When in 1997 Don Turner began pushing to get the city to create a permanent memorial to the Haymarket tragedy, he knew that history wasn’t on his side. For years city officials had avoided commemorating the site, near the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines, because of the stigma of anarchism and the violence associated with the event. The police didn’t want to see cop killers glorified.
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On the night of May 4, 1886, 2,500 people gathered near the square to protest the killing of two strikers by police the previous day. Labor activists and anarchists gave speeches in support of an eight-hour workday. As the meeting ended, 176 cops advanced on the remaining 200 spectators gathered around the speakers’ wagon near the mouth of the alley just north of Randolph. Someone still unknown threw a dynamite bomb, setting off a melee in which seven officers and four workers were killed. Hundreds of labor, anarchist, and ethnic community leaders were arrested. Eight men were brought to trial. Four were executed, one apparently committed suicide, and three were sent to prison (they were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893). It’s now generally agreed that the trial, carried out in a hysterically prejudiced atmosphere, was grossly unjust.
Why the thaw? “It takes a while for people to get an objective perspective on historical events and see [Haymarket] as an overall tragedy and not a polarizing issue,” says Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian. In the 1980s, when he worked for the landmarks commission, Samuelson floated the idea of a sculpture representing a speakers’ wagon to symbolize free speech. “But Haymarket meant so many different things to many people, and there was never a good consensus.”
There was once a monument in the area. In 1889 the city erected a statue of a Chicago policeman in honor of the slain officers (despite evidence that all but one were killed by their own bullets). Frequently vandalized, the statue was moved to Union Park, then back to Randolph near the newly built Kennedy Expressway, where in 1969 and ’70 it was twice blown up by radical political groups. It was finally given refuge in the Chicago Police Training Center in 1976.
Her nearly 15-foot-high bronze depicts a number of blocky figures engaged in building–or is it dismantling?–a wagon. The “ascension of human activity,” as Brogger puts it, culminates in the speaker on top, symbolizing the importance of free speech. The monument, which also includes panels of text and cratelike benches, will be dedicated on July 31.
