Anarchists

 

He's a  geezer. Haven't seen a coat like that for years. I had one once, but eventually gave it to the college costume shop. 

Then there's the helmet. Somewhere along the line, someone claimed buckets like that do a decent job between the goal posts but not on Chicago's streets. Today, it's too "keystone cops."

And what is that shaft-like thing strapped to his belt? Seriously? A sword? A bayonet? A club? Don't ask.

Once upon the time this nine-foot tall, law-and-order guy was banged up by a street car, physically and symbolically. The driver told police he was tired of seeing this uniformed clown with his hand up in the air, so he just knocked him down. That was May 4, 1927, exactly 41 years after the 1886 Haymarket Square riot, which killed seven police, four civilians, and injured as many as 70 people. This old cop sculpture was meant to be commemorated that Haymarket Riot.

For the record, he was decorated and desecrated so often he now stands in a place where radicals and anarchists can't get him and wouldn't likely want to anyway because the public can't see him either.

When the old helmeted cop got beat up too often, some Chicagoians decided to commemorate the riot at Haymarket Square in with another statue, this one, four years later, taking what might be thought of as another side in local memories.

But there's another sculpture too, and this one picks a fight with that old helmeted cop. In 1893, just four years later, this Haymarket sculpture was parked in a Forest Lawn cemetery--8000 people attended. Dame Justice is about to place a laurel wreath on a fallen worker. That nine-foot cop celebrated law and order, one of those who swarmed the wagon from which the man on the ground here was speaking. A bomb ignited and the carnage began.

Dame Justice is borrowed from mythology--no bucket cap or long coat, just a flowing gown. Dame Justice celebrates the heroism of those who, that day in May, were fighting the coppers. She celebrates the working stiff in the war between labor and management, a war that may have abated but has never really ended.

When the old helmeted cop got beat up too often, Chicago decided to commemorate the riot at Haymarket Square in with another statue, this one (2004), far less in-your-face but a bit more unexplainable.

A union man is aboard a hay wagon, holding forth on the treachery of the bosses, surrounded by both admirers and sufferers. It's a mess, but then, so was the riot on Haymarket Square.

Chicago wanted a sculpture to commemorate an end to conflicts between labor and management. But then, most of us would say that war is never-ending.

Anarchists—dirty, rotten, red-bellied anarchists—have been blamed wherever fires rage for the cause of social justice. When the riots in Washington were happening, January 6, 2020, conservative pols and commentators went so far as to say that the madness at the Capital was ignited by the Antifa, a name given to the latest wave of anarchists, liberals sworn to break things up. 

A man I know who works for justice among South African blacks, a missionary who’s been on the field for decades and came home on leave recently to learn that one of the churches who had supported his work had unceremoniously dropped him without a word. It seems one of the men with most capital in that church claimed someone had said our friends were pedaling social justice in South Africa. "Social justice" smells like disunity, even worse, communism.

I grew up in a home where, in the early Sixties, my wonderfully warm, devotedly Christian father really distrusted Martin Luther King, thought him "communistic," an "agitator," just another word for anarchist.

I don't trust our President using that language, but then I don't trust him either. He'll be designing his own statue soon. You can bet on that.