Nashville now and then: A fatal fervor

Anarchist Adolph Fischer did not find a receptive audience in 1880s Nashville. But in Chicago's Haymarket Square, he was all too successful in drawing attention to his views.
[Article available without subscription]

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

The 'Haymarket riot' of 1886, as imagined by a popular magazine of the day. One-time Nashville resident Adolph Fischer was among the anarchists executed for allegedly throwing a bomb into the crowd during a rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square.

Yesterday passed quietly in the streets of Nashville. We've never been the types to get excited about May Day around here.

Yet there was at least a tenuous Nashville connection to the event that sparked the international phenomenon of celebrating the struggles of the working class on May 1.

This week in 1886, Nashvillians read the shocking news of a violent outburst in Chicago's Haymarket Square. At a time of great tension between industrial laborers and their employers, a crowd had gathered in the square on the evening of May 4 to hear anarchist speakers rail against the exploitation of labor and call for a limit of eight hours to the working day.

As the peaceful gathering neared its end, someone threw a bomb into the crowd. It killed a policeman, and the other cops on hand began firing wildly into the throng. Six more policemen and an unknown number of others perished. Though some of the workers were armed, it was later established that all of the policemen were killed by their own colleagues' bullets.

The Haymarket affair would go on to become an international cause célèbre. Commemorations of it developed into the May Day rallies and marches that Communist countries used to put on with considerable pageantry. Many in Europe and elsewhere still celebrate the holiday.

When Nashville printer William B. Fischer first heard the news of the riot, it must have sent a chill through him. His troublemaking brother Adolph was in Chicago, and this was exactly the sort of mess he was likely to get himself into.

William Fischer published the Anzeiger des Südens (Southern Gazette), a journal for his fellow German immigrants. He moved its operations from Little Rock to Nashville around 1880. His younger brother Adolph had sailed from their hometown of Bremen in the 1870s and served as his apprentice in Little Rock. Adolph then moved to St. Louis, married, and moved again, in 1881, to Nashville, where he worked for his brother again.

He didn't last long. William would later tell the Nashville Banner that Adolph "entertained radical opinions." The New York Times would report that Adolph tried to "advocate socialistic ideas" in the Anzeiger, but that William would have none of it.

Within a year, Adolph moved on to a German paper in Cincinnati. There, too, he clashed with the editor over politics and was soon fired. Finally, in 1883, he found kindred spirits and steady work in Chicago.

Adolph was setting type for the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers' Newspaper), working and living among immigrants who called themselves socialists and anarchists somewhat interchangeably. In 1886, many of those immigrants joined in a nationwide effort to mount a general strike against employers who would not agree to the eight-hour day. Marches were held in several industrialized cities across the Midwest and Northeast on May 1.

In Chicago, those protests passed off peacefully. They coincided, however, with an ongoing lockout at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, which had brought in replacement workers under the protection of some 400 policemen.

On May 3, locked-out workers were protesting at the factory gates when a shift change took place. As strike-breaking workmen exited, the protest turned into a massed attack on the "scabs." The police opened fire, and six of the protesters fell dead.

Adolph Fischer and his friends immediately planned a rally to denounce the police and support the workers. Fischer set to work on the Arbeiter-Zeitung's press, turning out flyers summoning their comrades to the Haymarket the next day.

The authorities had reason to worry about violence from this gathering. At least one surviving flyer, which may or may not have come from Fischer, carries the tag line: "Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!"

Small wonder, then, that the police turned up at the Arbeiter-Zeitung offices on the morning after the bombing and arrested Adolph, along with other staff members. Still, when a Banner reporter spoke with his brother on May 15, William expressed confidence that Adolph would be cleared of any wrongdoing. He had just had a letter from Adolph's wife saying that "they will be able to prove an alibi."

Several witnesses would ultimately back up Adolph's claim that he had walked into a tavern near the Haymarket by the time the bombing occurred. No evidence would ever emerge that he had been involved in the attack.

The ensuing legal process, however, would focus on Adolph's words, not his deeds. He had become a firebrand activist, and from the moment he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, he took every opportunity to grandstand about his beliefs with seeming disregard for the capital case pending against him.

The trial of the Haymarket anarchists spawned a forerunner of the international media frenzy later seen in such instances as France's Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s, the Rosenberg trial of the 1950s and the O.J. Simpson prosecution of the 1990s. Newspapers competed to provide saturation coverage of the trial of Fischer and his co-defendants. The mainstream press thoroughly demonized the anarchists in its coverage.

After the guilty verdict was announced, Fischer addressed the court. "This verdict, which was rendered by the jury in this room, is not directed against murder, but against anarchy," he said. "I feel that I am sentenced, or that I will be sentenced, to death because of being an anarchist, and not because I am a murderer."

Writing to the governor of Illinois two weeks before his execution date, Fischer said he opposed efforts by others to secure a commutation of his sentence — because any "mercy" would imply he was guilty:

"So I say society may hang a number of disciples of progress who have disinterestedly served the cause of the sons of toil, which is the cause of humanity, but their blood will work miracles in bringing about the downfall of modern society and hastening the birth of a new era of civilization."

On Nov. 11, 1887, Fischer and three other anarchists were led to the gallows at Chicago's Cook County Jail. A Chicago newsman, observing the condemned as they stood with nooses dangling before them, observed that "Fischer was much the calmest-looking of the lot."

After all the nooses and hoods were in place, one of the men yelled "Long live anarchy!"

Fischer echoed his comrade: "Long live anarchy! This is the happiest day of my life!"

The trap doors then opened. To the horror of many observers, it was apparent within seconds that the hanging had been botched. None of the men's necks were broken. Reporters began to count the seconds, and then the minutes, as they witnessed the slow strangulation of the men writhing before their eyes.

Fischer was the last pronounced dead, seven minutes and 42 seconds after he fell.

Three of the anarchists had been imprisoned rather than executed. In 1893, Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld pardoned those men and announced his belief that all of the Haymarket defendants had been innocent.

William Fischer continued to publish the Anzeiger des Südens until 1891. No copies of it are known to exist today, so it is not known whether he had any comment in his own publication about his brother's fate.

On June 30, 1886, as the Haymarket trial was beginning, a son was born to William and Annie Fischer in Nashville. They named him Adolph.

Birthdays of note this week:

• State House Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry (D-Memphis), former Nashville banker Dale Polley — May 5
• Baker Donelson Managing Partner Bruce Doeg — May 7
• Former managed care exec Sam Howard, mortgage banker Steve Wood Sr. — May 8
  

Each week, this column is made freely available to NashvillePost.com subscribers and non-subscribers alike. If you would like to be alerted by e-mail as each new edition is published, let us know at tom.wood@nashvillepost.com. Your personal information will not be shared with any outside entity.

"Nashville now and then" from the first week of May 2007:

Remembering the Nashville namesake of Andrews Air Force Base... Also: a Nashville-born spymaster in Bolshevik Russia meets a mysterious fate, and a few familiar surnames go out on the town in early May 1894.