ut the country, Governor Oglesby commuted the sentences of Fielden
and Schwab to life imprisonment. Two days before the execution--when the
defense committee had mobilized a great movement in Chicago--tables for
signing petitions to the governor had been set up in the city streets, the
able police of Chicago, worthy ancestors of those police who murdered
eleven steel strikers at the Republic plant on Memorial Day, 1937,
suddenly discovered a bunch of "bombs" in the jail where the men were
held. On the next day they announced that Louis Lingg had committed
suicide by blowing his own head off with a small bomb!

Hitler used the Reichstag fire. Chicago used "bombs."

The men died bravely, like the heroes that they were. Spies' last words
spoken on the gallows were prophetic: "_The day will come when our
silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today_."

He was right, righter than he knew. That silence is making itself heard in
the auto factories of Michigan, in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and
Ohio, on the docks, in the mines, in textile factories. The eight-hour day
is a reality. The defense of the rights of labor is a reality. The great
movement for industrial unionism and democracy which they dreamed of is a
reality--in the C.I.O.

They did not die in vain. Taught by the lessons of the Haymarket tragedy,
such an organization as the International Labor Defense has been built by
the workers and progressive people of America, to stand guard and prevent
such legal murders today. Tom Mooney is still alive, J. B. McNamara and
Warren Billings; Angelo Herndon is free, four Scottsboro boys are
free--though all were threatened by the same fate as the victims of the
Haymarket martyrs. Reaction still takes a heavy toll of victims, but it
must reckon with the might of organized, united mass defense represented
and organized by the I.L.D. For example, the Nine Old Men who have made
the United States Supreme Court the stronghold of reaction with the same
callousness as their predecessors, arrogantly refused to review the appeal
in the case of Haywood Patterson, one of the innocent Scottsboro boys. But
the fight goes on, until all the remaining five are free.

We are dedicated to the cause--their cause--of freedom and democracy, to
the struggle for justice and defense of the rights and liberties of the
people.

* * * * *

There are two other labor martyrs who must be honor