By Paul Ortiz
I came of age in a society that did not work. It especially did not function adequately for working-class people and our families. Growing up in the shadows of Watergate, the American War in Vietnam, and deindustrialization, our elders shared two pieces of wisdom to explain the economic and social chaos engulfing our neighborhoods. Firstly, our society was run by rich people. Secondly, our political system was irredeemably corrupt. Putting two and two together, we learned post-New Deal slogans, like “The g-d slumlords run this town” and “To hell with both political parties. They are all crooks.”
A year before I graduated high school, Sheldon Wolin, Joyce Appleby, Lawrence Goodwyn and other scholars founded democracy, a journal that explained in academic prose what our parents had been teaching us in hard-pressed towns like Akron, Ohio; Fontana, California; Bremerton, Washington (where I grew up); and other places hammered by disinvestment, the Reagan Recession, and a rapidly collapsing safety net. In his 1981 introduction to the journal’s first issue, Wolin described, “ . . . the steady transformation of America into an antidemocratic society.” He went on to argue that,
Every one of the country’s primary institutions—the business corporation, the government bureaucracy, the trade union, the research and education industries, the mass propaganda and entertainment media, and the health and welfare system—is antidemocratic in spirit, design, and operation.
Returning from a tour of military duty in Central America in 1986, I embarked upon an intensive study of US history to try to figure out how and why the nation’s political system had been run off the rails. At the same time, I joined the labor movement as a volunteer organizer. I worked with the United Farm Workers of Washington State’s long struggle to unionize the Chateau Ste. Michelle wineries. In 1995, the workers won a union contract which is still in force.
The success of that campaign, as well as what I learned in labor and African American history in college, taught me that democracy is not a gift from the nation’s “Founding Fathers.” Nor is its source to be found in venerable documents housed in the National Archives. Democracy is people power. It is neighbors exercising principles of self-help, mutual aid, and solidarity.
I have learned as an activist and as a historian that we owe our most precious freedoms to immigrants, working-class people, and allies who have had to fight what Wolin called “the country’s primary institutions” since the American Revolution to win a modicum of dignity, freedom, and economic security. The United States was not born a democracy. Far from it. Every self-governing institution we currently have—and are desperately hanging onto—was fought for by enslaved African Americans, Indigenous people, labor unionists, LGBTQ activists, and other protagonists highlighted in Beacon Press’s Revisioning History Series.
The Fourth of July means remembering struggles for both successful and unsuccessful, such as Nat Turner’s rebellion, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. It means learning from Dana Frank’s magnificent new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression: Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times.
I took time out from this year’s Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) conference in Chicago to pay homage to an important group of our ancestors in struggle. On the first morning of the conference, I visited the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument at the Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.
The monument honors August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Albert Parsons. These men were anti-capitalists and labor organizers condemned to death for the killing of seven police officers at the May 4, 1886 rally held in support of striking workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago. Except for Albert Parsons, the eight men tried for the killings were first-generation immigrants.
Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg, and Parsons were active in anarchist, socialist, syndicalist, and trade union struggles that found common cause under the banner of the shorter work hours’ movement. Answering organized labor’s demand for national legislation mandating an eight-hour day, hundreds of thousands of workers rallied, marched, and protested across the United States on May 1, 1886. Chicago was the epicenter of the movement, and Albert Parsons and August Spies helped to lead an 80,000-strong May Day march of workers and their supporters.
In response to police homicides of striking workers at the McCormick works on May 3, anarchists and labor organizers called for a rally at Haymarket Square the following day. It is this event which has become known as “The Haymarket Incident.” Towards the end of what had been a peaceful protest, a bomb was thrown, and several police were killed in the resultant melee. According to a contemporary report in the Chicago Tribune, many of the police shot during the Haymarket Incident were gravely wounded by “friendly fire.”
The resultant capital trial of the alleged perpetrators of the bombing was a farce. In pardoning the surviving Haymarket “conspirators” in 1893, Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld noted,
“The prosecution could not discover who had thrown the bomb and could not bring the really guilty man to justice, and, as some of the men indicted were not at the Haymarket meeting and had nothing to do with it, the prosecution was forced to proceed on the theory that the men indicted were guilty of murder because it was claimed they had at various times in the past uttered and printed incendiary and seditious language, practically advising the killing of policemen, of Pinkerton men and others acting in that capacity, and that they were therefore responsible for the murder of [police officer] Mathias Degan.”
I believe the Haymarket martyrs are more important than ever as we reflect on the multiple meanings of the Fourth of July today. Like countless other labor activists in US history, August Spies and his comrades were denied due process, fair trials, and equal justice. Like the situation in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver today, the workers who gathered at Haymarket on May 4, 1886, to protest fallen comrades were harassed, brutalized, and incarcerated. Mexican, African American, and immigrant labor activists in the Gilded Age and Progressive eras were deported because they were anarchists or because they had the courage to stand up for their communities and fellow workers against government repression.
Honoring the Haymarket martyrs and other dissenting working-class people throughout history on the Fourth of July reminds us that we cannot rely on institutions like the courts or political parties to defend our rights and to save the republic. To do that, we must come together and forge powerful freedom movements for social justice. Solidarity forever!
About the Author
Paul Ortiz is a professor of labor history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States and Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, among other books. He is currently writing A Social Movement History of the United States, which will be published by Beacon Press.
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