ATDTDA (1): Haymarket - part 1

[Tim Strzechowski]

"'Since the Haymarket bomb,' Nate was explaining, 'we've had more work than we can handle, and it's about to get even more hectic, if the Governor decides to pardon that gang of anarchistic murderers" (p. 25).


from Chicago Days: 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City.  Ed. by Stevenson Swanson. Cantigny: Chicago, 1997.  pp. 48 - 9.

The Haymarket Incident -- May 4, 1886
Who threw the bomb that exploded into tragedy?  Not the eight men who were convicted.

Considering the incendiary events of the previous day, the open-air protest meeting on this date at the Haymarket, where Randolph Street widened out for two blocks on Chicago's Near West Side, started out as a disappointingly mild affair.  But the evening was destined to become a violent landmark in American labor history.

Throughout the nation, workers were crusading for an eight-hour day.  In Chicago, where tensions between labor and management were already high, police had killed two laborers and injured many more on May 3 in a clash at the McCormick Reaper Works.  The incident prompted August Spies, who edited an anarchist newspaper, to write that if the strikers had had "good weapons and a single dynamite bomb, not one of the murderers would have escaped his well-deserved fate."

Although fire-breathing in print, Spies watched his words when he spoke at the rally, which began at 7:30 p.m.  Because the turnout was much smaller than organizers had hoped for, the speaker's platform was moved to a wagon on Des Plaines Street, a half-block from the Haymarket.  As the sky darkened, the crowd dwindled to no more than three hundred people.  Mayor Carter Harrison, who had listened to some of the speeches, told Police Inspector John Bonfield that the gathering was "tame."

But once the mayor left, Bonfield quick-stepped 178 policemen to the meeting site and ordered the crowd to disperse.  Samuel Fielden, who was speaking at the time, agreed to go.  Suddenly, as he was stepping down from the wagon, a bomb was tossed over the heads of the crowd and exploded in the midst of the officers.  One policeman was killed instantly.  The others drew their revolvers and opened fire.

In all, eight policemen died and fifty-nine were wounded, but the bomb was only partly to blame.  "A very high number of the police were wounded by each other's revolvers," a high-ranking police official told the Tribune.  At least four civilians, and perhaps as many as ten, were killed, and thirty or more were wounded.

The violence near the Haymarket sparked the nation's first Red Scare.  "No effort should be spared until every man engaged in the conspiracy has been clutched," the Tribune editorialized.  But no bomb thrower was ever found, no conspiracy ever proved.  Yet it was unthinkable not to bring someone to trial.  Eight anarchists and sympathizers, including Spies, were convicted in proceedings later acknowledged to have been a mockery of the American legal system.  Spies and three others were hanged; another committed suicide.  Later, in a decision that ruined his political career, Illinois Governor Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining three defendants.

-- Patrick T. Reardon
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