When an anarchist--whose identity remains a mystery even today--tossed a homemade bomb into a great company of Chicago police at 10:20 P.M. on the night of May 4, 1886, he could not have appreciated the far reaching consequences his reckless action would have. His bomb, thrown in a light drizzle as the last speaker at a labor rally climbed down from the speaker's wagon, set off a frenzy of fire from police pistols that would leave eight officers and an unknown number of civilians dead, and scores more injured. It led to the nation's first "Red Scare," refocused national labor and immigration policy, and set the stage for one of the most infamous trials in the history of American jurisprudence. The Haymarket Trial, the cause celebre for American radicals in the 1880s, produced death sentences for seven of Chicago's most prominent labor leaders--convicted more for their words than deeds at a time when the First Amendment provided scant protection against an outraged public.
Background
With the end of the Civil War, a new breed of labor leader emerged--men who urged America now to turn its attention to the "social emancipation" of working people. One of these leaders, Ira Steward of Massachusetts, concluded that the best hope lay in winning for laborers--then plugging away from sunrise to sundown--an eight-hour work day. Across the nation, Steward's followers formed eight-hour leagues and organized rallies and parades in support of their new cause. The issue galvanized the American labor movement, and the number of unions in cities such as Chicago doubled in less than a year. A statewide convention of the Grand Eight-Hour League met in Chicago in 1866 and resolved to push legislation in Illinois that would enact an eight-hour work system. The strategy was successful, and on March 2, 1867, Governor Oglesby signed America's first eight-hour law.
Many Chicago employers, however, chose to fight the eight-hour mandate. They believed the law violated the sacred "liberty of contract": the right of each employer and employee to agree on terms of work free from governmental interference. When the new law took effect on May 1, many large Chicago employers simply refused to comply, demanding that their employees continue to work their customary ten-to-twelve-hour days. Police aided employers in suppressing the resulting worker unrest, and timid politicians from the governor's office down refused to enforce the eight-hour law, rendering the hard-fought legislative victory meaningless. As a dispirited labor movement faded in strength, booming Chicago came to represent as much as any city in the nation the new Gilded Age--a period of excess, when capitalists raked in huge profits with the help of cheap immigrant labor and easily corrupted politicians. City businessman gathered at splendid lakefront clubs, racetracks, or opera houses and discussed rising crime rates or the troublesome politics of the working class.
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