Haymarket Scrapbook (review)

222 the minnesota review Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Dave Roediger and FrankUn Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). On the centennial of its founding and the hanging of four of the Haymarket Martyrs, Charles H. Kerr, the recently resurrected and oldest sociaUst publishing house in the US, has issued its fat Haymarket Scrapbook. A famUy album of the Haymarket anarchists, their movement and legacy, the Haymarket Scrapbook is full of literally hundreds of illustrations — from a cover of a 1914 issue of MotherEarth by Surrealist Man Ray to an elaborate, baroque Uthograph of the eight Haymarket Martyrs topped by a cloven-hoofed vampire representing "Monopoly." FacsimiUes of magazine covers, handbills, daguerreotypes, paintings , and drawings of the era are in keeping with Kerr Publishing Company's other book ventures — the Wobbly comic book "Mr. Block," "The Autobiography of Mother Jones," writings by labor militant Mary Maracy against entering World War I, and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under SociaUsm." In the Haymarket Scrapbook the deluge of histories and biographies, speeches, and organizing pamphets, cartoons and editorials bring back a rousing and bristling Ufe and times of labor radicalism. If the handbills and lithographs reinforce nostalgia in this television-dominated, mass media age, unfortunately, the text might too. ObUvious to the current state of union malaise, the world of the Haymarket Scrapbook documents the optimism and mihtancy of tradeunionism 's roots. The eight Haymarket anarchists were not singled out by the ruthless Chicago police for oratorical skiU and popularity with the Chicago working-class alone, but also because anarcho-sydicalism was threatening to become the dominant ideal, especially in Chicago, of the labor movement. The Haymarket bombing provided the justification for a national wave of police repression, after which the labor movement had enormous difficulty in surviving and recuperating its previous strength and radicalism. Although Governor John P. Atgeld in 1893 destroyed his political career by pardoning the three remaining Uving Haymarket martyrs for lack of evidence, the damage had already been done. As one Chicago socialist wrote to William Morris: "One week ago freedom of speech was a right unquestioned by the bitterest anti-Socialist ... Today all this has changed ... Socialists are hunted like wolves." But the tale of the defense and response, and the echo ofthe Haymarket anarchists through time, make the Scrapbook a bracing tonic for the Reagan eighties, an era of labor roUbacks, wage concessions and runaway shops. The editors collect the published threads of the Haymarket martyrs' influence on movements as diverse as the struggle for Native American rights, the Black International, the women's movement, and through martyr Louis Lingg, on the Paris Surrealists. In addition to being an inspiring testament of the movement that spawned Emma Goldman, Eleanor Marx, Lucy Parsons, WiUiam Henry Jackson/Honore Jaxson, and so many others, the Haymarket Scrapbook attests to the common bonds that once united "anarchists," "socialists," and "communists" in the labor movement — a far cry from the hairsplitting sectarianism that is all too prevalent today. As Joseph Dietzingen, whom Marx and Engels aedited with independent discovery of the materialist dialectic, claimed, "the difference between anarchists and socialists should not be exaggerated." In fact, they "should be so 'mixed' together that no muddlehead could tell which is which." With humor and the robust spirit of rebellion that animated Louis Lingg at his trial — "I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!" — the Haymarket Scrapbook relives one of the most heroic periods of American labor. Its libertarian and syncretic spirit — instaunced by Honore Jaxson's metamorphosis into a Metis Indian, or the contribution to the socialist movement made by radical mediums and the Shakers — is refleaed in the richness of its cultural heritage. Flags, a play based on the Haymarket martyrs, was in many ways the first produaion of the epic theater made famous by Brecht. "Flags," wrote Erwin Piscator, "in a certain sense" was "the first Marxist drama, and that production the first attempt to grasp these materialist forces and make them tangible." Reviews 223 This laborious gathering together of the various streams of influences and actions, poUtical deeds and cultural artifacts...