Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that once every now and then is rerun episode like today, I took a week off so that someone could cut into my face to remove teeth at my request, and so I'm running a rerun. But it's a very special week because it's Mayday week, my favorite holiday besides the other holidays that I really like, which I also talk about a lot on this show,
but this one is May Day. Well, not today as this is released, but this week as it's released, the international workers holiday that comes from a really cool background, a little bit tragic. They do call it the Haymarket tragedy, but if you've listened to the show before, you know that I'm not afraid of thinking tragedy is cool. That sounds weird, But this is the first ever episode that I ever recorded of this show that we're rerunning, and
it's about May Day. Here you go, Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is a podcast about cool stuff that people did stuff cool. I suppose this is the very first episode, which means I should probably tell you what the show is. Okay, So there's bad stuff, right and fighting against bad stuff is cool. Cool people fight against bad stuff, so you should be cool.
You should fight against bad stuff. And every week on this podcast, I bring you a new story about cool people who did cool stuff like fight against bad stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today our first guest is Robert Evans.
That's right. I am the opposite of you, and my podcast is the opposite of yours. And if we were to ever make physical contact, it would create a nuclear explosion that would destroy all life in the universe.
That's true. Yes, So okay, So I'm looking at your your bio and it says that you're a podcaster, a war correspondent, a novelist, and you're the proud owner of the world's largest collection of please bleep this out.
Yes, yes, I used to belong to Jay Leno, but I bested him in a fight to the death, and now an impostor lives his life and I have taken over that collection. So really really been a good year for me?
Allegedly, sure, allegedly a good year. And that voice that you'll hear from time to time, disembodied in commanding is Sophie, our producer. Hello. Okay, so today I'm feeling the spirit for a holiday that has not happened by the time I'm recording this, but will have happened by the time you listen to this, which is May Day, the workers
Rights Day everywhere in the world except the US. Today, we're going to talk about where that comes from deciding to start the whole podcast series off with a bang, which is the best pun I will ever use on the show, and hopefully the last pun I ever use on the show. We're going to talk about the bomb that brought us the modern labor movement. Robert, are you familiar with the Haymarket riot, affair, massacre, or tragedy, depending on whatever people want to call it.
Yeah, So, a bunch of like anarchists and other people who didn't want there to be an eight hour or wanted there to be an eight hour workday were organizing and there were some cops, and then someone threw a bomb and it killed some of those cops, and then the cops arrested a bunch of anarchists, most of whom probably didn't have anything to do with the bomb, but a bunch of them got executed, and then we got an eight hour workday, right that's the gist.
That is the rough strokes.
Yes.
Yeah, although we didn't necessarily get the eight hour work day at the end of it, not to ruin the end of the episode, but that is yes, And we're going to be talking about the cool people and the mostly cool people and the like cool with caveat people who were busy fighting against capitalism and for immigrants, and they got very and labor and they got very not
cool murdered by the state for it. Talking about a mystery person who chucked a bomb at some cops a few days after cops gunned down striking workers, which is a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as eighteen eighty six. Yeah, thanks for laughing at my joke. It's the story of a fight for the eight hour workday.
Yeah.
But it's also a story about a huge immigrant subculture that developed in Chicago and started off believing in the ballot box and wounded up believing only in revolution, and how the whole thing came crashing down in a moment, only to grow into something even bigger later. And it's a story about people who are put on trial for their beliefs, not their actions or really even their words.
Well, that all just sounds cool.
Yeah, that's the show.
Okay.
I want to start this with a story from folk singer Utah Phillips. It's about one of the stars of this week's episode, Lucy Parsons. One time she was speaking at a big May Day rally back in the Haymarket in the middle of the nineteen thirties, during the depression. She was incredibly old. She was led carefully up to the rostrum a multitude of people there. She had her hair tied back in a tight white bun, her face a mass of deeply incised lines, deep set, beady black eyes.
She was the image of everybody's great grandmother. She hunched over that podium hawklike and fixed that multitude with those beady black eyes and said, what I want is for every greasy, grimy tramp to arm himself with a knife or a gun and stationing himself at the doorways of the rich, shoot or stab them as they come out. And then Utah, describing it, goes on to say, now I'm a pacifist by admire her spunk. And this wasn't the first time that Lucy Parson said anything like this.
The first time had been like fifty years earlier, in the eighteen eighties, and she was remarkably consistent her entire life. There's a park named after her in Chicago, and a little bit we'll talk about how she reached the conclusions that she reached more famous than her dead husband Albert Parsons. But he gets to steal the show a bunch today because it's the story about how he died and he becomes one of the Haymarket martyrs, and sorry and give
me a second. Well, most of the story is not about stabbing or the shooting of the rich, and it's not even really at its core a story about violence and the bombs and the stuff they just grab the most attention. I would argue that history teachers know that the good ones. Newspapers know it, at least at the time. The newspapers definitely knew that the bombs and the guns got the most attention, and as a podcaster, I know it. So that's why I'm starting with some stabbing and shooting
of the rich. And this is as a personal story for me, right, I wanted to start the whole series off with this episode because it's so personal to me. I have a tattoo on my arm of one of the martyrs, not not Albert Parsons, but George Engel, who was a toy shop owner and the oldest of the bunch. He met his aunt calmly after a life lived trying to improve the conditions of his fellow workers. And his last words were in German it was hawk the anarchy
or Hurrah for anarchy. And there's a there's a graveyard in Chicago with a big monument to these folks. And I've been a few times. I cry every time I go, oh, there were really nice people, some of them, most of them. They were cool people. I'll stop saying cool every single time.
They're cool people who did cool stuff.
They did actually mostly mostly cool stuff. Cool. Yeah, Okay, so now we get to talk about them. Lucy Parsons she was born Lucy Ella Gonzalez Waller, or maybe Lucy Elding Gathering's or maybe Lucia Carter, it depends on who you ask. Like, she was remarkably cagey about her history. She was maybe born enslaved in Texas, or maybe she was born enslaved in sometime around eighteen fifty one to eighteen fifty three, and she was Black Mexican in Creek.
I actually kind of feel guilty talking to There's so much work modern historians have put into trying to discern her heritage, and her whole thing was that she did not want to talk about her heritage. She said itself one point, she said, I am not a candidate for office,
and the public has no right to my past. But because being who she was would have been fundamentally illegal if she were if she claimed her black heritage, she maintained throughout her entire life that she was indigenous in Mexican and not African, though really no one believed her
then or now. And you know, so it's interesting how she becomes like this very important early figure in black anarchism, and yet you know, because of the conditions that she was living in or whatever decisions that she made that I'm not really in a good place to judge. She didn't really talk about it much. In eighteen seventy two, she married a traveling journalist named Albert Parsons, and for fifteen years they were one of the biggest power couples in the American left.
Ah.
Yeah, she gets to be powerful after that. But you can probably guess what happens in fifteen years to Albert A big spoiler alert that has already happened.
Okay, technically I spoiled it.
That's true. He spoiled the whole episode. I was thinking we could just end it there.
But you know, a nice people got married hooray.
Yeah, exactly, and their marriage wasn't legal, but I'll get to that, Okay. So then there's Albert, and we have way more information about Albert because he was really forthcoming, like this guy wouldn't shut up. Honestly, by the end of all this, I don't actually like Albert all that much, not because he's like a bad person, but because he just doesn't shut up. But we have a lot more information about him because his wife wrote his biography after he died, and so he was one of ten kids
born in Alabama to a shoe factory owner. And the Parsons family goes really far back, you know that like meme where it's like, if you go to a famous artist's Wikipedia page, all their parents name are always in blue because their parents of Wikipedia pages two. Yes, yeah, that's Albert Parsons, only it's not his parents, it's like his great great everyone there's so many Parsons.
From a long line of people who wanted to function up for the state.
Yeah. Well yes, and no, I mean some of them fought in the Revolutionary War. But he doesn't necessarily come from a line of it.
Was a state.
Yeah that's true. Yeah, his family definitely was Southern slave owners at this point. And okay, but when he was two, his mom died, and then when he was four or five is his dad died? And this is going to be a running theme for all of these people, very early parent deaths. He was raised by his brother, who was like twenty years.
Older than I have a running theme for that century too.
Yeah, I get that impression a lot of these people, even if they like they lived a long and happy life and died at fifty seven, And I'm like, huh, well, yeah, I'm hoping to do better than that.
Ancient dogged I mean, if you're a parent and your kids make it to eighteen, you nailed it in this period of time. That's really the only no matter how drunk you were, like, they don't die before they're legally adults. You have hid it out of the park in the eighteen fifties.
Yeah, or if you survive long enough to see them grow up.
Oh now that's like, yeah, that's a little bit of an unreasonable expectation.
Okay. Well, so when he's eleven, he moved to a town that you've probably never heard of, a town called Waco, Texas.
Oh Waco, I mean, of all of the towns in Texas, it is in my bottom three. Okay, not the worst because it's not Lufkin, but bottom three.
Well, I mean, I think it's only famous because Albert Parsons lived there. Right, That's the only thing that's ever happened in Waco. That and the Confederacy fled there when the war went bad.
A couple of other things. But hey, Waco beats out Amarillo and Lufkin in my Texas list.
Well, no, it's okay, we're going to get to the Confederacy in a minute.
Oh good. Yeah, I was worried we wouldn't get to the Confederacy, I know.
So when he's twelve, he goes and he gets an apprenticeship at his local paper, which is the job that he takes with him the rest of his life is that he works on newspapers. His employer was an upstanding leader of the pro slavery movement whose nickname was Old Whitey. Then the Civil War broke out, and so Albert Parsons runs away at thirteen years old, lies about his age to join the Confederate Army. He fought in the infantry, then the artillery, then the cavalry, like he was just dumb,
young teen, all in on the whole Confederacy thing. Fought the entire length of the war. When the war ended, he was seventeen, and he went back to Texas, which is, you know, a choice to have made.
Yeah, I wouldn't have made that call. I didn't make that call.
But yeah, okay, interesting, Yeah, but okay. So over the next two years he has a change of heart and he becomes this like very active person fighting for the rights of formally enslaved people. He starts his own Republican newspaper called The Spectator, which ooh wait.
Is that the same as The Spectator today?
I don't know, and I kind of doubt it.
Yeah, it couldn't be.
I feel like newspapers all have the same name as each other.
Yeah, there's like four diffame things you could call, like and now, although you were the old shit we used to like pick a yune like, we don't use those words anymore, but they used to be all over newspapers, Ah, the good old days.
Mark. I just remember that there's there's multiple newspapers in this story called the Tribune and the Times, and so there being a lot of spectators makes a lot of sense to me. And so it's during this time that he starts to understand how capitalism is also a problem, right, because he's seen the people who are formally enslaved are still just totally screwed over. And so he cruise up with a bunch of black speakers and they tore around
Texas teaching tolerance and acceptance. And you want to guess how popular that made him in eighteen sixties Texas, very a lot of people were paying attention to him, that's true. And everyone he knew stopped speaking to him. He was completely shut out of society, except occasionally they said things to him like they said to him, we're going to lynch you. And then one of them said I'm going to shoot you in the leg. Now, actually they might not have said that, but they did it. They shot
him in the leg. And then a different time some people kicked him down the stairs, so people were including him in society, but not incredibly politely. And he's still like, I'm going to be this upstanding guy. So he gets himself elected secretary of the state Senate. He becomes a tax collector. He's basically had every terrible job, like, wow, state senator, tax collector collector, guy, Confederate soldier. Yeah. Yeah,
though he's an interesting guy to start with. And then he uh, and then he serves as an officer in the state militia, specifically to try and protect black citizens against white harassment. But then he married Lucy, and their marriage was not legally recognized because white people weren't allowed to marry black people in Texas at that time because of anti missid I hate. This were so much annoutrounds. Yeah, anti miscegenation laws.
I mean, I'm sure were they allowed to marry anywhere in the US at this point. There must have been some places.
So when they moved to Illinois, their marriage is not legal until the next year.
Okay, well that's something.
In eighteen seventy four, and Texas didn't repeal their laws until nineteen sixty seven when the Supreme Court made everyone do it.
Hey, it's the same thing with their sodomy laws except two thousand and three.
Well, do you want to guess what year Alabama finally, the place that Parsons was born, finally got their shit together and got rid of those laws.
Oh, have they done it yet?
The year two thousand, the year two thousand they held on thirty three years after.
A Wow, they made it out of the twentieth century. Yeah, you know what was. By the way, this is random, but do you remember that period of time after the year two thousand, but before two thousand and one, when a bunch of very frustrating people were like, well, actually it's not the twenty first century until two thousand and one. That's the millennium hasn't changed. You remember that being like a thing.
That actually played into how I wrote this script, because I almost wrote a thing about they made it into the next millennia. And then I was like Pedance, I don't want to deal with Pedance.
I fuck them, you're wrong, you're wrong. Yeah, I don't care about the Pluto discourse. Who gets a shit? What a plan? And it is? But like the year two thousand, that's when the millennium changed. I'm not going to hear anything else.
About it, the numbers rolled over.
Yeah, you can yell at us on Twitter, but I will not hear you.
Yeah. And so even though it was eventually legally recognized, they were not socially accepted for who they were. Right, sure, right, they dealt with a lot of shit when they moved to Chicago.
I'm going to guess the year they make it legal in Illinois is still not the year in which everyone's fine with it.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, totally okay. So in Chicago they find their new cause which they devote the rest of their lives too, which is labor rights. And Albert didn't have as long left to devote to the rest of his life to it, but Lucy got to do it for a long time. And I want to bring this back to that opening quote about by Lucy Parsons about stabbing and shooting rich people. But this time I'm going
to say the whole thing. Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in weight on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they can come out. Let us kill them without mercy. Let it be a war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live, as General Sheridan devastated the
beautiful valley of the Shenandoah. Because I think this context matters, right, she was born and slaved, and she saw with her own eyes that the only way to end slavery was to run the rivers red with the blood of the people who thought that owning people was like cool and good. And so this is my opinion, probably a huge part of how she ended up with this framework that the rich were not going to give up their hoarded wealth at least without at least the threat of violence.
Well, is something that hasn't been born out by history. So I feel like probably can ignore more or less what she was saying.
Yeah, totally, Yeah, I mean that is really.
Important context that like, because it also makes the point she's looking at like these masses of like starving and desperate people and this tiny number of people who have hoarded the resources, and she's saying, well, this is a system of inequality, just like the system of inequality that I was raised in. And the thing that had to end the Confederacy was violence on a terrific scale. And perhaps that's the only way to end this system as well. Yeah, yeah, Faulter logic.
Yeah, and that logic plays through the whole thing that we're going to be talking about. And so now let's give you background on Chicago. Everyone's favorite city. I don't know if it's anyone's favorite. Actually, it's probably a lot of people's favorite city. In the eighteen and fifties and sixties, Chicago's a boom town and it was mostly German and Irish immigrant labor. Like it grew from four thousand people to ninety thousand people over twenty years.
Wow.
Yeah. Basically, since all of the trains coming from the West went to Chicago, it became a hub where all of the raw materials that were extracted from the colonial project of the United States, that were extracted out from the West turned into goods that could sent east. Right, And so at first it's like there's some decently high wages in this particular boomtown kind of in that way.
Have you ever been to like one of those oil boomtowns that are, yeah, where everything costs a ton of money because everyone who works there is getting a ton of money.
Everybody lives in trailers. Yeah, it's in Wyoming.
Yes, yeah, so that's Chicago, and there's a shanty town that's spreading out from the city center.
Love a good shanty town.
And I want to tell you about the opening salvo in Chicago labor struggle or class war or whatever you want to call it, which happened at eighteen fifty five. None of our characters are really on the scene yet, but it's still it's too cool to not include it. And it's the lagger beer riot like lagger, not like loggers who cut down trees.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like he takes a whiskey drink, he takes a lager drink, that kind of lagger.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
Have you heard of this political party that was rolling around at this time called the No Nothing's.
Yeah, they're basically like kind of it to sort of flatten them in a way that makes them sensible to kind of modern sensibilities. They were broadly like the Tea Party of its time.
Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, especially if the Tea Party started as a secret society, which the Tea Party might have.
Yeah, again, like anytime, you're kind of being like this thing from one hundred years ago, was like this thing now, like you're losing all because there was also weird specific political grievances that aren't really a part of modern politics that were important to them. But like totally they were kind of tea party esque for the time. That's how like people like us back then would have looked at them.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, they got their name. It took to be a while to find out where they got their name from. It's because it was a secret society. It's basically like if they were asked if they were a part of this, they're supposed to say, I know nothing.
Well that's actually kind of based like not the politics, but like that's a neat like if you were writing a fictional secret society, that would be like fun that people would enjoy that.
Yeah, totally, But it also becomes a fitting name for them because I mean I don't think that they're very that they've made intelligent choices with their life. They're anti immigrant. They specifically hate the Catholics and the Irish, okay, and they're nativists, which was a big thing back then, which basically means they like white Americans who were born in America and basically nobody else and they also hated drinking, and well.
These guys are not winning me over so far. No, I'm going to be honest with you.
So they came for the Irish and the German immigrants. They worked six days a week, like fourteen twelve to fourteen hour days, and then on Sunday is their only day off. So they all go to the bar and drink and hang out. And so what they do is they say, oh, you're not allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays, and it's just specifically to piss these people off. I'm sure they clouded it and like it's the Holy Day and this and that. Yeah, but it was entirely just
because they hated the immigrants. And so there was this massive civil disobedience where two hundred people got arrested for alcohol sales.
Jesus Christ, Okay, sure.
Yeah, and uh and they're like because I mean, they're you know, like the fuck this, I'm going to keep drinking anyway. And so then on the day of the trial, thousands of Germans marched downtown and they have like fife
and drum and shit, and the cops freak out. And at the time in Chicago, the river had swing bridges instead of lift bridges, so the bridges would like swing open like a door kind of, And so the cops swung them open while everyone was still on them and then just opened fire into the crowd.
Jesus Christ.
Only one person ended up killed, who apparently.
For the shitty guns of that time, I.
Know, and he shot back. The guy who got killed, he injured a cop.
Well, that's good for him.
Yeah. And they had like loaded cannons and stuff ready for all of this. And part of the reason I bring this up is because it's like, this is something that I feel like people need to understand when we're talking about nineteenth century movements, is that like, like the cops are just totally ready to open fire on huge crowds of people.
Yeah, open fire with like artillery.
Yeah, Like when we.
Say cannons, what they're what they're preparing is a big metal tube that they fill with shrapnel and gunpowder. It's called grape shot. They're making like a giant shotgun the size of a car and readying to fire that into a crowd of human beings.
Yeah.
That's that's crowd control.
Yeah, and so that's that's the that's the opening salvo in all of this, and then in eighteen seventy one, the entire city of Chicago burns down.
Well that was that was really nobody's fault, like right, every like that is one of those things back in the days, Chicago just burned down. Sometimes you know, nothing anyone can do about it. You just every now and then you're going to lose a Chicago or two.
Yeah, totally, and this just sends everything into recession the or actually not sends everything into a recession. They're starting to rebuild, and then there's a great depression that was called the Great Depression until we got another one in the twentieth century. And basically when I do a.
Thing sometime about like that's that style of thing where like there's this moment in history that's super well known today, but there was another very similar moment that went by the same name until the bigger thing happened. Because the same time, I'm reading about the potato famine in Ireland right now, and there was a famine that killed like nearly a million people that was like a generation or
so before it that they called the Great Famine. But then there wasn't even bigger famine, and so nobody remembers the first famine.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and which is why, Sophie, if it's all right, I'd really like us to be sponsored by potatoes.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I mean that would be our preferred sponsor forever.
But we have a lot of unfortunate ads from the potato blight, which we are working to stop. But yeah, it is. It is really hard to get them removed, probably due to their financial partnership with the Washington State Highway Patrol.
I'm definitely pro potato. And here's some ads. So in the middle of the worst depression in US history, while Chicago has just burned down, that's when Lucy and Albert decided to move to Chicago. And right, normally that would sound like a bad deal, but they were coming from the place where everyone was trying to murder them.
So also, I feel like Rint's pretty cheap when the whole city just burned down.
There's not a lot of buildings though.
Yeah, but like you could probably camp pretty cheap. Yeah, that's true, low cost of living.
Yeah, And so they moved there. Albert finds work as a type setter, and it's pretty quickly they start calling themselves socialists.
That's nice.
Of them, and words like socialism and anarchism get thrown around an awful lot, including in this particular episode. So I'm I'm gonna like really quickly try and say what I mean by those things, because everyone's going to use
those words really differently. Yes, socialism in this case is like the it's the broader social movement towards workers or society at large owning the means of production, which is to say, rather than having a business owner who owns a factory and hiring the workers, the workers themselves or society would own the factory. And it basically the difference between the value produced by the worker and the amount that the owner sells the product for is the owner's profit.
And so basically they're saying, this is theft.
This is like the sort of marketers stealing it from
the people doing the thing. It's this. There's this very frustrating discourse around anarchism that hit on Twitter a week or two ago, where people are like, well, how would you have in an ericist society, how would you handle you know, the widespread production of food or the manufacturing of goods, Like you can't do that with like just like you and your friends hanging out in an affinity group, and it's like, well, actually, anarchists have been talking about
this for like one hundred and seventy years and a number of different and those solutions have been acted on in places like revolutionary Spain and whatnot, and parts of Korea, and in some cases have have seen substantial successes. For periods of time, this has all been discussed.
Yeah, it's just about who owns the means of production and like how decisions are made.
It's not saying we don't have factories. It's saying, like, perhaps we don't need the factories to be owned by giant, multinational conglomerates that are able to, for example, build waste disposal plants that pump poison into the Gulf of Mexico, and because they lobby the politicians in that area, the people who actually live there aren't able to complain in any meaningful way, and several of them get exploded because the natural gas pipelines run by that company underneath the
area lea coals, which since explosive gas up into trailer parks. Perhaps we don't need that, and we could still have ways of distributing fuel.
I don't know that sounds crazy. You probably distribute fuel.
To get out of here with my radical politics.
Yea, and so so socialists in this case is like the broader word for what is, what the goal is, and how people are trying to actually create that is kind of unrelated. So anarchism, which will come up more soon as our characters become more and more anarchists, is the idea that we can have a society without state
or capitalism, without course of hierarchies. And lots of different people conceive of this in very different ways, but in general, the people that we're talking about today, like myself, want a socialist society that is also anarchist.
And yeah, I mean a lot of these people would say they were like working towards communism, which meant a different thing. Like now you get a lot of fights between anarchists and communists because communism has become so like tight in with the ideas of state communism that we saw with the USSR right. But like back in this day, a lot of these people would have been happy to just call themselves communists totally.
And like all these people like go to their grave being like I died for socialism, and then they're like yeah, but they're not like and so unfortunately so so now sometime whatever, people get into arguments about who does and doesn't count for this and that. But that seems like a decent starting place for where these people are at.
And then in eighteen seventy seven there's this big fuck off railway strike, which at some point I'd love to do an episode all about, because it covers the entire country. And by the entire country, I mean the entire country at the time where people actually or whatever. It covers like the mid Atlantic, in the Midwest and all those things. It starts in West Virginia and Maryland when workers got their third pay cut in a year and we're like fuck this, and they went on strike. It spread across
most of the country. Railways shut down everywhere, people were riding everywhere. And in Chicago people went hard as fuck, and they had all these banners like life by work or death by fight. One speaker said, better a thousand of us shot dead in the streets than ten thousand dead of starvation, because I mean people were starving, right. This isn't like just a you know, miners, they.
Don't just like want to be able to afford a new Xbox, like they're trying to like not die. Yeah, because people don't serve nice things too. But the situation was a lot was quite dire, Yeah, totally.
And so in Chicago, the shot dead in the streets thing was a little bit prescient. Actually it wasn't a lot of cities because after three days of striking, the police and the military as well as hundreds of deputized civilians of the middle and upper classes attacked and shot into the crowd, and in the end they killed thirty workers and like ten cops were injured. Jesus, and like everywhere else in the country, the work.
Or not to the ten cops injured, that seems like not quite enough.
But yeah, you know, yeah, well we'll stick with me.
Good. Well, no, because I know where the story goes broad, so I guess it's not really good either way. Yeah, that is the thing, Like, it's hard not to cheer on retribute a violence when like terrible things are being done by people in violence is visited upon the people doing the terrible things, but it generally doesn't resolve itself neatly.
Right, That is absolutely that is absolutely true. And so the media attacked the strikers as well, and they basically, of course, they called for their extermination, like they use the word extermination. This is ten years before Lucy Parsons used that, like we should exterminate the rich. And I feel like that that cause and effect matters, you know, Yeah, and.
I don't know.
Basically, people are trying everything they could think of to get better conditions, and they were basically just told you should all be killed. And during all.
Of this that's also important because yeah, she didn't just like start at like, well, the only solution is violence. A bunch of powerful people and influential people were like, the only solution is violence against you, and she was like, okay, yeah, exactly, exactly, all right then.
Yeah, and even during all of this until this, basically Albert and Lucy are both like pretty moderate in their socialism. Like Albert gave some speeches that's this whole thing at this point, but he's like advocate restraint and that people should avoid sabotage and that everyone should go vote in the upcoming elections to make everything better. Yeah, and his moderate position got him fired from the Chicago Times where he worked, and so suddenly he was completely without a.
Job because and I'm guessing because the Chicago Times thought he was too extreme, yes, yes, or were they are too extreme? Yeah yeah yeah.
And at this point Lucy opens up a dress shop. Sure, yeah, he gets canceled, and so Lucy Parsons opens up a dress shop and is supporting her husband and her two kids at the point, and this kind of rerex socialism in Chicago and the like, especially like party socialism, the kind of like let's all go vote socialism. They actually tried to go more and more moderate, not Lucy and Albert, but like the larger socialist parties, they tried to go
more and more moderate to bring in new members. But it had literally the opposite effect, and everyone became more and more radical cool, And in eighteen eighty three they all joined new anarchist organization called the IWPA, the International Working People's Association, which is a dead boring name, yes, vile name. It at least is the Working People's Association instead of the Workingmen's Association, which I feel like is said.
That is that is, it's actually pretty based.
It was somewhere between a federation and a loose network. There was no party, there was no membership organization, different collectives or which were called clusters joined just by endorsing a manifesto that some of them had written in Pittsburgh called can you guess the really original name of the manifesto that they wrote in Pittsburgh.
Working People Association Manifesto?
Close? It was the Pittsburgh Manifesto.
Oh okay, yeah, to day at Pittsburgh manifesto would be all about I don't know, what's it Pittsburgh sandwiches with a lot of meat in them.
Well, that's the seventh point that they considered in the six point manifesto that they settled on. I think it's because some people from out of town were there.
More roast beef, whitter roast beef, that's right, Pittsburgh.
Now, I'm just actually wondering how many of these people back then were actually vegetarian, because there's this whole weird overlap between the left and vegetarianism that goes back hundreds of years. But we'll talk about that some other time.
Yep. Oh, yes, okay.
So the six points of this of their program that you had to agree to in order to join. First, destruction of the existing class rule by all means, i e. By energetic, relentless revolutionary and international.
Action on That sounds good.
Second, establishment of a free society based on cooperative organization of production.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Third, free exchange of equivalent products buy and between productive organizations without commerce and profit mongery.
Sure.
Fourth organization of education on a secular, scientific and equal basis for both sexes.
Also sounds fine. Like the both sexes part. These folks are really really really hitting hard on that on that part, yep.
Fifth equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
Dope, very good.
Sixth regulation of all public affairs by free contacts between autonomous, independent communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis.
That sounds pretty nice. It would be good to have that.
Yeah, Like I look at this and I'm like, Okay, that's good.
Yeah. I mean I don't particularly disagree with anything there. Yeah, I might have some additional questions about how to handle the exchange of goods without commerce thing, because that's a complicated matter.
But I know, I feel like they've meant something pretty specific there that I just don't know what is.
Yeah, I think there's a number of ways you could try to do that. You know, there's like you get your mutualists and your whatnots. But I don't know. I'm not an economy expert, but broadly speaking, I don't disagree with any of that. That all seems like good stuff to just strive for in a society.
Yeah, And they grew really rapidly, especially in Chicago, but all over the country, and as the Socialist Party and especially the sort of more moderate socialists kind of diminished. Basically everyone's like, oh, no, this sounds good.
It's hard to be moderate when they've just shot thirty of you in the street. Yeah, yeah, that makes me not very moderate. The American branch, because this actually was an international organization, the American branch was mostly European immigrants. Their newspapers were like five of the seven newspapers or something or I don't know, some number. A lot of them were in German, but then there were other ones, other newspapers in Czech, English and Norwegian. And they took
their inclusive policies really seriously. At one point, a socialist organization wanted to merge with them, but the anarchists were like, you all exclude Chinese folks from your organization, and so they refused, and in one of the papers, the IWPA said the IWPA would never feel that its ranks were complete if it excluded working people of any nationality whatsoever. And they went on to say that the socialist organization was basically serving as tools of the CAPS by letting
racism divide the working class. They kind of ruled, Oh, I like that.
And all of the different clusters had total autonomy. The Chicago cluster was really excited about building a mass movement through union organizing. Some of the other clusters were more into like autonomous and individual action. In Chicago, each meeting elected a chairman to facilitate and they rotated it. The recording secretary and treasurer rotated. But they were a subculture also, right, and that doesn't get talked about enough. I really like subcultures.
That's why I'm always pointing out when this thing's happened in history. But they hung out in the Chicago beer halls, and that's basically where they did all of their propagandizing. And to talk about their subculture, I'm going to quote the historian Paul Averich in his book The Haymarket Tragedy. Beyond their publishing ventures, the anarchists engaged in a broad range of cultural and social activities which enhanced their feelings
of solidarity and greatly enriched their lives. In a relatively short period. They created a network of orchestras, choirs, theatrical groups, debating clubs, literary societies, and gymnastic and shooting clubs, involving thousands of participants. They organized lectures, concerts, picnics, dances, plays and recitations in which children as well as adults took part. Saloons and beer gardens became bustling centers of radical life.
The International moreover engaged in mutual aid services, providing assistance to members and their families in times of need. Bad ass, I know, And like, the thing that I really like about it is that it's like these were all really poor people who were like working six days weeks, twelve hour days, and they managed to have fulfilling, rich cultural lives. They had masquerade balls and shit. They had shooting contests,
and some of the plays were written by participants. They wrote like new words to popular songs, and they basically were like completely punk and I really like them.
Ah. Yeah, they were doing some remix art.
Yeah.
I mean everything you've described sounds so like high end and expensive for lack of a better word. Yeah, so it just makes it even cooler. Yeah.
And they just did it by actually all just doing it together collecting.
Yeah, you know, teamwork makes the dream work.
Yeah, And they would have these They would have huge celebrations of the Paris Commune every year on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, which was basically when the city of Paris like stole itself back from its government for a while, and then they had protests, and the protests were even more popular than everything else, and they regularly drew thousands of workers to march through the streets, and their banners were things like millions labor for the benefit
of the few, we want to labor for ourselves. They would have multiple brass bands, They had fucking floats, They had carriages drawn by mules with like allegorical displays like Uncle Sam driving around like a policeman because he serves the policemen. And the speakers like kept hitting the same points about including equal participate patient by women in the labor movement. And their newspapers were not just they were like there was like muck raking about, like this is
what the cops are doing. That's bad and stuff. But they also included like philosophy and translations of literature from other languages, and there was like fiction and poetry. And again it's this idea that these like like some of the people writing this poetry, which I'm sure some of it was terrible, but whatever was like written by workers who had never considered literary things before. And so it just, I don't know, a whole other way to raise people
out of poverty, it seems like. And you'll be shocked to know their hatred of government and capitalism was completely mutual. The media spent a lot of time villainizing them, and in particular the same as the anarchists focused on the Paris Commune, so did the media. Basically it was like, oh, you'll like this. They were like, don't let it happen here, because God forbid people self organize and rule themselves. If they did, we'd have total anarchy.
Oh no, oh no, yeah, I mean it makes sense like that. They of course they're scared of that.
Yeah, but you know what, they're not scared.
Of products and services. No, of course not.
Mainstream society was not scared of goods and services, including the ones that support this podcast. Here's the ads. Okay, we're back, and we are all excited to talk about people with a bunch of guns and cool outfits. We're going to talk about the people whose name I don't know how to pronounce because I cannot speak German, and every time I try to learn it goes in one part of my brain and out with the other.
I speak fluent German. I'll figure it.
Out, Okay. Leir and vera Varian, Yeah, yeah, you got
it right. Okay. The Leir and vere Varin were a group that we kind of can't leave out because the labor organizers were organizing themselves into armed formations ready for community defense revolution, both defensive and offensive action, and at least two of the labor unions, the metal workers and the carpenters, had armed sections that met regularly for drill and instructions in armed conflict, and the American group of the IWPA had a similar auxiliary, but none of them
could compete in numbers or sheer coolness with the learan vere Verin, which was the Education and Defense Association. Because these are very literal namers here, especially the Germans, it was a leftist militia movement in response to the right wing militias that have been forming and in response to all the strikers getting murdered. And this is how we get the first real challenges to the at least some of the first challenges the Second Amendment and gun control in the United.
States that that inspires people to want gun control.
Yeah, the state freaked out and banned all the non official militias and the open carry of rifles learon Vere fought it to the Supreme Court and they lost, basically paving the way for states rights to restrict firearms ownership and militia formation.
But that's an exciting piece of history, I know, no comment.
And so they would march in anarchist parades and different historians will describe their outfits differently, but all of them sound really good. And I'm going to pick the blue blouses and black pants and cult revolvers when the laws wouldn't allow rifles and they would like march information alongside the parades. There's four companies of them. They had somewhere between four hundred and three thousand members because didn't keep really good membership records for very good reasons. Yeah, and
they drilled weekly and then monthly. All of the companies came together and drilled, and then also when they had the anarchist picnics, they'd have these like mock battle where they'd run around in practice fighting at the picnics.
It just sounds that seems like the thing people ought to be doing.
Yeah, And basically this is like they raised a ton of money from people who had no money in order to buy guns for everyone. One six month period and anarchist quartermaster raised two hundred and fifty five dollars for new weapons, which is thirty seven thousand dollars today.
I mean that probably went further than thirty seven thousand dollars for new weapons would go today.
I assume, but I don't know. I mean, they probably all weren't trying to get the like two thousand dollars ars. You know, this is a real palmetto sure crash.
Sure, that's still like eighty weapons.
Yeah, and there was you know, probably three thousand of them. Okay, Okay, I see where I seehere. You're going with this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just assuming it went further than it would today, because again that's about like eighty ninety guns. You know, more if you're doing some of your own milling and shit like.
Yeah, they were all a bunch of cattle workers.
So yeah.
Yeah, basically there were community defense organizations and they perceived the revolution as completely inevitable also, and they wanted to be ready. They they thought capitalism was about to collapse under its own weight. How could it not with all the stuff they were seeing they were in. I mean, after all, they like everybody thinks that and it's never right. Well, but hear me out. They were in a major depression
about ten years after another major depression. I so, but yeah, capitalism didn't collapse this time that time, but it will just now, I probably won't collapse this time either.
Yeah. It's it's it's pretty it's pretty durable. It can take the punches. Look, you got to give capitalism credits. It's a prize fighter. I can take the hits.
It rithes away, you know, it could take the hit. But it's especially good at like dodging, you know.
Yeah, it just like blobs around your fist. Yeah, and then raises your rent thirteen times in seventeen months.
Yeah, anyway, exactly, Okay, which brings us quite naturally to the fight for the eight hour workday, which is you know, promised at the top of the hour. The fight for the eight hour workday is what all this is about. But it's also not what all this is about. But it was this thing that was happening at the time, and it was come into a head around this time. Basically, people didn't like working from sun up to sundown or sometimes fourteen hour days regardless of whether or not the sun was up.
And really, but that's ten whole hours for them to, you know, have families in sleep. I know, I feel like that's just greedy, I think.
So they're pretty much stealing from the bosses.
Yeah, I mean, we don't give our workers that much free time.
Yeah, I didn't spend I didn't. I wasn't up till three in the morning last night working on this. I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, So in city after city and trade after trade, basically all of these people started fighting for Originally, they weren't even fighting for the eight hour work day, or they were fighting for the like ten hour work day, you know, or even
just please not fourteen hours or whatever. Yeah, what if we had two days for the weekend, and so they had a whole bunch of strikes all throughout the nineteenth century, and some of them were one, some of them are lost. It went on like that for over a hundred years. Every few years, some trade in another city would or other country would win the ten hour day or the eight hour day, but sometimes they would win in legislation
and it wouldn't do anything. So Chicago actually won the eight hour workday in the eighteen sixties, but they didn't. They won it in legislation, but it was so full of loopholes that it was never enforced, and so kind of ironically or maybe fittingly, a ton of the strikers and socialists and even some of the anarchists were on some level just actually fighting for the law to be applied evenly across classes, which obviously they won because that
happens now. The law is definitely applied evenly across classes. I think. I hope it's not spoiler. It's not okay.
So in eighteen eighty four, members of the labor movement from across the country met in Chicago, which was kind of the center of a lot of the labor movement stuff, and they declared two years later May first, eighteen eighty six, they were going to enforce the eight hour day through strikes and walkouts just nationwide, all industries, which I feel like it's like worth noting that they gave themselves two years in order to plan a general strike.
Yep, that's probably worth noting. The statement of like a really single, singular, specific goal. I also really like the idea of like this is a thing we've decided we're getting, and then we're going to enforce the fact that we're getting that using that kind of language that the state uses, and thus that like people are very familiar with as opposed to kind of the we're agitating for change or
we're trying to like bring electoral change. No, no, no, we are in the same way that the state enforces things, you know, through its police, we are enforcing that we get this eight hour workday through our action. We're organizing to do that. I think that's a really smart way of like framing it.
Yeah. Yeah, they weren't fucking around. Even like the moderates and the you know, the less radical among the labor movement still knew what was at stake. At the beginning. The Chicago anarchists were opposed to the eight hour struggle, not because they were opposed of better conditions for workers. But they were basically, yeah, baby steps, what's a baby step? We need to all seize control of the workplaces in our cities and have a revolution.
It's that old. I mean, it wasn't an old argument then that it is now We still have that like why would you? Yeah, anyway, we don't need to get into that.
Yeah, although I will say.
It is an argument that people have not ever resolved though. Yeah.
But actually I find it interesting the way they came around to it, which is, on some level they realized which way the wind was blowing, and maybe that was cynical and they were like, Okay, well we better join up with everyone else. But I kind of think that, like maybe they took some of their own lessons to heart, because they don't want to tell other people what to do, and they don't want to have like a revolutionary vanguard
that tells everyone what they should want. And what people wanted was to fight for the eight hour workday, and so instead, by eighteen eighty six, the Chicago anarchists were all in, and they were really really good organized and propagandas and soon Chicago is the center of all this struggle and there's a quote from another anarchist and Italian
anarchist Malatesta. He wrote in an essay called reformism that I feel like applies here, which is, we will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one tears occupied territory from the enemy's grasp in order to keep on advancing. That's how I've always seen reformism personally, honestly, is like, well, of course we should get that. It's a good thing, we should get it.
I feel fine about this so far.
Yeah, well yeah, so then they strike and they win, and everything has been happily ever after, and slowly we've all adopted the six point platform and we live in utopian society which has no inner conflict.
Yeah, that's how it happened. Huh oh yeah, I was wondering why things were still perfect.
Yeah yeah, okay, So but during this build up, okay, it's important to note the anarchists weren't alone and thinking there was about to be a revolution. General Sherman of the US Army wrote, there will soon come in armed contests between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments and ballots, but with shot and shell gunpowder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howlings of the lower strata, and they mean to stop them.
Oh, buddy, Sherman, Sherman, Sherman Sherman. Uh, problematic faith, not even really a faith. I mean he was actually critical to the invention of concentration camp as a concept because
of the things that he did to Indigenous Americans. It's like it's like you've got this artist who releases a great album and then it turns out they were like doing some sort of horrible crimes too, and it's like, ah, I really liked it when you were burning large jokes of the Confederacy, but I can't back the rest of your career.
Yeah.
It's like with William Henry Harrison, totally supportive of his presidency, the only really perfect presidency anyone's now. The stuff he did before that I won't defend. But as while he was president flawless.
I do not know enough to comment. Unfortunately, Oh he died thirty days in doing Ah, that was him. Okay, he's the one who died to me. Yeah, he didn't get a chance to do anything bad. Yeah, great president. Yeah, no notes. Okay, So during this build up towards eighteen eighty six, Basically all of America is like, this is also completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. All of America is like, are we about to have another civil war? Like? What's about to happen?
That is one of the things that comforts me sometimes is that we've been asked, We've asked that question pretty regularly, and we've only occasionally had civil wars.
Yeah, that's true. Both the press and the clergy are basically working really hard to smear anarchists and spread fear. They were all painted as aliens and mad men and they're trying to destroy America's prosperity and freedom, and it kind of worked, and public opinion started turning against them as the incarnation of evil. And then the anarchists, for their part, started saying the same thing back about capitalists and cops, calling capitalist leeches and cops bloodhounds, which was
basically like calling them pigs. And so both both sides are working to the yeah, which brings it to a head in spring eighteen eighty six, and the stage was set for tragedy. On May first, a ton of owners and a ton of industries across the country actually capitulated without a strike and granted the eight or nine hour day to their employees a ton more nice did not.
Well, that's not nice, y.
So something like three hundred and forty thousand people went on strike on May first, which is impressive.
And there were only like three hundred and fifty thousand people in the country at this.
Yeah, exactly. So there's ten thousand people not on strike and they're all cops probably, And in Chicago alone, people walk off the job, which is like half the population of Chicago. It's not actually half, I'm being hyperbolic, but.
It's a lot. It's a lot significant chunk of the people who did not burn to death in the.
Fire right, and then another forty thousand the other half practically joined joined them in a march of eighty thousand people in Chicago. And so this is the first May Day labor march in history.
And are the people who work with the companies that yielded are they going on strike as part of the general strike or are they like not.
I'm not certain. I kind of my general impression is that probably the workers who yielded might have been like it's Saturday, and I don't know we're about to have a war. Let's go go to your parade. That's my gut feeling, but I don't actually know, okay. And then like in all the history books they're always or at least the ones I read, they're like, and it was led at the front by Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons and
their two kids. And I kind of want to like point this out, partially because I'm like, they were probably near the front or maybe at the front, but it's it's not like this was Lucy and Albert Parsons who did this. You know, they if they let it, they were not alone in it, but they might have been at the front. And it's also a really nice image
to have them at the front. They're two kids, they're like, I don't remember, they're like seven or something at this point, one of them, the older one is And during this big, happy march, you'll be shocked to know it all happened under the watchful gaze of police, private security, and deputized civilian snipers perched on rooftops all along the route.
Another thing that hasn't happened again, deputized civilian snipers, I know.
And then this also will totally surprise you out of sight. Militia waited with gatling guns with gatling guns.
Fun.
So this all feels pretty familiar to me.
Yeah, this all feels like a thing that's happened repeatedly.
But nothing bad happened, and then the next day.
But also is something that's happened before, and.
Then the next day Sunday, nothing bad happened. There wasn't a strike on Sunday because they didn't have to because but everyone hates a Monday, am I right?
Yeah?
Worst, So on Monday, May third, more workers walk off the job, including the lumber shovers, which is the coolest name of a job but actually sounds like a terrible job.
There, funny for a job. I'm sure it's it's a nightmare of a job, but it's a very funny thing to call you.
Yeah, it just basically means you like move logs and lumber around.
Yeah. I kind of guess what lumber shoving was from the contest.
Yeah, okay, fair enough. And then the seamstresses also went on strike. I'm sure other ones did, but those are the two that I like found about and I got excited about. And then there's the McCormick Reaper Works.
Which that's a that's a pretty tough name for a business, the Reaper Factor. It does it does sound like they make war crimes.
What they did is they automated the jobs of all the farmers and or fed the world, depending on who controls the means of production. Basically, and it was the first automated harvesting machine at like revolutionized farming. And it's factory had this long history of labor struggle and they had a union until earlier that year. McCormick, not the original McCormick who invented it, but I think his kid.
Basically he was like, you know what, I want to automate your jobs, and I don't like having a union around. So he fired his entire workforce who were not out on strike at the time, and then he just hired non union workers. So and a lot of anarchists from the metal Workers' Union had worked there. And so every time there was a picket, police and Pinkertons arrived armed to the teeth. Pinkerton's are the private security of the capitalists at this time?
Yes, yeah, So on.
May third, at the lumber Shover's rally, a few blocks away from the McCormick Reaper factory. They heard the McCormick bell strike the end of the day, and so all the lumber shovers ran over to join the picket and to throw rocks at the scabs who had stolen their jobs. The picketers drove the scabs back into the factory. Then the cops arrived, and then they threw stones at the cops, and then the cops drew revolvers and fired into the crowd. Two people at least were killed. No cops were so
much as injured. And I want to give you a sense of how the media handled this, the mainstream media, that bastion of neutrality. The New York Times reported it like this, Oh good. The eight hour movements spilled us first blood today and Joseph Vottlech, a lumber shover eighteen years old, was fatally wounded, and a dozen more strikers with bullet holes in their bodies. Representing the result of
the first encounter. There was a collision at McCormick's Reaper works between a mob of seven or eight thousand anarchist workmen and tramps maddened with free beer and free speech, and a squad of policemen. More than five hundred shots were fired, and hundreds of windows in the works were stoned. There are broken heads and bruised bodies all through the lumber District tonight. But the downtrodden masses have risen and had their fun.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, to be fair, New York Times, like I think it's like thirty years later came up with the concept of being a neutral newspaper, and they had not done so at this time, ah, or since Yeah, well they came up with the concept.
Thinking about that time they had the dictator of Turkey write a column or was that the Washington I forget Okay.
So the article goes on at like great length and it talks about how heroic the police are and how it includes all these like completely impossible details like the entire crowd roared in one voice kill the police, and.
How that does sound, don't I know?
And how But they also claimed that the crowd was throwing stones and then shooting guns in the air, but somehow, miraculously wasn't shooting at the cops even though they were ostensibly trying to murder the police.
Yeah, they were maybe trying to arc it down, you know, it's like Fielder, Oh yeah.
Yeah totally. They were like, we've read about these can using them as mortars.
Yeah.
So some of the anarchists who are there run off and they call for a demonstration the next day to be called at Haymarket Square. Most of the flyers just say like, hey, show up, but then a few of them show say hey, show up with guns. What the fuck?
Okay, because they well, that's good, that's going to get you in some Trump.
Yeah.
Just knowing the America, I know that's going to get you in some Trump and not judging it, but that's going to get you in some Trump.
And so first they printed the show up with guns one and then actually one of the people who later dies was like, uh, that's a bad idea. Yeah, that's going to get us in some trouble, and so they reprint it all. Fortunately they're all they all work for these newspapers they own, so they like because they all work for the different anarchists newspapers, so they can print
whatever they want. So then they print a new one that does not say show up with guns, but a couple hundred of the like show up with gun ones slip out, probably by accident. Maybe not by accident, who the fuck knows. So the next day, cops attack striking workers throughout the city. Some strikers destroyed a drug store that police were using to telephone back to their headquarters. But the rally, the one that had some flyers in, Hey, show but guns, was not fierce. It started off really late.
The turnout was like two thousand people instead of the twenty thousand people expected. Probably people have been frightened off because they were like, Oh, no, we don't actually want a war.
Yeah, we don't want to. Maybe this show up to the gun with gun situation isn't the right thing to bring my kids to.
Yeah, exactly exactly.
This may not be the one for me though.
Yeah. So a hundred cops are waiting in the wings and the mayor shows up, and the mayor is just there to make sure everything's peaceful. He was this like, he's a big free speech guy and a big free assembly guy and also a don't invite federal troops to shoot striking workers guy.
Well that sounds fine, it sounds like your best case scenario in this.
Exactly the best case scenario of a mayor. Absolutely, and he also but he doesn't actually have control of the police, which is completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. He tells the police what to do, and then they think about it, and then they do whatever they want. That's the same what what are you talking about. I've never heard of a COVID man that ever. They would obey it if it happened. Okay. So, so the mayor's friends are like, don't be so conspicuous, and he's like, no, I'm going
to be conspicuous. I want the people to know their mayors here because he's a reasonably stand up guy, you know, he seems he seems fine. So first this guy, August Spies goes up and he's the runs one of the newspapers. He's actually the one who canceled the police show up armed thing. I think I'm not entirely sure again cancel
culture yeah uh. And then Albert Parson goes up, and Albert Parsons he talks for like an hour, and I kind of suspect I wouldn't actually like Albert Parsons as a person, Like who shows him to this.
Mel You shouldn't ever talk for an hour at a round like minutes?
Yes?
Yeah, And so okay, So the mayor realizes that everything's fine, and the speakers are actually kind of toning down. Often they give speeches where they're like, we're gonna, you know, find the rich where they live and blow them up and all this shit. Like they're not subtle speakers normally, but they're being a little more subtle tonight because they're a little bit like, oh shit, oh shit, this is
all about to go really weird. So the mayor realizes it's fine, and he fucks off and he goes over to the cop shop and he tells the police captain to stand down. The police captain didn't agree, and then the third speaker goes on, and this is a guy named Samuel Fielden, and I just feel bad for this guy because he goes on at ten pm.
Feel for field Yeah, he goes on at.
Ten pm, a storm is rolling in. Most of the crowd disperses because the rain is coming, and then Albert Parsons, the fucking dick, is like, hey, everyone, let's go to the beer hall, even though Fielden is still up there speaking, And that's gotta be heartbreaking, Like you get all this adrenaline.
So he really seems like the dannie of this situation.
I once played a show where the main draw was the band that went on before me, and then everyone left, and then I just like played for like the person who booked the show, after like one hundred people have been watching the band before. It's like the same, only people end up dead. So but and he spoke to the two hundred or so people who were left, and at one point he made a reference to how the only thing to do with the law was to throttle it,
to kick it, to stab it. And two detectives who are watching it run off and tell the police Captain Bonfield that the speech was too naughty, so the cops come running immediately. Fielden was still speaking. He ended his speech with and I quote, people have been shot, men, women and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. It has no mercy. So at you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives,
your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with work and get a little relief or die on the battlefield resisting the enemy. What is the difference? Any animal, however loathsom will resist when stepped upon. Are men less than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me, I know that you have two. You have been robbed, and you will be starved into a worse condition. The
captain of the police orders the crowd to disperse. A light flashes through the air, falling into the crowd of police, and a bomb explodes. And that's what we'll leave it for today.
Okay. I do have a note, yeah, which is that I don't feel like snails and worms really do resist much when you step on them. I feel like, biologically he wasn't one hundred percent on there. I don't disagree with the statement in broad but I have stepped on the odd worm and I did not didn't seem like they resisted. I'm getting to into the week.
I mean, have you checked right above your bed and the rafters in the attic space.
Uh?
Yeah, it's always filled with worms. Yeah that like it's supposed to be.
No, they're they're there as organizing revenge.
Oh well that's probably fair. Yeah, Robert, we're talking about worms now.
Yeah, speaking of worms, do you have anything you want to plug that made no sense?
Well, my friend Margaret has a show called Cool People Who Did Cool Things, So you probably check that out.
Except that that's not the title. You were really close.
I was really close. What did we land on?
Stuff?
Cool?
People who did cool suck? Right?
We talked about whether or not to use stuff for things for like thirty minutes.
Didn't we there was there was a thirty minute combo and stuff was the choice.
I think I probably argued for stuff specifically too. This is great, I'm I'm I'm really see. This is why you got to have someone like me as the brains of this out but really keeping everything together.
Really, it's like the time that I changed it could when you wanted to name it could happen here, it can happen here, and I changed it, and then it.
Was just that's good, because then I would have been preemptively ripping off the book by the head of the ADL. It can't happen here. I was published a year and a half after It Could Happen Here came out and had a similar premise but wasn't wasn't at all related to my work and was not not at all anyway. It's fine, It's fine.
See I always hob You're back there we go.
Thanks, Sophie, You're welcome. BIG's head of the ad L.
Margaret is there where can people follow you?
You can find me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy, and you can find me on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy. And you can listen to my new podcast which is called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
And we'll be back on Wednesday with Part two. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.