Two Monuments
In September 1887, six weeks before the execution of the convicted anarchists, a group of prominent Chicago-area businessmen launched a fundraising drive to build a monument honoring the police officers killed and wounded at the Haymarket affair. With the Chicago Tribune hyping the campaign, the group quickly raised $10,000 to erect a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of a cop with his arm outstretched and palm facing forward. An inscription on the pedestal read: “In the name of the People of Illinois, I command peace.”
The police monument, which was placed in Haymarket Square, sparked protest even before its official unveiling in May 1889. On May 3, 1889, a leaflet was placed on the new monument’s pedestal asking, “Have you ever given a thought to . . .the base murder of five of the real victims of the haymarket tragedy…?” The anonymously authored pamphlet continued: “The time will come for an ample justification of our comrades, but it is not quite yet. On the monument at the haymarket should be inscribed in letters of fire these words: ‘Erected to commemorate the strangling of free speech and the shame of an enslaved people!’”
Authorities shrugged off this “blatant anarchist screed,” as the Tribune called it, and moved forward with the police monument’s dedication ceremony on May 30, Memorial Day. Meanwhile, the widowed Lucy Parsons and her comrades established the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to solicit donations for the families of the Haymarket martyrs. The association also raised money for a monument at the site of the martyrs’ tomb — a response to the police statue in Haymarket Square.
After nearly six years, enough money had been collected for sculptor Albert Weinert to build the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument: a statue of a hooded woman, representing Justice, protecting a fallen worker and placing a laurel wreath on his head. August Spies’s final words from the gallows are inscribed on the monument: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
On June 25, 1893, at a ceremony attended by eight thousand people, the monument was unveiled at the grave of the executed anarchists in Waldheim Cemetery. The following day, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld — a prolabor Democrat elected the previous November — pardoned the Haymarket anarchists, freeing Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe while excoriating the trial and executions as a gross miscarriage of justice.
Altgeld’s pardon, along with his refusal to support the deployment of federal troops to crush the Pullman strike the following year, effectively ended his political career. He lost his reelection bid and never held public office again.