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A Tragic Drama The title of Carl Smith's latest Web work, "The Dramas of Haymarket" (www.chicagohistory.org/dramas), is no mere literary affectation. The vast but accessible compilation of information is deliberately presented as a five-act tragedy with prologue and epilogue. The Web site, a close collaboration between Northwestern's academic technologies unit and the Chicago Historical Society, was partly funded by Ameritech and the U.S. Library of Congress. It explains the history leading up to the bombing at a mass meeting of anarchists at Chicago's Haymarket on May 4, 1886, the sensational and tragic events that ensued and the ways in which the incident resonates today. Why a play? "Any single lecture or class should have some shape and argument, and it seemed to be a kind of unifying idea that Haymarket can be viewed as drama," says Smith, who authored Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Smith points to the continuing references to tragedy from both the establishment forces seeking to avenge the eventual deaths of eight police officers and from those who mourned the four hangings and one suicide in 1887 of the eight anarchists convicted with virtually no direct evidence. "People were engaging in many kinds of activities — whether they were rallies, the trial, the executions, the funerals — on so many different levels so they could present certain ideas," he explains. At the time, the bomb blast, the trial and the courageous 1893 pardon of the remaining jailed anarchists by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld received headlines throughout North America and Europe. The original purpose behind the Haymarket gathering — to push for the eight-hour workday — soon took on added life because of the fallout from the incident. Afterward, the riot assumed mythic proportions. Those who were executed by the state were memorialized in book and song; poets from Vachel Lindsay to Kenneth Rexroth treated Haymarket creatively; and as recently as 1999 Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre produced Haymarket Eight by Derek Goldman and Jessica Thebus. The historical society possessed a wealth of material to mine for the Haymarket Web site — posters, illustrations, photographs, newspaper articles, even the handwritten guilty verdict. Smith added his extended narrative and worked with Jason Betke and Bill Parod of Northwestern's academic technologies unit to offer virtual tours of the Haymarket area today and video interviews with descendants on both sides of the dispute. As the deadline approached, Smith was putting in 14 to 16 hours a day on the project. "I learned a lot about the work ethic," says Betke, site designer, architect and director of production. "It was enlightening to see how Carl managed something of this size." Betke was also impressed by Smith's ability to organize the material. "He had hundreds of items from the historical society that he had to get his hands around, but it's a well-laid-out site with a beginning, a middle and an end," Betke says. "You can read the story that way, but there are also plenty of opportunities to go off and explore on your own." — R.F. |