Chicago's Haymarket affair turns deadly
On this day · 4 May 1886
A peaceful rally for the eight-hour workday ended in an explosion that would haunt American labor for generations.
On the evening of May 4, 1886, workers gathered near Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police violence against strikers and to press the demand that defined the era: an eight-hour workday. Days earlier, some 80,000 had marched down Michigan Avenue for the cause.
The meeting was winding down, and Mayor Carter Harrison had judged it peaceful enough to go home. Then police advanced to disperse the remaining crowd, and an unknown hand hurled a bomb into their ranks. One officer died instantly; in the chaos that followed, gunfire left seven policemen and at least four civilians dead, with dozens more wounded.
No one ever proved who threw the bomb.
The killing triggered a wave of fear and a sweeping crackdown. Eight men, mostly immigrant anarchists, were tried on thin evidence; four were hanged in 1887, and a fifth died in his cell. Their deaths turned May Day into a worldwide symbol of the labor struggle.
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