Rebel

EAGLE FORGOTTEN--Harry Barnard-- Bobbs-Merrill ($4).

A few minutes after ten o'clock on the night of May 4, 1886, a storm began to blow up in Chicago. As the first drops of rain fell, a crowd in Haymarket Square, in the packing house district, began to break up. At eight o'clock there had been 3,000 persons on hand, listening to anarchists denounce the brutality of the police and demand the eight-hour day, but by ten there were only a few hundred. The mayor, who had waited around in expectation of trouble, went home, and went to bed. The last speaker was finishing his talk when a delegation of 180 policemen marched from the station a block away to break up what remained of the meeting. They stopped a short distance from the speaker's wagon. As a captain ordered the meeting to disperse, and the speaker cried out that it was a peaceable gathering, a bomb exploded in the police ranks. It wounded 67 policemen, of whom seven died. The police opened fire, killing several men and wounding 200, and the Haymarket Tragedy became a part of U. S. history.

It broke the careers of most of the men who had anything to do with it. Eight anarchists were tried for murder, and although it was never determined who threw the bomb, four were hanged, three got life and one committed suicide. In 1893 the three who got life were pardoned by the pale, homely, contradictory John Peter Altgeld, Governor of Illinois, prison reformer, idealist, lawyer, wealthy real-estate operator and builder of one of Chicago's first skyscrapers. Last week Altgeld's story was told in a 496-page volume which gave the governor's reasons for his act, showed its consequences not only in his own career, but in the history of the Populist movement.

The irony of Altgeld's life was that he was not a rebel until his enemies made him one. Then he became one of the most effective dissenters in the country. Born in Germany of peasant stock in 1847, he was brought to the U. S. when he was three months old--a circumstance that kept him from being the Populist candidate for President. With his health permanently weakened by fever contracted as a Union soldier, he wandered through the West, became a lawyer in Missouri and settled in Chicago in 1875. He had married a childhood sweetheart, written a liberal study of prison reform, and served as a judge, when he won the governorship.

For Altgeld the essential factor about the Haymarket case was that the anarchists had not had a fair trial. Jurors had frankly admitted prejudice, and the record showed appalling contradictions. But when Altgeld said so in an 18,000-word pardon he was damned as a murderer, a communist, a demagogue, a foreigner, an anarchist, a thief, a liar, a madman, a knave, a fool, a bomb-thrower, a Nero and a coward.

Never in the U. S. history, says Author Barnard, had a man been assaulted in the press so fiercely and irrationally. The vituperation went on for months, increasingly hysterical, until Altgeld was all but broken by it. The usual report has been that Altgeld never recovered from this verbal bombardment. Barnard's account, however, is that after being dazed and bewildered, the governor suddenly began to fight with the savagery of a man who has nothing more to lose. When Cleveland sent Federal troops to Chicago during the Pullman strike of 1894, going over Altgeld's head, the governor had taken more than he could stand--he became a cool, impersonal, relentless political strategist, controlling the Democratic Party convention in 1896, maneuvering so skillfully that his enemies were thrown into panic. And after Bryan's defeat, when the Populists were exhausted and demoralized, he was almost the only leader who kept going, launching another attack on monopoly, vested interests and Wall Street as if unaware that his side had been licked. When he died in 1902, newspapers that had attacked him savagely began grudgingly giving him his due; in another ten years he had become a hero to midWest liberals, the "Eagle Forgotten" of Vachel Lindsay's poem.

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