I.

Introduction

Haymarket Square Riot, confrontation between police and protesters that took place on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago. The event became a famous landmark in United States labor history and took on symbolic importance around the world as a key event in the labor movement’s struggle for the eight-hour workday. The riot and the trial that followed of eight anarchists accused of conspiracy also raised questions about American attitudes toward immigrants and civil liberties in periods of social crisis. See also Hours of Labor; Labor Unions in the United States.

II.

The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Workday

During the American Civil War (1861-1865) workers in the industrialized North accumulated a host of grievances toward their employers, who they believed took advantage of the war to impose onerous working conditions. Chief among their grievances was the length of the workday, which was routinely ten hours or longer. Following the war, Eight-Hour Leagues were formed to campaign for the eight-hour day. The Chicago Eight-Hour League succeeded in persuading the state legislature to enact a law setting a legal limit of eight hours to the workday. Republican Governor Richard J. Oglesby of Illinois supported the legislation and signed the country’s first eight-hour law, which was to go into effect on May 1, 1867.

Employers defied the law, however, especially those who led the newly emerging, large-scale meatpacking, agricultural equipment, and railroad industries. Their defiance meant that the law existed only on the statutes, but not in reality. As a result, trade unions and organizations such as the newly formed National Labor Union continued to agitate for implementation of the eight-hour law in Illinois and for the passage of similar laws in other states.

The growth of industry in Chicago attracted a wave of immigrant laborers from Europe, many of whom were already influenced by trade union and socialist ideas, including the thinking of the German political philosopher Karl Marx and his International Workingmen’s Association. Among the leaders of the eight-hour movement in Chicago were Albert Parsons, a native-born worker who had been active with the Knights of Labor, and August Spies, a German-born worker who had become the editor of a German-language working-class newspaper. Both men had recently broken with the Socialistic Labor Party out of frustration with the electoral process. They considered themselves socialists of the anarchist type.

Nine years after passage of the eight-hour law, still frustrated by the failure of political leaders to challenge the defiance of employers, the Chicago labor movement called for a general strike to begin on May 1, 1886. A lockout of union workers was already in progress at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, and on May 3 several workers were shot by the police during a riot at the plant. Word spread that six of the strikers had been killed.

III.

Haymarket Rally Called to Protest Police Violence

A meeting was called at Haymarket Square on May 4 by a group of mainly German-born anarchist workers as a protest against police violence. Both Spies and Parsons addressed the rally, which drew about 3,000 workers. Parsons departed shortly after his speech. Chicago mayor Carter Harrison also attended the rally to ensure that it was peaceful. During Parsons’s speech, Harrison approached Chief Inspector John Bonfield and said the inspector could probably discharge some of the police units brought in as a reserve because the rally appeared to be peaceful. Harrison, too, then left the square.

The crowd dwindled to about 500 workers. The last speaker was Samuel Fielden, and during his speech the police attempted to disperse the meeting. In the ensuing riot a bomb was thrown. Police fired into the crowd. Seven policemen were killed and many injured; so were many civilians.

In the wake of the riot, Chief Inspector Bonfield told news reporters that the bombing was the result of an anarchist conspiracy. Newspapers around the country editorialized against the anarchists, and much of the opinion betrayed a distinctly anti-immigrant tone. The Chicago Times editorialized: “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue.” The Chicago Tribune described the anarchists as “the worst elements of the Socialistic, atheistic, alcoholic European classes.” The Tribune wrote that the “enemy forces” consisted of the “scum and offal” and the “inhuman rubbish” of Europe, citing Germany and Bohemia in particular. The Tribune also used the occasion to editorialize against the general strike, which appeared to be spreading. But a massive police presence as a result of the riot and a new resolve among employers meant that the general strike for the eight-hour day began to wane. By May 15 most workers were returning to their jobs.

Chicago police had kept under surveillance a number of anarchists living on the city’s North Side. Following police raids on homes, labor meeting halls, and the offices of foreign-language and radical newspapers, the police discovered a bomb-making factory in a house on the North Side and sought to arrest an anarchist named Louis Lingg. Soon after, a grand jury indicted eight anarchists who had attended the protest in Haymarket Square. All eight were charged with being accessories to the crime, on the ground that they had publicly and frequently advocated violence.

IV.

Trial and Execution of the Haymarket Anarchists

The trial of the anarchists began in June 1886 with the prosecution identifying Spies as the ringleader of the “conspiracy.” The eight defendants—George Engel, Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Lingg, Oscar Neebe, Parsons, Michael Schwab, and Spies—were found guilty on a variety of charges, although none was ever charged with actually throwing the bomb. Of the eight, only Spies and Fielden were still in attendance at the rally when the bomb went off. (The identity of the bomb thrower was never discovered.) In August all were sentenced to death, except Neebe, who received a 15-year prison sentence.

In the aftermath of the trial, a defense committee began to attract widespread support for a reversal of the trial results or, at the very least, clemency for those condemned to death. Samuel Gompers, soon to be head of the American Federation of Labor, claimed the eight anarchists had been victimized by “the misguiding and corrupting influence of prejudice and class hatred” and called the death sentence “judicial murder prompted by the basest and most un-American motives.” The journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd argued that the men were unfairly tried. The popular novelist William Dean Howells called for clemency, writing that it was wrong to have tried the men for murder when it could not be shown that they had committed the crime.

After losing appeals to the Illinois and U.S. supreme courts, the clemency effort focused on Illinois governor Oglesby. By November 1887, the month of the scheduled execution, an estimated 100,000 Americans had signed a clemency petition. However, Oglesby had received far more letters demanding the death penalty, and Chicago’s leading industrialists and businessmen, including Marshall Field, opposed clemency. Oglesby was reportedly sympathetic to the condemned men. He signaled privately that if the condemned men wrote letters requesting mercy, he would consider commuting the death sentences to life imprisonment.

Fielden and Schwab wrote letters asking for mercy, but Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel refused, proclaiming their innocence and saying they preferred death to life imprisonment. Lingg had committed suicide in his jail cell rather than be executed. Oglesby commuted the sentences of Fielden and Schwab, but the remaining four were hung on November 11. Spies’s final words were, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

In 1893 the recently elected governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, himself a German immigrant, pardoned the three men remaining in prison. The pardon was based mainly on the ground that no evidence had been presented actually connecting the defendants with the throwing of the bomb. Altgeld declared the trial had been unfair and illegal because of prejudicial statements made during jury selection, the bias shown by the trial judge, and because “much of the evidence given at the trial was a pure fabrication.” Altgeld wrote in his pardoning statement that he saw no evidence for a conspiracy and thought it was likely that the bombing was the act of an individual seeking revenge against the police for their unprovoked attacks on workers.

The executions of the Haymarket Square anarchists transformed them into martyrs for the cause of labor and the eight-hour day. In 1889 the Second International, a meeting of socialists in Paris, France, called for May 1st, May Day, to be commemorated as an international workers’ day in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. May Day celebrations soon became worldwide. In 1938 the U.S. Congress finally mandated the eight-hour day with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.