On Maydays, May Days and Never Giving Up
I have never felt so personally and persistently sad about the world as I have these last few months. I am a longtime activist. I have not been in denial about inequalities and injustices since I was a child, and I have been an activist, often facing the very uphill battle of activists, since I was a teenager. This is to say that the idea of an endless, Sisyphean move forward and backward is not new to me. It’s not that.
Despair is antithetical to activism so I am not there yet but I will be honest that the past few months have felt physically exhausting to remain on top of, spread the word about and try to fight against. Trump’s regime is an assault on virtually every facet of a liberal democracy, from attacking higher education and reversing inclusion to kidnapping citizens and criminalizing dissent. Just writing that last sentence enervated me.
I’ve had my iron levels checked. I’m taking my vitamin D, my B12. Until January, when we saw how Trump 2.0 was going to shake out, I’d always been someone with an abundance of energy. These days, it takes all my willpower to stay awake until 10:00 PM. (If I go to sleep earlier, I will definitely wake up in the middle of the night for at least a couple of hours, which worsens my already frayed sleep cycle for days.) I say this to point out that my tiredness does not seem physical. I am simply bone weary, and I think this regime — the chaos, the cruelty, the incessantly banging, bleating cacophony, the news cycle that whizzes like a deck of cards in the hands of an expert shuffler — is the reason why. I also cannot turn away, because, as a person with considerable advantages, I feel the need to at least bear witness to the Trump administration but ideally do much more than that: Stay informed, write, make phone calls, go to protests. I will be honest, though. Sometimes it takes all my strength and determination just to not curl up in bed in a way I have never felt called to do before.
It’s a familiar sight again these days, seeing my husband hunched over foam board on the dining room table, sketching out block letters in pencil like the graphic designer he is, and filling them in with cheap acrylic paint, trying to keep one particular cat from trodding upon the sign while it’s wet. We still have some of our signs from the 1990s, protesting the WTO, signs from the 2000s, protesting Bush-era wars in the Middle East. There are more signs that are long gone but I have recollections of, signs that protested furriers, rodeos and circuses, streaked and warped from the rain.
Yesterday, I told John I have a new slogan: “She doth protest too much.” Because I do. It’s not what Queen Gertrude meant in Hamlet, but it has taken on new meaning these days.
About 15 minutes from my home is a cemetery that houses a granite memorial sculpture known as the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument. Among other far-left organizers, anarchists and labor activists, Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons were also laid to rest at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, IL. Forest Home is kind of a hallowed ground of a who’s who of turn-of-the-century revolutionaries. Hard to get on that guest list. Visiting this place, which I am sure has received a lot of pilgrimages over the years, I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of intense conversations its famous spectral residents have inspired over the years and could be having themselves under the moonlight when the cemetery’s gates are closed. Surrounded by busy streets and traffic, even during the day, the cemetery still has a kind of peaceful hush pervading it.
Yesterday, an overcast, gloomy, spectacularly funereal day, I was on my way to the grocery store when I remembered that the next day — today — was May 1, and it is kind of famous in the Chicago area, and I just happen to live so close to a memorial to the people who put May Day on the map. I decided on a whim to pop over to Forest Home Cemetery and find the monument, pay a little visit to Emma and her comrades. It took some meandering and searching but I did finally find the location. I’ve been there before, but it’s been years.
To understand why there’s a Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument, you have to first understand what is referred to as Chicago’s Haymarket affair. There is a lot written about it elsewhere so in the interest of brevity, I will give you the broadest of brush strokes.
In the 1880s, a broad coalition of interests — from labor organizers to reformers to everyday workers — came together to demand an eight-hour work day. (This was finally passed as the law of the land in 1938 when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Labor Standards Act under the New Deal was enacted, but who even knows where that stands today under Trump.) In any case, for months, workers talked, organized, went to meetings, marched and on May 1, 1886, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs and went on strike, joined by tens of thousands more in the street in the days following.
Police and demonstrators clashed as tensions ramped up. On May 4, a bomb was thrown by an unknown party; police officers and demonstrators were killed in the melee. Business leaders became very anxious about the growing labor movement, and meetings, marches and picketing were banned by Chicago’s mayor, squashing the rising movement. The city’s newspapers published unsubstantiated anarchist conspiracies, published attacks on the non-native born and called for revenge.
Hundreds of strikers were arrested, though the bomb-thrower of May 4 was never identified. The public wanted someone to pay, though, and the people in power wanted nascent demonstrators to be afraid. Eight anarchists were tried for murder by a jury in which all jurors admitted prejudice against the defendants. There was no evidence linking any of the defendants to the bomb throwing, indeed, five were not even there when the bomb was thrown on May 4, but the jury, instructed by the judge to accept a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight. Seven defendants were sentenced to death. Four defendants, — August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel and Adolph Fischer — were hanged in Cook County Jail; one defendant, Louis Lingg, died by suicide and two had their sentences communted. In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld granted the three imprisoned defendants, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe and Samuel Fielden, absolute pardon, citing the lack of evidence against them and the unfairness of the trial. The Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument, depicting Justice as a woman standing guard over the body of a fallen worker, both in bronze, was also dedicated in 1883. She is holding a laurel wreath to crown the fallen worker.
Visiting the memorial, I couldn’t help thinking about this current political moment. We are not supposed to repeat the injustices of the past. We are supposed to learn from them. We need and deserve better. The issues that are supposed to be settled matters — fair trials and due process, to say the least — are suddenly on the chopping block for Trump and his enablers, his violent goons and their chainsaws.
Yes, I am tired in a whole new way but maybe that makes sense as our democracy is being assaulted in ways I have not encountered in my lifetime. The Haymarket trial is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history. I have zero doubt that this phase of Trump 2.0 will be another very regrettable, highly avoidable pitch-black passage in the dustbin of history.
I think I am going to sit out this year’s May Day march because of that whole exhaustion thing, so writing this will stand for my effort. In the meantime, I am gathering strength, energy and a little better an attitude. I hope you are doing the same for yourself because we really need you on the front lines.
Please, no more martyrs on our watch. We should have learned enough by now.
Marla Rose is co-founder of VeganStreet.com.
