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- THE ELEVENTH OF
NOVEMBER 1887
Haymarket Memorial Speech
by Voltairine de Cleyre
Delivered in Chicago, 1901
An APE Reprint
Let me begin my address with a confession. I make
it sorrowfully and with self-disgust; but in the presence
of great sacrifice we learn humility, and if my comrades
could give their lives for their belief, why, let me give
my pride. Yet I would not give it, for personal utterance
is of trifling importance, were it not that I think at this
particular season it will encourage those of our
sympathizers whom the recent outburst of savagery may
have disheartened,* and perhaps lead some who are
standing where I once stood to do as I did later.
This is my confession: Fifteen years ago last May
when the echoes of the Haymarket bomb rolled through
the little Michigan village where I then lived, I, like the
rest of the credulous and brutal, read one lying
newspaper headline, 'Anarchists throw a bomb in a
crowd in the Haymarket in Chicago,' and immediately
cried out, "They ought to be hanged." This, though I
had never believed in capital punishment for ordinary
criminals. For that ignorant, outrageous, blood-thirsty
sentence I shall never forgive myself, though I know the
dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those
who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as it
sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die - a
bitter reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited
the first wild rumor of an event of which I knew nothing,
*A reference to the repressions following President McKinley's assassination.
and, in my mind, sent men to the gallows without asking
one word of defence! In one wild, unbalanced moment
threw away the sympathies of a lifetime, and became an
executioner at heart. And what I did that night millions
did, and what I said millions said. I have only one word
of extenuation for myself and all those people -
ignorance. I did not know what Anarchism was. I had
never seen it used save in histories, and there it was
always synonymous with social confusion and murder.
I believed the newspapers. I thought those men had
thrown that bomb, unprovoked, into a mass of men and
women, from a wicked delight in killing. And so thought
all those millions of others. But out of those millions
there were some few thousand - I am glad I was one of
them - who did not let the matter rest there.
I know not what resurrection of human decency
first stirred within me after that - whether it was an
intellectual suspicion that maybe I did not know all the
truth of the case and could not believe the newspapers, or
whether it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy
which often prompts the heart to go out to the accused,
without a reason; but this I do know, that though I was
no Anarchist at the time of the execution, it was long and
long before that, that I came to the conclusion that the
accusation was false, the trial a farce, that there was no
warrant either in justice or in law for their conviction;
and that the hanging, if hanging there should be, would
be the act of a society composed of people who had said
what I said on the first night, and who had kept their eyes
and ears fast shut ever since, determined to see nothing
and to know nothing but rage and vengeance. Till the
very end I hoped that mercy might intervene, though
justice did not; and from the hour I knew neither would
nor could again, I distrusted law and lawyers, judges and
governors alike. And my whole being cried out to know
what it was these men had stood for, and why they were
hanged, seeing it was not proven they knew anything
about the throwing of the bomb.
Little by little, here and there, I came to know that
what they had stood for was a very high and noble ideal
of human life, and what they were hanged for was
preaching it to the common people - the common
people who were as ready to hang them, in their
ignorance, as the court and the prosecutor were in their
malice! Little by little I came to know that these were
men who had a clearer vision of human right than most
of their fellows; and who, being moved by deep social
sympathies, wished to share their vision with their
fellows, and so proclaimed it in the market-place. Little
by little I realized that the misery, the pathetic
submission, the awful degradation of the workers, which
from the time I was old enough to begin to think had
borne heavily upon my heart (as they must bear upon all
who have hearts to feel at all), had smitten theirs more
deeply still - so deeply that they knew no rest save in
seeking a way out - and that was more than I had ever
had the sense to conceive. For me there had never been a
hope there should be no more rich and poor; but a vague
idea that there might not be so rich and so poor, if the
workingmen by combining could exact a little better
wages, and make their hours a little shorter. It was the
message of these men (and their death swept that message
far out into ears that would never have heard their living
voices) that all such little dreams are folly. That not in
demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in
mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any lasting
alleviation come; but in demanding much - all - iri. a
bold self-assertion of the worker to toil any hours he
finds sufficient, not that another finds for him - here is
where the way out lies. That message, and the message
of others, whose works, associated with theirs, their
death drew to my notice, took me up, as it were, upon a
mighty hill, wherefrom I saw the roofs of the workshops
of the little world. I saw the machines, the things that
men had made to ease their burden, the wonderful things,
the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth in the living
flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed and
crippled stumps of men go limping away into the night
that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the ~
flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to
suicide in some dim corner where the black surge throws
its slime.
I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the
blanced face of the man who tended it, and knew surely
as I knew anything in life, that never would a free man
feed his blood to the fire like that.
I saw swarthy bodies, all mangled and crushed,
borne form the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in
a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which
the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours
a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm -
I, and you, and those others who never do any dirty work
- thse men had slaved away in those black graves, and
been crushed to death at last.
I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible
colored earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from
which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was
visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal's hunted
into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to
labor there, with pick and shovel in that foul,
sevage-soaked earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly
sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves
would do it.
I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the
men who shoveled the coal - burned and seared like
paper before the grate; and I knew that 'the record' of
the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who
laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered
bodies and souls.
I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by
sad brutes driven by sadder ones; for never a man, a man
in full possession of his selfhood, would freely choose to
spend all his days in the nauseating stench that forces him
to swill alcohol to neutralize it.
And I saw in the lead works how men were
poisoned; and in the sugar refineries how they went
insane; and in the factories how they lost their decency;
and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
was slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists
were right - the whole thing must be changed, the
whole thing was wrong - the whole system of
production and distribution, the whole ideal of life.
And I questioned the government then; they had
taught me to question it. What have you done - you the
keepers of the Declaration and the Constitution - what
have you done about all this? What have you done to
preserve the conditions of freedom to the people?
Lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and
got gain! You have sold away the land, that you had no
right to sell. You have murdered the aboriginal people,
that you might seize the land in the name of the white
race, and then steal it away from them again, to be again
sold by a second and a third robber. And that buying
and selling of the land has driven the people off the
healthy earth and away from the clean air into these
rot-heaps of humanity called cities, where every filthy
thing is done, and filthy labor breeds filthy bodies and
filthy souls. Our boys are decayed with vice before they
come to manhood; our girls - ah, well might John
Harvey write:
Another begetteth a daughter white and gold,
She looks into the meadow land water, and the world
Knows her no more; they have sought her field and fold
But the City, the City hath bought her,
It hath sold
Her piecemeal, to students, rats, and reek of the graveyard mold.
You have done this thing, gentlemen who engineer
the government; and not only have you caused this ruin
to come upon others; you yourselves are rotten with this
debauchery. You exist for the purpose of granting
privileges to whoever can pay most for you, and so
limiting the freedom of men to employ themselves that
they must sell themselves into this frightful slavery or
become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and
murderers. And when you have done all this, what then
do you do to them, these creatures of your own making?
You, who have set tern the example in every villainy? Do
You then relent, and remembering the words of the great
religous teacher to whom most of you offer lip service
on the officially religious day, do you go to these poor,
broken, wretched creatures and love them? No: you
build prisons high and strong, and there you beat, and
starve, and hang, finding by the working of your system
human beings so unutterably degraded that they are
willing to kill whomsoever they are told to kill at so
much monthly salary.
This is what the government is, has always been, the
creator and defender of privilege; the organization of
oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever become
anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you
that Anarchy, the dream of social order without
government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that
ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind
can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come
to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there
is any excuse for government.
It was for telling the people this that these five men
were killed. For telling the people that the only way to
get out of their misery was first to learn what their rights
upon this earth were - freedom to use the land and all
within it and all the tools of production - and then to
stand together and take them, themselves, and not to
appeal to the jugglers of the law. Abolish the law - that
is abolish privilege - and crime will abolish itself.
They will tell you that these men were hanged for
advocating force. What! These creatures who drill men
in the science of killing, who put guns and clubs in hands
they train to shoot and strike, who hail with delight the
latest inventions in explosives, who exult in the machine
that can kill the most with the least expenditure of
energy, who declare a war of extermination upon people
who do not want their civilization, who ravish, and burn,
and garrote, and guillotine, and hang, and electrocute,
they have the impertinence to talk about the unrighteousness
of force! True, these men did advocate the right to
resist invasion by force. You will find scarcely one in a
thousand who does not believe in that right. The one will
be either a real Christian or a non-resistant Anarchist. It
will not be a believer in the State. No, no: it was not for
advocating forcible resistance to their tyrannies, and for
advocating a society which would forever make an end of
riches and poverty, of governors and governed.
The spirit of revenge, which is always stupid,
accomplished its brutal act. Had it lifted its eyes from its
work, it might have seen in the background of the
scaffold that bleak November morning the dawn-light of
Anarchy whiten across the world.
So it came first - a gleam of hope to the proletaire,
a summons to rise and shake off his material bondage.
But steadily, steadily the light has grown, as year by year
the scientist, the literary genius, the artist, and the moral
teacher, have brought to it the tribute of their best work,
their unpaid work, the work they did for love. Today it
means not only material emancipation, too; it comes as
the summing up of all those lines of thought and action
which for three hundred years have been making
towards freedom; it means fulness of being, the free life.
And I saw it boldly, notwithstanding the recent I outburst of condemnation, notwithstanding the cry of
lynch, burn, shoot, imprison, deport, and the Scarlet
Letter A to be branded low down upon the forehead, and
the latest excuse for that fond esthetic decoration 'the
button', that for two thousand years no idea has so stirred
the world as this - none which had such living power to
break down the barriers of race and degree, to attract
prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic, Quaker and
Revolutionist. No other ideal but the free life is strong
enough to touch the man whose infinite pity and
understanding goes alike to the hypocrite priest and the
victim of Siberian whips; the loving rebel who stepped
from his title and his wealth to labor with all the laboring
earth; the sweet strong singer who sang No Master, high
or low; the lover who does not measure his love nor
reckon on return; the self-centered one who 'will not
rule, but also will not ruled be'; the philosopher who
chanted the Over-man; the devoted woman of the people;
ay, and these too - these rebellious flashes from the vast
cloud-hung ominous obscurity of the anonymous, these
souls whom governmental and capitalistic brutality has
whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage and
bitterness, these mad young lions of revolt, these
Winkelrieds who offer their hearts to the spears.
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