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.