American Experience (1988) s15e04 Episode Script

1
Narrator:
By the time of the Civil War,
after less than 30 years of unbridled capitalism,
Chicago was the metropolis of the mid-West.
The world's largest railroad hub.
The world's largest lumber market.
The world's largest grain port,
"stacker of wheat" poet Carl Sandburg called it.
And "Hog butcher to the world."
Built with timber from Wisconsin forests,
Chicago burned in 1871
like a giant forest fire,
the largest urban conflagration of the age.
A city of braggers and boasters,
it boasted once more.
People would swarm to the jobs along Chicago's stinking river,
from the East and from the Elbe, Rhine, Danube, and Vistula.
The Protestant elite who hired them
was hostile to their foreign ways,
their labor unions,
their socialism.
Especially the anarchists among them.
Donald L. Miller, Author:
They told capitalists, your function in life is to die.
We're going to get you.
We're going to bomb your factories.
We're going to tear apart your system.
The general strike's going to bring down capitalism.
You'll be shot afterwards.
Narrator:
The great battle of post Civil War America
was between capital and labor.
Chicago would be its cauldron.
Narrator:
The Chicago fire of 1871
was one of the great urban catastrophes of modern times.
Papers would boast that the great London fire of 1666
or Napoleon's siege of Moscow in 1812
hadn't done half the damage.
Chicago, its boosters believed,
had to be first in everything.
But railroads still converged on the city.
The stock yards and hundreds of mills,
factories and warehouses
that ringed the downtown had survived.
Editor Joseph Medill
cranked out an edition of the Tribune
while the ground was still hot.
Dominic Pacyga, Historian:
Chicago boomers and boosters are on trains
the next day going out to the East coast saying,
"Hey, this is a great place to invest.
"We're not broke.
We just had a little fire."
Narrator:
An inquiry at the time determined that one suspect,
Catherine O'Leary,
was not responsible,
that she was in bed when the fire started.
Not in the barn with her cow.
But within weeks
she was depicted as the culprit.
Not 38 years old but an old hag.
A published photo showed another woman with a steer
not a cow.
Nancy Connolly, O'Leary Descendant:
I've seen a few where she actually looks like a witch,
you know, they've got the big nose with the,
you know, the
um
the wart on her nose,
and uh
she actually looks evil in some of them.
She was a Catholic,
she was an immigrant,
she was poor,
and most of all, she was a women.
She was a perfect patsy for the fire.
Edward M. Burke, Alderman:
In truth, she was a very decent,
honorable, hard working lady
who was trying to raise her family
in very difficult circumstances.
They didn't want to lose their investors,
and so it was easy to, I think, find a scapegoat
and say "Oh, well we know the reason the fire started,
and you know these Irish were not clean,
they were throwing their garbage out."
This was just all made up.
And most of them are burned out too.
They did say that.
They've moved out of the city.
The slums are going to be cleaned up.
We don't have to worry about them anymore.
So it was really a terrible thing for her to have endure.
She just died, I think, heartbroken.
♪One dark night
when we were all in bed♪
♪Mrs. O'Leary brought a lantern in the shed♪
Narrator:
Mrs. O'Leary and her cow
became one of America's most enduring legends.
♪It'll be a hot time, in the old town, tonight!
Fire, fire, fire!♪
TV Announcer:
Chicago sends its Firemen's Band,
TV Announcer:
a Rose Parade favorite.
TV Announcer:
They come today to prevent the city of Chicago
TV Announcer:
from re-enacting the incident of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
TV Announcer:
This float won the coveted national trophy.
Narrator:
In 1997,
after 126 years,
the Chicago City Council investigated the fire
and formally absolved Mrs. O'Leary of responsibility.
Alderman Burke:
And the true villain
in this case
was Peg Leg O'Sullivan
who broke into the O'Leary barn
to steal milk from one of her cows
to mix up a batch of whisky punch
which was fueling a local
gathering of some of the lads
down the street from the O'Leary home.
Narrator:
The rubble was swept into Lake Michigan
to create more real estate.
Chicago began to rebuild.
Marshall Field dreamed of a new store on State Street
as he removed hay and dung from a brick barn
and set up display counters.
Potter Palmer would replace his grand hotel,
the Palmer House,
with millions in loans
secured only by his good reputation.
Cyrus McCormick, the Reaper King,
vowed to rebuild his plant on a vaster scale.
Donald L. Miller, Author:
Anthony Trollope, an Englishman, visited Chicago.
He said "These businessmen in Chicago
are reckless, and they fail a lot.
But failure doesn't bother them.
Catastrophe doesn't bother them.
They bounce right back."
And that seems to be ingrained in the character of the city.
The fire happens,
and believe it or not,
in the newspapers it's seen as an opportunity.
Chicago hops right to it after the fire,
and
rebuilds itself
in in an astonishingly short period of time.
It's about a 2-year period.
Ann Keating, Historian:
We didn't have a
mythological past,
so we're building one, in 1871.
To some degree, it's the city grows so quickly,
and then it's creating a past and thinking about a past
and the fire provides a mythology:
Chicago's going to rise out of the ashes,
it does arise out of the ashes.
How much of the city is actually burned?
Well, you know
only a small part of the actual city is burned
But that's not the way we think about the fire.
Narrator:
There was an outpouring of aid from around the nation
and from 25 foreign countries.
England sent 8,000 books.
Alderman Burke:
And even Queen
personally donated books
and inscribed them to the people of Chicago.
And they had assumed, of course, that
in the great fire,
Chicago would have lost its library.
There was only one problem.
Chicago didn't have a library.
Narrator:
Two years after the fire,
a 17 year-old came to Chicago from Boston
with dreams of becoming an architect.
Though he found the buildings unimpressive,
he was impressed with the recovery.
Young Louis Henry Sullivan,
who had dropped out of MIT after a year,
got, he said,
"a sense of big things to be done."
He wrote in his autobiography
about stepping off the train,
seeing the city before him,
part of it's still in ruins from the fire,
and thrusting his hand up in the air and saying,
"This is the place for me."
Narrator:
The city "shouted itself hoarse,"
Sullivan would write.
"We are the crudest, rawest,
most savagely ambitious dreamers
and doers in the world."
He would be one of them.
Gustavus Swift would be another.
Swift got his start as a teenage butcher
on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
The story my father likes to tell is
that when Gustavus Swift was
about 16 years old, he borrowed
20 dollars from his father,
to buy a heifer.
And then he slaughtered the heifer and went and
sold it to local residents in the Cape,
and came back, and his father asked him,
How did you do?
And he said, Well, I sold the meat for 20 dollars.
And his father said, Well,
you didn't make any money at it, then.
He said, Well, yes I did.
I sold the hide for two dollars.
And the reason I like that story is that eventually he
he discovered that the big picture,
that in the livestock business you didn't make
money or much money selling the meat,
but you made it in the byproducts.
Narrator:
Swift became a cattle dealer
who followed the market west.
In 1875
he moved his pregnant wife Ann and five children
into a rented house near the Union Stock Yards.
He was so frugal,
for 30 years he would not allow her to buy curtains
until she threatened to leave.
Even then
not for his bedroom.
Swift wanted to be closer to the source of cattle.
The source was no where near Chicago.
It was more than a thousand miles away in Texas.
Later it spread north,
across the great plains,
to Montana.
After the railroad reached Abilene, Kansas in 1867,
cowboys began herding Texas longhorns north
along the Chisholm Trail to the railhead.
They were loaded on cattle cars bound for buyers in Chicago
like Gustavus Swift.
Swift would revolutionize the beef industry.
What Americans and much of the world ate.
When they ate it.
Where they bought it.
How little they paid for it.
Once a luxury,
he made beef affordable and commonplace.
He bought his cattle at the Union Stock Yards
and shipped them East
to butchers he knew in Massachusetts.
But there were problems shipping live animals.
They have to be fed.
They have to be watered,
which they don't do very happily in a railroad car,
which means that they're constantly losing weight.
And many of these are animals with long horns,
stuffed into cattle cars and gouging each other.
So that a number of them will arrive wounded or dead,
by the time they reach their final destination.
These are all reasons not to want to ship live animals.
Swift:
Gustavus Swift was shipping, via the railroad,
steers that weighed about 1,000 pounds.
He only was able to sell 600 pounds
of that animal through the meat.
And so, there were 400 pounds that was
just costing him money.
Narrator:
Swift decided to slaughter the cattle in Chicago
and ship only the dressed beef East.
In that decision
he took risks greater than any Chicago entrepreneur
had ever taken.
If you're not going to ship live animals,
how are you going to ship the beef
so that it doesn't rot along the way?
And there, the answer to the riddle
has already been provided by the pork packers
in the 1850's,
this immense network of ice-storing places
that cut ice in the winter from Indiana, Wisconsin,
deliver it to Chicago.
If you could simply get that ice into railroad cars,
insulate those cars,
and then send a jet of cold air
across whatever the contents of the railroad car would be,
you could ship any meat
anywhere in the country
without it rotting.
Narrator:
Ice loaded in Chicago
would not last to New York.
This forced Swift into the ice business.
He created five depots along the tracks.
Every ton of dressed beef
needed a ton of ice at each of his five depots.
The railroads he used for livestock
had invested in cattle cars
and charged by the pound.
When Swift bought his own refrigerated cars,
the railroads conspired against him.
He retaliated
by dropping their more direct route to new York
that ran south of Lake Erie.
Instead he shipped through Canada to Montreal
and then south to Boston and New York,
arranging for ice along the way.
For dressed beef,
the longer trip didn't matter.
Transportation was only the first challenge.
Americans were used to eating their beef fresh.
They were used to pork being in a packed form,
whether it was ham or bacon or salt pork or what have you.
But the way they'd had beef up until this time
was by going down to their local butcher,
who had slaughtered that cow the night before,
and so the meat was still
just within 24 hours
of having been a living, pulsing animal.
And Swift was asking them
to buy beef that was at least a week old,
which did not sound like healthy beef
to most Americans.
New York butchers, Boston butchers,
Philadelphia butchers,
don't want to carry this meat.
In fact, they're giving it a bad rap.
They're calling it embalmed meat.
And they're really afraid of being put out of business.
Narrator:
Butchers in Fitchburg, Massachusetts
told Swift they would not sell Swift dressed beef
if all Fitchburg were starving.
"Alright," Swift replied,
"I'll feed Fitchburg myself."
His response to a boycott by butchers in Lowell
was the same.
Miller:
The old man
gets on a train,
goes East,
goes to Lowell,
sets up a railroad siding,
unloads a whole hell of a load of lumber,
builds a butcher shop,
hires a workforce,
and drives a number of the local butchers out of business.
Narrator:
It is all right to lose money,
Swift told his agents,
"just don't let them nose you out."
He hired many of the bankrupt butchers
as distributors of Swift beef.
His huge volume ensured low prices.
Competition from other Chicago packers like Philip Armour
forced prices lower still.
So low that Swift and his competitors
sold their meat at a loss.
In 1889
it cost $48 to purchase a steer in Chicago,
dress the meat, and ship it to New York.
It sold there for $38.
The Chicago packers earned their profits on the margin,
from what local butchers threw away.
Cronon:
Things that the local butcher
had had to give away
because there just wasn't enough of them
and there weren't enough-enough customers for them to sell,
could now be gathered into one location
and turned into tons and tons of that material.
You could hire scientists
to figure out how to turn that material into soap
or buttons or
new forms of meat that had never been sold before.
Narrator:
Hides were tanned to leather,
hair stuffed cushions,
horns became combs;
guts, tennis racquet strings;
tails, paintbrushes;
hooves, Jell-o.
Nothing was wasted.
Swift:
Gustavus Swift would walk out to Bubbly Creek,
which was this terrible little sewer
that ran out of one of his plants,
with his top hat, his dark suit,
he'd have his pants tucked into his Wellington boots,
and he would wade into Bubbly Creek
to check what was coming out of the sewer.
And if he saw any grease or fat
then he knew that was waste
because you could have turned that into lard.
And he'd go back
and he'd find the source of how that happened
and correct it.
He was a very hands on manager.
Nancy Koehn, Historian:
You can't understand industrial capitalism
without understanding the importance of pennies,
half cents, a tenth of a cent,
a hundredth of a cent.
And when you think about
millions of pounds of beef being processed
through a single plant in a year,
you begin to understand
why a hundredth of a cent was something that kept
Swift and Armour and other industrialists up at night.
Narrator:
There were two ways packers could cut costs.
Speed up the process and slash wages.
They did both.
In 1884
each of the most skilled workers,
the splitters, split 32 carcasses a day.
Ten years later each split 75,
double the work for less pay.
It took fifteen minutes from the kill to the chill room.
Low paid immigrants from Eastern Europe,
even children,
replaced the skilled butchers.
More than 150 people would each do a small,
routine job.
When skilled Irish or German workers went on strike,
Swift and Armour quickly replaced them.
Cars packed with dressed beef heading East
passed immigrants heading West
in what were little better than cattle cars.
Scandinavians,
Poles,
Lithuanians.
Many settled "Back of the Yards" in Packing-town.
Four room apartments would house families of twelve.
Often a border slept in a bed
while another worked a different shift.
By the 1890s
Packing-town had become the vilest slum in Chicago.
One boundary was the largest garbage dump in the city.
Children played there.
And women scavenged.
Pacyga:
One of the aldermen said,
"Hey, that whole neighborhood smells.
Where are we going to put garbage dumps
if we don't put it there?"
You know, I mean, it was beyond his comprehension
that anybody would complain.
Because here you had Bubbly Creek
which was this open sewer for northern boundary.
You had the stockyards which left off this odor.
And then you had this garbage dump.
And then the railroad yards along the south,
where children would get killed all the time
as they were trying to cross the lines to go to school.
There was a big place called the hair field there,
where they kept the hair,
you know, from some of the animals,
to dry out in the fields.
They had these enormous sewerage ditches there.
Men often drowned in the sewerage ditches.
They'd get drunk at a local shebang,
you know, they get down there, they fall into the ditch.
Even the lawyer,
Armour's lawyer,
said the best thing you can do with the yards
is burn them down.
Even his lawyer said that.
Narrator:
There were hundreds of saloons
back of the yards,
three on every block.
Many were on Whiskey Row at the gate of the stockyards.
Pacyga:
When the bell rang at 12:00,
men would run out to Whisky Row,
which was the major street
just to the west of the stockyards,
and they would get a beer, and a shot,
and then they could have a free lunch.
So there'd be usually huge steam tables in these taverns
in which they'd come in.
And there you had your, you know,
pickled hogs feet and your eggs
and your Polish sausage and your ham
and whatever. You'd make a sandwich,
and you'd eat,
and you'd go back into the packinghouses.
Narrator:
The saloons on Whiskey Row
served everyone.
On the side streets
the saloons were strictly ethnic.
A Polish newspaper recounted the fate of a drunken German
who wandered into a Polish tavern.
Pacyga:
The newspaper article reports that something
magical had happened.
A a a a
a bottle had come to life.
It hit the German on the head
and dragged him out and left him in the sewer.
And then jumped back up on the bar.
And there were various witnesses who said
this is exactly what happened.
And the bottom line of the article was,
"Drink in your own bars."
And I think that was very true.
If a Pole had walked
into an Irish tavern or a German tavern,
God help the Jew
who walked into any tavern on those streets.
There would have been a clash.
Narrator:
Swift and the meatpackers,
like all of Chicago's entrepreneurs,
depended on the railroad.
In 1877,
in the midst of a depression,
railroads cut workers salaries up to 40 percent.
Just 12 years after slavery was abolished,
workers considered themselves wage slaves.
They went on strike,
spontaneously,
from West Virginia to Chicago.
Pacyga:
These workers were feeling
that their means of production were being taken away from,
that they had no control over those railroads.
They had no control over their lives.
And so that struggle in 1877
was central
to a new understanding by working class people
what this new capitalism meant for them.
And now the New York Times and Tribune are pointing out
the predominant issue is no longer the race issue,
it's the labor issue,
labor and capital,
the relationship of labor and capital.
It's still a property issue, like slavery.
Who controls property?
When I control a concern, do I control
the employees as my property?
Are they working on my property
and hence have no rights
to bargain with me for better conditions,
because it's my property?
And so it raises all these kinds of issues.
Narrator:
The threat to property was more acute in Chicago
because of sympathy strikes organized by socialists.
Workers emptied factories and packinghouses.
On July 26, 1877
Bohemians,
socialists from what is now the Czech Republic,
left their jobs in the lumberyards
to battle the police.
They demanded an eight-hour day
and restoration of wages.
The Tribune described the mob stoning the police
as "Bridgeport and Stockyard plug uglies."
The police stormed a meeting
where German cabinetmakers were negotiating
peacefully with their employers
clubbing and firing at will.
Marshall Field loaned
his retail store delivery wagons to the police
to move their riot squads.
He later headed a Citizens Association
which bankrolled four Napoleon cannons
and a Gatling gun for the police.
Businessmen urged General Phil Sheridan,
stationed in Chicago after the Civil War,
to call in federal troops
who were fighting the Sioux in the Dakotas.
Miller:
The fear of revolution,
the fear of socialism.
There's a fear of spread of
anarchical ideas in the city.
There's a fear that capitalism itself
is fearfully vulnerable.
This is in the middle of the Great Depression,
and maybe the system's not quite
working the way it should.
New wealth has arisen,
a new class of plutocrats.
This is a real watershed moment in American history.
Narrator:
There had been a mass meeting
before the violence began.
The chief speaker was a typesetter
at the Chicago Times,
a socialist, named Albert Parsons.
His ancestors had arrived
on the second voyage of the Mayflower.
He had fought for the South in the Civil War.
Miller:
After the war,
he says in his autobiography, he felt so guilty
about fighting to retain slavery
because he had been brought up
by a black woman, a slave, a black nanny,
and he claims that he went to her personally
and apologized.
Became very active in Texas politics
in the 1860's, on the side of the
radical Republicans,
which are pushing for the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
giving blacks civil rights and the right to vote.
They're fighting the Klan.
Pacyga:
He married a woman of mixed race,
a black woman, Lucy Parsons.
He had to get out of Texas because of that.
And he came to Chicago.
And Chicago, of course, was on the very
cutting edge of this industrial change
and this industrial revolution.
All the questions that were bubbling up inside of Parsons
were also bubbling up inside the city.
So he was really
already beginning to question capitalism.
Narrator:
Parsons saluted the "Grand Army of Labor,"
and asked workers to join his party
to secure state ownership of industry.
"If the capitalist engages in warfare against our rights,"
he said,
"then we shall resist him with all the means
that God has given us."
The next morning
Parsons was fired from the Chicago Times
and escorted by the police
to a meeting of businessmen at City Hall.
Albert Parsons was taken to City Hall
and was cross-examined by the businessmen,
and asked who he was,
what he was doing in town,
his background, and things of that kind.
Richard Schneirov, Historian:
They questioned him,
and the police chief took him aside and said,
"They're going to string you up
if you don't get out of town."
And
Parsons says, "Who's they?"
And the police chief said, "The Board of Trade."
Narrator:
That night
Parsons went to the Tribune
to discuss the strike with his typesetter friends.
"I came in here as a gentleman,"
Parsons told the guards who grabbed him,
"and I don't want to be dragged out like a dog
One of them said 'Shut up
or we'll dash you out the windows on the pavements below.'"
"Another put a pistol to my head and said,
'I've a mind to blow your brains out.
Now go.'"
"I felt alone,
absolutely without a friend in the world"
Parsons recalled.
"This was my first experience with the powers that be,
and I became conscious
that they were powerful to give and take one's life."
"The Social Revolution" had begun,
he wrote,
and "must be settled one way or another."
Industrialist George Mortimer Pullman
had an answer to the labor problem.
He would solve it through social engineering.
Unruly workers, he felt,
had behavior problems
stemming from their squalid surroundings,
especially the saloons.
"Take the roughest man,"
Pullman said,
"and bring him into a room
elegantly carpeted and furnished
and the effect upon his bearing is immediate.
"I have faith in the educational
and refining influences of beauty."
George Pullman was a problem solver.
To build Chicago's sewers in the 1850s
he had helped raise the entire downtown with jacks
while people went about their business.
Then he tackled a problem that bothered him.
After the Civil War
Americans traveled everywhere by train.
And it was miserable.
Koehn:
He conceives of the idea
for a sleeping car,
what he will later call luxury for the middle class,
when he's sleeping on a wooden shelf
on a railroad, thinking that it's got to be
more comfortable than this.
Narrator:
Pullman envisioned what he called
Palace Cars
with gilded lamps, chandeliers,
and velvet hangings.
Travelers could luxuriate in rotating lounge-chairs.
And in thick cotton sheets on the pull-down berths.
Investors were skeptical.
Would people pay for a car
that cost four times
as much as an ordinary passenger car?
Would they know how to behave?
Miller:
The average person traveling in a car
might be a salesman, for example.
He's been out selling McCormick reapers somewhere,
tromping around in a field.
His feet are filled with mud.
He's got a chaw of tobacco in his mouth.
He's going to get on your car,
sleep in your car.
What's going to prevent him from spitting on the floor?
Skeptics told him
people would go to bed with their boots on,
they'd spit on the velvet curtains,
they'd chew tobacco
and dribble on the on the cotton pillow cases.
Pullman was having none of it.
Narrator:
Pullman's fledging company got a boost
when a Palace Car carried the funeral cortege
of Abraham Lincoln
from Chicago back to Springfield in 1865.
As Swift had done in meatpacking,
Pullman extended Chicago's reach across the nation
by leasing his sleeping cars
to America's railroads.
He hired only Black porters
to wait on passengers.
Former slaves, he felt,
knew how to serve.
Pullman's response to the great uprising of 1877
was to build a model town and factory
based on the principle of the Palace Car
- beauty uplifts behavior.
The town of Pullman,
on the prairie 12 miles south of the grime,
the brothels, and the saloons of Chicago,
housed 12,000 workers.
Drinking was not allowed.
There was a bar in the Hotel Florence,
named for his favorite child,
but it was off limits to workers.
His managers lived in single family houses,
the workers in attractive row houses.
Blacks, hired as waiters,
lived in boarding houses.
Koehn:
He really believed that he saw an answer
that flew in the face of everything,
in some sense, around him.
And it had to do with taking care of workers.
He was a great industrial utopian thinker
in that sense,
and, like many utopian thinkers, he was
fueled by fantasy as much as reality.
But he built his town
to try and realize that utopian vision.
Keating:
He builds this town
in which he doesn't want
workers to be able to drink.
He wants them to have
what he considered
decent housing
with indoor plumbing
and amenities like near-by stores
and a church that he was going to build
and parks and recreational facilities
and a library.
Koehn:
Education for children.
It's got every state-of-the-art service
that he can conceive of.
And the idea there is
that if workers are satisfied and taken care of
in a planned community,
they will find their work with Pullman
satisfying, enterprising,
perhaps indeed ennobling.
They'll have no need of unions, or strikes,
or any kind of discord
that has characterized
a lot of industrial and worker relations
in Chicago up to that point.
Narrator:
Pullman bought the Corliss engine,
the world's most powerful engine,
the chief exhibit at America's Centennial Exposition
in Philadelphia in 1876.
It would power his new plant
to make sleeper and freight cars.
On April 2, 1881
Pullman's pride and joy, Florence,
pushed the button.
To have his favorite daughter
pushing the switch to make it go on,
the pride that he must have felt
in his own achievement,
in what he'd worked to create,
uh is is indescribable.
Narrator:
Pullman's factory
was the most modern the new industrial age could offer.
With a beautiful town and factory,
he said
"the disturbing conditions of strikes
that convulse the world of labor
would not be found."
By the spring of 1882
George Pullman was manufacturing
25 freight cars
and two sleeping cars
a day.
The press applauded what it saw as
enlightened capitalism.
"No place in the United States,"
the Times of London would write,
"has attracted more attention
or has been more closely watched.
One woman remarked:
"With the terrible temptations of the open saloon gone
my husband has stopped drinking
and now we have a beautiful home
with comforts and luxuries."
Keating:
Pullman is seen as
one of a vanguard who is providing an answer
to the problem of urban poverty
and the problems of urban workers.
He is written up
in press account over and over and over again.
Koehn:
And Americans and others around the world,
want to believe that there must be a way
to reconcile
the material possibilities of capitalism
with what seemed to be
extraordinary costs.
Schneirov:
Not only did it seem that he was doing
something about it,
but he was showing that you could make money at it,
while also being a reformer.
So, a lot of people praised him as being
a practical reformer.
So, he's changing the system,
he's improving it for the workers,
and
he's making a profit.
So maybe this is the new way to go.
Narrator:
Pullman lived downtown
on Prairie Avenue
with tycoons like Marshall Field
and Phillip Armour,
but his mansion was considered
"grandest of them all."
Except for Florence,
Pullman was impatient with his family
and squabbled with his wife Harriet
about the time he spent away from home.
He lunched and played poker with Field and Armour
at the "millionaires table"
at the Chicago Club.
They were among his few friends.
He upbraided his staff at work
for the slightest failings.
George Pullman controlled everyone.
He could certainly control his workers.
Pullman's office was atop the 10 story Pullman building,
a skyscraper in downtown Chicago,
the busiest,
most concentrated business district in America.
When a visitor from China first saw it,
he was appalled.
Miller:
And he says
that he almost froze up
when he got off the train and entered the city.
The El system's up, and it's roaring overhead
like crazy.
There's swirling smoke in the city.
The soot coming off the street.
This cloud of smoke hanging over the city.
The rush of people, this cavalry charge on the streets.
Streetcar lines all over the place.
Trolleys going along.
Let's say there's a dray in front of it with four horses.
They just pick it up and push it to the side.
Horse and team spin over like that.
Peddlers on every corner.
The circus is in town.
Elephants down the street,
clowns, you know, big animals shitting on the street,
lions and tigers.
Skyscrapers going up
a story every three days,
you know.
And they're spectacles in the sky,
and people are watching them like urban shows,
you know, watching these buildings going up.
The sound of rivet guns,
which were just invented at the time.
Bang-bang-bang of the rivet systems.
Lots of immigrants who came to the city
went downtown for the first time
and just couldn't believe the spectacle.
It just seemed like one vast construction site.
Narrator:
The congestion was due in part to the El,
the elevated transit
that brought people downtown
from all parts of the city.
By 1900
Chicago had the best urban transit system
in the world.
Twenty years earlier
it was a mess.
It took longer to get downtown in 1882
by a horse car
than to Milwaukee by train.
The genius behind these changes
was Charles Tyson Yerkes.
Yerkes had done time in Philly
for embezzlement
and would leave Chicago
the most vilified public figure in its history.
He was this big, corpulent,
handsome man, very arrogant,
and made it known to Chicagoans that, he said,
this place is a hell hole.
And I'm going to live here for a while
and make a million, and I'm going back
to where I can live regally and well, in New York.
Narrator:
In 1882,
just after Yerkes arrived,
Chicago opened its first cable car line.
Marshall Field invested in cable cars
that headed for his store,
looped around and headed back south.
Since then The Loop has been synonymous
with downtown Chicago.
The rest of the city
had horse cars.
Backed by Philadelphia cohorts,
Yerkes consolidated these private transit lines
and replaced horse cars with cable cars.
He cleaned up two water soaked tunnels
under the river
to avoid the delay of swing bridges.
He introduced electric trolleys.
And then elevated them.
But no one liked him.
Douglas Bukowski, Writer:
He's always been seen as a monster in Chicago
because he was imperious.
Yerkes liked to run small trains,
as opposed to larger trains.
Asked why,
Wouldn't it be better
if you provided the customers with more amenities?
His response was,
"Why should I?
It's the strap hanger who provides me my margin of profit."
Narrator:
Yerkes was also a crook.
He built his North Chicago cable line for $3 million,
charged stockholders 10 million
and split seven
with his Philadelphia partners.
Late in the century,
he bribed state and city legislators
to pass a bill giving him a 50 year monopoly.
That was too much,
even for a city of hustlers.
Mobs stormed the Council chambers,
and the "Goliath of Graft"
was hounded out of Chicago.
Charles Tyson Yerkes
had made 15 million dollars in Chicago.
He went to London
and built its famous Underground.
In the 1880s and 90s
developers rebuilt Chicago's downtown
for the second time since the fire.
In their pursuit of money,
they created not only the world's first skyscraper city
but a unique, American architectural style.
The Loop was hemmed in
by Lake Michigan on the east,
the river on the north,
the South Branch on the west
and railroads to the south.
There was no where to go but up.
Stanley Tigerman, Architect:
You have a grid in a flat plane.
You tilt it up into space as a matrix.
All by itself,
that's wildly authoritative.
It's very powerful.
So even now when you fly in on a plane
and you see the prairie and the lake,
this tabula rasa,
you see this almost oasis
coming out of nowhere,
that is a grid in plan
and a grid in elevation,
that's wild.
That's the aesthetic that transpired as a result of that fire.
Narrator:
Improvements in elevators
Narrator:
and the creation of structural steel
made skyscrapers possible.
Miller:
They're built because space constraints,
yes, but they build because they're very efficient,
an efficient way to organize a business organization.
You have an internal mail system within the skyscraper.
Contiguous firms,
firms associated with one another
printers would hang out with lawyers,
copying people.
So there's
literally there's a business city under one roof.
Samuelson:
What the real estate people wanted
was somebody who could get the building up
fast,
on schedule,
on cost, and you could start collecting rent.
And if the architects were able to create something
creative in the process,
well, that was just icing on the cake.
Narrator:
Peter Brooks from Boston
wanted to make a buck in Chicago real estate.
He hired the Chicago architectural firm .
Burnham and Root
There were letters that went back and forth
between Boston and Chicago
where Burnham and Root would propose
ornamental details
and, in a good sense of hard-headed practicality,
the Brookses would say
I don't want that kind of detail.
I don't want to pay for it.
It's something that birds are going to sit on
and foul the building.
It's not necessary at all.
And they kept goading the architect.
Miller:
Clean it up, strip it down,
make it more functional,
make it less expensive.
At the same time
Root is coming to a new appreciation of simplicity,
and saying that this is the new American style.
This is a business city.
These are the kinds of buildings
that should be built for commerce,
with simplicity, strength, durability,
handsomeness.
Root says at one point,
"There's nothing more beautiful
than a plain brown wall.
Samuelson:
In the case of the Monadnock Building,
they got a building of such
direct and beautiful simplicity,
that could actually say
that the client had a hand in creating it.
And a masterpiece was the result.
Narrator:
Fearing people would be intimidated by the height
that structural steel allowed,
some architects tried to disguise it
by groups of windows
separated by moldings.
Buildings appeared to be two or three stories
stacked one on top of the other.
Louis Henry Sullivan
was not so constrained.
Samuelson:
There were people like Louis Sullivan,
the dreamer, the poet of Chicago architecture,
somebody who really held deep, passionate ideals
about what architecture was all about
and what it could be,
who really looked at the skyscraper
and said well, this is a new kind of building.
Why make a building look like a lot of little buildings
stacked on top of each other?
Why not let the building soar,
and let the sheer height become a thing of beauty.
Narrator:
Sullivan's department store,
the Carson Pirie Scott Building on State Street,
was considered a business
and aesthetic triumph.
Tigerman:
Clad columns,
clad for fireproofing, because of the fire.
But basically,
90 percent certainly, glass.
An all glass ground floor
that you can walk in.
That had never happened before
that you could actually see into the store.
You could walk down the street
and say,
"That's great,"
and walk in and buy it right then and there.
That's unheard of.
Narrator:
Sullivan's architectural credo
was "form follows function."
This did not mean sterile façades.
He delighted in decorative detail,
on the ground floors,
which people could enjoy.
Chicago developers did not skimp on money
for public spaces.
The spacious lobby of the Rookery Building
enticed clients.
A soaring glass ceiling let in light
- in an age before decent electric lights.
The entire building was designed to let light
into the offices of businessmen
and their clerks and typists.
Light poured into the largely glass façade
of the Reliance Building.
Rain cleaned its glazed columns like a plate
to save on maintenance.
Tigerman:
All this stuff still was at the service of capital.
Period.
Business,
raw business, unsullied,
just business.
Narrator:
Standing in the shadows of The Loop
in the late 19th century,
few were aware that their new city of stone and steel
was built during the very years
the pine forests of Michigan
and Wisconsin
vanished.
The transformation of an ecosystem into a city was,
to the few who noticed,
a sign of progress.
No trains passed through Chicago.
They all stopped at the edge of The Loop.
Adelman:
There used be a joke about
that Lady went to the conductor and said,
Does this train stop in Chicago?
And the conductor said,
Lady, if it doesn't stop in Chicago
there's going to be an awful crash.
Because the idea was
they wanted the trains to come here,
you would have to get off the train,
stay at the Palmer House
and shop at Marshall Field's store,
and then the next day go out on the other train.
And it was all set up that way.
And that promoted the business community.
Narrator:
The business community centered on State Street.
Potter Palmer had come to Chicago
to create a market for the few women shoppers
he observed in the 1850s.
By the 1890s
almost all the shoppers on State Street were women.
The premier store was Marshall Fields.
Koehn:
Field wasn't just selling you
a communion suit for your son
at a very important moment,
he was also selling you a slice of the good life,
a slice of the all be upper echelons of Chicago society.
If you bought European gloves,
which were produced exclusively for Field's,
you were also getting a taste of European
cultural history,
and a bit of old money,
brought to a town that was made up
completely of new money.
He understood instinctively
that when people purchased things
they were buying a bit of their own ambitions
for themselves.
And by making Field's
a kind of palace of consumption,
he was instilling his brand
with a very, very important element
of social legitimacy.
Narrator:
At age 17
Marshall Field had taken a job as a clerk
at a dry-goods store in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Field was such a good salesman,
he was offered a quarter interest in the store
at age 22.
He refused.
He was "swept up in the prevalent fever to come West,"
he later told writer Theodore Drieser.
Chicago, he sensed,
was a city with "plenty of ambition and pluck."
Field found a job in a dry goods store.
He worked fourteen hour days
and saved half his salary by sleeping in the store.
Twelve years later
in 1868
Field leased Potter Palmer's new retail Palace
on State Street.
Like Palmer,
Marshall Field's goal was
"to give the lady what she wants."
Upscale merchandise,
elegant surroundings,
courteous service.
Marshall Field became Chicago's new Merchant Prince,
and with investments in Pullman and real estate,
Chicago's richest
and most powerful man.
Pacyga:
He doesn't want a lot of poor women
coming in there and shopping,
or poor women coming in and applying
to work at his store.
Field saw his department
as the sort of ultimate
class establishment in the city of Chicago.
He was catering
to a middle and an upper middle class clientele.
And so immigrant women had no place in his world-view.
Don't dirty Field's up.
Miller:
What he did is, he would hire women
such as Theodore Dreiser wrote about,
Sister Carrie,
young farm girls,
not with a lot of means,
but who would come to Chicago in search of opportunity.
And you know, in the 1880's,
more women,
young women, are coming to Chicago than young men.
Pacyga:
Field wants these American farm girls for his clerks,
his salespeople.
They don't speak with an accent.
They know how to dress.
And, you know, you always had to dress up
to work at Marshall Field's. You still do.
Narrator:
A rhyme captured Field's upscale image:
All the girls who wear high heels
They trade down at Marshall Field's
All the girls who scrub the floor
They trade at the Boston Store.
Miller:
He also hired children,
cash boys,
that would take change
from one counter to another.
One time a group of cash boys
complained about their wages.
And he fired the whole lot of them.
(Laughs).
He hated unions.
He wouldn't even allow
union leaders
to shop in his store.
Anyone suspected of fraternizing
with a union or union leaders was fired.
And he ran the store with iron discipline.
Narrator:
Marshall Field had few friends.
He was estranged from his wife,
distant from his son.
His work was his life.
All he had would soon be threatened
as he was pulled into the great battle of the age
between capital and labor.
After he was fired from the Chicago Times
during the uprising in 1877,
Albert Parsons abandoned socialism
and began to publish the Alarm,
an anarchist pamphlet.
He shared an office with another anarchist,
August Spies,
a German immigrant who ran a small furniture company
and published the German language Arbeiter Zeitung.
When Frank Stauber,
a German born socialist,
lost his race for alderman in 1880
because Irish ward bosses stuffed the ballot boxes,
many Germans turned against the system.
"The holiest institution of the American people,"
a German newspaper fumed,
"had become a miserable farce and a lie."
Schneirov:
Large numbers of them
pulled out of the Socialist Labor party
and they aligned themselves
with the International Working People's Association,
which was an anarchist affiliated organization.
And they began
to advocate a violent revolution,
using dynamite.
Now Parsons and other people
blamed this on the capitalists, at the time.
In fact, it wasn't the capitalists,
it was the local ward politicians.
And they were
very demonstrative in their rhetoric.
I mean, they really, you know, went straight at them,
went straight at them, and called for assassination.
And they felt that if you destroyed the state,
uh perhaps with an act,
a single act of violence
that would cause the working people
to rise up,
uh
capital would just
crumble
and a new society
would take shape.
A society of communes, as they put it.
Adelman:
August Spies
used to really make Marshall Field and Pullman angry
because he used to go to the same restaurants
that they went to,
and he'd make sure he sat near them,
and they learned to recognize who he was,
and it would just spoil their whole dinner
that he was sitting at the table next to them.
Narrator:
The Sunday picnics that Chicago's Germans enjoyed
became more than picnics.
They were a chance to spread the word
and recruit.
One Sunday,
anarchist leader Samuel Fielden
spoke of the wonders of a new invention,
dynamite,
which, he said,
"science has placed within the reach of the oppressed."
On Thanksgiving Day 1884
the anarchists unveiled their new symbol.
The black flag of hunger and death
joined the red flag of social change.
Playing the anthem of the French revolution,
the Marseillaise,
they began a march
which took them past Potter Palmer's elegant hotel,
the Palmer House.
Then on to the Prairie Avenue mansions of the capitalists
who had "deprived them,"
their leaflets said,
"of every blessing during the past year."
"Every worker,
every tramp
must be on hand
to express their thanks in a befitting manner."
Miller:
They're marching down
Prairie Avenue,
okay,
the very citadel of capitalism.
And
it's hard to march on a plant,
but they're right at the homes of the capitalists.
Never happened anywhere else like that.
They collect what they call hoboes
but they're anarchists as well.
And they're going up and they're ringing the doorbells.
And of course nobody's answering the doors.
But they're screaming that they want
bread
or power.
There'd just never been a direct
demonstration quite like that.
Narrator:
Albert Parsons read from the Epistle of St. James:
"Your riches are corrupted
Your gold and silver is cankered,
and the rust shall eat your flesh
as it were fire
We do not intend to leave this matter for the Lord,"
he concluded.
"We intend to do something for ourselves."
They approached the Prairie Avenue mansion
of Marshall Field,
whom Parsons had attacked
for discriminating against
immigrant women shopping in his store.
"Our international movement is to unite
all countries and do away with the robber class,"
Samuel Fielden told the marchers.
"Prepare for the inevitable conflict."
They marched on the Prairie Avenue mansion
of George Pullman.
Adelman:
Pullman was absolutely horrified
with the sight of poor people
walking up his street and ringing his doorbell.
The next day he went to his attorney,
Wert Dexter,
and he said,
"I want you to get this guy Parsons."
They were Catholic,
they didn't speak English,
they spoke German,
they drank
beer on Sundays,
they went to saloons on Sundays.
They were a threat.
They were totally alien
to this American,
Protestant way of life.
Narrator:
They marched on the Board of Trade
when it opened an elaborate new building
on LaSalle Street
the next year.
"The Board of Thieves",
they bellowed,
stood for
"starvation of the masses,
privileges and luxury for the few."
One in the crowd yelled,
"Blow it up with dynamite."
To Chicago's business leaders
these were not idle threats.
Miller:
They're reading in newspapers
about assassinations abroad.
There're people being killed in Europe,
including Czar Alexander at this time.
The movement is extremely strong in Germany.
And now
their speakers are coming from Germany
to agitate.
So,
they know the anarchists are serious.
Narrator:
"The better classes are tired
of the insane howlings of the lowest strata,"
warned General Phil Sheridan,
"and they mean to stop them."
On May 1st 1886,
the anarchists did something unusual.
They teamed up
with the main stream labor movement:
disgruntled railroad workers,
packinghouse butchers,
Bohemian socialists.
Albert and Lucy Parsons
led 80,000 workers down Michigan Avenue
as part of a nationwide strike for labor's big issue,
an eight-hour day.
With its Mayor Carter Harrison supporting it,
Chicago became the center of the strike.
Pacyga:
"Eight hours a day for work;
eight hours a day to sleep;
eight hours a day to play
in a free Americ-kay."
Schneirov:
The anarchists didn't lead the eight-hour movement,
but they attempted to commandeer it.
August Spies,
uh felt strongly that this was a demand
that was, in effect,
a revolutionary demand, even though it didn't
openly say so.
It was a demand that could not be won
under the existent circumstances,
and it was a demand that would
inevitably lead
the eight-hour movement into a
revolutionary situation,
under the leadership of the anarchists.
They told capitalists,
Your function in life is to die.
We're going to get you.
We're going to bomb your factories.
We're going to tear apart your system.
The general strike's going to bring down capitalism.
You'll be shot afterwards.
Pacyga:
The streetcar lines are shut down.
The city is shut down.
This is a general strike.
And there's tremendous amount of tension.
Workers, of course, were winning,
you know, the eight-hour day in the packinghouses.
Narrator:
Workers struck the packinghouses on May 2nd.
The packers,
Chicago's largest employers,
conceded to an eight-hour day
- the same pay for eight hours
that workers had gotten for ten.
What happened May 3
at the McCormick Reaper Works
got the anarchists involved in another labor dispute
and ignited the most sensational labor incident
of the 19th century.
Cyrus Hall McCormick,
the Reaper King,
had died in 1884.
A floral reaper adorned his casket.
His last words were
"work, work, work."
His son mechanized the plant.
Blades that used to be forged by hand
were now forged by steam hammer.
This threatened the skilled iron workers.
In May 1886
they had been on strike for months.
McCormick hired scabs
to take their place.
Schneirov:
The McCormick strike was over
a long-standing dispute
that had begun before the 8 hour day had begun,
that turned on the attempt
of McCormick
to
mechanize the whole process of iron molding
and thereby to get rid of one of the strongest unionized
forces,
the iron molders union.
And these were largely Irish.
And so there was a very bitter struggle
that was going on at that time.
Some of the Bohemian lumber shovers and other
uh socialists and anarchists
had gone up there
in solidarity with the McCormick workers.
August Spies had made a very
militant speech.
Narrator:
When the whistle blew to end the shift on May 3rd,
locked out strikers attacked the scabs
as they left the plant.
Police rushed in to protect the scabs.
They killed two of the striking workers.
Adelman:
Spies witnessed this,
from behind a boxcar.
He saw it.
And he ran back to his office
on Wells Street
and he wrote a protest,
and he left it on the desk and said,
I want this circulated the next morning.
And he told them to put a banner on it.
Well, to his great dismay
the banner that somebody put on it was "revenge",
which was the last thing
that should have been put on it.
Because he didn't mean it to be that kind of thing.
Narrator:
A second circular called for a rally
the next evening at Haymarket Square.
Haymarket Square was an open air market by day.
By nightfall on May 4th,
the pushcarts were gone.
Chicago's popular mayor,
Carter Harrison, was there
and made certain the crowd saw him.
It would ensure order.
Pacyga:
It was a very peaceful rally.
The anarchists were saying things that they always said.
Death to the owner class,
revolution.
Mayor Harrison rode up
and everybody yelled, "Hoosah, hoosah, Mayor Harrison."
You know, and he took his hat off
and he waved at the people and
said his little campaign thing.
And he stayed at the back
and then the police captain, Captain Bonfield,
came up, said, "What should we do with this rabble, sir?"
And he said, basically, "Let them speak.
They've said many worse things
than they're saying tonight.
And there's no one here.
And he says, "I'm going to go home,"
and he goes home.
Narrator:
Captain Bonfield dismissed most of his men.
Not all.
The last speaker,
Samuel Fielden,
remembered the men shot at the McCormick Works:
"The law is framed for your enslavers.,"
he said.
"Throttle it, kill it,
do everything you can to impede its progress."
Bonfield considered this inflammatory.
He ordered the police to march.
Fielden was winding down.
"He that has to obey the will of another
is a slave.
Can we do anything except
by the strong arm of resistance?
War has been declared on us.
People have been shot.
Defend yourselves!"
No one noticed the man lurking in the shadows.
"Any animal will resist
when stepped upon.
Are men less than snails or worms?"
In the name of the state of Illinois,
I command you to disperse,"
the police captain said.
"But we are peaceable,"
Fielden protested.
Seven policemen were killed,
mostly by friendly fire.
The Chicago Times called the workers
"rag-tag and bobtail cutthroats of Beelzebub
from the Rhine,
the Danube,
the Vistula,
and the Elbe."
Labor's largest paper called them
"wild beasts."
The respected Albany Law Review
called them
"long-haired,
wild-eyed,
bad smelling, atheistic,
reckless foreign wretches."
Perry Duis, Historian:
It was front-page news around the world.
Remember Chicago
is the world's window into the future.
People from around the world really saw it
as what city life was going to be like for them
perhaps 10 or 20 years down the road.
And when you got into the labor violence,
what appeared to be proletarian riots,
it was very frightening to people
in many places around the world.
Schneirov:
Throughout the nation
Americans were almost unanimous
in favor of the utmost repression
of the anarchists.
There was a belief that American
civic institutions were being threatened to their core.
Foreign born
workers under the leadership of anarchists
were seen to be a threat of the first order.
Adelman:
The very next day
marshal law was declared in Chicago.
A law is passed
saying that no more than two people can be
standing on a street corner to talk.
If there's three, you can arrest them.
And homes are entered without search warrants.
All the union newspapers are closed down.
Uh
hundreds, literally, hundreds of labor leaders
are put in the different city jails.
Miller:
After Haymarket the city went crazy.
This is a real red hunt,
and it's the first American red hunt.
They know that everyone they're rounding up
is not an anarchist.
They're rounding up labor agitators.
They're out to crush the labor movement,
which is the threat here,
more than the anarchists.
They can handle them.
They can hang them and shoot them.
In many ways,
this is for them
an opportunity.
They can paint them with a brush of anarchism
and go after them like that.
Narrator:
"They didn't belong to the human race,"
poet Carl Sandburg,
a child at the time,
would recall.
"They seemed more like slimy animals
who prowl, sneak and kill in the dark.
I didn't hear anyone in our town
who didn't so believe."
Eight were charged with murder and conspiracy.
They included Albert Parsons
who had fled to Wisconsin
but returned.
Pacyga:
And here's a man who's rather naïve.
Don't you think?
He sits up there in Wisconsin, he says,
"Well, this is America and
And the justice system will prove me
to be right.
And so, I'll come down,
I'll talk about anarchism,
I'll explain that I was five blocks away
in a tavern with my wife
and the jury will,
you know,
let me go.
Narrator:
Judge Joseph E. Gary presided over the trial.
Leon Despres, Former Alderman:
Well there was such fury about the case
that there was no effort made
to find a fair jury.
The bailiff was sent out
to find people and bring them in
as potential jurors,
and of course he found people who were
deeply prejudiced,
that wasn't hard at the time,
and I'm sure
the bailiff rejected anybody who showed any sympathy.
Adelman:
One prospective juror
dared to say he wanted to listen to the evidence
before he decided whether they were guilty or not,
in the cross-examination,
whether he would be on the jury or not.
And
he was not accepted as a juror.
He went back to his job, downtown,
the next day, and was fired by his employer,
because he did not automatically assume,
even before hearing the testimony,
that they were guilty.
Schneirov:
That mere fact that they were even being tried at all,
when the bomb thrower wasn't known,
is just a travesty.
How can you
even
prosecute somebody for conspiracy
if you
don't have any evidence
that they were together with the person
that threw the bomb
or that committed the crime?
Only two of the anarchists
were at the scene
and they were both on the so-called podium
in full public view.
Somebody threw that bomb,
but
nobody had any idea
who threw it.
Narrator:
"Anarchy is on trial,"
the prosecutor said.
"Gentlemen of the jury,
convict these men,
make examples of them,
hang them
and you save our society."
The verdict was guilty.
The sentence, death by hanging.
Three asked for clemency
and got life in prison.
One blew himself up in jail
with a cigar bomb.
A former Tribune editor,
Henry Demarest Lloyd,
began a national campaign for clemency.
Illinois's governor said he would support it
if the businessmen did.
Banker Lyman Gage gathered
50 of the business elite
to argue that clemency
would improve labor relations.
He seemed to sway them.
But they feared to cross Marshall Field,
Chicago's most influential businessman,
who was opposed.
Koehn:
The great industrialists
all, I think, woke up,
at least at times,
in the middle of the night in a cold sweat
and worried about revolution.
It was impossible not to entertain
the potential for serious social unrest
and indeed political
and economic revolution in this country,
when the rewards
of this extraordinary moment of change in capitalism
were being so unequally distributed.
And they knew it.
Field knew it.
Pullman knew it.
Swift knew it.
Armour knew it.
They couldn't not know it
and that was a very scary
possibility for people like Field.
Schneirov:
You have to remember that
this is a period of time
that was still in the shadow of the Civil War,
and people felt
that if you didn't take a hard and firm line,
as had been taken by Lincoln
and the Republican party against the slaveholders,
if you didn't take a hard and firm line
against threats to property,
that this sort of thing would be repeated.
And I can't help but think that Marshall Field felt that
this was a great test of leadership.
You couldn't have invented
an enemy that is more maniacal
and more threatening
to Field than the anarchist movement.
Field thought that property is sacrosanct.
"I formed this business on my own.
Worked up from stock boy.
It's mine.
They have no right to tell me how to run it,
and certainly they're not going to tell me
that they're going to dynamite it to death."
Field and elite control the banks
and they control the business establish
They've lost control of politics.
Now are they going to lose control
of their own businesses?
It caused a furor throughout the world.
People saying don't hang these guys,
commute the sentence.
And letters came from
George Bernard Shaw,
from Tolstoy, I believe.
Do not execute them.
But there was one industrialist who was adamant,
and that was Marshall Field the first,
the merchant prince.
He said, in effect,
hang the bastards.
Narrator:
As Chicago's capitalists
tried to put their labor problems behind them,
a memorial to the anarchists
became a shrine for revolutionaries.
The elite's attempt
to project an image of urban harmony to the world
would not be easy.