May Day May Day May Day May Day

Crowds and Power
Eighty-five, bent and nearly blind, as poor as the day she arrived there more than a half-century earlier, Lucy Parsons addressed a rally in Chicago on November 11, 1937. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the day her husband, Albert Parsons, and three other anarchists were hanged by the State of Illinois for allegedly throwing a bomb in Haymarket Square at an open-air rally in May 1886, a rally called to condemn a brutal attack the previous day by police on striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works. She was there to memorialize the Haymarket anarchists and to cry out against a more recent act of deadly violence, the "Memorial Day Massacre" that spring, when Chicago police shot ten men in the back who had gathered, along with thousands of others, to demand union recognition at Republic Steel, a bitterly antiunion corporation. For Lucy nothing had changed. Such savagery would continue, she told her listeners, until capitalism was overthrown. That was the nub of a conviction that had inspired her, her husband, their comrades and untold numbers of others all across late nineteenth-century America. They were alive in an age that, with the singular exception of the Civil War, was arguably the most protracted period of social violence in the country's history; one might even call it an undeclared second civil war following hard on the heels of the first.
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The Real May Day
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Not all newspapers were as supportive, however. The strikes and demonstrations, one paper complained, amounted to "communism, lurid and rampant." The eight-hour day, another said, would encourage "loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery, and drunkenness."

The greatest opposition came in response to the demonstrations led by anarchist and socialist groups in Chicago, the heart of the eight-hour day movement. Four demonstrators were killed and more than 200 wounded by police who waded into their ranks, but what the demonstrators' opponents seized on were the events two days later at a protest rally in Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police who had surrounded the square, killing seven and wounding 59.

The bomb thrower was never discovered, but eight labor, socialist and anarchist leaders - branded as violent, dangerous radicals by press and police alike -- were arrested on the clearly trumped up charge that they had conspired to commit murder. Four of them were hanged, one committed suicide while in jail, and three were pardoned six years later by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.

Employers responded to the so-called Haymarket Riot by mounting a counter-offensive that seriously eroded the eight-hour day movement's gains.

But the movement was an extremely effective organizing tool for the country's unions, and in 1890 President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor was able to call for "an International Labor Day" in favor of the eight-hour workday. Similar proclamations were made by socialist and union leaders in other nations where, to this day, May Day is celebrated as Labor Day.

Workers in the United States and 13 other countries demonstrated on that May Day of 1890 -- including 30,000 of them in Chicago. The New York World hailed it as "Labor's Emancipation Day." It was. For it marked the start of an irreversible drive that finally established the eight-hour day as the standard for millions of working people.
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