Hurrah for Anarchy: A History of Haymarket, May Day, and the Chicago Anarchists
by Margaret Killjoy
Zine #29 — May 2024
A History of Haymarket, May Day, and the Chicago Anarchists
Introduction
All around the world, people celebrate May 1st as the labor holiday. In most countries, it’s an official holiday. Not in the United States–we have Labor Day for that. Which is a bit strange, because the day got its start in Chicago.
In the United States, it’s also become a day to celebrate immigrant labor–and fight for immigrant rights–specifically. That makes sense–it’s a day that celebrates the organizing and actions of immigrant workers.
We celebrate May Day because at the birth of the labor movement, in the 1880s, a large group of disgruntled, overworked immigrant workers got together with a woman who had been born into slavery and her ex-confederate-soldier of a husband. Collectively they tried their hardest to overthrow the capitalist order and institute a stateless, socialist society–an anarchist society. Police and rightwing thugs opened fire on them, time and time again, and the workers fought back. They fought back with marches, they fought back with speeches. They also fought back with handguns and dynamite.
On May 3rd, 1886, as part of a nationwide general strike to fight for an eight-hour workday, police attacked striking workers at a factory in Chicago. On May 4th, 1886, the police attacked an anarchist rally at Haymarket Square and someone threw a bomb into the police. A gunfight broke out, though most of the police that died were killed by friendly fire. Anarchists across the city were rounded up and eight people were tried. The court was quite clear: they weren’t on trial for throwing the bomb, or even organizing the rally. Anarchism itself was on trial. In the end, five of the men were sentenced to hang for murder despite no one claiming they’d done the crime themselves. One of the defendants took his own life in prison, and four faced the noose.
Their lives, words, and deeds have echoed across history, leaving us with a mournful holiday that connects us to our lineage of struggle against the state, against capitalism, against borders, and for anarchist socialism. This is their story.
Lucy Parsons
There’s a story told by the folk singer Utah Phillips, a story about a Black anarchist and firebrand named Lucy Parsons:
“One time, she was speaking at a big May Day rally back in the Haymarket in the middle 1930s during the depression. She was incredibly old. She was led carefully up to the rostrum, a multitude of people there. She had her hair tied back in a tight white bun, her face a mass of deeply incised lines, deep-set beady black eyes. She was the image of everybody’s great-grandmother. She hunched over that podium, hawk-like, and fixed that multitude with those beady black eyes, and said: “What I want is for every greasy grimy tramp to arm himself with a knife or a gun and, stationing himself at the doorways of the rich, shoot or stab them as they come out.”
Utah then goes on to say about the whole thing: “Now, I’m a pacifist, but I admire her spunk.”
This wasn’t the first time Lucy Parsons had said such a thing. She’d been saying roughly the same thing for at least fifty years at that point, since at least the 1880s. A remarkably consistent woman, that Lucy Parsons. There’s a park named after her in Chicago. She’s more famous than her dead husband, Albert Parsons, but this story, the story of the Haymarket anarchists, is a story about how her husband died. A story about his martyrdom.
Most of this story isn’t about stabbing and shooting of the rich. It’s not even at its core a story about violence. It’s a story about a diverse group of people who tried everything in their power to fight for the rights of workers. The bombs and violence just grab the most attention. History teachers know it, the newspapers at the time–both socialist and capitalist–knew it. As a writer, I suppose I know it too.
Lucy Parsons was born Lucy Ella Gonzales Waller. Or maybe it was Lucy Eldine Gathings. Or maybe Lucia Carter. It depends on who you ask. She was born enslaved, maybe in Texas, or maybe Virginia, sometime around 1851 to 1853, with Black, Mexican, and Creek heritage. She was cagey her whole life about her background and her ethnicity, saying at one point “I am not a candidate for office, and the public have no right to my past.” In her early life, before she got married, she largely went by Lucy Gonzales.
In 1872, in her early 20s, she married a traveling journalist named Albert Parsons. We’ve got a lot more information about Albert’s youth, because he was a lot more forthcoming, and because Lucy wrote his biography after he died.
Albert was one of ten kids, born in Alabama to a shoe factory owner. The Parsons family was as American as it gets–they could trace their lineage back to the Mayflower. When Albert was two, his mom died. When he was four or five, his dad died. A brother twenty years older than Albert whisked him off to raise him in Waco, Texas, a town that is of course only famous because of Albert Parsons.
When he was 12, he took an apprenticeship at a local paper. His employer was a leader of the pro-slavery movement who went by “old whitey.” When Albert was 13, the civil war broke out. He ran away, lied about his age, and joined the Confederate army. He fought in the infantry, the artillery, and the calvary. Somehow, he survived the war. A grizzled veteran at 17, he moved back to Texas and started his life’s work: undoing the evil that he’d just fought for. By the time he was 19 he ran his own Republican paper called The Spectator which advocated for the rights of formerly enslaved people and for the South to accept the terms of surrender.
He got together with some Black speakers and toured around Texas, teaching tolerance and acceptance. This did not make him a popular man among the white population. Everyone he knew cut him out of their lives, and he was assaulted on several occasions by bigots, one of whom shot him in the leg.
For years, he tried to solve society’s problems by working within the system. He got himself elected secretary of the state senate, then became a tax collector, and at one point served as an officer in the state militia to protect Black citizens against white harassment.
When he married Lucy Parsons, the wedding wasn’t legal–anti-miscegenation laws at the time were clear that white and Black people could not get married. The pair moved to Chicago in 1873, where their marriage still wouldn’t be legally recognizable for another year. (Illinois repealed its anti-miscegenation laws in 1874. Texas didn’t repeal theirs until 1967 when the federal supreme court declared such laws unconstitutional. Alabama, where Albert was born, didn’t repeal theirs until the year 2000.)
In Chicago, the couple found their new cause, one which they devoted the rest of their lives to: labor rights. And they were militant about it, because they’d just seen with their own eyes the level of violence necessary to change American society.
Lucy Parsons’s quote about stabbing and shooting rich people is worth repeating in full:
Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live as [Union General] Sheridan devastated the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah.
Lucy Parsons was born enslaved, and she saw with her own eyes that the only way to end slavery had been to run the rivers red with the blood of the people who thought that owning people was a reasonable thing to do. She believed that the rich would never give up their hoarded wealth, their power over others, without at least the threat of violence.
Chicago
In the 1850s and 60s, Chicago had been a boomtown, mostly of German and Irish immigrant labor. The city grew from 4,000 people to 90,000 people over only twenty years. All the trains coming from the west came through Chicago, so it became a hub of processing the raw materials extracted from the colonial project out west before they were sent to the east. A boom town meant high wages and long hours, and a shanty town spread out from the city center.
The opening salvo of the Chicago labor struggle happened in 1855, the Lager Beer Riot.
There was this political party at the time, the Know-Nothings. They were nativists, which is to say they liked white Americans who had been born in the USA and not really anyone else… specifically, they were anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. They’d gotten their name from when they’d been a secret society: if they were asked about their allegiance to the society they were supposed to say “I know nothing.”
This nativist group got a mayor named Levi Boone elected in 1855, who immediately banned the sale of beer and liquor on Sundays and raised the price of liquor licenses. German and Irish Catholic immigrant laborers at the time worked six days a week, having only Sundays off, which they generally spent socializing in beer halls. The German immigrants defied the law and 200 people were arrested for civil disobedience of buying, selling, and consuming alcohol.
On the day of the trial, thousands of Germans marched on downtown Chicago with fife and drum. The cops, lying in wait with rifle and cannon, swung open the bridges, with the marchers still on them. The cops opened fire. The immigrants fired back. One protester was killed after wounding a cop.
In the end, the city lowered its liquor license fee and most of the arrestees had their charges dropped. Beer halls continued to be the primary social centers for ethnic immigrant populations.
Then in 1871, Chicago burned down. More than 17,000 buildings went up in flames. In 1873, the US had its biggest recession to date, which they called the Great Depression. The working classes started expressing some frustrations. The middle and upper classes organized a militia to bolster the police.
That’s the Chicago that Lucy and Albert moved to, in 1873.
The Railroad Strike
Albert found work as a typesetter, and it wasn’t long before Lucy and Albert were calling themselves socialists. They start off, like a lot of people do, fairly moderate.
In 1877, a massive railway strike broke out across the country after workers in West Virginia and Maryland received their third pay cut of the year. People in Chicago march behind banners that say “life by work, or death by fight.” A speaker put it: “Better a thousand of us shot dead in the streets than ten thousand dead by starvation.”
Albert gave speeches urging restraint: no sabotage, and could please everyone just vote in the upcoming elections? Even this moderate socialist position got him fired from the Chicago Times, and Lucy opened up a dress shop to support the family and their two young kids.
After three days of strikes in Chicago, the police and the military, as well as hundreds of deputized civilians, attacked and shot into the crowd. In the end, thirty workers were killed and around ten cops were injured. Like elsewhere in the country, the workers lost and went back to work at their reduced rates.
The media attacked the strikers as well, and some called for the extermination of the strikers–years before Lucy Parsons adopted using such language in return.
After the massacre, socialism in Chicago was left in shambles. What was left of the moderate Left tried to become more and more moderate to draw in new members, but this had the opposite effect, and more and more people became radical.
IWPA
In 1883, most of the Chicago socialists joined a new anarchist organization called the IWPA, the International Working People’s Association. A mouthful of a name, but an early use of gender neutrality on the Left–its organization predecessor had been the International Workingmen’s Association.
The IWPA was somewhere between a federation and a loose network. It wasn’t a political party and there was no official membership. Different collectives, or “clusters” as they were called, joined just by endorsing a manifesto some of them had written in Pittsburgh called, originally enough, “the Pittsburgh manifesto.” That manifesto boils down to six points:
First — Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, ie by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action.
Second—establishment of a free society based on cooperative organization of production.
Third—Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.
Fourth—organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.
Fifth—equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
Sixth—Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.
The IWPA soon eclipsed the Socialist Labor Party as the primary organization on the Left in the United States.
The American branch was mostly European immigrants (most of their newspapers were in German, with a small handful in Czech, English, and Norwegian), but they took their inclusive policies seriously. At one point a socialist organization wanted to merge with them, but like most US socialist and labor organizations at that time, that party denied Chinese people entry. The IWPA refused to let them join. One IWPA paper said “The IWPA would never feel that its ranks were complete if it excluded working people of any nationality whatsoever,” and then went on to say that the socialist organization was serving as tools for the capitalists by letting racism divide the working class.
All 16 clusters across the US had total autonomy and they often disagreed with one another. The Chicago cluster, by and large, was excited about building a mass movement through union organizing. Some of the East Coast clusters were more into individual action.
The Chicago cluster was a subculture, one that practiced what it preached. To quote historian Paul Avrich’s book The Haymarket Tragedy:
Beyond their publishing ventures, the anarchists engaged in a broad range of cultural and social activities, which enhanced their feeling of solidarity and greatly enriched their lives. In a relatively short period, they created a network of orchestras, choirs, theatrical groups, debating clubs, literary societies, and gymnastic and shooting clubs, involving thousands of participants. They organized lectures, concerts, picnics, dances, plays, and recitations, in which children as well as adults took part. Saloons and beer-gardens became bustling centers of radical life. The International, moreover, engaged in mutual aid services, providing assistance to members and their families in times of need.
By organizing together, thousands of folks managed to have rich and fulfilling lives despite desperate poverty. Masquerade balls, shooting contests, picnics with games and prizes, concerts. Plays written by the participants. They wrote new words to popular songs.
One holiday they always celebrated was the anniversary of the Paris Commune, when in 1871 the people of Paris took over their city to experiment with socialism and self-governance before being crushed by the military.
One year, the anarchists had to secure two different auditoriums to almost fit the whole crowd for their Paris commune celebration. Banners flew saying things like “every government is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor” and “liberty without equality is a lie.”
Their protests were even more popular than their other events, regularly drawing thousands of workers to march through the streets, each with multiple brass bands. Banners read “millions labor for the benefit of the few–we want to labor for ourselves.” They had floats–carriages drawn by mules with allegorical displays like uncle sam driving around a policeman. Speakers emphasized the need for allowing equal participation by women in the labor movement. They would march en masse down the avenues where the rich people lived, by some accounts holding a banner that proclaimed: “Behold your future executioners.”
They had newspapers, at least seven different ones in the US alone, in German, Czech, English, and Norwegian. Some were daily, some weekly, some monthly. They ran everything from muckraking journalism about the police to labor conditions to philosophy and translations of literature to fiction and poetry. Written by and for people working six-day weeks and 12-14 hour days. Lucy Parsons wrote extensively about the need for the workers to join in the class war that was already being waged against them.
The Chicago anarchists hated the government and capitalism. Government and capitalism hated them right back. The media spent its time villainizing them. The socialists celebrated the Paris Commune, while the media said “Don’t let it happen here.”
They also organized armed formations ready for community defense of revolution–after watching their comrades shot dead in the streets by police and right wing militias, it made sense. At least two labor unions, the metalworkers and the carpenters, had armed sections that met regularly for drill and instruction. The American group of the IWPA had a similar auxiliary. The most memorable group, though, was called Lehr-und-wehr Verein, the “education and defense association.” They marched in the anarchist parades in blue blouses and black pants, open carrying revolvers or rifles depending on the state of gun control laws at the time–upon seeing them march, the state of Illinois banned non-official militias from open-carrying rifles. Lehr-und-wehr Verein fought this all the way to the US Supreme Court and lost.
There were four companies of the group in Chicago, organized by geographic region, each with somewhere between 400 and 3000 members depending on who you ask. Each company drilled weekly, then monthly they all came together to drill together. They held mock battles at the anarchist picnics and went out to the woods to practice shooting. During one six month period in 1885, an anarchist quartermaster raised $1255 for new weapons for the group, almost $37,000 today.
These were, essentially, community defense organizations. They perceived the revolution as inevitable and wanted to be ready. Of course, they thought that capitalism was about to collapse under its own weight. They were in a major depression about ten years after a previous major depression.
Capitalism, as we’ve since learned, turns out to be quite resilient against collapse.
The Eight-Hour Day
While the anarchists were after workers’ control of the means of production, the broader labor movement in the US was fighting for, as a start, workers to work only eight or nine hours a day. Trade after trade in city after city, starting in 1803 with the shipwrights of New York, have fought for the wild idea of working less than 14-hour days. Some of these strikes were won, some strikes were lost. It went like this for the next century, basically. Every few years some trade or another in some city or country or another would win the 10-hour day or the 8-hour day.
Sometimes though, they won in legislation and saw nothing change in practice. Chicago supposedly won the eight hour day in the 1860s, but that law was so full of loopholes that it didn’t matter and it was never enforced.
So in 1884, members of the labor movement from across the country met in Chicago and declared that as of May 1, 1886, the workers themselves would enforce the eight hour day, through strikes and walkouts as necessary. They gave themselves two years to plan a nationwide general strike, then they all set to work preparing.
The Chicago anarchists started off opposed to the struggle for the eight hour day. They were convinced that baby steps were meaningless, that workers had to seize control of their workplaces and their city. But as the movement swelled, they realized which way the wind was blowing and came around. Maybe this was a cynical move–the media certainly accused them of only joining because they wanted to infiltrate the movement. Or maybe they took some of their own lessons to heart–in general, anarchists are opposed to telling other people what to do, and that precludes having a “revolutionary vanguard” that tells the people what they should want.
What people wanted was to fight for the eight hour work day. By 1886, the Chicago anarchists were all in. They were really, really good organizers and propagandists, and soon Chicago was the center of the struggle.
As the italian anarchist Malatesta wrote a few decades later in an essay called “Reformism:”
“We will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one tears occupied territory from the enemy’s grasp in order to go on advancing.”
1886
As the working class got ready to strike, the anarchists weren’t alone in thinking there was about to be a revolution. General Sherman of the US Army wrote: “There will soon come an armed contest between Capital and Labor. They will oppose each other not with words and arguments and ballots, but with shot and shell, gunpowder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howlings of the lower strata, and they mean to stop them.”
Press and pulpit were working hard to smear the anarchists and spread fear. The anarchists were all painted as foreigners and madmen, trying to destroy America's prosperity and freedom. This campaign worked, and public opinion started to turn against anarchists as the incarnation of evil. The anarchists, for their part, started saying the same about the capitalists and cops, calling them leeches and bloodhounds respectively–bloodhounds being the “pigs” of the time. Both sides were working hard to dehumanize the other.
It built to a head in spring 1886, and the stage was set for tragedy.
On May 1st, a lot of owners in a lot of industries across the country capitulated without a strike and granted the 8- or 9-hour day to their employees. A lot more refused and faced the strike.
Something like 340,000 people around the country went on strike on Saturday, May 1, 1886. In Chicago, 40,000 workers walked off the job, and they joined another 40,000 supporters in a march. This was the first May Day labor march in history, with Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons, and their two kids marching at the front.
The first May Day march happened under the watchful gaze of police, private security, and deputized civilian snipers perched on rooftops all along the route. Out of sight, the rightwing militia waited with gatling guns.
That day, nothing particularly bad happened.
Then Sunday, May 2nd, nothing particularly bad happened.
Monday, however, was different.
May 3
On Monday, May 3, more workers walked off the job, including seamstresses and the folks with the evocative job title “lumber-shovers.”
So too did the workers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The McCormick Reaper was the first automated harvesting machine, and it had revolutionized farming. Its factory in Chicago had a history of union struggle, and McCormick, determined to break the union so he could automate away more jobs, had fired his entire workforce that February to bring in non-union workers. A lot of anarchists from the metalworker’s union had worked there, and every time there was a picket, police and pinkertons arrived armed to the teeth.
On May 3rd, there was a lumber-shovers rally happening a few blocks away from the McCormick plant. When they heard the McCormick bell tolled the end of the day, several hundred of them went over to join the picket to yell and throw rocks at the scabs. The picketers drove the scabs back into the factory. Then as the cops arrived, the picketers threw rocks at the cops. Cops drew revolvers and fired into the crowd, killing at least two people. No cops were so much as injured that day.
To get a sense of how the media was treating the labor movement at that point, here’s how that bastion of neutrality, The New York Times, represented it:
The eight-hour movement spilled its first blood today, and Joseph Votjek, a lumber shover 18 years old, was fatally wounded, and a dozen more strikers with bullet holes in their bodies, represented the result of the first encounter. There was a collision at McCormick’s Reaper Works, between a mob of 7,000 or 8,000 Anarchist workmen and tramps, maddened with free beer and free speech, and a squad of policemen. More than 500 shots were fired and hundreds of windows in the works were stoned. There are broken heads and bruised bodies all through the lumber district tonight but the downtrodden masses have risen and had their fun.
The article goes on at great length, lauding the heroism of the police, and including pretty much impossible details like how the entire crowd roared “kill the police” in one voice. How the crowd was both only throwing stones but also shooting guns into the air, but somehow didn’t shoot at the police they were supposedly trying to murder.
The anarchists ran off and called for a demonstration the next day, to be held at Haymarket Square. Most of the flyers just told people to arrive, but a few told people to arrive armed.
May 4
The next day, cops attacked strikers throughout the city and some strikers destroyed a drug store that the police were using to telephone their headquarters.
But the rally at Haymarket that night was not a fierce thing. It started late and the turnout was only around 2,000 people instead of the 20,000 expected. People had been frightened off, afraid of pitched battle or a massacre. One hundred and eighty cops were waiting in the wings. The mayor himself showed up to check on that everything was peaceful–he was a big free speech and free assembly guy and also a don’t-invite-federal-troops-to-shoot-striking-workers guy, so basically the best anyone could hope for in a mayor. He made himself conspicuous, despite his friends telling him to be careful.
At the rally, first a man named August Spies spoke, then Albert Parsons. Albert Parsons spoke for almost an hour.
The mayor realized the workers weren’t going to start anything and went to the police hall to tell Captain Bonfield to stand down. Bonfield did not obey, and the fate of the labor movement was changed forever.
A third speaker, Samuel Fielden, went on at 10pm when a storm rolled in both metaphorically and meteorologically. Most of the crowd dispersed because rain was coming. Albert Parsons said basically “why don’t we move this party to the beer hall,” while Sam was still speaking. Fielden did his best and spoke to the less than two hundred people who remained. At one point, he made some reference to how the only thing to do with the law was to throttle it, to kick it, to stab it. Two detectives decided his speech was too violent and ran off to tell Captain Bonfield that the speaker was being naughty.
The cops came running, immediately.
Fielden was still speaking. He ended his speech with:
People have been shot. Men, women, and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. It has no mercy—so ought you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives, your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with work to get a little relief, or die on the battlefield resisting the enemy? What is the difference? Any animal, however loathsome, will resist when stepped upon. Are men less than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me; I know that you have, too; you have been robbed and you will be starved into a worse condition.
The captain of the police ordered the crowd to disperse.
A light flashed through the air, falling into the crowd of police, and a bomb exploded. The bomb shattered windows for blocks around, and one cop was killed on the spot. The explosion was so loud that the mayor heard it from his bed. The cops drew revolvers and started firing wildly. Six more cops were killed. All of them, most likely, were killed by their own friendly fire–some of the anarchists were armed, and some of them might have shot back. But the forensic evidence strongly suggests that most of, or all, the cops were killed by other cops. One light post, for example, was full up of bullet holes all coming from the direction of the cops, so the very next day it was removed and replaced to destroy it as evidence.
This gets called the Haymarket Riot, but it wasn’t a riot. It was a short and bloody massacre, or maybe at best it was a short and bloody one-sided battle. No records of civilian casualties were ever successfully compiled, but it was probably in the range of eight dead and forty wounded, meaning roughly a quarter of the crowd was shot. A lot of people, for good reason, didn’t want anyone to know they or their loved ones were there, and many refused to go to the hospital.
Samuel Fielden, that speaker who was already having a rough night, got shot in the knee. One detective snuck up on and tried to assassinate the earlier speaker August Spies, but August was saved by his brother Henry who got shot in the groin for the trouble.
If the cops had waited a few more minutes, the whole meeting would have ended peacefully. Some folks, back then and now, believe the cops were always going to attack the crowd regardless of the thrown bomb. Captain Bonfield had been itching to stamp out the anarchists once and for all and earlier that day had had a “council of war.” He’d waited until the mayor was gone and the crowd was at its weakest before attacking on the barest provocation. Maybe it would have been a massacre either way. Maybe not. One witness says that Bonfield grabbed a second revolver off a fallen officer and fired into the crowd with a gun in each hand.
His nickname was “Black Jack” for his love of hitting people in the head with a blackjack. His slogan had been “a club today saves a bullet tomorrow.” Even some of the bosses in town didn’t like him: at one point, the owners of a company called People’s Gas wrote the mayor to ask that Black Jack no longer be allowed to beat up all of his workers.
On the other side, while none of the anarchists who stood trial had thrown the bomb, it’s not like they were shy in the advocacy of dynamite. In the years building up to Haymarket, one anarchist professor from New York had written in to one of the Chicago anarchist papers saying he carried a bomb around in his pocket all the time to dissuade cops from approaching. He wrote: “You can learn to make tri-nitro-glycerine, and if you carry two or three pounds of it with you people will respect you much more than if you carried a pistol.”
In another letter to an anarchist newspaper, someone wrote:
Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. [...] A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.
The Haymarket bomb wasn’t the first time dynamite had been used in a labor struggle. Three times prior it had been used to destroy property, including in the Washington territory where someone dynamited the empty house of a man who had been foreclosing people out of mortgaged homes and evicting renting tenants.
The Roundup
In the wake of the bombing and the massacre, America got its very first Red Scare. Conspiracies went wild: the anarchists were going to level entire cities with their bombs. Ironically, this red scare frenzy was the sort of “mob justice” that people accuse anarchists of, a wild howling for blood in newspapers across the country. To quote again from Paul Avrich:
The New York Times offered the following prescription: "In the early stages of an acute outbreak of anarchy a Gatling gun, or if the case be severe, two, is the sovereign remedy. Later on hemp, in judicious doses, has an admirable effect in preventing the spread of the disease." The Philadelphia Inquirer recommended a "mailed hand" to teach the anarchists that America was not a shelter for "cutthroats and thieves," while the Louisville Courier-Journal insisted that the "blatant cattle" be "strung up," the sooner the better. "Judge Lynch," echoed the American Israelite of Cincinnati, "is a tremendous expounder of the law." "It is no time for half measures," agreed the Springfield Republican, urging the authorities to make an example of the ringleaders. "There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists," the St. Louis Globe-Democrat chimed in.
The police raided more than fifty gathering places and people’s homes in Chicago, almost universally without bothering with warrants or the rule of law. In one house, the cops confiscated the kid’s pillowcases because they were red. The prosecutor who was later to try the case said at the time: “Make the raids first and look up the law afterward!”
Hundreds of people were arrested and tortured. Many were offered bribes for information, but almost everyone refused to cooperate. For two months, all constitutional rights for everyone in Chicago were illegally set aside: mail was opened, newspapers were shut down, union gatherings were dispersed, and public gatherings were banned.
Nearly all the editors of the anarchist papers were arrested. Albert Parsons, however, had taken to the wind already. He was in Wisconsin, hidden by a socialist who ran a small pump factory.
Lucy Parsons managed to get arrested four separate times during the ensuing weeks, with the police saying racist and sexist things to her every time. At one point, the cops broke into her home, tied up her six year old kid on the floor, and spun him around on the floor screaming what amounted to “where’s your dad we’re going to hang him.”
In the end, a grand jury indicted ten anarchists to stand trial for murder. Seven of them were the editors and printers at three of the local anarchist newspapers, The Alarm, Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Der Anarchist. One of the others was a young firebrand. Another went state’s evidence.
The tenth defendant, Rudolph Schnaube, was presented at the time as the person who’d likely thrown the bomb–though historian Paul Avrich makes a strong case that it wasn’t him. Rudolph was arrested in the first roundups, but after 10 hours in what was called “sweat box,” he refused to talk and he was released. He politely told his boss he wouldn’t be in to work for a bit and then took to the wind, never to be seen again by the authorities.
More than once, newspapers excitedly announced Rudolph’s death in this or that state, but each time they were wrong. After leaving Chicago, he made his way across the border into Canada, and an assortment of some indigenous folks and then international anarchists got him to Europe and eventually to South America, where he lived out the rest of his days in peace. He probably hadn’t thrown the bomb. He just didn’t want to stand trial, and he lived a long and happy life for having made that decision.
The Trial
The trial was a sham. Even though the charge was murder, none of the eight defendants were accused of actually throwing the bomb. The judge who oversaw it was entirely committed to conviction rather than obeying the law. Witnesses for the prosecution were generally paid. The jury was selected in order to convict.
We know all of this because the governor of Illinois, several years later, wrote a pardon for the surviving defendants and a posthumous pardon for the dead defendants that spells it all out in great detail. The trial was one of the most rigged in American history, which is saying something.
Finding a lawyer for the defense was a nightmare, because whoever stepped up would be doing so at the expense of their career. It was a moderate Leftist who finally took on the case, because he believed in the rule of law and believed in his morals more than his own self-interest. His name was Captain William Black, a southerner who’d betrayed his family as a teenager by volunteering for the Union Army. He agreed to tank his entire career and work for a year and a half for barely any money because it was the right thing to do.
Albert Parsons came out of hiding and turned himself in, in solidarity with his co-defendants. He also thought he could beat the charges, since they were so obviously a fabrication. There might have been some core of him, that for all his bluster, still believed in the American legal system.
After a few months of trial, the defense proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of the defendants had made or thrown the bomb in question. The jury took only three hours to return a guilty verdict. Seven of the defendants were sentenced to hang. One man. Oscar Neebe, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
The whole affair, from the roundup to the trial, suggests that very few people, at the core of it, believe in the law except as a tool with which to achieve their own goals. The prosecutor, in his final address to the jury, said:
They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury, convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.
Before sentencing, the judge allowed each defendant to make a speech. The speeches lasted for days. They were soon transcribed and translated and distributed across the world and remain classics of anarchist literature.
The Defendants
August Spies spoke first. He was editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, German for “Worker’s Newspaper.”
August Spies was the eldest of five children, born in central Germany in 1855. He had a happy childhood, raised to be a forester for the government like his father before him. When his father died in 1873, August left school and emigrated to the US. He became an upholsterer and opened his own shop. In 1875, he saw a young mechanic give a lecture on socialism, then dove into every book on the subject he could find. It was the railroad strike of 1877 that won him over, and he joined the Lehr-und-Wehr Verein. Soon enough found himself an anarchist.
Ironically, he worked 12-16 hour days at the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He kept a circle bomb on his desk in the office he shared with Albert Parsons, who ran the English language paper The Alarm. The bomb was probably empty.
He was handsome as hell, with as much a reputation as a ladies’ man as a revolutionist. He worked out with the Amerikanische Turner Bund, a German gymnastic society. He was sardonic and haughty but never lied.
He once spoke in front of Congress about socialism, saying they were not organizing the revolution, merely anticipating it. That they were “birds of the coming storm.” That it was the capitalists, not the socialists, who treated workers as if they were not individuals, as if they were just cogs in a machine.
To quote from his final address to the court:
If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement—the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.
Michael Schwab
Michael Schwab gave his speech next. He wasn’t so much of a talker, just a quiet, thoughtful man behind a big dark beard. He was married, a father of two. A hard worker for the revolution, a reporter and editor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He ran the IWPA’s library. He was gentle and wasn’t prone to outbursts of emotions. He was thirty-two at the time of the bombing. He’d been born in Germany in 1853, with a peasant mother and a tradeswoman father. He’d had a happy childhood until his mom died when he was 8, followed by his dad when he was 12. He went to live with an uncle. Soon enough he got to reading, leaving the family’s catholicism first for agnosticism and then finally atheism. He apprenticed as a bookbinder, working 13 to 17 hour days. In 1872 he joined a bookbinding union, then joined the social democratic party. He traveled around Germany and determined that, quote “political liberty without economic freedom is a mocking lie.”
Michael moved to Chicago in 1879, quickly learning that American capitalism was no better than the European variety. He realized that skilled and unskilled workers alike were just becoming part of the machine. First he joined the Socialist Labor Party. It wasn’t enough. As he put it: “For an honest and honorable man only one course was left, and I became an opponent to the order of things, and soon was called an anarchist.”
In his speech after sentencing he said:
Violence is one thing and anarchy another. In the present state of society violence is used on all sides, and, therefore we advocated the use of violence against violence, but against violence only, as a necessary means of defense.
Oscar Neebe
Oscar Neebe spoke third. He was another worker at the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and the only defendant who hadn’t been sentenced to death. He’d been born in the US to German immigrants, and in his life he had worked every kind of job, from cook to tinsmith to, at the time of his arrest, peddling yeast from a cart in the street.
During his speech he said he desired only to be hanged too:
For I think it is more honorable to die suddenly than to be killed by inches. I have a family and children; and if they know their father is dead, they will bury him. They can go to the grave, and kneel down by the side of it; but they can't go to the penitentiary and see their father, who was convicted for a crime that he hasn't had anything to do with.
His wife died while he was in prison and he wasn’t permitted to attend her funeral.
Adolph Fischer
Fourth came Adolph Fischer. He was the editor of Der Anarchist, which was a more radical paper than Arbeiter-Zeitung, advocating less for mass movement and workers’ struggle and more for autonomous actions by individuals and collectives. He’d been born in Germany and was a second generation socialist. He moved to America and worked as a typographer for various papers. When he moved to Chicago, he was an active member of Lehr-und-Wehr Verein.
When he was arrested, he was armed, presumably legally, with a revolver and a dagger. One cop pointed the revolver at his head, another put the dagger to his chest, and they only didn’t kill him when a lieutenant intervened.
In prison, two of his codefendants who didn’t speak English entrusted him to translate their autobiographies and other writings. He worked constantly to give money to the cause and looked forward to the revolution.
Adolf Fischer gave the shortest speech of them all, which included:
I was tried here in this room for murder, and I was convicted of Anarchy. I protest against being sentenced to death, because I have not been found guilty of murder. However, if I am to die on account of being an Anarchist, on account of my love for liberty, fraternity and equality, I will not remonstrate. If death is the penalty for our love of freedom of the human race, then I say openly I have forfeited my life; but a murderer I am not.
Louis Lingg
Fifth came Louis Lingg. He’d only been twenty-one when the bomb was thrown. He had a water-tight alibi for where he’d been the night of the bombing: he and his friends had been at home making bombs. When the cops came to arrest him, he tried to go down fighting and almost killed one officer with his bare hands before the other knocked him down. The New York Times claimed that while he was in the carriage on the way to jail he remarked “it all would have been worth it, if only I’d been able to kill that police officer.” I don’t believe he spoke much English, though, so while it would have been in character for him to have said that, it doesn’t seem too likely.
Louis Lingg had only arrived in the US in 1885, ten months before Haymarket. Born in Germany in 1864. Like so many of his codefendants, he’d had a happy childhood until his father’s death, which came shortly after his father had lost his job due to a workplace accident. After that, Louis and his sibling and mother fought starvation every single day. Eventually he fled Europe to avoid the draft, then joined the carpenter’s union and soon worked as an organizer. People trusted him–he was scrupulously honest and upfront, traits that seemed almost universal among the Chicago anarchists.
In the anarchist circles at the time, he was a sex symbol. Younger men adopted his haircut and his “lithe” way of walking around the ballroom at the anarchist balls. And it was the highest compliment to be called his name. Another anarchist in their circle, William Holmes, wrote about Louis:
Lingg was one of the handsomest men the writer has ever met. His well-shaped head crowned with a wealth of curly chestnut hair, his fine blue eyes, his peach and white complexion and straight, regular features, made him a fit model for a greek god, while his athletic form and general activity showed him to be possessed of an abundance of physical vigor and health.
His speech was far and away the most fiery of the bunch, delivered in German. He ended with:
I repeat that I am the enemy of the “order” of today, and I repeat that, with all my powers, so long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. I have told Captain Schaack, and I stand by it, “If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you.”
You laugh! Perhaps you think, “You'll throw no more bombs”; but let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they will do the bomb throwing! In this hope I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!
George Engel
After the youngest came the oldest, George Engel, a German immigrant about fifty years old who owned a toy shop with his wife and worked for Der Anarchist. He had been born in Germany, orphaned young, and taken in by a painter who apprenticed him. Eventually he came to the US to flee poverty, but found it just as bad in the US. As he put it, “I have seen human beings gather their daily food from the garbage heaps of the streets, to quiet therewith their gnawing hunger.”
He first joined the socialists, but was soon disillusioned by the politicking, maneuvering, opportunism, rigged elections, and compromise of principle. So he joined the anarchists and the IWPA. He was neither a speaker nor a writer, just a gentle man who supported the movement with absolute sincerity. Gentle, perhaps, but deeply radical. He and others had been, most likely, devising a plan to take the city by force if it came to open war after the McCormick murders.
George Engel didn’t get along well with Schwab or Spies–there was a serious divide between the more moderate anarchists of the Abreiter-Zeitgung and the radicals at Der Anarchist. Engel hadn’t been on speaking terms with Spies for over a year at the time of their arrest.
When he was arrested, the police just disappeared him from his family, who only found him days later when his daughter went to the jail to look for him and heard him singing distantly down the cell block.
In his final address to the court, he said:
We see from the history of this country that the first colonists won their liberty only through force; that through force slavery was abolished, and just as the man who agitated against slavery in this country had to ascend the gallows, so also must we. He who speaks for the workingman today must hang.
Samuel Fielden
Second to last came Samuel Fielden, the man who’d been speaking at the time the police showed up at the Haymarket rally. He’d been born to a poor weaver in England and had started working at age eight in the same cotton mills that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had based their analysis of the English working class on. He cut his political teeth in England speaking on behalf of the Union side of the US Civil War and against slavery. Soon enough, he moved to the US, taking whatever work he could get and preaching the Methodist gospel, traveling the south and becoming dismayed by the condition that Black people still found themselves in. He settled in Chicago and worked 12-14 hour days as a stone cutter, then found himself a speaker for the anarchists and a treasurer for the IWPA.
When he spoke in the courtroom, his words brought tears to the audience. The prosecutor bitterly laughed that it was good the jury hadn’t heard it before their verdict.
In his speech, he said:
We feel satisfied that we have not lived in this world for nothing; that we have done some good for our fellow men, and done what we believe to be in the interest of humanity and for the furtherance of justice. ... If my life is to be taken for advocating the principles of Socialism and Anarchy, as I have understood them and honestly believe them in the interest of humanity, I say to you that I gladly give it up; and the price is very small for the result that is gained.
Albert Parsons
Finally, Albert Parsons spoke. He spoke for eight hours over two days, but it was not his finest hour. The ordeal had hit him hard, and he often rambled and lost his way. Near the end, though, he said simply: “I have nothing, not even now, to regret.”
Limbo
After their sentencing, appeals went on for a year, reaching all the way to the Supreme Court, who decided against the anarchists.
Lucy Parsons and a few other members of the IWPA spent the whole time traveling the country, giving talks about the trial and the defendants. Lucy was arrested multiple times in the course of this and had her events shut down everywhere she went, yet her propaganda campaign was largely successful. After the moment of panic receded, popular opinion started to shift towards the defendants and the rest of the labor movement managed to find its spine again. The Arbeiter-Zeitung went from 4,000 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers as more and more people saw the hypocrisy of the government and adopted socialist and anarchist views. There were rallies and demonstrations for the defendants across the country and the world.
Some of their most ardent supporters hated their politics, but hated more so to see the US legal system be made a mockery of by the sham trial.
The prisoners were now celebrities, albeit doomed celebrities. August Spies, who’d avoided marriage his whole life, finally married a woman he only met once he was locked up: Nina van Zandt, an heiress to a fortune and a member of high society. This was, of course, quite scandalous in the papers. He wasn’t allowed to attend his own wedding, and his brother, the one who’d been shot saving his life, stood in his place as proxy at the wedding. They got married so that she had legal rights to keep visiting him in jail, though they never did more than once kiss through the bars. She was cut out of her inheritance by her angry family, forfeiting around $400,000, equivalent to roughly $12 million today. Nina Spies kept the name, long after her husband’s death. She remarried for awhile, then divorced again and took the name Spies once more. She lived in poverty because of her decision, and wound up an old lady who collected stray cats and dogs and marched in labor demonstrations.
After the Supreme Court gave them no reprieve, the defense committee moved to a strategy of getting the governor to grant clemency and commute their sentences to life in prison. Thousands of letters of support came from people from all walks of life, radicals and moderates alike.
The son of martyred abolitionist John Brown, John Brown Jr., sent the condemned men a basket of fruit and a letter of support and later told others that his father, had he had the chance, would also have been a socialist since what he believed in was a “community plan of cooperative industry.”
In the end, only three of the defendants asked for clemency. Fielden, Schwab, and more reluctantly, Spies. They had to say they were sorry, and you’re dealing with a bunch of obsessively honest guys who weren’t sorry at all. Spies, a few days after writing his letter, wrote back and said basically “actually could you please just only kill me and not anyone else okay? But I’m not actually sorry.”
The other four refused to repent. Lingg, in fact, the young firebrand, had refused to even let his name be included in the case to the supreme court, because he’d lost all taste for capitalist justice. Parsons, for his part, wrote an open letter to the governor instead of asking for clemency, saying “look if I’m innocent let me go, and if I’m guilty, kill me.”
The governor granted clemency to Fielden and Schwab. The five who refused to say sorry were to die.
At this point, the anonymous bomber returns to the story. At the time of the trial, it’s probable that none of the defendants knew who had thrown the bomb. Some of them, like Albert Parsons, believed it was a private security officer, a Pinkerton, who had done it to discredit the movement.
But once the sentence came down, a man named George Schwab (no relation to Michael Schwab) came forward to trusted comrades–Engel and Fischer and the other folks connected to the more radical wing of the IWPA. He’d escaped to New York after the bombing, but showed up and asked basically “if I come forward, will everyone else be set free?” And people thought it through and said “no, it won’t. You’d just be one more victim.” He lived out the rest of his days a free man, and not more than the tiniest handful of people knew it was him who’d thrown the bomb until around a hundred years later.
A week before the execution, guards found four bombs in Louis Lingg’s cell, which had been smuggled in to him by a comrade. Maybe they were there for suicide, maybe they were there for a prison break. The fuses were only a second or two long, implying suicide or perhaps a desperate attack.
The day before the execution, Louis Lingg put a blasting cap in his mouth and took his own life. Some reports say he’d hidden it in his hair, some that it had come in as an exploding cigar, smuggled to him from outside after the bombs were confiscated. However he got the thing, he didn’t recognize the right of the court to kill him, so he did it himself. His death, though, was slow and painful in coming.
A few days before he died, his mother and aunt had written to him. His mother wrote “I will be as proud of you after your death as I have been during your life.” His aunt wrote “whatever happens–even the worst–show no weakness before those wretches.”
The Gallows
The night before the execution, the condemned men smoked cigars and talked with jailers. Albert Parsons sang and recited poetry.
George Engel talked with the priest who came to offer him last rights. He told the priest:
In the shadow of the gallows, as I stand, I have done nothing wrong. I have not done everything right during my life, but I have endeavored to live so that I need not fear to die. Monopoly has crushed competition and the poor man has no show, but the revolution will surely come, and the working man will get his rights. Socialism and Christianity can walk hand in hand together as brothers, for both are laboring in the interest of the amelioration of mankind. I have no religion but to wrong no man and to do good to everybody.
On the morning of the execution, three hundred police guarded the prison like it was a fortress. Gatling guns laid in wait. The media had been spreading fear that an army of anarchists was going to descend on the place and free them all. For once, the media had been right. A desperate plan had been set into motion, but it was the condemned men themselves who had put a stop to it.
Lucy Parsons arrived with her two kids to see the execution. The police tried to stop her. She told them they would have to kill her to stop her and she forced her way in, whereupon she was arrested, stripped naked, and left in a cell with her kids until after her husband was hanged.
With noose around their neck, each man shouted out his last words.
Spies said “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
Engel shouted, in German, “Hoch die anarchie!” “Hurrah for anarchy!”
Fischer shouted, also in German, “Hurrah for anarchy, this is the happiest day of my life!”
Parsons said “Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Matson! Let the voice of the people be heard! O–” and then the trap opened under the four of them. The hanging was done wrong, and each of the men took long minutes to strangle.
Their funeral march had 20,000 participants and 200,000 onlookers, the largest ever seen in Chicago. Unions and radicals across the world commemorated their deaths, and still do today on May 1st, the worker’s holiday in every country in the world except the US.
The Aftermath
In 1889, Captain Black Jack Bonfield was caught taking bribes and among the stolen goods he was storing were the personal effects of Louis Lingg that had gone missing. He was fired from the force. With that, the defense committee got back together and started pushing for a pardon for the remaining three defendants who were still in prison.
In 1893, when a progressive was elected governor of Illinois, the remaining three got it. Governor John Altgeld wrote a scathing critique of every part of the crooked trial, 17,000 words long (almost twice as long as this zine you hold in your hands), and released Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab. It cost him his career to do it, but like all the decent people in this story, anarchist and non-, he was compelled by a sense of justice regardless of the cost.
In 1889, police put up a statue in Haymarket square in honor of one of the fallen officers, the only one of eight who hadn’t been killed by other cops. The model they used for the statue was a still-living cop named Birmingham. Birmingham was, fittingly enough, crooked as all hell and later got fired for fencing stolen goods. In 1903, someone stole the crest of the city off the statue. In 1925, a streetcar jumped the tracks and knocked it down–most people say the driver did it on purpose. Afterwards, the statue was moved to Union Park. On May 4, 1968, it was defaced with black paint. The next year, the Weathermen, a radical faction of the antiwar movement, blew it up. So it was rebuilt. So the Weathermen blew it up again a year later. It was rebuilt once more, and now it’s in the lobby of the Chicago police headquarters where every day every cop can see a statue of a crooked cop.
Haymarket didn’t win the eight-hour work day, but it didn’t delay it either. One by one, various unions and trades won better hours. By 1937, the Fair Labor Standards Act finally won the eight-hour day more officially nationwide. Though these days, more and more people work endless hours once again, through multiple jobs, gig work, freelancing, underpaid salary work, or bosses who don’t bother to follow what laws there are.
And while anarchism in Chicago faded after the trial, anarchism worldwide only grew as a result.
Oh and Lucy Parsons, who we opened this story up with, she stayed involved in anarchism and socialism her whole life, helping form the union the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, which went on to inspire revolutionaries around the world. In the 1920s, the Chicago police department declared that she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”
Which is something to aspire to, really.
Notes From the Author
The informal writing style of this zine is due to the fact that I adapted it from a podcast script, written in 2022 for the inaugural episodes of the show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
While I consulted numerous articles and essays in the writing of this piece, the most authoritative text that I relied on (and suggest for further reading) is Paul Avrich’s 1984 book The Haymarket Tragedy.
Every time I revisit the story of May Day, I’m emotionally affected by some new piece of it. We are part of a proud and long tradition, one that stretches back before Haymarket, before even we had words like “anarchism” with which to describe our yearning for equality and freedom.
The martyrs of Haymarket are buried in Forest Home Cemetery outside of Chicago, near the graves of Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons. I recommend the pilgrimage to anyone who would like to connect to our proud history of revolt.
About the Author
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, podcaster, and musician living in Appalachia with her dog. Her next upcoming book is The Sapling Cage, coming September 2024 from Feminist Press.