Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Haymarket Riot About this episode 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
0:32 Speaker 02 If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Grainger. Grainger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers. Plus, you can rely on Grainger for easy reordering, so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.
1:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
1:37 Speaker 04 Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new Chicken Nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces, and they created a brand-new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating U.S. restaurants, don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.
2:08 Holly Frey? 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.
2:23 Tracy V. Wilson? As a note, Lucy Parsons is a big part of this episode, and we also have an episode about her that came out on February 16, 2022.
2:33 Holly Frey? This episode originally came out on June 2, 2021. Enjoy.
2:40 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:55 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:56 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 to have seen none of this discussion and discourse.
3:10 Holly Frey? I was gonna make a fake, like, what? I haven't heard about this. But it's too on the nose.
3:16 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 a little oversimplified. And it's more that in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 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 in the United States, we arrived at a work week being at
4:00 Tracy V. Wilson? least theoretically 40 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.
4:16 Holly Frey? Right? That's just how the world works. Works.
4:17 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 were still the weekend, even though my weekend might be on a Tuesday and a Thursday, which are not even consecutive days off.
4:33 Holly Frey? Yes, in any conversations, because I too have had those jobs, people are always like, oh, 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.
4:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 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.
5:31 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah, we could get into a whole thing. Maybe we will on Friday. The Haymarket Riot took place in Chicago in 1886 during a period of widespread labor activism in Chicago and 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.
6:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this also clearly was not just in the US, but that's where we're talking 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 been mechanized in a way that allowed employers to replace those workers with ones who had less training and could be paid lower wages.
6:34 Holly Frey? So, the US Civil War had ended a little more than 20 years before in 1865, followed by the abolition of slavery, except in punishment for a crime. This had contributed to huge shifts 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.
7:03 Tracy V. Wilson? In the 1870s and 1880s, huge numbers of people had also immigrated to the United 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 Chichang Ping. Most of these new arrivals were fleeing some kind of financial or economic hardship, and so this all led to even more competition for paying work. Economic factors compounded these job shortages, including the panic of 1873 and the economic depression that followed it.
7:44 Holly Frey? For Chicago specifically, these changes in the economic conditions connected to them were massive. In 1830, about 30 years before the start of the Civil War, Chicago had basically been a small outpost with a population of only about 100 people. And then over the next 60 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 5 million. And in the late 19th century, more than 40% of Chicago's population were immigrants. At some points, that number was as much as half.
8:23 Tracy V. Wilson? So, working in most of Chicago's industries generally involved low pay and long hours. 10- to 12-hour workdays, six days a week, were really common. At packing houses, shifts were often between 12 and 16 hours long, and mills usually ran in 12-hour shifts. So, the idea of a shorter workday 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 24-hour day into thirds. It was eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. Robert Owen, who we talked about in our episode on the New Harmony Utopia, is often credited
9:06 Tracy V. Wilson? with coining this phrase as "eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest."
9:11 Holly Frey? So by 1886, labor organizations in Chicago and elsewhere in the US had been working to shorten the workday for decades. And in theory, they had some success. On May 1st, 1867, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby signed a law establishing an eight-hour day for workers in Illinois. On June 25th, 1868, Congress passed an act doing the same for some federal workers. Other governments passed similar laws as well, but our focus here is Illinois.
9:43 Tracy V. Wilson? 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." And that meant employers could just completely get around it by getting their workers to sign special 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.
10:21 Holly Frey? Labor activists in Illinois didn't think this law was good enough for obvious reasons, so they organized a statewide strike to begin on May 1st, 1867. 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.
10:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I 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
10:54 Holly Frey? Yeah.
10:54 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 laws were already supposedly guaranteeing that for at least some people.
11:11 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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.
11:44 Holly Frey? I'm just marveling at the ongoing discussion that remains the same forever.
11:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, the thing that led me to this episode was this whole thing about, like, what's a work week? 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.
12:04 Holly Frey? Anarchists in particular were focusing on the idea of an eight-hour workday at a 10-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 as indistinguishable from one another and as antithetical to so-called American values.
12:31 Tracy V. Wilson? So we noted earlier that about 40% of Chicago's population were immigrants, and many of these immigrants were from Germany. Many of the labor movements, communist, socialist, 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 a range of reasons and in pursuit of a range of goals. But especially after the events that we're going to talk about, German immigrants were also grouped together as like one indistinguishable mass regardless of their individual politics or backgrounds. Once again, under the idea that they were opposing American values.
13:15 Holly Frey? In 1884, nearly two decades 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 1, 1886, to mark the start of a massive nationwide movement for an eight-hour workday for everyone. The Knights of Labor and the International Working People's Association, IWPA, which was an 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.
13:56 Tracy V. Wilson? The Haymarket riot took place just a few days after the start of this national event, and we will talk about it after a sponsor break.
14:07 Speaker 01 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
14:35 Speaker 06 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
14:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
14:58 Speaker 06 It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
15:06 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
15:13 Speaker 07 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
15:19 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
15:22 Speaker 07 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
15:26 Speaker 06 With the fans' experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
15:30 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything.
15:34 Holly Frey? AT&T. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward?
16:18 Holly Frey? How do we best show up for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:31 Speaker 04 This is Mauro Lopez from all Mauro Lopez Daily Podcasts. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan with the latest features in tech. Or just drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at traded. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.
17:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Before the break, we talked about activism that had been ongoing for just decades before this national strike started on May 1 of 1886. But 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 intimidate and terrify them into backing down on their demands.
17:49 Holly Frey? Leading up to the Haymarket Incident in May of 1885, 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. Anytime there was a labor demonstration of any size, law enforcement tended to be on edge, regardless of who was there and whether the demonstration itself was peaceful.
18:16 Tracy V. Wilson? But parts of this movement were also employing violent rhetoric and actual violence. Dynamite had been invented in 1867 and had made it a lot easier for people to make and transport bombs. Anarchist publications in particular did everything from waxing rhapsodic about the potential political power of dynamite to actually printing instructions on how to make bombs. August Spies, 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 1885, the radical newspaper The Alarm printed a piece that read in part, quote, "Dynamite is a peacemaker because it makes it unsafe to harm our
19:01 Tracy V. Wilson? fellows."
19:02 Holly Frey? Although they were happening in this incredibly tense atmosphere, at first the events in Chicago around the May 1st, 1886, national strike proceeded mostly without incident. May 1st was a Saturday, and about 35,000 workers walked off the job that day. About 80,000 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 Republican after the war was over. Albert and Lucy had married in 1872, and
19:47 Holly Frey? they moved to Chicago together in 1873. Albert had become a typesetter and had joined Chicago's socialist movement, later becoming editor of the periodical The Alarm.
19:58 Tracy V. Wilson? So marches and demonstrations continued on May 2nd, which was a Sunday. Monday, May 3rd, would have been the first day back to work. May 1st 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 3rd, August Spees spoke at a rally to support the lumber shovers union, which was on strike. And then after that rally, some 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.
20:40 Tracy V. Wilson? And so, the striking members of both of these unions, along with members of the IWPA, who were there basically to support them, they all started heckling these strikebreakers at McCormick as they left the building.
20:52 Holly Frey? 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.
21:07 Tracy V. Wilson? So, it's not entirely clear what happened outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company on May 3rd. But at some point, about 200 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.
21:28 Holly Frey? After this, Spees went to the Arbiter Zeitung office and wrote up a handbill in both German and English. It read, "Working men, 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 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 for years endured the most abject humiliations. You have..."
22:12 Holly Frey? For years suffered unmeasurable inequities. You have worked yourself 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 to lessen your burden, he sends his bloodhounds to shoot you, kill you. If you are men, if you are the sons of your grand sires, who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. Two arms, we call you, two arms.
22:57 Tracy V. Wilson? So when he was setting the type for this handbill, the typesetter added the word revenge in all capital letters up at the top of the page.
23:06 Holly Frey? Meanwhile, anarchists George Engel and Adolf Fisher started planning and advertising a rally to be held May 4th in Haymarket Square. Posters in English and German announced a mass meeting to begin at 7:30, 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, "Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force."
23:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Fisher invited Spies to speak at this rally, and Spies actually refused unless that last sentence was removed from the poster. And it was, and the posters were reprinted, but a few that still had that line in there did wind up in distribution.
23:51 Holly Frey? Although the language promoting this demonstration was deliberately incendiary, the event itself was relatively subdued. Only about 1,300 people attended, a fraction of the number who had attended other events earlier in the week. And the 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.
24:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Three men spoke at this rally: August Spies, Albert Parsons, and Samuel Fielden.
24:31 Tracy V. Wilson? After a while, it started to rain and people started leaving. Eventually, only 300 people or so still remained. Spees, Parsons, and the mayor all left before the rally was over.
24:43 Holly Frey? A little after 10:30 PM, as Fielden was getting to the end of his speech, more than 175 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.
25:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Fielden agreed, but just after that, someone threw a bomb into the police ranks. It detonated, and Officer Mathias J. Deegan 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 huge incident.
25:33 Holly Frey? In addition to Officer Deegan, seven other police officers died, including one whose death two years later was attributed to the injuries that he sustained. At least 60 officers were wounded. It's estimated that about the same number of attendees at the rally were injured and killed, but that number is a lot harder to determine. Samuel Fielden was shot, as was August Spees' 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.
26:09 Tracy V. Wilson? This incident led to a huge crackdown against labor activists, anarchists, and German immigrants. And we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
26:21 Speaker 01 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
26:50 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for
27:34 Holly Frey? each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
27:45 Holly Frey? This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra to a Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for
28:05 Speaker 02 holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, shop toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with Dr. Laura Jayhai of Cleveland Clinic about how advanced computing is helping shorten the path from medical discovery to treatment. The moment that there is a compound that someone in a lab thinks it would be effective to treat a certain disease, it takes about 10 to 13 years from that moment to when that drug is on a shelf for a patient. A big part of that gap could be computationally solved. Better
28:49 Speaker 02 simulation of compounds, designing drug trails that are more efficient, that would finish faster. That was the motivation to bring computational tools and technology closer to biomedical researchers. Learn more about how Cleveland Clinic and IBM are using AI and
29:08 Speaker 01 Quantum Computing to revolutionize biomedical research at IBM.com/smarttalks.
29:22 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 masse. This included a raid on the Arbiter Zeitung offices. Illinois State's Attorney Louis Grenell was reported 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
30:07 Tracy V. Wilson? more often used to describe the period that followed World War I and included the Palmer Raids, which we've talked about on the show before.
30:14 Holly Frey? During these raids in 1886, 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 Herman Schudler said that while he was trying to arrest anarchist Louis Ling, Ling cocked his revolver and tried to fire at him. Schudler said that he only stopped Ling by biting his thumb while the two men fought.
30:44 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, but since they were finding weapons at 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, and Cyrus McCormick Jr.
31:24 Holly Frey? On May 27, 1886, a grand jury indicted 31 men on charges of rioting and unlawful assembly. The grand jury also delivered a 69-count indictment of nine purported ringleaders: August Spees, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolf Fischer, George Engel, Louis Ling, Oscar Nieb, and Rudolph Schnabel. These nine men were charged with the murder of Matthias J. Deegan. 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 demonstrators or by other officers.
32:10 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 100% resolved question, I think. So we have mentioned some of these men and their work already. Spees 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 the bombing.
32:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Although Spees, Parsons, and Fielden all spoke at this rally, none of them was involved in the planning of it.
32:58 Holly Frey? George Engel and Adolf Fischer had organized the rally, 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 with Louis Ling, who regularly practiced with a rifle, had learned how to make bombs, and advocated resisting violence with violence, Engel and Fischer were probably the most radical of the men charged with Deegan's murder.
33:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Michael Schwab had been at the rally, but had also left before the bombing. Police had also focused on his brother-in-law, Rudolph Schnabelt, 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, Schnabelt was the only one who did not stand trial.
33:48 Holly Frey? Oscar Nieb was a labor organizer and a communist, and he worked with Spees, Parsons, Fielden, and Schwab pretty regularly. But he wasn't involved with the rally at all, and he was not there. Although there were suspicions that Louis Ling had built the bomb, he also had nothing to do with the actual rally. Although Spees, Parsons, Fielden, Schwab, and Nieb were frequent collaborators, they didn't really know Engel and Fisher that well, and none of the other indicted men really had much contact with Ling at all.
34:20 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 immigrated to the US in 1868. The other men who were indicted in the murder were all immigrants from Germany, and most of them had immigrated to the US in the 1870s or early 1880s.
34:43 Holly Frey? With Schnabelt having disappeared, the eight remaining defendants were tried as a group. Their trial began on June 21, 1886, with jury selection stretching all the way until July 15. 981 potential jurors were questioned, and the transcript of those proceedings is about 4,000 pages long. Ultimately, only two of the 12 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.
35:22 Tracy V. Wilson? This jury 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 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 12 appropriate people.
36:03 Holly Frey? The defense team was headed by William Perkins Black, 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 Schnabelt 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 170 police officers to
36:42 Holly Frey? try to disperse a crowd of about 300 people at an event that was nearly over.
36:49 Tracy V. Wilson? But the prosecution, led by Julius S. Grenell, 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 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.
37:23 Holly Frey? The trial continued until August 11th. By that point, 227 witnesses had testified, including 54 members of the Chicago Police Department and four of the defendants themselves. The "working men arm yourselves" version of the flyer advertising the rally was introduced as evidence. One of the witnesses for the defense was Mayor Carter Harrison, who described the rally as tame.
37:49 Tracy V. Wilson? The jury deliberated for about three hours before finding all eight defendants guilty. Oscar Nebe, who had no clear involvement with the rally in addition to not being there, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, and the other seven men were all sentenced to death.
38:07 Holly Frey? On October 7th through the 9th of 1886, 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 speeches came from Louis 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.
38:33 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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, Spies had a relationship with Nina Van Zant, who married him by proxy on January 29th of 1887. She was the daughter of a prominent businessman, leading to fears that this 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.
39:13 Holly Frey? The men's appeals were unsuccessful. On September 14th, 1887, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction. The defense petitioned the US Supreme Court for a writ of error, but the Supreme Court denied it on November 2nd, 1887.
39:30 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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.
40:01 Holly Frey? The execution was scheduled for November 11th, 1887. On November 10th, Louis Ling took his own life, using a blasting cap that had been smuggled into his cell. George Engel, Adolph Fisher, Albert Parsons, and August Spies were all hanged on the 11th. On November 13th, a funeral procession for the executed men drew enormous crowds. Estimates that you read will place the number at anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 people. 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.
40:44 Tracy V. Wilson? For decades after all of this, historians have generally interpreted the trial and executions as an enormous miscarriage of justice. But in 2011 and 2012, historian Timothy Messer-Cruz published two books on this. One is "The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks," and the other is "The Trial of the Haymarket: Anarchists, Terrorism, and Justice in the Gilded Age." In these two interconnected books, he argues that the trial would not be considered fair by today's standards, 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.
41:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Messer-Cruz drew these conclusions after poring 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 trial transcripts and police records are not inherently unbiased. You basically can't use them to just correct the earlier record without more context and analysis of that. And they've also noted that his books essentially argue the same case that the prosecution argued in 1886, which other historians have already poked various holes in.
42:05 Holly Frey? In 1889, socialist and labor rights groups designated May 1st as International Workers' 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 by Officer Deegan's teenage son. In 1893, another monument to the executed men, known as the Haymarket Martyrs Monument, was dedicated in Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park. Albert Parsons' son, Albert Jr., unveiled that statue. The next day, Illinois Governor John Peter Althgeld pardoned Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Nebe.
42:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 Labor. The bombing also stoked anti-union sentiments 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.
43:20 Holly Frey? The Haymarket riot also caused a temporary pause in the national campaign for an eight-hour workday. About four years passed after the bombing before the American Federation of Labor renewed its calls for an eight-hour workday. 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 1937, sets a 40-hour maximum for some workers, with work beyond 40 hours requiring overtime pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act applies to most, but not all, businesses and some types of
44:00 Holly Frey? employees are exempt from the overtime rule, including executives, professionals, administrative employees, and highly compensated employees.
44:10 Tracy V. Wilson? In more recent decades, the Haymarket area of Chicago has been home to both pro labor and pro-police rallies. After Weather Underground bombed the police memorial repeatedly in 1969 and 1970, that memorial was relocated to the Chicago Police Department's Training Academy.
44:29 Holly Frey? A new Haymarket memorial, designed by Mary Broger, was unveiled in 2004. 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.
44:52 Tracy V. Wilson? So that's the Haymarket Incident, 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.
45:03 Holly Frey? The complicated Haymarket, I don't know what to call it.
45:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
45:12 Tracy V. Wilson? None of them completely work, in my opinion.
45:14 Holly Frey? Yeah.
45:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
45:42 Speaker 04 This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan, with the latest features Entec. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. ShopToyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.
46:20 Speaker 01 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
46:49 Speaker 02 Hello? Hey, it's me, your wallet. Oh, hey. I was just wondering if we could maybe take it easy this week? Absolutely. Really? Yep, I'm shopping at Food Lion. Wait, you mean low prices? And MVP savings. Oh, you do care. Obviously. Okay, I feel better. Good, now let's go get some snacks. At Food Lion, low prices and MVP savings make it easier to shop for what you need without spending more than you have to. When your wallet needs a little TLC, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.
47:25 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous Behind the Scenes Minis: Serving Lip and Ethics Next Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Part 1 Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated