| The panoply of parades and demonstrations in nineteenth-century American cities included banners with inscriptions of all kinds, and anarchist events were no exception. In his 1889 book on Haymarket, Anarchy and Anarchists, Police Captain Michael Schaack provided numerous examples of these banners. Several of the banners were confiscated by the police, and, though not entered as evidence, draped in the courtroom during the Haymarket trial. Like the mastheads of the various working-people's papers, the banners give some sense of the international (native-born critics would call it "foreign") flavor of socialist protest, as the banners here are in Czech and German, as well as English. They also show the alliance, uneasy at times, between trade unionism and rhetoric that was generally socialist ("wage-system means slavery, co-operation means freedom") and specifically Marxist ("Workingmen of all tongues unite...") and anarchist ("In the absence of law all men are free"). |