This Day in History

November 11, 1887:
Hanging of the Haymarket Anarchists, Chicago  

. . . At 8 p.m. on May 4, August Spies addressed a few hundred workers gathered at Haymarket Square. As he warmed to his subject, he began denouncing McCormick and challenged the workers. "The families of twenty-five or thirty thousand men are starving because their husbands and fathers are not men enough to withstand and resist the dictation of the thieves on a grand scale," he cried. Albert Parsons next addressed the slowly growing crowd. "I am not here for the purpose of inciting anybody," he declared. "It behooves you, as you love your wife and children, if you don't want to see them perish with hunger, killed or cut down like dogs in the street, Americans, in the interest of your liberty and your independence, to arm, to arm yourselves." The people applauded and cried, "We will do it, we are ready now!" 

 

A rainstorm drove away many of those gathered, and at 10 p.m., when about 180 police arrived, only 300 to 400 remained. The rally had been peaceful, but the police captain ordered it to disperse. No sooner had he spoken than someone threw a bomb into the ranks of police, killing one officer and injuring sixty others. The police fired into the crowd. In the aftermath, one striker lay dead, 12 others were wounded.

  

Newspaper accounts of the Haymarket episode made it appear that the bomb throwing had been part of a well orchestrated anarchist plot. In the weeks that followed, police arrested socialists and anarchists in Chicago and suppressed their newspapers. Among those arrested were August Spies and another anarchist leader, Samuel Fielden. Albert Parsons, who had gone into hiding, decided to give himself up. "I could not bear to be at liberty knowing my comrades were here and were to suffer for something of which they were as innocent as I," he said . . .

READ MORE about the trial of the Haymarket anarchists and their execution.