An Emphasis on Conspiracy, Less on the Trial

The Haymarket ConsipracyLast week Timothy Messer-Kruse, author of The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, published a post on his own blog in response to a negative review in Dissent. While tacitly acknowledging that not everyone will like or agree with his work, he takes on the review’s claims point-by-erroneous point. Here is a sample:

“Jones’ wields his hatchet with a particularly clumsy swing when he is compelled to misquote a passage from my book in order to depict me as some sort of neo-con:

‘Demonstrating his enmity toward the defendants, Messer-Kruse asserts that modern Americans should abide by the assumptions of a flawed nineteenth-century legal system explicitly designed to protect plutocratic interests. “According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial,” he writes, “the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb” but the plotting of the demonstrations that resulted in violence. If prosecutors at the time had employed a standard as lax as Messer-Kruse advocates today, every labor activist in Chicago would have been as legally culpable for the attack as the individual bomber.’

Here is the actual quotation from p. 14 of my book:

‘According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial, the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb but the meeting at which this attack was planned.’

(Note that in order to twist my words, Jones elides the end of my quote which would have clarified my meaning had he included it.)”

Read more about The Thai Jones Hatchet Job for Dissent.