The Haymarket Legacy

The Haymarket affair and its aftermath effectively ended the German anarchist movement, and it never reappeared. As the New Yorker Volks-Zeitung reported, "the trade union movement, which in Chicago had been stronger than in any other city in the country before Haymarket, was now at a completely low tide. The Central Labor Union had more than 40,000 members in the spring of 1886. Now a mere 5,000 are left on paper, and of these, not even 1,000 will show up at demonstrations" (cited in Keri 1986, 23). Even the Alarm , when it was finally published again on November 5, 1887, felt compelled to give up its advocacy of the use of force in the fight to emancipate the working class. Other radical organizations faced similar problems. The German American Turner Association complained of a "moral state of siege dating from the lamentable events

in Chicago. Since that time anything smacking of dissatisfaction with the public order has been banned; anyone who dares express his sympathies for the masses and their struggle for salvation is declared a revolutionary and anarchist worthy of the gallows" (cited in Keil 1986, 23).

Employers now had a free hand in crushing militant strikes; they received even greater support from the passage of various repressive labor acts, including the Merritt Conspiracy Bill, which made it a crime to conspire to perform an act of force or violence dangerous to human life, person, or property. Even a speech or written article could make one liable under the act. The Coles Anti-Boycott Law affixed penalties of $2,000 and/or two years imprisonment for anyone conspiring with another to institute a boycott (Pierce 1957, 3: 289-90).

Haymarket and its aftermath simply ruled out the more militant socialist and anarchist choices within the labor movement; the movement's reformers now defined the only major tendency. They were active on both the economic and political fronts. Politically, the Trades and Labor Assembly founded the United Labor Party in August 1886. It was a coalition of various factions, including the remnants of the Greenback movement of the late 1870s. The party polled twenty-five thousand votes in the fall 1886 elections, electing one state senator, seven members of the house, and five judges. The party lobbied successfully for reformist legislation, including an anti-convict labor law, a law against the use of private detectives to put down labor disturbances, a law to prevent discharge for engaging in union activities, and an anti-sweatshop labor act; but there were few enforcement provisions.

On the economic front, there were now no competitors for the reform unionists. The Central Labor Union had been destroyed, and the Knights of Labor in Chicago were soon dead as well. The Knights' intensive organizing in 1886 had in fact been very haphazard; they had simply induced many existing unions to affiliate with them. In 1887, skilled unions, seeing the Knights assemblies as competition, demanded that all workers affiliated with the Knights also affiliate with the skilled trade unions in the city or face exclusion from the craft. Most Chicago craftsmen obeyed the order by withdrawing from the Knights altogether, which destroyed the mixed assemblies because the unskilled were unable to support

them using their own resources. By the end of 1887, District 24 had only thirty-five hundred members, and only five hundred by 1889. The Trades and Labor Assembly expelled all Knights assemblies from the coalition in 1888 (Bogart and Thompson 1920, 467-73).

This left the labor movement in the control of the Trades and Labor Assembly unions. By 1890, sixty-five thousand Chicago workers belonged to these unions (Pierce 1957, 3: 297), which were now affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The printers had provided the model for relationships with one's employers. In February 1885, as part of a strike settlement, the union ratified the first contract in the city between a union and an employer when it received a closed shop in return for a guarantee that the union would not engage in any sort of strike, boycott, or other job action against the Telegram (Chicago Typographical Union no. 16 minutes, February 8, 1885). In early 1887, the Chicago Typographical Union became the first in the city to engage in collective bargaining with an organization of employers, the Chicago Daily Newspaper Association. The price scale agreed to was to remain in effect for five years, subject to change at the end of each year. All other disputes between the parties would be submitted to arbitration if they could not be resolved by committee; strikes and boycotts were ruled out as a means of resolving disputes.

Similar trade agreements were soon worked out in the building trades and among mill workers, marine trades, machinists, woodworking, and garment workers. The agreements gave workers greater employment security and wage increases; employers received the assurance that production would not be interrupted by strikes or business hurt by boycotts. These conditions came at the cost of accepting the basic outlines of the capitalist economic system and all the problems that system would create for workers.