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.
Welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoyan. Each week I take you way back into history to find people who were cool, who did stuff that was cool because they were cool, so they did cool stuff. This is part two of a two part series about heymarket the bomb that brings us the modern labor movement. So if you haven't already, you might want to do yourself a favor and go back and listen to part one.
But I'm not the boss of you. Do whatever you want.
And my guest this week is none other than Robert Evans. Robert, Hey, what's the what's the best way to describe you?
Here?
I am the boss of you? And if you listen to this one before listening to the first one, I will wreak a terrible vengeance upon your soul. Hell, And that's who I am. That's all I am is a force, a force for revenge of content. It's unclear what I am, Margaret, but I'm here to talk with you about this story.
And other people who were forces for revenge in their own right.
That's right, that's right, And the fact that revenge can sometimes lead to people being harmed that you didn't intend to harm, because once the consequences of actions can be unpredictable, exactly.
And we also have our producer Sophie here. Sophie, you want to say Hi?
Yeah, Robert, who Sophie, Robert, Sophie, Margaret, Hi.
Hi, Okay, so we're going to get back to it. Where we last left our heroes. Two hundred folks were at an anarchist rally in Chicago. Cops had shown up, someone had thrown a bomb, and I was pretty proud of that.
Cliffhanger, Yeah, great first week Cliffhanger.
Mm hmmmm, all sakes solid. Sylvester Stallone film Cliffhanger. Oh, good movie. Not enough mountain climbing thrillers these days.
Their bombs in it.
I think there might have been. Actually, there's definitely like terrorists and stuff. My memories of it are fuzzy. I haven't seen it, so I was like twelve or so, but probably I think probably.
So much like the bomb in the movie Cliffhanger, which I've definitely seen this bombly, Yes, Yeah, his bomb shattered windows for blocks around and one cop was killed immediately on the spot. The explosion was so loud that the mayor heard it from his bed. He had like ridden home on his horse, and then he got undressed and went to bed, and then he heard the explosion, and then they went to the window and he heard gunshots, so he ran back out. The cops drew revolvers and
they started firing wildly. Six more cops were killed. All of them were killed by other cops.
Awesome critical support.
And so because some of the anarchists were armed, right, the anarchists at the time were often armed, and some
of them might have even shot back. But like all the friend evidence of all of the bodies and all of the scene is like really strongly on the side that probably all of the cops were killed by all the other cops who were overreacting, and like one light post was entirely full of bullet holes that were all coming from the direction of the cops, so they like removed it and tried to destroy the evidence immediately.
That's just all such cop shit.
I know.
This is like the it's not the origin of cop shit, the origin of cop shit. Well, actually you covered very well, but it ties into some origin.
The origin. This is pretty early on in the concept of cop shit being a thing. Yeah, these guys were really breaking new ground in terms of shooting each other to death. There's a mutual friend of ours. I think Molly conjure goes through like the websites that are like end of Watch for cops and like boy howdy, a lot of cops die because other cops shoot them when they're doing like training in rooms and they're not like
practicing proper guns safety to each other. It's like had an uncommon way for a cop to go out.
Yeah, oh god. And that's how six of them went out, or eventually I think seven. One of them died like two years later from the wounds, well one of them. So it's called a riot, but it wasn't a riot. It was either a short and bloody massacre or at best, it was a short and bloody, pretty much one sided battle.
There was no rioting at any point, really, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It was all over within like five minutes, and there was no records of civilian casualties because basically everyone who was shot there was like I'm not saying shit, and they like dragged their friends' bodies away and like some of them went to the hospital, but most of them just went off to go find somewhere else because they all knew what would happen if they showed up
and said I was at this thing. Okay, So Samuel Fielden, the speaker, who's already having a rough night, you know, he's like going last, he's following a blowhard.
Yeah, boy, this is as a public speaker. This is definitely a rough, rough, rough gig crowd.
I know, although, okay, I'll go ahead and spoil that he actually has the best result of any of these people, of any of the people who get arrested. But he gets shot in the knee right away. And then as far as I can tell, a detective like snuck up and tried to assassinate the earlier speaker, August Spies, and then August Spies was saved by his brother Henry, who like got in the way or whatever and got shot in the groin for his trouble of saving his brother's life.
Boy.
And yeah, so one of the things that's kind of wild about it is that if the cops, if they'd waited a few more minutes, the meetium was basically over, it was raining field and was basically done.
They were speaker up there like people are done. Yeah.
Yeah, And it's kind of weird to try and think about it. Doesn't do you any good, but to try and think about how differently the history of Chicago and the US would have been if the cops had waited like a few minutes. But the thing is they probably weren't going to some folks back then and now think that the cops were going to attack the crowd. Whether or not they were going to like rolling with truncheons, or whether or not they were going to just like
open fire is kind of anyone's guess. But the guy who was in charge, Captain Bonfield, he had been itching to stamp out the anarchists like once and for all since earlier that day when he had like a council of war, and he basically he waited until the mayor was gone and the crowd was at its weakest and then attacked. His nickname was Blackjack because he liked beating people so much with his Blackjack as Billy Club that
it became his name for him. Yeah, he had such a reputation of beating people that at one point, some like owners of a gas works were like, hey, could you stop beating up our employees even when they're on strike. We actually need them, We need them to.
Be a breaking too many of their boats.
Yeah, so it might have wound up a massacre either way, whether or not the bomb was thrown, but it's it's hard to saying. Oh, and then one witness who was pro cop said that Bonfield during a wild every cops shooting every which direction, grabbed a second gun off of a fallen cop and just started dual wielding into the crowd's So this guy is probably more many cops than any of the Chago anarchists.
I'll bet he dropped a couple of them. Guns don't work great when you use them that way.
Yeah, okay, And so none of the anarchists who stood trial had thrown the bomb, but it's not like they were shy in the advocacy of dynamite.
Yeah.
In the years building up to Haymarket, one anarchist professor from New York wrote into one of the Chicago Anarchist papers saying that he carried a bomb around in his pocket all of the time to dissuade cops from approaching.
Just always be a potential suicide bomber. That's how you avoid arrest.
Yeah, which seems like it would work, but eventually backfire.
You know, it seems like it would work briefly.
Yeah. Quote was, you can learn to make tri nitro glycerine, and if you carry two or three pounds of it with you, people will respect you much more than if you carry a pistol my God. In another letter, another person advocating for the use of dynamite wrote, dynamite of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.
Wow.
Yeah. And so I bring this up because it's like, there's a lot of things that I love about the Chicago anarchists, but I think they were kind of just wrong about dynamite.
That's probably a little bit. Look. Will dynamite stop you from getting mugged? Perhaps? Yeah? Will it stop people from fucking with you? Perhaps yes? Is the best way to stop people from getting fucked with you carrying a tool that indiscriminately would destroy large chunks of a neighborhood if detonated, Perhaps.
Not right exactly. You just need to on threat modeling a little better. I feel like that's what they want good.
At I would say, like it would be a little bit like I mean, I I do intend to one day chop a twenty millimeter anti tank gun down to something that's legally a pistol and concealed carry it in case I get robbed, yeah, by obviously fighting vehicle on my way home from the grocery store. But I don't pretend that's good, like a good idea.
Right, And I think at some level some of these people knew that they were like participating in radical rhetoric because they liked radical rhetoric.
Yeah, because it's fun, because it's it sounds cool as shit. Yeah, Like that's definitely a character you want to put in a novel or like a movie's like the guy who's
just like yeah, I mean you introduced him. He's like walking home in the early morning, and this like cop sees him and like notices that he's some sort of like weirdo radical or or even ideally someone else is getting like fucked with by the police or by like some militia chuds or something, and he like walks in and they're like, well, what are you going to do about it? Then he opens his jacket and he's just
strapped with dynamite. Like yeah, absolutely, you can totally like definitely an intriguing character, but right, exectively, maybe not the best idea.
And so dynamite had actually been used in labor struggle before this, but no previous time had it targeted people at all. A couple of times it was used to destroy property, including once in the Washington Territory where someone dynamited the empty house of a guy who was foreclosing people out of mortgaged homes and evicting tenants from their rental homes.
Oh you know, I was just talking with it could happen here with Jake Hanrahan about the riots in Cyprus he was at and they're doing a version of this where they're destroying, like using incendiaries to destroy people's vacation homes because it's like making the cost of living untenable, like bombing vacation homes, you know, all right, Yeah, yeah, I have no I have no issue with that. You'll notice that I'm not condemning that tactic.
Yeah, but this is the first time that a bomb is thrown in a labor struggle that I'm aware of, at least in the United States. And it so this causes America's very first red scare, which we have a long and proud tradition of, and all across the country, everyone freaks out and it's like these damn anarchists and their dynamite and something must be done, don't you know,
And conspiracies go wild. The anarchists are going to level the city it's it's kind of hard to overstate how unhinged this whole frenzy wasah, And this is actually where the reputation of anarchists in the US comes from. Basically, the not picnics, not mutual aid societies, not supporting one another in labor struggle, just bombs. One hundred percent bombs. That's all an anarchist is is a walking bomb, which I guess is kind of like today and like smashing windows.
In total fairness, some of the anarchists were not We're not doing anything to dissuade that attitude.
It's true.
Well, I am literally a walking bomb. I always have to get on me in case I need to.
True it's true. Okay, So, to quote Paul Averich, the historian, about how the New York Times and other newspapers handled all of this, the New York Times offered the following prescription. In the early stages of an acute outbreak of anarchy, a gatling gun, or if the case be severe, too is the sovereign remedy. Later on, hemp and judicious doses has an admirable effect in preventing the spread of the disease.
The Philadelphia Inquirer recommended a mailed hand to each of the anarchists that America was not shelter for cutthroats and thieves, while the Louisville Courier Journal insisted that the blatant cattle should be strung up. The sooner the better. Judge Lynch is a tremendous expounder of the law. It is no time for half measures, agreed the Springfield Republican, urging the authorities to make an example of the ring leaders. There
are no good anarchists except dead anarchists. The Saint Louis Globe Democrat chimed in Globe is another one of those things that every newspaper had to be called Globe.
It was like one of the five were talking about him. They're talking about like hanging people, right. They're not saying, yes, get them stoned, right, Okay? Yes?
Yeah, no, Yeah, I mean that would probably work. If I was nervous about a bunch of anarchists who were threatening me, I might just buy them all weed. Yeah, I feel like they would his story anymore. Not a bad way to get anarchists on your side.
Yeah.
In Chicago, the cops raided everywhere. They raided like fifty gathering places. They raided people's homes. They never had any kind of warrants, They didn't bother. The prosecutor who later tried the case gave the cops permission by saying, make the raids first and look up the laws later. In one house, they confiscated a kid's pillowcases because they were red.
Okay.
Yeah, hundreds of people were arrested and tortured. Many of them were offered bribes for information, but almost everyone refused to cooperate.
Some people to say, live in their heads, rent free until you talked about all the folks that they tortured. Yeah.
For two months, all constitutional rights for everyone in Chicago were dropped based illegally like now was opened. Papers were shut down, Union gatherings were dispersed, public gatherings were banned. It just there was no rule of law in Chicago.
It does kind of seem like historically an awful lot of people are willing to end the concept of civil rights. As soon as someone says there's anarchists.
About right, which has some deep irony. Right, the anarchists are like law is bad, and they're like, no, we think laws really bad, and that's why we're going to suspend it, to go around and beat you all up and arrest you. And they arrested basically all the editors of all the anarchist papers except Albert Parsons, who fucked off to Wisconsin. And then Lucy Parsons managed to get arrested four times in the ensuing weeks. And you'll be shocked to know that they said racist and sexist shit
to her when they arrested her. Cops, I know at one point.
Well, this one's kind of bad to take my thin blue line flag down.
Well, they broke into her house, tied up her six year old kid on the floor, and then started spinning him around while screaming basically, where's your dad. We're going to hang him.
Oh my god, Jesus fucking Christ. Wow wow.
Yeah. In the end, a grand jury indicted ten of them to stand trial. Ten of the anarchists. One of them went state's evidence.
Uh.
Most of the rest were editors and printers at three of the newspapers, which was the English language The Alarm, the German language Arbeter de Tongue, which means worker paper. Because again, really really literal naming schemes.
Yeah again, and your pronunciation was perfect as as an expert of the German language, I think.
Oh.
Uh.
And then the third paper, dare anarchist, which means the anarchist.
You probably figured that part.
Out of the remaining people who got indicted, one of them was a young fire brand, and one of them was a guy who just took off. He just was like, I'm gone. They arrested him for like, his name was Rudolph Schnab and a lot of people say he's the one who threw the bomb. I actually don't believe this, and I'll get it more into that later. He was arrested in the aftermath of all of this, and then like but he spent like ten hours in the sweat box.
That ended up calling it the police where they put everyone in the sweatbox, and that's where they tortured them. He refused to talk. He was released, He completely just fucked off. He politely went and told his boss that he wasn't going to come into work for a bit, and then he just disappeared a gentleman.
I know.
He left Chicago. He made his way across the border into Canada, and then like some indigenous folks and then later international anarchists smuggled him to Europe and then South America, where he lived out the rest.
Of his days in peace, and well that's good.
Yeah, And he basically everyone was like, oh, this is the guy who threw the bomb. And I think actually, in some ways it kind of worked out for people to have everyone think it was this guy.
But he's out. Yeah. Yeah, but it.
Wasn't him, and he just didn't want to stand trial and he got to live a long and happy life for having made that decision. So they went to trial and it was a complete eight of them did and it was a complete sham. None of the eight defendants were accused of actually throwing the bomb. It was a murder trial and none of them were actually I mean, they were accused of doing it, but they didn't say you threw the bomb, but they said you're guilty of
murder because you're you, because you're an anarchist. And the judge who oversaw it was completely committed to conviction rather than obeying the law. Witnesses for the prosecution were usually paid by the prosecution. The jury was selected specifically in
order to convict them. And we know all of this because later the governor of Illinois wrote a pardon for everyone who was left, and he just it's a seventeen thousand word pardon that he wrote, being like Jesus Christ, everything that happened in this trial was wrong and basically a crime.
That's like three and a half episodes of Behind the Bastards for a part.
Yeah, so it's basically one of the most rigged trials in American history, which is saying something. I feel like they really went the extra mile here, and they had to find a lawyer to defend them, and everyone was like, I'm not going to fucking defend these people. I will never work again. But they found this guy who's I think really cool. He's one of my cool people. He was not an anarchist, he was a moderate, and his
name was Captain William Black. He'd been born a Southerner and then he betrayed his family as a teenager to volunteer for the Union Army.
So already he's kind of liking this guy. Yeah, I know, so it's pretty base from the start.
Yeah, and he was just this like he was like a rising star corporate lawyer, but he believed in the law. And they came to him and they were like, look, no one wants to take our case, and you're a really good lawyer, and we're not guilty, and it's so obvious, and he like did some soul searching. He's like, all right, I'm going to tank my entire career to defend you for barely any money. And he spent like two years of his life working on their case and tanked his career.
It didn't recover for decades afterwards.
Wow, what a fucking hero. Good for him.
I know, I like this guy. And then Albert Parsons turned himself in. I think it was like the first day of trial or something is very early on he just is like, Okay, I need to show up and stand in solidarity with these people. But also he thought he was going to win because it was so obviously a bullshit case against him, And so I think for some at the core of his heart, he still actually believed in the American legal system, which was entirely naive.
After a few months of trial, and they proved the defense proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of the defendants had made or thrown the bomb in question. The jury took three hours to return with a guilty verdict. Seven of them were sentenced to hang. One man, oscar Neve was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. I think I think only a tiny handful of people, maybe a few lawyers and the rare politician like actually believe in law. The judge and the prosecutor and the jury clearly didn't.
It was just a tool to be used to achieve their goal. The prosecutor and his final address to the jury said, they are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury. Convict these men, make examples of them, hang them, and you save our institutions, our society.
Our institutions are valid because we are happy to violate every tenant of them in order to blame these people to protect our institutions which are valid. Yeah, exactly. It really makes you feel for Black as like a guy who believes in institutions, but like, really, I am curious to learn more about what was going on in this dude's soul as this all shook out. It could not have been an emotionally easy thing to handle.
It was really hard for him. The Paul Average book talks about him a lot actually, and talks about how like hard on it was on him on him and his wife and like just how society treated him and all of these things, but how he ended up basically like friends with these people. Even he was like, I don't I don't agree with what they want, but I believe that they are like honest and upstanding people who are doing what they believe is right.
And there's a lesson there too for anarchists in the the value of speaking to moderates and sometimes they wind up torpedoing their entire life to defend you. You know. Yep, that's also a nice message to take out.
Totally Okay. So before the sentencing, they were each the judge allowed each one to make a speech, and the speech has lasted for days, mostly because Albert Parsons was there.
Right, but this guy, Yeah, I.
Feel bad making fun of this dude who's like he's gonna die, He's gonna die.
Yeah. No, I mean, look, no speech at a protest should last more than five minutes, but I think days is the right amount of time for this sort of speech to last. Yes, you can sit with it, you know.
And if you want to read these speeches, then they are the Haymarket martyrs are the advertisers who support this show because they're still alive and with us. And here are the ads that they are providing to us for you to hear.
Are you walking down the street with three to four pounds of dynamite on your body? Why not? Oh, No, one eight hundred dynamite today to buy enough dynamite to protect yourself from anything except for dynamite which you'll be much more vulnerable to.
Exactly. Here's the rest of the ads. Okay, we're back, And if you want to hear the rest of the speeches besides the ones that advertise on this show, I recommend that you go. If there's one thing that you follow up and read about Haymarket. The speeches are really beautiful pieces. And now I get to introduce to you all the defendants and it's kind of fun, kind of interesting people. They're mostly German. Fortunately I can pronounce most
of their names. So August Spies went first. We met him some already and he was the editor of the arbiter Zetongue. He was the oldest of five kids. He was born in central Germany. He was a Sagittarius. He was a happy childhood. He was raised to be a forester for the government like his dad until his dad died, and then he left school and emigrated to the US, and then he became an upholsterer. He opened his own shop. He saw someone give a lecture on socialism and he
was like, oh, that actually makes some sense. And then that eighteen seventy seven strike happened and he was like, oh, that really makes some sense. And soon enough he found himself an anarchist and he joined the leirand ver Veren and kind of ironically for the fight for the eight hour workday, he works like twelve to sixteen hour days at his German paper, and.
That is I mean, that's the thing with anarchists. It's like, no, we don't want to work an eight hour work day, but if I'm doing the thing I want to do, then I will work for like nineteen hours a day of course. Yeah, I want to be doing exactly. Yeah.
And he's this guy and he actually keeps a circle bomb on his desk in his office, and we don't know whether or not the circle bomb was actually like one of those old timey bombs circle and has a little fuse coming out of it. That was probably the type of bomb that was thrown at the cops. We don't know whether or not the bomb in his office had had any dynamite in it or not, And the historical record would really like you to know that August SPIE's was fucking hot.
That's good. Yeah, you know, I was going to ask, because I'm incapable of actually caring about people if they were not hot.
Right, well, you're in luck.
Actually, that's why I have created a new hot or not that is specifically for the victims of war crimes, so you can tell if you need to feel bad about a specific war crime by knowing if they were hot or not.
That's excellent. I look forward to using this service.
It's sponsored by Microsoft.
So August SPIE's was known as a ladies man. He's one of the only people wasn't already married at the start of all this thing. And he was, yeah, but he was also he was sardonic and haughty, but he also refused to lie. And he basically just like walked around and he threw around his charisma and charmed.
Women and men and they did.
And he once spoke in front of Congress about socialism and he just like went and he was like, yeah, we're gonna have a revolution, and he was like.
You get this guy's number.
He was like, we're not going to make the revolution. We're anticipating the revolution. We are His quote was birds of the coming storm, and it.
Was oh, oh, oh, I know, I know, and that's good.
Someone in Congress is like, well, why do you hate the individual with your socialism or whatever? And he's like, are you kidding me? It's the capitalists who treat workers like they're just cogs in the machine. And to quote from his final address to the court, not to Congress, but when he's sentenced to death. If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, the movement from which the downtroden millions, the million two oil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves
expect salvation. If that is your opinion, then hang us here. You will tread upon a spark. But here and there, and behind us, and in front of you and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.
Holy shit, that's I know. That's that's hot girl shit. Yeah, that's some hot girl shit. Yeah. Oh my god, did he write did he do his own like writing. Is this all him or does he have like, you know.
Yeah, he's team. That's kind of his thing, is he's he's one of the Yeah, the editors of these papers. They're also like publishing their own shit a ton. Sure, these people have been giving speeches and like writing propaganda.
That's like there their thing, you know. Which is why I think that they're both leaders of the movement and not is because they were actually more the propagandas who got put on trial in this trial rather than like necessarily the people who are organizing and like planning actions and stuff. Okay, so Michael Schwab goes and gives his speech next. And this guy's not as much of a talker. He's just a quiet, thoughtful man behind a big dark beard. He's married, he's a father of two. He's like just
a hard worker for the revolution. He's a reporter and editor for the Arbaderzetongue, and he ran the itwpa's library. He was just basically seen as a very gentle He was thirty two at the time of the bombing. And he was born in Germany with a peasant mother and a tradesman father, and he had a happy childhood until and this feels like a pattern. Maybe it's just the nineteenth century. His mom died when he was eight and his dad died when he was twelve.
Well, yeah, they made you know what, they made it a decent chunk of time. Yeah, it's true, kid, you're gonna have to carry yourself across that finish line. Yeah.
And so when he's like, I don't know, thirteen or something, and he apprentices to a bookbinder, and he starts working thirteen to seventeen hour days.
Yeah.
And then he joins a book binding union, and then the Social Democrat Party, and then and he decides that political liberty without economic freedom, as a mocking lie is like his big thing. He moves to Chicago. He quickly learns that American capitalism is no better than European which actually happens to a lot of people. A lot of the immigrants are like, oh, land of opportunity, and they're like, what, No, this is just as bad. I feel betrayed, And shortly
enough he becomes an anarchist. In his speech at sentencing, he said violence is one thing and anarchy another. In the present state of society, violence is used on all sides and therefore we advocate the use of violence against violence, but against violence only as a matter as a necessary means of defense. Then you get oscar Nebe. He was another worker at the arbiterszetongue really wasn't a good time to be in the newspaper business, and he was the
only one who wasn't sentenced to death. He'd been born in the US to German immigrants, and he worked basically every kind of job from cook to tinsmith. So then he was unemployed for a while, and at the time of his arrest he was a yeast peddler. He I don't even know what kind of yeast, but he would go around to a car art in the street, just like get your.
Yeast east for sale.
Yeast for sale, Yeah, like fixit with your dynamite, Robert.
The main thing that he wanted people to know at is very short speech was that he wanted to be hanged too. His quote is for I think it is more honorable to die suddenly than to be killed by inches. I have a family and children. If they know their father is dead, they will bury him. They can go to the grave and kneel down by the side of it. But they can't go to the penitentiary and see their father who was convicted for a crime that he has had nothing to do with.
Well, yeah, sada know, hard to argue with the logic though.
To and then his wife died while he was in prison and he wasn't allowed to go to a funeral.
Jeez.
And then we get Adolph Fisher. Adolph Fisher's not a common name.
Any close to being a bad name.
Yeah. He edited Der Anarchist, which was the more radical paper than Arbiter's Etongue, and he advocated less for a mass movement and more for autonomous actions by individuals and collectives. He was born in Germany. He was a second generation socialist. He moved to America worked as a typographer, and then as soon as he moved to Chicago, he joined the leer Veren, the militia, and when he was arrested he
was armed. He had a presumably legally both a revolver and a dagger, and then one cop took his revolver out, pointed at his head. Another cop put the dagger to his chest, and they only didn't kill him when the lieutenant intervened because they wanted him to stand trial. Instead, and in prison, two of his co defendants, who didn't
speak English, entrusted him to translate their autobiographies. And basically he was this like he just worked constantly and to give money to the cause, and he was really looking forward to the revolution. And he gave the shortest speech of them all, which included, I was tried here in this room for murder, and I was convicted of anarchy. I protest against being sentenced to death because I have
not been found guilty of murder. However, if I am to die on account of being an anarchist, on account of my love for liberty, fraternity, and equality, I will not remonstrate. If death is the penalty for our love of freedom of the human race, then I say openly I have forfeited my life, but a murderer I am not. I just really like all these speeches.
Yeah, okay, these were really really good lines. All right.
Then we get to lewis Ling. Lewis Ling is a crowd pleaser. He was the youngest, he was twenty one when the bomb was thrown, and he had a watertight alibi. There's no way he could have thrown the bomb. Do you know why he couldn't have thrown the bomb.
Was he making more pomps?
Yeah, he was, he was. He was too busy at home making bombs.
Incredible, I know.
And when the cops came to arrest him, he tried to go down fighting, and he almost killed one officer with his bare hands before the other one like knocked him down.
Unbelievable, What a chad.
And then The New York Times, which was completely untrustworthy of a source at the time, especially back then, says that while he was on the carriage on the way to jail, he basically said, it all would have been worth it if only I had been able to kill that police officer, which frankly he might have said.
Yeah, I looked based on the man you've described, I don't think the police maybe lied about that one.
Yeah, exactly.
And that sounds in line with our boy.
Yeah, okay. So he had just shown up in the US ten months earlier, before all this shit happens. He had been born in Germany, and then he had a happy childhood until you'll be shocked to know. Well, first his dad was thrown out of work for a workplace accident, and then he died shortly thereafter. And he and his sibling and his mother fought starvation every single day. He fled Europe to avoid the draft, and then he joined the Carpenter's Union soon found work as an organizer. People
liked him. He was really scrupulous, honest, and up front, which was basically universal among all the Chicago anarchists, which I think fucking rules, because if you're going to be all about something, just be honest. I mean sometimes you go lie to avoid certain situations.
Yeah, but it's like it's like it was a Bob Dylan that said that to live outside the law, a man must be honest. I forget where that came from, but.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's what these people are doing. Okay, And I know you're you're wondering where lewis Ling lays in the relative hotness of the various defendants.
I am literally incapable of caring about this story emotionally until I learned.
Okay, Well, if you want to, should google lewis Ling. It's two g's and ling, And don't use the photo from Wikipedia as the example. Find one where his hair is shorter and he doesn't really have a beard.
He kind of looks like Elijah Wood Yeah, that's true. He's got a little bit a little bit of a like, kind of a broader chin, but like a little bit of that Elijah Wood vibe his teeth zone. You could like cast Elijah Wood to play this guy and it would work pretty well.
I would love to watch that.
Okay.
And in case you're wondering whether I wonder whether any of the Haymarket folks were queer, I want to read you this description of lewis Ling, written by William Holmes, another anarchist in their circle. Ling was one of the
handsomest men this writer has ever met. His well shaped head, crowned with a wealth of curly chestnut hair, his fine blue eyes, his peach and white complexion, and straight regular features made him a fit model for a Greek god, while his athletic form and general activity showed him to be possessed of an abundance of physical vigor and health.
Well, that just sounds straight as hell to me, Margaret, Yeah, totally, yeah, and fortunately it was kind of sound super straight.
Yeah, describing the straightest situation in the world. And to be fair, like heterosexuality and homosexuality like didn't exist as concepts at this point.
No, and so homosexuality. The word was invented by a German dude in like the eighteen nineties.
Yeah, that sounds about right, But I've got my head canon and that's what matters here. But he was also he was a sex symbol in the anarchist scene. Like younger men adopted his haircut and his quote lithe way of walking around the ballroom at all the anarchists balls to get called his name was like the highest compliment you could give someone, and his speech was the fieriest of the bunch. He delivered it in German, and he ended it with I'm not gonna do the whole thing
in German. I'm not gonna do any of it in German. He ended it with I repeat that I am the enemy of the order of today, and I repeat that with all my powers, as long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. I have told Captain Shack, and I stand by it. If you cannonade us, we will dynamite you. You laugh, you think you'll throw no more bombs, But let me assure you
that I die happy on the gallows. So confident am I in the hot that the hundreds and thousands to whom I've spoken will remember my words, and when you shall have hanged us, then mark my words, they will do the bomb throwing in this hope. I say to you, I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your force propped authority. Hang me for it. He wasn't actually right about the everyone else doing the bomb throwing part is kind of for better or worse. I'm not actually
sure one way or the other. But now we get George Engel, who I have a tattoo of on my arm. I'm gonna show you the tattoo even though no one else can see it.
So you're saying you really really don't like this person.
Yeah, this is definitely my least favorite person, this stick figure drawn.
On my arms, the tattoo I have of Roger Stone. Yeah no, yeah, exactly, Jesus, that's cute. Okay.
So George Engel is the oldest of them all, much like Robert's Roger Stone, and he's about fifty years old, and he owns a toy shop with his wife, and he works for a deanarchist and he was He was born in Germany. You'd be shocked to know this. He was orphaned young, oh whoa, and he was taken in by a painter who apprenticed him. He came to the US.
He found the US just as bad as Germany. He first joined the Socialists, but he grew disillusioned by all their politicking, the maneuvering, the opportunism, the rigged election, the compromise of principle. So he joined the anarchists. And he wasn't a speaker or a writer. He was just this guy who supported the movement with absolute sincerity. But he was also one of the most radical in his beliefs
of the whole bunch. Like he'd probably the night before the Haymarket rally, he'd probably been meeting in a bar with some other of the more radical people like not parsons and spies and all those to figure out how with the like two thousand armed men they had that if they needed to, they could take the city, Like which places they would raid to get more guns and shit? Yeah, and which you know you've just watched everyone get shot
in the middle of the big uprising. He also hated Schwaben Spis because they weren't radical enough, and he hadn't been on speaking terms with Spis. I just I kind of hate the idea that you have to like go face the death penalty with people you have like really serious scene drama with.
I mean, I would hope he would be like at that point, like, well, Okay, maybe we had disagreements before, but clearly we're all committed to the same degree now that we're about to get executed, Like, I can't really hit them for not being committed enough as we're all about to die together, you would, right.
I think I think so. I think he like didn't like he doesn't like super trust them, but he's like, yeah, okay, like.
This is yeah, we're all about to die together, so yeah, probably shouldn't fetch too much.
Yeah. When they arrested him, they just literally showed up at his house and disappeared him and his family didn't know what happened to him for days until his daughter went to the jail and then heard him like singing distantly down the cell block. And in his final address to court, he said, we see from the history of this country that the first colonists won their liberty only
through force, that through forced slavery was abolished. And just as the man who agitated against slavery in this country had to ascend the gallows, so also must we he who speaks for the working men today must hang. And then Samuel Fielden, this is the guy who couldn't get a break, got shot in the knee, spoke last the rally. He wasn't German, which is a big break from everyone else.
He was born a parent survived to see him hit the ripe old age of eleven.
I think so, actually, yay. He's kind of the kind of comes out this whole thing the winner, as much as you can win this particular this is like a it's like a squid games thing, and he wins. He's born a poor weaver in England, like he starts working at the age of eight, so I feel like you can say you were born a weaver at that point. And he works into cotton mills that Karl Marx and George Engel based their whole analysis of how the how shitty the English working class have it like on the
cotton mills in his town. And he cuts his political teeth in England, speaking on behalf of the Union in the States and against slavery. Then he moves to the US and he takes whatever work he can, and he's like a Methodist traveling preacher, and he travels the South and becomes dismayed by the conditions of black folks there.
He's white.
He settled in Chicago, and then he started working twelve to fourteen hour days as a stonecutter. And then he found himself as a speaker for the anarchists again, the kind of like the C List one. And he's the treasurer for the IWPA. And when he speaks in the courtroom apparently it actually he kind of pulls it off.
It actually.
A List speaker. Today it brings the entire courtroom to tears, and the prosecutor laughs and says, it's a good thing the jury hadn't been here to hear this speech before they made their verdict.
Jesus, what a goblin.
Yeah, he really is. In his speech, Fielden says, we feel satisfied that we have not lived in this world for nothing, that we have done some good for our fellow man and done what we believe to be in the interest of humanity and for the furtherance of justice. If my life is to be taken for advocating the principles of socialism and anarchy, as I have understood them
and honestly believe them in the interest of humanity. I say to you that I gladly give it up, and the price is very small for the result that is gained. I will now read the entire speech of Albert Parsons. No, I'm just kidding. Albert Parsons goes up. He's last. He speaks for eight hours over two days. Any kind Yeah, he kind of just loses his way and rambles a lot.
Like vamping a bit.
Yeah, yeah, And I get the impression that this whole ordeal actually breaks him harder than it breaks the other folks, or he breaks in a different way maybe, And he has very few like Baller lines that are worth repeating. But near the end he said, I have nothing, not even now to regret. Well, speaking of regrets, here the ads that support this show. Okay, So the appeals go
on for over a year. They reach all the way to the Supreme Court, who decides against the anarchists, and Lucy Parsons and a bunch of the other people from the IWPA spend the whole time traveling the country giving talks about the trial and the defendants, and this is happening in the middle of all this hysteria, right, Lucy's arrested like multiple times over the course of this, and her events are shut down everywhere she goes, but it's
still largely successful. The moment of panic recedes, and then popular opinion starts to shift back towards the defendants, and the rest of the labor movement manages to find its spying again. At the beginning, the labor movement's like, whoa, we don't know these guys, even though they were all involved in all levels of the labor movement. And then eventually the labor movement's like, okay, okay, maybe we know
these guys. And it led to this peak and people paying attention to what was going on, and people becoming anarchists.
The Arbiter Zetongue. That newspaper goes from four thousand subscribers to ten thousand as more and more people see the hypocrisy of the government and adopt socialist and anarchist views, and there's rallies across the country, in the world, and then kind of again ironically or fittingly, some of the most ardent supporters at this time end up being people who hate their politics, but hate even more so to see the US legal system be like just made a
mockery of by this trial. And now the prisoners are all celebrities. They're doomed celebrities. But I want to tell you about what August Spies gets up to while he's a celebrity, because he couldn't be fucked to get married before. But he finally marries once he's in jail. Y. Yeah, and he marries a woman he had never met who just started coming to the trial. Awesome, and she's an heiress, Nina van Zandt is an heiress to a fortune and
is a member of high society. And it is like crazy scandalous through all the papers and apparently some of the other defendants are like, don't do this, this might affect the case or whatever, and he's like, no, I'm marrying this lady. But he wasn't allowed to attend his own wedding, so his brother, the one who got shot in the groin defending him, is a stand in as a proxy for the wedding, and they basically got married so that she could keep visiting him in jail and
I actually think these were not conjugal visits. I think that they like never got to do more than like once kissed through the bars in a very dramatic and romantic way. Yeah, I knows. She's kind of interesting. She gives up like a four hundred thousand dollars inheritance, which because her her family's pissed off about this, which is twelve million dollars today Jesus.
And she wow, So it's definitely not like poverty tourism. She actually like makes it, oh sacrifice.
She moves to poverty that she's like, I like this town.
Yeah.
And she she keeps her name.
Of the chicken the common People song.
Yeah, exactly, I love that song. It's a really good bitter song to listen to a song. Yea, so so cause Nina Speeds keep now. Now, Nina Speeds keeps her name even after her husband dies, and she even like gets remarried and then divorced and then goes back to the name Spies because she's now a committed I presume anarchist, and she lives in poverty. She ends up an old lady who collects stray cats and dogs, and she marches
in labor demonstrations and she's still alive today. No, but that would rule, like.
If you got to like that would be amazing.
So the Supreme Court says, no, fuck these guys. So then they moved to a strategy of trying to get the governor to give them clemency and commute their sentences to life in prison. And they get thousands of letters from support from all walks of life, radicals and moderates, and there's still probably more Americans who hate them, but it's like, well, this is something that's totally unfamiliar to
modern society. Society was very polarized by this, and a lot of the moderates instead to ended up taking radical positions on one side or another. The son of John Brown writes them a life and sends them a fruit basket, and he he says, basically, I support you, and my father would have supported you, and that had he had the chance, John Brown would have been a socialist too, since what he believed in was the quote community plan of cooperative industry. The fruit basket is a nice touch.
The fruit basket is a nice touch. I hope that they were Like there's always that debate about like would John Brown have been like problematic today because he was you know, he was also a religious extremist. Yeah, totally, which is the thing that can go a couple of ways. But no, I think his kid's probably right. I think he I think being on the right side of slavery to that extent at that time means he probably would have been on the right side of a lot of things.
Yeah, and you know who would know better than the kid who's name John Brown Junior, you know, m h And in the end, only three of the But okay, so they do all of his work to get clemency, and only three of them end up actually writing the governor for clemency because there's a big problem to write the governor for clemency. Have to say you're sorry.
Oh they are not sorry, so so Field and then Schwab are like, sure, whatever, we're sorry. Yeah, hey man, could you not kill us?
And then Speez says I'm sorry too. But then Speez freaks out, has this moment of like everyone gets calls him a sellout, and he's like, no, no, I take it back, and he writes the governor's second letter. He's like, no, I'm just kidding. Not only am I not sorry, but you should kill only me and leave out, like leave everyone else.
Go.
Wow, that's a man who values values the clout.
Yeah, you know, original clout chaser August Speed.
Yeah, it's fun. Okay, and then I mean it's not fun. But honestly, anything you do in that situation is fine. I agree. I would never judge anybody for being like, well, I will say I'm sorry to not get murdered. Yeah. Fine. At the same time, I also respect heavily anyone who would be like, fuck that shit, I ain't sorry. Yeah, like you can hang my ass.
Parsons ended up actually the most torn because he's the one who's like really like, you know, he's kind of broken at this point, but he's a true believer, right, and he's basically like asking all his friends for advice. He's like, what do I do? What do I do? And then one of his friends, this guy named dire Lum, is like, honey, Albert, what you should do is die. And Albert's like, oh, thank you. You're the only one willing to tell me that.
Thank you.
That is so chances, I know. So he decides to die, and so he writes an open letter to the governor and his open letter says, look, if I'm innocent, let me go, and if I'm guilty, kill me. So the governor grants clemency at like the final hour to field in the Schwab and the five who refuse to say they're sorry where to die. And now I'm going to tell you who threw the fucking bomb?
Eh?
Yeah, good, okay, because the anonymous bomber comes back into play at this point, we don't know for sure, right, but historian Paul Average has done more work than anyone who I actually trust about this, And Albert Parsons was convinced a cop did it. It was like a Pinkerton did it. He's like, oh, it's a false.
Flag attack, right, false flag attacked.
Yeah, But basically, probably while all this is happening, the bomber was probably this guy named George Schwab who's completely unrelated to Michael Schwab, and he fucks off to New York after the bomb is thrown, and then when they're sentenced to die and everything, like the Supreme Court thing fails and all this shit, he's like, a, hey, should I come forward? Will that save these people's lives? If I say I'm the one who did it? Will they be let go? And they all kind of think about it.
And when I say they all not everyone, like the defendants don't know this except the two autonomous ones who are more not actually lewis Ling, but the two autonomous ones who ran dare anarchist. They end up knowing about it. And they finally they sit down and they're like, no, if you come forward, you're just going to die too. It's just one more victim of capitalism if you come forward.
Yeah.
So the bomber is like, all right, and he does not come forward.
That's a lot to live with. Yeah.
And then lewis Ling not only did he not write for clemency, he actually had his name taken off the Supreme Court case because he was he was, I'm done with capitalist justice. I have nothing to do with any of this.
Wow.
So a week before the execution, guards find bombs in his cell. He has four bombs, and I always thought that they were there to like affect a prison break, but apparently the fuses were like a set a second or two long, so they were almost certainly there so he could kill himself. But they find the bombs, so he doesn't get to kill himself in a nice clean, explodeing way. And instead, the day before the execution, lewis Ling has somehow got a hold of a blasting cap.
There's a lot of different claims about how he got it there. He puts it in his mouth and he blows himself up, takes his own life. But because it's only a blasting cap, it takes six hours.
For him to bleed to death.
Oh Jesus, And since this is his exit from history, I'll say that a few days before he died, his mother and aunt had written him letters, and his mother wrote, I will be as proud of you after your death as I have been during your life, and his aunt wrote, whatever happens, even the worst, show no weakness before those wretches.
So he had supportive family. That's good. The one person whose family wasn't dead.
I know exactly. And then the night before the execution, all the condemned men they're sitting around, they're smoking cigars, and they're talking with jailers. Its apparently somehow very friendly. Parsons keeps like singing and reciting poetry every chance he gets. I'm pretty sure Parsons has lost his mind, which I do not blame him at all. I'm cert sure entirely my mind in this in this environment.
I've lost my mind on like five hour long flights before. Yeah.
Yeah, George Engel my favorite. He talks with the priest who comes to offer him his last rites. And I'm going to say quote what he said to the priest in the shadow of the gallows. As I stand, I have done nothing wrong. I have not done everything right during my life, but I have endeavored to live so that I need not fear to die. Monopoly has crushed competition, and the poor man has no show. But the revolution will surely come and the working man will get his rights.
Socialism and Christianity can walk hand in hand together as brothers, for both are laboring in the interests of the amelioration of mankind. I have no religion but to wrong no man and to do good to everybody. And I just it's a cool guy. Yeah, he's being nice to the priest that he didn't even call for He like, as the priest is leaving, he's like, look, hey, I know that was weird, but I didn't even call for you. Okay.
The execution. On the morning of the execut there's three hundred cops and they're guarding the prison like it's a fortress, and there's once again gatling guns laying in wait, and for once, the media is right. The media is on about how an army of anarchists is going to descend on the place and free them all. But actually the anarchists had come up with a plan like that, and actually it was the condemned men who are like, guys, it's over, it's fine, let us just get this over with.
And so that's why there's no massive last minute jail break. Lucy Parsons shows up to see her husband. She has her two kids in tow, and an officer tries to stop her. She says, you're gonna have to fucking kill me, and then she just like pushes her way through the police line. However, they then arrest her, strip her naked, leave her in a cell with her kids until after her her husband was hanged Jesus with a noose around
their neck. Each man shouts their last words. Spies says, there will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangled.
Today.
Angle shouts in German uh Hoch, the anarchy or Hurrah for anarchy. Fisher shouts, also in German, hurrah for anarchy. This is the happiest day of my life. And then Parsons he says, I feel bad making fun of him right now, but I'm just gonna do it. I'll just quote him. We'll make fun of himself. I'm sorry, Parsons, you were a great guy. Parsons says, will I be allowed to speak? Oh, men of America, let me speak, Sheriff Mattson, Let the voice of the people be heard.
Oh.
And then the trap opens, and the hanging was done wrong, and they took long life. They took minutes to strangle. I think it took seven minutes for the last one to die.
Sure that was an accident, Yeah, I'm.
Sure, you know classic whoops. I've been doing this my whole life, and I just somehow slept up and didn't break their necks. Their funeral march had twenty thousand participants and two hundred thousand onlookers. And again, I actually should have looked up the population Chicago at the time, But two hundred and twenty thousand people in eighteen eighty seven. It's a lot of people, a lot. Yeah, it's the
largest funeral that had ever been seen in Chicago. And basically, unions and radicals across the world commemorate their deaths and still do on May first, and which is the Worker's holiday, Like I said at the top, in every country of the world except the US, where they can't handle the radical stuff.
Yep. Yeah.
But to close out the rest of our characters, you want to know what happened to Captain Blackjack Bonfield, right, the cop who charged the crowd. Well, yes, he was caught taking bribes, and among the stolen goods he was storing was the personal effects of lewis Ling. Everyone had been like, hey, where's lewis Ling's stuff, and the cops like, oh, I don't know. And it's because this dude has stolen it. He gets fired, which is actually that might be a sign of the times having changed in a bad way.
He actually gets fired for this.
And.
That's actually the impetus to get start getting the pardon pushed forward. Is they're like, look, the main guy for the prosecution was a piece of shit, corrupt cop, and they get pardoned. A progressive as elected governor of Illinois in eighteen ninety three, and he once again he tanks his entire career. It costs him the reelection, but he pardons the remaining He frees the remaining three who are still in prison, and he posthumously pardons the five who died.
And he never managed to get back into office after doing that. But well, he actually cared about justice.
Good for him. Yeah, another moderate who made a sacrifice. Yeah, for these people. That is nice to see a couple of times, in addition to all of the ones who stopped by and did nothing. But yeah, yeah, Okay.
Then there's the fun of the cop statue. In eighteen eighty nine, the police put up a statue in Haymarket Square in honor of the fallen officer, the only one who had actually.
They oh, the one who didn't get killed by other cops. Yeah, exactly.
For some reason, they didn't do one of all the people who had been murdered by officers. It wasn't a picture of dual wielding blackjack shooting down other cops.
A monument to the cops killed by other cops.
It's called critical support the monument. Yeah, all right, so the model for this cop, they don't use the actual dead cop as the model. They take a living cop a guy named Birmingham, and he's crooked as shit.
Was the dead cop ugly? Were they just like that guy's not sexy enough for a statue.
Yeah, I gotta assume. So they pick a crooked cop who then gets fired for fencing stolen goods.
Incredible, Yeah, an amazing monument.
And then in nineteen oh three someone steals the crest of the city off the statue. In nineteen twenty five, a street car driver, probably on purpose, jumps the track with the street car and plows down the statue. It gets moved to a place called Union Park. On May fourth, nineteen sixty eight, it was defaced with black paint. The next year, the Weathermen, who are the radical fact part of a radical faction of the anti war movement, they just fucking blow up the statue.
Ah, nice to hear they got one of those bombs, right, Well, they get two of them, right because then yeah, they got a couple, right, Well, they get at least to them, right, because they rebuilt the statue.
And then a year later the weathermen blow.
It up again.
Excellent, And then it was rebuilt once more, and now it's in the lobby of the Chicago Police headquarters. Where every day every cop can see a statue of a crooked cop. And this didn't win not the cop statue, but hey market, it didn't win them the work eight hour workday. But as far as I can tell, it didn't actually delay it as much as sometimes people say. The labor movement in the US and especially worldwide actually grew and eventually with this and basically, one by one,
various trades and unions one better hours. By nineteen thirty seven, the Fair Labor Standards Act finally won it for more or less everyone nationwide.
That's good.
Anarchism in Chicago kind of faded after the trial, but anarchism worldwide grew, and basically everywhere you would go across the world, in any kind of labor hall, you would see the Haymarket martyrs, you see pictures of them. It leaves me with this like really complicated takeaway, right, because their rhetoric of violence is kind of what got them into this mess on some level.
Yes, and certainly all of the dynamite had an impact on all of the dynamite.
Right, But it's really hard to say whether the end result was positive or negative for the labor movement. For anarchism, for any of these things. It's like it's it's almost
impossible to parse out. And then and one of the things that I'm left thinking about with this is that, like a lot of the stories of Haymarket that you'll read and in sort of more mainstream papers will be like, oh, there was this good protest movement and some anarchists came and fucked it all up by throwing a and that leaves out the fact that it was the anarchists who organized not the whole thing, but a huge chunk of it in the first place, and certainly the thing that
got fucked up by someone throwing a bomb. And I feel like that happens a lot, is that people like radical people end up organizing this, and then that that work is forgotten about. And then my final note is that Lucy Parsons, who I opened the story up with, she stayed involved her entire life, and she ended up helping form the union the Industrial Workers of the World in nineteen oh five, who probably wanted to get their own episode, and she used the lessons of Haymarket to
teach young radicals. In the nineteen twenties, the Chicago Police Department declared that she was quote more dangerous than a thousand rioters, and that feels like something to aspire to.
Yeah, yep.
So Robert, how are you feeling about Haymarket.
I mean bad, it doesn't I mean on the whole bad time. I feel good that a lot of people came around to the fact that it was bullshit when in terms of talking about like the long term value of something like this, it's not bad that the kind of inherent contradictions and factileness of the system and how it exists primarily not to achieved justice but to do violence against people who threaten power like that, that's not bad. Like,
it's useful that that was done. I don't know how much comfort that was for the families of the deceased, but it seems like it was some comfort for most of the deceased. And May Day is a good holiday.
It is a good holiday.
Dare I say cool people who did cool stuff?
I hope. So, yeah, it's pretty pretty cool, you know. I went to my favorite May Day that I've been to was in Berlin. And in Berlin, one of the things they do on May Days is all of the bars kind of like move out into the streets, like they'll just set up like kiosks and stuff with their beer, and for one night it's allowed to just like throw your bottles everywhere. So there's just like snow drifts of
shattered glass all over the streets and it's fine. Apparently this one night you can break glass all you want all over the damn place. And I had this very fun moment of just like shattering god knows how many Ibria bottles over the street. And then at one of the s Bahn stations, my friend like stopped to piss in like a corner, and will you get immediately ticketed by the jury place?
That's just taking it too far.
There's kids hucking bottles at the streets. Size yeah, just like all right, but this isn't okay.
Yeah, we have laws here, we have rules here.
Yeah, we have one less rule tonight, but we have rules here.
Yea.
Anyway, thank you, Margaret, this has been a hoot. Yeah, thanks for coming on. And dare I say a holler? Yeah? Oh that's too much.
Do you have anything you want to plug? Robert Evans?
Never never heard of you, Robert Evans.
Do you have anything?
I've certainly never heard of.
Me, David, do you host any podcasts.
I do the Dynamite Cast where we talk about the health benefits of a dynamite enriched diet, which are none. There are Well, actually, it would probably help with certain heart conditions, right, because nitroglycerin is literally used in one form as a heart medication. So I guess there are some ways that ingesting dynamite might potentially help you. But I doubt it would. I doubt it would work if you just were to take the form used as an explosive as.
A heart medication. But I don't actually know you're using it wrong. I don't know, Like, Okay, have you ever had a headache? Okay, now if you don't want to have a headache, you could explode your entire body.
Well, now that's you. See this is you're really getting onto the subject of my new self help book, The Explosion Driven Life.
So so from what I got from what Robert just said, he was saying, listen to it could happen here. Uh And and buy his book After the Revolution.
And check out my new book, The four Dynamite Workweek and The four Dynamite Body both go great together and will teach you how to change your life with just four sticks of dynamite amazing Margaret.
Where can people follow you?
People can follow me on the internet on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy and on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy.
Who what we do do Well?
We'll be back next week on Monday with another allegedly with another cool person who may have done in fact something cool, right Margaret.
With lots of caveats as always, Yep, Cool people Coming up?
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com. Check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.