When Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano visited Chicago on a book tour in the mid-1980s, he only had one special request: that local friends take him to the Haymarket district, near the corner of Randolph and Desplaines.
Galeano laments that May 1–adopted as International Labor Day a few years after the Haymarket episode–is just a day like any other in the U.S., and that “no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.” Then he writes about going to a Chicago bookstore and finding a poster that seemed to be waiting just for him, a poster that summed up his failure to find a single marker at the Haymarket site. The poster displays an African proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.”
“I’ve been told that people have come to the site and simply broken down into tears when they found there was absolutely no demarcation there,” ILHS President Leslie Orear testified to the committee, adding that he often led foreign labor leaders to the unmarked area himself. “People come from all over the world to the site in awe, like it is a holy place.”
The lead story of the May 1992 “Illinois Labor History Society Reporter,” a monthly newsletter edited by Orear, features a photo of the Desplaines-Randolph street sign; it looks northwest to the site of the proposed park. “Not much to look at, but real possibilities!” reads the caption. “This is the now official designated site of the Haymarket Tragedy in Chicago.” The folks at the ILHS aren’t the only ones who have thought about sprucing up the site. Sometime in the late 1980s, according to Joan Pomeranz, a former Landmarks Commission staffer who researched the Haymarket site, “the [city] Planning Department was looking at the opportunity to enhance the appeal of the area, and one possibility was to create a public space with historic commemoration.” During the February 1992 hearings Mazola had testified in favor of upgrading and historicizing the area, re-creating the Haymarket era with quaint touches like gaslights and cobblestones to enhance tourism.
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A Planning Department spokesperson who refuses to go on record says that [a few dozen] bronze, 18-by-18-inch Chicago Landmark plaques (including one for the Haymarket site) “are being processed now.” The city contracts with Wagner Brass Foundry, near Elston and Cortland; each plaque costs about $500, including installation. Budgetary constraints have played no role in the historic plaque backlog. “We do get the money,” he explains. “It’s a special allocation, a lump sum, every five years. It’s best to order in volume; it pays to order 20 to 30 at the same time. We’ve found that’s the most responsible way of dealing with these things.” For the Haymarket plaque, he says, the inscription on the plaque and its location have “yet to be determined.” Since historic designation plaques must be put on city-owned land, Michael, like Orear, assumes that the Haymarket plaque will be placed on a pedestal in the Randolph Street lane divider just west of Desplaines. (Randolph, at this point, is still one-way westbound; the divider separates the street from one of the many parking lots in the Haymarket area.)
While Orear doesn’t doubt that the “designation will eventually be made apparent to the public,” it doesn’t surprise him that the ILHS has been pursuing the issue for a quarter of a century; the group initially formed as the Haymarket Workers Memorial Committee in 1968. The city and the police, he thinks, have been overly sensitive about memorializing the eight workers who died. Orear points out that in May 1970, a year after the ILHS recommended to the State of Illinois that the Haymarket Square area be declared a state historical landmark, the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad (which was disbanded in 1975) filmed the entire State Historical Society plaque unveiling ceremony. The plaque had been placed on the corner of the Catholic Charities Building at 126 N. Desplaines because the city wouldn’t approve a spot on its property. The plaque was pulled off the wall some months later, presumably by persons on the conservative right–or “friends of the police,” as Orear puts it. (You can still see the holes made by the missing plaque’s bolts on the southwest corner of Randolph and Desplaines.)
“Haymarket was a big, traumatic event in the history of Chicago, and it’s been a sore spot in the psyche of city officialdom and the business establishment,” says Orear, a former Chicago headquarters staffer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen International AFL-CIO, and one of the original volunteer members of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee of the CIO. “The business establishment has long forgotten it; it doesn’t give a rip anymore. It’s mostly been a problem of the city. . . . It’s all a part of a deliberate amnesia. Our story is that Haymarket was a police riot–nobody did a damn thing till the police came. Their story is that [the incident] saved the city from anarchist terrorism. Our position doesn’t dishonor the police. But I can see how the police might be sensitive about it, and the city doesn’t like to rock the boat.”
