The Haymarket Affair
by Carlton Martz
On May 4, 1886, a rally in support of workers’ rights and against police brutality took place at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The rally turned violent when someone threw a bomb that exploded among police ranks. The bomb-thrower was never caught. However, eight people were arrested and tried for conspiracy. The trial remains controversial today.
The General Strike
As the United States more and more became an Industrial economy in the 19th century, labor unions organized. Unions generally sought reforms to improve workers’ wages and working conditions. Some also supported workers’ strikes and boycotts against companies that treated workers unfairly.
In the late 1800sone of the labor movement’s major goals was to get employers to reduce the then-typical ten-hour workday to eight hours without loss of wages. The major national organization of labor unions demanded that employers institute an eight-hour workday by May 1, 1886.
After employers did not institute an eight-hour day, over 350,000 workers nationwide went on strike. The eight-hour movement was very strong in Chicago, Illinois, where workers called for a general strike (a strike to shut down the city). On May 1, 1886, over 80,000 workers marched in protest in Chicago.
A small group of Chicago anarchists, many of whom were recent German immigrants, were thrilled to support the strike. Anarchists believed in the abolition of government and typically opposed capitalism. Many anarchists became active in the labor movement. Some anarchists in the 19th century believed that capitalism could only be ended through violence.
Several Chicago employers eventually yielded to the strikers’ demands for an eight-hour workday. Other employers, like the McCormick Reaper Company, instead hired workers known as strikebreakers to keep the company operating during the general strike.
On May 3, a crowd of striking workers amassed outside McCormick Reaper’s factory in Chicago, throwing stones at the strikebreakers as they walked by. August Spies, the editor of a German-language anarchist newspaper, urged the strikers to remain peaceful.
But soon the police arrived. The police attacked the strikers with clubs and used gunfire to break up the crowd. At least one striker was killed and several others were injured.
That night, Spies angrily composed a flyer for the strikers, titled “Workingmen, to Arms!” Spies wrote, “If you are men . . . then you will rise . . . and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms we call you, to arms!” Before it went to print, a typesetter added the title “REVENGE!” to the flyer. Hundreds of copies were distributed.
That night, two other anarchists, George Engel, a former anarchist newspaper editor, and Adolph Fischer, a typesetter for Spies’s newspaper, joined with others in a secret meeting. They discussed what to do about the police actions at the McCormick Reaper Company. They agreed to call a protest meeting at Haymarket Square, a commercial area on Chicago’s west side, the following night.
The Bomb
The next morning on May 4, Spies’s newspaper printed another flyer that advertised a “Mass Meeting” at Haymarket Square. “Good speakers will be present to denounce the latest atrocious act of the police, the shooting of our fellow workmen yesterday afternoon,” it declared.
Fischer inserted the line “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!” onto the flyer. Spies said he would refuse to speak at the mass meeting unless that provocative line was removed. (Spies later testified that he was concerned that the call to bring arms to the rally would scare supporters and keep them from participating.) The line was taken out, but some original copies of the flyer had already been distributed. Around 20,000 copies without the provocative line were then distributed.
Meanwhile, another anarchist, Louis Lingg, was busy making homemade bombs in his apartment. He and others made about thirty bombs and later helped move them to a saloon, where several men took them. What happened to the bombs then is unknown.
The Haymarket meeting began around 7:00 p.m., drawing a crowd of about 3,000 protesters. Along with labor union leaders, Spies and two other anarchists, Albert Parsons and Samuel Fielden, all spoke from a hay wagon, steps away from Crane’s Alley.
Their speeches touched on the poor conditions of workers, the eight-hour movement, and the police violence from the previous day. Fielden, the last to speak, was quoted as saying: “I tell you war has been declared on us, and I ask you get ahold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.”
Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, sympathetic to the workers, listened for a while and told a police commander that the meeting was peaceful. As the evening went on, rain began to fall and the crowd began to leave. Parsons left with his family to a nearby saloon. Spies and Fielden remained on the speakers’ wagon.
At around 10:30 p.m., about 100 police officers arrived, and their commander ordered the crowd to disperse. Fielden protested, “But we are peaceable.” Suddenly, someone threw a bomb with a lighted fuse and filled with dynamite into the air, probably from the direction of Crane’s Alley. The bomb exploded amid the ranks of police, killing Officer Mathias Degan.
The police began shooting wildly into the crowd. Some witnesses would later say that people in the crowd shot at the police at the same time the police began shooting. But the exact source of all the gunfire was never clearly established.
The violence lasted only about five minutes. Altogether, seven policemen died of bomb fragments or gunfire. The number of protesters or onlookers killed or wounded is unknown. Among them, Samuel Fielden suffered a bullet-wound in his leg.
The Search for the Co-Conspirators
The next day, outrage at the deaths of the policemen inflamed Chicago’s main newspapers. The press blamed the anarchists, German immigrants, and the entire eight-hour movement, calling for the quick arrest, trial, and hanging of the murderer of the “police heroes.” The police failed to identify and arrest the bomb-thrower, but assumed that a conspiracy of anarchists was responsible for the bombing.
Hundreds of arrests of union members and anarchists followed. Several unions denounced anarchism. Spies and his assistant, Michael Schwab, and the entire staff at Spies’s newspaper were arrested and beaten by the police. The wounded Fielden was arrested in his home. Police considered Louis Lingg a prize arrest because his apartment was filled with bomb-making materials. Albert Parsons fled the state and went into hiding.
The police raided anarchists’ homes and businesses, as well as labor union offices, often without search warrants. However, such police behavior was not uncommon at the time, as this was long before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police may not gather evidence in violation of people’s constitutional rights.
The Trial
A grand jury convened in Cook County, Illinois in late May 1886 and determined that the attack on the police and death of Officer Degan was “the result of a deliberate conspiracy.” The grand jury indicted eight “accessories,” all avowed anarchists: August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons (still in hiding), Michael Schwab, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. Neebe had apparently only distributed some of Spies’s flyers.
Each side had a team of lawyers. Julius Grinnell, the state’s attorney for Cook County, led the prosecution. William Black, a reform-minded member of a Chicago law firm, led the defense.
Judge Joseph Gary presided over the trial court. The defense wanted to try the defendants in two groups to separate those with less liability. But Judge Gary ruled that all the defendants would be tried together.
Just before the trial began, Albert Parsons made a dramatic entrance into the courtroom. Confident he would be found not guilty, he turned himself in, was arrested, and tried with the others.
Selection of the jury proved to be one of the most controversial parts of the trial. Hundreds of men were questioned (women were barred from juries at this time), and most were dismissed by one side or the other until the jury pool was used up.
A “special bailiff,” not unusual for the time, was approved by the prosecution, defense, and the judge. This bailiff rounded up more potential jurors, mainly from the neighborhood of the courthouse.
Judge Gary was later criticized for accepting jurors who admitted they had an opinion of the case based on what they had read in the newspapers. However, Illinois law allowed the use of such jurors as long as they declared they could reach a fair verdict based on the evidence. Judge Gary did excuse some potential jurors who had obvious prejudice against the defendants.
After several weeks, twelve jurors were selected. Most were salesmen or clerks. One was a school principal. But none were laborers or factory workers.
The Case for the Prosecution
The trial began on July 15, 1886, when Chief Prosecutor Grinnell made his opening statement. Since he had no evidence to accuse any of the eight defendants of throwing the bomb, his theory of the case was that the those defendants were on trial as “accomplices” in a conspiracy to start a revolution.
August Spies, Grinnell said, was the ringleader of the “dynamite plot.” Spies, he argued, had been using the eight-hour movement for months to set off a revolution, and provoked the violent riot at the McCormick factory, which put into motion the conspiracy planned at the secret meeting attended by fellow anarchists Adolph Fischer and George Engel. Prosecutor Grinnell argued that the defendants plotted to use Louis Lingg’s bombs against the police at the rally the next day at Haymarket Square to spark an uprising.
Prosecutor Grinnell called over one hundred witnesses to support his arguments. He also presented scientific findings that fragments from the bomb that killed Officer Mathias matched the chemical composition of bomb materials found in Lingg’s apartment. Grinnell also showed the jury the flyers printed by Spies and read from numerous anarchist writings and speeches that called for a revolution.
The prosecution had a witness who attended the secret meeting the night before the Haymarket rally. That witness confirmed the planning for the rally but did not recall anyone talking about attacking the police.
Prosecutor Grinnell believed that his last witness, H. L. Gilmer, would seal the case. Gilmer testified that he saw Spies light the fuse of the bomb and hand it to another man at the alley from where the bomb was probably thrown. Gilmer later identified that man from a photograph as Rudolph Schnaubelt. The police had actually arrested and questioned Schnaubelt during the sweep of arrests following the bombing, but they released him. He eventually disappeared.
Prosecutor Grinnell ended his case by telling the jurors that the question for them was not only who threw the bomb, “but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it.”
The Case for the Defense
In his opening, defense lawyer William Black expressed that the defendants could not be “accomplices” when the bomb-thrower had not been identified or accused. Whoever he was, did the defendants assist or encourage him? This was unknown.
Black presented his own long list of defense witnesses. They testified that all but two of the defendants had alibis and were not at Haymarket Square when the bomb exploded. Fielden was still on the hay wagon speaker’s platform, arguing with the police commander who ordered the crowd to disperse.
What about Spies? Recall that prosecution witness Gilmer pointed to Spies in the courtroom as the one who lighted the fuse of the bomb and handed it to the thrower. No other witness confirmed what Gilmer said he saw. Several defense witnesses were prominent Chicago citizens who testified that Gilmer had a reputation for being a liar. Other witnesses placed Spies on the hay wagon when the bomb went off.
Several witnesses testified that any of the defendants’ talk about using violence against the police would only be in self-defense. The defense argued that the officers who were struck by bullets were undoubtedly killed by their own wild gunfire.
The testimony of the prosecution’s and defense’s witnesses was often contradictory. Of course, it was up to the jurors to decide which witnesses to believe. Already, most of the jurors had admitted seeing press accounts describing the police victims as heroes. Prosecutor Grinnell drove this point home when he spent days reading anarchist writings, speeches, and other documents that advocated the violent overthrow of the capitalist system. The defense lawyers protested that the defendants were being prosecuted for their words, which were protected by the First Amendment, and not their acts.
Spies and three other defendants also testified, which opened them up to tough cross-examination by the prosecution. This probably harmed the defense.
The Verdict and Aftermath
After eight weeks, the trial ended. In his defense summation, Black said the entire prosecution case was based on thin circumstantial evidence because the bomber’s motive for throwing the bomb was unknown.
Prosecutor Grinnell admitted that the prosecution had not identified the bomb-thrower. But he argued that the defendants were “the accessories, the conspirators, the individuals who framed the plan, who got it up, who advised and encouraged it . . . .” Therefore, he argued, the defendants were still guilty of murder.
The jury deliberated for several hours and returned a verdict of guilty for the eight defendants. The jury recommended the death penalty for all of them except Oscar Neebe, for whom they recommended a prison sentence of 15 years. Chicago’s major newspapers and most of the public cheered the verdict, which also stirred feelings against organized labor and immigrants. Working-class neighborhoods, however, were in disbelief.
At the sentencing hearing, the defendants had a chance to speak. Spies quoted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Lingg, the bomb-maker, was most defiant. “I despise you and your laws!” he shouted. “Hang me for it!”
Judge Gary sentenced all but Neebe to hang. But someone smuggled a dynamite cap into Lingg’s cell, and he purposefully blew himself up.
On appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, the defense claimed Judge Gary committed several legal errors. One of them was that the state’s evidence did not prove a conspiracy. The court rejected all the defense arguments and upheld the convictions.
On further appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the defense’s claim that due process of law had been denied. The court also found no substantial constitutional questions in the case. Afterward, Illinois Governor Richard J. Ogelsby reduced the sentences of Fielden and Schwab from death to life in prison because they renounced their anarchist views.
Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Fischer were allowed last words before being hanged together on November 11, 1887. Spies remarked, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
Seven years later, in 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned all eight defendants, including the three defendants who were still alive: Neebe, Schwab, and Fielden. Altgeld stated that the trial record showed that both the judge and jury were biased against the defendants. He also claimed that the prosecution had failed to prove a conspiracy. Critics of Altgeld’s pardons claimed that he merely had a grudge against Judge Gary, who had previously ruled against Altgeld in a separate court case.
The Haymarket Affair’s Lasting Influence
The Haymarket Affair, as it is often called, provoked strong reactions in society. A wave of fear of immigrants rose in the nation after the event. Unions tried to distance themselves from anarchists. The Knights of Labor, a national labor organization to which Albert Parsons had belonged, disbanded.
However, the American Federation of Labor and other labor unions continued to campaign for the eight-hour workday. One by one, industries such as mining, railroads, and printing began adopting the eight-hour workday. Finally, in 1937, Congress set a maximum of 40 work hours per week as part of the New Deal. The eight-hour workday became the standard across the nation.
Questions for Discussion
1. Explain why there was a rally held at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886.
2. At trial, the defense argued that the defendants were merely on trial for proclaiming their political opinions instead of engaging in a conspiracy. Do you agree? What evidence in the article supports your answer?
3. Who do you think had the stronger case: the prosecution or the defense? Give reasons to explain your answer.
This article was originally published in BRIA, the quarterly curricular magazine of Teach Democracy (formerly Constitutional Rights Foundation). Click here for a high-school classroom activity on this article, as well as a source list for the article. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
