Criminalware - The Parsons, American Anarchists
- makermlsmith
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
The anarchist movement fought to improve the lives of workers around the world. In 1867, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law aiming for an eight-hour workday, but it contained loopholes that allowed employers to negotiate for longer hours, making it largely ineffective. In Chicago, many employers forced workers to sign waivers of the law as condition of employment. Eventually, the workers had enough and began to organize.
On May 1, 1886, 80,000 workers lay down their tools and marched up Michigan Avenue. Hundreds of police, private security and militia groups monitored the march, and the day ended peacefully. But on Monday, May 3, the peaceful scene turned violent when the Chicago police attacked and killed picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Plant. A protest meeting was planned on Haymarket Square for the next day, May 4. It was a peaceful gathering, smaller than expected because the original speakers failed to appear.
At the last minute, August Spies the editor of the English-language anarchist newspaper, The Alarm, and Albert Parsons, the leader of the American branch of the International Working People's Association (I.W.P.A.), came to speak to the small crowd that was gathered. They had been attending a nearby meeting of sewing workers organized by Albert's wife Lucy Parsons and her fellow labor organizer Lizzie Holmes.
Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago who was sympathetic to the labor movement, was in the crowd, making himself as conspicuous as possible: "I want the people to know their mayor is here." When Harrison left the rally, he assured Police Captain "Black Jack" Bonfield that the meeting posed no threat of violence. The Haymarket meeting was almost over and only about two hundred people remained when Captain Bonfield sent in his troops.
Then someone threw the first dynamite bomb ever used in peacetime history of the United States. The police panicked, and in the darkness shot their own men as well as workers. When the dust settled, seven police officers were dead and sixty were injured, many of them hit by wild shots from fellow policemen.
In the following days, labor leaders were rounded up, houses were entered without search warrants and union newspapers were closed down. Eventually eight men, representing a cross section of the labor movement were selected to be tried, including Albert Parsons.
The trial was a sham. The defendants were convicted by a prejudiced judge and jury because of their political views, rather than on the basis of solid evidence that linked them to the bombing. Most of the defendants were not even present at Haymarket when the bombing took place, but they were convicted and hanged anyway.
Albert Parsons was so sure of his innocence, he returned to Chicago from Waukesha, Wisconsin, to stand in solidarity with his comrades. Parsons likely could have had his sentence commuted to life in prison rather than death, but he refused to write the letter asking the governor to do so, as this would be an admission of guilt. Albert Parson died by hanging at the age of 34.
Albert wrote a final letter to The Alarm, in which he stated the following:
"And now to all I say: Falter not. Lay bare the inequities of capitalism; expose the slavery of law; proclaim the tyranny of government; denounce the greed, cruelty, abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage-slaves."
In June of 1893, Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the 3 men still alive and condemned the entire judicial system that had allowed this injustice. The real issues of the Haymarket Affair were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to free assembly, the right to a fair trial by a jury of peers and the right of workers to organize and fight for things like the eight-hour day.
After Albert's death, Lucy Parsons continued her activism as an anarchist and social reformer. She spoke across the US and in England to support the working class and democratic socialism. She died in a house fire at the age of 92.
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