![]() ![]() The labor movement was divided in its observance of labor days, said Adelman, but after the Russian Revolution, May 1 was associated with communism and eventually the date became Law Day in this country. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland made the first Monday in September national Labor Day. In 18, international labor and socialist groups adopted May 1 as labor day and a time to honor Haymarket ‘s “martyrs.” Another group gave 100 acres for Great Lakes. ![]() The bomb thrower never was identified or tried.Īnxious to forestall another Haymarket, Marshall Field and other prominent businessmen bought land north of Chicago, gaving it to the federal government in 1887 to establish what is now Fort Sheridan. 11, 1887, despite appeals and protests throughout the United States and Europe, the four were hanged. Two defendants later received life sentences. Neebe’s grandfather was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and the rest, to death. The state’s attorney admitted in court that the defendents “were not more guilty than the thousands who follow them.” He told the jury to make examples of them. Judge Joseph Gary limited the evidence the Haymarket anarchists’ lawyers could bring up, but allowed the state’s attorney free rein. “The prosecution wanted to prove it was part of a huge movement to destroy Chicago,” said Adelman.īefore the trial, each jury member had expressed an opinion against the men. Police ransacked homes and offices of hundreds of suspected radicals. The city was under virtual martial law for almost eight weeks. Panic and hatred seized Chicago and the rest of the country. In other labor confrontations in Chicago, workers, not police, had been killed. An eighth officer died of complications two years later. In the next few weeks, six others died from their wounds – mostly from bullets shot by other policemen. Nevertheless, Bonfield, sworn enemy of the labor movement, marched in 176 men and ordered the meeting to disperse. ![]() Just after 10 p.m., Mayor Carter Harrison, who was there to ensure order, left, stopping at the nearby Desplaines Street police station to tell Inspector John Bonfield that the meeting was “tame” and unlikely to become violent. As clouds threatened, the crowd of 2,000 or 3,000 dwindled to 200 or 300. It was poorly organized, with mixed signals about weapons and a delay in speeches. The next night a protest meeting was called at Haymarket Square. It came two days later when two people were killed in a police clash with strikers at the locked-out McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. On May 1, 1886, Chicago braced itself for trouble when 40,000 workers struck and 80,000 protesters marched down Michigan Avenue in the nation’s largest parade in support of an eight-hour workday. Chicago was home to key members of the International Working People’s Party, which called for an end to class rule, equality of the sexes and races, an end to “profit mongery,” making unions the “instruments of revolution.” The city became a center for the movement advocating an eight-hour workday and other labor agitation. Workers – many German, Irish and Eastern Europeans – had flocked to Chicago to build the booming city, and to rebuild it after the fire. Business leaders also had advocated using dynamite on the anarchists. Inspired by the writing of Paine and Jefferson, as well as Marx and Engels, disillusioned by political corruption, the anarchists talked and wrote of dynamite, the great leveler. The Haymarket protest meeting of 1886 was a result of years of labor unrest, which worsened in the cycles of depression and prosperity in the last quarter of the 19th century. ![]()
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