HAYMARKET RIOT

(May 4, 1886), violent confrontation between police and labour protesters in Chicago that dramatized the labour movement's struggle for recognition in the United States. On May 3, one person had been killed and several injured as police intervened to protect strikebreakers from strikers during a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. (The strike itself was part of a campaign by militant labour unionists in Chicago and elsewhere to secure an eight-hour workday.) In response to this violence, a mass meeting to protest police brutality was called by radicals to take place on May 4 in Haymarket Square. The meeting remained peaceful until a police contingent attempted to disperse it. At this point a dynamite bomb, thrown by a person never positively identified, killed 7 policemen and injured about 60 others. The rest of the police then traded pistol fire with workers in the crowd. Amid the ensuing public hysteria, August Spies and seven other alleged anarchist labour leaders were convicted of murder on the grounds that they had conspired with or aided an unknown murderer, with whom their connection was not demonstrated. Spies and three others were hanged on Nov. 11, 1887; another committed suicide; and the surviving three were pardoned in 1893 by the Illinois governor John Peter Altgeldan action widely condemned by conservatives but applauded by organized labour.