Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green (review)

Book Reviews 175 Negro Exposition of 1940, a relatively unsuccessful effort to build upon the "celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Civil War and blacks' official emancipation from slavery" (p. 20). Although it did evoke a growing interest in history, the exposition's shortcomings as a celebration of contemporary culture actually fostered more successful efforts at self-awareness elsewhere. Green then takes readers on a tour of Chicago's hvely music scene, including gospel, blues, and other African American genres. Music becomes a form of expression that emphasizes the common experience and self-image of its hsteners, paralleling the efforts of the printed word. In what are truly outstanding chapters, Green explores the stories of two media innovators. Founded in 1919, Claude Barnett's Associated Negro Press hnked together dozens of newspapers, providing them with features and news stories that made local events national and vice versa. John Johnson's Ebony magazine first hit the newsstands in 1945. The magazine's embrace of celebrities and consumer goods appealed to a more middle-class audience, while its companion publication, Jet, was more edgy. Selling the Race then moves on to the Emmett Till affair, the 1955 murder case in which an African American youth from Chicago was lynched in Mississippi after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, and the 1955 riots that accompanied the effort to integrate pubhc housing. These stories are linked by a running commentary that delineates the difficulties involved in creating a national black culture within the historic constraints of "clientage," an accommodation based on peacefully institutionahzed subservience. The writing is crisp, the topics were chosen with great thought, the research is thorough, and the arguments are logical. This is amarvelous book, amust-read for everyone interested in the history of Chicago, aswell asmid-century African American history. Perry R. Duis, Professor of History University of Illinois at Chicago James Green. Death in theHaymarket: A Story of Chicago, theFirst Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Pp. 383. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $26.95. On the evening of May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a workers' rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Dozens of pohce officers were injured and seven died of their wounds. Rally participants also suffered 176 Michigan Historical Review casualties. Among the victims was the labor movement itself. The bombing triggered cries for revenge, as the pohce unleashed a witch hunt against labor organizers and immigrant workers. Convicted by the press and pubhc opinion before their trial began, four anarchist workers went to the gallows. The events in Chicago?the labor conflict known as the "Great Upheaval" in the spring of 1886, the Haymarket bombing, and the ensuing red scare, trial, and hangings? mark one of the most dramatic episodes in America's emergence as a modern industrial society. As the title suggests, James Green's book is first about the city of Chicago, whose enormous industries produced vast wealth and promise, along with dark clouds of gaseous smoke and bitter class divisions. The first half of the book explores the world of the ethnically diverse working class, with its Bohemian militias, German meeting halls, and complex mix of radical and labor organizations. The account of the Great Upheaval, where the pohce met workers' strikes for the eight-hour day with truncheons and revolvers, helps explain why all parties in the contest tended to interpret events in terms of cataclysmic violence. The terror struck on May 4, and Green does a masterful job of capturing the human drama, from the bomb that arched over Haymarket to the trap doors of the gallows that fell beneath the convicted labor leaders. The events at Haymarket had a powerful impact on the national labor movement. It would take more than a generation for the trade union movement in Detroit and other midwestern cities to recover from this tragedy. Haymarket's history also poses large questions about immigrant rights, freedom of speech, and legal protections in a time of terror and mass hysteria. Other sources that discuss these events include: The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich, which provides an in-depth analysis of...