Reply #8: Howard Fast discusses Haymarket in detail in his book "The American" [View All]

[hfojvt]

which I excerpted here http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/47

In some sense Spies was calling for warfare. His headline for the May 5th rally (hmm, May 5th, Karl Marx's birthday) was "Working men, TO ARMS! TO ARMS!" Although the actual headline may have been in German.

You make an error here

"These eight men were mostly anarchists, Communists, or socialists, and all of them were immigrants to the United States."

Albert Parsons was born in Alabama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Parsons

Oscar Neebe was born in NYC (although educated in Germany)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Neebe

You mention the 3 conservative Republican Presidents of the 1920s, but it really was the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who crippled the labor movement. Many labor leaders, like Eugene V. Debs, were prosecuted or persecuted for opposing WWI. Debs went to jail and actually ran for President, for the 3rd time in 1920 as Convict 9653. Scott Nearing was put on trial and perhaps fired from his teaching job (I cannot remember for sure, it has been years since I read his autobiography "Education of a Radical") Walter Rauschenbusch was attacked (and German ancestry did not help in that) and his efforts in opposing the war and the attacks he faced seemed to have contributed to his death on 25 Jul 1918 at the relatively young age of 57. (His father had lived to be 83.) Those are just a few prominent examples.