DRAMAS OF HAYMARKET
Carl Smith.
(Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, The Trustees of Northwestern University, 2000)
URL:  http://www.chicagohs.org/dramas/

Note: Review also available on H-Urban Logs.
Return to H-Urban Web Link entry for this website.

Carl Smith's Dramas of Haymarket offers a rich historical experience for those who take time to investigate its contents thoroughly. To do that may require more time and attention than needed for many other web sites. Dramas of Haymarket includes some 270 web pages, 325 images, 400 pages of text found in eight interpretive essays, and 185 shorter, more descriptive essays, as well as forty transcribed documents. As the number of essays suggests, the site provides serious analytic insights into topics as wide-ranging as individuals' behavior and the impact of industrialization on late nineteenth century American society. Some of the shorter essays can be consumed quickly. The broader arguments often require the close attention and careful reading frequently assumed to belong to books and articles alone. Moreover, the very nature of this hypermedia presentation encourages readers to discover new insights into Haymarket and its implications as they pursue the various narrative paths that Smith has made available to them. Depending on the paths they take -- and readers should explore many -- the nuances of Haymarket will come into sharper focus thanks to Smith's fine scholarly effort.

At its most obvious, Dramas of Haymarket is exactly what its title suggests: a study of the dramatic events leading up to and following the bomb explosion in Chicago's Haymarket Square on 4 May 1886. Smith, a professor of English and American Civilization at Northwestern University, demonstrates both his historical and literary skills by fashioning those events into a tightly woven drama of five acts driven by the actual riveting historical events. Those acts, along with a prologue and epilogue, provide the larger historical narrative and the stage on which the historical actors perform as Smith, as the historian-narrator, provides the commentary. For those interested in the most straightforward path through and best introduction to the site, following from one act to another represents the best way to proceed. It is through this carefully crafted script that the dramatic events of Haymarket most logically unfold.

The Prologue, "Whither America?" sets the scene, providing the audience with what it needs to know about urbanization more generally and Chicago in particular. The text recounts the devastating effects of the 1871 fire, Chicago's phoenix-like recovery, and the contests over what the nature of the rebuilt city should be. Key characters make their first vivid appearances on the stage: Albert Parsons and August Spies for the anarchists, Julius Grinnell for the prosecution. So, too, do the unions, Chicago's elites, and the political organizations that reflected their opinions. Finally, using the Railroad Strike of 1877, the prologue sets the tone for what, in true dramatic fashion, will necessarily follow.

With a click on the screen, the curtain rises on Act I. Appropriately entitled "Subterranean Fire," this act introduces the leaders and issues of the radical movements that were both little understood and greatly feared by Chicago elites. Carefully cultivating the notion of the subterranean, Smith demonstrates how the city's comfortable classes chose to know little about the ideas that attracted an increasing number of the city's working class. At the same time, he makes good use of fire as a literary image and plot device, linking the devastation of the Great Fire with the equally devastating explosion soon to take place in Haymarket Square. Stoking those subterranean fires were the men and women who would come to play important roles in the Haymarket events. Through the anarchists' critiques of American society, their often-articulated threats of bombs and violence, and the elite's continuing indifference toward those critiques punctuated with periodic repression, the fire smoldered, waiting for appropriate conditions to combust.

Act II: "Let Your Tragedy Be Enacted Here," in its focus on the first four days in May 1886, brings the actual events in Haymarket Square onto center stage and establishes the events as a classic tragedy. As workers throughout the city left their jobs in support of the eight-hour day and rioting erupted at the McCormick Works, events and emotions sped toward an inevitable climax. Late on the night of 4 May, as the remnants of a crowd remained in Haymarket Square listening to a speech against the unjust conditions of industrial society, the most dramatic event of Smith's history exploded literally--on the scene. In the confusion caused by the police's attempt to disperse the crowd, a nameless player lobbed a bomb into their midst. When it exploded, mortally wounding one officer, his fellow officers responded with gunfire. By the time the shooting stopped minutes later, police and civilians alike lay wounded by police bullets and shrapnel from the bomb. In terms of Smith's history and his dramatic reading, the stage, at last, was set for those who had fought to free workers from repressive conditions to be overcome by them.

Act III: "Toils of the Law" stands at the center of Dramas. From a literary perspective, this act launches a play within a play, where historical characters consciously orchestrated their own drama that used Chicago and the world as its stage. From a historical perspective, this act clearly sets out Smith's argument that contemporary participants understood the trial as a drama that presented two opposing "plots" of the bomb and what led to it. This very public presentation of two powerful interpretations of America made Haymarket, according to Smith, so important to contemporaries and generations of historians that followed. The careful and creative use of the trial transcripts and press reports convincingly shape Smith's own "plot" and set the stage for the remaining acts and the denouement of Dramas of Haymarket .

The next act, "The Voice of the People," explores the events from the conviction of seven men as Haymarket conspirators to the hanging of four of them. Act IV's action moves from lawyer's office to jail cell to pressroom to the Governor's mansion to the streets of Chicago as supporters of the seven men convicted in Act III seek their freedom. It ends on the gallows with the voices of the four men who would come to be known as the Haymarket Martyrs: Adolph Fischer and George Engel celebrating anarchy and Albert Parsons demanding a last chance for the voice of the people to be heard. For Smith's staging, however, August Spies's voice rings out above the others: "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today!"

Indeed, the final act, "Raising the Dead," and the Epilogue, "Drama Without End," bear strong witness to his claim. Act V considers Haymarket from the funeral and burial in Waldheim Cemetery to John Peter Altgeld's pardon of the two convicted conspirators who remained in prison. Smith acknowledges that the forces of law and order, had they written the script, would not have included this act. With the executions, they considered justice done and the incident complete. For those who felt the executions had made martyrs of innocent men, however, the plot was still midstream. The men had to be memorialized, and their causes continued. Following their lead, Smith continues his play through Gov. Altgeld's attempt to right the wrongs of the trial. In the epilogue, he reaches into the present to demonstrate how correct Spies had been as he faced death on the gallows and how elusive a consensus on Haymarket remains, even after a century. Like any drama that has survived the test of time, Haymarket provokes many readings, and Smith brings his own to a close by featuring the interpretations of others, most centrally those of Lucy Parsons, the activist widow of one of the martyrs.

What distinguishes Smith's intriguing narrative of Haymarket is not just its imaginative staging. Rather, he takes full advantage of the nature of hypertext and electronic media to let his audience approach Haymarket and his narrative in other ways. Sitting on audience left during each of the acts is the equivalent of a Greek chorus: links that let individual audience members stop the action, find out more about particular people, events, and ideas, and even step into the archives to see if Smith is right about his argument. The range of media, voices, and background information available through these links is stunning. Because Smith carefully annotated images and exhibits, there is as much historical information and analysis located in these resources as in the main plot narrative itself. Inquisitive audience members can take a QuickTime tour of Waldheim Cemetery or watch Studs Terkel talk about Lucy Parsons. They can see how a scholar like Smith mines a political cartoon from an earlier era to reveal important insights into American society, culture, and politics or read excerpts from Albert Parsons's autobiography. These excursions can be launched from within the various acts or, for those who want to understand how a historian comes to conclusions and constructs arguments, they can begin from the site map reached through the resources page. Approaching these excursions this way would allow an audience member to intellectually walk through the same themes explored in Smith's drama relying much more fully on their own understanding of the events.

Of particular interest is a visit to the site's archives. Dramas of Haymarket was designed with two distinctive purposes. The first was to serve as an online exhibit on Haymarket, a logical choice for the Chicago Historical Society. The second was to serve as an interpretative companion to the Historical Society's new Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. [1] This recently opened collection, supported by Ameritech as part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project, makes its rich collection of Haymarket materials, including the court documents Smith used for Dramas, available to everyone on the World Wide Web. Several were built into the exhibit itself, offering visitors to the site a preview of the digital collection along with Smith's cogent explanations. With both in place and conveniently linked, they provide an unparalleled resource for researchers, teachers, students, and the general public interested in historical events and how history is written. The availability of the archive makes Dramas of Haymarket a fitting example of the new model of historical scholarship of the kind Robert Darnton and others have advocated.[2]

Because Dramas of Haymarket is such a fine example of historical scholarship on the World Wide Web, historians will find it particularly informative and revealing to view it from still another perspective. Carl Smith is one of a few, but increasing, number of scholars who have worked successfully in both print and digital media. His book, Urban Disorder And The Shape Of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, And The Model Town Of Pullman, won the Urban History Association's Prize for Best Book in 1996. [3] His the Great Chicago Fire And The Web Of Memory appears on many of the lists celebrating the best historical web sites. [4] Considered with Dramas of Haymarket , they provide fascinating insights into possibilities associated with different types of narrative structures and presentations. Reading Part II of the book in conjunction with Dramas lets an individual reader evaluate the ways in which the different media work best for exposing historical information and argument. They confirm what most writers believe: that there is almost always another equally compelling way to present one's research and conclusions. Working through The Great Chicago Fire and Dramas offers sharply contrasting approaches to dealing with the important topic of historical memory. When the book is added as well, the three serve as a formidable example of how scholars might consider the effect of belief in shaping historical events.

The three in tandem also reveal much about audiences and how to approach them. A successful book, Urban Disorder has sold several thousand copies. Between July 1997 and October 2000, the Chicago Fire site had more than 850,000 visitors and almost half a million hits a month. Between its launching on 4 May 2000 and October of that year, Dramas recorded 27,000 visitors and almost 100,000 hits a month. [5] As reviews start to appear and now that the Haymarket Archive is finished, those numbers should climb rapidly. Searching on the web for either site also reveals the links in other pages and the teaching sites that have developed to take advantage of both of Smith's sites. Historians interested in knowing how others make use of scholars' work can easily track those sites and appreciate how teachers and researchers have engaged the results of Smith's enormous labor.

Finally, the three work well to illustrate the ways in which design affects scholarship. One can easily contrast the effectiveness of endnotes and an image section in the book with the ways in which designers organized sources and images in the web sites. One can contrast the effectiveness of the index of the book with the structures for locating materials within the web sites. This list could continue indefinitely. The essential point, however, is to use these comparisons to understand how we achieve the goal of producing good history more effectively.

Carl Smith and his support teams at Northwestern University and the Chicago Historical Society have demonstrated how well history can be done on the web. Smith has provided us with new insights into the art of historical narrative. Dramas of Haymarket has added to our understanding of that critical event and its significance. For all those reasons - and for many more that remain yet to be uncovered in the site by others who pursue their own paths -- this is a site that all readers of H-Urban should visit more than once.

1. http://www.chicagohs.org/hadc/index.html

2. Robert Darnton, "The New Age of the Book," New York Review Of Books (18 March 1999), available at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F.

3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

4. http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/

5. These figures, provided by Matt Crenshaw of the Chicago Historical Society, do not reflect two months during that period when incomplete information was posted. To clarify any confusion about the numbers, one visitor to the site can record multiple hits. In preparing this review, for example, my 8-10 visits probably amounted to 700 hits as I visited different pages.

Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

CITATION:  Janice L. Reiff, "Review of Dramas Of Haymarket," H-Urban, H-Net Reviews (22 Mar 2001). URL:   http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Urban&month=0103&week=d&msg=JkLIPzmJ8DHhZKpquGfe/g&user=&pw=