On the evening of May 4, 1886, a crowd of approximately 1,500 workers gathered in the open street near Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, to listen to speeches protesting police violence against striking laborers. By the time the evening ended, a bomb had exploded, officers and civilians lay dead or dying in the street, and one of the most consequential events in the history of the American labor movement had been set irrevocably in motion.
The Haymarket Affair, as it came to be known, was not an isolated incident. It was the explosive outcome of years of industrial conflict, the convergence of a national movement for the eight-hour workday, and the gathering forces of radical labor politics in a city that was, in 1886, the fastest growing and most industrially dynamic in the United States. What happened in Chicago that night would echo across the world and is remembered today as the origin of May Day as International Workers’ Day.
Chicago in 1886: A City at the Center of Industrial Conflict
To understand the Haymarket Affair, it is necessary to understand what Chicago represented in the spring of 1886. The city had grown at a pace that staggered contemporaries, drawing hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Germany, Bohemia, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe to work in its factories, meatpacking plants, lumberyards, and railroads. The concentration of industrial labor in a single city, combined with conditions that were often brutal and wages that were frequently inadequate, made Chicago the nerve center of American labor agitation.
Workers in the 1880s typically labored ten to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, in conditions that were frequently unsafe and sometimes lethal. The concept of an eight-hour workday had been endorsed by the Illinois legislature as early as 1867, and a federal law had established the eight-hour day for federal employees in the same year. Neither law was enforced. Employers routinely required workers to sign waivers of the eight-hour provision as a condition of employment. The slogan that spread through the labor movement captured the demand in simple and memorable terms: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
In the summer of 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the predecessor organization to the American Federation of Labor, established May 1, 1886, as the target date for a nationwide movement to achieve the eight-hour day. Workers and organizers had two years to prepare, and they used the time to build the most ambitious labor campaign in American history to that point.
Among the organizers in Chicago were Albert Parsons and his wife Lucy Parsons. Albert, born in Texas, was a former Confederate soldier who had become a committed socialist and anarchist labor activist. Lucy Parsons, born approximately 1853, was a woman of African American, Native American, and Mexican heritage who had worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War and become one of the most powerful labor organizers and writers in Chicago. Together they were central figures in the Chicago labor movement’s radical wing.
May 1 to May 3: The Strike Builds and Violence Erupts
On May 1, 1886, labor groups called the general strike that had been two years in the planning. In Chicago, more than 40,000 workers walked off their jobs and marched down Michigan Avenue in a massive demonstration. The turnout exceeded expectations across the country. An estimated 80,000 workers marched in Chicago alone that day in one of the largest labor demonstrations America had ever seen. Albert Parsons marched at the head of one procession, while Lucy Parsons organized workers in another sector of the city.
The city’s authorities were prepared for trouble. Chicago’s police force was experienced in suppressing demonstrations and breaking strikes, and Mayor Carter Harrison, while personally sympathetic to labor’s cause, maintained a heavy police presence.
For the first two days, the general strike proceeded without major violence. But on May 3, the situation changed catastrophically at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant at Western and Blue Island Avenues on Chicago’s West Side. McCormick workers had been on strike since February, and the company had been using replacement workers, or strikebreakers, to keep production running. A crowd of striking workers gathered outside the plant gates.
August Spies, a German-born labor activist and editor of the anarchist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, was addressing a separate meeting of striking lumber workers nearby when the McCormick confrontation escalated. Police moved in to protect the strikebreakers and disperse the crowd, opening fire on the strikers. Accounts vary on the number of workers killed: some sources record one death, others record two, and still others suggest as many as six were killed. Multiple workers were wounded. The date was May 3, 1886.
Spies rushed back to the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in a state of fury. Working through the night, he composed a leaflet denouncing the police attack and calling for workers to arm themselves and attend a protest meeting the following evening. The printed flier circulated through the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago bore the headline “Revenge” in some versions, though evidence suggests that inflammatory heading was added by Spies’s printer without Spies’s authorization. A second, more moderate circular called simply for a peaceful protest meeting at Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4.
The Speakers: Who Was at Haymarket Square That Night
The meeting at Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4, 1886, was not the mass gathering its organizers had hoped for. Word had spread through a broader network, and organizers had anticipated as many as 20,000 attendees. The actual crowd was approximately 1,500, partly because the weather was threatening and had turned cold and rainy as the evening progressed.
August Spies opened the meeting, speaking from the bed of a wagon on Desplaines Street adjacent to Haymarket Square. He recounted the events at the McCormick plant and called for workers to organize in their own defense. Albert Parsons, who had traveled to Cincinnati to speak at a labor rally there, returned to Chicago and arrived at the meeting during Spies’s speech, joining him on the wagon. Parsons spoke at length about the conditions of industrial labor and the demand for the eight-hour day.
The third and final speaker was Samuel Fielden, a British-born labor activist and teamster. As Fielden spoke, the crowd had thinned considerably; by the time his speech neared its conclusion, only approximately 300 people remained. The rain was intensifying.
Mayor Carter Harrison had attended the early portion of the meeting as an observer, precisely to assess whether it required police intervention. After listening to Spies and Parsons speak and finding the meeting peaceful and orderly, Harrison left and personally instructed Police Inspector John Bonfield that the crowd was peaceful and that the police should remain at their station. Bonfield overruled this assessment. After Harrison departed, Bonfield ordered nearly 200 police officers to march from the Desplaines Street police station to the meeting site and disperse the remaining crowd.
The Bomb: May 4, 1886
As the column of police marched toward the speakers’ wagon and Bonfield’s lieutenant ordered the crowd to disperse, someone from the crowd or from the edge of the gathering threw a bomb toward the advancing officers. The device exploded in the midst of the police column, and chaos erupted immediately.
The explosion killed Officer Mathias Degan instantly. Six other officers died in the following days from their wounds, bringing the total police death toll to seven. In the pandemonium that followed, police drew their weapons and fired into the crowd indiscriminately, and some accounts suggest that workers returned fire from the edges of the square. Between four and eight civilians were killed and dozens more wounded. In all, more than a dozen people were dead or dying in the immediate aftermath, and close to 100 had been injured.
The identity of the bomb thrower has never been definitively established. The most widely accepted suspect, based on contemporary investigation, was Rudolph Schnaubelt, the brother-in-law of Michael Schwab and an activist who had been present at the rally. A state witness named Gilmer testified that he had seen Schnaubelt throw the bomb, identifying him from a photograph. Schnaubelt was indicted but fled Chicago and then the country before he could be arrested. He later sent letters from London denying any involvement. Among historians, Schnaubelt remains the most generally accepted candidate, though the case was never proven and many scholars consider the question genuinely unresolved.
The Arrests and the Trial: Anarchy on Trial
The night of May 4 and the days immediately following saw martial law effectively declared in Chicago and a sweeping wave of arrests across the city. Police raided homes without search warrants, shut down labor newspapers, and rounded up hundreds of suspected radicals and organizers. The attacks were not confined to Chicago: across the country, police in multiple cities detained foreign-born labor activists and radicals.
Within days, eight men were selected as the primary defendants to be tried for the murder of Officer Degan. The defendants were August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. Five of the eight were German immigrants. The critical fact, widely acknowledged both at the time and since, was that several of the defendants had not been present at Haymarket Square at the time of the bombing. George Engel, for instance, had been at home playing cards. Louis Lingg, accused of making the bomb, had witnesses who placed him more than a mile away. Oscar Neebe, an organizer associated with the Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper, had no connection to the rally at all.
The trial, officially titled Illinois vs. August Spies et al., opened on June 21, 1886, before Judge Joseph Gary. State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell’s strategy was explicit and legally radical: he did not need to prove that any of the defendants had thrown the bomb. He only needed to prove that they had, through their speeches, writings, and organizing, “abetted, encouraged, and advised” the unnamed bomber to commit the act. Grinnell used Spies’s “Revenge” leaflet and the defendants’ published writings and public speeches about the necessity of armed resistance as the core of his case. In his framing, he was putting anarchy itself on trial, not individual acts.
The atmosphere made any hope of impartiality essentially impossible. The Chicago Tribune reportedly offered to pay jurors if they found the defendants guilty. Judge Gary seated jurors who openly admitted they believed the defendants were guilty before any evidence was presented. The trial lasted two months, and on August 20, 1886, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all eight defendants after deliberating for only a few hours. Neebe was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. The other seven were sentenced to death by hanging.
The Executions and the Pardons
A massive clemency campaign swept the country and parts of Europe following the verdicts. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, traveled from Washington to Illinois to appeal personally to Governor Richard Oglesby on November 10, 1887, the day before the scheduled execution. A petition bearing more than 100,000 signatures was delivered. Governor Oglesby commuted the sentences of Schwab and Fielden to life imprisonment after they submitted petitions for mercy.
Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer refused to ask for clemency, stating that they would not admit guilt for a crime they had not committed. On November 11, 1887, all four were hanged at the Cook County Jail. The night before the execution, Louis Lingg, the youngest of the condemned, died in his cell by exploding a smuggled dynamite cap in his mouth, cheating the gallows on the morning of his scheduled hanging.
Spies’s last reported words from the scaffold were: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
The Wikipedia article on the Haymarket Affair provides a comprehensive scholarly account of the events, the trial, and the lasting international significance of the affair, available at the Wikipedia article on the Haymarket Affair.
Governor Altgeld’s Pardon and the Verdict of History
In 1893, six years after the executions, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld conducted a thorough review of the complete trial record. His conclusion, delivered in a formal pardon message for the three surviving defendants, Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe, was unequivocal. Altgeld found that the trial had been fundamentally unjust. The jury selection had been improper. The evidence connecting the defendants to the bombing was nonexistent. Judge Gary had conducted the proceedings with open bias against the defense. The men had been convicted for their political beliefs, not for any criminal act.
The pardon destroyed Altgeld’s political career. He was vilified in the press, attacked as an anarchist sympathizer, and lost his subsequent bid for reelection. His act of political courage nonetheless established the historical record: the Haymarket Eight had been victims of one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history.
The Lasting Legacy: May Day, International Workers’ Day, and the Labor Movement
The Haymarket Affair’s consequences rippled across decades and continents. The Knights of Labor, then the largest union organization in the United States with approximately 40,000 members in Chicago alone, was blamed by the press and public opinion for the bombing despite having no proven connection to it. The association with violence caused many local Knights of Labor chapters to leave the organization and join the newer, more conservative American Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers. The Knights of Labor, which had represented a broad and radical vision of labor solidarity, never recovered and eventually dissolved.
In 1889, socialist and labor organizations gathered in Paris to form the Second International, a federation of socialist parties and unions. In commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs and the Chicago general strike of May 1, 1886, the Second International designated May 1 as International Workers’ Day. May Day is today observed as a public holiday in more than 60 countries across the world, and the four men hanged on November 11, 1887, are remembered in monuments, murals, and memorials across Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs Monument was erected at the Waldheim Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, where the executed men are buried. The monument bears the words of August Spies spoken on the scaffold. In 1889, a statue was dedicated at Haymarket Square in honor of the police officers who were killed; that statue was moved to the Chicago Police Department’s training academy in the early 1970s after it was repeatedly damaged.
The Britannica entry on the Haymarket Affair provides a thorough overview of the event’s place in both American labor history and the global workers’ rights movement, available at the Britannica entry on the Haymarket Affair.
The Library of Congress research guide on the Haymarket Affair provides access to primary source newspaper coverage and historical documentation of the events, available at the Library of Congress Haymarket Affair research guide.
The eight-hour workday that the workers of Chicago marched and died for in May 1886 eventually became the standard of American labor law, though it would take decades of further struggle to achieve it through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The men whose names are inscribed on the Waldheim monument, condemned in a trial that their own governor called unjust, became the occasion for a holiday observed by workers around the world every year on the first day of May.
