The Haymarket Square Riot

Chicago in the late 1800s was one of America’s centers of industry, a major transportation hub, and the nation’s fastest growing city.

But the vast fortunes being made by the owners of these industrial powerhouses were built on a foundation of underpaid, overworked laborers. Men, women, and children — many of them immigrants — toiled in unsafe sweatshops for 60 hours a week, and yet could only afford to live in crowded, dilapidated tenements.

The glaring inequality between the workers and the owners gave rise to workers organizing to fight for their interests — better pay and working conditions, the right to join unions, and an 8-hour workday. Some — though certainly not all — labor activists were also socialists, communists, or anarchists.

Labor uprisings like strikes, boycotts, and direct actions (such as blocking railway lines to disrupt businesses) became increasingly common. In 1886, it is estimated that a half a million workers went on strike across the US, and between 30,000 and 40,000 of them were in Chicago, one of the hotbeds of labor activity.

Most of the time police, nearly always in the pay (legally or not) of wealthy business owners, met these uprisings with overwhelming force, clubbing or even shooting strikers and protestors, whether peaceful or not (see the Ludlow Massacre).

Such was the case when the workers at the McCormick Reaper Factory went on strike for an 8-hour workday. The 8-hour workday had actually been law since 1867, but in Chicago, it wasn’t enforced. Workers were required to sign “waivers” agreeing to work 10-hour days as a condition of employment.

When its workers went on strike May 1, the owner of the McCormick Reaper Factory simply brought in strikebreaking workers. At the end of each shift, as the strikebreakers would leave the factory, the striking workers would gather at the gates to heckle and threaten them. McCormick hired 400 Chicago police, under the command of Capt. John Bonfield, to protect the strikebreakers. Bonfield, a rabid xenophobe and anti-Catholic, had led a similarly sized force a few years earlier in beating workers blocking a rail line.

During the day shifts, labor organizers, including Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, gave rousing speeches to inspire the workers. In fact, their speeches were so effective, half the strikebreakers left the line and joined the strikers. This led McCormick’s owner to offer the strikebreakers an 8-hour day — the very deal his original workers were striking for.

On the afternoon of May 3, German immigrant and publisher of the anarchist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker’s Newspaper), August Spies, was speaking to several thousand striking workers near the plant gates when the shift ended. As they had previously, many of the workers turned to heckle the strikebreakers. When some of the hecklers began to throw rocks, police responded with gunfire, killing at least two people.

Spies was incensed at this show of police brutality, and immediately went back to his press and printed up flyers calling workingmen to come to a rally at Haymarket Square the next evening. In the first draft of the flyer, he called on men to arm themselves. But after speaking with the pro-labor mayor, Carter Harrison, he removed that call to arms and insisted the rally must be peaceful.

The rally was scheduled to begin at 7:30, but none of the speakers showed up. The crowd of about 2,500 — including Harrison, on hand to witness to its peaceful nature — milled around until 8:30, when Spies took the stage for a short speech. Soon fellow labor leader Albert Parsons showed up, and Spies gave the stage to him. Parsons spoke for about an hour.

Then the final speaker, Samuel Fielden, took the stage. Fielden was an English immigrant, anarchist, and lay Methodist minister. As rainclouds gathered in the dark sky, and the crowd began to thin, he delivered the most fiery speech of the evening, calling for laborers to “lay hands on [the law] and throttle it until it makes its last kick.”

This alarmed the police who were monitoring the crowd — now numbering only about 300. Two officers ran back to the nearby station and informed Bonfield that Fielden was inciting violence against the police. Bonfield ordered his troops to march into Haymarket Square and break up the rally.

When police arrived at the square, rain had begun falling. Bonfield read an announcement ordering the gathering to disperse. Fielden, still on stage, replied, “But we are peaceable!”

At that moment, witnesses described seeing a dynamite bomb, its fuse lit, fly overhead and land just in front of the police line before exploding. It was the first dynamite bomb used in peacetime in the U.S., and no one would ever determine who threw it.

Chaos ensued. Police began firing blindly into the crowd. People fled in a panic, trampling some underfoot. They ducked into buildings and set up barricades with tables and furniture while the police fired for over two minutes.

When the smoke finally cleared, Haymarket Square was littered with bodies. Seven police officers were dead and 60 were wounded; between four and eight civilians were killed and at least 30 were wounded.

In the wake of the massacre, the City of Chicago declared martial law. Public gatherings of more than two people were outlawed. Anarchists and labor leaders were rounded up (and often beaten), their houses were ransacked in warrantless searches, and pro-labor newspapers were shut down.

Newspapers sympathetic to the capitalists routinely smeared immigrants and anarchists, and after the Haymarket Square massacre, they doubled down. In one editorial, the Chicago Times urged, “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.”

In the end, the state indicted eight men: Parsons, Fielden, and Spies, along with Louis Lingg, a militant anti-capitalist; George Engel, a socialist organizer; Aldof Fischer, a socialist and foreman at the Arbeiter-Zeitung; Oscar Neebe, a pacifist socialist organizer; and Michael Schwab, a labor leader and associate editor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The men would become known as the Chicago Eight.

Their trial was one of the most controversial in American history. The jury pool had been hand-picked by the bailiff — not randomly selected, as was the custom. There was not one immigrant or laborer among them.

Anyone expressing anti-capitalist or pro-labor views was summarily dismissed. One man, when asked how he would vote, replied that he would need to see the evidence first. He was not only dismissed from the jury pool, but when his employer found out what he’d said, fired him as well.

Public sentiment was split — many in the labor movement saw this as an injustice, while others believed the anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist hysteria being whipped up by the pro-business newspapers. The Chicago Tribune allegedly offered to pay the jury money if they found the men guilty.

The trial itself, which ran from June 21 to Aug. 21, was not about the facts of the case. Of the eight men charged with conspiracy and murder, only two of them — Spies and Fielden — were even at Haymarket Square, and were on the stage when the bomb was thrown.

There was not one item of evidence presented that implicated any of them in any plot to commit a bombing or any other kind of violence. Neebe, in fact, was an avowed pacifist. Mayor Harrison even testified for the defense, stating the rally was peaceful and that he saw no weapons among the crowd. Other witnesses corroborated the mayor’s testimony, and added that all the gunfire came from the police.

But the defendants’ actual guilt was not on trial. Instead, as the prosecution so blatantly stated, “anarchism itself is on trial.” The prosecution presented as evidence mountains of newspapers, flyers, and other materials demonstrating that the accused were involved in labor activism — which was equated with anarchism.

Prosecutors warned that freeing the defendants would be taking a “dangerous step toward anarchy.” Acquittals, they argued, would cause anarchists to “flow into the streets again like a lot of rats and vermin.”

After only a few hours, the jurors returned with their verdict: guilty. Seven of the Chicago Eight were sentenced to death. Only Neebe, the pacifist, was spared the gallows; he was sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

Chicago, the U.S., and the world reacted with shock and rage. Letters were written and a petition asking for clemency garnered 100,000 signatures, including those of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Gov. Richard Oglesby responded by granting clemency to Fielden and Schwab, commuting their sentences to life in prison.

But four men — Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Fischer — were hanged to death Nov. 11, 1887. Spies’ last words were powerful: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Lingg, the youngest of the eight, was found dead in his cell, having held a lit stick of dynamite in his mouth, blowing half his skull away. How he got the dynamite, and why he would commit suicide the day before he was expecting a commutation from the governor, are questions that are still unanswered.

Public sentiment continued the pressure to pardon the remaining three men — Schwab, Fielden, and Neebe. Famed attorney Clarence Darrow petitioned the new governor, John Altgeld, who was a progressive.

Altgeld concluded that the eight men had not been given a fair trial, and in 1893, granted them a full pardon. However, that move got him branded a “friend to anarchists” and cost him his political career.

The effects of the Haymarket Square riot and its fallout on the American labor struggle can’t be overstated. While business interests (and their loyal police forces) doubled down on their repressive tactics, laborers became more united than ever. Membership in labor unions grew rapidly, and immigrants and native-born workers found common purpose.

Activist Emma Goldman described the Haymarket Square riot and its aftermath as “the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth” and considered it to be “the most decisive influence in my existence.” “Big Bill” Haywood, who would go on to found the Industrial Workers of the World, credited the Haymarket Square riot for inspiring him to labor activism.

In July 1889, the Second International labor conference convened in Paris. There, a delegate from the American Federation of Labor recommended that May 1 be set aside as International Labor Day in memory of the Haymarket martyrs. The motion passed overwhelmingly.

To this day, in almost every major industrial nation, Labor Day is still celebrated May 1. The U.S. and Canada are the only exceptions.

That the U.S. doesn’t celebrate Labor Day on May 1 is no accident. American labor leaders did pressure the government to declare a national Labor Day holiday on May 1. However, not wanting to call attention to the injustice done to the Haymarket martyrs (and to discourage solidarity with workers in other countries), President Grover Cleveland (D-NewYork) agreed to create a national Labor Day holiday — but in September.

According to Jonathan Cutler, author of Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism (affiliate link), “the United States is the great exception to the May Day tradition. Our end-of-summer Labor Day holiday was developed as an official government alternative to the labor movement’s May Day rallies. One central difference: May Day has always been linked to the demand for less work and more pay; Labor Day celebrates the ‘dignity’ of work.”

This move, more than any other, helped erase a vital piece of labor history from our nation’s collective memory. Whereas in other countries — particularly in Latin America — the Haymarket martyrs are celebrated on May 1, most Americans barely even know what the Haymarket Square riot was. In the spirit of solidarity and education, this article is dedicated to the memory of those martyrs. May they rest in power.