1922: Union Squabble (cont)

The Haymarket Affair is the symbol and galvanizing event for both labor and management.  Before and after the Haymarket Affair labor issues and political issues regarding employment and labor conditions are omnipresent (JCLC p.460-461).  A number of contemporaneous accounts address working conditions and describe with great specificity the working conditions and living conditions for workers and their families in this period.

Click here for 1000 Homeless Men, 1914.

For further reading:

 

Smith, Carl S., Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief - The Great Chicago Fire; The Haymarket Bomb and the Model Town of Pullman. Chicago:  U. of Chicago Press, 1995.  A rich and unusually structured narrative, a political and social history, recreating the tapestry of events and contemporaneous commentary surrounding these three signature events in Chicago. The affect of the Haymarket trial and executions, only a year later, on the culture surrounding criminal justice and the courts was immediate and long lasting. The author sums up the contemporary mood of the city as follows: “The ‘apprehensive concern’ surrounding Haymarket was based in ‘the feeling and the fact that it is one phase, and the worse phase, of a widespread discontent upon the part of millions of the poorer people of this and other countries.’” p. 169. Internal citation omitted.

 

Lukas, J. Anthony, Big Trouble - A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.  Although a murder trial in Idaho is the principal story, a great deal of the relevant history and background, including the history of socialism, the labor movement and unions takes place in Chicago. The book includes a narrative of national and state politics of the period, and the social history and personalities of a number of key political and social figures prominent in Chicago, including: Clarence Darrow, the founder of the Pinkerton Agency, Theodore Roosevelt and Illinois Governor Altgeld are