Deadly Terrorism in Chicago—And Deadly Overreaction

A contemporary engraving depicts the moment the bomb exploded.

A hundred and twenty years ago today, on May 4, 1886, a bomb hissed through the air and landed among ranks of Chicago policemen who were dispersing a public meeting. The explosion and the spasm of violence that followed turned that city’s Haymarket Square into a contentious symbol of the nineteenth-century struggle between capital and labor.

The violence had its roots in the wrenching transformations that engulfed the nation after the Civil War, including industrialization, the growth of cities, and a flood of immigrants. A prolonged depression in the 1870s had hit the laboring communities of Chicago particularly hard. Low wages and grueling 60-hour weeks generated unrest among those who saw the ever-expanding factory system as little better than slavery.

One who took up the cause was Albert Parsons, a typesetter turned revolutionary. Parsons became increasingly radicalized as he watched the brutal suppression of an 1877 rail strike and the Chicago city council’s refusal to seat a candidate elected in 1880 under the socialist banner. There was, he felt, “a great fundamental wrong at work in society.” He joined the ranks of anarchists who, despairing of reform, strove to overturn society altogether.

As the anarchist movement grew during the early 1880s, its leaders made cavalier calls for workers to take up arms. Because the government was, as Parsons said, “the agent of the owners of capital,” labor had to defend itself. Anarchists developed a fascination with dynamite as the ideal weapon for such purposes and issued instruction manuals in its use. “One pound of dynamite is better than a bushel of ballots,” an anarchist paper declared. Supporters of the status quo were equally casual in advocating force. A group of Chicago businessmen donated two Gatling guns to the local militia for use on the rabble.

The campaign for an eight-hour workday, which had begun in the 1860s, brought the situation to a head that spring in Chicago. Two years earlier, labor organizations had proclaimed May 1, 1886, as when the shorter day must come to pass. If not, a nationwide general strike was planned. May Day came, and thousands of Chicago workers laid down their tools. Parsons led a parade of 80,000 supporters up Michigan Avenue. Though the police stood at the ready, the day passed without disorder. The next day, a Sunday, was also peaceful.

On Monday, May 3, the strike continued. That afternoon, angry union workers at the city’s McCormick Reaper Works, who had been locked out of their jobs since February, gathered at the plant to harass non-union replacements. The heckling turned into a brawl. Police rushed in with guns blazing, killing at least two workers. The news sent one of the radicals’ leaders, August Spies, into a rage. He printed an incendiary broadside that urged “Working men to Arms!” Several anarchists called for a protest the next evening at the Haymarket, a square that could hold 20,000 people.

The May 4 mass meeting fizzled. Fewer than 3,000 had turned out when Spies arrived at 8:15 p.m. He sent runners to gather additional speakers, including Albert Parsons. He moved the conclave around the corner from the broad square and used a wagon for a platform. Spies, Parsons, and several other radicals gave their usual speeches to a dwindling crowd. Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison watched for a while to assure himself that nothing untoward was brewing. He pronounced the rally “tame” and went home. With rain threatening, many in the crowd did the same.

At half past ten, with the meeting winding down, Police Inspector John Bonfield, an outspoken antagonist of the labor cause, suddenly ordered his 175 men to rush out of a police station and quick-march to the site of the meeting. Only about 500 onlookers remained. A police captain gave them the order to disperse; the final speaker agreed to go. As he was climbing down from the wagon someone—his identity is unknown to this day—threw the bomb.

The explosion threw out a sheet of light and shattered windows for blocks. “Goaded to madness,” as the Chicago Tribune reported, the police became “as dangerous as any mob.” They pulled their pistols and fired indiscriminately for about three minutes. Of the seven police officers killed in the melee, only one died exclusively from the bomb blast. The others received bullet wounds, mostly from police weapons. Witnesses reported little or no gunfire from the crowd. An anonymous police official told the Tribune that “officers emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.” At least four participants in the rally died, and many more were injured. It was, the Chicago Herald reported, a scene of “wild carnage.”

The incident touched off the nation’s first “red scare.” Police shut down newspapers, searched homes without warrants, beat up witnesses. A visiting economist called the time a “period of police terrorism.” Newspapers labeled radicals “incendiary vermin.” Authorities arrested seven known anarchist leaders, including August Spies. Albert Parsons escaped but later turned himself in.

The men were hauled into court that summer. One of them, Louis Lingg, had indeed manufactured bombs but had not attended the Haymarket rally. Others had had no connection to the meeting whatever but had voiced their ideology on other occasions. The prosecution presented no credible evidence that any of the accused had conspired in the bomb throwing but charged them as accomplices because of their words. The jury, carried along by the hysteria of the moment, brought back guilty verdicts. All but one of the defendants were sentenced to hang. Their appeals failed.

Calls for clemency came from around the country and around the world. Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby said he couldn’t act unless the convicted men requested mercy. Only two did, and their sentences were commuted. Lingg committed suicide in his cell. On November 11, 1887, Spies, Parsons, and two others went to the gallows singing anarchist anthems. Six years later a new governor, John P. Altgeld, convinced that the trial had been a travesty, granted a full pardon to the three men still in prison.

The Haymarket tragedy jolted the country. It tainted the movement for the eight-hour day, which would not be mandated by federal law until 1938. Samuel Gompers, head of the newly formed American Federation of Labor, judged that it “struck at the foundation of the organized labor movement,” which afterward tended to focus on wage and hour issues rather than deeper social reforms.

The bombing permanently fixed in the public mind the notion of anarchists as fomenters of violence, though some outspoken radicals softened their rhetoric after Haymarket. The incident and the patently unjust reaction to it also served as an inspiration and rallying point for radical proponents of workers’ rights. In Europe and Latin America in particular, the “Chicago martyrs” were revered for decades.

A kind of political inkblot, Haymarket long served as a focal point of protest. During the Vietnam War era, a new generation of radicals twice bombed a statue erected in the square to honor the slain police officers. Others destroyed a plaque that commemorated the incident as an event in labor history.

Haymarket Square itself was overshadowed by the construction of a freeway during the 1960s, but the issues that surrounded the event were never eclipsed. The tragedy showed that the thoughtless espousal of violence can have deadly consequences, and it amply illustrated the danger to a free society when fears about public order and safety trump fundamental rights to free speech, peaceable assembly, and a fair trial.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).