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Title: Haymarket Widows Author: Carolyn Ashbaugh Date: 1986 Language: en Topics: Haymarket, women Source: Retrieved on August 11, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160811113130/http://flag.blackened.net/lpp/haymarket/ashbaugh_widows.html Notes: Published in Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986.
The Haymarket trial and its aftermath brought tragedy and grief into the
lives of women whose husbands, brothers, sons and comrades were
imprisoned and executed. These family members and friends of the men who
stood trial for a murder which none of them committed suffered
immeasurable loss. Although the personal tribulations of many of these
women have not been recorded, it is clear that they all suffered the
emotional loss of a partner, close relative or friend, as well as the
financial loss of that person’s income.
The workers’ movement helped support the widows and children of the
Haymarket martyrs through the Pioneer Aid and Support Association,
founded on December 15, 1887. The widows received $8 a week plus $2 each
for the first two children and $1 for a third. Anarchists and
sympathizers from all over the world contributed to this fund; a single
rally in Havana, Cuba, raised nearly $1000 for the purpose. The
Association also collected funds to erect the Haymarket Martyrs Monument
at Waldheirn (Forest Home) Cemetery.
But for the martyrs’ female family members-Lucy Parsons, Nina van Zandt
Spies, Christine Spies, Gretchen Spies, Maria Schwab, Johanna Fischer,
Elise Friedel, Mrs. Engel, Mary Engel and Mrs. Fielden-life would never
be the same.
Meta Neebe, wife of defendant Oscar Neebe, died during the ordeal. At
her death in March 1887 she was only in her mid-thirties, and
many-including her doctor-attributed her death to the stress and anxiety
caused by her husband’s incarceration and trial. The Chicago Tribune for
March 13, 1887 reported that her funeral “called out more sympathy and
excited more interest than any event that has occurred in the
neighborhood since it was reclaimed from the prairie,” and added that it
was, indeed, “in some respects, the most notable funeral demonstration
Chicago has ever seen.”
Mrs. Fielden was described as someone who had never taken a streetcar
downtown by herself prior to her husband’s arrest; she had major
adjustments to make during Samuel Fielden’s seven-year imprisonment.
Johanna Fischer was left with three small children to support after
Adolph Fischer’s execution. Mary Engel and her mother lost father and
husband, George Engel. Mrs. Engel continued to run her husband’s
toy-shop after his arrest. The Engels may have fared better economically
than several of the other families, as the women were able to operate
the family business.
Maria Schnaubelt Schwab, herself an active member of the International
Working People’s Association, would eventually lose her husband to
tuberculosis contracted in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet,
despite Michael Schwab’s pardon and release by Governor Altgeld in 1893.
As a result of the Haymarket events, she did not see her brother Rudolph
Schnaubelt for another thirty years, when she visited him in Argentina.
Little has been written on the later activity of the Haymarket widows,
sisters and friends, but we do know that several of them remained
active, in one way or another, in the anarchist movement.
In 1888 Christine Spies, August Spies’ mother, published a 182-page
compilation, Reminiscenzen von Aug. Spies. The last page announced the
availability of the English-language Autobiography of August Spies,
published by Nina van Zandt Spies, and listed mailing addresses for two
leading anarchist publications: The Alarm and Johann Most’s Freiheit.
In May 1901 the Chicago anarchist weekly Free Society urged its readers
to contribute to a fund recently started by the Central Labor Union to
help support Christine Spies, who was then 70 years old. The June
16^(th) issue reported that the paper had collected over ninety dollars
for this purpose, and noted that several CLU members had volunteered to
provide for her.
Lucy Parsons’ paper Freedom (“A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist
Monthly”) announced in April 1892 the marriage of the “amiable and
accomplished “ Gretchen Spies, “sister of our martyred comrade,” to
Comrade Robert Steiner, “well known throughout the country as an active
worker in the cause of Labor .. now connected with the editorial staff
of the Arbeiter-Zeitung of this city ... Freedom wishes the newly
married couple all the happiness possible in the marriage relation under
present social arrangements.”
Capt. Schaack, in his Anarchy and Anarchists, reported that detectives
later noted Louis Lingg’s friend Elise Friedel at “several dances,” but
whether these were anarchist events is not clear.
Nina van Zandt’s life changed dramatically with her interest in the
Chicago trial and her marriage to the imprisoned August Spies in
January, 1887. A Vassar graduate and the only child of wealthy Chicago
parents, she followed the trial closely and soon realized that the
defendants were honest, principled individuals dedicated to the
betterment of humanity, rather than the depraved monsters guilty of
heinous crimes depicted in the press. She wrote an article on the case
for the Chicago Knights of Labor, later reprinted in her edition of
August Spies’ Autobiography, to which she also contributed a preface.
In later years Nina Spies was a colorful and familiar figure at the Hobo
College and IWW meetings in Chicago, as well as at May Day and Eleventh
of November commemorations. She eked out a marginal existence running a
rooming-house on Halsted Street, and she took in stray dogs and cats as
well as homeless persons. After Haymarket, her life ran a different
course than expected of a graduate of a prestigious women’s college. Her
funeral in 1936 was a well-attended gathering of activists representing
virtually every current of American radicalism.
The best known of the women immediately connected with the Haymarket
events was the far-from-wealthy Lucy Parsons, who had made her own
reputation as a persuasive and dramatic radical speaker prior to the
Haymarket police riot. The Chicago police considered her “more dangerous
than a thousand rioters” and broke up her meetings for thirty years
after Haymarket. The execution of her husband and comrades made her more
determined than ever to go on with the struggle, yet it left her with a
legacy of personal tragedy and set the stage for further tragedy.
Lucy Parsons gave herself wholly to the movement and avoided discussion
of her personal life. Albert Parsons’ death left her a widow with two
small children; poverty had already forced her to move from the
apartment the family had occupied on Indiana Street to a third floor
walk-up flat on Milwaukee Avenue. As the executions approached, she
worked her fingers to the bone sewing to support herself and her
children, and she also worked herself to exhaustion selling pamphlets
about the case and trying to avoid police harassment. Yet she adamantly
refused to encourage her husband to petition to the governor for
clemency. Albert Parsons had said, “If the State of Illinois can afford
to hang an innocent man, I can afford to hang.” Lucy and Albert held to
this position; they were devoted to truth and justice at all cost.
Lulu Eda’s death two years after her father’s was another devastating
blow. Albert Parsons Jr. can be seen as the final casualty of Haymarket,
the victim of incarceration in the Illinois Northern Hospital for the
Insane from 1899 until his death from tuberculosis in 1919. His fate was
in the unfolding of the Haymarket tragedy and the characters of its
strong-willed participants: his martyred father, and his mother,
determined to bring up a son to take his father’s place in the social
struggle.
Lucy Parsons’ impoverishment in the years following Albert’s execution
and her experience with persecution and abuse for her beliefs may have
in part led her into a relationship with the young anarchist Martin
Lacher, a printer who helped her publish The Life of Albert R. Parsons
in 1889. The two lived in the country with two large watchdogs to
protect them. Lucy’s personal life, no less than her political life, was
under constant surveillance, and the protection afforded by her young
comrade and the dogs may have kept the police at bay. Ironically, her
relationship with Lacher ended in police court in 1891 where she sought
protection against his abuse of her as a woman and former lover.
In the years after Haymarket the Chicago police systematically denied
Lucy Parsons her first-amendment rights. As soon as she began to speak
at a meeting she was arrested, booked for disorderly conduct and
released, an interruption long enough to disrupt the meeting program.
Graham Taylor of the Chicago Commons settlement-house first met Lucy at
the northside Turner Hall on November 11, 1896, nine years after the
executions. The police arrested her just as she began to address the
crowd of 1200 people.
When Lucy appeared at a free-floor meeting at the Commons several years
later, it was unanimously voted that she should speak the following
Tuesday. “Taken by surprise and not a little embarrassed,” Graham Taylor
related, “I offered no objection to the proposal, which I knew would be
regarded as a supreme test of the freedom of the floor.” As the meeting
was private, Lucy was able to speak without being arrested. This
meeting, near the turn of the century, was a rare occasion for Lucy
Parsons to be heard in Chicago-a speech by her was indeed the supreme
test of free speech!
Lucy Parsons remained an ardent revolutionist to the end of her life,
and she was an important influence on innumerable later activists in the
radical labor movement. In 1894 she addressed “Coxey’s Army” of the
unemployed on their ill-fated March on Washington. In 1905 she helped
found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago. Later she
took part in William Z. Foster’s short-lived Syndicalist League of North
America, though she stayed on good terms with her Wobbly friends, and
continued to write for the IWW press.
A featured speaker at the anarchist Free Society Forums in Chicago in
the 1920s, she also appeared at forums and meetings organized by the
IWW, the Proletarian Party and, especially in later years, the Communist
Party, as well as at the bohemian Dill Pickle Club. For many years she
was a familiar sight at workers’ demonstrations and on Chicago
street-corners, where she sold her Life of Albert R. Parsons, Famous
Speeches of the Chicago Martyrs and other anarchist and revolutionary
publications.
Especially active in labor defense, she wrote and spoke on behalf of Tom
Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Gastonia and Scottsboro defendants. In
one of her last public appearances, in 1941, she addressed strikers at
International Harvester, successor to the old McCormick Reaper Works
where the police shooting of workers had resulted in the fateful
Haymarket meeting in May 1886.
Lucy Parsons and her companion George Markstall, with whom she had lived
since around 1910, died in a fire at their Chicago home in March 1942.
They were cremated and their ashes buried together in a grave close to
the Haymarket Martyrs Monument at Waldheim.