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May Day - International Workers Day [1]
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Date: 2023-05-01
What started out as a national strike for 8 hour work days on May 1, turned into a deadly riot by May 4th in Chicago. From the Illinois Labor History Society:
On May 1st 1886, 80,000 workers marched up Michigan Avenue everywhere slogans were heard like "Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will!"...
On Sunday, May 2, Albert [Parsons] went to Ohio to organize rallies there, while Lucy [Parson] and others staged another peaceful march of 35,000 workers. But on Monday, May 3, the peaceful scene turned violent when the Chicago police attacked and killed picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Plant at Western and Blue Island Avenues. This attack by police provoked a protest meeting which was planned for Haymarket Square on the evening of Tuesday, May 4…
The Haymarket meeting was almost over and only about two hundred people remained when they were attacked by 176 policemen carrying Winchester repeater rifles… Then someone, unknown to this day, threw the first dynamite bomb ever used in peacetime history of the United States. The police panicked, and in the darkness many shot at their own men. Eventually, seven policemen died, only one directly accountable to the bomb. Four workers were also killed, but few textbooks bother to mention this fact...
The next day martial law was declared, not just in Chicago but throughout the nation. Anti-labor governments around the world used the Chicago incident to crush local union movements. In Chicago, labor leaders were rounded up, houses were entered without search warrants and union newspapers were closed down. Eventually eight men, representing a cross section of the labor movement were selected to be tried…
On August 20, 1886, the jury reported its verdict of guilty with the death penalty by hanging for seven of the Haymarket Eight, and 15 years of hard labor for Neebe. On November 10, the day before the execution, Samuel Gompers came from Washington to appeal to Governor Oglesby for the last time. The national and worldwide pressure did finally force the Governor to change the sentences of Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab to imprisonment for life. Although 5 of the 8 were still to be hanged the next day, on the morning of November 10, Louis Lingg was found in his cell, his head half blown away by a dynamite cap. The entire event was most mysterious, since Lingg was hoping to receive a pardon that very day. Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Albert Parsons and August Spies were hanged on November 11, 1887. In June of 1893, Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the 3 men still alive and condemned the entire judicial system that had allowed this injustice.
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