolled over.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Yeah, you can yell at us on Twitter, but I
will not hear you.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah. And so even though it was eventually legally recognized,
they were not socially accepted for who they were. Right, sure, right,
they dealt with a lot of shit when they moved
to Chicago.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
I'm going to guess the year they make it legal
in Illinois is still not the year in which everyone's
fine with it.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, totally okay. So in Chicago they
find their new cause which they devote the rest of
their lives too, which is labor rights. And Albert didn't
have as long left to devote to the rest of
his life to it, but Lucy got to do it
for a long time. And I want to bring this
back to that opening quote about by Lucy Parsons about

(17:48):
stabbing and shooting rich people. But this time I'm going
to say the whole thing. Let every dirty, lousy tramp
arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in
weight on the steps of the palaces of the rich
and stab or shoot their owners as they can come out.
Let us kill them without mercy. Let it be a
war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the
avenues where the wealthy live, as General Sheridan devastated the

(18:09):
beautiful valley of the Shenandoah. Because I think this context matters, right,
she was born and slaved, and she saw with her
own eyes that the only way to end slavery was
to run the rivers red with the blood of the
people who thought that owning people was like cool and good.
And so this is my opinion, probably a huge part

(18:30):
of how she ended up with this framework that the
rich were not going to give up their hoarded wealth
at least without at least the threat of violence.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, is something that hasn't been born out by history.
So I feel like probably can ignore more or less
what she was saying.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, totally, Yeah, I mean that is really.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Important context that like, because it also makes the point
she's looking at like these masses of like starving and
desperate people and this tiny number of people who have
hoarded the resources, and she's saying, well, this is a
system of inequality, just like the system of inequality that
I was raised in. And the thing that had to
end the Confederacy was violence on a terrific scale. And

(19:11):
perhaps that's the only way to end this system as well. Yeah, yeah,
Faulter logic.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, and that logic plays through the whole thing that
we're going to be talking about. And so now let's
give you background on Chicago. Everyone's favorite city. I don't
know if it's anyone's favorite. Actually, it's probably a lot
of people's favorite city. In the eighteen and fifties and sixties,
Chicago's a boom town and it was mostly German and

(19:39):
Irish immigrant labor. Like it grew from four thousand people
to ninety thousand people over twenty years.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah. Basically, since all of the trains coming from the
West went to Chicago, it became a hub where all
of the raw materials that were extracted from the colonial
project of the United States, that were extracted out from
the West turned into goods that could sent east. Right,
And so at first it's like there's some decently high
wages in this particular boomtown kind of in that way.

(20:08):
Have you ever been to like one of those oil
boomtowns that are, yeah, where everything costs a ton of
money because everyone who works there is getting a ton
of money.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Everybody lives in trailers. Yeah, it's in Wyoming.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yes, yeah, so that's Chicago, and there's a shanty town
that's spreading out from the city center.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
Love a good shanty town.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
And I want to tell you about the opening salvo
in Chicago labor struggle or class war or whatever you
want to call it, which happened at eighteen fifty five.
None of our characters are really on the scene yet,
but it's still it's too cool to not include it.
And it's the lagger beer riot like lagger, not like
loggers who cut down trees.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like he takes a
whiskey drink, he takes a lager drink, that kind of lagger.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Have you heard of this political party that was rolling
around at this time called the No Nothing's.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, they're basically like kind of it to sort of
flatten them in a way that makes them sensible to
kind of modern sensibilities. They were broadly like the Tea
Party of its time.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, especially if the Tea
Party started as a secret society, which the Tea Party
might have.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yeah, again, like anytime, you're kind of being like this
thing from one hundred years ago, was like this thing now,
like you're losing all because there was also weird specific
political grievances that aren't really a part of modern politics
that were important to them. But like totally they were
kind of tea party esque for the time. That's how
like people like us back then would have looked at them.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, they got their name. It took to
be a while to find out where they got their
name from. It's because it was a secret society. It's
basically like if they were asked if they were a
part of this, they're supposed to say, I know nothing.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Well that's actually kind of based like not the politics,
but like that's a neat like if you were writing
a fictional secret society, that would be like fun that
people would enjoy that.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, totally, But it also becomes a fitting name for
them because I mean I don't think that they're very
that they've made intelligent choices with their life. They're anti immigrant.
They specifically hate the Catholics and the Irish, okay, and
they're nativists, which was a big thing back then, which
basically means they like white Americans who were born in
America and basically nobody else and they also hated drinking,

(22:26):
and well.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
These guys are not winning me over so far. No,
I'm going to be honest with you.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
So they came for the Irish and the German immigrants.
They worked six days a week, like fourteen twelve to
fourteen hour days, and then on Sunday is their only
day off. So they all go to the bar and
drink and hang out. And so what they do is
they say, oh, you're not allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays,

(22:53):
and it's just specifically to piss these people off. I'm
sure they clouded it and like it's the Holy Day
and this and that. Yeah, but it was entirely just
because they hated the immigrants. And so there was this
massive civil disobedience where two hundred people got arrested for
alcohol sales.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Jesus Christ, Okay, sure.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, and uh and they're like because I mean, they're
you know, like the fuck this, I'm going to keep
drinking anyway. And so then on the day of the trial,
thousands of Germans marched downtown and they have like fife
and drum and shit, and the cops freak out. And
at the time in Chicago, the river had swing bridges
instead of lift bridges, so the bridges would like swing

(23:33):
open like a door kind of, And so the cops
swung them open while everyone was still on them and
then just opened fire into the crowd.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Only one person ended up killed, who apparently.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
For the shitty guns of that time, I.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Know, and he shot back. The guy who got killed,
he injured a cop.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, that's good for him.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah. And they had like loaded cannons and stuff ready
for all of this. And part of the reason I
bring this up is because it's like, this is something
that I feel like people need to understand when we're
talking about nineteenth century movements, is that like, like the
cops are just totally ready to open fire on huge
crowds of people.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, open fire with like artillery.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, Like when we.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
Say cannons, what they're what they're preparing is a big
metal tube that they fill with shrapnel and gunpowder. It's
called grape shot. They're making like a giant shotgun the
size of a car and readying to fire that into
a crowd of human beings.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
That's that's crowd control.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, and so that's that's the that's the opening salvo
in all of this, and then in eighteen seventy one,
the entire city of Chicago burns down.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
Well that was that was really nobody's fault, like right,
every like that is one of those things back in
the days, Chicago just burned down. Sometimes you know, nothing
anyone can do about it. You just every now and
then you're going to lose a Chicago or two.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, totally, and this just sends everything into recession the
or actually not sends everything into a recession. They're starting
to rebuild, and then there's a great depression that was
called the Great Depression until we got another one in
the twentieth century. And basically when I do a.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Thing sometime about like that's that style of thing where
like there's this moment in history that's super well known today,
but there was another very similar moment that went by
the same name until the bigger thing happened. Because the
same time, I'm reading about the potato famine in Ireland
right now, and there was a famine that killed like
nearly a million people that was like a generation or

(25:30):
so before it that they called the Great Famine. But
then there wasn't even bigger famine, and so nobody remembers
the first famine.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and which is why, Sophie, if it's
all right, I'd really like us to be sponsored by potatoes.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
I mean that would be our preferred sponsor forever.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
But we have a lot of unfortunate ads from the
potato blight, which we are working to stop. But yeah,
it is. It is really hard to get them removed,
probably due to their financial partnership with the Washington State
Highway Patrol.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
I'm definitely pro potato. And here's some ads. So in
the middle of the worst depression in US history, while
Chicago has just burned down, that's when Lucy and Albert
decided to move to Chicago. And right, normally that would
sound like a bad deal, but they were coming from
the place where everyone was trying to murder them.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
So also, I feel like Rint's pretty cheap when the
whole city just burned down.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
There's not a lot of buildings though.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, but like you could probably camp pretty cheap. Yeah,
that's true, low cost of living.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, And so they moved there. Albert finds work as
a type setter, and it's pretty quickly they start calling
themselves socialists.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
That's nice.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Of them, and words like socialism and anarchism get thrown
around an awful lot, including in this particular episode. So
I'm I'm gonna like really quickly try and say what
I mean by those things, because everyone's going to use
those words really differently. Yes, socialism in this case is
like the it's the broader social movement towards workers or
society at large owning the means of production, which is

(27:13):
to say, rather than having a business owner who owns
a factory and hiring the workers, the workers themselves or
society would own the factory. And it basically the difference
between the value produced by the worker and the amount
that the owner sells the product for is the owner's profit.
And so basically they're saying, this is theft.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
This is like the sort of marketers stealing it from
the people doing the thing. It's this. There's this very
frustrating discourse around anarchism that hit on Twitter a week
or two ago, where people are like, well, how would
you have in an ericist society, how would you handle
you know, the widespread production of food or the manufacturing
of goods, Like you can't do that with like just
like you and your friends hanging out in an affinity group,

(27:52):
and it's like, well, actually, anarchists have been talking about
this for like one hundred and seventy years and a
number of different and those solutions have been acted on
in places like revolutionary Spain and whatnot, and parts of Korea,
and in some cases have have seen substantial successes. For
periods of time, this has all been discussed.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah, it's just about who owns the means of production
and like how decisions are made.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
It's not saying we don't have factories. It's saying, like,
perhaps we don't need the factories to be owned by giant,
multinational conglomerates that are able to, for example, build waste
disposal plants that pump poison into the Gulf of Mexico,
and because they lobby the politicians in that area, the
people who actually live there aren't able to complain in
any meaningful way, and several of them get exploded because

(28:37):
the natural gas pipelines run by that company underneath the
area lea coals, which since explosive gas up into trailer parks.
Perhaps we don't need that, and we could still have
ways of distributing fuel.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
I don't know that sounds crazy. You probably distribute fuel.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
To get out of here with my radical politics.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yea, and so so socialists in this case is like
the broader word for what is, what the goal is,
and how people are trying to actually create that is
kind of unrelated. So anarchism, which will come up more
soon as our characters become more and more anarchists, is
the idea that we can have a society without state

(29:15):
or capitalism, without course of hierarchies. And lots of different
people conceive of this in very different ways, but in general,
the people that we're talking about today, like myself, want
a socialist society that is also anarchist.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
And yeah, I mean a lot of these people would
say they were like working towards communism, which meant a
different thing. Like now you get a lot of fights
between anarchists and communists because communism has become so like
tight in with the ideas of state communism that we
saw with the USSR right. But like back in this day,
a lot of these people would have been happy to
just call themselves communists totally.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
And like all these people like go to their grave
being like I died for socialism, and then they're like yeah,
but they're not like and so unfortunately so so now
sometime whatever, people get into arguments about who does and
doesn't count for this and that. But that seems like
a decent starting place for where these people are at.
And then in eighteen seventy seven there's this big fuck
off railway strike, which at some point I'd love to

(30:11):
do an episode all about, because it covers the entire country.
And by the entire country, I mean the entire country
at the time where people actually or whatever. It covers
like the mid Atlantic, in the Midwest and all those things.
It starts in West Virginia and Maryland when workers got
their third pay cut in a year and we're like
fuck this, and they went on strike. It spread across
most of the country. Railways shut down everywhere, people were

(30:32):
riding everywhere. And in Chicago people went hard as fuck,
and they had all these banners like life by work
or death by fight. One speaker said, better a thousand
of us shot dead in the streets than ten thousand
dead of starvation, because I mean people were starving, right.
This isn't like just a you know, miners, they.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Don't just like want to be able to afford a
new Xbox, like they're trying to like not die. Yeah,
because people don't serve nice things too. But the situation
was a lot was quite dire, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
And so in Chicago, the shot dead in the streets
thing was a little bit prescient. Actually it wasn't a
lot of cities because after three days of striking, the
police and the military as well as hundreds of deputized
civilians of the middle and upper classes attacked and shot
into the crowd, and in the end they killed thirty
workers and like ten cops were injured. Jesus, and like

(31:28):
everywhere else in the country, the work.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Or not to the ten cops injured, that seems like
not quite enough.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
But yeah, you know, yeah, well we'll stick with me.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
Good. Well, no, because I know where the story goes broad,
so I guess it's not really good either way. Yeah,
that is the thing, Like, it's hard not to cheer
on retribute a violence when like terrible things are being
done by people in violence is visited upon the people
doing the terrible things, but it generally doesn't resolve itself neatly.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
Right, That is absolutely that is absolutely true. And so
the media attacked the strikers as well, and they basically,
of course, they called for their extermination, like they use
the word extermination. This is ten years before Lucy Parsons
used that, like we should exterminate the rich. And I
feel like that that cause and effect matters, you know, Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Basically, people are trying everything they could think of to
get better conditions, and they were basically just told you
should all be killed. And during all.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
Of this that's also important because yeah, she didn't just
like start at like, well, the only solution is violence.
A bunch of powerful people and influential people were like,
the only solution is violence against you, and she was like, okay, yeah, exactly, exactly,
all right then.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, and even during all of this until this, basically
Albert and Lucy are both like pretty moderate in their socialism.
Like Albert gave some speeches that's this whole thing at
this point, but he's like advocate restraint and that people
should avoid sabotage and that everyone should go vote in
the upcoming elections to make everything better. Yeah, and his

(33:08):
moderate position got him fired from the Chicago Times where
he worked, and so suddenly he was completely without a.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Job because and I'm guessing because the Chicago Times thought
he was too extreme, yes, yes, or were they are
too extreme? Yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
And at this point Lucy opens up a dress shop. Sure, yeah,
he gets canceled, and so Lucy Parsons opens up a
dress shop and is supporting her husband and her two
kids at the point, and this kind of rerex socialism
in Chicago and the like, especially like party socialism, the

(33:41):
kind of like let's all go vote socialism. They actually
tried to go more and more moderate, not Lucy and Albert,
but like the larger socialist parties, they tried to go
more and more moderate to bring in new members. But
it had literally the opposite effect, and everyone became more
and more radical cool, And in eighteen eighty three they
all joined new anarchist organization called the IWPA, the International

(34:03):
Working People's Association, which is a dead boring name, yes,
vile name. It at least is the Working People's Association
instead of the Workingmen's Association, which I feel like is said.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
That is that is, it's actually pretty based.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
It was somewhere between a federation and a loose network.
There was no party, there was no membership organization, different
collectives or which were called clusters joined just by endorsing
a manifesto that some of them had written in Pittsburgh
called can you guess the really original name of the
manifesto that they wrote in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Working People Association Manifesto?

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Close? It was the Pittsburgh Manifesto.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
Oh okay, yeah, to day at Pittsburgh manifesto would be
all about I don't know, what's it Pittsburgh sandwiches with
a lot of meat in them.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Well, that's the seventh point that they considered in the
six point manifesto that they settled on. I think it's
because some people from out of town were there.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
More roast beef, whitter roast beef, that's right, Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Now, I'm just actually wondering how many of these people
back then were actually vegetarian, because there's this whole weird
overlap between the left and vegetarianism that goes back hundreds
of years. But we'll talk about that some other time.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
Yep. Oh, yes, okay.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
So the six points of this of their program that
you had to agree to in order to join. First,
destruction of the existing class rule by all means, i e.
By energetic, relentless revolutionary and international.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Action on That sounds good.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Second, establishment of a free society based on cooperative organization
of production.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Yeah, that would be nice.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Third, free exchange of equivalent products buy and between productive
organizations without commerce and profit mongery.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Fourth organization of education on a secular, scientific and equal
basis for both sexes.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Also sounds fine. Like the both sexes part. These folks
are really really really hitting hard on that on that part, yep.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Fifth equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Dope, very good.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Sixth regulation of all public affairs by free contacts between autonomous,
independent communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
That sounds pretty nice. It would be good to have that.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, Like I look at this and I'm like, Okay,
that's good.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Yeah. I mean I don't particularly disagree with anything there. Yeah,
I might have some additional questions about how to handle
the exchange of goods without commerce thing, because that's a
complicated matter.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
But I know, I feel like they've meant something pretty
specific there that I just don't know what is.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
Yeah, I think there's a number of ways you could
try to do that. You know, there's like you get
your mutualists and your whatnots. But I don't know. I'm
not an economy expert, but broadly speaking, I don't disagree
with any of that. That all seems like good stuff
to just strive for in a society.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, And they grew really rapidly, especially in Chicago, but
all over the country, and as the Socialist Party and
especially the sort of more moderate socialists kind of diminished.
Basically everyone's like, oh, no, this sounds good.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
It's hard to be moderate when they've just shot thirty
of you in the street. Yeah, yeah, that makes me
not very moderate. The American branch, because this actually was
an international organization, the American branch was mostly European immigrants.
Their newspapers were like five of the seven newspapers or
something or I don't know, some number. A lot of
them were in German, but then there were other ones,

(37:28):
other newspapers in Czech, English and Norwegian. And they took
their inclusive policies really seriously. At one point, a socialist
organization wanted to merge with them, but the anarchists were like,
you all exclude Chinese folks from your organization, and so
they refused, and in one of the papers, the IWPA
said the IWPA would never feel that its ranks were

(37:52):
complete if it excluded working people of any nationality whatsoever.
And they went on to say that the socialist organization
was basically serving as tools of the CAPS by letting
racism divide the working class. They kind of ruled, Oh,
I like that.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
And all of the different clusters had total autonomy. The
Chicago cluster was really excited about building a mass movement
through union organizing. Some of the other clusters were more
into like autonomous and individual action. In Chicago, each meeting
elected a chairman to facilitate and they rotated it. The
recording secretary and treasurer rotated. But they were a subculture also, right,

(38:31):
and that doesn't get talked about enough. I really like subcultures.
That's why I'm always pointing out when this thing's happened
in history. But they hung out in the Chicago beer halls,
and that's basically where they did all of their propagandizing.
And to talk about their subculture, I'm going to quote
the historian Paul Averich in his book The Haymarket Tragedy.
Beyond their publishing ventures, the anarchists engaged in a broad

(38:53):
range of cultural and social activities which enhanced their feelings
of solidarity and greatly enriched their lives. In a relatively
short period. They created a network of orchestras, choirs, theatrical groups,
debating clubs, literary societies, and gymnastic and shooting clubs, involving
thousands of participants. They organized lectures, concerts, picnics, dances, plays
and recitations in which children as well as adults took part.

(39:16):
Saloons and beer gardens became bustling centers of radical life.
The International moreover engaged in mutual aid services, providing assistance
to members and their families in times of need. Bad ass,
I know, And like, the thing that I really like
about it is that it's like these were all really
poor people who were like working six days weeks, twelve

(39:36):
hour days, and they managed to have fulfilling, rich cultural lives.
They had masquerade balls and shit. They had shooting contests,
and some of the plays were written by participants. They
wrote like new words to popular songs, and they basically
were like completely punk and I really like them.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Ah. Yeah, they were doing some remix art.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
I mean everything you've described sounds so like high end
and expensive for lack of a better word. Yeah, so
it just makes it even cooler. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
And they just did it by actually all just doing
it together collecting.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yeah, you know, teamwork makes the dream work.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah, And they would have these They would have huge
celebrations of the Paris Commune every year on the anniversary
of the Paris Commune, which was basically when the city
of Paris like stole itself back from its government for
a while, and then they had protests, and the protests
were even more popular than everything else, and they regularly
drew thousands of workers to march through the streets, and
their banners were things like millions labor for the benefit

(40:41):
of the few, we want to labor for ourselves. They
would have multiple brass bands, They had fucking floats, They
had carriages drawn by mules with like allegorical displays like
Uncle Sam driving around like a policeman because he serves
the policemen. And the speakers like kept hitting the same
points about including equal participate patient by women in the
labor movement. And their newspapers were not just they were

(41:05):
like there was like muck raking about, like this is
what the cops are doing. That's bad and stuff. But
they also included like philosophy and translations of literature from
other languages, and there was like fiction and poetry. And
again it's this idea that these like like some of
the people writing this poetry, which I'm sure some of
it was terrible, but whatever was like written by workers
who had never considered literary things before. And so it just,

(41:28):
I don't know, a whole other way to raise people
out of poverty, it seems like. And you'll be shocked
to know their hatred of government and capitalism was completely mutual.
The media spent a lot of time villainizing them, and
in particular the same as the anarchists focused on the
Paris Commune, so did the media. Basically it was like, oh,
you'll like this. They were like, don't let it happen here,

(41:49):
because God forbid people self organize and rule themselves. If
they did, we'd have total anarchy.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Oh no, oh no, yeah, I mean it makes sense
like that. They of course they're scared of that.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, but you know what, they're not scared.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Of products and services. No, of course not.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Mainstream society was not scared of goods and services, including
the ones that support this podcast. Here's the ads. Okay,
we're back, and we are all excited to talk about
people with a bunch of guns and cool outfits. We're

(42:36):
going to talk about the people whose name I don't
know how to pronounce because I cannot speak German, and
every time I try to learn it goes in one
part of my brain and out with the other.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
I speak fluent German. I'll figure it.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Out, Okay. Leir and vera Varian, Yeah, yeah, you got
it right. Okay. The Leir and vere Varin were a
group that we kind of can't leave out because the
labor organizers were organizing themselves into armed formations ready for
community defense revolution, both defensive and offensive action, and at
least two of the labor unions, the metal workers and
the carpenters, had armed sections that met regularly for drill

(43:08):
and instructions in armed conflict, and the American group of
the IWPA had a similar auxiliary, but none of them
could compete in numbers or sheer coolness with the learan
vere Verin, which was the Education and Defense Association. Because
these are very literal namers here, especially the Germans, it
was a leftist militia movement in response to the right

(43:30):
wing militias that have been forming and in response to
all the strikers getting murdered. And this is how we
get the first real challenges to the at least some
of the first challenges the Second Amendment and gun control
in the United.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
States that that inspires people to want gun control.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Yeah, the state freaked out and banned all the non
official militias and the open carry of rifles learon Vere
fought it to the Supreme Court and they lost, basically
paving the way for states rights to restrict firearms ownership
and militia formation.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
But that's an exciting piece of history, I know, no comment.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
And so they would march in anarchist parades and different
historians will describe their outfits differently, but all of them
sound really good. And I'm going to pick the blue
blouses and black pants and cult revolvers when the laws
wouldn't allow rifles and they would like march information alongside
the parades. There's four companies of them. They had somewhere
between four hundred and three thousand members because didn't keep

(44:30):
really good membership records for very good reasons. Yeah, and
they drilled weekly and then monthly. All of the companies
came together and drilled, and then also when they had
the anarchist picnics, they'd have these like mock battle where
they'd run around in practice fighting at the picnics.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
It just sounds that seems like the thing people ought
to be doing.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yeah, And basically this is like they raised a ton
of money from people who had no money in order
to buy guns for everyone. One six month period and
anarchist quartermaster raised two hundred and fifty five dollars for
new weapons, which is thirty seven thousand dollars today.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
I mean that probably went further than thirty seven thousand
dollars for new weapons would go today.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
I assume, but I don't know. I mean, they probably
all weren't trying to get the like two thousand dollars ars.
You know, this is a real palmetto sure crash.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Sure, that's still like eighty weapons.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, and there was you know, probably three thousand of them. Okay, Okay,
I see where I seehere. You're going with this.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just assuming it went further than
it would today, because again that's about like eighty ninety guns.
You know, more if you're doing some of your own
milling and shit like.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, they were all a bunch of cattle workers.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
So yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, basically there were community defense organizations and they perceived
the revolution as completely inevitable also, and they wanted to
be ready. They they thought capitalism was about to collapse
under its own weight. How could it not with all
the stuff they were seeing they were in. I mean,
after all, they like everybody thinks that and it's never right. Well,
but hear me out. They were in a major depression

(46:05):
about ten years after another major depression. I so, but yeah,
capitalism didn't collapse this time that time, but it will
just now, I probably won't collapse this time either.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Yeah. It's it's it's pretty it's pretty durable. It can
take the punches. Look, you got to give capitalism credits.
It's a prize fighter. I can take the hits.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
It rithes away, you know, it could take the hit.
But it's especially good at like dodging, you know.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Yeah, it just like blobs around your fist. Yeah, and
then raises your rent thirteen times in seventeen months.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yeah, anyway, exactly, Okay, which brings us quite naturally to
the fight for the eight hour workday, which is you know,
promised at the top of the hour. The fight for
the eight hour workday is what all this is about.
But it's also not what all this is about. But
it was this thing that was happening at the time,
and it was come into a head around this time. Basically,

(47:04):
people didn't like working from sun up to sundown or
sometimes fourteen hour days regardless of whether or not the
sun was up.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
And really, but that's ten whole hours for them to,
you know, have families in sleep. I know, I feel
like that's just greedy, I think.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
So they're pretty much stealing from the bosses.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, I mean, we don't give our workers that much
free time.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, I didn't spend I didn't. I wasn't up till
three in the morning last night working on this. I
don't know what you're talking about. Okay, So in city
after city and trade after trade, basically all of these
people started fighting for Originally, they weren't even fighting for
the eight hour work day, or they were fighting for
the like ten hour work day, you know, or even

(47:45):
just please not fourteen hours or whatever. Yeah, what if
we had two days for the weekend, and so they
had a whole bunch of strikes all throughout the nineteenth century,
and some of them were one, some of them are lost.
It went on like that for over a hundred years.
Every few years, some trade in another city would or
other country would win the ten hour day or the

(48:06):
eight hour day, but sometimes they would win in legislation
and it wouldn't do anything. So Chicago actually won the
eight hour workday in the eighteen sixties, but they didn't.
They won it in legislation, but it was so full
of loopholes that it was never enforced, and so kind
of ironically or maybe fittingly, a ton of the strikers

(48:27):
and socialists and even some of the anarchists were on
some level just actually fighting for the law to be
applied evenly across classes, which obviously they won because that
happens now. The law is definitely applied evenly across classes.
I think. I hope it's not spoiler. It's not okay.

(48:48):
So in eighteen eighty four, members of the labor movement
from across the country met in Chicago, which was kind
of the center of a lot of the labor movement stuff,
and they declared two years later May first, eighteen eighty six,
they were going to enforce the eight hour day through
strikes and walkouts just nationwide, all industries, which I feel

(49:09):
like it's like worth noting that they gave themselves two
years in order to plan a general strike.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Yep, that's probably worth noting. The statement of like a
really single, singular, specific goal. I also really like the
idea of like this is a thing we've decided we're getting,
and then we're going to enforce the fact that we're
getting that using that kind of language that the state uses,
and thus that like people are very familiar with as
opposed to kind of the we're agitating for change or

(49:37):
we're trying to like bring electoral change. No, no, no,
we are in the same way that the state enforces things,
you know, through its police, we are enforcing that we
get this eight hour workday through our action. We're organizing
to do that. I think that's a really smart way
of like framing it.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah. Yeah, they weren't fucking around. Even like the moderates
and the you know, the less radical among the labor
movement still knew what was at stake. At the beginning.
The Chicago anarchists were opposed to the eight hour struggle,
not because they were opposed of better conditions for workers.
But they were basically, yeah, baby steps, what's a baby step?
We need to all seize control of the workplaces in

(50:13):
our cities and have a revolution.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
It's that old. I mean, it wasn't an old argument
then that it is now We still have that like
why would you? Yeah, anyway, we don't need to get
into that.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, although I will say.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
It is an argument that people have not ever resolved though. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
But actually I find it interesting the way they came
around to it, which is, on some level they realized
which way the wind was blowing, and maybe that was
cynical and they were like, Okay, well we better join
up with everyone else. But I kind of think that,
like maybe they took some of their own lessons to heart,
because they don't want to tell other people what to do,
and they don't want to have like a revolutionary vanguard
that tells everyone what they should want. And what people

(50:52):
wanted was to fight for the eight hour workday, and
so instead, by eighteen eighty six, the Chicago anarchists were
all in, and they were really really good organized and
propagandas and soon Chicago is the center of all this
struggle and there's a quote from another anarchist and Italian
anarchist Malatesta. He wrote in an essay called reformism that
I feel like applies here, which is, we will take

(51:15):
or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that
one tears occupied territory from the enemy's grasp in order
to keep on advancing. That's how I've always seen reformism personally, honestly,
is like, well, of course we should get that. It's
a good thing, we should get it.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
I feel fine about this so far.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Yeah, well yeah, so then they strike and they win,
and everything has been happily ever after, and slowly we've
all adopted the six point platform and we live in
utopian society which has no inner conflict.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Yeah, that's how it happened. Huh oh yeah, I was
wondering why things were still perfect.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Yeah yeah, okay, So but during this build up, okay,
it's important to note the anarchists weren't alone and thinking
there was about to be a revolution. General Sherman of
the US Army wrote, there will soon come in armed
contests between capital and labor. They will oppose each other,
not with words and arguments and ballots, but with shot
and shell gunpowder and cannon. The better classes are tired

(52:12):
of the insane howlings of the lower strata, and they
mean to stop them.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Oh, buddy, Sherman, Sherman, Sherman Sherman. Uh, problematic faith, not
even really a faith. I mean he was actually critical
to the invention of concentration camp as a concept because
of the things that he did to Indigenous Americans. It's
like it's like you've got this artist who releases a

(52:38):
great album and then it turns out they were like
doing some sort of horrible crimes too, and it's like, ah,
I really liked it when you were burning large jokes
of the Confederacy, but I can't back the rest of
your career.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
It's like with William Henry Harrison, totally supportive of his presidency,
the only really perfect presidency anyone's now. The stuff he
did before that I won't defend. But as while he
was president flawless.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
I do not know enough to comment. Unfortunately, Oh he
died thirty days in doing Ah, that was him. Okay,
he's the one who died to me. Yeah, he didn't
get a chance to do anything bad. Yeah, great president. Yeah,
no notes. Okay, So during this build up towards eighteen
eighty six, Basically all of America is like, this is

(53:26):
also completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. All of America
is like, are we about to have another civil war? Like?
What's about to happen?

Speaker 3 (53:34):
That is one of the things that comforts me sometimes
is that we've been asked, We've asked that question pretty regularly,
and we've only occasionally had civil wars.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
Yeah, that's true. Both the press and the clergy are
basically working really hard to smear anarchists and spread fear.
They were all painted as aliens and mad men and
they're trying to destroy America's prosperity and freedom, and it
kind of worked, and public opinion started turning against them
as the incarnation of evil. And then the anarchists, for

(54:03):
their part, started saying the same thing back about capitalists
and cops, calling capitalist leeches and cops bloodhounds, which was
basically like calling them pigs. And so both both sides
are working to the yeah, which brings it to a
head in spring eighteen eighty six, and the stage was

(54:24):
set for tragedy. On May first, a ton of owners
and a ton of industries across the country actually capitulated
without a strike and granted the eight or nine hour
day to their employees a ton more nice did not.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Well, that's not nice, y.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
So something like three hundred and forty thousand people went
on strike on May first, which is impressive.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
And there were only like three hundred and fifty thousand
people in the country at this.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Yeah, exactly. So there's ten thousand people not on strike
and they're all cops probably, And in Chicago alone, people
walk off the job, which is like half the population
of Chicago. It's not actually half, I'm being hyperbolic, but.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
It's a lot. It's a lot significant chunk of the
people who did not burn to death in the.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Fire right, and then another forty thousand the other half
practically joined joined them in a march of eighty thousand
people in Chicago. And so this is the first May
Day labor march in history.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
And are the people who work with the companies that
yielded are they going on strike as part of the
general strike or are they like not.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
I'm not certain. I kind of my general impression is
that probably the workers who yielded might have been like
it's Saturday, and I don't know we're about to have
a war. Let's go go to your parade. That's my
gut feeling, but I don't actually know, okay. And then
like in all the history books they're always or at
least the ones I read, they're like, and it was

(55:50):
led at the front by Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons and
their two kids. And I kind of want to like
point this out, partially because I'm like, they were probably
near the front or maybe at the front, but it's
it's not like this was Lucy and Albert Parsons who
did this. You know, they if they let it, they
were not alone in it, but they might have been
at the front. And it's also a really nice image
to have them at the front. They're two kids, they're like,

(56:15):
I don't remember, they're like seven or something at this point,
one of them, the older one is And during this big,
happy march, you'll be shocked to know it all happened
under the watchful gaze of police, private security, and deputized
civilian snipers perched on rooftops all along the route.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Another thing that hasn't happened again, deputized civilian snipers, I know.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
And then this also will totally surprise you out of sight.
Militia waited with gatling guns with gatling guns.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
Fun.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
So this all feels pretty familiar to me.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
Yeah, this all feels like a thing that's happened repeatedly.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
But nothing bad happened, and then the next day.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
But also is something that's happened before, and.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Then the next day Sunday, nothing bad happened. There wasn't
a strike on Sunday because they didn't have to because
but everyone hates a Monday, am I right?

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Worst, So on Monday, May third, more workers walk off
the job, including the lumber shovers, which is the coolest
name of a job but actually sounds like a terrible job.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
There, funny for a job. I'm sure it's it's a
nightmare of a job, but it's a very funny thing
to call you.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Yeah, it just basically means you like move logs and
lumber around.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Yeah. I kind of guess what lumber shoving was from
the contest.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Yeah, okay, fair enough. And then the seamstresses also went
on strike. I'm sure other ones did, but those are
the two that I like found about and I got
excited about. And then there's the McCormick Reaper Works.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Which that's a that's a pretty tough name for a business,
the Reaper Factor. It does it does sound like they
make war crimes.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
What they did is they automated the jobs of all
the farmers and or fed the world, depending on who
controls the means of production. Basically, and it was the
first automated harvesting machine at like revolutionized farming. And it's
factory had this long history of labor struggle and they
had a union until earlier that year. McCormick, not the

(58:13):
original McCormick who invented it, but I think his kid.
Basically he was like, you know what, I want to
automate your jobs, and I don't like having a union around.
So he fired his entire workforce who were not out
on strike at the time, and then he just hired
non union workers. So and a lot of anarchists from
the metal Workers' Union had worked there. And so every
time there was a picket, police and Pinkertons arrived armed

(58:33):
to the teeth. Pinkerton's are the private security of the
capitalists at this time?

Speaker 3 (58:40):
Yes, yeah, So on.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
May third, at the lumber Shover's rally, a few blocks
away from the McCormick Reaper factory. They heard the McCormick
bell strike the end of the day, and so all
the lumber shovers ran over to join the picket and
to throw rocks at the scabs who had stolen their jobs.
The picketers drove the scabs back into the factory. Then
the cops arrived, and then they threw stones at the cops,

(59:04):
and then the cops drew revolvers and fired into the crowd.
Two people at least were killed. No cops were so
much as injured. And I want to give you a
sense of how the media handled this, the mainstream media,
that bastion of neutrality. The New York Times reported it

(59:25):
like this, Oh good. The eight hour movements spilled us
first blood today and Joseph Vottlech, a lumber shover eighteen
years old, was fatally wounded, and a dozen more strikers
with bullet holes in their bodies. Representing the result of
the first encounter. There was a collision at McCormick's Reaper
works between a mob of seven or eight thousand anarchist

(59:47):
workmen and tramps maddened with free beer and free speech,
and a squad of policemen. More than five hundred shots
were fired, and hundreds of windows in the works were stoned.
There are broken heads and bruised bodies all through the
lumber District tonight. But the downtrodden masses have risen and
had their fun.

Speaker 3 (01:00:06):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah, yeah, to be fair, New York Times, like I
think it's like thirty years later came up with the
concept of being a neutral newspaper, and they had not
done so at this time, ah, or since Yeah, well
they came up with the concept.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
Thinking about that time they had the dictator of Turkey
write a column or was that the Washington I forget Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
So the article goes on at like great length and
it talks about how heroic the police are and how
it includes all these like completely impossible details like the
entire crowd roared in one voice kill the police, and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:40):
How that does sound, don't I know?

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
And how But they also claimed that the crowd was
throwing stones and then shooting guns in the air, but somehow,
miraculously wasn't shooting at the cops even though they were
ostensibly trying to murder the police.

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
Yeah, they were maybe trying to arc it down, you know,
it's like Fielder, Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Yeah totally. They were like, we've read about these can
using them as mortars.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
So some of the anarchists who are there run off
and they call for a demonstration the next day to
be called at Haymarket Square. Most of the flyers just
say like, hey, show up, but then a few of
them show say hey, show up with guns. What the fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Okay, because they well, that's good, that's going to get
you in some Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Just knowing the America, I know that's going to get
you in some Trump and not judging it, but that's
going to get you in some Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
And so first they printed the show up with guns
one and then actually one of the people who later
dies was like, uh, that's a bad idea. Yeah, that's
going to get us in some trouble, and so they
reprint it all. Fortunately they're all they all work for
these newspapers they own, so they like because they all
work for the different anarchists newspapers, so they can print
whatever they want. So then they print a new one

(01:01:52):
that does not say show up with guns, but a
couple hundred of the like show up with gun ones
slip out, probably by accident. Maybe not by accident, who
the fuck knows. So the next day, cops attack striking
workers throughout the city. Some strikers destroyed a drug store
that police were using to telephone back to their headquarters.

(01:02:13):
But the rally, the one that had some flyers in, Hey,
show but guns, was not fierce. It started off really late.
The turnout was like two thousand people instead of the
twenty thousand people expected. Probably people have been frightened off
because they were like, Oh, no, we don't actually want
a war.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Yeah, we don't want to. Maybe this show up to
the gun with gun situation isn't the right thing to
bring my kids to.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Yeah, exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
This may not be the one for me though.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Yeah. So a hundred cops are waiting in the wings
and the mayor shows up, and the mayor is just
there to make sure everything's peaceful. He was this like,
he's a big free speech guy and a big free
assembly guy and also a don't invite federal troops to
shoot striking workers guy.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
Well that sounds fine, it sounds like your best case
scenario in this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
Exactly the best case scenario of a mayor. Absolutely, and
he also but he doesn't actually have control of the police,
which is completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. He tells
the police what to do, and then they think about it,
and then they do whatever they want. That's the same
what what are you talking about. I've never heard of

(01:03:19):
a COVID man that ever. They would obey it if
it happened. Okay. So, so the mayor's friends are like,
don't be so conspicuous, and he's like, no, I'm going
to be conspicuous. I want the people to know their
mayors here because he's a reasonably stand up guy, you know,
he seems he seems fine. So first this guy, August
Spies goes up and he's the runs one of the newspapers.

(01:03:40):
He's actually the one who canceled the police show up
armed thing. I think I'm not entirely sure again cancel
culture yeah uh. And then Albert Parson goes up, and
Albert Parsons he talks for like an hour, and I
kind of suspect I wouldn't actually like Albert Parsons as
a person, Like who shows him to this.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Mel You shouldn't ever talk for an hour at a
round like minutes?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Yeah, And so okay, So the mayor realizes that everything's fine,
and the speakers are actually kind of toning down. Often
they give speeches where they're like, we're gonna, you know,
find the rich where they live and blow them up
and all this shit. Like they're not subtle speakers normally,
but they're being a little more subtle tonight because they're
a little bit like, oh shit, oh shit, this is

(01:04:22):
all about to go really weird. So the mayor realizes
it's fine, and he fucks off and he goes over
to the cop shop and he tells the police captain
to stand down. The police captain didn't agree, and then
the third speaker goes on, and this is a guy
named Samuel Fielden, and I just feel bad for this
guy because he goes on at ten pm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
Feel for field Yeah, he goes on at.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Ten pm, a storm is rolling in. Most of the
crowd disperses because the rain is coming, and then Albert Parsons,
the fucking dick, is like, hey, everyone, let's go to
the beer hall, even though Fielden is still up there speaking,
And that's gotta be heartbreaking, Like you get all this adrenaline.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
So he really seems like the dannie of this situation.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
I once played a show where the main draw was
the band that went on before me, and then everyone left,
and then I just like played for like the person
who booked the show, after like one hundred people have
been watching the band before. It's like the same, only
people end up dead. So but and he spoke to
the two hundred or so people who were left, and
at one point he made a reference to how the

(01:05:27):
only thing to do with the law was to throttle it,
to kick it, to stab it. And two detectives who
are watching it run off and tell the police Captain
Bonfield that the speech was too naughty, so the cops
come running immediately. Fielden was still speaking. He ended his
speech with and I quote, people have been shot, men,

(01:05:49):
women and children have not been spared by the capitalists
and minions of private capital. It has no mercy. So
at you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives,
your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with
work and get a little relief or die on the
battlefield resisting the enemy. What is the difference? Any animal,
however loathsom will resist when stepped upon. Are men less

(01:06:11):
than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me,
I know that you have two. You have been robbed,
and you will be starved into a worse condition. The
captain of the police orders the crowd to disperse. A
light flashes through the air, falling into the crowd of police,
and a bomb explodes. And that's what we'll leave it
for today.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Okay. I do have a note, yeah, which is that
I don't feel like snails and worms really do resist
much when you step on them. I feel like, biologically
he wasn't one hundred percent on there. I don't disagree
with the statement in broad but I have stepped on
the odd worm and I did not didn't seem like
they resisted. I'm getting to into the week.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
I mean, have you checked right above your bed and
the rafters in the attic space.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
Yeah, it's always filled with worms. Yeah that like it's
supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
No, they're they're there as organizing revenge.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
Oh well that's probably fair. Yeah, Robert, we're talking about
worms now.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
Yeah, speaking of worms, do you have anything you want
to plug that made no sense?

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
Well, my friend Margaret has a show called Cool People
Who Did Cool Things, So you probably check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Except that that's not the title. You were really close.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
I was really close. What did we land on?

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Stuff?

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
Cool?

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
People who did cool suck? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
We talked about whether or not to use stuff for
things for like thirty minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Didn't we there was there was a thirty minute combo
and stuff was the choice.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
I think I probably argued for stuff specifically too. This
is great, I'm I'm I'm really see. This is why
you got to have someone like me as the brains
of this out but really keeping everything together.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
Really, it's like the time that I changed it could
when you wanted to name it could happen here, it
can happen here, and I changed it, and then it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
Was just that's good, because then I would have been
preemptively ripping off the book by the head of the ADL.
It can't happen here. I was published a year and
a half after It Could Happen Here came out and
had a similar premise but wasn't wasn't at all related
to my work and was not not at all anyway.
It's fine, It's fine.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
See I always hob You're back there we go.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Thanks, Sophie, You're welcome. BIG's head of the ad L.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Margaret is there where can people follow you?

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
You can find me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy, and
you can find me on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy. And
you can listen to my new podcast which is called
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
And we'll be back on Wednesday with Part two. Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.