Haymarket Riot
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The Haymarket Riot on May 4 1886, in Chicago, Illinois is the origin of international May Day observances and in popular literature inspired the caricature of "a bomb-throwing anarchist." The causes of the incident are still controversial, although deeply polarized attitudes separating the business class and the working class in late 19th century Chicago are generally acknowledged as having precipitated the tragedy and its aftermath.
May Day parade and strikes
On May 1 1886 (later known as May Day), labor unions organized a strike for an eight-hour work day in Chicago. Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, with his wife Lucy Parsons and two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue in what is regarded as the first May Day Parade. In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers, including 70,000 in Chicago, who went on strike at 1,200 factories.On May 3 striking workers met near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant. A fight broke out on the picket lines, and Chicago police intervened and attacked the strikers, killing two, wounding several others and sparking outrage in the city's working community.
Local anarchists distributed fliers calling for a rally at Haymarket Square, then a bustling commercial center (also called the Haymarket) near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street in what was later called Chicago's west Loop. These fliers alleged police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice. In response to the McCormick killings, prominent anarchist August Spies published "Revenge! Workingmen to Arms!" This pamphlet urged workers to take action:
To arms we call you, to arms!
Rally at Haymarket Square
The rally began peacefully under a light rain on the evening of May 4. August Spies spoke to the large crowd while standing in an open wagon on a side street. According to many witnesses Spies said he was not there to incite anyone. Meanwhile a large number of on-duty police officers watched from nearby. The crowd was so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., who had stopped by to watch, walked home early. Some time later the police ordered the rally to disperse and began marching in formation towards the speakers' wagon. A bomb was thrown at the police line and exploded, killing a policeman (see [Mathias J. Degan]); 7 other policemen later died from their injuries. The police immediately opened fire on the crowd, injuring dozens. Many of the wounded were afraid to visit hospitals for fear of being arrested. A total of eleven people died.
Trial, executions and pardons
Eight people connected directly or indirectly with the rally and its anarchist organisers were charged with Degan's murder: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe. Five (Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg and Schwab) were German immigrants while a sixth, Neebe, was a U.S. citizen of German descent.
The trial was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary. The defense counsel included Sigmund Zeisler, William Perkins Black, William Foster, and Moses Salomon. The prosecution never offered evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing but argued that the person who had thrown the bomb had been incited to do so by the defendants, who as a result were equally responsible.
The jury returned guilty verdicts for all eight defendants, with death sentences for seven. Neebe (who seemed to have been almost forgotten by the prosecution) received a sentence of 15 years in prison. The sentencing sparked more outrage in labor circles, resulted in protests around the world and made the defendants international political celebrities and heroes. Meanwhile the press had published often sensationalized accounts and opinions about the incident which tended to polarize public reaction.
For example, journalist George Frederic Parsons wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly articulating the fears of middle-class Americans concerning labor radicalism and asserting the belief that workers had only themselves to blame for their troubles.
After the appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden's and Schwab's sentences to life in prison. On the eve of his scheduled execution, Lingg committed suicide in his cell using a smuggled dynamite cap, which he reportedly held in his mouth like a cigar (the blast blew off half his face and he survived in agony for several hours).
The next day, November 11 1887, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged together before a public audience. Marched to the gallows in hoods, they sang the Marseillaise, the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members including Lucy Parsons who attempted to see them for the last time were arrested and searched for bombs; none were found. August Spies was widely quoted as having shouted out, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." Witnesses reported that the condemned did not die when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the audience visibly shaken.
Lingg, Spies, Fischer, Engel and Parsons were buried at the German Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago (as were Schwab and Neebe when they died). In 1893 the Haymarket Martyrs Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert was raised at Waldheim. Over a century later it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior (the only cemetery memorial to be noted as such).
On June 26 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab after having concluded all eight defendants were innocent (the pardons signalled his own political end).
The police commander who ordered the dispersal was later convicted of unrelated corruption. The bomb thrower was never identified, although some anarchists privately indicated they had later learned his identity but kept quiet to avoid further violence and death. It is also widely suspected that the bomb thrower was an agent provocateur hired by the heads of the steel industry to discredit the labor movement. The trial is often referred to by scholars as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in United States history.
Haymarket Square in the aftermath
In 1889 a commemorative nine-foot bronze statue of a Chicago policeman by sculptor Johannes Gelert was erected in the middle of Haymarket Square with private funds raised by the Union League Club of Chicago. A statue of a policeman revealed the ambivalence of local residents to the riot as did the subsequent history of the statue. The irony of a policeman statue was likely not lost on the labor movement in the U.S., but its appearance and long maintenance and protection by the city is often not known by those around the world who honor the Haymarket events. On the 41st anniversary of the riot, May 4 1927, a streetcar jumped its tracks and crashed into the monument (statements made by the driver suggested this was deliberate).
The city moved it to nearby Lincoln Park. During the early 1960s, freeway construction erased about half of the old, run down market square and the statue was moved back to a spot on a newly built outcropping overlooking the freeway, near its original location. In October 1969 it was blown up, repaired by the city and blown up again a year later, reportedly by the Weather Underground.
Mayor Richard J. Daley placed a 24-hour police guard around the statue for two years before it was moved to the enclosed courtyard of Chicago Police academy in 1972. The statue's empty, graffiti marked pedestal stood in the desolate remains of Haymarket Square for another three decades and was known as an anarchist landmark.
In 1985, scholars doing research for a possible centenial commemoration of the riot were shocked to learn that most of the primary source documentation relating to the incident was not in Chicago, but in communist East Berlin.
In 1992 the site of the speakers' wagon was marked by a bronze plaque set into the sidewalk, reading:
A decade of strife between labor and industry culminated here in a confrontation that resulted in the tragic death of both workers and policemen. On May 4 1886, spectators at a labor rally had gathered around the mouth of Crane's Alley. A contingent of police approaching on Des Plaines Street were met by a bomb thrown from just south of the alley. The resultant trial of eight activists gained worldwide attention for the labor movement, and initiated the tradition of "May Day" labor rallies in many cities.
- Designated on March 25, 1992
- Richard M. Daley, Mayor
Defendants
- August Spies German immigrant, was hanged
- Albert Parsons U.S. citizen, was hanged
- Adolph Fischer German immigrant, was hanged
- George Engel German immigrant, was hanged
- Louis Lingg German immigrant, sentenced to death, took his own life with dynamite while in prison
- Michael Schwab German immigrant, death sentence commuted to life in prison, then pardoned in 1893
- Samuel Fielden English immigrant, death sentence commuted to life in prison, then pardoned in 1893
- Oscar Neebe U.S. citizen of German descent, sentenced to 15 years, served seven until pardoned in 1893
See also
- History of the United States (1865-1918)
- Third Great Awakening
- May Day Riots of 1894
- May Day Riots of 1919
Sources, Further reading
- Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Affair.
- Bach, Ira and Mary Lackritz Gray, Chicago's Public Sculpture, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1983
- Fireside, Bryna J, Haymarket Square Riot Trial: A Headline Court Case Enslow Publishers, Inc., Berkeley Heights, NJ 2002
- Green, James, Death in the Haymarket Pantheon 2006
- Harris, Frank, The Bomb, Feral House Printing, Portland Ore 1963
- Hucke, Matt and Ursula Bielski, Graveyards of Chicago, Lake Claremont Press, Chicago Il 1999
- Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, Haymarket - A Century Later, unpublished manuscript
- Riedy, James L, Chicago Sculpture University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL 1981
- Rodeiger, Dave and Rosemont, Franklin, ed. Haymarket Scrapbook, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., Chicago, 1986.
External links
- [The Haymarket Martyrs]
- [The Haymarket Monument]
- [The Haymarket Affair Digital Archive]
- [The Haymarket Massacre Archive]
- [Mayday and the Haymarket Martyrs]
- [The Haymarket Massacre] Anarchy Now! page
- [Officer Down Memorial Page]
- [Library of Congress Memory page]
- [Death in the Haymarket:A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded-Age America]
External images
- [Late 19th century postcard view of Haymarket Square]
- [The police monument at its original site in Haymarket Square]
- [Gelert's Union League Club statue in the courtyard of Chicago police headquarters]
- [Brogger's sculpture at Haymarket Square during the winter of 2004-05]
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