May Day and the Haymarket Affair: The Real Origin of International Workers' Day

May 1 is International Workers’ Day because of four days in Chicago in 1886, not because of anything to do with spring. On May 1 that year, somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 workers across the United States walked off the job to demand an eight-hour day. Three days later, at a rally called to protest police violence against strikers, someone threw a bomb that killed a Chicago police officer. Eight men went on trial for it. Prosecutors never identified the bomb thrower and convicted all eight anyway, and the state hanged four of them. Three years later, European socialists put an international workers’ holiday on that same date, on purpose. The United States, where all of this happened, moved its own labor holiday to September instead.

Why May 1

The date was a deadline unions had set two years earlier, not a coincidence noticed after the fact. In 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the body that reorganized later that decade into the American Federation of Labor, resolved that eight hours would count as a legal day’s work everywhere in the country, effective May 1, 1886. Local unions spent the two years in between organizing toward that date the way any strike deadline works: signing up members, printing leaflets, and daring employers to ignore it once it came. The fuller history of that fight is at /causes/eight-hour-day. What matters for May Day is that the date sat circled on a labor calendar well before anyone in Chicago knew what the week would become.

May 1, 1886

The deadline landed, and workers walked. Estimates for the day range from 300,000 to 500,000 people on strike or in the streets nationwide, with major turnouts in New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Chicago carried the largest share: 30,000 to 40,000 workers off the job, with as many as 80,000 people in the demonstrations over the following days. The city’s anarchist left already had its own press agitating specifically for the eight-hour day: August Spies edited the German-language Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Albert Parsons edited The Alarm. Neither man expected the week to end the way it did.

McCormick, May 3

The trouble started at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, where locked out workers had been picketing for weeks. As the end-of-shift bell rang on May 3 and strikebreakers left the plant, a confrontation broke out at the gates. Police fired into the crowd and killed two strikers; some newspapers at the time reported as many as six dead. Spies witnessed the shooting and said later he recognized it for what it was: “this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement.” That night his paper printed a circular headlined “Revenge,” calling workers to a mass meeting the next evening at Haymarket Square.

Haymarket Square, May 4

The Haymarket meeting drew a modest crowd, somewhere between 600 and 3,000 people, some drifting off as rain threatened. Spies, Parsons, and Samuel Fielden spoke against the backdrop of the McCormick shooting. Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison, watched part of it, decided the meeting was peaceful, and told police inspector John Bonfield to send the reserves home. Bonfield did not. As Fielden wound down his speech, Bonfield marched 176 officers into the square and ordered the crowd to disperse. Someone in the dark, never identified, threw a homemade bomb into the advancing police line. It killed Officer Mathias Degan almost instantly and set off a chaotic exchange of gunfire. Seven police officers eventually died along with at least four civilians; the historian Paul Avrich concluded that most of the police deaths came not from the bomb but from the police’s own bullets, fired in the dark and into each other.

A trial that never named the bomb thrower

Police rounded up Chicago’s radical leadership within days, prosecuting them not for evidence tying any one of them to the bomb but for years of writing and speaking in favor of revolution against the state. State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell told the jury directly that identifying the actual bomb thrower was not the point:

The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it?

Jury selection began June 21, 1886, the day Parsons walked into the courtroom and surrendered rather than stay a fugitive. On August 20 the jury convicted all eight. Seven of them, Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Schwab, Fischer, Engel, and Lingg, were sentenced to death. Oscar Neebe, who had not even been at Haymarket Square that night and whose only tie to the case was helping run the Arbeiter-Zeitung’s business office, got fifteen years at hard labor. The Illinois Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court both let the verdict stand.

Two days in November 1887

The executions were set for November 11, 1887. The day before, Louis Lingg, the one defendant with any real evidence of bomb-making tied to him, killed himself in his cell with a smuggled dynamite cap. That same day Governor Richard Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s death sentences to life in prison; both men had petitioned for mercy, and even the trial judge wrote to Oglesby on their behalf. Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel refused to sign the petition the law required for clemency, on principle, choosing to hang rather than ask. All four died the next morning. Parsons’s widow, Lucy Parsons, spent the rest of her life defending his name and building her own career as an organizer and speaker.

Altgeld says so, in writing

Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe served nearly six years before Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned all three, on June 26, 1893. He knew exactly what it would cost him. Before he signed, he told his friend Clarence Darrow:

If I conclude to pardon those men it will not meet with the approval that you expect; let me tell you that from that day I will be a dead man politically.

He signed anyway and published an 18,000-word public accounting of the trial that named names, including the special bailiff who had picked the jury, a man witnesses swore had bragged he was managing the case and knew the defendants “are going to be hanged as certain as death.” On the fact the whole case rested on, Altgeld wrote plainly:

The State has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatever between the defendants and the man who did throw it.

Of Neebe, who had never set foot at Haymarket Square, he wrote that the evidence against him “utterly fails to prove even the shadow of a case.” Altgeld’s prediction came true. The press branded him an anarchist sympathizer, he lost his 1896 re-election bid, and he never held office again.

How Chicago’s May 1 became the world’s

The Second International, the federation of socialist and labor parties founded at a Paris congress in July 1889, resolved to hold one great international demonstration for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890, the same date the American Federation of Labor had already set for a renewed U.S. push. On May 1, 1890, demonstrations happened across the United States and most of Europe, the single date proved too strong to stay a one-off, and the International formally made it an annual observance at its Brussels congress the following year. The majority of countries in the world now mark May 1 as an official workers’ holiday. Every one of those marches traces back to the same four days in Chicago and the pardon that came seven years later.

The holiday America moved

The country where all of this happened does not mark it on May 1. New York’s Central Labor Union held the first American Labor Day parade on September 5, 1882, years before Haymarket, and credit for proposing it is still split between two men who happened to share a surname, Peter J. McGuire and Matthew Maguire. Cleveland was on record as early as 1887 favoring a September date over May 1, worried a May holiday would become a running commemoration of Haymarket. By the time he had the chance to make it federal law, the Second International had already made May 1 the world’s date, and he still chose September. On June 28, 1894, he signed the bill making Labor Day a federal holiday in September, while Eugene Debs’s Pullman boycott was still shutting down freight and mail across the country. Federal troops went into Chicago to break that strike days later. The country where the story happened takes Labor Day off the first Monday in September, without much mention of why. Most of the rest of the world still takes off May 1, the month it actually happened.