Haymarket 1886: They Hanged Four Men for a Bomb Nobody Proved They Threw

On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of American workers walked off the job. They were not asking for a raise. They were asking for a workday that did not kill them. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

Two days later, Chicago police opened fire on striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works and killed at least two of them. A rally was called for the next night at Haymarket Square to protest the murder.

The rally was peaceful. It was almost over. Then somebody, and nobody ever proved who, threw a bomb into the line of police advancing on the last speaker. One officer died instantly. In the gunfire that followed, police shot each other and workers in the crowd. Seven officers and at least four workers died.

The trial

The state did not investigate who threw the bomb. The state decided, from the start, that the bomb was the inevitable result of labor organizing, and that anybody who had publicly organized for the eight-hour day had thrown it. Eight men were arrested. Most of them were not at Haymarket when the bomb went off. One was home with his family. It did not matter.

The judge was not impartial. The jury was hand-picked by a bailiff who later admitted he was looking for men who would convict. The evidence presented was the defendants' speeches and newspapers, not any link to the bomb. The prosecutor, Julius Grinnell, told the jury outright: "Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. Gentlemen of the jury, convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society."

Seven were sentenced to death. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One, Louis Lingg, killed himself in his cell the day before, biting down on a smuggled blasting cap. The two remaining death sentences were commuted. Six years later, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld read the full trial record and pardoned the three surviving men, declaring the convictions a farce. It ended his political career.

What it meant

The eight-hour movement, paradoxically, lost ground in the immediate aftermath. Employers used Haymarket to tar every strike as anarchist violence. The Knights of Labor collapsed within a few years. The American Federation of Labor, more cautious, rose in its place.

But outside the United States, the date would not be forgotten. In 1889, the Second International, meeting in Paris, resolved to call a great international demonstration on May 1, 1890, for the eight-hour day. The demonstration was repeated every year, in every country the Second International could reach, in memory of the Haymarket martyrs. May Day. When Congress moved to adopt a federal labor holiday in 1894, it chose the first Monday in September, a date the federal government would not link to any specific strike or fight, instead of May 1. Grover Cleveland, the same president who a few weeks later would send federal troops to crush the Pullman Strike, signed it into law. Labor Day.

The eight-hour day itself was not federal law in the United States until 1938. Fifty-two years after Haymarket.

What to remember

Do not let anyone tell you the eight-hour workday was a gift from a grateful employer, or a natural consequence of economic progress, or a bureaucratic adjustment. It was taken. Men were hanged for asking. And when you get to leave work at five, you are standing on their graves.