Haymarket Affair - Pardon and Historical Characterization

Pardon and Historical Characterization

Among supporters of the labor movement in the United States and abroad and others, the trial was widely believed to have been unfair, and even a serious miscarriage of justice. Prominent people such as novelist William Dean Howells; celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow; poet and playwright Oscar Wilde; and playwright George Bernard Shaw strongly condemned it. On June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, the progressive governor of Illinois, himself a German immigrant, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab, calling them victims of "hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge" and noting that the state "has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it." Altgeld also faulted the city of Chicago for failing to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for its repeated use of lethal violence against striking workers. Altgeld's actions concerning labor issues were seen as unpopular, and were used to defeat his reelection.

Soon after the trial, anarchist Dyer Lum wrote a history of the trial critical of the prosecution. In 1888, George McLean, and in 1889, police captain Michael Shack, wrote accounts from the opposite perspective. Awaiting sentencing, each of the defendants wrote their own autobiographies (edited and published by Philip Foner in 1969), and later activist Lucy Parsons published a biography of her condemned husband Albert Parsons. Fifty years after the event, Henry Davis, wrote a history, which was superseded in another scholarly treatment by Paul Avrich in 1984, and a "social history" of the era by Bruce C. Nelson in 1988. In 2006, labor historian, James Green, wrote a popular history.

Christopher Thale in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, writes that lacking credible evidence regarding the bombing, the prosecution focused on the writings and speeches of the defendants. He further notes that the conspiracy charge was legally unprecedented, the Judge was "partisan," and all the jurors admitted prejudice against the defendants. Historian Carl Smith writes: "The visceral feelings of fear and anger surrounding the trial ruled out anything but the pretense of justice right from the outset." Smith notes that scholars have long considered the trial a "notorious" "miscarriage of justice." In a review somewhat more critical of the defendants, historian Jon Teaford concludes that "he tragedy of Haymarket is the American justice system did not protect the damn fools who most needed that protection... It is the damn fools who talk too much and too wildly who are most in need of protection from the state." In 2011, labor historian Timothy Messer-Kruse published a history. Based on his examination of the trial transcripts and other archival material, he concludes there is abundant evidence connecting defendants to advocacy of violence and preparations for it. He argues that Chicago's anarchists were indeed "part of an international terrorist network and did hatch a conspiracy to attack police with bombs and guns that May Day weekend"; and he calls the evidence establishing the guilt of "most of the defendants" "overwhelming." Moreover, Messer-Kruse opines that the trial was fair "by the standards of the age" and the jury representative. According to him, "The tragic end of the story was the product not of prosecutorial eagerness to see the anarchists hang, but largely due to a combination of the incompetence of the defendant's lawyers and their willingness to use the trial to vindicate anarchism rather than to save the necks of their clients."

During the late 20th century, scholars doing research into the Haymarket affair were surprised to learn that much of the primary source documentation relating to the incident (beside materials concerning the trial) was not in Chicago, but had been transferred to then-communist East Berlin.