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Haymarket Riot

Page history last edited by Mr. Hengsterman 12 years, 3 months ago

The Haymarket Riot (1886)

REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! . . . You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; . . . you have worked yourself to death... your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord-in short: you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years: Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the coffers of your thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, kill you! ... To arms we call you, to arms!

May 3, 1886 Speaking to a rally outside the plant on May 3, August Spies and Albert Parsons advised the striking workers to "hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed." Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point had remained largely nonviolent. When the end-of-the-workday bell sounded, however, a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strikebreakers.

Despite calls by Spies for the workers to remain calm, gunfire erupted as police fired on the crowd. In the end, two McCormick workers were killed (although some newspaper accounts said there were six fatalities).Spies would later testify, "I was very indignant. I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement

DBQ - HAYMARKET POSTER: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haymarket/attention.html

On May 4, 1886, several of the better known labor leaders and anarchists addressed a crowd of sympathizers from the back of a wagon which had been pulled into an alley near the Haymarket to protest the killing and other brutalities by the authorities during the May Day strikes. August Spies spoke in English, followed by Albert Parsons, (listen an actor portray Parsons) who also spoke in English for almost an hour denouncing the capitalist system, and quoting statistics, as he had on numerous other occasions. Parsons’ speech was followed by a speech in a similar vein by Samuel Fielden, another well known activist. The crowd was so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., who had stopped by to watch, walked home early. When police ordered the rally to disperse and began marching in formation towards the speakers' wagonA bomb was thrown into the crowd and gunfire ensued, killing several policemen and civilians and wounding approximately 100. Panic seized the city and several anarchists were arrested, although there was never any evidence linking them to the bomb-throwing.

POST SCRIPT - What happened to the alleged anarchists?

With no evidence, the police arrested eight anarchist leaders in Chicago accessories to crime, anyone inciting a murder was guilty of that murder. The evidence against the eight anarchists was their ideas, their literature; none had been at Haymarket that day except Fielden. they were sentenced to death. This created an international excitement

A year after the trial, four of the convicted anarchists-Albert Parsons, a printer, August Spies, an upholsterer, Adolph Eischer, and George Engel-were hanged. Louis Lingg, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter, blew himself up in his cell by exploding a dynamite tube in his mouth. Three remained in prison.