haymarket tour

Last Thursday I joined two associates for a tour of Chicago's Haymarket history, led by the knowledgeable Nicolas Lampert.  We began with a stop at Waldheim Cemetary, final resting place of Emma Goldman 

and the site of the monument to the Haymarket martyrs. The lefty gravemarkers, with wonderful inscriptions having to do with the long struggle for justice and dignity, are simply amazing. The collection of famous radicals keeping company in death and memory is a wonderful act of imagination that strengthens their claim on history from the other side of the grave. I love that Emma's marker is only a few steps away from her one-time rival associate, and later respected colleague,
Emma and Voltairine were both radicalized by the injustice suffered by the Haymarket martyrs, even though they went off in very different philosophical directions. Their markers offer themselves as evidence of Haymarket's role in the proliferation of anarchist thought and action, in a way rendering true August Spies's last words, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you throttle today!"

We ended the tour at the site of the incident, marked by a sculpture in what is now the West Loop. The new monument is not what you would call radical. Rather it serves to memorialize the histories of all involved, whether law enforcement or labor organizers. Blandness might therefore be expected. But in between Waldheim and the West Loop, we made a stop at the Chicago Police headquarters on South Michigan. There, near the building entry, stands the policeman's statue, which over the decades had been toppled at least three times. After years of assault by radicals, and years in storage, without a good place to put it, now it lives outdoors once again, but in the fully protected environs of the police parking lot. According to Nicolas, the current pedestal is about the same size as that of the original. Can you imagine toppling that? The first time it took a street car jumping the tracks and crashing it, and then decades later the Weathermen used bombs.