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Title: Haymarket Incident Author: Dave Roediger Date: 1992 Language: en Topics: Haymarket Source: Retrieved on August 11, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160811055716/http://flag.blackened.net/lpp/haymarket/roediger_haymarket.html Notes: Published in Buhle, Mari Jo, Buhle, Paul, Georgakas, Dan, eds., Ecyclopedia of the American Left, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1992
On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown as local police attacked an
anarchist-led labor demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Eight
policemen died as a result of the bombing and of crossfire among police.
An undetermined, but probably larger, number of demonstrators lost their
lives amidst the tumult and police gunfire. The identity of the
bomb-thrower remains a mystery, but the events leading up to Haymarket,
and the tremendous repercussions of the bombing, are more clear.
The Haymarket Square demonstration grew out of a massive nationwide
movement of working people demanding the eight-hour working day. That
demand had begun to attract support during the Civil War as workers
identified their long hours as a kind of “slavery” from which they could
be “emancipated” by legislation. After the war, EightHour Leagues boomed
in membership and successfully lobbied for eight-hour laws in several
states. But these laws almost all featured gaping loopholes. In
Illinois, Chicago Eight-Hour Leagues were instrumental in securing the
passage of a shorter-hours law in 1867, albeit an unenforceable one. On
May I of that year, tens of thousands of Chicago workers attempted to
make the statute apply by striking. Their actions failed, largely as a
result of police violence, but the episode in that booming industrial
city presented in microcosm trends that would mature in the next twenty
years and lead toward Haymarket.
By the early 1880s, radical workers in Chicago and elsewhere had
accumulated further grievances against the political system, especially
in the bloody suppression of the 1877 railroad strike and in subsequent
local elections in which socialist candidates charged that fraud had
“counted them out” of victory. Three separate national organizational
responses resulted, all of them seeking to reconcile republican
citizenship with industrial society and to address the question of how
the labor movement should interact with a government hostile to labor
action. The oldest of these organizations, the Knights of Labor (founded
1869), preached the virtues of cooperatives, of working-class self
-education, of agitation for political reform, of cultivation of good
relations with local politicians, of organization of both skilled and
unskilled workers, and of caution in undertaking strikes. IrishAmerican
workers strongly supported the Knights of Chicago. The Federation of
Organized Trades and Labor Unions (founded 1881, evolved into the
American Federation of Labor in 1886) stressed trade union organizing
and sought to avoid politically divisive issues and reliance on the
state in labor-reform matters. The smallest organization, the
International Working People’s Association (founded 1881) mixed
anarchism, socialism, and syndicalism. The IWPA utterly rejected both
politics and reform while embracing revolutionary self-defense and
writing romantically about the possibility of dynamite as a too] for
labor militants. It attracted substantial support among German, Czech,
and Scandinavian immigrants. Its Chicago branch, led by Albert Parsons,
Lucy Parsons, and August Spies, emphasized the role of industrial unions
and farm organizations in providing the basis for a new and stateless
society.
Lines dividing these various approaches to labor organization were
extremely fluid, with many activists easily switching organizational
affiliations or even belonging to different groups simultaneously. In
Chicago, with the approach of the May 1, 1886, date designated by the
FOTLU for transition to an eighthour day, Knights, craft unionists, and
the IWPAers who helped lead the large Central Labor Union joined forces
to build a huge strike involving perhaps 80,000 workers.
During this strike, it became apparent that Mayor Carter Harrison, who
earlier had urged restraint in the policing of labor disputes, had
abandoned such a policy in favor of the stance of his appointee, police
captain John Bonfield, who held that “the club today saves the bullet
tomorrow.” On May 3, lumber workers rallying for the eight-hour day
joined strikers from the McCormick Harvest Works, involved in a separate
labor dispute, to harass strikebreakers at the latter establishment.
Police fired into the crowd, killing at least two and wounding many
strikers. The anarchist leader August Spies had spoken to the lumber
workers and witnessed the bloodshed. The IWPA, which had promised to
defend the eight-hour strikes against the kind of police, Pinkerton, and
National Guard violence that had caused scores of workers to die in the
1877 strike wave, called the May 4 meeting at Haymarket to protest
police violence and to memorialize the victims at McCormick Works.
Tensions ran high as employers’ associations and the press demanded
decisive antistrike measures while one version of the IWPA’s leaflets
against police violence bore the headline: REVENGE WORKINGMEN, TO ARMY!
The demonstration in Haymarket Square was itself uneventful until the
police attacked. Rain was heavy and attendance light. Mayor Harrison,
who came as an observer, found the gathering peaceable and orderly. But
after the mayor and most of the demonstrators had departed, Captain
Bonfield led 180 police in an attempt to break up the rally. Moments
later, the bomb exploded, sparking a police riot.
The first fruits of the bombing were accelerated campaigns of repression
against the eight-hour strikers, anarchists, and labor leaders in
Chicago and, to an extent, nationally. Chicago’s press mixed
anti-immigrant, anti labor union and antiradical stereotypes in a
hysterical campaign against anarchist “serpents,” who were seen as the
“offscourings of Europe.” Police for weeks kept up a steady pattern of
raids on Chicago labor leaders’ homes and labor organizations’
headquarters, and their spurious reports of finding caches of arms and
explosives just as steadily splashed across front pages of the city’s
daily papers.
Eight IWPA members were prosecuted in this atmosphere for conspiracy to
murder policeman Mathias Degan, who died at Haymarket. In their trial,
State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell affirmed that “anarchy” was the real
defendant and, as Paul Avrich has recently put it, judge Joseph E. Gary
“flaunted his bias against the defendants” at every turn. All eight
defendants received guilty verdicts in August 1886, though no evidence
specifically linked them to the bomb. In November of the following year,
four of them-August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, and Adolph
Fischer-were executed by hanging. A fifth condemned anarchist, Louis
Lingg, killed himself in jail. Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden, and Michael
Schwab stayed in jail until released in 1893 by Illinois governor John
Peter Altgeld, whose stinging pardon message acknowledged the injustice
of the trial.
Haymarket’s bomb echoed long and deep. The explosion and ensuing
repression decimated the anarchist labor movement, though the martyred
defendants became heroes to many and inspired countless individual
conversions to anarchism and to socialism. Victimized too were the
Knights of Labor, who suffered both from the general repression of
worker’s organizations and from the refusal of their national leadership
to endorse the broad-based campaign in defense of those accused as a
result of the bombing. The pardons ruined Altgeld’s promising political
career. The tactic of the mass strike was far less appealing to
pragmatic U.S. labor leaders after Haymarket, and the idea of
self-defense by labor never again received so broad a hearing on the
national scale. On an international scale, the Haymarket events and 1886
eighthour strikes contributed to the 1889 decision of the Second
International to adopt May 1 as World labor Day.
REFERENCES
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984.
David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair. New York: Russell and
Russell, 1958.
Forier, Philip S., ed. The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. New
York: Mondd Press, 1969.
Nelson, Bruce C. Beyond the Martyrs: A Sooal History of Chicago
Anarchisim 1870–1900. New Brunswi( k: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook.
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 1986.