RADICAL SENSATIONS

World Movements, Violence, and Visual CultureBy SHELLEY STREEBY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5280-8

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………………………………xiiiPREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………….1PART I Global Haymarket………………………………………………………………………………..351. Looking at State Violence: Lucy Parsons, José Martí, and Haymarket………………………………71PART II Revolutionary U.S.-Mexico Borderlands…………………………………………………………….1113. Sensational Socialism, the Horrors of the Porfiriato, and Mexico’s Civil Wars……………………………..151PART III Black Radical New York City…………………………………………………………………….1755. Sensational Counter-Sensationalisms: Black Radicals Struggle over Mass Culture…………………………….1956. Archiving Black Transnational Modernity: Scrapbooks, Stereopticons, and Social Movements……………………2317. “Wanted—A Colored International”: Hubert H. Harrison, Marcus Garvey, and Modern Media………………….251EPILOGUE Deportation Scenes…………………………………………………………………………….269NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………………..305BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………….323

Chapter One

Looking at State Violence

LUCY PARSONS, JOSÉ MARTÍ, AND HAYMARKET

In late 1887, while he was living in New York City, José Martí wrote about the Chicago anarchists who were hung after being found guilty of inciting the violence at Haymarket Square that led to the death of a police officer on May 4, 1886. Several other people also died and many more were severely injured as a result of the blast of a bomb as well as the bullets that civilians and the police fired into the crowd and, accidentally, at each other. Although the bomb-thrower’s identity was never determined, the state claimed that the anarchists were part of a conspiracy to “excite the people, or classes of the people” to “sedition, tumult and riot” in order to “overthrow the existing order of society and to bring about a social revolution by force.” As part of that conspiracy, it charged, the anarchists, in their speeches, newspaper writings, pamphlets, and broadsides, used “incendiary,” sensational language to provoke the murder of the police.

The “drama” of Haymarket, as Martí called it, which included the anarchists’ imprisonment, trial, appeals, and execution in the months that followed, was crucially mediated and shaped by the late-nineteenth-century expansion of the pictorial marketplace and the transformation of visual culture. In the wake of the removal of state-sponsored executions from public spaces, an emergent mass visual culture promised access to forbidden scenes of punishment, while the state and the police tried to use new visual technologies and cultural forms to turn Haymarket into a spectacle, enforce their own interpretations, and regulate the responses of viewers and readers. José Martí and Lucy E. Parsons, on the other hand, intervened in late-nineteenth-century practices of looking by re-envisioning iconic sentimental and sensational Haymarket scenes and raising questions about violence, the visual, and state power that connect world movements across space and time.

Many scholars of Martí’s years in the United States have suggested that Haymarket coincided with a larger transformation in his thinking: I build on this work by emphasizing how he responded to a changing visual culture and new mass-produced images of Haymarket. Although in an earlier piece Martí harshly criticized the anarchists and defended the state, after the executions he adapted and altered discourses of sentiment and sensation in order to reimagine iconic Haymarket scenes and mobilize sympathy for the anarchists. Martí’s chronicles, which were written for the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, reached readers in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, the United States, and other parts of the Americas, for whom debates about violence and the state in visions of future revolutionary and anticolonial transformation were both relevant and pressing. By the late 1880s, as Benedict Anderson has observed, globe-stretching and nation-linking networks connected anarchists in many different parts of the world, notably including Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Spain, the United States, China, France, England, and Japan, and anarchism had become “the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left.” As a writer for a Spanish-language newspaper with a transnational circulation, Martí participated in just such a network, but as an anticolonial, revolutionary nationalist, he was alarmed by anarchist objections to the nation-state, although he ambivalently admired their passion for social justice and sympathized with their desire to change the world. Martí’s anxieties about working-class violence and his commitment to the ideal of a utopian, fraternal, and anticolonial nation shaped his perspective on “la guerra social” in Chicago, despite his outrage at the police violence and the legal injustice that followed. Even so, Martí’s chronicle of the “escenas extraordinarias” in Chicago suggests the global significance of the Haymarket drama, as he called it, as well as the challenges posed by anarchist world movements to nations and nationalisms at the end of a long century of anticolonial wars and nation-and empire-building in the Americas.

In representing Haymarket as a global drama to a world audience, Martí’s chronicles also respond to significant transformations in visual culture. He repeatedly refers to or re-envisions in words the images of Haymarket scenes that were disseminated by means of new technologies such as the telegraph and the camera and in illustrations based on photographs and eyewitness sketches (see figure 6). Scenes of the speeches and bombing at Haymarket, the trial, the anarchists’ imprisonment, the visits made by family and friends, the anarchists’ final hours and execution, along with the massive public funeral that followed, were graphically illustrated in lithographs, cabinet cards, cartoons, albums, mass-circulation daily newspapers, weekly illustrated papers, pamphlets, and books. Many of Martí’s elaborately rendered “escenas” suggestively evoke the most iconic images of the conflict, including line drawings of the explosion of the bomb at Haymarket Square, photographs of the anarchists, and illustrations of the suicide in his prison cell of the youngest of the anarchists, Louis Lingg (see figure 7), a German immigrant youth who, Martí marveled, wanted to “desventrar la ley inglesa / eviscerate English law” and did not even speak English! Martí was not alone in reworking such visual material, for the anarchists and their allies also struggled to make use of newly ubiquitous images by reproducing and reimagining iconic ones. The struggle over the meaning of Haymarket, then, was also a struggle over the images of state violence and anarchist world movements that circulated in the popular press and through the transnational networks of which Anderson writes.

Martí’s modernist newspaper chronicle recasts a wide range of such popular images and narratives of the Haymarket drama: he responds to the events of the day by assimilating, revising, and stylizing the representations of an emergent mass visual culture. As Julio Ramos suggests, the Latin American chronicler at the fin de siècle struggled to “dominate in the very process of representation” a “conjunction of materials, tied to journalism.” In this way, Martí seeks to “overwrite” (107) inscriptions of U.S. newspapers, anarchist literature and culture, and other sources with his own interpretation of the events. But although Martí cites anarchist literature as he criticizes the state’s case and the representations of Haymarket purveyed in mass culture, he ultimately draws back in horror from the anarchists’ denial of the patria, for he remained committed to the ideal of the nation and to republican institutions even as he was forced to confront the question of whether violence against the state was necessary in anticolonial contexts.

Twenty-five years after Martí wrote his chronicle, Lucy E. Parsons self-published a memorial edition of the Famous Speeches of the Haymarket anarchists that gave a prominent place to an illustration of the gallows scene, one of the most widely reproduced of the scenes associated with Haymarket. During this era, Parsons was one of the founding members of the iww, the “one big” U.S. union that organized immigrants and women, and one whose official publication declared that workers had “no country” and frequently criticized the sentiment of patriotism. Parsons also made speeches and raised money for Mexican anarchists who were imprisoned in the United States, such as Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, two of the leaders of the revolutionary PLm, a transnational movement that initially helped to overthrow Porfirio Díaz and eventually tried to push the Mexican Revolution in an anarchist, rather than liberal reformist, direction.

In his second Haymarket chronicle Martí referred to her as “la mestiza Lucy Parsons” and declared that her tempestuous eloquence and heroic efforts to wrest the bodies of the anarchists from the gallows amazed him. She may have been a former slave and was described in the popular press as a “mulatto” although she claimed to be solely of Mexican and Indian descent. She played an active role in the events surrounding Haymarket, for she was an important organizer, writer, and orator as well as the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the leaders of the Chicago branch of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) and the editor of the anarchist newspaper the Alarm, who was hung along with three of the other Chicago anarchists. In the years after the executions, Lucy Parsons continued to write, speak, and organize, and compiled the Life of Albert R. Parsons (1889; 1903) as well as the Famous Speeches of the Haymarket anarchists, which went through many editions and translations and traveled all over the world. This last text was eventually illustrated with a few prominent images, most notably an illustration of the gallows scene that Parsons instructed her reader to “look at” while swearing “in your heart” to work for the overthrow of the “accursed system” that was responsible for the “awful murder of our comrades.”

In bringing Lucy Parsons and José Martí together, I combine insights from nineteenth-century visual-culture studies with methodologies in literary studies that look below, above, and beyond the nation and the state, unsettling both as the primary horizons of analysis. As the Martí scholar Laura Lomas suggests, much of the recent revisionary American studies work on transnational literature in the Americas has focused on “the multilingual and deterritorialized routes and roots of Latino or transamerican writing in the work of mainly light-skinned Creole elites of early to mid-nineteenth century Cuba.” By the 1880s, in the wake of “truncated wars of independence and after the gradual abolition of slavery began,” the “numbers of islanders and other Latino Americans in multiracial barrios, especially Florida, swelled to the thousands.” Many were anarchists who questioned what they saw as the narrowness of the idea of national independence championed by the previous generation of exiles and émigrés as well as by wealthy businessmen prominent in the independence movement of their own time. Martí’s perspective on Haymarket, which betrays anxieties about anarchism as a rival worldview as well as sympathy for the Chicago anarchists, was thus shaped by his complex relationships with Cuban anarchists and by debates over state power, violence, direct action, and political reform within and around the independence movement.

For Haymarket was an epochal event that provoked responses not only in Chicago and the United States, but also in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Russia, Germany, England, and other places where anarchism flourished. And despite his ambivalence about the Chicago anarchists, Martí, like Lucy Parsons, was part of a larger world of migrants, writers, and organizers at odds with or openly critical of states and state power, including anticolonial revolutionists, socialists, and anarchists. In the United States, many anarchists, like most of the men on trial at Haymarket, were immigrants. Lucy Parsons and her husband, Albert, were both born in the United States, but they cast their lot with the German immigrant workers who led the Chicago labor movement when they joined the iwPa, whose Pittsburgh Manifesto insisted that “political structures (States), which are completely in the hands of the propertied, have no other purpose than the upholding of the present order of exploitation.” As a woman of color whose marriage was not recognized by the state and who may well have been a former slave and thereby legally classified as property, it is not surprising that Lucy Parsons had a strong critique of the state, legal institutions, and the limits of political reform. In the early twentieth century, during the Mexican and Russian Revolutions and the First World War, Haymarket continued to be remembered by others who imagined alternatives to state power and who were punished by states for doing so, including the Flores Magóns, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, all of whom were targeted by federal immigration, citizenship, sedition, and obscenity laws.

The changing meanings of the Haymarket archive in transnational contexts suggest that debates about state violence and state power responded to what Joshua Brown has called the “vast expansion of the pictorial marketplace” in this era. Recent work in nineteenth-century visual-culture studies, especially American studies scholarship on violence, photography, and discourses of sentiment and sensation, is helpful in making these connections. Some of this work emphasizes how the visual cultures of sentiment and sensation disappear evidence of violence: in Tender Violence Laura Wexler traces “the constitutive sentimental functions of the innocent eye” in white women’s photographs that erase “the violence of colonial encounters in the very act of portraying them,” as she argues for the connections between literary sentimentalism and a broader visual culture of sentiment at the end of the nineteenth century. But if sentimental literature and visual culture may hide evidence of the violence of white supremacy and imperialism, showing that violence can cause other problems, as scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Jacqueline Goldsby suggest. These theorists of literature and visual culture warn that the spectacles of death and suffering in sentimental and sensational representations of violence may reproduce or extend that violence.

In what follows, I argue for the importance of new forms of sentimental and sensational visual culture in struggles over Haymarket, violence, and the mass-mediated spectacle of state power. Sentimental and sensational images of the dead and wounded bodies of the police were used to mobilize public sentiment against the anarchists, while newspapers and illustrated magazines tried to turn the imprisonment, execution, and funeral of the anarchists into a spectacle. On the other hand, the anarchists and their allies disrupted the spectacle by critically commenting on such scenes as well as by reproducing them, along with other images of the anarchists’ trial and punishment, as evidence of unjust state violence. In the decades after Haymarket, writers and artists would reproduce and critically reframe many of these very Haymarket icons in order to inspire participation in the great world movements of the era. Although it is often said that the fallout from the Haymarket tragedy was a huge setback for the labor movement and that alternative voices were quickly overwhelmed by dominant media, Haymarket’s long afterlife looks different if we widen our perspective to trace its reemergence as a powerful image in the decades to come throughout the world.

THE SCAFFOLD AS BATTLEGROUND: HAYMARKET IN VISUAL CULTURE

A key source that Martí used and that he sought to “overwrite” in his Haymarket chronicle was the New York Sun, one of the mass-circulation daily newspapers of the period. An evening edition of the Sun began to appear just before the executions took place, filled with news that the paper boasted came over “our own private wire from the jail.” In this way, the Sun purveyed a glimpse of that which was out of bounds to the crowd: the execution of white criminals. Although witnessing the execution scene in person was proscribed for all but a few, the Sun promised access to readers, claiming it was “the first time in the journalistic history of the world” that the telegraph or “electric current had been introduced right into the very corridor of death itself, for the purpose of chronicling the final movements” of the anarchists. The men were imprisoned in a “cage” that “was so located that every movement … could be discerned,” while the “finger of the operator” made the “click, click” of the “telegraph instrument” echo through the corridor of the prison. As the operator watched the men walk to the gallows, the paper reported, their white linen shrouds “rubbed against the wires of the outside of the cage,” and before they ascended the stairs, “the fact that the final moment was at hand was flashing over the United Press wires in all directions.” The operator sat motionless, his eyes “riveted” on the sentry box, where the executioner awaited the signal, heard the crack on the chisel that severed the rope, pressed his finger on the key, “and even before the bodies had fallen in the full length of their ropes it was known in tens and hundreds of cities throughout the country that the sentence of the law had been fulfilled.” Never before, the Sun writer commented, “had realism in the distribution of news been more graphically illustrated, and never before had the echo of the hammer and chisel of the executioner been flashed over the wires to the outer world.”

This “graphically illustrated” realism, spurred by the telegraph and new mass-circulation daily newspapers, partly responded to the incomplete withdrawal of scenes of state-sponsored execution from U.S. public spaces in the nineteenth century. As Foucault’s analysis would lead us to expect, in Chicago in November 1887 the machinery of state executions was “placed inside prison walls and made inaccessible to the public … by blocking the streets leading to the prison” (15). The Chicago police captain Michael Schaack reported in his mammoth, illustrated Anarchy and Anarchists (1889) that on the morning of the executions three hundred police were deployed “to preserve order and keep away from the immediate vicinity of the building all persons not having proper credentials or not properly vouched for.” As the time of the execution neared, the crowd pushed to get closer to the scene as “the streets beyond the ropes became crowded with people of all grades and descriptions,” but they were “kept moving by policemen scattered along the thoroughfares … so that no groups might gather and under the excitement of the moment precipitate a row or riot” (643). Schaack even observed that Lucy Parsons, “dressed in mourning and accompanied by her children, presented herself at the ropes and demanded admittance to see her husband, ‘murdered by law,'” but instead police took her to the police station and “detained her until after the execution” (644). All of these measures would seem to confirm Foucault’s claim that by the 1840s the “punishment” of (white) criminals became “the most hidden part of the penal process” (9) and that execution scenes were increasingly removed from public view.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from RADICAL SENSATIONSby SHELLEY STREEBY Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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