At 10:30 on the night of May 4, 1886, a crowd in Chicago’s Haymarket Square was thinning out. The rally had been called to protest a police shooting the day before, at the McCormick reaper plant, that had killed at least two striking workers. Rain was starting. Mayor Carter Harrison, who had walked through the crowd earlier and found nothing worth worrying about, had already gone home. Then a line of police arrived to order the remaining few hundred people to disperse, someone in the dark threw a bomb into their ranks, and Officer Mathias Degan was dead within minutes. Gunfire followed, some of it police firing on each other in the confusion. By the time it stopped, seven officers and at least four civilians were dead.
Nobody ever learned who threw the bomb.
That single fact is the hinge the rest of the story turns on, and it is why the holiday most of the world uses to mark labor’s history points at Chicago, while the American holiday points somewhere else entirely.
The strike that came first
The bombing did not happen at a riot. It happened at the tail end of a national general strike for the eight-hour day, called for May 1, 1886, that drew somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 workers off the job across the country, with Chicago as its center. Three days in, the strike was still largely peaceful. What turned it violent was the police response at McCormick on May 3, and the Haymarket rally on May 4 was called specifically to protest that shooting. It was a protest of a protest, called by August Spies, one of the men later hanged for what happened there.
A trial built on a theory, not a suspect
Chicago police arrested eight anarchists in the aftermath: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. Only two of them were even in Haymarket Square when the bomb went off. None was ever shown to have thrown it, and the state’s own case never claimed to know who had. The prosecution’s theory instead was conspiracy: that the men’s speeches, writings, and general advocacy of the eight-hour movement and of anarchist ideas had incited whoever threw the bomb, so all eight bore responsibility regardless of who committed the act.
A jury convicted all eight. Seven were sentenced to death, and Neebe, on thinner evidence still, got 15 years. Lingg died by suicide in his cell the night before the scheduled hangings. On November 11, 1887, Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel were executed. Two others, Fielden and Schwab, had already had their sentences commuted to life in prison by Governor Richard Oglesby.
What Altgeld found when he looked at the record
Six years after the executions, the newly elected Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld, did something no politician of his standing had reason to do: he read the trial record himself, in full, and then pardoned the three men still in prison, Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe, in a public statement dated June 26, 1893. It read less like sentiment than like a legal indictment of the trial, written by a sitting governor, and it named names.
The special bailiff responsible for summoning the jury pool, Henry L. Ryce, had told a prospective juror before the trial even began:
“I am managing this case, and know what I am about. Those fellows are going to be hanged as certain as death.”
Altgeld’s pardon found that Ryce had packed the venire with men he knew or suspected would convict, and that the judge, Joseph Gary, had refused to strike jurors who admitted under questioning that they already believed the defendants guilty. On the trial’s central question, the pardon was direct:
“The state has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policemen, and the evidence does not show any connection whatever between the defendants and the man who did throw it.”
Altgeld did not argue that the eight men were saints, or that their politics were his own. He argued that a jury selected by a bailiff who had announced his verdict in advance, presided over by a judge who ruled for the state on every contested point, had not tried the case at all. It had staged a conviction. The distinction mattered enough to end his political career; Altgeld was defeated for reelection in 1896, and the pardon was cited against him for the rest of his life.
The date takes on a second life
By the time Altgeld wrote his pardon, May 1 had already become something bigger than the Chicago case. In 1889, an international congress of socialist parties meeting in Paris set May 1 as an annual day of workers’ demonstrations, choosing the date to honor the American movement that had struck for the eight-hour day in 1886, and by extension the men hanged in its name. International Workers’ Day spread from there through Europe, Latin America, and much of Asia and Africa, and it still commemorates a set of events that began and ended in an American city.
The United States took a different date. Labor parades had already been held on the first Monday of September in several states since 1882, organized by trade unions with no particular tie to Haymarket. When Congress moved to establish a federal Labor Day in 1894, it built on that existing September custom rather than adopting May 1, a date that had by then acquired the political weight of anarchism and international socialism that no elected government in Washington wanted attached to an official American holiday.
President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day act into law on June 28, 1894. He did it in the middle of the Pullman strike, the national railroad shutdown that had begun that May over wage cuts at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago, the same city again. Within two weeks of signing, Cleveland sent federal troops to break that strike, over the objection of Illinois’s governor, who by then was Altgeld. A conciliatory national holiday and a strikebreaking deployment landed within the same fortnight, from the same administration, over the same city.
What the date actually marks
Most of the world’s labor holiday and America’s Labor Day both trace back to a fight over the length of a workday. Only one of them still carries the name of the city where that fight turned fatal, and where a governor later put his own name behind the finding that the men executed for it had not gotten a fair trial. The American holiday, by design, does not ask anyone to know that. It arrives in September with a picnic and a long weekend, disconnected on purpose from the Square where the question started.