Michael J. Schaack

author

Michael J. Schaack

A Chicago police captain turned author, he is best known for a sweeping 1889 account of anarchism and the Haymarket case. His writing offers a vivid, deeply partisan window into one of the most charged episodes in 19th-century American history.

1 Audiobook

Anarchy and Anarchists A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators

Anarchy and Anarchists A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators

by Michael J. Schaack

About the author

Born in Luxembourg in 1843, Michael J. Schaack immigrated to the United States as a boy and built his career in Chicago. He became a police captain and was closely involved in the investigation that followed the 1886 Haymarket affair, a defining and still-debated moment in American labor and political history.

In 1889, he published Anarchy and Anarchists, a large, heavily illustrated book on radical movements, the Haymarket conspiracy case, and the people drawn into it. The work remains notable less as a neutral history than as a forceful firsthand account from a police official who helped shape the case.

Schaack died in Chicago in 1898. Today, his book is still read by historians and curious readers alike for what it reveals about fear, politics, policing, and public opinion in the late 1800s.