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  • The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks by Timothy Messer-Kruse
  • Richard Bach Jensen
The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks Timothy Messer-Kruse Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012; 236 pages. $85.00 (cloth), $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-03705-4

Claiming that previous scholars, "fearing what lurks beneath," have not wished to lift the "rock" under which lies the truth about what the Chicago anarchists wanted and how they proposed to get it (6), Timothy Messer-Kruse has written two provocative revisionist books on the Haymarket bombing. While his first book focused on the trial, this work looks at the alleged conspiracy that preceded the 1886 explosion and places it in the context of transatlantic anarchism's dedication to "propaganda by deed." The author claims that Spies, Parsons, and other Chicago social revolutionaries "succeeded in reorienting American socialism away from its libertarianism and its republicanism" while "embracing an imported and foreign ideology of direct violent action" (90). Abandoning all genuine interest in reform, the Chicago anarchists cynically supported the eight-hour workday movement in order "to steer it into a direct revolutionary confrontation with authorities" that might very possibly explode into a social revolution and the takeover of Chicago (163). The conspiracy was hatched in two secret meetings, the most important of which occurred in the basement of Greif's saloon on 3 May. The plan, devised by George Engel, called on the anarchists' armed groups (whose size the author does not give, although estimates range from a few hundred to over 2,000) to attack police stations once a riot in the center of the city had begun. The meeting at the Haymarket on 4 May was designed to lure the police into confrontation (although, as the author admits, no mention had been made in Greif's saloon about throwing a bomb during the Haymarket gathering). In the end the plan went awry when the anarchists proved less committed or more cowardly than expected and failed to attack the police stations. Interest in staging a violent confrontation in Haymarket Square began to melt away. The author notes a thirdhand piece of information reported by the historian Max Nettlau explaining that an anarchist who had not been [End Page 128] alerted to this change mistakenly threw the famous bomb that killed several officers and provoked the police into firing wildly into the crowd, killing and wounding a hundred more. But for Messer-Kruse, the Haymarket blast was not an aberration due to a misinformed fanatic but rather the "culmination of an ideological movement" whose leaders deserved to pay the ultimate penalty (178).

While the author claims that his book is based on previously untapped German-language sources, as well as on material from American archives and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, his argument is very much that of the prosecution at the Haymarket trial. It therefore contains all the flaws of that original argument, which earlier scholars, such as Paul Avrich, have pointed out. For example, if Engels planned the Haymarket rally to stage a confrontation with the police, why was he at home playing cards during the event? Much of Messer-Kruse's (and the prosecution's) evidence regarding the secret meeting at Greif's is based on the testimony of Gottfried Waller, but the author fails to point out that Waller was given money by the Chicago chief of police and, after the trial, sent back to Germany with his family at police expense. The author's failure to pay more than scant attention to the tainted quality of the testimony of many prosecution witnesses undermines one's confidence in his argument.

The author abundantly documents the American anarchists' violent rhetoric and apparent capability to produce and procure dynamite. He cites many obscure acts of anarchist violence, from blowing up statues, to robbery and arson, to bombing incidents in Kansas. He also points out interesting connections between the anarchists and the Fenians, Irish terrorists. All this is valuable to historians of anarchism and terrorism. What is lacking, though, is much of a context for the propensity toward violence of anarchists in America. While Messer-Kruse mostly attributes this...

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