Preaching dynamite: August Spies at the Haymarket trial

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the dynamite at the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing trial and in the courtroom address of accused bomb conspirator August Spies. The analysis focuses on the crucial object of the Haymarket events—the dynamite bomb—as much as it focuses on Spies's words. I argue that the material presence of dynamite interacted with polysemy and paradox when Spies preached dynamite. Spies delved into the polysemy of the term dynamite by drawing attention to the word's multiple meanings, and he constructed turnaround arguments warranted by dynamite to reverse the accusation of conspiring to commit violence back onto the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Weapons rhetoric
• rhetoric and technology
• strategic polysemy
• paradox
• materialism

Acknowledgments

Ian E. J. Hill is Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Rhetoric at University of British Columbia. The author thanks Drs. Ned O'Gorman and Judy Segal, for their advice and encouragement, as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. This historical account of Haymarket is derived from the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection, Chicago Historical Society, http://www.chicagohistory.org [hereafter HADC]; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor, 2006); Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, ed., The Haymarket Scrapbook, Anniversary Ed. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and AK Press, 2011); and Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists. A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe. Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed. The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy, and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators (Chicago: F. J. Schulte & Company, 1889).

2. Bruce C. Nelson, “Arbeitspresse und Arbeiterbewegung: Chicago’s Socialist and Anarchist Press, 1870–1900,” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850–1940, ed. E. Shore, K. Fones-Wolf, and J. P. Danky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 81–107. Also see Jon Bekken, “The First Anarchist Daily Newspaper; The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung,” Anarchist Studies 3 (1995): 3–23; and Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 115–26.

3. HADC, People's Exhibit 63.

4. John Angus Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle Way,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 348; and James J. Brown, Jr. and Nathaniel A. Rivers, “Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop,” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies 1 (2013): 29.

5. Angela G. Ray, “Explosive Words and Glimmers of Hope,” in The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Andrea Lunsford (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 528.

6. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 190.

7. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

8. Herbert W. Simons, introduction to Rhetoric in the Human Sciences, ed. Herbert W. Simons (London: Sage, 1989), 1.

9. Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett, “Material Powers: Introduction,” in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2010), 4.

10. Peter Simonson, “Reinventing Invention, Again,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44 (2014): 313; Matthew S. May, “Orator-Machine: Autonomist Marxism and William D. ‘Big Bill’ Haywood’s Cooper Union Address,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45 (2012): 429–51; and Latour, Pandora's Hope, 21, 176.

11. See the recent “New Materialism” forum in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9 (2012): 87–113.

12. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8, 78–81; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Penguin, 1998), 109–11.

13. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunement of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 285; and Scot Barnett, “Chiasms: Pathos, Phenomenology, and Object-Oriented Rhetorics,” Enculturation (Nov. 23, 2015), http://enculturation.net/toward-an-object-oriented-rhetoric.

14. August Spies, “Address of August Spies,” in The Chicago Martyrs: The Famous Speeches of the Eight Anarchists in Judge Gary's Court, October 7, 8, 9, 1886, and Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab. By John P. Altgeld, Ex-Governor of Illinois (San Francisco: Free Society, 1899), 5.

15. For more on the prevalence of dynamite rhetoric in the Haymarket era, see Floyd Dell, “Socialism and Anarchism in Chicago,” in Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, vol. 2, ed. J. S. Currey (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1912), 388–92; Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 160–77; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 161–63; David, The History of the Haymarket Affair, 65–7; Joseph E. Gary, “The Chicago Anarchists of 1886: The Crime, the Trial, and the Punishment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 45 (April, 1893), 813–19; and Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1938), 80–82.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 250.

17. Lorraine Daston, “Introduction: Speechless,” in Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 12 and 24.

18. At the Haymarket trial, the most notorious piece of anarchist dynamite advocacy was Johann Joseph Most's Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft; ein Handbüchlein zur Anleitung betreffend Gebrauches und Herstellung von Nitro-Glyzerin, Dynamit, Schiessbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber, Bomben, Brandsätzen, Giften, u.s.w. (New York: International News Company, 1885).

19. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 145, 160; and Laurie Gries, “Dingrhetoriks,” in Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 301–4.

20. Gary, “The Chicago Anarchists,” 831.

21. “Capt. Schaack’s Day.” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1886.

22. Ibid.

23. William P. Black, Moses Salomon, and Sigmund Zeisler, Brief and Argument for Plaintiffs in Error (Chicago: Barnhard & Gunthorp, Law Publishers, 1887), 164–73.

24. Anna Feigenbaum, “Resistant Matters: Tents, Tear Gas and the ‘Other Media’ of Occupy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11 (2014): 16.

25. On the materiality of pathos, see Barnett, “Chiasms.”

26. See Mark P. Moore, “Life, Liberty, and the Handgun: The Function of Synecdoche in the Brady Bill Debate,” Communication Quarterly 42 (1994): 437; and Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 9.

27. Moore, “Life, Liberty, and the Handgun,” 436.

28. HADC, People's Exhibit 6. “REVENGE!” was added by Hermann Pudewa, an Arbeiter-Zeitung typesetter.

29. HADC, Testimony of August Spies, 100.

30. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 4.

31. August Spies, August Spies' Autobiography; His Speech in Court, and General Notes, ed. Niña Stuart Van Zandt Spies (Chicago: Niña Van Zandt, 1887), 6.

32. May, “Orator-Machine,” 440.

33. Ibid.

34. See Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 72–75; and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 153–73.

35. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, 390.

36. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ideology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi, xii.

37. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 63.

38. Stephen Howard Browne, “‘This Unparalleled and Inhuman Massacre’: The Gothic, The Sacred, and the Meaning of Nat Turner,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 311.

39. Spies, “Address of August Spies,” 1–16.

40. Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 398.

41. Ibid., 410, 396.

42. Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1886.

43. Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 143–46.

44. August Spies, Reminiszenzen von August Spies. Seine Rede vor Richter Garn, Sozialpolitische Ubhandlungen, Briefe, Notizen, u., ed. Albert Currlin (Chicago: Christine Spies, 1888), 4 (translation mine); and Spies, “Address of August Spies,” 4.

45. Spies, “Address,” 5.

46. Ibid., 3; Albert Parsons, “Address of Albert Parsons,” in The Chicago Martyrs, 82; and Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 69, 176.

47. Most, Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft, 3–4, 15.

48. Michael Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Dover, 1970), 40, 59, 62; and Peter Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” in Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings, ed. R. N. Baldwin (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 150–52, 168, 172.

49. Spies, “Address,” 15.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 3.

53. “Infernal Machines,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 1885.

54. Spies, “Address,” 9.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 6.

57. Spies, Autobiography, 38 (emphasis his).

58. Spies, “Address,” 6, 12.

59. Ibid., 6.

60. Ibid., 1 (emphasis his).

61. Ibid., 1, 8.

62. Ibid., 9.

63. Ibid.

64. Spies, Autobiography, 32–33.

65. Spies, “Address,” 9.

66. Ibid., 14, 16, 13.

67. Ibid., 8–9.

68. Ibid., 7–8.

69. Ibid., 3.

70. Quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 163–64; and Most, Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft, 10, 21.

71. HADC, People's Exhibit 21.

72. For accounts of the public's fear of dynamite after Haymarket, see Greene, Death in the Haymarket, 199–200; Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 177, 222–24; and Smith, Urban Disorder, 124–25.

73. Quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 455–56.

74. Nelson, “Arbeitspresse,” 103.

75. Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” in The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 916; and Franklin Rosemont, “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture,” in Rosemont and Roediger, The Haymarket Scrapbook, 203–12.

76. Martha Solomon, “Ideology as Rhetorical Constraint: The Anarchist Agitation of ‘Red Emma’ Goldman,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 185.

77. Rosemont, “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend.”

78. Green, Death in the Haymarket, 203.

79. Jeffory A. Clymer, America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 24.

80. Ibid., 52, 61.

81. Altgeld, “Reasons for Pardoning,” in The Chicago Martyrs, 153.

82. “A Hellish Deed,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1886.

83. Quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 455.

84. Spies, “Address,” 16.

85. See Green, Death in the Haymarket, 274–320; Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 428–36; and Rosemont and Roediger, The Haymarket Scrapbook, 173–248.

86. Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, revised ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1934); Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford, 2009); and David H. Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters: The Story of the Haywood Trial (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2006).