Spies, August

SPIES, AUGUST (1855–1887). Leading American spokesperson for revolutionary socialism, a role that contributed to his execution after being framed on charges of conspiring in the 1886 Haymarket bombing, August Spies, a German, was born in Landeck and emigrated to the United States at age seventeen. He settled in Chicago, where he became a skilled upholsterer and eventually the owner of his own shop. Radicalized by reading socialist literature, attending lectures, and witnessing the 1877 mass strike in Chicago, Spies became an active member of the Workingmen’s Party, and in turn the Socialist Labor Party, as well as of German gymnastic societies and in radical “study and rifle” clubs. In 1880 he became manager of the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper. Spies moved away from political socialism in the early 1880s and gradually adopted anarcho-syndicalist positions. He presided at the opening of the 1881 Chicago Congress, which established the Revolutionary Socialistic Party. In 1883 he was a delegate to the Pittsburgh Congress, which established the anarchist International Working People’s Association.

His words just before his execution are among the most famous ever spoken by an American radical: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Foner, Philip S., ed. Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. New York: Monad Press, 1969.

Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon, 2006.

Nuhn, Heinrich. August Spies: Ein hessischer Sozialrevolutionär in Amerika. Kassel: Jenior und Pressler, 1992.