[Marxism] Haymarket/McCormick -- a story untold, true but unknown

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 14:53:23 -0500
> From: "Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Marxism] RE: [SocialistsUnmoderated] Haymarket
> To: <SocialistsUnmoderated@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,  "'SNCC'"
>       <sncc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <redyouth@xxxxxxxx>, "'Marxism Discussion'"
>       <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Message-ID: <000001c41047$5646f5f0$78991a41@yourkf1y8xksrv>
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>
> If anybody believes there is no such thing as official history, they
> need to take a look at Haymarket.  At the hundredth anniversary, a group
> of us wanted to get footage of the policeman's statue...which was safely
> moved form the pedestal at the old site of Haymarket after a series of
> bombings that toppled it to the safety of the police academy on the west
> side.  With my wife and one of her friends in tow, I took a video camera
> over there on a Sunday and sweet-talked our way inside.
>
> There in the courtyard was the brazen offender...looking like a Keystone
> cop with one arm raised in a kind of Hitler salute.  "Stop in the name
> of the people of the state of Illinois."
>
> We took plenty of footage and lots of stills, as the watchman explained
> to us how the anarchists had nearly overrun the city by 1886.  Only the
> thin blue line protected civilization from its destruction.  ...this to
> my most noncommittal academic grunts.
>
> Then he gave us a card passed to all the police cadets and visitors to
> the academy.  It told the story of the brace police officers who had
> saved civilization from the beer-soaked immigrant rabble waving their
> red and black flags.  That card wasn't that new, but I noted that it was
> signed by liberal Democratic Mayor Jane Byrne, the city's first female
> mayor.

This is absolute garbage which demands an explanation, "beginning"
with "liberal mayor Jane Byrne" and "ending" with the omission of
that event which triggered the Haymarket riot, the bonafide massacre
(slaying of unarmed persons by security guards) at the McCormick Harvester
plant on the North Side some days earlier.  Covered up by the McCormick-owned
*Trib*, until recently knowledge of this event was not even available to
those
European socialists who chose Haymarket as the "occasion" of May Day --
and as you omit any mention of this as part of your *academic
"noncomittality"
you really owe us all a very good explanation as to why such attitudes ought
to be normative for this list.

>
> There wasn't a hint of any other way to look at what happened in
> 1886...and, as vindication, the trumped-up convictions and judicial
> murders of 1887 were cited.

This doesn't count.  Liberality disgraceth no man, but "faith in a misplaced
system" will not solve problems created by pure economic pressure --
including the lack of a panoply of perspectives on an issue: in the
battle between Galileo and the Church I'm still liking the Church, and
"opposing viewpoints" are too often cold comfort for the information
you are presenting here to be (intimidating or not) an adequate account
of those events.  The quorum deserves better, and it is something of a
Marxist tradition not to make claims per se about "equipollence"
(fungibility)
as regards representative men.

Rubard




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