To the editors:
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Bill Adelman’s fantasies about skinhead death squads are too ludicrous to merit reply; even the slightest familiarity with the rich historical work on the Haymarket events disproves his claims that the Haymarket Martyrs ran the gamut from conservative to radical. All were activists in Chicago’s anarchist movement and its affiliated unions (the conservatives had their own unions). August Spies edited the world’s first and longest-lived anarchist daily newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung; Albert Parsons had left the Socialist Labor Party for the anarchists years before, edited an anarchist paper and wrote a book explaining his anarchist beliefs; Samuel Fielden was not only a preacher, he was an official of Chicago’s leading atheist organization. These are simple facts upon which all serious historians agree; each of the Haymarket Martyrs was quite explicit about his anarchist beliefs, both before and following the police terror of May, 1886.
Jon Bekken
