The Haymarket Riot

The Haymarket Riot, aka the Haymarket Affair or the Haymarket Massacre, is 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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Lately, I've
been reading a lot of articles about the purported labor

(00:22):
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. I was going to
make a fake like, what I haven't heard about this,
but it's too on the nose. 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

(00:44):
shortage it's late. 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 nineteen pandemic, people just all across the socioeconomic spectrum
are reevaluating their lives and what they want to do

(01:06):
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 least theoretically
forty hours long, with a work day again theoretically eight

(01:26):
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, Right,
That's just how the world works. 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, we're still the weekend.

(01:47):
Even though my weekend might be on a Tuesday and
a Thursday, they're not even consecutive days off. 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. Right,

(02:08):
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

(02:29):
Haymarket Riot, also called the Haymarket affair or the Haymarket massacre.
I really feel like none of those three terms really
encapsulate what happened. Uh, that's been on our listeners suggestion
list for a long time, and it's what we're going
to talk about today after all of my navel gazing
about what a work week is. Oh yeah, we could

(02:53):
get into a whole thing. Maybe we will on Friday. Um.
The Haymarket Riot took place in Chicago in eight six
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,

(03:14):
so things like long hours and low pay and unsafe
or otherwise poor working conditions. 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

(03:37):
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. So the US Civil War had
ended a little more than twenty years before in eighteen

(03:59):
six five, 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

(04:22):
to find work. In the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties,
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,

(04:43):
including our recent one on Chomping. 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 jobs short is, including
the Panic of eighteen seventy three and the economic depression
that followed it. For Chicago specifically, these changes in the

(05:08):
economic conditions connected to them were massive. In eighteen thirty,
about thirty years before the start of the Civil War,
Chicago had basically been a small outpost with the population
of only about a hundred people, and then over the
next sixty years it became the second largest city in
the US, with a population of more than a million people.

(05:29):
For comparison, the largest city in the world at that
point was London, with a population of about five million,
and in the late nineteenth century more than forty percent
of Chicago's population were immigrants. At some points that number
was as much as half. So working in most of
Chicago's industries generally involved low pay and long hours. Ten

(05:51):
to twelve hour work days six days a week were
really common. At packing houses, shifts were often between twelve
and sixteen hours long, and mills usually ran in twelve
hours shifts. So the idea of a shorter work day
had become a big issue for labor activists, coalescing around
the idea that a day should be eight hours long.

(06:12):
One popular slogan basically divided the twenty four 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 with coining this phrase as
eight hours labor, eight hours of recreation, eight hours rest.
So by eighteen eighty six, labor organizations in Chicago and

(06:36):
elsewhere in the US had been working to shorten the
work day for decades, and in theory they had some success.
On May one, eighteen sixty seven, Illinois Governor Richard James
Oglesby signed a law establishing an eight hour day for
workers in Illinois. On June sixty eight, Congress passed an
act doing the same for some federal workers. Other governments

(06:59):
passed similar or laws as well, but our focus here
is Illinois. 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

(07:23):
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 contangent on the worker signing a waiver
that just required that person to accept longer working hours.
Labor activists in Illinois didn't think this law was good

(07:44):
enough for obvious reasons, so they organized a statewide strike
to begin on May first, eighteen sixty seven. 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. Yeah, I found conflicting accounts

(08:06):
about whether the city of Chicago was just totally brought
to a standstill or if it was more like specific
sectors of Chicago 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 work day, even though these two laws were already

(08:27):
supposedly guaranteeing that for at least some people 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

(08:49):
while operating within the structures of capitalism, but there were
also socialists, communists, and anarchists who worked more from the
idea that capitalism was inherent, corrupt and exploitive, and that
the capitalist system needed to be dismantled entirely. I'm just
marveling at the ongoing discussion that remains the same forever um. Yeah,

(09:11):
the thing that led me to this episode was this
whole thing about like what's a work week? Why? 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. Anarchists, in particular, we're focusing on
the idea of an eight hour work day at a
ten hour pay rate. This was something that employers were

(09:33):
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 is indistinguishable from one another and as antithetical
to so called American values. So we noted earlier that
about of Chicago's population were immigrants, and many of these

(09:58):
immigrants were from Germany. Many of the labor movements communists, 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 it pursuit of a range of goals. But especially

(10:19):
after the events that we're going to talk about, German
immigrants were also groups together as like one indistinguishable mass,
regardless of their individual politics or backgrounds, once again under
the idea that they were opposing American values. In eighteen
eighty four, nearly two decades after the federal government in
Illinois had each passed laws setting a work days eight hours,

(10:43):
the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for
May first, eighteen eighty six, to mark the start of
a massive nationwide movement for an eight hour work day
for everyone. The Nights of Labor and the International Working
People's Association i w p A, which was an anarchist organization,
were also part of this eight hour work day movement.

(11:05):
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. 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. Before the break, we talked about activism

(11:34):
that had been ongoing for just decades before this national
strike started on May one, six, 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

(11:56):
even the National Guard frequently tried to disperse strike and
demonstrating workers with force, or to intimidate and terrify them
into backing down on their demands. Leading up to the
Haymarket incident, in May of eighty five, Illinois militia had
killed two striking workers in Lamont and today that's a
suburb of Chicago. Three months later, bystanders were beaten during

(12:20):
a strike at the West Division Railway Company. Any time
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. But parts of
this movement were also employing violent rhetoric and actual violence.

(12:40):
Dynamite had been invented in eighteen sixties seven 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. Guest Spies, who

(13:01):
was editor of the German language anarchist newspaper are Biter Zeitung,
kept a pipe on his desk that he said was
a bomb. In April of eighteen eighty five, 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 fellows. Although they were happening in this incredibly

(13:22):
tense atmosphere at first, the events in Chicago around the
May one, eighteen eighty six national strike proceeded mostly without incident.
May one was a Saturday, and about thirty five thousand
workers walked off the job. That day, about eighty thousand
people participated in a march down Michigan Avenue. This march
was organized largely by husband and wife team Albert and

(13:44):
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 again after the war was over. Albert and Lucy
had married in eighteen seventy two, and they moved to

(14:05):
Chicago together in eighteen seventy three. Albert had become a
type setter and had joined Chicago socialist movement, later becoming
editor of the periodical The Alarm. So marches and demonstrations
continued on May second, which was a Sunday. Monday. May
three would have been the first day back to work.
Uh May first had been considered a work day even

(14:26):
though it was a Saturday, because Saturday as 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 three, August spies 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

(14:48):
had been locked out of their workplace since February. After
they went on strike, McCormick had brought in non union
replacement workers, and so the striking members of both of
these unions, along with members of the i w p A,
who were there basically to support them, they all started
heckling these strike breakers at McCormick as they left the building.

(15:10):
And as a side note, yes, this harvesting machine company
was owned by the same McCormick family, whose fortune Katherine
Dexter McCormick inherited part of, and that was money that
she used to fund the development of the first oral contraceptives.
So it's not entirely clear what happened outside the McCormick
Harvesting Machine Company on May three, but at some point

(15:32):
about two hundred 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. After this, Spies went to the arbiter
z I Tongue office and wrote up a handbill in
both German and English. It read, working men to arms.

(15:55):
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,

(16:18):
that you must be satisfied and contented with whatever your
boss's condescend to allow you, or you will get killed.
You have four years endured the most abject humiliations. You
have four years suffered unmeasurable inequities. You have worked yourself
to death. You have endured the pangs of want and hunger.

(16:38):
Your children, you have sacrifice 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,

(16:58):
kill you. If you are men, if you are the
sons of your graham 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 to arms. So when he
was setting the type for this handbill, the types that
are added the word revenge and all capital letters up

(17:22):
at the top of the page. Meanwhile, anarchists George Engle
and at All Fisher started planning and advertising a rally
to be held May fourth in Haymarket Square. Posters in
English and German announced a mass meeting to begin at
seven thirty, featuring quote good speakers who would be present
to quote denounced the latest atrocious act of the police,

(17:44):
the shooting of our fellow workmen. This also read in
bold letters, working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force.
Fisher invited Speeds to speak of this rally, and shep
is actually refused unless that last sentence was you from
the poster, and it was, and the posters were reprinted,
but a few that still had that line in there

(18:06):
did wind up in distribution. Although the language promoting this
demonstration was deliberately incendiary, the event itself was relatively subdued.
Only about hundred 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

(18:26):
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.
Three men spoke at this rally, August Spies, Albert Parsons

(18:47):
and Samuel field In. After a while, it started to
rain and people started leaving. Eventually only three hundred people
are so still remained. Species, Parsons, and the mayor all
left before the rally was over. A little after ten
thirty pm, as field In was getting to the end
of his speech, more than a hundred and seventy five
police officers moved in and Captain William Ward ordered the

(19:10):
crowd to disperse. At first, Fielding 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 failed an agreed, but
just after that someone threw a bomb into the police ranks.
It detonated an officer, Matthias J. Deagan was killed instantly.

(19:34):
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 protests just
turned into a riot or a melee like it was
a whole huge incident. In addition to Officer Degan, seven
other police officers died, including one whose death two years

(19:57):
later was attributed to the injuries that he sustained. Aimed.
At least sixty 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 SPI's brother Henry,
but both of those men survived. In general, people feared

(20:20):
retribution for having been at the rally, so many of
the injured people were patched up in one another's homes.
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. After the bombing in Haymarket Square, rumors

(20:46):
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 were 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 on mass This included a raid on the

(21:09):
Arbiter's I Tung offices. Illinois States Attorney Louis Grinnell 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 more often used to

(21:29):
describe the period that followed World War One and included
the Palmer Raids, which we've talked about on the show before.
During these raids in six 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.

(21:51):
Detective Herman Shuttler said that while he was trying to
arrest anarchist Louis Ling, Lynn cocked his revolver and tried
to fire at him. Shoot said that he only stopped
Ling by biting his thumb while the two men fought.
Although labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and others protested against this crackdown,

(22:11):
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 that anyone's homes, people
felt like it was a good thing that this mass
sweep was being done. The Chicago business community generally approved

(22:32):
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. On a grand jury indicted thirty
one men on charges of rioting and unlawful assembly. The

(22:53):
grand jury also delivered a sixty nine count indictment of
nine purported ringleaders, August Bees, Albert Parsons, Samuel field In,
Michael Schwab, Adolf Fisher, George Engel, Louis ling Oscar Neebe
and Rudolph Schnellbelt. These nine men were charged with the
murder of Matthias J. Deagan. Even though other officers were killed,

(23:17):
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. Yeah,
there's been some debate over the decades since this happened
about exactly how many of the officers were killed by

(23:37):
shots that were fired by other officers and not by
the crowd. It's not a percent resolved question, I think.
So we have mentioned some of these men and their
work already. Species 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

(23:58):
with them, something you would not expect them to do
if they knew about a violent plot that was going
to be uh put into play During the night. The
last speaker, Samuel Fielden, had been wrapping up his speech
at the time of the bombing. Although Sprees, Parsons, and
Fielden all spoke at this rally, none of them was
involved in the planning of it. George Angle and Adolf

(24:21):
Fisher had organized the rally, as we mentioned, but also
had not been there when the bomb was thrown. Angle
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. Angle and Fisher were
probably the most radical of the men charged with Deagan's murder.

(24:45):
Michael schwab had been at the rally, but had also
left before the bombing. Police had also focused on his
brother in law, Rudolf Schnabot, as a suspect in throwing
the bomb, but he seems to have fled to Europe
and was never seen in the u S again. Of
the nine men who were indicted in the murder, Schnaubot

(25:05):
was the only one who did not stand trial. Oscar
Neebe was a labor organizer and a communist, and he
worked with Spies 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

(25:26):
with the actual rally. Although SPI's Parsons, field In, Schwab,
and Need were frequent collaborators, they didn't really know Angle
and Fisher that well, and none of the other indicted
men really had much contact with Ling at all. Of
all of these men, Samuel Parsons was the only one
who had been born in the United States. Samuel Fielden

(25:48):
had been born in England and had immigrated to the U.
S in eighteen sixty eight. The other men who were
invited in the murder were all immigrants from Germany, and
most of them had m graded to the US in
the eighteen seventies or early eighteen eighties. With snow Belt
having disappeared, the eight remaining defendants were tried as a group.

(26:09):
Their trial began on June twenty one, eighteen eighty six,
with jury selection stretching all the way until July fIF nine,
eight one. Potential jurors were questioned and the transcript of
those proceedings is about four thousand pages long. Ultimately, only
two of the twelve selected jurors had a working class background.

(26:31):
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. 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

(26:54):
who were obviously and unchangeably biased against them. As Ashiel
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

(27:17):
after the original pool of potential jurors had been totally
exhausted without finding twelve appropriate people. 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

(27:37):
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 Rudolf Schnowbelt was not on trial,
Black introduced evidence showing that he was not at the
rally when the bomb was thrown. Black also argued that

(27:59):
there was no reason and to send more than one
hundred seventy police officers to try to disperse a crowd
of about three hundred people at an event that was
nearly over. But the prosecution, led by Julius Es Grannell,
argued that the small crowd and the generally non threatening
speeches were a trap, one that was meant to lure

(28:19):
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

(28:41):
that unknown person The trial continued until August eleven. By
that point, two hundred twenty seven witnesses had testified, including
fifty four members of the Chicago Police Department and four
of the defendants themselves. The working Men Arm Yourselves version
of the liar advertising the rally was introduced as evidence.

(29:04):
One of the witnesses for the defense was Mayor Carter Harrison,
who described the rally as tame. The jury deliberated for
about three hours before finding all eight defendants guilty. Oscar Neebe,
who had no clear involvement with the rally in addition
to not being there, was sentenced to fifteen years of
hard labor, and the other seven men were all sentenced

(29:27):
to death. On October seven. Through the ninth of eighty six,
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, prompt authority,

(29:47):
hang me for it. In the end, the sentence of
death was upheld for each of the men. 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

(30:08):
to provide some money for his family. From prison, Spy's
had a relationship with Nina van Zandt, who married him
by proxy on January twenty nine of eighteen eighty seven.
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

(30:30):
was corrupting the good daughter of a prominent citizen. The
men's appeals were unsuccessful. On September four, eight seven, the
Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction. The defense petitioned the U. S.
Supreme Court for a writ of error, but the Supreme
Court denied it on November two, eight seven. A movement

(30:51):
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

(31:13):
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. The execution was scheduled for November eleven.
On November ten, Louis Ling took his own life using
a blasting cap that had been smuggled into his cell.

(31:33):
George Angle at All, Fisher, Albert Parsons, and August Spies
were all hanged on the eleventh. On November thirteenth, funeral
procession for the executed men drew enormous crowds. Estimates that
you read will place the number at anywhere from a
hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand people. By
this point, the general public still largely approved of the

(31:56):
trials and the hanging, but to the labor movement, anarch is, socialists,
and other supporters, those men had become martyrs. For decades
after all of this, historians have generally interpreted the trial
and the executions as an enormous miscarriage of justice, but
in twenty eleven, and twelve. Historian Timothy Messer Cruz published

(32:18):
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. And
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

(32:40):
he also argues that there really was an international violent
anarchist conspiracy at work. Messr Cruz drew these conclusions after
pouring 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

(33:02):
police records are not inherently unbiased. Basically, can't use them
to just correct the earlier record without more contexts and
analysis of that, and they've also noted that his books
essentially argue the same case that the prosecution argued in
eighteen eighty six, which other historians have already poked various

(33:24):
holes in. In eighteen eighty nine, socialist and labor rights
groups designated May First 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 Degan's
teenage son. In eighteen, another monument to the executed men,

(33:49):
known as the Haymarket Murders Monument, was dedicated in Waldheim
Cemetery in Forest Park. Albert Parson's son, Albert Jr. Unveiled
that statue. The next day, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld
pardoned Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Need. Because several
of the men who were tried in the wake of

(34:10):
the Haymarket bombing had all been involved with the Nights
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 in xenophobia, and it really fueled
a perception that anarchism was intrinsically connected to violence and terrorism, although,

(34:35):
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. The Haymarket riot also
caused a temporary pause in the national campaign for an
eight hour work day. About four years passed after the
bombing before the American Federation of Labor renewed its calls
for an eight hour work day. Although workers in some

(34:57):
industries and places did wind up securing at eight hour day,
at this point, it's still not universal. The Fair Labor
Standards Act, passed into law in ninety seven, sets a
forty hour maximum for some workers with work beyond forty
hours requiring overtime pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act applies

(35:18):
to most, but not all, businesses, and some types of
employees are exempt from the overtime rule, including executives, professionals,
administrative employees, and highly compensated employees. In more recent decades,
the Haymarket area of Chicago has been home to both
pro labor and pro police rallies. After Weather Underground bombed

(35:40):
the police Memorial repeatedly in nineteen nineteen seventy, that memorial
was relocated to the Chicago Police Department's training academy. A
new Haymarket Memorial, designed by Mary Brogger, was unveiled in
two thousand four. This was commissioned by the City of Chicago,
the Illinois Federation of Labor History, Chicago Fraternal Order of Police,

(36:02):
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.
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. The complicated Haymarket. Um,

(36:28):
I don't know what to call it. Yeah, none of
them completely work in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, Do you
have email that works from a listener? Perhaps I do so.
I actually have two short emails on the same subject,
because like we've gotten we've gotten a couple of emails
on the subject, like this is really interesting, and I

(36:50):
don't I don't think there's enough info on it for
it to be an episode or maybe even a six
impossible episodes entry, So I just thought we would have
it as listener mail. So the first one is from Natalie.
Natalie says, hi, I was listening to the stuff umiss
in history class classic about the Crystal Palace, and I
thought you guys would get a kick out of one
of the exhibits, a copy of which you can see

(37:11):
at the Whitney Museum in Yorkshire, The Tempest Prognosticator. It's
a barometer. It predicts the weather using leeches. It is
in fact a leitch barometer, designed by the curator of
the period, George Merryweather. It's one of my husband and
I his favorite exhibits at the Whitney. Whitney Museum, which
also hosts The Hand of Glory, a bottleship collection that

(37:33):
includes a Mary Celeste, some very creepy wax dolls and
plenty more beside. It's a very old fashioned museum and
the best way with all sorts of treasures cram together.
And if you're ever in North Yorkshire, I thoroughly recommend
a visit. I love the podcast and I've been looking
for something worth emailing you about for a while, so
I hope you get a kick out of The Tempest Prognosticator.

(37:53):
All the best, Natalie. And then the other email is
from Eva or perhaps a Eva that just came in
this morning that says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I hope
you're both well. Is there an episode about leeches and barometers?
I recently read something brief about George Merryweather see for example,
and there's a link to a brief excerpt from an

(38:16):
Atlas Obscura book that's at The Atlantic. I thought you
would both find this interesting too. I would love to
hear more about the history and how it works if
you would consider making this an episode. Sincerely from your
longtime listener, Eva. So, uh, yeah, this leech barometer does
seem really interesting. But that also, uh from you know,

(38:38):
from my from my poking around, seems like most of
the whole story. This guy had an idea to make
a barometer using leeches, and the idea was that if
stormy weather was coming, it would change the leeches behavior,
and that was like what the barometer relied on. I
do not think, uh scientists generally agree to day that

(39:00):
this works. But man, it is so weird and interesting
and relying on leeches, which are just kind of I
don't want to call them gross, because animals are just
doing their thing, right. It's still a very particular kind
of animal, right. I Mean, there's part of me that

(39:23):
has to applaud and recognize the insight that comes from
recognizing the animals are sometimes sensitive to things that we
humans are not perceiving in the natural world. So there's
part of me it's like I totally get how this
came to be a thing, But also that also comes
with the unpredictability of animals and other factors we might

(39:45):
not understand about how they behave for sure. So thank
you both for your emails about the Tempest Prognosticator, which
is also just a great name in general. It's you
could google Tempest Prognosticator and there it will be various
things about it. Um And if you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcasts, where

(40:07):
History podcast at i heeart radio dot com and we're
all over social media at missing History and that's where
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And you can subscribe to our show at the i
heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else that
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class

(40:31):
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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