The first of May was originally celebrated by pagans throughout Europe as the beginning of summer, which was recognized as a day of fertility (both for the first spring planting and sexual intercourse). A maypole was often erected for young women and men to dance around and entwine the ribbons they carried with one another to find a mate... at least for the night.
• Persecution of May Day began as early as the 1600s; in 1644 the British Parliament banned its practice as immoral, with the Church bringing its full force to bear across the spectrum. Governments throughout Europe were largely ineffective in outlawing these celebrations, and thus the Church took a different approach – it attempted to assimilate the festivities by naming Saints days on the first of May. These efforts led to the destruction of May Day in some places, but the traditions and customs of May Day continued to remain strong throughout much of the peasantry of Europe, whose ties to one another and nature were far stronger than their ties to the ruling class and its religion. Celebrations became increasingly festive, especially at night when huge feasts, song, dance and free love were practised throughout the night.
• After the birth of capitalism, the roots and principles of the tradition survived to various extents, with workers across Europe celebrating the first of May as the coming of spring and a day of sexual fertility. Most mythical and religious sentiments faded away, but the spirit of the festival in expressing the love of nature and one another gained strength.
• At the end of the eighteenth century, May 1 became popular as International Workers’ Day throughout the world mainly to working people and a symbolic day of emancipation from the slavery of capitalism.
• International Workers’ Day (also known as May Day) is a celebration of the international labour movement. May 1 is a national holiday in many countries today and celebrated unofficially in many other countries.
• It is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, a small industrial city belong to Illinois state of the USA. The Haymarket affair was the aftermath of a bombing by an unidentified person that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday, May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The demonstration began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. The aftermath of the bombing was bloodshed, the police reacted by firing on the workers, killing dozens of demonstrators and several of their own officers.
• In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American Federation of Labor) unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the 8 hour workday would become standard. As the chosen date approached, U.S. labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.
• In 1885 a circular passed hand to hand through the ranks of the proletariat in the United States. With the following words, it called for class-wide action on May 1, 1886: “One day of revolt – not rest! A day not ordained by the bragging spokesmen of institutions holding the world of labor in bondage. A day on which labour makes its own laws and has the power to execute them! All without the consent or approval of those who oppress and rule. A day on which in tremendous force the unity of the army of toilers is arrayed against the powers that today hold sway over the destinies of the people of all nations. A day of protest against oppression and tyranny, against ignorance and war of any kind. A day on which to begin to enjoy ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.’”
• On Saturday, May 1, 1886, thousands of workers went on strike and rallies were held throughout the United States, with the cry, “Eight-hour day with no cut in pay”. Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U.S. ranged from 300,000 to half a million. In New York City the number of demonstrators was estimated at 10,000 and in Detroit at 11,000. In Chicago, the movement’s center, an estimated 30,000-to-40,000 workers had gone on strike and there were perhaps twice as many people out on the streets participating in various demonstrations and marches.
• On May 3, striking workers in Chicago met near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant. Union molders at the plant had been locked out since early February and the predominantly Irish-American workers at McCormick had come under attack from Pinkerton guards (Private forces employed by industrialists, especially during the second industrial revolution, to break up, often very forcibly, riots and protests against the terrible living and working conditions, etc) during earlier strike action in 1885. This event, along with the eight-hour militancy of McCormick workers, had gained the strikers some respect and notoriety around the city. By the time of the 1886 general strike, strike-breakers entering the McCormick plant were under protection from a garrison of 400 police officers. Although half of the replacement workers defected to the general strike on May 1, McCormick workers continued to harass strike-breakers as they crossed the picket lines.
• Speaking to a rally outside the plant on May 3, August Spies advised the striking workers to “hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed.” Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point had remained largely nonviolent. When the end-of-the-workday bell sounded, however, a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strike-breakers. Despite calls for calm by Spies, the police fired on the crowd. Two McCormick workers were killed (although some newspaper accounts said there were six fatalities).
• Outraged by this act of police violence, a section of labor organizers (suspected to be the local members of an anarchist organization called ‘International Working Peoples’ Association’) gathered in a meeting at Grief’s Hall that night and decided to hold a protest the following evening near Haymarket Square (also called the Haymarket), which was then a bustling commercial center near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street. The next morning, one of those anarchists, Adolph Fischer, arranged with August Spies, manager of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, to publish fliers calling for a rally the following day at Haymarket Square. Printed in German and English, the fliers claimed that the police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice. The first batch of fliers contain the words Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force! Spies was also invited to speak at the meeting and initially, he agreed, but when he saw the inflammatory phrase (“Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force”) he said he would not speak at the rally unless the words were removed from the flier. Nevertheless, copies of the original flier were already distributed and a few hundred of the fliers were destroyed, and new fliers were printed without the offending words. More than 20,000 copies of the revised flier were distributed.
•Two or three thousand people gathered at Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4, but the crowd was smaller than hoped. The rally began peacefully under a light rain. August Spies, Albert Parsons (the suspected anarchist), and Samuel Fielden spoke to a crowd estimated variously between 600 and 3,000 while standing in an open wagon adjacent to the square on Des Plaines Street. A large number of on-duty police officers watched from nearby. The object of this meeting was to explain the general situation of the eight-hour movement and to throw light upon various incidents in connection with it.
• Following Spies’ speech, the crowd was addressed by Parsons, the Alabama-born editor of the radical English-language weekly The Alarm. Parsons spoke for almost an hour. The last speaker of the evening, the British socialist Samuel Fielden, delivered a brief ten-minute address. Many of the crowd had already left as the weather was deteriorating.
• At about 10:30 pm, just as Fielden was finishing his speech, police arrived en masse, marched towards the speakers’ wagon, and ordered the rally to disperse. Fielden insisted that the meeting was peaceful. But police Inspector John Bonfield proclaimed: I command you (addressing the speaker) in the name of the law to desist and you (addressing the crowd) to disperse. In his testimony before the court about three months later, Fielden recalled: “I do not think I should have spoken one minute longer when I noticed the police. I stopped speaking and Captain Ward came up to me, and he raised his hand —; and I do not remember now whether he had anything in his hand or not —; and he said: ‘I command this meeting, in the name of the People of the State of Illinois, to peaceable disperse.’ I was standing up, and I said ‘Why Captain, this is a peaceable meeting,’ in that tone of voice, in a very conciliatory tone of voice, and he very angrily and defiantly retorted that he commanded it to disperse, and called, as I understood — I didn’t catch those words clearly — he called up the police to disperse it. Just as he turned around in that angry mood I jumped from the wagon and said ‘All right, we will go,’ and jumped to the sidewalk. . . . Then the explosion came.”
• At this time suddenly a homemade bomb, which was thrown into the path of the advancing police, exploded killing policeman Mathias J. Degan and wounding six other officers. Immediately after the bomb blast, as reported, there was an exchange of gunshots between police and demonstrators, but it is very difficult to say what really happened Accounts vary widely as to who fired first and whether any of the demonstrators fired at the police at all. What is not disputed is that in less than five minutes the square was empty except for the casualties. The Chicago Herald (May 5, 1886) described a scene of “wild carnage” and estimated at least fifty dead or wounded civilians lay in the streets.
• In all, seven policemen and at least four workers were killed that day. Another policeman died two years after the incident from complications related to injuries received on that day. About 60 policemen and a large number of workers were wounded in the incident. It is unclear how many workers were wounded since many were afraid to seek medical attention, fearing arrest. They found aid where they could. A very large number of the police were wounded by each other’s revolvers.
• The writer of the Special Presentation, The Dramas of Haymarket, Professor Carl Smith, concludes: “The state’s witnesses maintained that the bombing was instantly succeeded (some said preceded) by gunfire from the crowd, and that the police valiantly held their position and returned fire. But the weight of the testimony and evidence suggests that understandably terrified by the blast, the policemen initiated the gunplay, firing every which way, including into their own ranks. While several of their number besides Degan appear to have been injured by the bomb, most of the casualties seem to have been caused by bullets. About sixty officers were wounded in the riot, as well as an unknown number of civilians. Among the latter were Samuel Fielden and August Spies’s brother Henry, who were both hit by gunfire but managed to get away. . . .Others tried to escape as quickly as they could, scattering in all directions as the police used their pistols and clubs indiscriminately.”
• A harsh anti-union clampdown followed the Haymarket incident. The entire labor and immigrant community, particularly Germans and Bohemians, came under suspicion. Scores of suspects, many only remotely related to the Haymarket affair, were arrested. Casting legal requirements such as search warrants aside, Chicago police squads subjected the labor activists of Chicago to an eight-week shakedown, ransacking their meeting halls and places of business. The emphasis was on the speakers at the Haymarket rally and the newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung.
• Police raids were also carried out on homes and offices of suspected anarchists. A small group of anarchists was discovered to have been engaged in making bombs on the same day as the incident, including round ones like the one used in Haymarket Square. The police assumed that an anarchist had thrown the bomb as part of a planned conspiracy; their problem was how to prove it.
• Among property owners, the press, and other elements of society, a consensus developed that suppression of anarchist agitation was necessary. While for their part, union organizations such as The Knights of Labor and craft unions were quick to disassociate themselves from the anarchist movement and to repudiate violent tactics as self-defeating. Many workers, on the other hand, believed that men of the Pinkerton guards were responsible because of their tactic of secretly infiltrating labor groups and its sometimes violent methods of strike breaking.
• While state terror was going on to suppress workers, there was a massive outpouring of community and business support for the police and many thousands of dollars were donated to funds for their medical care and to assist their efforts.
• On the morning of May 5, they raided the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, arresting its editor August Spies, and his brother (who was not charged). Also arrested were editorial assistant Michael Schwab and Adolph Fischer, a typesetter. A search of the premises resulted in the discovery of the “Revenge Poster” and other evidence considered incriminating by the prosecution.
• On May 7 police searched the premises of Louis Lingg where they found a number of bombs and bomb-making materials. Lingg’s landlord William Seliger was also arrested but cooperated with police and identified 21 years Lingg as a bomb maker and was not charged. An associate of Spies, Balthazar Rau, suspected as the bomber, was traced to Omaha and brought back to Chicago. After interrogation, Rau offered to cooperate with the police. He alleged that the defendants had experimented with dynamite bombs and accused them of having published what he said was a code word, “Ruhe” (“peace”), in the Arbeiter-Zeitung as a call to arms at Haymarket Square.
• By May 14, when it became apparent that Rudolf Schnaubelt, the police’s lead suspect as the bomb thrower, who was arrested twice early but released, had played a significant role in the event, he had fled the country. William Seliger, who had turned state’s evidence and testified for the prosecution, was not charged.
• On June 4 of the same year, seven other suspects, however, were indicted by the grand jury and stood trial for being accessories to the murder of Degan. Of these, only two had been present when the bomb exploded. Newspaper editor August Spies and Samuel Fielden had spoken at the peaceful rally and were stepping down from the speaker’s wagon in compliance with police orders to disperse just before the bomb went off. Two others had been present at the beginning of the rally but had left and been at Zepf’s Hall, an anarchist rendezvous, at the time of the explosion. They were: Arbeiter-Zeitung typesetter Adolph Fischer and the well-known activist Albert Parsons. Parsons, who believed that the evidence against them all was weak, subsequently voluntarily turned himself in, in solidarity with the accused. A third man, Spies’s assistant editor Michael Schwab was arrested since he was speaking at another rally at the time of the bombing (he was also later pardoned). Not directly tied to the Haymarket rally, but arrested because they were notorious for their militant radicalism were George Engel (who was at home playing cards on that day), and Louis Lingg, the hot-headed bomb maker denounced by his associate, Seliger. Another defendant who had not been present that day was Oscar Neebe, an American-born citizen of German descent who was associated with the Arbeiter-Zeitung and had attempted to revive it in the aftermath of the Haymarket incident.
• Of the eight defendants, Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg and Schwab were German-born immigrants; a sixth, Neebe, was a U.S.-born citizen of German descent. Only the remaining two, Parsons and Fielden, born in the U.S. and England, respectively, were of British heritage
• The trial, Illinois vs. August Spies et al., began on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11 of the same year. The trial, which is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history, was conducted in an atmosphere of extreme prejudice by both public and media toward the defendants. It was presided over by partisan Judge Joseph E. Gary who displayed open hostility to the defendants, consistently ruled for the prosecution and failed to maintain decorum. All 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants.
• Selection of the jury was extraordinarily difficult, lasting three weeks, and nearly one thousand people called. All union members and anyone who expressed sympathy toward socialism were dismissed. Frustrated by the hundreds of jurors who were being dismissed, a bailiff was appointed who selected jurors rather than calling them at random. The bailiff proved prejudiced himself and selected jurors who seemed likely to convict based on their social position and attitudes toward the defendants.
• The defense counsel included Sigmund Zeisler, William Perkins Black, William Foster, and Moses Salomon. A motion by the defense to try the defendants separately was denied. The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, argued that since the defendants had not actively discouraged the person who had thrown the bomb, they were therefore equally responsible as conspirators. The jury heard the testimony of 118 people, including 54 members of the Chicago Police Department and the defendants Fielden, Schwab, Spies and Parsons. Albert Parsons’ brother claimed there was evidence linking the Pinkertons to the bomb. This reflected a widespread belief among the strikers.
• Police investigators under Captain Michael Schaack had a lead fragment removed from a policeman’s wounds chemically analyzed. They reported that the lead used in the casing matched the casings of bombs found in Lingg’s home. A metal nut and fragments of the casing taken from the wound also roughly matched bombs made by Lingg. Schaack concluded, on the basis of interviews, that the anarchists had been experimenting for years with dynamite and other explosives, refining the design of their bombs before coming up with the effective one used at the Haymarket.
• Finally all eight defendants were adjudged guilty. Before being sentenced, Neebe told the court that Schaack’s officers were among the city’s worst gangs, ransacking houses and stealing money and watches. Schaack laughed and Neebe retorted, “You need not laugh about it, Captain Schaack. You are one of them. You are an anarchist, as you understand it. You are all anarchists, in this sense of the word, I must say.” Judge Gary sentenced seven of the defendants to death by hanging and Neebe to 15 years in prison.
• The sentencing of the defendants provoked outrage from labor and workers’ movements and their supporters, resulting in protests around the world, and elevating the defendants to the status of martyrs, especially abroad. On the other hand, portrayals of the anarchists as bloodthirsty foreign fanatics in the press inspired widespread public fear and revulsion against the strikers and general anti-immigrant feeling, polarizing public opinion.
• The case was appealed in 1887 to the Supreme Court of Illinois, then to the United States Supreme Court where the defendants were represented by John Randolph Tucker, Roger Atkinson Pryor, General Benjamin F. Butler and William P. Black. The petition for certiorari (Latin word, most commonly used in the US Supreme Court. means a writ or order of a higher court to send all documents in a case of it so that the higher court can review the lower court’s decision) was denied.
• After the appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887. On the eve of his scheduled execution, Lingg committed suicide in his cell with a smuggled blasting cap which he reportedly held in his mouth like a cigar (the blast blew off half his face and he survived in agony for six hours).
• The next day (November 11, 1887) four defendants—Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies—were
taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods. They sang the Marseillaise, then the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members including Lucy Parsons, who attempted to see them for the last time, were arrested and searched for bombs (none were found). According to witnesses, in the moments before the men were hanged, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices “ you strangle today.” In their last words, the men reportedly praised anarchism. Parsons tried to request to speak, but he was cut off when the signal was given to open the trap door. Witnesses reported that the condemned men did not die immediately when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the spectators visibly shaken.
• Which is interesting in this case no actual bomber was ever brought to trial.
• Among supporters of the labor movement in the United States and abroad, the trial was widely believed to have been unfair, and even a serious miscarriage of justice. Prominent people such as novelist William Dean Howells, celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde and playwright George Bernard Shaw strongly condemned it.
• On June 26, 1893, John Peter Altgeld, the progressive governor of Illinois, himself a German immigrant, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab, calling them victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge” and noting that the state “has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.” Altgeld also faulted the city of Chicago for failing to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for repeated use of lethal violence against striking workers. Altgeld’s actions concerning labor were used to defeat his reelection.
• A statue dedicated to the policemen who died as a result of the violence at Haymarket Square was dedicated at the site of the riot in 1889. A monument to the men convicted in connection to the riot was erected in 1893 at Forest Park, Illinois, the cemetery where they are buried.
• The Haymarket affair was a setback for the American labor movement and its fight for the eight-hour day. Yet it also can be seen as strengthening its resistance, especially in Chicago, where trade union activities continued to show signs of growth and vitality, culminating later in 1886 with the establishment of the Labor Party of Chicago.
• In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (A world’s fair held in Paris, France, from 6 May
to 31 October 1889, an event considered symbolic of the beginning of the French Revolution.), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International’s second congress in 1891. The red flag was here created as the symbol that would always remind masses of the blood that the working-class has bleed, and continues to bleed, under the oppressive reign of capitalism.
• In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on “all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.” The congress made it “mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers.”
• An interesting feature is, though May 1 is now celebrated as International Workers’ Day, which is popularly known as May Day, in many countries across the world, in the US it is not celebrated. In the US and its neighboring country Canada, however, the official holiday for workers is Labor Day in September. This day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, who organized the first parade in New York City. After the Haymarket Massacre, US President Grover
Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the ‘‘riot’’s. Thus he moved in 1887 to support the Labor Day that the Knights supported. The official May 1 holiday in the US being observed as Loyalty Day.
• In the United States, efforts to officially switch Labor Day to the international date of May 1 have not been successful. In 1921, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, May 1 was promoted as “Americanization Day” by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups as a counter to communists. It became an annual event, sometimes featuring large rallies. In 1949, Americanization Day was renamed Loyalty Day. In 1958, the U.S. Congress declared Loyalty Day, the U.S. recognition of May 1, a national holiday; that same year, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 Law Day as well.
• Some unions and union locals in the United States — especially in urban areas with strong support for organized labor — have attempted to maintain a connection with more left-wing labor traditions through their own unofficial observances on May 1. Some of the largest examples of this occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s when thousands of workers marched in May Day parades in New York’s Union Square. Smaller far-left groups have also tried to keep the May Day tradition alive with more radical demonstrations in such cities as New York and Seattle, without major union backing.
• In 2006, May 1 was chosen by mostly Latino immigrant groups in the United States as the day for the Great American Boycott, a general strike of undocumented immigrant workers and supporters to protest H.R. 4437, immigration reform legislation which they felt was draconian. From April 10 to May 1 of that year, millions of immigrant families in the U.S. called for immigrant rights, workers' rights and amnesty for undocumented workers. They were joined by socialist and other leftist organizations on May 1.
• In 2007, May 1 was observed organizing a mostly peaceful demonstration in Los Angeles in support of undocumented immigrant workers ended with a widely televised dispersal by police officers.
• In March 2008, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union announced that dockworkers will move no cargo at any West Coast ports on May 1, 2008, as a protest against the continuation of the Iraq War and the diversion of resources from domestic needs.
• For May Day 2010, marches were being planned in many cities uniting immigrant and native workers including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Albany, Chicago and Los Angeles — most of whom protested against the Arizona Senate Bill 1070.
• Members of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ held protests in a number of cities in Canada and the United States on May 1, 2012, to commemorate May Day.
• Though the US, where May Day originated, has not still recognized May 1 as Labour Day, in many a country of the world, the workers sought to make May an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually at dawn. May Day has been an important official holiday in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Cuba and the former Soviet Union.
More historical information on the related topic will be found on other pages.
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