Death in the Haymarket

On the night of May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded in the ranks of Chicago police, who had just ordered the dispersal of a peaceful rally called to protest the police shootings of about six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works the previous day. The explosion was followed by a fusillade of police shots at the crowd, and, according to some accounts, by return fire from some of the protesters. Seven police died as the result of the events of May 4, and over two dozen protesters were killed or wounded. Although some of the speakers and organizers had, at the rally and previously, openly advocated the use of violence and dynamite against the authorities, no direct evidence was ever uncovered tying them or anyone else to the bombing, and the rally was indisputably peaceful before the police intervention. Nonetheless, the police arrested two hundred people in the aftermath of the bombing, and eight of them were tried for conspiracy to commit murder (most of them immigrants associated with the radical International Working People's Association, which had recently helped lead May 1 strikes that attracted almost one hundred thousand protesters in Chicago). After a farcical trial, during which the judge openly displayed bias against the defendants, and persons admittedly prejudiced against them were placed on a unrepresentative jury, seven of them were sentenced to death, of whom one committed suicide in his jail cell, two had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, and four were hanged on November 11, 1887. They were widely regarded in the working-class community as innocent martyrs, and about two hundred thousand witnessed their funeral cortege on November 13. In 1893, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned three of those executed on the grounds that their trial had been prejudiced and that no conspiracy to murder had been proved—but that likely one individual had sought revenge against a police department that had repeatedly “without authority of law invaded and broke up peaceable meetings, and in scores of cases brutally clubbed people who were guilty of no offense whatever” (John P. Altgeld, “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab,” in The Chicago Haymarket Riot: Anarchy on Trial, ed. Bernard R. Kogan, 1959, p. 107)

Criminology · False accusation · Feud · Imprisonment · Jury · Political science · Sociology · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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