Abstract
Alongside the titanic legal struggle playing out in courtrooms from Illinois to Washington, D.C., anarchist defenders battled to reverse the public’s approval of their heroes conviction. Soon after the verdicts were rendered, one of Chicago’s leading labor papers, the Knights of Labor, serialized autobiographies of all the convicted men. While their lawyers prepared their arguments for the state supreme court in the spring of 1887, a slim volume with the ponderous title, A Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists in 1886 was published by the Socialistic Publishing Company, the house of the Arbeiter Zeitung and Parson’s Alarm. No other single work proved as powerful in shifting perceptions of this event and even influencing the way it would be chronicled by generations of historians.
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Notes
Dyer D. Lum, A Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists in 1886 (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Co., 1887; reissued by Arno Press, New York, 1969), p. 69.
Clara and Rudolf Kirk, “William Dean Howells, George William Curtis, and the ‘Haymarket Affair’,” American Literature, 40:4 (Jan. 1969), pp. 487–498.
Howard A. Wilson, “William Dean Howells’ Unpublished Letters About the Haymarket Affair,” Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, 61:1 (Spring 1963), pp. 5–19.
Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958, org. 1936), p. 428.
James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 254.
Samuel P. McConnell, “The Chicago Bomb Case: Personal Recollections of an American Tragedy,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1934, pp. 735–736.
John P. Altgeld, Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab (Chicago, IL: s.n., 1893), p. 8.
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© 2011 Timothy Messer-Kruse
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Messer-Kruse, T. (2011). Executions and Amnesty. In: The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339293_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339293_9
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