Haymarket Eighteen Eighty-Six, The Bomb Nobody Saw

The labor rally in Haymarket Square on the evening of May fourth, eighteen eighty-six, was winding down. It had been called to protest the killing of striking workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company the day before, when police fired into a crowd on the South Side. The Haymarket gathering was peaceful enough that Chicago's mayor, who had attended to watch, went home early and told his chief of police the situation was calm. The police moved to disperse the crowd anyway.

Someone threw a dynamite bomb into the police column. Seven officers died. Police fired into the crowd. The bomb thrower was never identified with certainty. That fact did not slow the prosecution.

Eight men, all labor organizers with anarchist or socialist politics, were arrested. The trial produced no evidence that any of them had thrown the bomb. The jury convicted all eight anyway. Four were hanged in November eighteen eighty-seven: Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer. A fifth, Louis Lingg, died in his cell the night before the execution, apparently by his own hand. Three were eventually pardoned by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld in eighteen ninety-three, who reviewed the trial record and concluded that it represented a miscarriage of justice. The pardon destroyed Altgeld politically. Newspapers called him a traitor. He was not reelected.

The Haymarket affair sent fractures through American labor law, immigration law, and civil liberties. The executed men became the martyrs around whom International Workers' Day, observed every May first, was organized, a commemoration that spread to nearly every country in the world. The United States does not observe May Day as a labor holiday. Congress created Labor Day in September eighteen ninety-four instead, a separate occasion that carries no connection to Haymarket.

The memorial in the square today is a bronze sculpture of a worker raising a hand. For decades before it, a statue of a police officer occupied the same space. It was blown up twice by protesters and eventually moved to a police station. History in this square has always been contested ground.