May Day in the City of Big Shoulders — Eduardo Galeano on “Forgetting”

[Eduardo Galeano wrote the following words in his Book of Embraces, after visiting Chicago on a book tour for the last volume in his monumental trilogy, Memory of Fire. He generously identified his host bookstore, Guild Books, as the “largest bookstore in Chicago.” We take pleasure in reprinting this annually as we approach May Day.  We also had the pleasure of introducing him on his last visit to Chicago ( 3 years ago, for the Guild Complex and the Chicago Labor & Arts Festival)  to some of the workers who marched in the May Day march of a million workers.  He was delighted to know that a statue has indeed been erected, and to find that memory of the fire in the mind of that distant May Day was kindling a fire anew.– Lew Rosenbaum]

Forgetting
Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world’s tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.

Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.

‘It must be around here,’ they tell me. But nobody knows where.

No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.

May 1st is the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all geographies, all languages and all religions and cultures of the world coincide. But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.

After my fruitless exploration of the Haymarket, my friends take me to the largest bookstore in the city. And there, poking around, just by accident, I discover an old poster that seems to be waiting for me, stuck among many movie and rock posters. The poster displays an African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.

Eduardo Galeano is a journalist and historian who lives in Montevideo. His many publications include The Open Veins of Latin America and the three-volume history of Latin America, Memory of Fire. Cedric Beifrage, who translated this piece, wrote The American Inquisition on the McCarthy era in the US.

From The Book of Embraces, copyright © 1989 by Eduardo Galeano; Copyright © 1991 by Cedric Beifrage. Published by WW Norton & Company, Inc, New York, 1991. Originally published in Spanish as El Libro de los Abrazos by Siglo Veintiuno.