The Haymarket Affair: The Bomb That Changed American Labor

The Haymarket affair is one of the most consequential events in American labor history. On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a workers’ rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, killing seven police officers. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested and four were hanged — none of them proven to have thrown the bomb. The government’s response to the Haymarket affair destroyed the eight-hour movement for a decade, but turned its executed leaders into the founding martyrs of international labor organizing.

The Haymarket bomb did not appear from nowhere. By the spring of 1886, the movement for an eight-hour workday had reached a critical mass. The standard American workday in factories and industrial plants ran ten to sixteen hours. Workers who organized to shorten it faced blacklisting, Pinkerton infiltration, and police violence. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions — the organization that would become the AFL — had set May 1, 1886, as a national strike date for the eight-hour demand.

The Eight-Hour Movement Reached Its Breaking Point in Chicago

In Chicago alone, roughly 40,000 workers walked off the job on May 1. The city had a substantial immigrant working class and an active anarchist press — most prominently the Arbeiter-Zeitung, edited by August Spies, a German immigrant who had become one of the city’s most prominent labor activists.^1^

On May 3, striking McCormick Reaper workers clashed with scabs and police outside the plant at 22nd Street and Blue Island Avenue. Police fired into the crowd, killing at least two workers. Spies, who had witnessed the shooting, wrote and distributed a circular calling workers to a protest meeting the following evening.

The Night of May 4

The rally at Haymarket Square drew an estimated 3,000 people at its peak, though the crowd had thinned to perhaps 300 by the time police Captain John Bonfield ordered his 180 officers to advance and disperse what he called an “unlawful assembly” at 10:30 p.m. A moment later, a bomb with a round cast-iron casing landed among the officers and detonated.

The bomb killed officer Matthias Degan instantly. Six more officers died in the following days. The police returned fire — into the crowd and, according to some accounts, into each other in the chaos. The number of workers killed has never been definitively established. Estimates range from four to eight, with many more wounded.^2^

Nobody was ever identified as the bomb-thrower. The investigation produced no physical evidence linking any individual to the act. Police Inspector John Bonfield later stated that the department believed the bomb-thrower was a man named Rudolph Schnaubelt, who fled to Europe and was never charged.

A Theory of Collective Guilt Replaced the Absence of Evidence

What the city of Chicago lacked in evidence it compensated for with intent. Eight men were arrested and charged with murder: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe, and Samuel Fielden. None of them were proven to have thrown the bomb. Several had not even been present at Haymarket when it exploded.

The prosecution’s argument, accepted by Judge Joseph Gary, was that by printing and distributing literature advocating violence and resistance, the defendants had conspired to cause the bomb to be thrown. It was a theory of collective guilt for speech — novel at the time and deeply troubling to civil libertarians, including many who had no sympathy for anarchism.^3^

The jury was hand-selected from men who had publicly stated their belief in the defendants’ guilt before the trial began. The jury deliberated for three hours. Seven men were sentenced to death. Oscar Neebe received fifteen years in prison.

Louis Lingg cheated the gallows by smuggling a small blasting cap into his cell and detonating it in his mouth on the night before the executions. On November 11, 1887, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged in the Cook County jail. Governor Richard Oglesby had commuted the sentences of Fielden and Schwab to life imprisonment.

From the scaffold, August Spies spoke his last words: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

What Did Haymarket Actually Cost the Labor Movement?

The immediate aftermath was catastrophic for labor organizing. The press — including many papers that had previously been sympathetic to the eight-hour movement — ran wall-to-wall coverage framing all labor radicalism as foreign-born terrorism. Membership in labor organizations dropped sharply across the country. The Knights of Labor, which had been the dominant national labor organization, never fully recovered from the association.^4^

But the long game was different. In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld — after an exhaustive review of the trial record — pardoned the three surviving defendants, calling the proceedings a miscarriage of justice. The pardon ended Altgeld’s political career. It did not undo the hangings.

The Haymarket executions became a founding reference point for international labor organizing. May Day — May 1, the date of the 1886 general strike — became International Workers’ Day in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, celebrated in countries across the world. In the United States, Congress moved the national labor holiday to September, in part to distance it from those events.

The eight-hour workday eventually became law, through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, more than half a century after the workers at Haymarket Square asked for it. The same pattern — workers demanding something reasonable, government crushing the demand, and decades passing before the demand was quietly granted — would repeat itself at Homestead, Pullman, and Blair Mountain.

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Sources:

1. Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton University Press, 1984.
2. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. Pantheon Books, 2006.
3. Roediger, David, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1986.
4. Adelman, William J. Haymarket Revisited. Illinois Labor History Society, 1986.