The Haymarket tragedy is rooted in the Eight-Hour movement. The drive, beginning in 1865, to legislate an eight-hour workday had not succeeded, but the idea remained very popular. In 1884 the trade unions, organized in 1881 as the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States, revived the idea by calling a nationwide strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886.
In Chicago, anarchists saw the strike call as an excellent propaganda opportunity. Unfortunately, their revolutionary rhetoric combined with intense grassroots support for a shorter workday convinced many that Chicago was on the brink of a violent social upheaval. On May 1, 1886, a large number of people, led by prominent anarchists Albert Parsons and August Spies, peacefully marched up Michigan Avenue in support of the eight-hour day. But rather than allay fears of violence, the parade contributed to the general apprehension.
Two days later an unrelated incident touched off the anticipated violence. Earlier, on February 16, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company had gone on strike over the issue of hiring nonunion people. The company responded by shutting down the plant and then hiring replacements. Although production had not regained its former levels, it became obvious by late April that McCormick had secured enough strikebreakers to defeat the union. To maintain its union-busting strategy, the company even granted its workers an eight-hour day when many refused to work on May 1. On May 3 union picketers attacked the strikebreakers as they left work. The Chicago police intervened by shooting into the crowd, killing two.
August Spies, a speaker at a nearby mass meeting in support of the eight-hour day, rushed to the scene and witnessed the carnage. Returning to the office of the anarchist newspaper he edited, Spies issued a pamphlet urging workers to arm themselves and attend a protest meeting the following evening at Haymarket Square. About 3,000 people braved the miserable weather to hear Spies and his fellow anarchists Parsons and Samuel Fielden. Despite the rhetoric of the so-called revenge circular, the meeting was peaceful and began to break up when police entered the square. Someone threw a bomb among the police, killing one officer outright and fatally injuring others. The police then opened fire. The bomb and the bullets killed 12 people (eight police and four civilians) and wounded at least 90 others.
The episode appeared to confirm the widespread fear of revolution. The press and a large cross section of the community demanded that radicalism be smashed. Police arrested known radicals, searched their homes, and tried to induce false testimony. As a result of this investigation eight people—Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Eugene Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe—all anarchists, were tried and convicted.
Although the prosecution could not link them directly to the bomb throwing, the jury obeyed Judge Joseph Gary’s instructions to find them guilty if it determined that they had ever advocated violence. Neebe received a 15-year sentence, and the seven others were sentenced to death. Lingg committed suicide during the appeals process, and Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were executed on November 11, 1887. Fielden and Schwab, whose death penalties were commuted to life imprisonment, were, with Neebe, pardoned in 1893 by Governor John Peter Altgeld.
Further reading: Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: a Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon, 2006).
—Harold W. Aurand
Hearn, Lafcadio (1850-1904) journalist, writer The foremost multiculturist of his generation, Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Greek island of Leucadia on June
27, 1850. His mother was Greek, and his father was an Irish surgeon in the British army. When Hearn was two, he and his mother joined his father’s relatives in Dublin. Two years later his mother returned to Greece, leaving him in the custody of his father’s aunt. Grooming him to be her heir, his aunt sent him first to a Catholic school near Rouen, France, and then to St. Cuthbert’s College, near Durham, England. While playing a game at that school, he was blinded in one eye when struck by a block of wood tied to the end of a rope. His constant reading made his other eye protrude in a disfiguring way.
When most of his great-aunt’s money was lost by a relative, who had displaced Hearn as her heir, Hearn was sent to live with a former servant in London and in 1869 to a distant relative in Cincinnati, Ohio. After a number of jobs, including proofreading and type setting, he became a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1874. The next year, when he was fired for having an affair with a biracial woman, he was hired by the Cincinnati Com mercial. He had already gained a following for his elegant writing about gruesome crimes and his sensitive translations of French stories.
In 1877 he moved to New Orleans, where he nearly died during a yellow fever epidemic, and stayed 10 years. He did more French translations, studied Creole dialect and folkways, and found himself a cultural interpreter after he became the literary editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1881. Hearn published Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884), an anthology of folklore from Eskimo, Polynesian, Hindu, Jewish, Arabic, and other sources, and began placing pieces in Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Weekly.
In 1887, the year he left New Orleans, Hearn published Some Chinese Ghosts, six legends from Eastern sources, and arranged for his first novel, Chita, to be serialized in Harper’s Monthly. Influenced by French symbolism, the novel, with its polished, lyrical prose, is Hearn’s greatest work. It is a story of the 1856 New Orleans hurricane that devastated Last Isle, a resort area where couples, dancing at a ball, are swept into the storm. Among the dead in “the confusion of heaping waters,” Feliu, the founder of the island’s Spanish fishing settlement, sees movement and a “gleam of bright hair.” He wrestles with the waves to reach the billiard table, where a four-year-old girl is tied with a silken scarf to her dead mother. Using the scarf, he binds the child to him and against all odds reaches the shore. He brings the new Chita to his wife, Carmen, who is forever burning candles before a wax Virgin with an Indian face, while she prays for a child to replace her first Chita, who died years earlier. The novel is the new Chita’s story, but it is more about nature than about her. It is “rhythm, sensation, color, recurrence.” It is “a succession of pieces. . . that match like a mosaic” (Kunst, 69).
Also in 1887 Hearn moved to Martinique, where he wrote sketches of native life, Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), and Youma (1890), a short novel about a slave uprising. After writing a year in New York and Philadelphia, Hearn left for the East in March 1890. His object was to write for Harper’s a book about Japan. Continuing to live a most exotic life, Hearn wrote 12 books on Japanese culture, married Setsu Koizumi, fathered four children, was a public school and a university teacher, and became a Japanese citizen. He died in Tokyo on September 26, 1904.
Further reading: Arthur E. Kunst, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969); Elizabeth Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Macmillan, 1961).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Hepburn v. Griswold (1870) See currency issue.
Herbert, Victor August (1859-1924) musician, composer
Victor Herbert is remembered for his operettas, which enjoyed immense popularity from the 1890s through World War I. He was one of the finest cellists, conductors, and composers of his generation and was an important advocate for composers’ rights.
Herbert was born on February 1, 1859, in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Edward Herbert and Fanny Lover. Edward died while Victor was still an infant, and he spent his early childhood in England at the home of his maternal grandfather, noted Irish painter, novelist, and songwriter Samuel Lover. In 1866 Herbert’s mother married a German doctor, and the family settled in Stuttgart, Germany. Victor enrolled at the local gymnasium and began music studies, at first piano and flute before settling on the cello. He left the gymnasium at age 15, and from 1874 to 1876 he studied cello with Bernhard Cossmann.
In 1876 he began his professional career as a cellist, performing with orchestras throughout Europe. Around 1880 he spent a year in Vienna with the orchestra of Eduard Strauss, where he gained a familiarity with the Viennese operetta and lighter classical music that was to greatly influence his own work. In 1881 he returned to Stuttgart to play in the court orchestra; in 1883 he appeared as soloist with the orchestra in his first large-scale composition, the Suite for Cello and Orchestra, op. 3, and in 1885 he appeared as soloist in his First Cello Concerto, op. 8. During these years he studied composition with Max Seifritz at the Stuttgart Conservatory. In 1886 Herbert married Therese Forster (1861-1927), a distinguished Viennese soprano who had been engaged by the court opera in 1885.
She was offered a contract with the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York, and it was arranged that Herbert would be offered a position as first cellist with the opera orchestra. The couple sailed for New York in the autumn of 1886.
In New York, Herbert quickly became a leading figure in the musical life of the city. In addition to playing in the opera orchestra, he found work as a conductor, teacher, chamber musician, and cello soloist. In 1889 he was appointed to the faculty of the National Conservatory, where Antonin Dvorak served as director from 1892 to 1895. Although he left the conservatory in 1893, he developed a warm personal relationship with Dvorak. He was appointed director of the 22nd Regiment Band of the New York National Guard in 1893. That band, known as “Gilmore’s band,” was founded in 1861 by Patrick S. Gilmore and was considered one of the finest bands in the nation. The reputation of the band declined following Gilmore’s death in 1892, but Herbert quickly reestablished it as a leading organization and toured widely with it for the next seven years. In 1898 he was appointed conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and he succeeded in raising it to the level of the finest American orchestras. In 1904 he founded the Victor Herbert Orchestra, which achieved national fame and popularity by performing light orchestral music.
Herbert was active and successful as a composer from his arrival in America. In 1894 he introduced his Second Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. His tone poem Hero and Leander (1901) reflects the influence of Wagner and Liszt, yet he composed and arranged many marches and lighter works for band and orchestra. He composed two operas, Natoma (1911) and Madeleine (1914), and wrote one of the first scores for the classic full-length film The Birth of a Nation (1916). But it was as a composer of operettas that he had his greatest success. His first operetta, Prince Ananias, was produced in New York in 1894 by the Bostonians, a popular theater company. The work was only a modest success, but the following year saw the production of The Wizard of the Nile, the first of a string of hits that would last for the next 30 years. The Serenade (1897) and The Fortune Teller (1898) were major successes, and in 1899 he had three more shows in production on Broadway. In all, Herbert wrote more than 40 operettas, the most notable being Babes in Toy-land (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906), Naughty Marietta (1910), Sweethearts (1913), and Eileen (1917). These shows reflect the influence of Viennese operetta but also owe a debt to Gilbert and Sullivan and Tin Pan Alley. Many of the most popular songs of the era came from these works, including “Kiss Me Again,” “Italian Street Song,” “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” “Streets of New York,” and “Because You’re You.”
Herbert was a leader in the fight for composers’ rights. His testimony before Congress was influential in the passage of the copyright law of 1909 that secured composers’ royalties on the sale of recorded cylinders, discs, and piano rolls. He was also one of the founders of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and he served as a vice president and director from 1914 until his death on May 26, 1924. He recognized the importance of sound recording and made many early recordings as a cellist and conductor.
Further reading: Edward N. Waters, Victor Herbert: A Life in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1955).
—William Peek
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911) abolitionist, reformer, writer, minister A radical activist, Thomas W. Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1823. A well-rounded boy who loved nature, sports, and books, he entered Harvard at the age of 13 and graduated in 1841, second in his class. Higginson taught school for two years before returning to Harvard for graduate study, primarily in the Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1847. His prospects for employment were dim. He was an abolitionist who had already in 1846 published a sonnet in praise of William Lloyd Garrison and had publicly declared that the clergy should lead in righting social wrongs.
In September 1847 Higginson married his second cousin, Mary Elizabeth Channing, and thanks to a shortage of ministers, began his pastorate at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts. It was a conservative Unitarian congregation, and Higginson refused to tailor his beliefs to suit its views. He denounced Northern apathy over Southern slavery and Newburyport apathy over the exploitation of workers in local cotton mills. He supported women’s rights (Lucy Stone stayed in the Higginsons’ home while on a lecture tour) and opposed capital punishment. After two years his congregation asked him to resign, although he was supported by women, young men, reformers, and the poor. He remained in the Newburyport area, delivering lectures, writing newspaper articles, and increasing his social activism. In 1850 he signed the call for the Worcester, Massachusetts, Woman’s Rights Convention, helped form the Boston Vigilance Committee to resist the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Free Soil ticket.
In spring 1852 he became the minister of the Free Church of Worcester. This time was on the same wavelength as his congregation, which allowed him to pursue his widening reform interests, which blossomed into a militant activism. In 1853 he addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention on “Woman and Her Wishes” and attended the World Temperance Convention in New York. When that organization slighted women delegates, Higgin-son led the delegates to another hall and formed the Whole World’s Temperance Convention. Two years later he presided at the wedding of Stone and Henry Blackwell, where Stone retained her maiden name and Blackwell renounced his legal rights as husband.
Abolition remained Higginson’s chief passion. In 1854 he led the Boston Vigilance Committee’s unsuccessful attempt to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave held in the federal courthouse. After smashing down the door, Higgin-son and his fellows were confronted by club-wielding deputy federal marshals. Higginson got a nasty cut on his chin, and a pistol shot killed a marshal, ending the assault. Luckily, Higginson, who had not fired the shot, was indicted for riot rather than murder and was not prosecuted. “It would be good for the cause if they were to hang you,” Stone suggested.
The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening free territory to slavery, promoted violence as proslavery and antislavery forces clashed in Kansas in their efforts to win that state. Doing less preaching and more acting, Higginson, in 1856, became an agent of the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee, visited Kansas, helped arm free state people, and sent letters to the New York Tribune, which published them as A Ride Through Kanzas (1856). In 1858 Higginson was one of the “Secret Six,” who agreed to support John Brown’s plea for help in a “most important undertaking.” Unknown to Higginson, it turned out to be Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in hopes of fomenting a slave revolt. Publicly avowing his support of Brown, Higginson in 1860 and
1861 wrote a series of sympathetic articles on slave revolts. His wife, though an invalid, fully supported his activism.
When the Civil War came in 1861, Higginson was loath to leave his wife but by 1862 had raised the 51st Massachusetts Volunteers, in which he was a captain. In November
1862 he became colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first of many all-black regiments in the Union army. Higginson served until May 1864, when he failed to recover from a wound. Upon his resignation he joined his wife in Newport, Rhode Island. His appreciative articles on African-American troops, who proved to be essential for Northern victory, began to appear in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864, and in 1870 Higginson published his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment.
After the war Higginson devoted himself to writing. He was primarily an essayist for the Atlantic, but his range was broad. He remained a reformer, concentrating on women’s rights. Those interests converged in his friendship and encouragement of Emily Dickinson (with whom he corresponded after 1862) and Helen Hunt Jackson
(who moved to Newport in 1866) and in his biography of Margaret Fuller. In 1890 Higginson found a publisher for Dickinson’s poems and coedited two volumes of them. He maintained his friendship with Stone and for years contributed to Woman’s Journal, the organ of her American Woman Suffrage Association. Higginson also wrote an immensely popular Young Folks’ History of the United States (1875).
His wife, Mary Channing, died in 1877, and two years later he married Mary Thatcher. They had two daughters. Higginson moved back to Cambridge, where he continued his literary work and maintained his interest in reform but became less militant and more pragmatic than he had been in his youth. Higginson disagreed with abolitionist friends, when in 1877 he understood the political realities that caused Rutherford B. Hayes to cease using federal troops to support Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1884 he joined the MUGWUMPS as they bolted the Republican Party to support Grover Cleveland for president. Higginson was impressed by Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (1888) and supported the Nationalist Clubs dedicated to bringing about the egalitarian society Bellamy envisioned. Appalled that the United States had joined European powers in their race for colonies, Higginson helped found the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898.
Higginson continued to pour out essays, was the poetry editor of the Nation from 1877 to 1903, and was the biographer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1902) and John Greenleaf Whittier (1902). Higginson published his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, in 1898 and remained productive until his death on May 9, 1911. An honor guard of African-American soldiers participated in his funeral.
Further reading: Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968); Howard N. Meyer, ed., The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) (New York: DaCapo Press, 2000); Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Hill, James J. (1838-1916) businessman, financier James Jerome Hill, the builder of the Great Northern Railway, was born on September 16, 1838, in Rockwood, Ontario, Canada, to farmers James Hill and Alice Dunbar. James J. Hill left school at age 14 and worked as a grocery-store clerk. In 1856 he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he held a variety of jobs as a clerk and agent of companies involved in river and railroad transportation. In 1866 he established his own company, specializing in the
James J. Hill (left) with J. H. Carroll (Library of Congress)
Transfer and warehousing of freight, and in 1867 he contracted to supply the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad with fuel. Poorly managed, that railroad went bankrupt in 1873, and Hill, recognizing the importance of rail transportation to the future of the Northwest, acquired it in 1878 with the support of three Canadian investors. Hill extended the St. Paul & Pacific line to link St. Paul with Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in 1878, and the next year he reorganized it as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway. He also built west through the Dakotas and Montana to Great Falls by 1887. In contrast to the jerry-built Northern Pacific Railroad (NP), Hill’s road was carefully surveyed, well constructed, and efficiently managed. In 1890 Hill united all his railroad holdings in to the Great Northern Railway Company, a vast network that in 1893 reached Seattle, Washington, and for a time ran steamships to China and Japan.
While dedicated to the expansion of his rail empire, Hill was implacable in defending and promoting his financial interests and in eliminating competition. Hill and financier J. Pierpont Morgan in 1896 gained control of the NP, and in 1901 they acquired the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railway Company (CB&Q), thus gaining access to Chicago. Edward H. Harriman, the dominant figure in southwestern railroads, and who was backed by financier Jacob Schiff, also wanted the CB&Q and challenged Hill and Morgan for control of the NP, which had half-interest in the CB&Q. The bidding for NP stock was so intense that Wall Street was shaken, but the rivals made an uneasy peace later that year by forming the Northern Securities
Company, with Hill as president. Serving as a holding company for the Great Northern, the NP, and the CB&Q systems, the Northern Securities Company was dissolved in 1904 when the Supreme Court declared it to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Despite the Court’s action, the NP remained strongly influenced by Hill. Ironically, in 1970 the Interstate Commerce Commission approved the merger of the Great Northern, NP, and the CB&Q.
Hill was widely regarded as an “empire builder.” To generate traffic for the Great Northern, he promoted the settlement and development of the Northwest. He encouraged immigration, sought to improve farming methods, and by keeping freight rates and passenger fares affordable along his right of way, earned a reputation for concern for the welfare of the pioneers in the region. Hill had the clear vision to see that their prosperity was the source of the Great Northern’s strength and his fortune. He died in St. Paul on May 29, 1916.
Further reading: Michael P. Malone, James J. Hill: E-mpire Builder of the Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
—Dennis Wepman
Hoar, George F. (1826-1904) politician Born in Concord, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1826, George Frisbie Hoar, a distinguished reform-minded U. S. senator, came from an eminent family. His grandfather Roger Sherman had signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; his father Samuel was a conspicuous antislavery man driven from South Carolina by a mob in 1844; his older brother Ebenezer Rockwood was Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general; and his sister Elizabeth was noted for her brilliance among the outstanding intellectuals of their town. Hoar graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, practiced in Worcester, Massachusetts, entered politics as a Free-Soiler, and joined the Republican Party in 1856. From 1856 to 1857 he worked with the free-state element in Kansas. After several years in the Massachusetts legislature, Hoar served in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1877 and from then on in the Senate until his death in Worcester on September 30, 1904.
While always loyal to the Republican Party, Hoar neither forgot its reform origins nor his own heritage of conscientious public service. Honest, upright, decent, and forthright, Hoar had an independent streak, and when aware of wrongdoing, he would expose the misdeeds and oppose the policies of fellow Republicans if he thought them wrong. He helped investigate the Credit Mobilier scandal (implicating the vice president and members of Congress for taking bribes), opposed the so-called Salary Grab Act (1873) (retroactively raising congressmen’s salaries), and in 1876 was a manager of the impeachment of Grant’s secretary of war (for selling Indian-post trader-ships) even after he had resigned.
Having begun his career as an antislavery reformer, Hoar consistently supported civil rights for all (the Fourteenth Amendment); voting rights for Aerican Americans (the Fifteenth Amendment, which he thought was “the crowning measure of Reconstruction”), and for women (for which he wrote pamphlets); and the rights of Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. He also worked to purify politics and to improve the machinery of government. He supported the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reeorm Act, which required that civil servants be appointed on the basis of open competitive examinations, and he wrote the 1887 repeal of the Tenure of Office Act as well as the 1886 Presidential Succession Act. The growth of monopoly disturbed Hoar, who was an architect of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and who later sought to regulate corporations more effectively by licensing those engaged in interstate commerce.
In the twilight of his career Hoar denounced imperialism as contrary to the ideals of the founders of the Republican Party, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the morality of the Golden Rule. Urging that the United States promote self-determination, he strongly favored Cuban independence and opposed the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The anti-imperialist crusade failed: Cuba, nominally independent, became an American protectorate; Puerto Rico became a colony; and the Philippines were conquered and annexed. Self-determination was ignored, but a generation after Hoar’s death the United States found that self-determination was preferable to imperialism.
Further reading: Richard E. Welch Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
World History
