March 31 Saturday – In Hartford Sam wrote to William Dean Howells, enclosing his speech “Knights of Labor — The New Dynasty” which he’d given at the Monday Evening Club back on Mar. 22, 1886. This letter is evidently a response to one sent by Howells and now lost, which included “Anarchist” pamphlets, probably William M. Salter’s Cure for Anarchy, and possibly John C. Kimball’s “clemency sermon,” which compared the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists to the crucifixion of Christ.

W.D. and Elinor Howells had moved without daughter Winny (who was at a sanatorium at Dansville, N.Y.) to New York City, taking a four-room apartment in one of the vast “caravan series…so common in New York, — ten stories high, and housing six hundred people” on West 9th Street [Goodman & Dawson 292]. Howells was deeply invested in the Haymarket case; arguably radicalized by it. Sam expressed the dilemma of mechanization to labor:

The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery — & nothing else in the world could have done it. It has been Labor’s savior, benefactor; but Labor doesn’t know it, & would ignorantly crucify it. But that is human, & natural. Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men — & within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million. But you can’t make Labor appreciate that…[MTHL 2: 597 & notes].

Ellery S. Ayer wrote from Boston collecting “items for a book” he would call The National Album, or, Favorite Mottos of Emminent Men and Women of Our Times. He sought Sam’s words. Sam wrote on the envelope, “Make no reply” [MTP].