The Haymarket affair was a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day; it was held the day after a May 3 rally at a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on the West Side of Chicago, during which police killed two strikers by opening fire at the crowd as it surged to the gate to confront strikebreakers. Many others were injured. At the Haymarket Square rally on May 4, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.
Eight anarchists were charged with the bombing. They were convicted of conspiracy in the internationally publicized legal proceedings. The evidence put forward in the court trial was that one of the defendants may have built the bomb but none of those on trial had thrown it, and only two of the eight were at the Haymarket at the time. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Illinois governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to terms of life in prison; another died by suicide in jail before his scheduled execution. The other four were hanged on November 11, 1887. In 1893, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants and criticized the trial.
The site of the incident was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1992, and a sculpture was dedicated there in 2004. The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997 at the defendants' burial site in Forest Park, Illinois. The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant as the origin of International Workers' Day held on May 1. It was also the climax of the period of social unrest among the working class in America known as the Great Upheaval and Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
Events Following the Civil War, particularly following the Long Depression, industrial production was rapidly expanded in the United States. Chicago was a major industrial center, and tens of thousands of German and Bohemian immigrants were employed at about $1.50 per day. American workers worked on average slightly over 60 hours during a six-day work week. The city became a center for many attempts to organize labor's demands for better working conditions. Employers responded with anti-union measures, such as firing and blacklisting union members; locking out workers; recruiting strikebreakers; employing spies, thugs, and private security forces; and exacerbating ethnic tensions in order to divide the workers. Business interests were supported by mainstream newspapers and were opposed by the labor and immigrant press.
During the economic slowdown between 1882 and 1886, socialist and anarchist organizations were active. Membership of the Knights of Labor, which rejected socialism and radicalism but supported the eight-hour work day, grew from 70,000 in 1884 to over 700,000 by 1886.Kemmerer, Donald L.; Edward D. Wickersham (January 1950). "Reasons for the Growth of the Knights of Labor in 1885–1886". Industrial and Labor Relations Review 3 (2): 213–220. In Chicago, the anarchist movement of several thousand, mostly immigrant, workers centered on the German-language newspaper ("Workers' Newspaper"), edited by August Spies. Other anarchists operated a militant revolutionary force with an armed section equipped with explosives. Its revolutionary strategy centered around the belief that successful operations against the police and the seizure of major industrial centers would lead to massive public support by workers, start a revolution, destroy capitalism, and establish a socialist economy.Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (1936), introductory chapters, pp. 21 to 138
May Day parade and strikes In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard, declaring that they resolved that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor, from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations that they so direct their laws". As the chosen date approached, U.S. labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.
On Saturday, May 1, thousands of workers who went on strike and attended rallies held throughout the United States sang the anthem "Eight Hour". The song's chorus reflected the ideology of the Great Upheaval, "Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will."Winik, Jay. The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800. New York: HarperCollins, 2007 (p. 153) Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U.S. range from 300,000 to half a million. In New York City the number of demonstrators was estimated at 10,000Foner, May Day, pp. 27–28. and in Detroit at 11,000.Foner, May Day, p. 28. In Milwaukee, some 10,000 workers turned out. In Chicago, the movement's center, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 workers had gone on strike,Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 186. and there were perhaps twice as many people out on the streets participating in various demonstrations and marches,According to Henry David there were strikes by "no less than 30,000 men", and "perhaps twice that number (i.e., 80,000) were out on the streets participating in or witnessing the various demonstrations".David, The History of the Haymarket Affair, pp. 177, 188. as, for example, a march by 10,000 men employed in the Chicago lumber yards.Foner, May Day, p. 27. Though participants in these events added up to 80,000, it is disputed whether there was a march of that number down Michigan Avenue led by anarchist Albert Parsons, founder of the International Working People's Association (IWPA), his wife and fellow organizer Lucy Parsons, and their children.
On Monday, May 3, speaking to a rally outside a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on the West Side of Chicago, Spies advised the striking workers to "hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed". Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point had mainly remained non-violent. However, workers surged to the gates to confront strikebreakers when the end-of-the-workday bell sounded. Spies called for calm, but the police fired on the crowd. Two McCormick workers were killed; some newspaper accounts said there were six fatalities.Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 190. Spies later testified, "I was very indignant. I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement."Green, Death in the Haymarket, pp. 162–173.
Outraged by this act of police violence, local anarchists quickly printed and distributed fliers calling for a rally the following day at Haymarket Square (also called the Haymarket), which was then a bustling commercial center near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street. Printed in German and English, the fliers stated that the police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice. The first fliers contained the words "Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!" When Spies saw the line, he said he would not speak at the rally unless the words were removed from the flier. All but a few hundred fliers were destroyed, and new fliers were printed without the offending words.Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 193. More than 20,000 copies were distributed.
Rally at Haymarket Square The rally began peacefully under a light rain on the evening of May 4. Spies, Parsons, and Reverend Samuel Fielden spoke to a crowd estimated variously at between 600 and 3,000 while standing in an open wagon adjacent to the square on Des Plaines Street. A large number of on-duty police officers watched from nearby.
Paul Avrich, a historian specializing in the history of anarchism, quotes Spies as saying:
Following Spies' speech, the crowd was addressed by Parsons, the Alabama-born editor of the radical English-language weekly The Alarm.Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 188. The crowd was so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison III, who had stopped by to watch, walked home early. Parsons spoke for almost an hour before standing down in favor of the last speaker of the evening, the English-born socialist, anarchist, and labor activist Methodist pastor Fielden, who delivered a brief ten-minute address. Many of the crowd had already left as the weather was deteriorating.
A New York Times article, with the dateline May 4, and headlined "Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago ... Twelve Policemen Dead or Dying", reported that Fielden spoke for 20 minutes, alleging that his words grew "wilder and more violent as he proceeded". Another New York Times article, headlined "Anarchy's Red Hand", dated May 6, opens with: "The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago tonight and before daylight at least a dozen stalwart men will have laid down their lives as a tribute to the doctrine of Herr Johann Most." (Most was a German-American anarchist theorist and leader, who was not in Chicago.) The article referred to the strikers as a "mob" and used quotation marks around the term "workingmen".
Bombing and gunfire At about 10:30 pm, just as Fielden was finishing his speech, police arrived en masse, marching in formation towards the speakers' wagon, and ordered the rally to disperse.Avrich (1984), pp. 205–206. Fielden insisted that the meeting was peaceful. Police Inspector John Bonfield proclaimed:
A homemade fragmentation bomb was thrown into the path of the advancing police, where it exploded, killing policeman Mathias J. Degan and severely wounding many of the other policemen. This is the same article datelined May 4, reproduced elsewhere.
Witnesses maintained that immediately after the bomb blast, there was an exchange of gunshots between police and demonstrators.Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, pp. 146–148. According to historian Randall David Law, it is unclear who fired the first shot, while Avrich maintains that "nearly all sources agree that it was the police who opened fire", reloaded and then fired again, killing at least four and wounding as many as 70 people.Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 209 In less than five minutes, the square was empty except for the casualties. According to the May 4 New York Times, demonstrators began firing at the police, who then returned fire. In his report on the incident, Inspector Bonfield wrote that he "gave the order to cease firing, fearing that some of our men, in the darkness, might fire into each other". An anonymous police official told the Chicago Tribune, "A very large number of the police were wounded by each other's revolvers. ... It was every man for himself, and while some got two or three squares away, the rest emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other."Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1886, quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 209.