Britain, Anarchist Federation, Organise! #80 - Haymarket Scrapbook. Edited by Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger.

In 1886 the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York. In the same year in another great 
city of the United States, Chicago, four anarchists were hanged whilst another cheated the 
noose by killing himself. These anarchists were not hanged for murder - in which they had 
had no part whatsoever - but for their devotion to their ideas and their important role in 
mobilising the working class in Chicago for the fight for the eight hour day and 
eventually for social revolution. The American press in a concerted and united campaign
whipped up prejudice against the anarchists and ghoulishly gloated over their executions. 
--- May Day was designated as a holiday for these martyrs and as a celebration of the 
struggle of the working class on an international level for emancipation and liberation.

This book is a lavishly illustrated
tribute to these fallen anarchists-
Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg,
August Spies, Adolph Fischer,
George Engel ? and to their
comrades- Oscar Neebe, Samuel
Fielden, and Michael Schwab-
who spent long years in prison
as a result of the decisions of the
kangaroo court. These last three
are buried alongside their mur-
dered brothers in the Waldheim
cemetery in Chicago.

The book is a revised edition of
the one that appeared in 1986
to commemorate the centen-
nial of the judicial murders.
These editions owe much to the
work of Franklin Rosemont and
his comrade Penelope. As such,
while this book gives much
space to the martyred anarchists
and those of the same beliefs
who sprang to their support,
like Voltairine de Cleyre, Piotr
Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and
Johann Most, it also makes room
for radical historians like the late
Paul Avrich and Richard Drinnon;
writers and poets like the great
realist novelist Nelson Algren,
author of A Walk on the Wild Side
and The Man With The Golden
Arm; members of the Industrial
Workers of the World; as well as
socialists, communists and pro-
gressive reformers. As Ron Sa-
kolsky remarks at the end of the
book; ?this roster was not merely
a catalogue of politically-correct
inclusivity, but a many-headed
hydra of subversive texts and
incendiary salvos aimed at the
heart of the dominant order?.

Franklin Rosemont himself con-
tributed articles on the passion-
ate young anarchist Louis Lingg,
on Algren, on the great working
class philosopher Dietzgen and an
extremely entertaining, eloquent
and well-informed piece on ?The
Image of the Anarchist in Popular
Culture?; in which he wrestles
the caricature of the bearded,
wild-eyed, bomb throwing
madman to the ground. Practi-
cally the only spoiler in this rich
anthology is the limp and woolly
foreword by Peter Linebaugh.
His ramblings encompass Aneu-
rin Bevan, ?non-aligned? na-
tions, Franz Fanon and Obama
in a confection of incoherence
only redeemed by his observa-
tion: ?class consciousness is the
knowledge that emancipation is
ours. Class struggle is the fight
for it, the fight to be a class and
then the fight to abolish the
class system.?

Buried right by the Chicago
Martyrs and their memorial are
other anarchists like De Cleyre,
Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Boris
Yelensky, the founder of the
original Anarchist Black Cross, as
well as supporters like Dietzgen.
A little further away is the grave
of Franklin Rosemont, who died
in 2009. He would have been
very proud.

?Anarchists, as well as all other
thinking people, claim that in the
present society a great number
of people are deprived of a de-
cent existence. We demand the
reinstallation of the disinherited!
Is this a crime? Are we therefore
dangerous criminals, whose lives
should be taken in the interests
of the common good society??

Adolph Fischer

?Anarchism is order without
government. We anarchists say
that anarchism will be the natu-
ral outgrowth of universal co-
operation (communism). We say
that when poverty has vanished
and education is the common
property of the people, that then
reason will reign supreme. We
say that crime will belong to the
past and that the misdeeds of
erring brothers can be righted
by other means than those of
today. Most of the crimes of our
days are engendered directly by
the system of today, the system
which creates ignorance and
misery?. Michael Schwab
?Yet we shouldn?t be sad, nor
should we grieve our dead. We
should express our respect and
vindicate our love for them. If
anyone reading this feels tears
welling in their eyes, they should
listen to the song sung by A. R.
Parsons, one of our dead, as he
approached the scaffold. ?Come
not to my grave with your mourn-
ings... Cease your sorrowful bell;
I am well!? Ba Jin, one of China?s
foremost novelists, anarchist

266 pages. Charles H. Kerr Publishing/AK Press.
?18.95