The Haymarket Affair

The first Monday in September is a day that is familiar and cherished by nearly all Americans. It is Labor Day, a symbol of over 150 years of struggle and activism by the American working class. The 8-hour workday, the minimum wage, broad benefits packages, workplace safety regulations, workplace injury compensation, equal pay between men and women, a ban on child labor, and paid vacation time are all concessions made by wealthy businessmen that have dramatically improved the lives of all lower and middle-class people working within the United States. But they were not earned without a mighty clash or tiring fight. These rights are red with the blood and tears of industrial, agrarian, and service workers. Comfort, wages, safety, and even lives were given in exchange for these improved conditions and Labor Day is a great way to commemorate those sacrifices. However, Labor Day as we know it is an accepted part of Western culture. A separate incarnation of Labor Day exists, popular in the developing world but obscure in the developed, and sits on May 1. It is celebrated by Third Worlders, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and communists, but few others. May Day/International Worker's Day is the radical cousin of Labor Day, and it was made possible by the Haymarket Affair.

On May 1, 1886, employees at McCormick's Harvesting Machine Company went on strike in Chicago, Illinois, demanding a shorter workday. Almost immediately after, on May 3, 1886, police were sent in to break up the strike. August Spies, a local anarchist activist in Chicago and German immigrant, was absolutely furious when he learned of this fact. He organized a separate demonstration in order to protest the use of police brutality against the McCormick workers. The strike was set to take place in Haymarket Square, an area of Chicago where many farmers went to sell their crops and meats, and was scheduled for May 4, 1886. As Spies planned, the protest began in Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. Chicago mayor Carter Harrison - a relative of both Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison - even declared Spies' demonstration a peaceful one and attended as an observer, maintaining his presence to ensure the situation remained calm and under control. After a few hours, Harrison decided that the protest was so tame that his presence wasn't needed and left as a result.

With Harrison absent, the police plugged the power gap. They were looking for absolutely any reason to crush Spies' protest, just as they had crushed the strike at McCormick's Harvesting Machine Company. Their manufactured excuse came in the form of rhetoric given by Samuel Fielden, one of Spies' fellow anarchists and another organizer of the protest. Fielden gave an angry speech filled with fiery remarks about the police, the state, and corporations. At one point, Fielden stated that it would be better for the workers to die fighting their obvious oppression rather than to live a long life timidly accepting abuse and mistreatment. The police framed this as a call to violence and cited it as their excuse to crush the protest set up by Fielden and Spies. As they approached the crowd, the anarchist protestors became irate. An anonymous member of the collective, who was never identified and almost certainly never will be identified, tossed a single stick of dynamite into the group of police, killing 7 officers.

Because of the 7 deaths, the explosion only further inflamed tensions. The police and protestors began violently clashing in an infamous incident known by historians and labor experts as the Haymarket Affair. By the end of the fighting, 11 people, including both anarchists and law enforcement agents, were killed. News about the Haymarket Affair swiftly blanketed the entire United States, sparking conversations about the moral position of those involved and the future of the labor movement. Interestingly, while the Haymarket Affair, unfortunately, did a lot of damage to America's unions and workers' rights activists, it reinvigorated and energized the international pursuit of working class liberation. Because the Haymarket Affair devolved from a simple strike at McCormick's Harvesting Machine Company calling for a briefer workday, information about the crisis and the violence it entailed inflicted severe damage on the 8-hour workday movement.

Inside the labor movement, the Haymarket Affair had a quelling, moderating effect. The Knights of Labor, a market socialist labor union famous for accepting black and female members and which had orchestrated some of the most important strikes of the Gilded Age, also suffered immense reputational harm because of the Haymarket Affair. This is especially tragic and bizarre because the Knights of Labor actually had nothing to do with the Haymarket Affair. Neither Spies nor Fielden nor any other organizer of the protest at Haymarket Square were members of the Knights of Labor. Still, the impact of the Haymarket Affair, coupled with violence during the Great Southwest Strike (which actually was set up by the Knights of Labor), caused the quick collapse of the Knights of Labor. By the end of 1886, the organization had almost no members and had lost all of its political influence. It officially disbanded much later, however, technically existing until 1949.

Public outrage following the Haymarket Affair culminated in the creation of the American Federation of Labor. Samuel Gompers, a former cigar maker and prominent trade unionist, had left the Knights of Labor around 1880 in protest of its continued insistence that unions push for legislative economic change. Gompers didn't oppose these reforms - he endorsed banning child labor, setting a minimum wage, improving workplace safety, and mandating the 8-hour day as much as the rest of the Knights of Labor - but he thought the pursuit of those policies should be left to political parties and think tanks, not labor unions. Unions, Gompers believed, should simply advocate better working conditions for very specific workers at very specific firms at very specific moments.

In 1881, he protested the Knights of Labor's emphasis on politics by setting up a rival union: The Federation of Organized Trades. The FOT exclusively focused on what Gompers called "bread and butter unionism", i.e. short-term reductions in working hours and increases in earnings rather than long-term changes. It also denied membership to black people, women, and unskilled laborers. The FOT never really got anywhere, and so Gompers capitalized on the public's response to the Haymarket Affair by creating its successor, the American Federation of Labor. The AFL ended up existing until 1955, when it merged with the Congress of Industrial Organization.

As for Spies himself, because he was a German immigrant, his role in the Haymarket Affair sparked a massive wave of xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment. Spies, Fielden, and 6 other anarchists known collectively as the Chicago Eight were arrested on charges of inciting the bombing at Haymarket Square. They were all given kangaroo trials, where they were found guilty of murder and provoking an insurrection. Some of the Chicago Eight wasn't even present at Haymarket Square during the protest and subsequent riot, yet they were still convicted. Members of the jury were likely paid to vote for a guilty verdict. Of the 8 activists, 5 - including Spies - were sentenced to death. On November 11, 1887, 4 of those given a death sentence were hanged, with Spies being one of those murdered at the gallows. The other person unfortunate enough to be presented with execution committed suicide in his cell the night prior, deciding that it would be better to abandon existence on his own terms. The remaining 3 members of the Chicago Eight were pardoned by the governor of Illinois in 1893.

While the Haymarket Affair weighed on American labor activists like a massive boulder of red-hot burning steel, it massively benefitted labor activists in Europe, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. The persecution of Spies, Fielden, and the other members of the Chicago Eight was closely studied by workers in the rest of the world and rendered them completely furious. They viewed the Chicago Eight as martyrs and understandably so. In their eyes, the Chicago Eight was murdered at the hands of a despotic government as distant from its revolutionary origins in 1776 as the windy surface of Neptune was from the burning passions of the Sun. The international working class grew determined to avenge these unjust instances of tyrannical slaughter. Every hour shaved off the grueling workday was an hour shaved off for Spies and the Chicago Eight. Every expansion of their wages was an expansion garnered in the name of August Spies. Every new benefits package and workplace safety regulation was obtained to bring shining fame to the slain corpses of the 5 anarchists killed for the 8-hour day.