The Haymarket Affair

In the 1880s strikes spread as workers protested long hours and low wages, and unions launched a national campaign for the eight-hour day, centered on May 1, 1886. Chicago, a fast-growing industrial and immigrant city, was a center of both the labor movement and radical anarchist politics.

On May 3, police fired on strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, leaving one man dead and many injured. Labor activists called a protest rally for the next evening.

On May 4 at 7:30 p.m., around 1,500 people gathered on Desplaines Street near Haymarket Square. Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison, attended as an observer and confirmed the meeting was peaceful. As the rally wound down and the mayor left, police arrived to disperse the remaining crowd. Someone threw a bomb. Chaos followed as police, and possibly some in the crowd, opened fire. Seven police officers and at least one civilian died, and at least sixty were wounded. The bomb thrower was never identified.

Eight men — the “Chicago Eight,” known for their anarchist politics and pro-labor activism — were charged with murder, though some had not even attended the rally and little evidence connected them to the bomb. On August 20, 1886, a jury found them guilty, and Judge Joseph E. Gary sentenced seven to death. Two sentences were commuted to life imprisonment; Louis Lingg killed himself in his cell; and on November 11, 1887, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Albert Parsons, and August Spies were hanged. In 1893 Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the three surviving defendants.

The affair set off a wave of xenophobia and anti-labor sentiment in Chicago and across the country, damaging the Knights of Labor and the eight-hour movement as many Americans associated labor activism with violence and foreign radicals. To many workers at home and abroad, the executed men became martyrs.