The Pullman Strike
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| On May Day 1886, the workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hope of gaining a shorter work day. The marchers' slogan was, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will."
On May 3, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out, resulting in the police and Pinkertown Detective Agency security guards shooting several workers; one person was killed and several others injured. The following day, May 4, a large rally was planned by anarchist leaders to protest alleged police brutality. A crowd of 20,000 demonstrators was anticipated at Haymarket Square, where area farmers traditionally sold their produce. Rain and unseasonable cold kept the numbers down to between 1,500 to 2,000. Eyewitnesses later described a "peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs when authorities – against the instructions of the mayor - began to move in and disperse the crowd." Suddenly a pipe bomb was thrown into the police ranks and exploded, followed by pandemonium and an exchange of gunfire. Eleven people were killed including seven police officers. The police fired into the crowd and killed four. More than a hundred were injured. A period of panic and overreaction followed in Chicago. Hundreds of works were detained; some were beaten during interrogation and a number of forced confessions was obtained. The Chicago Tribune railed against "the McCormick insurrectionists." Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31 suspects. Eventually, eight men, "all with foreign sounding names" as one newspaper put it, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder. No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb. Several of the suspects had not attended the rally. But all eight were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged and a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the Illinois Governor, Richard Ogelsby, who had privately expressed doubts "that any of the men were guilty of the crime," commuted the remaining men's death sentences to life in prison. Illinois's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men. A German born immigrant who had enlisted in the Union army at the age of 15, Altgeld declared, "The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice. And the truth is that the great multitudes annually arrested are poor, the unfortunate, the young and the neglected. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence." After granting the pardon, he said to the famous attorney Clarence Darrow: "Let me tell you that from this day, I am a dead man, politically." There was an immediate outcry. The Washington Post asked rhetorically: "What would one expect from a man like Altgeld, who is, of course, an alien himself?" The Chicago Tribune stated that the governor "does not reason like an American, does not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one." Widespread fear of unionism and other radicalism influenced most of the public to support harsh treatment of the accused. In 1889, the American Federation of Labor delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy, the right of workers to organize, and to memorialize the eight "Martyrs of Chicago." T  he Haymarket Riot was a signal event in the early history of American labor. It was largely responsible for delaying acceptance of the eight-hour day, as workers deserted the K.O.L. and moved toward the more moderate American Federation of Labor. For many years the police at Haymarket Square were regarded as martyrs and the workers as violent anarchists; that view moderated to a large extent in later times.
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