The Haymarket Bomb: Reassessing the Evidence

The Haymarket affair of 1886 is a landmark in American social and political history. On May 4, 1886, a rally was called to protest the previous day’s shooting of strikers by Chicago police at the McCormick Reaper Works. The meeting was organized by self-proclaimed anarchists, a small but growing movement that included both recent immigrants (primarily German) and native-born radicals who advocated militant self-protection of workers and demanded the swift overthrow of the government and all capitalist institutions. Their protest meeting, which took place close to the Haymarket Square on Chicago’s near West Side, was poorly attended even by the anarchists’ standards. Liberal mayor Carter Harrison came and observed the proceedings for a brief time and told his police squads that the gathering did not seem dangerous. Nevertheless, after Harrison left and as the rally crowd dwindled to a few hundred around 10 p.m., several squads of Chicago police marched into the area and ordered the protesters to disperse. Without warning, someone tossed a bomb into the police ranks that exploded with horrifi c force, wounding scores of offi cers. Gunfi re erupted on both sides, and by the time the shooting ended seven police offi cers had been fatally wounded and at least three protesters lay dead. After a fi erce investigation that included many warrant-less searches, dozens of arrests, and harsh interrogations, eight men were brought to trial. They were charged as accessories before the fact, which under Illinois law carried the same penalties for murder as the deed itself. The jury condemned seven men to death and one to a long prison term. (In the end four were executed, one cheated the hangman with a jail-cell suicide, and the sentences of two others were commuted.) N O T ES A N D D O C U M EN T S