May 1st, International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic
struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in
most countries. The United States of America and Canada are among the
exceptions. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in
the USA, linked to the battle for the eight-hour day, and the Chicago
anarchists.
The struggle for the eight-hour day began in the 1860s. In 1884, the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and
Canada, organized in 1881 (and changing its name in 1886 to American
Federation of Labor ) passed a resolution which asserted that “eight
hours shall constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886,
and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout this district
that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution”.
The
following year the Federation repeated the declaration that an
eight-hour system was to go into effect on May 1, 1886. With workers
being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, support for
the eight-hour movement grew rapidly. In the months prior to May 1,
1886, thousands of workers, organized and unorganized, members of the
organization Knights of Labor and of the federation, were drawn into the
struggle. Chicago was the main center of the agitation for a shorter
day. The anarchists were in the forefront of the Central Labor Union of
Chicago , which consisted of 22 unions in 1886, among them the seven
largest in the city.
During the Railroad strikes of 1877, the workers had been violently
attacked by the police and the United States Army. A similar tactic of
state terrorism was prepared by the bureaucracy to fight the eight-hour
movement. The police and National Guard were increased in size and
received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders.
Chicago’s Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois
National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st,
the movement had already won gains for many Chicago workers. But on May
3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick
Harvester Machine Company, killing at least one striker, seriously
wounding five or six others, and injuring an undetermined number.
Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to
protest the brutality.
The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last
speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking
up, with only about two hundred people remaining. It was then a police
column of 180 men marched into the square and ordered the meeting to
disperse. At the end of the meeting a bomb was thrown at the police,
killing one instantly, six others died later. About seventy police
officers were wounded. Police responded by firing into the crowd. How
many civilians were wounded or killed from police bullits never was
ascertained exactly. Although it was never determined who threw the
bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack anarchists and the
labor movement in general. Police ransacked the homes and offices of
suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. A reign
of police terror swept over Chicago. Staging “raids” in the
working-class districts, the police rounded up all known anarchists and
other socialists. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterward!”
publicly counseled the state’s attorney.
Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago’s most
active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the
Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a
lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower, and they
were sentenced to die. In October 9, 1886, the weekly journal Knights of
Labor published in Chicago, carried on page 1 the following
announcement: “Next week we begin the publication of the lives of the
anarchists advertised in another column.” The advertisement, carried on
page 14, read: “The story of the anarchists, told by themselves;
Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Schwab, Fischer, Lingg, Engle, Neebe. The only
true history of the men who claim that they are condemned to suffer
death for exercising the right of Free Speech: Their association with
Labor, Socialistic and Anarchistic Societies, their views as to the aims
and objects of these organizations, and how they expect to accomplish
them; also their connection with the Chicago Haymarket Affair. Each man
is the author of his own story, which will appear only in the “Knights
of Labor” during the next three months, – the great labor paper of the
United States, a 16-page weekly paper, containing all the latest foreign
and domestic labor news of the day, stories, household hints, etc. A
co-operative paper owned and controlled by members of the Knights of
Labor, and furnished for the small sum of $1.00 per annum . Adress all
communications to Knights of Labor Publishing Company, 163 Washington
St., Chicago, Ill.” Later this journal and the paper Alarm published the
autobiographies of the Haymarket men.
Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer and George Engel were
hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison.
The authorities turned over the bodies to friends for burial, and one of
the largest funeral processions in Chicago history was held. It was
estimated that between 150,000 to 500,000 persons lined the route taken
by the funeral cortege of the Haymarket martyrs. A monument to the
executed men was unveiled June 25, 1893 at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago.
The remaining three, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab,
were finally pardoned in 1893.
On June 26, 1893, the governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld,
issued the pardon message in which he made it clear that he was not
granting the pardon because he believed that the men had suffered
enough, but because they were innocent of the crime for which they had
been tried, and that they and the hanged men had been the victims of
hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge. He noted that the defendants
were not proven guilty because the state “has never discovered who it
was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence
does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the
man who threw it.”
It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream
union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of
May Day. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May
Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be “Law Day”, and
gave the workers instead Labor Day, the first Monday of September – a
holiday devoid of any historical significance.
Nevertheless, rather than suppressing the labor and anarchist
movements, the events of 1886 and the execution of the Chicago
anarchists, spokesmen of the movement for the eight-hour day, mobilized
many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the
time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth.
Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of
Haymarket.
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