The Red Hue of Haymarket Square

A great jumble of human voices chafed against the cold Chicago air on one November evening. Boots clanked against the soot-stroked sidewalks as moving bodies created tremors across the streets. Fists raised high towards the heavens and invectives suffocated the atmosphere.

I slated myself right in the midst of Haymarket Square, gladly bobbing and quaking in the mass of depraved working souls who fought for their rights.

"Down with the robber barons! Down with the fat-cats!" My teenage voice growled in unison with the crowd.

"Down with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers! They'd rather see us keel over and die than pay us another cent!" The crowd chimed in with fervor.

"Up with the might of the working class!" Cheers echoed dauntlessly throughout the entire state of Illinois, the bleating cries of the working man clambering outward.

Our eyes zeroed in on the center-stage of the Square, with blood-red tarping draped over the usual cornucopia of workday traffic. Atop an elevated platform stood the inveterate August Spies—German journalist, activist and hero of the proletariat—whose wide-rimmed glasses and short stature belied the fire in his voice as he addressed his fellow Americans.

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the year of our Lord eighteen-eighty-six, the situation in America is ghastly! The industrialists of our age bask in a paradise of profits as they lounge in their prettied mansions and penthouses, having sucked the life out of the laboring masses. Off the backs of the working man have they made their riches, their bones cracked by endless hours of labor, their wages a pittance as barely a scratch of gold trickles down from the top!"

The people roared in assent, their knuckles pummeling the air. It was thought that those thickly accented words spoke truer than the most posher strands of the Queen's God-forsaken English. Sentences sewn that strung to the heart, emanating a palpable sensation of empathy for one another, of unity in the struggle. Looking across the drove of individuals scattered all around me, I could feel the likeness of their stories.

Of men who came home after ten grinding hours of work with mangled fingers as they toyed with rusty silverware at the dinner table. Of women who toiled in the textile factories, weaving together luxury dresses for the heiresses before they found out that they didn't receive enough pay to buy coats for the winter nights, and froze. Of the children who slithered through decrepit mineshafts by day and returned to their household to find their father felled by a fallen steel beam, doomed to an unmarked grave by night.

Like myself.

They were all our stories on this heady November evening. We stood as a great mosaic of humanity bonded together by the common struggle. We rejoiced in our shared sentiment like the Jews at the parting of the Red Sea, even as policemen snaked their way to our premises like the Egyptian chariots.

"Brace yourselves, here come the blue-caps!"

Of course, this was to be expected. Like the rise and fall of the sun and moon it seemed only the nature of things in the world that baton-toting battalions would arrive on the scene sooner than later to clamp down on our cries for freedom. To them, "freedom of assembly" was as sturdy a right as the moldy old paper it was written on.

We stood firmly in place, bodies linked side-to-side in an enveloping shield of solidarity. We knew that those 'defenders of the public' had shot and killed our brethren just a few days prior at the McCormick mechanical reaper factory, and hungered no less for the spilled guts of the rest of us. If they wanted to make a few more martyrs, then so be it. We held our ground with force and righteous ferocity.

Soon enough, though, that obdurate stance would not last, as the ground itself seemed to move.

"Go to hell, you blue bastards!"

An explosion rang out against the policemen's advance, thundering in the air. A bomb was thrown from an anarchist's grasp, straight into the incoming lines of navy!

That's when the bubble of contained tension burst like a cresting gale. The blue-caps stormed our front, their nightsticks smashing against our skulls and gunshots blazing through the columns of humanity. We packed ourselves at the edges, fighting back their advance with our worn fists, our throats gasping at their menacing serenity. Up close one could get a snapshot of the coppers' slack faces, unperturbed at the carnage regardless of the red that kneaded its way into their gnarled hedges of facial hair, their implacable brows. I flung myself into the fire, jostled amid the wave of workers that refused to back away. Here they were laboring not for paychecks of capital but for the wages of their souls—the commodity of an ideology to die for.

Bodies dropped. Bloodied hats billowed in the air. Screams of pain and zeal deafened the earth. And yet I kept throwing hands, lunging with my feet and my forearms into the bulk of broken bones laid before us. My motion was their motion, and down to the last man and woman we clashed.

None of this had to happen. Not an ounce of bile had to seep within our veins, not a trifle of disdain for this country. If only they heard our plight.

No copper had to ram his nightstick down our gullets. No manager had to cut wages for four more hours of work. No robber baron had to raid us of all our life.

And right at that lofty ballot box? No president had to sit back and flounder while we toiled, peering on from the People's House while the people sorely suffered. This was our peace, our grounds of power. It was our day to discharge our scorned thoughts from our busted bodies.

If no one fought for us, we fought for ourselves. We didn't ask for violence; violence asked for us. We defended our sense of humanity with every tremor in our bones, every breath in our lungs and beat of our hearts. We bled their uniforms with as much red as they beat out of us.

We didn't give a damn if the media branded us as radicals who eschewed the normal order of the world. (Darwin's "survival of the fittest" had already classified our kind as destined to the doldrums of the food chain, hunted down by all the opulent animals above.) Barbarians of the workplace, who raped and pillaged the finery of the establishment with ferocity. In the end, we couldn't care less.

This was our fight—our sacred battle—and if the United States of America would not give us peace, then clearly war was our only answer on this very day.