The Untold Story of Haymarket

What happened at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886, is well known: leaders of the International Working People’s Association (an anarchist organization founded in 1881) had organized a rally in protest of police violence against strikers fighting for the eight-hour workday at the McCormick Reaper Works plant the day before. The rally was almost over when suddenly a bomb exploded. Amidst the confusion and shooting that ensued, seven policemen and at least three demonstrators were killed, while dozens were injured. Eight prominent anarchists—Albert Parsons, August Spies, Oscar Neebe, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Michael Schwab, and Samuel Fielden—were blamed for the attack, tried, and eventually convicted of conspiracy to murder. Although the bomb thrower was never identified, all except for Neebe, who was given fifteen years, were sentenced to death. Four were hanged; one, Lingg, committed suicide in jail the day before going to the gallows; while Fielden and Schwab recanted their views and had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. The three remaining prisoners were eventually pardoned in 1893.

The Haymarket trial immediately became a working-class cause célèbre—a symbol of the powerful struggle between labor and capital, antiradical hysteria, and state repression. A testament to its worldwide influence, in 1890, the International Socialist Congress designated May Day as the workers’ international day to honor the memory of the Chicago anarchists and the larger fight for the eight-hour workday of which they were a part. Radicals of all persuasions and nationalities consequently appropriated Haymarket to expose the injustices of capitalism, memorializing the convicted anarchists as martyrs to the cause of labor.

Haymarket also became one of the most studied events of American labor history.¹ Like other controversial political trials, it divided the nation, arousing deep-seated emotions and spawning an unprecedented literature of social criticism and protest. A concise history of the trial was published by the socialist press immediately after the jury announced its verdict, and the first scholarly monograph of the “Haymarket tragedy” appeared in 1936.² A steady flow of both fictional and scholarly work has followed ever since. These publications include collections of primary sources, novels, memoirs, biographies of the convicted men, and, on the eve of the centennial, the prize-winning book by the late Paul Avrich. Avrich was the premier American scholar of anarchism, and his book has been universally considered the most comprehensive study on the subject.³ Digitized collections containing primary documents, photos, and even an interactive site—The Dramas of Haymarket, curated by Northwestern University professor Carl Smith—have been made available online; and, reflecting continued scholarly fascination with this epic event, another full historical account was published in 2006.⁴

Yet, for all the literature and interest it has generated, the Haymarket story is, according to historian Timothy Messer-Kruse, fundamentally inaccurate. Historical consensus held that the convicted anarchists were likely innocent and the trial largely prejudiced. Messer-Kruse reaches the opposite conclusion: the trial, he writes, “was fair, the jury representative, and the evidence establishing most of the defendants’ guilt overwhelming” (Trial, p. 8). Perhaps more important, contrary to generally benign views of the Chicago anarchists as union activists, idealists, and pacifists, he contends they were dangerous terrorists, part of a transnational movement committed to “propaganda by the deed”— the use of insurrectionary violence to destroy the established order. Therefore, Messer-Kruse concludes, the state’s response was not only right but legitimate.

Messer-Kruse pursues his provocative arguments in two interrelated books. The first, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, which won the 2012 best book award from Labor History, focuses almost exclusively on the trial from a legal view. Espousing a transnational perspective, the second, The Haymarket Conspiracy, is instead concerned with the ideological...