The Chicago Tragedy

Henry George

[Reprinted from The Standard, Vol. II, No. 20, New York, Saturday, 19 November, 1887]

Four men were hanged in Chicago on Friday last. There would have been five, but that one had escaped the gallows by a most determined suicide. They were hanged upon judicial conviction of the highest crime known to the law-a crime which resulted in the killing of seven people and the wounding of some scores of others. Yet, on the eve of their execution, a long procession, with muffled drums and banners draped with crape, marched through the streets of New York; on the Sunday after the execution their dead bodies were carried to the grave in Chicago with demonstrations of respect and sympathy such as are rarely accorded to unquestioned public benefactors, and in all parts of the country there are indications that a considerable class regard these men not as criminals, but as heroes and martyrs.

In this there is matter for much serious thought.

One strong element in the sympathy with the Chicago anarchists is, of course, due to that disposition which arises from the long interval which our legal procedure permits between the first arraignment for a capital crime and the execution of sentence. Events diminish in impressiveness as they recede in time, just as visible objects dwindle in size as they recede in distance. The imagination concerns itself with the living man under the shadow of the gallows more readily and more powerfully than with the act which brought him there, and pity for the sad plight of the criminal excites sympathy and prompts excuse, while the crime is condoned or forgotten. So strong is this disposition that, no matter how clearly his guilt has been proved, the most atrocious murderer does not fail to find sympathizers and excusers in the time intervening between trial and execution, and to be set before the public mind as a victim rather than as a criminal. Whatever may be said for capital punishment, it certainly loses its most important effects in the long delays which our criminal procedure permits, and either these delays should be prevented, so that trial and execution should follow closely upon the crime, or capital punishment should be abolished. In criminal, as in civil cases, justice ceases to be justice when it is not prompt.

But beyond this sentimental sympathy which is in greater or less degree excited by every case of capital punishment when execution is long delayed, and which, from the nature of the case and the wide attention called to it, was peculiarly strong in the case of the Chicago anarchists, there has been a widespread impression, even among those who had no sympathy with anarchy, that these men did not have a fair and unprejudiced trial, and that they were convicted rather as anarchists than as participators in the overt act for which they were arraigned.

The sympathizers with anarchy have from the first been actively engaged in propagating the belief that these men were simply victims to the vengeance of an excited class feeling; but beyond the effect thus exerted upon the public mind and giving great help and countenance to it, has been the impression produced by the fragmentary reports of the trial which reached the general public through the press.

Until the seven judges of the supreme court of Illinois, after a full examination of the evidence and the record unanimously sustained the verdict and the sentence, it was certainly my impression-an impression confirmed by the opinions of men whom I knew to be fair-minded- that the seven anarchists, or at least some of them, no matter how much moral connection their teachings and agitation might have had with the throwing of the bomb, had, in the excited state of public feeling in Chicago, been condemned on evidence that did not really amount to legal proof, and were only connected with the bomb throwing by general and vague incitements to acts of the kind. A reading of the summary of the evidence which is embraced in the decision of the supreme court of Illinois showed me that this was not correct but that enough evidence had been presented to clearly connect the seven men with a specific conspiracy to use dynamite against the police on the evening on which the bomb was thrown, and to render them under the statutes of Illinois, and on the common principles of law, as much guilty as though with their own hands they bad thrown the bomb.

Probably the most satisfactory answer to the many letters which I have received from those who, having no sympathy with anarchy in itself, have urged me to join in the demand for the pardon of the Chicago anarchists on the ground that they had been convicted on insufficient evidence, is the letter from Judge James G. Maguire, which is printed on the fifth page of this number of THE STANDARD.

I found, on talking with Judge Maguire, in one of the brief intervals during the canvass in which we had opportunity to meet, that his impression of the case of the Chicago anarchists was that I had first entertained, and being extremely desirous of testing my own opinion by that of an old friend for whose ability and character I have the highest respect-a man in full sympathy with all true reform, and at the same time acquainted with legal procedure and accustomed to the weighing of evidence-I urged him to read the papers in the case, and give me his opinion. At the same time I handed him a long letter from a friend of ours, a lady of intelligence, who, in urging me to do what I could to arouse public opinion against what she deemed would be judicial murder, had gone over the points which have been popularly presented as telling in favor of the innocence of the anarchists, and who had asked me to show the letter to Judge Maguire, whose influence she also invoked.

Judge Maguire did as I requested him. But, not having time before leaving for San Francisco to write for THE STANDARD a review of the case, he gave me permission to get and print the private letter he had while still engaged in the campaign written to our friend.

I do not print it as a full review of the case, for Judge Maguire would have been more elaborate if writing for publication, but as showing the conclusion which a judicial and unprejudiced had arrived at after examination, and as an appropriate answer to many other letters which during the last few weeks I have received. In printing his letter I may also say of the judge that while he saw no ground for asking executive clemency as a matter of right and justice, he agreed with me in believing that there were good grounds of public policy for the mitigation of the capital sentences.

But beyond the element of which I have been speaking-the impression, shared in many cases by those who have no sympathy with violence, that the anarchists had not been fairly condemned-there are other elements of more permanent importance. There is among us a class who justify and applaud such deeds as that for which the Chicago anarchists were executed. There is another class, who without justifying such acts of violence imagine that they will hasten, if, indeed, they are not actually necessary to social reform. And there is a still 1arger number who, without any definite opinions, are disposed to sympathize with any one who falls under the ban of a class whom they regard as the enemies of their own.

Anarchy is a reaction from socialism, and the ranks of the anarchists proper are filled by men who having been attracted by the large promises of German or state socialism, have come at length to see its incoherence and impracticability. The theory of anarchism is the antipodes of that of socialism. instead of the cumbrous and impossible system which would make government the all in all and reduce the individual to the position of an employe and ward of the state, philosophic anarchy would carry to its extreme the proposition that "The best government is that which governs least," by abolishing all government and leaving individuals free to fall as it supposes, into the mutual relations dictated by their own interests and convenience. With the mass of the so-called anarchists, however, anarchy is not a theory, but a feeling that working men are oppressed by an intolerable class despotism, and that the breaking down of governmental power by acts of violence is the only sure and speedy way of release. Anarchy is the child of despair. It is the impulse of men who, bitterly conscious of injustice, see no way out.

Anarchy is an importation into the United States. It is not an accident that out of the eight men convicted in Chicago only one was of American birth, for the American element among our avowed socialists and anarchists is in hardly greater proportion. But if anarchy did not find congenial soil it would not perpetuate and propagate itself on this side of the Atlantic. The foreigner, imbued with anarchistic principles in a country where great standing armies maintain avowed class governments, crosses the ocean to a country where government is nominally based upon the will of the people. If he found here that political liberty brought social justice, that there was in the great republic room for all, work for all, and the opportunity to make a fair living for all, his anarchism would soon be forgotten, and the apostle of dynamite would, amid any class of our foreign population, meet only ridicule and derision. But what great bodies of the foreigners who come here actually do find, is that our political equality is little better than a delusion and a mockery, and that there exists here the same bitter social injustice which presses down the masses of Europe. In a country where there were no tramps; in a country where there were no paupers; in a country where there were no men forced to beg for work or alms; where there were no families crowded together in miserable tenement rooms; and no children compelled to toil when they ought to be at play, anarchy might be imported and imported, but it could not exist, much less take root. But amid conditions that can be found to-day within the American republic, anarchy finds its proper soil and atmosphere.

The strength of anarchy in Chicago is in those squalid quarters where foreigners live, not so much because they are foreigners as because they are miserably poor- quarters in which, not merely do whole families work and live in single rooms, but sometimes two families occupy the same room.-Large numbers of these people have been brought to this country by the false promises of land and railroad agents who have deliberately misstated the opportunities for work and the wages that could be obtained. Swindled from the moment they landed at Castle garden, and largely helpless from their ignorance of the language, they have been driven into the fierce competition and bitter degradation of the slums of a great city, a sense of injustice rankling in their breasts.

So it is in New York and in our other large cities. If any one will travel through the foreign quarters on the east side of New York and see how human beings live and work, or even if he will read the reports of the ministers of religion and charity who occasionally explore the dark places of this east side world, he will see how fit are the conditions to propagate and even intensify that blind revolt against government and society which was first developed under European tyranny.

We cannot shut out anarchy by shutting out immigration. The evil thing is already here. Nor can we extirpate it by now and then hanging or imprisoning or clubbing. In all our cities we are rearing an increasing number of children under conditions which would make anarchism a thing of spontaneous development, even if it did not already exist.

In all our great cities to-day may be seen those barbarians of civilization, the fiercer and more destructive Huns and Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied, and with whom, if they continue to grow and increase, modern civilization must some day fight its death fight. Where the older ones among them were born is a matter of little moment. They are to-day an integral part of our people. And their children are growing up, and other people's children are falling under like conditions.

Of the two, anarchism is much better suited than socialism to the American genius, and I am inclined to think that, as a theory, it has many more adherents among native Americans. But the extension of theoretical anarchism need give us little concern. The really dangerous thing is in our people becoming habituated to ideas of violence, and in the growth of passions that incite to it.

There are many, even among native Americans, who, without expressly justifying violence, yet think and talk as though violence would hasten, if, indeed, it is not the only agency that can bring about anything like large political and social reforms. Conscious of corruption in the political organization and of deep and bitter injustice in the industrial organization, they-even the more intelligent of them-have formed no clear idea of the cause, nor yet of the cure. They have such an abiding faith in the power of combination and of concentrated capital on the one side, and in the ignorance and helplessness of the masses of the people on the other, that they are hopeless of any reform until the wealthy and powerful class are startled by menace of violence into conceding to fear what they would refuse to justice. All great advances, they say, must be bought by the blood sacrifice, and the vis inertia of organized society can only be broken by social earthquake. . All this is erroneous. Good is not begotten by evil; it is good that begets good. If great advances have sometimes been marked by blood sacrifices, so, in greater degree, have periods of decadence. The great agencies that have every where enslaved men have been the passions kindled by war and bloodshed. And when civilization has gone down, it has been in the action and reaction of violence. What our modern civilization needs to extricate it from the dangers that under present conditions gather with its advance, are intelligence and conscience. But violence arouses passion, And in this breast of the civilized man still lurk the same passions that belonged to human nature when men chipped flints into spear heads.

All idea that violence may secure or hasten social reform is based upon the vague notion that there is some particular body of men who have the power but lack the will to bring about social reform, and who may be forced or frightened into doing so. This is a notion akin to those so vaguely but widely diffused, that hard times are due to greedy speculators; low wages to grasping employers; and corrupt government to depraved politicians. But all such notions are childish. Social and political evils are due not to particular men or sets of men, but to general conditions, in the maintenance of which the whole people are concerned, and to the changing of which the general intelligence and the general conscience must be aroused. Even in Russia it is not the police and the army that maintain autocratic government so much as the superstitious loyalty of the Russian peasant. But of all countries in the world this is most clearly true of the United States. There is here no privileged aristocracy, no established church, no standing army loyal to a person or a dynasty. Here all power is in the hands of the people-of the working masses, who constitute the great majority of the voters. They can make or unmake politicians; they can give power to this party or to that party; they can rewrite the laws when they will and according to their will. If voters are bought, it is because there are men willing to sell as well as men willing to buy; if legislative bodies are corrupt, it is because voters tolerate corruption and because they tolerate a system which brings corrupt men to the front. It is not any set or sets of bad men who are oppressing and misgoverning the American people, but the American people themselves.

And if it is true that there are among workingmen many who are disposed to condone acts of violence when committed by those who assume to be the champions of oppressed labor, is it not true that there is the same blind class feeling among the well-to-do? When Pinkerton detectives shoot down strikers; when superserviceable policemen club socialists, is there any outcry from those who deem themselves conservative? The bursting of a dynamite bomb in a Chicago street; the hanging of men in the United States for a crime for which, had it been committed in Russia, we would not have extradited them; the fact that the idea of law and the idea of justice are already in the minds of thousands so far divorced that those whom the courts condemn as deserving the highest punishment known to our code, are by considerable bodies of our people thought of as martyrs, are ominous things. There is no danger, perhaps, that organized anarchism will ever prove formidable in the United States, but there is danger that the minds of men becoming familiarized with ideas of violence, violence will here and there break out. There is danger that the frenzy born of injustice on the one side and the frenzy born of fear on the other, may, by a series of actions and reactions, lead to results the most disastrous.

The anarchists are not our most dangerous class. Back of the men who died on Friday in Chicago with a fortitude worthy of a better cause; back of the men who sympathize with them and their deed, is a deep and widespread sense of injustice. Those who are most responsible for the existence of this are those who, having time and opportunity and power to enlighten the public mind, shut their eyes to injustice and use their talents and opportunities to prevent the arousing of thought and conscience and to decry any peaceful remedy that may be proposed.

There is one body of men in the United States who do see the causes and the cure of that social injustice which is arraying men against each other in combinations of capital and combinations of labor, which is bringing forth the millionaire on the one side and the tramp on the other, which is exciting class hatred and class passion. There is a party which does not denounce men, but aims by constitutional and peaceful means to change general conditions, and which appeals to intelligence and to conscience. This party polled 73,000 votes in the state of New York at the last election. But it will poll more. In it, or, rather, in the ideas that it is disseminating is the hope of true conservatism. But these ideas have to make their way, not merely against the ignorant poor and the ignorant rich, but against the misrepresentations of a majority of those who by the positions they hold and the influence they wield, are most bound to do their best to enlighten the public mind.

A letter also appeared in the 19 November, 1887 edition of The Standard, written by Judge Maguire, providing his opinion of the justice of the sentence handed down in the case of the Chicago anarchists.