Labor Day.
Our nation needs a timeout!
Struggling though hurricane hell, choking from ferocious fires, and drowning in the debris of flood water for the past month, the country needs a touch of tranquility right now.
And the nation can always use a hero, even if his bravery has been basically forgotten.
The first Monday in September became a national holiday in 1894 to honor the American worker via the Labor Movement, but the road from abysmal working conditions and meager salaries was a bumpy ride.
History has not forgotten Chicago’s Haymarket Square Riot in 1886; a peaceful protest that morphed into mayhem between gun-wielding Chicago police, a mysterious bomb tosser, and activist laborers and anarchists protesting the death of a striker a day earlier.
However, history’s fading ink can lose heroes along the way, specifically the heroism under fire by one-term Illinois Gov. John P. Altgeld (1893-1897); and the famous Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, who extolled Altgeld’s valor.
When the riot was over, at least 11 people were dead, seven of them police officers. And eight activists were convicted, even though no evidence tied them to the bombing, and some weren’t even at the rally.
The Ralph Clarkson portrait of Gov. John Peter Altgeld of Illinois.
Sun-Times archives
Enduring enormous criticism in 1893 — seven years after the Haymarket riot — Altgeld granted full pardons to the three surviving imprisoned activists. Four had already been hanged, and another died by suicide the day before his execution date. Still another had been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Before Gov. Altgeld’s predecessor, Gov. Richard Oglesby, left office, he commuted the death sentences of the two activist prisoners still on Death Row to life in prison. But it was Altgeld who set all three surviving prisoners free, questioning their lack of a fair trial.
A progressive Democrat, Altgeld was then publicly excoriated by fellow Democratic President Grover Cleveland for pardoning the Haymarket prisoners. The decision cost Altgeld reelection, despite his establishment of a state board of pardons and creation of a state home for juvenile offenders.
He died four years later and is buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. The Altgeld Gardens public housing complex on the Far South Side was named for him.
But it was poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who had once lived next to the Illinois Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, who heralded Altgeld’s bravery and integrity in one of his most famous poems: “The Eagle That Is Forgotten.”
Vachel Lindsay
Sun-Times archives
Lindsay, then a household name and troubadour of poetry who tramped across the country three times trading rhymes for bread, eulogized Altgeld’s integrity and bravery for pardoning the Haymarket anarchists.
Below is Lindsay’s famous poem, in which he uses the eagle as an example of a “fearless mindset; never surrendering strength and courage in difficult situations to achieve extraordinary results,” according to historical records.
“Sleep softly … eagle forgotten … under the stone.
“Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
“’We have buried him now,’ thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
“They have made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
“They have snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day.
“Now you were ended. They raised you ... and laid you away.
“The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
“The window bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,
“The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,
“That should have remembered forever … Remember no more.
Gov. John Peter Altgeld
Chicago Sun-Times archives
“Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,
“The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
“They call on the names of a hundred high-valient ones,
“A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons,
“The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began.
“The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.
“Sleep softly … eagle forgotten … under the stone.
“Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
“Sleep on, O brave hearted; O wise man that kindled the flame–
“To live in mankind is far, far more than to live in a name.
“To live in mankind, far, far more … than to live in a name.”
Lindsay, who eventually died by suicide, loved Springfield so much he promised to haunt it.
Let’s hope Gov. Altgeld’s tale of courage never dies.
Say Whaaaa?
Shakur Up?
Mayor Brandon Johnson took heat last month for evading questions about his firing of Dr. Alison Arwady, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s public health commissioner.
Hizzoner chose instead to explain it in a terse verse he attributed to the late rapper Tupac Shakur:
“Real eyes realize real lies.”
Mayor Johnson is not the first person to quote the late rapper using the phrase. It’s all over the web and on T-shirts.
Sneedless to say, the quote is also in the lyrics of track 10 of the heavy metal band Machine Head’s 1994 album “Burn My Eyes.”
The song’s name? “Real Eyes, Realize, Real Lies.”
Whadda you think?
Sneedlings…
Saturday birthdays: actor Mark Harmon, 72; tennis player Jimmy Connors, 71; actor Keanu Reeves, 59; .. Sunday birthdays: actor Charlie Sheen, 58.
