Today is May Day, the
workers’ holiday. At least in most nations. But not the United States. The
story of May Day goes back to Chicago in 1866.
On March 4, 1886,
during a protest march against police brutality in Chicago’s Haymarket Square,
a bomb went off in the middle of a group of policemen, killing 7 officers.
The aftermath of the Haymarket bombing showed the fear American capitalists had of working-class ideologies, the lack of civil liberties during the Gilded Age, and the tenuousness of labor organizations during these years of class formation.
The aftermath of the Haymarket bombing showed the fear American capitalists had of working-class ideologies, the lack of civil liberties during the Gilded Age, and the tenuousness of labor organizations during these years of class formation.
The mid-1880s saw the native-born working class struggling to understand the new labor system of the Gilded Age. With the promises of mutually respectful employer-employee relations at the center of early Republican free labor ideology shown to be a farce and workers living increasing desperate lives in dirty and dangerous factories and condemned to poverty, the American working-class sought to even the playing field between employer and employee.
The Knights of Labor promised the eight-hour day; in a period
when labor looked for a single panacea to solve all problems rather than a deep
class analysis of labor-employer relations, the working-class jumped to the
idea. The Knights, led by Terence Powderly, grew rapidly in the mid-1880s, even
though Powderly didn’t really envision the organization as a radical challenge
to capitalism.
Still, “Eight Hours
for Work, Eight Hours for Sleep, Eight Hours for What You Will” became the
slogan for a million or more Americans. But Powderly’s control over the
organization was tenuous and with the Knights defined as open to all workers,
it meant that anarchists and other radicals could easily join and then try to
convert workers to their cause.
The center of 8-hour
organizing was in Chicago, where small numbers of radicals began organizing
workers to demand the 8-hour day and threaten a general strike if denied. On
May 1, 1886, between 300,000 and 500,000 workers walked off their job around
the nation. Probably 80,000 of those workers were in Chicago.
The police responded
with sadly predictable violence. On May 3, police murdered 6 strikers at the
McCormick Harvesting Machine plant. The McCormick workers had battled with
their employer for a year, who had hired Pinkertons to beat them. They combined
their already existing struggle with the 8-hour day to become some of the most
respected working-class militants in the city. Responding to the murders, labor
called a march to protest police violence the next day at Haymarket Square,
which somewhere between 1000-3000 people attended.
When the police moved
in on the marchers, someone threw a bomb. The police responded by firing into
the marchers, killing a disputed number (probably between 4 and 8) before
cease-firing, fearful they would shoot each other in the darkness and confusion.
Maybe 50 people on both sides were wounded.
Unsure who actually
threw the bomb, authorities just rounded up all the leading anarchists they
could find and tried them for the murder. Despite the lack of evidence, 7 were
sentenced to death and another to 15 years in prison. Of the 8, only 2 had even
attended the Haymarket event and neither of the two were even suspected of
throwing the bomb.
But in the nation’s
first Red Scare (even if we usually associated that term with post-World War I
repression), thoughts mattered more than actions; leading 8-hour day actions
meant you might as well be a bomb-throwing anarchist.
Among the convicted
was Albert Richard Parsons. Born in Alabama, Parsons grew up in frontier Texas
in the 1850s. Although he volunteered for the Confederacy as a young man, he
became a southern white Republican in the years after the war. Parsons
repudiated his Confederate past and supported not only the principles of
Reconstruction but voting rights for African-Americans.
He then married a part-black,
part-Mexican woman named Lucy Gonzalez. Gonzalez (later Lucy Parsons) had a
long and amazing career of her own, including being at the founding of the
Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, fighting with Emma Goldman over the
role sex should play in anarchist politics (she thought class was more
important), leading the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, and inspiring the young
Studs Terkel in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Anyway, Parsons and
Gonzalez were forced out of Texas due to intolerance to both their political
beliefs and their interracial marriage. They moved to Chicago where they both
wrapped themselves in the political maelstrom of the time. Parsons became a
socialist newspaper editor, attended the first convention of the National Labor
Union in 1876, and in 1880, withdrew from electoral politics to immerse himself
in anarchism. He became obsessed with the 8-hour day and in 1884 began an
anarchist newspaper in support of the idea.
Parsons was not at the
Haymarket protest. But as a leading anarchist, one in an interracial marriage
for that matter, he was suspect and hated by the forces of order. He was
convicted of murder and hanged, with 3 others, on November 11, 1887.
The aftermath of
Haymarket completely destroyed the Knights of Labor and the 8-hour movement.
Powderly repudiated the violence but was also totally unprepared for every part
of the situation, from the size of the Knights to the official repression of
labor radicalism. The Knights crumbled soon after and though workers still dreamed
of the 8-hour day, it would take another half-century and countless dead
workers to see it become a reality.
As for May Day, the
Haymarket Riot became a major cause for socialists and anarchists throughout
the United States and Europe. In 1889, the Second International, a meeting of
socialists from around the world, called for international demonstrations on
May 1, 1890 to remember the Haymarket martyrs. In 1891, it made this the
official Workers’ Holiday.
But in the United
States, May Day plays second fiddle to Labor Day. In 1894, facing widespread
condemnation for government support of crushing the Pullman Strike in Chicago,
President Grover Cleveland rushed to sign legislation creating a Labor Day in
September as the official workers’ holiday. He feared that celebrating May Day
would benefit socialist and anarchist movements.
Erik Loomis is
a progressive, a native Oregonian and a professor of history at the University
of Rhode Island focusing on the Civil War era as well as labor and
environmental history. He also blogs for lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com and you can
follow him on twitter @ErikLoomis.