Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

a Gatling gun. However, the famous Haymarket massacre involved 
neither of these formations. Th
  e workers’ rally was unarmed and 
unprotected. An individual, perhaps a provocateur, threw a bomb, 
and four policemen were killed in the resulting melee. Albert and 
Lucy, who were unarmed, had taken their children to the rally. Th
 e 
Chicago police responded to the bomb throwing by indiscriminate 
shooting, killing perhaps a dozen and may have caused some of their 
own casualties. Th
  e anarchist and socialist movement had rhetori-
cally posed the question of revolutionary violence without clearly 
deciding and explaining the circumstances that might require and 
justify it. 
Th
  e eight-hour movement in Chicago had huge support in May 
1886, but that support was disoriented by the carefully orchestrated 
media hysteria claiming an anarchist terror plot. Th
 e subsequent 
trial of the supposed ringleaders of an armed uprising was a judicial 
lynching rather than a legal process—as the pardons later issued 
to those who had been imprisoned (rather than hanged) acknowl-
edged and documented. Th
  e issuing of this pardon just eight years 
after the trial illustrates an interesting aspect of the Chicago anar-
chists: namely, that they did not abstain from electoral politics. 
Mayor Harrison testifi ed in favor of Albert Parsons, and Parsons 
urged his followers to vote for Harrison—who lost in 1886 but was 
reelected in 1893. When Peter Altgelt, the Governor of Illinois, 
issued pardons to the surviving Haymarket leaders in 1892, he did 
not suff er  electorally.
155
  Th
  ough generally scornful of politicians, 
Lucy Parsons expressed her high regard for Altgelt’s courage. 
Lucy Parsons was a dedicated and accomplished orator, agita-
tor, and organizer, roles that she sustained for half a century after 
her husband was hanged. She had a special gift for encapsulating 
the syndicalist worldview. From today’s perspective, her identity 
as a woman and a person of mixed ancestry—Mexican, white and 
black—makes her a symbol of multiculturalism. However, her own 
self-conception stressed her identity as a neo-abolitionist expos-
ing “wage slavery.” In the 1890s she launched a journal called Th e 
Liberator, a deliberate echo of William Lloyd Garrison’s famous 
155 James 
Green, 
Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor 
Movement and the Bombing that Divided America, New York 2006.
94  an unfinished revolution

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abolitionist magazine. She expressed her horror at Southern lynch-
ings and other attacks on African Americans. But she believed that 
it was class, not color, that defi ned the exploited and the oppressed. 
She urged the Southern blacks to organize and resist without fully 
registering that white violence was designed to make this impos-
sible. Her anarchist or syndicalist beliefs led her to warn Southern 
blacks that neither preachers nor politicians would help them. 
She became a member of Industrial Workers of the World, the 
syndicalist organization, at its founding conference in Chicago 
in 1905. For her, the redemptive power of “One Big Union” was 
needed to crush and scatter the bosses, whether the latter owned 
factories, railroads, or plantations.
156
Another product of Reconstruction and the International 
milieu was Timothy Th
  omas Fortune, a New York journalist who 
had been born a slave in Florida and freed by the Emancipation 
Proclamation and who later served as an aide to his father, a Radical 
Republican. Fortune’s writings, especially White and Black: Land, 
Labor and Politics in the South (1884), analyzed the racial forma-
tion of class in the postbellum South. Fortune saw racial and class 
privilege as mutually supportive. His focus on the historic confron-
tation between “labor and capital” betrayed some Marxist infl uence, 
but he was also founder of the Afro-American League, one of the 
successors to the Black Convention Movement of 1830–70 and a 
precursor of the NAACP.
157
 In the 1890s he worked for Booker T. 
Washington and advocated measures favorable to black business 
and a black middle class.
Both color-blindness and conscious racism prevented US labor 
from taking up the cause of the victims of white oppression in the 
South. Employers were often able to exploit and foster racial antag-
onism. Booker T. Washington sometimes urged employers to take 
on black employees with the argument that they would be good 
workers who would spurn the troublemakers. Blinkered as they 
were, the more ideological wing of German American socialism 
never recanted their commitment to human unity. Even a writer as 
156 Lucy 
Parsons, 
Freedom Equality and Solidarity: Writings, and Speeches, 
1878–1937, edited and introduced by Gale Ahrens, Chicago 2004.
157 T. 
Th
  omas Fortune, “Labor and Capital,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around, 
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., pp. 143–6.
introduction  95

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critical of the German American Marxists as Messer-Kruse con-
cedes that they “never renounced their devotion to the principle 
of racial equality,”
158
 something which cannot be said of several 
traditions of Anglo-American socialism.
159
If the nonappearance of a US labor party marked a critical defeat 
for Karl Marx, the failure of the Republican Party to emerge from 
Reconstruction and its sequel as a party of bourgeois rectitude and 
reform registered a spectacular defeat for Lincoln’s hopes for his 
party and country. After dominating Washington for half a cen-
tury the Republicans were the party of cartels and corruption. Th
 e 
Democrats were also no slouches when it came to ingratiating them-
selves with Big Money or persecuting social reformers. Both parties 
failed US capitalism by off ering neither honest stewardship nor the 
regulatory institutions that might have checked abuse and under-
pinned progressive development. Instead, as Matthew Josephson 
showed so vividly, venal “politicos” became the handmaidens of 
the new corporations and the enemies of social improvement.
160
 
Moreover, no event so well exhibited the vices of the US politi-
cal class as the Wormley House deal that ended Reconstruction in 
1877. Th
  e violence of Southern whites was rewarded, the freedmen 
and women were abandoned, the wishes of the voters were fl outed, 
and railroad contracts were forwarded or thwarted. Th
 e participants 
in these proceedings sought to camoufl age their sordid character by 
claiming that “reform” would be promoted, but this had become a 
code word for spending cuts, not integrity and authority in Federal 
158 Messer-Kruse, 
Yankee International, p. 188.
159  Whatever their other failings, twentieth-century American Marx ists, 
white as well as black, were to make an outstanding contribution to the battle 
against white racism and for civil rights. No other political current has such an 
honorable and courageous record. It is to this tradition and a Marxist US New 
Left that we owe the term political correctness. Despite occasional excesses, 
PC has nevertheless proved to be a hugely progressive force, establishing a 
basic etiquette of respect and collaboration. Mocked though it sometimes is, 
its achievement is a noble one. Th
  is having been said, Marx—at least in his pri-
vate correspondence—furnishes a fi eld day for PC critics, though they should 
notice that his negative characterizations are bestowed impartially on Germans 
and French, Yankees and South Americans, blacks and Jews. Cherishing 
universalism, he is excessively hostile to any type of partiality.
160 Matthew 
Josephson, 
Th
 e Politicos, New York 1963.
96  an unfinished revolution

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