May Day, Haymarket, and the struggle for the eight-hour workday

Southern Illinoisan, May 6, 2014

 The events have a contemporary feel: business magnates earning fabulous wealth which, in turn, exacerbates the era’s widespread political corruption; large numbers of workers displaced by economic and technological changes; waves of immigrants prompting debates over whether such outsiders could be absorbed into the larger American society; a public fearful of conspirators in their midst planning destruction and mayhem; fanatics advocating violence as a political weapon; and—in the aftermath of the conflagration—a widespread disregard for basic civil liberties.

The setting, though, is the 1880s when the issue of an eight-hour workday sparked the labor movement. In the 1880s, laborers worked an average ten hours a day, six days a week. While business leaders argued a reduction in hours would destroy American competitiveness, the call for a 48-hour work week resonated widely with workers, and labor leaders called for a one-day general strike in support of the issue to take place on May 1, 1886.

Tens of thousands of workers responded to the call for a general strike in such cities as New York, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Detroit, while in racially-segregated Louisville 6,000 black and white workers marched together.

The biggest response came in Chicago where around 50,000 workers walked off the job. The movement in Chicago largely was led by the Central Labor Union, an organization that found many immigrant anarchists among its leadership, though the most prominent was Albert Parsons, a Texas-born former Confederate soldier turned Reconstruction-era Republican turned labor organizer. Within this context, some anarchists engaged in a great deal of loose talk about the use of dynamite. In a period when business could increasingly count on the armed support of the police, National Guard and U.S. military to defend its interests in labor struggles, anarchists saw dynamite as an opportunity to level the field. In Parsons’ words, “Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal.”

Business interests responded by setting aside their competitive tendencies and drawing together against the common threat of an increasingly organized working class. The anarchists’ talk of dynamite fueled a growing trepidation, especially among Chicago’s middle- and upper-classes, of secret anarchist cabals. Stereotypes of crazed, wild-eyed, bomb-throwing, immigrant militants proliferated. But, as historian James Green argues, “the city’s most powerful men were less afraid of bomb talk than they were of the large working-class following the anarchist-led Central Labor Union had attracted in various immigrant districts.”

Three days later, on the evening of May 4, as dozens of police moved in on horseback to break up a labor rally at Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb, killing seven policemen and at least three civilians in the ensuing melee. The response of the political establishment and business community was immediate. Police cracked down widely on labor activists, and eight anarchists, including Parsons and seven German immigrants, were arrested and convicted on a loose conspiracy charge even though none of them was alleged to have had anything to do with making or throwing the bomb.

Within a few years of the original May Day, the holiday would be taken up by the American Federation of Labor, as well as by workers’ organizations around the world and become a day to celebrate labor solidarity. And in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, this holiday with its origins in the American struggle for the eight-hour day would ironically devolve into a day in which Soviet leaders paraded their military weaponry through Red Square.

Especially given the success of the original May Day, the Haymarket bombing had a disastrous impact on the eight-hour movement—which American workers would not fully achieve until the later labor struggles of the 1930s—as well as for the labor movement in general.

But as historian David Roediger has said, by choosing May 1, labor leaders “identified with a long-established connection of that date with renewal, joy and change.” The date signified May Poles, warmth and new growth.

In today’s climate of austerity, wherein business leaders resist even a small increase in minimum wage, it may be useful to remember an era in which workers connected the seasonal rebirth of spring to their renewed desire for control of their own lives. As they sang in the 1880s, “We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught/ But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought/ We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers;/ We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours.”