Bay View, May 5, 1886

The morning of May fifth, eighteen eighty-six, had already been building for days. Nearly fourteen thousand workers had gathered around the Bay View Rolling Mill on Milwaukee's south lakefront, most of them Polish immigrants demanding a simple thing: an eight-hour workday instead of ten or twelve. The mill sat along the lake, enormous and belching, and the workers who ran its furnaces had been living inside its schedule for years.

Governor Jeremiah Rusk had called out six companies of Wisconsin state militia. The soldiers were positioned at the factory gates with orders, according to accounts from the period, to fire if the marchers entered the grounds. On the morning of the fifth, approximately fifteen hundred workers formed a column and began marching toward the mill.

A command to halt was issued. The crowd did not stop. The militia fired a single volley.

Seven people died. Among the seven who died were Frank Nowarczyk, Martin Jankowiak, Michael Ruchalski, Johann Zazka, Frank Kunkel, and John Marsh, along with a thirteen-year-old boy who had followed the march to see what was happening. A retired man named Robert Erdman, who lived nearby and had gone to get water from his well, was struck by a stray round and died in front of his house. He was not part of the strike.

Governor Rusk was unapologetic. He reportedly said that he saw it was necessary to kill some of them to save many of them. The remark was widely reprinted. It was not widely condemned, not in the major newspapers of eighteen eighty-six.

The Bay View Massacre, as Wisconsin labor historians call it, is the bloodiest single moment in Wisconsin's labor history. The eight-hour workday the workers died for became the legal standard in the United States thirty-two years later.

A marker stands near the site. The Wisconsin Labor History Society holds a commemoration here every year in May.