LMT #136: Haymarket Square, Chicago (US) – Leon Fink

The Haymarket Square, Chicago bombing on May 4, 1886 and its aftermath highlight one of the seminal conflicts of America’s Gilded Age.  The Gilded Age commonly refers to the years from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century, years that witnessed very rapid economic development, urbanization, and the growth of immigration. The period also saw growing social polarization, expressed not only in the growth of both poverty and great wealth but also in bitter and often violent strikes that punctuated the period.   “Haymarket,” as the event is known, not only reflected the buildup of contemporary class tensions but ultimately also effected the conflict in ways that undermined the power of organized workers in American society. 

The ‘event’ itself refers to a bomb thrown into a cordon of Chicago police who were attempting to break up a demonstration led by German anarchists as part of an already-bloody “eight-hours” strike that had united a disparate citywide labor movement.  Haymarket was a bustling commercial corridor situated near immigrant (German, Czech, and Irish) neighborhoods and not far from the steel-making and railroad industrial corridor that powered the city’s explosive Gilded Age growth.  For years Chicago’s well-organized skilled workers had pressed for shorter hours as well as recognition of their unions by the city’s large employers.  The demands—originally enunciated in an 1867 state law that went unenforced—were picked up both by the broadly-focused social movement Knights of Labor as well as the more cohesive ranks of the newly-formed American Federation of Labor (AFL), who called for massive strikes to begin on May 1, 1886.

In Chicago, and elsewhere, conflict and confrontation immediately ensued outside factory gates.  When Chicago police assaulted unarmed pickets, killing four workers outside the McCormick Reaper Works on May 3, anarchist leaders representing the International Working People’s Association or “Black International”—effectively the radical edge of the local labor movement—organized the Haymarket rally the next day in self-defense. The anarchist leader August Spies’ prepared remarks, delivered standing from atop a haywagon, concluded with an invocation of the McCormick Works victims: 

“What did they do?  The police tell you that they were a most dangerous crowd, armed to their teeth.  The fact is, they, like ignorant children, indulged in the harmless sport of bombarding McCormick’s slaughter house with stones.  They paid the penalty of this folly with their blood.  The lesson I draw from this occurrence is, that working men must arm themselves for defense, so that they be able to cope with the government hirelings of their masters.”

As Spies concluded his remarks, Inspector John Bonfield, bivouacked in a police headquarters just a block away, ordered his men to disburse the gathering. Unknown to many of the rally organizers—including Spies and fellow radical Albert Parsons, then relaxing at a nearby workers’ saloon—one or more participants in their ranks had carried  with them a dynamite bomb (prepared in anticipation of a future attack from the police).  As officers moved  in late evening to break up the rally, a bomb was thrown into  police ranks, killing seven.  Martial law, including a wave of arrests, the shutting of the labor press, and warrants for the arrest of the entire Chicago anarchist leadership quickly followed.  A hurried trial convicted seven of eight defendants guilty of murder with the penalty of death; the eighth, Oscar Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years in prison although he had been neither present nor aware of the proceedings.   In the end one of the accused committed suicide, four were hanged on November 11, 1887, and the Republican governor commuted the sentences of two others who had requested it in exchange for  life imprisonment.  In 1893, newly-elected Democratic reform Governor John Peter pardoned and released the remaining three defendants on grounds that the state had never produced direct evidence of complicity by the defendants with the actual bombing.

Politically, the panic set off by the bombing took a devastating toll on the labor movement in Chicago and elsewhere.  While Knight of Labor leader Terence Powderly, condemned the anarchists as harshly as the business press did, such distancing did not spare his members the opprobrium of middle-class anti-labor reaction across the country.  Within a year of Haymarket, both the Knights and the eight-hour movement had gone into irreversible decline, while anarchism, if still occasionally potent (as in President William McKinley’s assassination by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist activist in 1901) drifted to the very margins of the American political culture.  Of the pro-labor factions, only the AFL with its more targeted goals of defending the gains of skilled workers, emerged from the period in a stronger position than it began.  Meanwhile, controversy swirled for years over the likely ‘author,’ never found or identified, of the actual bombing.

What remained was a battle over Haymarket memory.  For a century and more, labor partisans and their antagonists would quarrel over the lessons of Haymarket—ie a heroic resistance by labor martyrs against corporate and police violence, a necessary stand for law-and-order, or a sign of the ‘bad old days’ of industrial relations that had given way to a more hopeful social order?  Internationally, the rise of socialist and later communist-led labor movements  turned traditional First of May celebrations as early as 1890 into International Workers’ Day commemorations.

 Across the industrial world, “May Day” served as a rallying cry for worker mobilization and militancy.  In Spain, France, and Italy—and perhaps most of all across Latin America –socialist and revolutionary union federations literally carried the banner of Haymarket memory.  A national holiday in Mexico, May 1, for example,  is popularly known as  the “Day of the Martyrs of Chicago.”

The city of Chicago itself long struggled to reach a public consensus about the Haymarket events.  The first public memorial at the site in 1889 mentioned only the police victims; in 1900 it was declared a traffic hazard and after being moved several times, in 1969, it was blown up by anti-Vietnam War protesters, then finally relocated to the yard of the Policy Academy.  Meanwhile, an unceasing effort by Lucy Parsons, Albert’s widow and herself an ouspoken anarchist agitator (and future founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World) was crowned by the unveiling of the Haymarket Martrys’ Monument, raised with private funds, in Forest Home Cemetery coincident to the 1893 opening of the Chicago World’s Fair. Yet the search for a more common-denominational symbol for the city’s civic culture continued.  Finally, in 2004 legendary Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, heir to one of the most famous urban ‘boss’ systems in American history, presided over the installation of the Haymarket Memorial at the original site.  Designed by artist Mary Brogger and dedicated explicitly to the defense of free speech rather than labor rights—note it won the support of both city’s labor federation and the Fraternal Order of Police –the bronze sculpture invokes more abstract images of the quest for social justice.  As a plaque at the site reads, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”  Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, however, U.S. workers and their representatives (as well as all public institutions) have long opted to set aside the first Monday of September—commemorated by local labor federations as early as the 1880s—not May 1, as America’s national Labor Day.  It is a telling act of American exceptionalism.

  _{Current monument in Haymarket Square, iChicago, inaugurated in 2004.}

To learn more:

• James Green, Death in the Haymarket (New York: Pantheon, 2006)
• Laurajane Smith, Paul Shakel, and Gary Campbell,  Heritage, Labour, and the Working Classes (London: Routledge, 2012)
• Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)

Cover image credit: Illustration of the events of May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square by T. de Thulstrup, published in Harper’s Weekly, vol. 30, May 15, 1886.

WORKING CLASS MEMORY SITES

The Working Class Memory Sites series is coordinated by Paulo Fontes.