Haymarket Redux

Your Labor Day reading: What Happened at Haymarket?

The Haymarket Riot trial is a staple in Leftist worship of socialism and a cornerstone of labor union dogma. Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse was happily indoctrinating a new batch of students with liberal philosophy when a student asked him a question he'd never considered before: "If what it says in our textbook is true, that there was ‘no evidence whatsoever connecting them with the bombing,' then what did they talk about in the courtroom for six weeks?”

He couldn't answer her. The dogma states that Haymarket was cut-and-dry: Evil Capitalists and Pigs brutally slaughtered Heroes of the Labor Revolution and then staged a kangaroo court to falsely convict the remaining Martyrs of the Proletariat. But why would a kangaroo court take six weeks? Something didn't seem right... So he started digging into the actual trial transcripts to find the answer and discovered that what's taught in the modern history books is little more than propaganda:

Messer-Kruse discovered that the Library of Congress and the Chicago Historical Society had just digitized a large collection of material on Haymarket, including a transcript of the trial. He slogged through thousands of pages, consulting other primary documents to gain a sharper picture of what lay buried in the historical record. Along the way, he realized that earlier researchers had not consulted this transcript. Instead, they had relied on an abstract of the trial prepared by defense lawyers, drawing their conclusions from a flamboyantly prejudiced account of the bombing and its aftermath. 'The best source had been hiding in plain sight,' says Messer-Kruse.

Messer-Kruse believes that although it’s impossible to rule out lethal friendly fire, several policemen were probably shot by armed protesters — a fact that chips away at the belief that the anarchists were peaceful. Messer-Kruse also worked with chemists to study the forensic remains of Haymarket’s violence. He determined that the original trial experts brought in to study the bomb and bullet fragments had done their jobs well. He furthermore concluded that one of the Haymarket defendants — Louis Lingg, who killed himself before authorities could carry out his death sentence — almost certainly built the bomb.

You can guess the reaction from the Ivory Tower when he published his findings.

It's not a long article and well worth the read. Within it is displayed in the clearest possible way the deeply ingrained quasi-intellectualism of the American Left. Like Bill Ayers and Barack Obama, they see what they want to see, not what's really there. When someone points out the delusion, they react with violent disbelief. It's a very common response of the True Believer when confronted with undeniable evidence which counters his most cherished notions. One could almost feel sorry for such people, if they hadn't spent the last century trying to destroy the greatest nation on Earth with their Communist nonsense.