This page was created by Rachel Boyle.
Haymarket Square, 1886
Avenging Industrial Disaster
Waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe arrived in Chicago's Near West Side in the late nineteenth century to satiate industrial demand for labor. Wholesale businesses lined the north side of the neighborhood, including grocers in Haymarket Square at the intersection of Randolph and DesPlaines streets. Chicagoans at Haymarket hawked produce, ideas, and news to the city's workers. For example, in the first days of May 1886, laborers went on strike and marched in the streets demanding an eight-hour workday. When police killed two strikers at McCormick reaper works, outraged labor activists and anarchists picked Haymarket as a logical meeting place to protest police brutality and defend workers' rights.A crowd of workers and activists descended on Haymarket Square, joined by observers like Mayor Carter Harrison. However, as speeches progressed and the weather deteriorated, the gathering largely dissipated. Harrison even left and informed the nearby DesPlaines police station that Haymarket did not require a police presence. Yet when word of inflammatory language by one of the final speakers reached the captain, he deployed over one hundred policemen. Shortly after the officers arrived, a makeshift bomb was hurled into the crowd and pandemonium ensued.
Several police officers and an unknown number of civilians died. Fear of anarchists, labor activists, and free speech gripped the city, and the ensuing trial convicted seven people without evidence connecting them to the bomb. Haymarket continued to haunt the city for decades, putting police and city officials more on edge around protesters and vice versa. Efforts to grapple with the collective memory of the event persisted into the twenty-first century, as competing groups erected, destroyed, and gathered around monuments commemorating the fraught moment in the city's history.