SYMHC Classics: Haymarket Riot

This 2021 episode examines the Haymarket Riot, one of the many interconnected events and people and movements that are all integral to defining the basic idea of what a full-time job is in the U.S. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We have an upcoming episode that's going to
make some references to the Haymarket affair also called the
Haymarket massacre or the Haymarket Riot, so we are bringing
out our episode on that event for Today's Classic. As
a note, Lucy Parsons is a big part of this episode,
and we also have an episode about her that came

(00:24):
out on February sixteenth, twenty twenty two. This episode originally
came out on June's second, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,

(00:45):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. Lately, I've been reading a lot of
articles about the purported labor shortage in the United States.
I feel like you maybe need to have been under
a rock. You have seen none of this discussion and discourse.
I was gonna make a fake like, what I haven't

(01:06):
heard about this, but it's two on the nose. Yeah,
So there's just I mean, there's been a lot of
conversation about whether there's a labor shortage and whether it's
not a labor shortage. It's late it's like a shortage
of jobs that are paying a living wage and have
decent working conditions. But then I've read a bunch of
other articles that are about how even that idea is

(01:27):
a little oversimplified. And it's more that in the wake
of the ongoing COVID nineteen pandemic, people just all across
the socioeconomic spectrum are reevaluating their lives and what they
want to do with them and what kind of work
they want to do. So all of that discourse has
led me to just think a lot about how here

(01:49):
in the United States we arrived at a work week
being at least theoretically forty hours long, with a work
day again theoretically eight hours long, and a weekend that
falls on Saturday and Sunday. Like all of that is
just kind of random and arbitrary, and yet it feels
almost like a given at this point, Right, That's just

(02:10):
how the world works. Yeah, even even if you're in
an industry or a job where you work on Saturdays
and Sundays like I have been in those jobs before,
like Saturday and Sunday, we're still the weekend. Even though
my weekend might be on a Tuesday and a Thursday,
which or not even consecutive days off. Yes, in any conversations,
because I too have had those jobs, people are always like, oh,

(02:32):
you have to work the weekend, Like you are always
clearly the outlier if you have a job that doesn't
fall on that Monday to Friday. Right. So you know,
I've just I've been thinking about that a lot and
how as a society that became a thing. And really
there are a whole lot of different interconnected people and

(02:53):
movements and events that have all been connected to this
basic idea of what a full time job is, and
some of them particularly stand out. One is the Haymarket Riot,
also called the Haymarket affair or the Haymarket massacre. I
really feel like none of those three terms really encapsulate
what happened. That's been on our listener suggestion list for

(03:16):
a long time, and it's what we are going to
talk about today after all of my navel gazing about
what a work week is. Oh yeah, we could get
into a whole thing. Maybe we will on Friday. The
Haymarket riot took place in Chicago in eighteen eighty six,
during a period of widespread labor activism in Chicago and

(03:38):
across the United States, workers were facing a lot of
the same issues that have come up pretty much every
time we have discussed labor rights and the labor movement,
so things like long hours and low pay and unsafe
or otherwise poor working conditions. Yeah, this also clearly was
not just in the US, but that's where we're talking

(03:58):
about today, and the United States had also been rapidly industrializing.
People had been losing their jobs in the wake of
that industrialization. Sometimes whole positions had just been eliminated as
workplaces had become more mechanized, and in other cases, tasks
that required some kind of specialized training or skills had

(04:19):
been mechanized in a way that allowed employers to replace
those workers with ones who had less training and could
be paid lower wages. So the US Civil War had
ended a little more than twenty years before in eighteen
sixty five, followed by the abolition of slavery except in
punishment for a crime. This had contributed to huge shifts

(04:41):
all across the nation, as industries that had relied on
enslaved workers having to adjust to an economy where slavery
was outlawed. This also led to demographic shifts nationwide as
freed people from former slave states tried to move north
to find work. In the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties,
huge numbers of people had also immigrated to the United

(05:03):
States from Europe, especially from England, Ireland, and Germany. These
are the same years that the US was also trying
to curb immigration from Asia, especially from China. We have
talked about that on several previous episodes of the show,
including our recent one on Chai Chanping. Most of these
new arrivals were fleeing some kind of financial or economic hardship,

(05:26):
and so this all led to even more competition for
paying work. Economic factors compounded these job shortages, including the
Panic of eighteen seventy three and the economic depression that
followed it. For Chicago specifically, these changes in the economic
conditions connected to them were massive. In eighteen thirty, about
thirty years before the start of the Civil War, Chicago

(05:49):
had basically been a small outpost with the population of
only about one hundred people, and then over the next
sixty years it became the second largest city in the US,
with a population of more than a million people. For comparison,
the largest city in the world at that point. Was London,
with a population of about five million, and in the
late nineteenth century more than forty percent of Chicago's population

(06:13):
were immigrants. At some points that number was as much
as half. So working in most of Chicago's industries generally
involved low pay and long hours. Ten to twelve hour
work days six days a week were really common. At
packing houses, shifts were often between twelve and sixteen hours long,

(06:33):
and mills usually ran in twelve hour shifts. So the
idea of a shorter work day had become a big
issue for labor activists, coalescing around the idea that a
day should be eight hours long. One popular slogan basically
divided the twenty four hour day into thirds. It was
eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours

(06:53):
for what we will. Robert Owen, who we talked about
in our episode on the New Harmony Utopia, is often
credit with coining this phrase as eight hours labor, eight
hours recreation, eight hours rest. So by eighteen eighty six,
labor organizations in Chicago and elsewhere in the US had
been working to shorten the workday for decades, and in

(07:13):
theory they had some success. On May first, eighteen sixty seven,
Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby signed a law establishing an
eight hour day for workers in Illinois. On June twenty fifth,
eighteen sixty eight. Congress passed an act doing the same
for some federal workers. Other governments passed similar laws as well,

(07:34):
but our focus here is Illinois. So that federal law
only applied to laborers, workmen, and mechanics who were being
paid by the federal government, so that was not everyone
by any stretch, and the Illinois law contained some really
big loopholes. It applied only quote where no special contract exists,

(07:55):
and that meant employers could just completely get around it
by getting their workers to sign spec contracts. Employers threatened
to close if their employees didn't agree to work longer shifts,
or they made new job offers contingent on the worker
signing a waiver that just required that person to accept
longer working hours. Labor activists in Illinois didn't think this

(08:17):
law was good enough for obvious reasons, so they organized
a statewide strike to begin on May first, eighteen sixty seven.
This strike partially nearly shut down the city of Chicago,
and it lasted for about a week, but the strike
eventually crumbled, and the eight hour law, which was already
full of holes, wasn't really enforced after that. Yeah, I

(08:38):
found conflicting accounts about whether the city of Chicago was
just totally brought to a standstill or if it was
more like specific sectors of Chicago grounds to a halt.
For the next two decades, though, activists and organizers in
Chicago and in the rest of the US kept working
toward an eight hour workday, even though these two long

(09:00):
h were already supposedly guaranteeing that for at least some people.
Aside from this focus on an eight hour day, though
a lot of these people who were doing this work
did not share the same political perspectives. Some labor organizations
were focused on the idea of collective bargaining and trying
to secure better working conditions, shorter hours, and higher pay

(09:21):
for workers while operating within the structures of capitalism. But
there were also socialists, communists, and anarchists who worked more
from the idea that capitalism was inherently corrupt and exploitive
and that the capitalist system needed to be dismantled entirely.
I'm just marveling at the ongoing discussion that remains the

(09:43):
same forever. Yeah, the thing that led me to this
episode was this whole thing about like, what's a work week? Why?
Why is it this way? But so many of the
things in this episode have parallels to discussions and events
still happening now. For sure. Anarchists in particular were focusing
on the idea of an eight hour work day at

(10:03):
a ten hour pay rate. This was something that employers
were not likely to accept at all, and it was
more of a tool to try to push workers to
demand more radical changes. People who opposed these groups generally
saw communists, socialists, and anarchists is indistinguishable from one another
and as antithetical to so called American values. So we

(10:26):
noted earlier that about forty percent of Chicago's population were immigrants,
and many of these immigrants were from Germany. Many of
the labor movements, communists, socialists, and anarchist members were also German.
But Chicago's German immigrant community was just it was not
monolithic at all. They represented a whole spectrum of the
population of Germany. They had arrived in the US for

(10:48):
a range of reasons and in pursuit of a range
of goals, but especially after the events that were going
to talk about German immigrants were also grouped together as
like one indistinct, wishable mass, regardless of their individual politics
or backgrounds, once again under the idea that they were
opposing American values. In eighteen eighty four, nearly two decades

(11:11):
after the federal government in Illinois had each passed laws
setting a workday as eight hours, the Federation of Organized
Trades and Labor Unions called for May first, eighteen eighty six,
to mark the start of a massive nationwide movement for
an eight hour workday for everyone. The Nights of Labor
and the International Working People's Association IWPA, which was an

(11:34):
anarchist organization, were also part of this eight hour workday movement.
The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions organized a
national strike and huge demonstrations, rallies, parades, and other events
were held all over the United States. The Haymarket riot
took place just a few days after the start of
this national event, and we will talk about it after

(11:56):
a sponsor break. Before the break, we talked about activism
that had been ongoing for just decades before this national
strike started on May first of eighteen eighty six. But

(12:18):
we didn't get into how those same decades were often
very violent. In general. Business owners, political leaders, and the
public saw striking workers as a threat, so police, militia,
pinkerton detectives, and sometimes even the National Guard frequently tried
to disperse striking and demonstrating workers with force, or to

(12:38):
intimidate and terrify them into backing down on their demands.
Leading up to the Haymarket incident in May of eighteen
eighty five, Illinois militia had killed two striking workers in
Lamont and today that's a suburb of Chicago. Three months later,
bystanders were beaten during a strike at the West Division
Railway Company. Time there was a labor demonstration of any size,

(13:03):
law enforcement tended to be on edge, regardless of who
was there and whether the demonstration itself was peaceful. But
parts of this movement were also employing violent rhetoric and
actual violence. Dynamite had been invented in eighteen sixty seven
and had made it a lot easier for people to
make and transport bombs. Anarchist publications in particular, did everything

(13:27):
from waxing rhapsodic about the potential political power of dynamite
to actually printing instructions on how to make bombs. August Schpiez,
who was editor of the German language anarchist newspaper Arbiter Zeitung,
kept a pipe on his desk that he said was
a bomb. In April of eighteen eighty five, the radical
newspaper The Alarm printed a piece that read, in part quote,

(13:50):
dynamite is a peacemaker because it makes it unsafe to
harm our fellows. Although they were happening in this incredibly
tense atmosphere at first, the events in Chicago around the
May first, eighteen eighty six national strike proceeded mostly without incident.
May first was a Saturday, and about thirty five thousand
workers walked off the job. That day, about eighty thousand

(14:13):
people participated in a march down Michigan Avenue. This march
was organized largely by husband and wife team Albert and
Lucy Parsons. Lucy had been born in Virginia and enslaved
from birth, and her enslaver had moved his enslaved workforce
to Texas shortly before the end of the Civil War.
Albert had fought for the Confederacy before becoming a radical

(14:35):
Republican after the war was over. Albert and Lucy had
married in eighteen seventy two, and they moved to Chicago
together in eighteen seventy three. Albert had become a typesetter
and had joined Chicago's socialist movement, later becoming editor of
the periodical The Alarm. So marches and demonstrations continued on
May second, which was a Sunday. Monday, May third would

(14:57):
have been the first day back to work. First had
been considered a workday even though it was a Saturday,
because Saturdays were not considered a weekend day yet at
that point, so Sunday was the only day off that
people typically had. So on Monday May third, August Spiez
spoke at a rally to support the lumber Shovers union,
which was on strike, and then after that rally, some

(15:19):
of the attendees joined union workers from the nearby McCormick
Harvesting Machine company, who had been locked out of their
workplace since February. After they went on strike. McCormick had
brought in non union replacement workers, and so the striking
members of both of these unions, along with members of
the IWPA who were there basically to support them, they

(15:41):
all started heckling these strike breakers at McCormick as they
left the building. And as a side note, yes, this
harvesting machine company was owned by the same McCormick family,
whose fortune Catherine Dexter McCormick inherited part of, and that
was money that she used to fund the development of
the first oral contraceptives. So it's not entirely clear what

(16:03):
happened outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company on May third,
but at some point about two hundred police attacked the
demonstrators and at least one demonstrator was killed. I've seen
sources say anything from one to two, all the way
up to as many as six people. After this, spies

(16:23):
went to the arbeiter Zeitung office and wrote up a
handbill in both German and English. It read, workingmen to arms.
Your masters sent their bloodhounds the police. They killed six
of your brothers at McCormick's this afternoon. They killed the
poor wretches because they, like you, had the courage to
disobey the supreme will of your bosses. They killed them

(16:46):
because they dared ask for the shortening of the hours
of toil. They killed them to show you, free American
citizens that you must be satisfied and contented with whatever
your bosses condescend to allow you, or you will get killed.
You have four years endured the most abject humiliations. You
have four years suffered unmeasurable inequities. You have worked yourself

(17:10):
to death. You have endured the pangs of want and hunger.
Your children, you have sacrificed to the factory lords. In short,
you have been miserable and obedient slave all these years.
Why to satisfy the insatiable greed to fill the coffers
of your lazy, thieving master. When you ask them now

(17:31):
to lessen your burden, he sends his bloodhounds to shoot you.
Kill you. If you are men, if you are the
sons of your graham sires who have shed their blood
to free you, then you will rise in your might
hercules and destroyed the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you.
To arms. We call you to arms. So, when he

(17:51):
was setting the type for this handbill, the types that
are added the word revenge and all capital letters up
at the top of the page. Meanwhile, anarchists George Engel
and Adolph Fischer started planning and advertising a rally to
be held May fourth in Haymarket Square, posters in English
and German announced a mass meeting to begin at seven

(18:12):
point thirty, featuring quote good speakers who would be present
to quote denounce the latest atrocious act of the police,
the shooting of our fellow workmen. This also read, in
bold letters, workingmen, arm yourselves and appear in full force.
Fischer invited Spiez to speak at this rally, and Spiez
actually refused unless that last sentence was removed from the poster,

(18:37):
and it was and the posters were reprinted, but a
few that still had that line in there did wind
up in distribution. Although the language promoting this demonstration was
deliberately incendiary, the event itself was relatively subdued. Only about
thirteen hundred people attended, a fraction of the number who
had attended other events earlier in the week, and the

(18:59):
whole thing started more than an hour late. Chicago Mayor
Carter Harrison, who was pro union, was in attendance, both
to verify that it was a peaceful gathering and to
encourage it to remain that way. As the speeches went on,
he repeatedly ReLit his cigar to make sure the assembled
crowd saw him and knew that he was there. Three

(19:19):
men spoke at this rally, August Speed's Albert Parsons and
Samuel Fielden. After a while, it started to reign and
people started leaving. Eventually only three hundred people or so
still remained. Spiez, Parsons, and the mayor all left before
the rally was over. A little after ten thirty pm,
as Fielden was getting to the end of his speech,

(19:41):
more than one hundred and seventy five police officers moved
in and Captain William Ward ordered the crowd to disperse.
At first, Fielden told them that he was almost done
with his speech and that the crowd was peaceful, so
they should be allowed to stay. Ward insisted that the
crowd disperse immediately. Field And agreed, but just after that

(20:02):
someone threw a bomb into the police ranks. It detonated
and Officer Mattias J. Degan was killed instantly, dozens more
were injured, and the police opened fire on the crowd.
Some of the people in the crowd were armed and
returned fire, and this previously peaceful protest just turned into
a riot or a melee like it was a whole

(20:25):
huge incident. In addition to officer Degan. Seven other police
officers died, including one whose death two years later was
attributed to the injuries that he sustained. At least sixty
officers were wounded. It's estimated that about the same number
of attendees at the rally were injured and killed, but

(20:45):
that number is a lot harder to determine. Samuel Fielden
was shot, as was August SPIE's brother Henry, but both
of those men survived. In general, people feared retribution for
having been at the rally, so many of the injured
people were patched up in one another's homes. This incident
led to a huge crackdown against labor activists, anarchists, and

(21:08):
German immigrants, and we'll talk more about that after a
sponsor break. After the bombing in Haymarket Square, rumors spread
that it had been part of a much bigger plot,
one that had been planned as a coordinated attack on

(21:30):
police stations and on freight houses where strike breaking workers
were staying. Labor meetings were banned, and police raided the
homes and workplaces of anarchists, labor organizers and German immigrants,
arresting people en mass. This included a raid on the
arbiters Zeitung offices. Illinois State's Attorney Lewis Grinnell was reported

(21:52):
as saying, make the raids first and look up the
law afterward. Sometimes this response to the Haymarket bombing is
described as the first Red Scare, although the first Red
Scare label is a lot more often used to describe
the period that followed World War One and included the
Palmer Raids, which we've talked about on the show before.

(22:13):
During these raids in eighteen eighty six, officers found radical texts, pistols, daggers,
and other weapons, along with explosives, bomb making materials, and
instructions on making bombs at various locations all around the city.
Detective Hermann Schudler said that while he was trying to
arrest anarchist Lewis ling, Ling cocked his revolver and tried

(22:35):
to fire at him. Shudler said that he only stopped
Ling by biting his thumb while the two men fought.
Although labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and others protested against this crackdown,
for the most part, there was a public surge of
support for police and approval of the wide scale raids
and arrests. They were not finding weapons at everyone's homes,

(22:59):
but since they were fire weapons that anyone's homes, people
felt like it was a good thing that this mass
sweep was being done. The Chicago business community generally approved
of this crackdown as well, with some of the city's
wealthiest and most prominent men vocally supporting it, people whose
names people may still recognize today, including Marshall Field, George Pullman,

(23:20):
and Cyrus McCormick Junior. On May twenty seventh, eighteen eighty six,
a grand jury indicted thirty one men on charges of
rioting and unlawful assembly. The grand jury also delivered a
sixty nine count indictment of nine purported ringleaders, August Schpies,
Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel,

(23:44):
Louis ling oscar Nebe, and Rudolph Schnaubelt. These nine men
were charged with the murder of Mattias J. Deagan. Even
though other officers were killed, the men were not charged
in their deaths, possibly because it wasn't clear whether they
were killed by the bomb or by gunfire, and if
it was gunfire, whether the shots had been fired by

(24:05):
demonstrators or by other officers. Yeah, there's been some debate
over the decades since this happened about exactly how many
of the officers were killed by shots that were fired
by other officers and not by the crowd. It's not
one hundred percent resolved question, I think. So we have
mentioned some of these men and their work already. Spee's

(24:27):
and Parsons had both been speakers at the rally, but
both had left before the bomb was thrown. Parsons and
his wife Lucy had actually brought their children with them,
something you would not expect them to do if they
knew about a violent plot that was going to be
put into play during the night. The last speaker, Samuel Fielden,
had been wrapping up his speech at the time of

(24:49):
the bombing. Although Speeze, Parsons, and Fielden all spoke at
this rally, none of them was involved in the planning
of it. George Engel and Adolf Fischer had organized the
rat as we mentioned, but also had not been there
when the bomb was thrown. Engel had not attended at all,
and he was home playing cards at the time along

(25:09):
with lewis Ling, who regularly practiced with a rifle, had
learned how to make bombs, and advocated resisting violence with violence.
Engel and Fisher were probably the most radical of the
men charged with Degan's murder. Michael Schwab had been at
the rally, but had also left before the bombing. Police
had also focused on his brother in law, Rudolph Schnaubelt,

(25:31):
as a suspect in throwing the bomb, but he seems
to have fled to Europe and was never seen in
the US again. Of the nine men who were indicted
in the murder, Schnaubelt was the only one who did
not stand trial. Oscar neb was a labor organizer and
a communist, and he worked with Spe'es, Parsons field In,

(25:52):
and Schwab pretty regularly, but he wasn't involved with the
rally at all, and he was not there. Although there
were suspicion that lewis Ling had built the bomb, he
also had nothing to do with the actual rally. Although Shpie's,
Parsons field In, Schwab, and nib were frequent collaborators, they
didn't really know Angel and Fisher that well, and none

(26:14):
of the other indicted men really had much contact with
ling at all. Of all of these men, Samuel Parsons
was the only one who had been born in the
United States. Samuel Fielden had been born in England and
had emigrated to the US in eighteen sixty eight. The
other men who were indicted in the murder were all

(26:34):
immigrants from Germany, and most of them had emigrated to
the US in the eighteen seventies or early eighteen eighties.
With Schnaubelt having disappeared, the eight remaining defendants were tried
as a group. Their trial began on June twenty first,
eighteen eighty six, with jury selection stretching all the way
until July fifteenth, nine hundred eighty one Potential jurors were questioned,

(26:58):
and the transcript of those seatings is about four thousand
pages long. Ultimately, only two of the twelve selected jurors
had a working class background. The rest were businessmen, clerks,
or salesmen. All had acknowledged that they were prejudiced against
the defendants, but said that they thought they could hear
the case impartially in spite of that prejudice. This jury

(27:21):
selection continues to be pretty controversial. Some historians have concluded
that it was unfairly biased against the defendants, with the
judge refusing to dismiss potential jurors who were obviously and
unchangeably biased against them. A special bailiff had selected the
potential jurors, which has led to speculation that the pool

(27:42):
itself was biased, so like they started with people who
were probably going to find the defendants guilty and picked
the jurors from there, But it was actually the defense
counsel who requested a special bailiff after the original pool
of potential jurors had been totally exhausted without finding twelve
propriate people. The defense team was headed by William Perkins Black,

(28:04):
who argued that all eight men had alibis for the bombing.
Only two of the defendants were even at the rally
when the bomb was thrown. Both of them were on
the wagon that was being used as a stage, and
one of them was speaking. Black also argued that the
violent rhetoric in some of the men's writings and materials
confiscated from their homes was just that rhetoric. Although Rudolph

(28:28):
Schnaubelt was not on trial, Black introduced evidence showing that
he was not at the rally when the bomb was thrown.
Black also argued that there was no reason to send
more than one hundred seventy police officers to try to
disperse a crowd of about three hundred people at an
event that was nearly over. But the prosecution, led by

(28:49):
Julius S. Crennell, argued that the small crowd and the
generally non threatening speeches were a trap, one that was
meant to lure police into complacency and then bomb them.
The prosecution also argued that this was an international anarchist
conspiracy introduced by foreign agitators. The prosecution did not establish

(29:10):
who had thrown the bomb, but this entire case rested
on the idea that the eight defendants were part of
a conspiracy with that unknown person. The trial continued until
August eleventh. By that point, two hundred and twenty seven
witnesses had testified, including fifty four members of the Chicago
Police Department and four of the defendants themselves. The Workingmen

(29:35):
Arm Yourselves version of the flier advertising the rally was
introduced as evidence. One of the witnesses for the defense
was Mayor Carter Harrison, who described the rally as tame.
The jury deliberated for about three hours before finding all
eight defendants guilty. Oscar Neibe, who had no clear involvement

(29:56):
with the rally in addition to not being there, was
sentenced to fi fifteen years of hard labor, and the
other seven men were all sentenced to death on October
seventh through the ninth of eighteen eighty six. The men
who had been sentenced to death were allowed to speak
before the judge to give any reason why they should
not be put to death. The most vehement of these

(30:17):
speeches came from lewis Ling, who said, quote, I despise
your order, your laws, your force propped authority. Hang me
for it. In the end, the sentence of death was
upheld for each of the men. To raise money for
their appeals, the men's supporters published their speeches and sold
copies of them, as well as printing and selling autobiographies

(30:39):
that the men had written from prison. Parsons also whittled
a small wooden boat that was auctioned off to provide
some money for his family. From prison, Spiez had a
relationship with Nina van Zandt, who married him by proxy
on January twenty ninth of eighteen eighty seven. She was
the daughter of a prominent businessman, leading fears that this

(31:00):
relationship would skew public opinion against the convicted men even further,
basically with this idea that he was corrupting the good
daughter of a prominent citizen. The men's appeals were unsuccessful.
On September fourteenth, eighteen eighty seven, the Illinois Supreme Court
upheld the conviction. The defense petitioned the U. S. Supreme

(31:22):
Court for a writ of error, but the Supreme Court
denied it on November two, eighteen eighty seven. A movement
for clemency had been growing throughout all of this. People
increasingly started to see the trial as unfair and as
a serious miscarriage of justice. Fielden and Schwab both asked
for mercy, and Governor Richard Oglesby reduced their sentences to

(31:44):
life in prison. Oglesby said he couldn't offer clemency to
any of the other men because they had not asked
for it. This whole movement for clemency was also kind
of undermined when pipe bombs were found under Ling's bed
in his prison cell. The execution was scheduled for November eleventh,
eighteen eighty seven. On November tenth, lewis Ling took his

(32:06):
own life using a blasting cap that had been smuggled
into his cell. George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and
August Spiez were all hanged on the eleventh. On November thirteenth,
the funeral procession for the executed men drew enormous crowds.
Estimates that you read will place the number at anywhere
from one hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand people.

(32:30):
By this point, the general public still largely approved of
the trials and the hanging, but to the labor movement, anarchists, socialists,
and other supporters, those men had become martyrs. For decades
after all of this, historians have generally interpreted the trial
and the executions as an enormous miscarriage of justice. But

(32:51):
in twenty eleven and twenty twelve, historian Timothy Messer Cruz
published two books on this. One is The Haymarket Conspiracy
Transit lit. Anarchist Networks, and the other is The Trial
of the Haymarket Anarchists, Terrorism and Justice in the Guild
and Age. In these two interconnected books, he argues that
the trial would not be considered fair by today's standards,

(33:14):
but that it was reasonably fair given the standards of
the time, and he also argues that there really was
an international violent anarchist conspiracy at work. Messercruz drew these
conclusions after pouring over the trial transcripts that had been
digitized by the Chicago Historical Society, along with other primary
source documents. However, critics of his work have noted that

(33:38):
trial transcripts and police records are not inherently unbiased. Basically,
can't use them to just correct the earlier record without
more context than analysis of that, and they've also noted
that his books essentially argue the same case that the
prosecution argued in eighteen eighty six, which other history brands

(34:00):
have already poked various holes in. In eighteen eighty nine,
socialist and labor rights groups designated May first as International
Worker's Day, choosing the date in commemoration of the Haymarket incident.
That same year, a statue in honor of the police
who had been killed was dedicated in Haymarket Square, unveiled

(34:20):
by Officer Degan's teenage son. In eighteen ninety three, another
monument to the executed men, known as the Haymarket Martyrs
Monument was dedicated in Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park. Albert
Parson's son, Albert Junior, unveiled that statue the next day.
Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardon Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab,

(34:43):
and Oscar neb Because several of the men who were
tried in the wake of the Haymarket bombing had all
been involved with the Knights of Labor, that organization was
viewed with increasing suspicion. After all of this, a lot
of its chapters ultimately moved over to the American Federation
of La Labor. The bombing also stoked anti union sentiments

(35:04):
and xenophobia, and it really fueled a perception that anarchism
was intrinsically connected to violence and terrorism, although as we
noted up at the top of the show, anarchists were
kind of all over the map in terms of what
they thought about violence. The Haymarket riot also caused a
temporary pause in the national campaign for an eight hour

(35:25):
work day. About four years passed after the bombing before
the American Federation of Labor renewed its calls for an
eight hour work day. Although workers in some industries and
places did wind up securing that eight hour day. At
this point, it's still not universal. The Fair Labor Standards Act,
passed into law in nineteen thirty seven, sets a forty

(35:46):
hour maximum for some workers with work beyond forty hours
requiring overtime pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act applies to most,
but not all, businesses, and some types of employees are
exempt from the overtime rule, including executives, professionals, administrative employees,
and highly compensated employees. In more recent decades, the Haymarket

(36:10):
area of Chicago has been home to both pro labor
and pro police rallies. After Weather Underground bombed the Police
Memorial repeatedly in nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy, that
memorial was relocated to the Chicago Police Department's training Academy.
A new Haymarket Memorial, designed by Mary Broger, was unveiled

(36:31):
in two thousand and four. This was commissioned by the
City of Chicago, the Illinois Federation of Labor History, Chicago
Fraternal Order of Police, and the Chicago Department of Transportation.
It depicts figures both on and under a wagon that
is a nod to the wagon that was used as
a stage at the rally. So that's the Haymarket incident,

(36:52):
or the Haymarket riot, or the Haymarket affair. Again, as
I said at the top of the show, I don't
think any of those terms are perfect terms for it
at all. The complicated Haymarket I don't know what to
call it. Yeah, none of them completely work in my opinion. Yeah,

(37:18):
thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
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