Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation! It’s May Day!

Note—I just wrapped up thirty straight days of epic poetry posts with repeats or reposts.  I am exhausted!  Glad May Day is here and I can take a rest.  I’ll put on my red shirt and black tie and go abroad in the world singing Solidarity Forever and The Internationale.  And it will be good.  In the mean time, I glad to share my annual post about why May First is the only and authentic  International Labor Day.

Chicago was a-boil with labor turmoil in 1886.  The burgeoning city had become a major manufacturing center and tens of thousands of immigrants had poured into the city since the Civil War to join displaced American born farmers and former independent craftsmen in giant factories.  Hours were long, working conditions hard and dangerous, bosses harsh, and pay cuts frequent. 

Since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 tensions had been building.  And so had a labor movement—craft unions loosely organized under a city central labor body, and the Knights of Labor, officially a benevolent society whose national leadership was opposed to strikes.  But unlike the craft unions, the Knights would enroll all workers—skilled and unskilled alike. 

In addition immigrant communities had their own radical leadership and press.  None was as vigorous as or developed as the Germans, who were not only the largest immigrant community in the city, but had a highly educated leadership steeped in European radicalism.  Many of these leaders identified with the growing international anarchist movement.

There were several major strikes ongoing in the city that spring.  The largest was at the giant McCormick Harvesting Machine plant on the South Side where strikers had been replaced by scabs under police protection and daily clashes were occurring at the factory gates. 

On May 1st workers responded to a call for a General Strike for an 8 Hour Day which had been called nationally by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (ancestor of the American Federation of Labor.)   In Chicago the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA) organized a march by 8,000 workers led by Albert and Lucy Parsons, the main English language figures in the anarchist labor movement.  The General Strike got so much support that even half of the scabs at McCormick lay down their tools to join.

Employers were in a panic at the turn of events.  They met with city officials demanding suppression of strikes and demonstrations and agreed among themselves to redouble their own efforts to violently suppress strike through the use of the Pinkerton Agency and bands of thugs and criminals hired off the streets. 

On May 3 a rally in support of striking McCormick workers was addressed by German anarchist leader August Spies.  When strikers confronted scabs emerging from the plant after the 4 PM end shift, police opened fire killing six workers and wounding scores.  Outraged Spies rushed to the North Side where his daily newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung was published.  He and his associates decided to call a protest meeting at the Haymarket just west of downtown for the next day.  Flyers in German and English were hastily printed and rushed into distribution.  Spies noticed that the flyers contained the words “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!” as inserted by a militant typesetter. He ordered the copies destroyed and new ones printed without those words.  Spies had consistently counseled non-violence.  Most of the thousands of flyers distributed omitted the words, but a few hundred of the first run were circulated before they could be recalled.

The evening of May 4, a huge crowd gathered at the Haymarket in a drizzling rain to hear speakers orate from the back of a wagon.  Mayor Carter Harrison stopped by and observed that the crowd was orderly and peaceful.  He ordered police massed near by not to interfere.  The last scheduled speaker of the evening, English born Samuel Fielden, a Methodist lay preacher as well as a labor activist, was addressing a thinning crowd when the police officer in charge, Inspector John Bonfield, who was getting “supplemental” income and support from a coalition of major employers, decided to act. He ordered a phalanx of 175 officers to advance through the crowd from the rear.  Captain William Ward addressing Fielden on the wagon ordered the crowd to disburse.  Fielden protested that the assembly was peaceful and he was nearly finished anyway.  Ward issued a second warning.  Fielden said, “All right.”

Then someone—it has never been determined who—threw a bomb from a side ally into the massed police.  Five officers were killed and others injured.  Police responded by firing wildly, wounding many of their own.  About 60 officers were wounded—most by friendly fire, but so were dozens of workers, including Fielden.

The crowd ran away and Fielden limped away.

The press went, predictably, berserk.  The offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and regular meeting places and haunts of anarchists and unionists were raided.  Police quickly rounded up much of the German leadership. 

A warrant was out for Albert Parsons, who had spoken at the rally earlier but was gone when the attack occurred, but Parsons disguised himself and fled to Wisconsin.  He later decided to turn himself in and stand trial in solidarity with his German comrades. 

In addition to Spies, Parsons and Fielden authorities charged Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe.  Some of the defendants had not been at the Haymarket that night at all, and Neebe was out of town.  21 year old Lingg was known to be an advocate of propaganda of the deed and had written a provocative article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung advocating the use of dynamite.  But he was not at the rally.

The trial began on June 21 and was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary who made no attempt to conceal his animus to the defendants.  Although no evidence could be brought forward linking any defendant to the bomb, prosecutors argued that they were in a conspiracy and that the defendants were guilty because they had not actively discouraged the unknown bomber.  All eight men were convicted by the jury.  Seven were sentenced to death and Neebe to 15 years in prison.

Before sentence could be carried out, Lingg committed suicide in his cell by biting a smuggled blasting cap. 

After appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887.  The next day, November 11, the four remaining condemned men were led to a scaffold in a courtyard of Cook County Jail and hung.  Their execution drew outrage and protest from the labor movement around the world.

The base of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery is inscribed with the words of August Spies from the scaffold.

In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld, a liberal Democrat, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab and concluded all eight defendants were innocent. The pardons and his opposition to calling in Federal troops to intervene in the Pullman Strike ended his political career.

In 1898 Samuel Gompers, head of the newly reorganized AFL petitioned the First Congress of the Second International (socialist) to designate May 1 to commemorate the Martyrs of Chicago and support a new general strike call for an 8 hour day scheduled more May 1, 1890.  The International enthusiastically agreed calling for “a great international demonstration” on that date.  Huge crowds responded around the world including a march by tens of thousands in New York City.  The event was so successful that it was made annual the next year and has been celebrated globally ever since.

But in the United States, where May Day was born, the holiday was officially abandoned within a few years.  Samuel Gompers stuck his historic deal with the employer’s organization, the Civic Federation, which gave craft unionists a “place at the table.”  Part of that deal was the abandonment of May Day, now associated with Socialism, in exchange for recognition of a non-ideological Labor Day in September around the time of a local New York City building trades celebration.

Industrial and militant unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) kept May Day, as did socialists of all stripes.  Large celebrations persisted in many American cities until the post World War II anti-Communist hysteria when the press successfully identified May Day with military parades in the Kremlin.

In recent years, even conservative unions have revived the May Day tradition.  The Chicago Federation of Labor funded a new Haymarket Memorial featuring a speaker on a wagon at the exact location of the original and hold annual commemorations.  For the past several years Hispanic and immigration activists have staged huge marches for immigration reform on May Day, increasingly with the support of the labor movement.

So Happy May Day, Fellow Workers! 

National Poetry Month—The End

It’s over.  The end.  All kaput.  This is the last of the National Poetry Month entries for 2014.  And it’s been sort of a whirlwind.  Instead of featuring one poet or one poem a day this year, I mostly featured poems grouped around themes.  That opened up new possibilities, new voices but left room to hear even more from some beloved and familiar voices.  It mixed the classic with the almost shiny-new, the famous and the obscure.  And there was plenty of room for poets with above average melatonin in their complection and various genders, sexes, and plumbing arrangements. 

Some folks must like what they have seen.  My poetry posts usually don’t draw flies.  But maybe the poetry geeks out there finally discovered this joint, because this month’s post had a daily average readership considerably higher than my average and some spiked considerably above that.  Could it be that we are actually succeeding in getting folks to read poetry?

We will celebrate with some poet’s random thoughts on The End, whatever it means to them.

Wislawa Szymborska was the 1996 Nobel Prize Lauriat in Literature.  Her work reflected the tumultuous times she lived through in her native Poland.  She survived World War II  working on the railways and narrowly avoided being sent to a Nazi forced labor camp. After the war she studied and began working as an illustrator and began composing poetry.  At first she was a loyal member of the Polish United Workers’ Party—Communists—even when her first book of verse was rejected because it “did not meet socialist requirements.”  However she grew estranged and disconnected from the regime.  By 1966 she had left the party and had established connections with underground dissidents.  In the ‘80’s here work was being published in the underground samizdat periodical Arka under the pseudonym Stańczykówna, as well as to the Paris-based opposition magazine Kultura. When she died at her long-time Kraków home in 2012 at the age of 88 she was mourned as national treasure.

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

—Wislawa Szymborska

Another Eastern European—they seem drawn to such themes—Czesław Miłosz was Lithuanian by ethnicity and a Polish citizen by accident of the map.  During World War II he was part of an underground socialist movement in Poland and was later honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Israel.  After the war he rose to become Polish Minister of Culture but was soon disillusioned by Stalinism and defected to the West settling in the United States where he became a distinguished academic and continued to write poetry.  When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 most Poles and Lithuanians had never heard of him because his work had long been banned.  Later he was hailed as a hero.  But in death Polish right wingers threatened to disrupt his funeral because he had not publicly—although he had privately—reconciled with Catholicism and because he had signed public statements defending the rights of Gay and Lesbians.

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

—Czesław Miłosz

Americans are not immune from end of time musings.  John Haines, once the Poet Laureate of Alaska, mused on the close of a century and millennium.

A Poem for the End of the Century

I am the dreamer who remains
when all the dreams are gone,
scattered by the millennial winds
and sacked by the roadside.

The solar clock hand stopped:
confusion and fury on the street

—so much idle paper
shredded and tossed aside.

The small, dim shops of the tourist
trade are shuttered and locked ...
Nightfall, and the buyer turns away.

One more stolen fortune spent:
another century gone
with its fits and desolations—
I leave my house to the creditor wind.

Tell me if you know my name,
whose face I wear, whose stored-up
anger fades to a tentative smile.

I am the one who touches fire,
who rakes the leaves to watch them burn,
and who says once more to himself
on this calm evening of earth:

Awake! The stars are out,
mist is on the water,
and tomorrow the sun will return.

—John Haines

The gifted poet Robert Creeley probably had better days than when he wrote this.  Actually folks were rather fond of him.

The End

When I know what people think of me

I am plunged into my loneliness.  The grey

hat bought earlier sickens.

I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.

A feeling like being choked

enters my throat.

—Robert Creeley

And finally, there is love.  Yes, it too has to end.  Often sloppily.  Or does it.  Jan Heller Levi wonders….

Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another

All my stories are about being left,

all yours about leaving. So we should have known.

Should have known to leave well enough alone;

we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put

our cards on the table, your card

was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t

get till 4 am, so tired from wanting

what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads,

we’d lost our minds. Love, I wanted to call you

so fast. But so slow you could taste each

letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.

L, love, for let’s wait. O, for oh no, let’s not. V

for the precious v between your deep breasts

(and the virtue of your fingers

in the voluptuous center of me.)

Okay, E for enough.

Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made

the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . .

But not so wrong to try.

That means taking a lot of walks,

which neither of us is good at,

for different reasons, and nights up till 2

arguing whose reasons are better.

Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13

years my marriage. 5 years you my friend.

4th of July weekend when something that begins

in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much

has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love

on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods

so we can keep the crazy beads clicking,

clicking. It wasn’t a question

of a perfect fit. Theoretically,

it should be enough to say I left a man

for a woman (90% of the world is content

to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman

lost her nerve, I left

for greater concerns: when words like autonomy

were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get

what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on;

bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove

the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone

beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket

to call one, then the other, or to call one

twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him—

remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says

he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank

and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly,

but two sheets of glass to shiver between.

This is called being street-smart: dialing

a number that you know won’t be answered,

but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried.

And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called

hedging your bets? I fish out my other

coin, turn it over in my fingers, press

it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

—Jan Heller Levi