Haymarket affair and May Day

On May 4, 1886, several thousand people gathered at Haymarket Square in Chicago, in a rally in support of striking workers and the eight-hour day. As police moved to disperse the dwindling crowd, someone threw a bomb, which killed police officer Mathias Degan and fatally wounded others; police opened fire, and in the confusion seven officers and at least four civilians died in all. The bomber was never identified. The rally came a day after police had killed at least two strikers outside the McCormick Reaper Works.¹²³

Workers were then pressing for the eight-hour day, and the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions had set May 1, 1886 for a national strike, in which more than 300,000 workers took part. Chicago's labor movement was among the most radical in the country, with an active anarchist press among German immigrants, and employers and newspapers feared revolution. Chicago police arrested hundreds of radicals, and eight anarchists were tried. Evidence linking them to the bomb was weak, and several were not present when it exploded. Seven were sentenced to death and one to fifteen years. The governor commuted two sentences, one man killed himself in his cell, and four, including August Spies and Albert Parsons, were hanged on November 11, 1887. Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three survivors in 1893, saying the trial had been unfair.¹²

The affair set back the American eight-hour movement and fed a wave of anti-radical feeling, but it made martyrs for labor movements worldwide. In 1889 the Second International, meeting in Paris, called for annual demonstrations on May 1, in honor of the 1886 strike, and May Day became International Workers' Day, a holiday in most of the world. In the United States, where the Labor Day holiday in September was established in 1894, May Day is not an official holiday. The Haymarket monument in Chicago's Forest Home cemetery marks the graves of the men.¹²