Haymarket
By Martin Duberman
Seven Stories, 330 pages, $24.95
Novelist Henry James maintained that the task of both the historian and the creative writer is to represent reality, but writers have a harder job because they must produce literature as well as history. James elsewhere claimed that all great writers are historians, “even when they least don the uniform.” This is because literature can convey a feel for what British cultural critic Richard Hoggart calls “the experiential wholeness of life,” the texture of emotions, perceptions and thoughts, as well as the private and public settings and actions that distinguish a time.
But what about literature that deals with historical figures and events that possess extraordinary dramatic power, that present an authentic story beside which mere fiction pales? James responded succinctly to this possibility when he pointed out another distinction between the historian and the imaginative writer that at least implicitly favors the latter. The historian, he explained, “wants more documents than he can really use,” while the novelist or playwright “only wants more liberties than he can really take.” The best writers do not slavishly serve actuality but use it as inspiration for art, and in so doing offer revelations that historians cannot.
In his novel “Haymarket,” Martin Duberman has taken on one of the most inherently compelling series of events in Chicago and American history: the protest rally half a block north of the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines Streets (where a haymarket once stood) on May 4, 1886, at which an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb that killed at least one police officer; the riot that immediately followed, in which several more police officers and many people attending the rally were killed or wounded; the legally reprehensible roundup of hundreds of anarchists and labor activists, fully endorsed by the newspapers and even funded by prominent businessmen; the conviction of eight anarchists in a trial marked by extreme prejudice and flimsy evidence; and the hanging of four of them on Nov. 11, 1887, in the old Cook County Jail at the corner of Dearborn and Illinois. Since the bomb exploded, Haymarket’s meaning has been profoundly contested, some celebrating it as a heroic defense of law and order, and others honoring the anarchists as martyrs for the workers.
Several historians have told the story of Haymarket, the best of them Paul Avrich in “The Haymarket Tragedy.” Duberman is not the first writer to retell it imaginatively. Journalist and man of letters Frank Harris published his novel “The Bomb” in 1908. In 1999 the Steppenwolf Theatre staged Derek Goldman and Jessica Thebus’ moving drama, “Haymarket Eight.” In America and abroad, numerous poets, songwriters and visual artists, the last including Diego Rivera, have expressed their outrage at the legal travesty of the trial and the executions.
Duberman would seem to be ideally suited to continue this tradition. He is an eminent historian who has won the Bancroft Prize and a distinguished author cited by the National Academy of Arts and Letters for his literary achievements. While much of his recent work has been in gay and lesbian studies, he has written noteworthy histories, biographies and plays on a wide range of subjects, several about such embattled political radicals as Paul Robeson and Emma Goldman, who lies buried near the monument to Haymarket martyrs in Forest Park’s Forest Home Cemetery.
But “Haymarket,” unfortunately, does not add luster to Duberman’s deservedly high reputation. He seems determined above all to demonstrate that his heart is in the right–more precisely, the left–place. “Haymarket” is full of a sympathy so fulsome that it comes close to smothering its main characters and the tumultuous events that swirl around them.
With one minor exception, all these characters are real historical figures. Duberman takes as his protagonists Haymarket defendant Albert Parsons and his wife, Lucy, an extraordinarily unlikely and remarkable couple. Albert could proudly trace his ancestry back to the second voyage of the Mayflower, but he was born in Alabama, grew up in Texas and joined the Confederate cause when he was 13. After the war, however, he was active in journalism and politics on the side of rights for freed slaves. He fell in love with Lucy, who, though she denied it publicly, was African-American (the newspapers sensationalized this during the trial, calling her “Parsons’s dusky bride”). By 1873 they had left Texas and settled in post-fire Chicago, with Albert working as a newspaper typesetter. Both became involved in increasingly extreme labor and class agitation. By the time of the Haymarket meeting, Albert, who had been blacklisted for the speeches he made during the national railroad strike of 1877, was a leader of the English-speaking group of Chicago anarchists and editor of their newspaper, The Alarm. At the trial, the prosecution singled him out as a traitor as well as a murderer, because he was the only native-born American among the eight defendants (six were German and one was English).
In a note at the end of the novel, Duberman explains that while he follows “the known historical record” as recounted by scholars (he includes a bibliography), he takes several liberties of the kind to which James alluded in pursuit of “the experiential wholeness” that Hoggart describes. Acknowledging that there is much evidence available on the public aspects of Haymarket, Duberman remarks that “very little has survived that documents the private lives of those involved, and almost nothing in the way of diaries or intimate letters–those subjective road maps that reveal the most about personal experience, temperament, inner states of being, and relationships.” Duberman overstates his case, but he is completely within his rights as a novelist in inventing journal entries by Albert and letters between Albert and Lucy, as well as “nearly all the novel’s dialogue, ruminations, and interactions.” (Harris told his story from the point of view of the alleged bomb thrower, who had fled the country to avoid prosecution.)
But these fictive elements and the narrative as a whole are almost relentlessly earnest and flat. Duberman shortchanges Albert, Lucy and their comrades by oversimplifying and oversanctifying them in a way that is ultimately, if unintentionally, patronizing, because they become two-dimensional objects of his political and human sensitivity. Duberman deals with the tricky issue of whether the anarchists believed in the violence they preached by dulling the edge of their rhetoric and implying that they did not really mean it anyway. Lucy’s fiery temperament becomes an occasion to demonstrate Albert’s affectionate tolerance rather than an indicator of the extent of social division in 1880s Chicago. Virtually everyone in the novel is either a brave and selfless person of integrity who dies unjustly, an individual of good intentions who is helpless to stop the tragic course of events (this includes Mayor Carter Harrison and defense attorney William Black, as well as Lucy Parsons and other unindicted anarchists), or a self-interested careerist (for example, the police officers who conducted the red scare after the bombing) who gets his way at the cost of truth and justice.
One problem rests in the language of the dialogue, letters and diaries. Most of the characters sound the same, whether they are an African-American woman from Texas like Lucy or a German immigrant like Albert’s fellow defendant August Spies (the name as published has been corrected in this text). And what they say to each other is implausible. Despite Duberman’s admirable aim to look at events from the inside out, the personal exchanges and documents he fabricates are too often directed to summarizing or explaining circumstances and ideas to the readers.
At its weakest, “Haymarket” reads like a cross between a cloying melodrama and a middle-school civics play, not a probing depiction of what it was like to be committed to social revolution in the nation’s leading industrial city at a time of crisis. When Albert tells Lucy that he is now editor of The Alarm, she squeals with delight, throws her arms around him and covers his face with kisses. As soon as she catches her breath, she exclaims:
” ‘Your first full-time newspaper job since the Times blacklisted you. And the coincidence of it! Spies just appointed editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and now you. It’s too good to be true!’ “
Burly Samuel Fielden, another defendant who spoke of the need to smash capitalism, is turned into a big teddy bear who at one point gives his wife “a huge hug, the only kind he knew.” Defense attorney Black takes the case over the protests of his wife, who then declares:
” ‘You’re a noble man, my dearest William. I’m not worthy of you. But I will stand by your side. Firmly by your side.’ “
There are some historical errors, but most involve small details. A highly questionable use of creative license is Lucy’s friendship well before the bombing with Nina Van Zandt, a proper, middle-class woman who improbably fell in love with Spies during the trial and married him by proxy. This is evidently meant to show that “respectable” people who got to know these supposed enemies of society understood their fundamental decency, but it’s a real stretch. At the trial the prosecution and defense disputed the extent to which the police precipitated the violence by arguing about whether their pistols were drawn or not, but Duberman feels obliged to arm them with Winchester repeater rifles to underline the point that by so aggressively looking for trouble they provoked it.
Readers who wish to get a feel for Haymarket would do better to read Avrich’s masterfully written and exceptionally absorbing history, which is full of the words of dozens of participants. If they want to learn even more about Haymarket, they might look at the considerable documentary evidence, much of which is available online in the Chicago Historical Society’s Haymarket Affair Digital Collection (www.chicagohistory.org/hadc). Duberman gives his fictional treatment a valiant try, but the actual history of Haymarket makes a far better story than this novel.
