This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb. 

 

The Breaks

In 1883 Parsons, Spies, and others in the country over had organized the International Working People’s Association, which had thrown all its resources into the fight for the eight-hour day. Parsons became the recording secretary of the Chicago Eight-Hour League. It was with great satisfaction that he saw the eight-hour movement sweeping the country in 1885 and 1886 with the fervor of a religious crusade. At the same time, as a result of the successful strike in the Wabash and Gould’s Southwestern System in 1885, the membership of the Knights of Labor increased sevenfold within a year, from 100,000, in 1885 to 700,000 in 1886. This tremendous growth frightened many a monopolists, who decided that the time had come to try once again to break the labor movements. All that was needed was the opportunity. It arrived in Chicago. [1]

“There is eight-hour agitation everywhere,” wrote John Swinton in his April 18, 1886 issue. Workers marched and sang from New York to San Francisco. The newspapers were virtually unanimous in some variation of the declaration that the movement was “communism, lurid and rampant.” They declared that it would engender “lower wages, poverty and social degradation for the American worker,” while inducing “loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery and drunkenness.” The New York Times on April 25, 1886, declared the movement “un-American,” adding that, “labor disturbances are brought about by foreigners.” The workers seemed unimpressed by such warnings. While wearing “Eight-Hour Shoes,” footwear manufactured in establishments which had already granted the shorter workday, and smoking “Eight-Hour Tobacco,” they everywhere shouted a song that echoed menacingly on the air, at least to employers’ ears:

                                    “We mean to make things over

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[1] Monday

a truck hits

a car hits

hers and the brakes

the driver says the brakes

are so weak

the decisions

are not decisions

not like the decision the company made to not

maintain the brakes allowing

the crash and to crash and to crash

there would be the break

she needed the balance

into the next hour then the next when

the snows came to her to conspire

                                                       We’re tired of toil for nought
                                      But bare enough to live on; never
                                                        An hour for thought.
                                     We want to feel the sunshine: we
                                                       We want to smell the flowers
                                     We’re sure that God has willed it
                                                       And we mean to have eight hours.
                                     We’re summoning our forces from
                                                      Shipyard, shop and mill
                                     Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
                                                      Eight hours for what we will!” [2]

 

Even the slogan of the order, “An injury to one is the concern of all,” was rising to plague Powderly, as members used it in defending the proposed strike. Sixty thousand Negroes had joined the order and Frank Ferrell, Negro leader of New York, was a national officer. The foreign-born and unskilled labor had rushed into the organization by the thousands, unimpressed but its goal of education for producers’ cooperatives, but eager for pay raises and trade union protection. Women workers were increasingly active in its ranks under the direction of Leonora Barry. Now one of the largest labor organizations in all the world, many of its members were talking of forming a worldwide labor organization. [3]

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[2] Tuesday

To be that close to the system

Of fault and circumstance

The wind was strong that morning because the storm was coming

She had been breaking already slowly

Into what they call spring

Break broke broken

Everything will be new after the officer said

[3] Wednesday

And the trees fell and there was no power

No one went in not that hour or the next or this

What luck you have they said

You picked the perfect week to stop

In a bath of essential thought

To think about limits and how if we do not

We are made to by trucks or stars or logic

Founded in 1881 as the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, it had its base among the skilled workers of the nation. Organized along craft lines, it sought to build strong and well-knit national unions financially able to carry on strikes, if necessary, to secure increased wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions.

Accepting the class struggle and the strike as labor’s most potent weapon, this new and fighting organization, then an uncertain infant, sought an issue upon which to rally the nation’s worker. It found it in the eight-hour day. At its 1884 convention it unanimously adopted a resolution proposing that all labor join on May 1, 1886, to establish an eight-hour day. [4]

•

May 1 was a beautiful day in Chicago. The blustery wind from the Lake, often particularly piercing in spring, suddenly died away and the sun way strong. It was a quiet day in more ways than one, the factories still and empty, the warehouses closed, the teamsters idle, the streets deserted, construction halted, no columns of smoke ascending from factory chimneys, the stockyards silent. 

It was Saturday, ordinarily a day of work. But crowds of workers, laughing, chatting, joking, and dressed in their best clothes, accompanied by their wives and children, were assembling for a parade on Michigan Avenue…People laughed with a queer elation, continually looking back at the vast marching concourse which seemed a visible symbol of labor’s power when unified. In its seemingly unending numbers were Knights of Labor and members of the American Federation of Labor; Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Russians, Irish, Italians, Negroes, and former cowboys who now worked at the stockyards. There were Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, Anarchists and Republicans, Communists and Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, and just plain people all one and irresistible for the eight-hour workday.

The parade turned into the Lake Front, gathering there for speeches in English, Bohemian, German, and Polish. Parsons spoke of the invincible might of united labor. Spies, thirty-one, editor of the German workers’ paper, Arbeiter-Zeitung, and equally

 

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[4] Thursday

We are in an age of dissolution

Smith says labor is the source of wealth and all culture

The subject line of all email correspondence between us

She names Champagne

Champagne I was in a car crash today

Champagne before I forget they are looking                                                                

For a poet to teach this

eloquent in his native tongue and in English was a favorite of the crowd. The applause for Spies died away and May 1 was all over. [5}

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[5] Friday

For in the beginning.

            For still untold and largely missing.

            For more than the dying.

            For more than the gunmen in the mountains.

            For more than the crying on the gallows, “Let the voice be heard!”

            For whose bravery swept the land with the speed of a prairie fire.

            For birth amid the great convulsion.

            For under depressions.

            For the greatest heights in conjoined hands.

            For never living in isolation.

            For never progressing without allies.

            For always.

            For at the very crux of history.

            For there has been none more concerned.

            For the ever-increasing power.

            For very nature is synchronized.

            For the very growth of monopoly.

            For its great leap forward was an answering.

            For its great action to the trusts and the empires.

            For its rank and file.

            For the sobbing desperation of the wives as they shook the gates.

            For the husbands hanged.

There has been no bloodshed, no repetition of the Paris Commune. The police, exasperated by the futility of May 1 after such high expectations, gained some relief by clubbing the locked-out employees of the McCormick Harvester Works as they rushed in 300 scabs. At closing time, a great crowd of the locked-out employees was waiting the exit of the scabs when police suddenly charged them with drawn revolvers. They retreated when police, according to a witness, “opened fire into their backs. Boys and men were killed as they ran.” It was reported that six had been slain, Spies, who has been speaking at a nearby meeting of striking lumber workers, was a witness to the massacre and, after he had reported it to his colleagues, it was decided to call a protest meeting against police violence for the next evening at Haymarket Square.

Parsons finished speaking at ten. A cold wind had whipped in off the lake and there had been a few drops of rain. It looked as if there would be a storm. Many in the crowd left. Soon the group were laughing and telling stories over mugs of beer as Fielden outside, a pedestrian speaker, plowed on before a steadily dwindling crowd.

“Is it not a fact,” he was saying, “that we have no control over our own lives, that others dictate the working conditions of our existence, that -” Suddenly there were cries of urgent warning. “Look! The police!” Down the street in regular military formation, their clubs drawn, came 180 patrolmen, led by Captain Bonfield and Captain Ward. The crowd began to run as Captain Ward stopped before the wagon and, addressing the astonished Fielden, said: “In the name of the people of the State of Illinois, I command this meeting immediately and peaceably to disperse.”

“But Captain, ” gasped Fielden, “we are peaceable.”

There was a moment of silence and in the blackness of night there was the sound of running feet. Then there was a flash of red and a terrific explosion. Someone had thrown a bomb. There was a terrible confusion in the darkness, police firing wildly in every direction, people falling, many being wounded, others running, cursing, moaning, being trampled upon and wildly clubbed by the maddened police, one of who number had been killed outright, and seven of whom were fatally wounded.

The next day Chicago and the nation exploded into one great cry for vengeance. “With the blast of the bomb,” David writes in his account of the Haymarket affair, “the press lost every vestige of objective

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

            For the railroads.

            For from a prison cell.

            For the movement that grew until it freed.

            For the great love and the lonely fight.

            For the unknown to history but at the very heart.

            For the immigrants on a strange new shore.

            For the bloody.

            For out of the fat war.

            For nearly all the galaxy of uncommon men who were to be the overlords of the                                future. For out of the contracts came the great fortunes and the beginnings.

There was a moment of silence and in the blackness of night there was the sound of running feet. Then there was a flash of red and a terrific explosion. Someone had thrown a bomb. There was a terrible confusion in the darkness, police firing wildly in every direction, people falling, many being wounded, others running, cursing, moaning, being trampled upon and wildly clubbed by the maddened police, one of who number had been killed outright, and seven of whom were fatally wounded.

The next day Chicago and the nation exploded into one great cry for vengeance. “With the blast of the bomb,” David writes in his account of the Haymarket affair, “the press lost every vestige of objective accuracy…A characteristic headline screamed ‘NOW IT IS BLOOD!…A Bomb Thrown into [Police] Ranks Inaugurates the Work of Death.”

 

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* lines borrowed and adapted from Richard O. Boyer’s Labor’s Untold Story

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