Bomb Shatters Rally: Haymarket Labor Tragedy Unfolds

A pipe bomb arced through the evening air and detonated among a line of police officers advancing on a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Officer Mathias Degan was killed instantly. Police opened fire into the crowd, and the crowd fired back. When the shooting stopped on May 4, 1886, seven police officers and at least four civilians lay dead, with dozens more wounded on both sides. The rally had been called to protest the police killing of several striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works the previous day. Chicago was the epicenter of the national movement for an eight-hour workday, and tensions between labor organizers and industrialists had been escalating for weeks. On May 1, some 80,000 workers had marched down Michigan Avenue in the largest labor demonstration in American history to that date. The Haymarket rally was peaceful and sparsely attended by the time police arrived. Mayor Carter Harrison had stopped by earlier and told the police commander the crowd was calm. But after Harrison left, Inspector John Bonfield ordered 176 officers to disperse the remaining few hundred people. The bomb was thrown as the police column approached the speakers' wagon. The bomber's identity has never been conclusively established. Eight anarchist labor organizers were arrested, tried, and convicted, though prosecutors never proved any of them threw the bomb. The evidence centered on their published writings and speeches advocating revolutionary violence. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One committed suicide in his cell. The remaining three were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893, who concluded the trial had been fundamentally unfair. Haymarket devastated the American labor movement in the short term, associating unions with anarchist violence in the public mind. But the martyrdom of the executed men galvanized international labor solidarity. In 1889, the Second International designated May 1 as International Workers' Day in their honor, a holiday now observed in over 80 countries.