The Haymarket Affair: The Bomb That Gave the World May Day

On May 4, 1886, a labor rally at Haymarket Square turned into one of the most consequential events in American labor history. Workers had gathered to protest police violence against striking laborers at the nearby McCormick Reaper Works. As police moved to disperse the crowd, someone threw a dynamite bomb. Seven police officers died, and at least four civilians were killed in the chaos that followed. Eight anarchists were arrested and tried in a deeply prejudicial proceeding — none was proven to have thrown the bomb. Four were hanged. One died in prison. Three were eventually pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who called the trial a fraud. The Haymarket affair galvanized both the labor movement and the anti-labor backlash simultaneously. It gave rise to May Day as an international workers' holiday — celebrated in nearly every country in the world except the United States, where it is deliberately not observed at the federal level. A bronze statue of a police officer, erected in 1889, stood in or near the square on and off for decades, repeatedly vandalized and moved, until it was taken indoors to police facilities in the 1970s. A new abstract monument was installed at Desplaines and Randolph in 2004.