Haymarket Affair

HAYMARKET AFFAIR. On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown while local police attacked an anarchist-led labor demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Eight policemen died as a result of the bombing and their own crossfire. An undetermined, but probably larger, number of demonstrators lost their lives amid 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 much clearer.

The Haymarket Square demonstration grew out of a massive nationwide movement of working people demanding the eight-hour work 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, Eight-Hour Leagues boomed in membership and successfully lobbied for eight-hour laws in several states. But almost all these laws 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 1 of that year, tens of thousands of Chicago workers tested the viability of the statute by striking. Their actions failed, largely as a result of police violence. Nevertheless, the episode previewed trends that would mature in the next twenty years and culminate in the Haymarket Affair.

By the early 1880s, radical workers in Chicago and elsewhere had accumulated further grievances against the political system, especially following the bloody suppression of the 1877 railroad strike. In subsequent local elections, socialist candidates charged that fraud had robbed them of victory. Three separate national organizational responses resulted, all of them seeking to reconcile republican citizenship with industrial society and to address the labor movement’s response to a hostile government. The oldest of these organizations, the Knights of Labor (founded 1869), preached the virtues of cooperatives, working-class self-education, agitation for political reform, cultivation of good relations with local politicians, organization of both skilled and unskilled workers, and caution in undertaking strikes. Irish-American workers strongly supported the Knights in Chicago. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU; 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 (IWPA; 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 tool 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 groups were extremely fluid, with many activists easily switching affiliations or even belonging simultaneously to different organizations. In Chicago, on May 1, 1886, the date designated for securing the eight-hour day, Knights, craft unionists, and the members of the IWPA and Central Labor Union joined forces to stage a huge strike involving as many as 80,000 workers.

On May 3, lumber workers rallying for the eight-hour day joined strikers from the McCormick Harvester Works, involved in a separate labor dispute, to harass strikebreakers. Police fired into the crowd, killing at least two and wounding many others. The anarchist leader August Spies witnessed the bloodshed. The IWPA, which had promised to defend the eight-hour strikes against the state and corporate violence, called the May 4 meeting at Haymarket to protest police brutality and to memorialize the victims at McCormick Works. Tensions ran high. Employers’ associations and the press demanded decisive retaliatory measures while a IWPA’s leaflet bore the headline: REVENGE! WORKINGMEN, TO ARMS!!!

The demonstration in Haymarket Square was itself uneventful until the police attacked. Rain was heavy and attendance light. Mayor Carter Harrison, who came to observe, found the gathering peaceable and orderly. But the mayor’s appointed police captain, John Bonfield, held that “the club today saves the bullet tomorrow.” After the mayor and most of the demonstrators departed, Captain Bonfield led 180 police to break up the rally. Moments later, a bomb exploded, sparking a police riot.

The bombing accelerated the campaigns of repression against the eight-hour strikers, anarchists, and labor leaders in Chicago and, to an extent, nationally. The press featured negative stereotypes of immigrants, union members, and radicals in hysterical diatribes targeting anarchist “serpents” who were caricatured as the “offscourings of Europe.” For weeks, the police wielded a steady storm of raids on Chicago labor leaders’ homes and organizational headquarters. Their sham 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 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 historian Paul Avrich put it, Judge Joseph E. Gary “flaunted his bias against the defendants” at every turn. All eight defendants received guilty verdicts in August, 1886, although no evidence linked them specifically 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.

The Haymarket Affair echoed long and deep. The explosion and ensuing repression demolished the anarchist labor movement. The defendants, however, became heroes –“Haymarket Martyrs”—in Left circles and converted many to anarchism or socialism. Also sorely reduced were the Knights of Labor. Amid the widespread repression of labor organizations, the Knights’ leadership refused to defend the Haymarket defendants and thereby alienated many members. The pardons ruined Altgeld’s promising political career. After the Haymarket Affair, US labor leaders turned away from the tactic of the mass strike.

Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair. New York: Russell and Russell, 1958.

Foner, Philip S., ed. The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. New York: Monad Press, 1969.

Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon, 2006.

Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 1986.

Haymarket Affair Digital Collection, Website. Chicago History Museum.
http://www.chicagohistoryresources.org/hadc/

Haymarket Bomb in Historical Context. Wayback Machine Digital Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20121128083358/http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/haymarket/index.html