The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in ChicagoMcLean, George N.
History
The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago
McLean, George N.
Anarchists -- United States; Haymarket Square Riot, Chicago, Ill., 1886
Samuel Fielden was born in Todmorden, Lancashire, England, in 1847, and
spent thirteen years of his boyhood working in a cotton mill. In early
manhood he became a Methodist minister and Sunday-school superintendent
in his native place. In 1868 he came to New York, worked for a few
months in a cotton mill, and in the following year came to Chicago.
For the greater portion of the time since he has worked as a laborer.
He joined the liberal league in 1880, where he met Spies and Parsons.
He became a socialist in 1883, and has spent much time as a traveling
agitator of the International Working People's association.
We feel sure that Samuel Fielden is to-day serving out a life sentence
as the result of forming associations through which he was led to
mingle with agitators anarchistic, whose teachings were treasonable.
Though not endowed by nature with proclivities whose tendencies
were toward violence and bloodshed, yet being full of vanity and of
a vacillating nature was led to make speeches of an incendiary and
revolutionary character which identified him with those responsible for
the result of the fatal bomb, and doomed him to a life of unrequited
toil and of penal servitude.
ADOLPH FISCHER.
Adolph Fischer, who was about thirty years old, came to this country
from Germany when a boy, and learned the printer's trade with his
brother, who was editor of a German weekly at Nashville, Tenn. For
several years Fischer was editor and proprietor of the Little Rock
(Ark.) _Staats Zeitung_. This he sold in 1881, after which he worked
at his trade in St. Louis and Chicago. After coming to Chicago he
became a most rabid anarchist, and often accused Spies and Schwab of
being half-hearted, and of not having the courage to express their
convictions. He, like Engel, believed they were not radical enough.
At one time he, with Engel and Fehling, started _De Anarchist_, a
fire-eating weekly, designed to supplant the _Arbeiter Zeitung_.
He entered with all his possible energy into the spirit of socialism
and anarchy, so much so, that it became his only theme and the source
of happiness to him which he fully expressed in his last words upon
the gallows, viz: "This is the happiest moment of my life." If that
were the case, what an unendurable life were his, and the prospect
of dissolution offered a rest from the self-inflicted torment of
continuing to live.
GEORGE ENGEL.
George Engel was born in Cassel, Germany, in 1836. He received a
common school education and learned the printer's trade. He came to
America in 1873, and a year later to Chicago, where he became a convert
to socialism, and later a rabid anarchist. He founded the famous
"Northwest group" in 1883.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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