A Memorial Oration
[November 11, 1901]
Let me begin with a confession. I make it sorrowfully and with self-disgust; but in the presence of great sacrifice we learn humility, and if my comrades could give their lives for their belief, why let me give my pride. Yet I would not give it, for personal utterance is of trifling importance, were it not that I think at this particular season, it will encourage those of our sympathizers whom the recent outburst of Savagery may have disheartened, and perhaps lead some who are standing where I once stood to do as I did later. This is my confession: fifteen years ago last May when the echoes of the Haymarket bomb rolled through the little Michigan village where I then lived, I, like the rest of the credulous and brutal, read one lying newspaper headline “Anarchists throw a bomb in a crowd in the Haymarket in Chicago,” and immediately cried out “They ought to be hung.”—This, though I had never believed in capital punishment for ordinary criminals. For that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence I shall never forgive myself, though I know the dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die, a bitter reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited the first wild rumor of an event of which I knew nothing, and, in my mind, sent men to the gallows without asking one word of defense! In one wild unbalanced moment threw away the sympathies of a lifetime, and became an executioner at heart. And what I did that night millions did, and what I said millions said. I have only one word of extenuation for myself and all those people—ignorance. I did not know what Anarchism was. I had never seen it used save in histories, and there it was always synonymous with social confusion and murder. I believed the newspapers. I thought these men had thrown that.bomb, unprovoked, into a mass of men and women, from a wicked delight in killing. And so thought those millions of others. But out of those millions there were some few thousand, I am glad I was one of them, who did not let the matter rest there.
I know not what resurrection of human decency first stirred within me after that, whether it was an intellectual suspicion that maybe I did not know all the truth of the case and could not believe the newspapers, or whether it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy which often prompts the heart to go out to the accused, without a reason; but this I do know that though I was no Anarchist at the time of the execution, it was long and long before that, that I came to the conclusion that the accusation was false, the trial a farce, that there was no warrant either in justice or in law for their conviction; and that the hanging, if hanging there should be, would be the act of a society composed of people who had said what I said on that first night, and who had kept their eyes and ears fast shut ever since, determined to see nothing and to know nothing but rage and vengeance. Till the very end I hoped that mercy might intervene, though justice did not; and from the hour I knew neither would nor ever could again, I distrusted law and lawyers, judges and governors alike. And my whole being cried out to know what these men had stood for, and why they were hanged, seeing it was not proven they knew anything about the throwing of the bomb.
Little by little, here and there, I came to know that what they had stood for was a very high and noble ideal of human life, and what they were hanged for was preaching it to the common people, the common people who were as ready to hang them, in their ignorance, as the court and the prosecutor were in their malice! Little by little I came to know that these were men who had a clearer vision of human right than most of their fellows: and who, being moved by deep social sympathies, wished to share their vision with their fellows, and so proclaimed it in the market place. Little by little I realized that the misery, the pathetic submission, the awful degradation of the workers, which from the time I was old enough to begin to think had born heavily upon my heart, (as they must bear upon all who have hearts to feel at all), had smitten their’s more deeply St ll,—so deeply that they knew no rest save seeking a way out,-and that is more than I had the sense to conceive. For me there had never been a hope there should be no more rich and poor; but a vague idea that there might not be so rich and so poor, if the workingmen by combining could exact a little better wage, and make their hours a little shorter. It was the message of these men, (and their death swept that message far out into ears that would never have heard their living voices), that all such little dreams are folly. That not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any lasting alleviation come; but in demanding, much,-all,—in a bold self-assertion of the worker to toil any hour he finds sufficient, not that another finds for him,—here is where the way out lies. That message, and the message that others, whose works, associated with theirs, their death drew to my notice, took me up, as it were, upon a mighty hill, wherefrom I saw the roofs off the workshops of the little world. I saw the machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden, the wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth in the living flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed and crippled stumps of men go limping away into the night that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide in some dim corner where the black surge throws its slime.
I saw the rose fire of the furnace Shining on the blanched face of the man who tended it, and knew surely as I knew anything in life, that never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.
I saw the swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm—I, you, and those others who never do any dirty work—those men had slaved away in those black graves, and been crushed to death at last.
I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal’s hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there, with pick and shovel in that foul, sewerage-Soaked earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves would do it.
I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal—burned and sered like paper before the grate; and I knew that “the record” of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck was paid for with these—withered bodies and souls.
I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes driven by sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his self-hood, would freely choose to spend all of his days in the nauseating stench that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it.
And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it was slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists were right, the whole thing must be changed, the whole thing was wrong,-the whole system of production and distribution, the whole ideal of life.
And I questioned the government then; they had taught me to question it. What have you done—you the keepers of the Declaration and the Constitution—what have you done about all this? What have you to preserve the conditions of freedom to the people?
Lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and got gain! You have sold away the land, that you had no right to sell. You have murdered the aboriginal people, that you might seize the land in the name of the white race, and then-steal it away from them again, to be again sold by a second and a third robber. And that buying and selling of the land has driven the people off the healthy earth and away from the clean air into these rot-heaps of humanity called cities, where every filthy thing is done, and filthy labor breeds filthy bodies and filthy souls. Our boys are decayed with vice before they come to manhood; our girls—ah, well might John Harvey write:
Another begetteth a daughter white and gold,
She looks into the meadow land and water, and the world
Knows her no more; they have sought her field and fold
But the City, the City hath bought her, it hath sold
Her piecemeal, to students, rats, and reek of the graveyard mould.
You have done this thing, gentlemen who engineer the government; and not only have you caused this ruin to come upon others; you yourselves are rotted with this debauchery. You exist for the purpose of granting privileges to whoever can pay most for you, and so limiting the freedom of men to employ themselves that they must sell themselves into this frightful slavery or become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes and murderers. And when you have done all this, what do you do to them, these creatures of your own making 7 You, who have set them the example in every villainy? Do you then relent, and remembering the words of the great religious teacher to whom most of you offer lip service on the officially religious day, do you go to these poor, broken, wretched creatures and love them? Love them and help them, to teach them to be better? No: you build prisons high and strong, and there you beat, and starve, and hang, finding by the working of your system human beings so unutterably degraded that they are willing to kill at so much monthly salary.
This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To hope it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of Social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.
It was for telling the people this that these five men were killed. For telling people that the only way to get out of their misery was first to learn what their rights upon this earth were;—freedom to use the land and all within it and all the tools of production—and then to stand all together and take them, themselves, and not to appeal to the jugglers of the law. Abolish the law—that is abolish privilege, and crime will abolish itself. They will tell you these men were hanged for advocating force. What! These creatures who drill men in the science of killing, who put guns and clubs in hands they train to shoot and strike, who hail with delight the latest inventions in explosives, who exult in the machine that can kill the most with the least expenditure of energy, who declare a war of extermination upon people who do not want their civilization, who ravish, and burn, and garotte and guillotine, and hang, and electrocute, they have the impertinence to talk about the unrighteousness of force! True these men did advocate to resist invasion by force. You will find Scarcely one in a thousand who does not believe in that right. The one will be either a real Christian or a non-resistant Anarchist. It will not be a believer in the State. No, no; it was not for advocating forcible resistance on principle, but for advocating forcible resistance to their tyrannies, and for advocating a Society which would forever make an end to riches and poverty, of governors and governed.
The spirit of revenge, always stupid, accomplished its brutal act. Had it lifted its eyes from its work it might have seen in the background of the scaffold that bleak November morning, the dawn-light of Anarchy whiten across the world. So it came first,—a gleam of hope to the proletaire, a summons to rise and shake off his material bondage. But steadily, steadily the light has grown, as year by year the scientist, the literary genius, the artist and the moral teacher, have brought to it the tribute of their best work, their unpaid work, the work they did for love. Today it means not only material emancipation, but intellectual and moral emancipation, too; it comes as the summing up of all those lines of thought and action which for three hundred years have been making towards freedom; it means fulness of being, the free life.
And I say it boldly, notwithstanding the recent outburst of condemnation, notwithstanding the cry of lynch, burn, crop, imprison, deport, and the Scarlet Letter A to be branded low down upon the forehead, and the latest excuse for that fond esthetic decoration “the button” that for two thousand years no idea has so stirred the world as this, none which had such living power to break down barriers of race and degree, to attract prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic, Quaker and revolutionist. No other ideal but the free life is strong enough to touch the man whose infinite pity and understanding goes alike to the hypocrite priest and the victim of Siberian whips; the loving rebel who stepped from his title and his wealth to labor with all the laboring earth; the sweet strong singer who sang, “No master, high or low”; the lover who does not measure his love nor reckon on return; the self-centered one who “will not rule, but also will not ruled be,” the philosopher who chanted the Over-man,—the devoted woman of the people; ay, and these too,-these rebellious flashes from the vast cloud-hung ominous obscurity of the anonymous, these souls whom governmental and capitalistic brutality has whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage and bitterness, these mad young lions of revolt; these Winkelrieds who offer their hearts to the Spears.
VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE.
Voltairine de Cleyre, “A Memorial Oration,” Why? 1 no. 13 (November, 1913): 1-6.
