Haymarket Affair

The Haymarket Affair was an event that captured the nation's attention in the final years of the 1880's. The following is an example of the kind of bomb which was thrown at the police unit attempting to break up the demonstration at Haymarket Square on the night of May 4th, 1886 in Chicago. The bomb wounded sixty officers and killed one, Mathias Degan.

In the trial that followed, eight men connected with anarchist and labor advocacy publications were tried and convicted as accessories to the murder of Degan. Their conviction largely hinged on evidence that they were the ideological heads of a general conspiracy to overthrow the existing social order. The only man of American birth among the convicted was Albert Parsons, who volunteered in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and was connected to the mainstream labor advocacy union the Knights of Labor. Here is a picture of his wife, Lucy Parsons a woman of Native American, Mexican and Black ancestry who understandably petitioned strongly for her husband's pardon.

While there would be no pardon for Parsons, in 1893, the liberal Governor of Illinois, John Altgeld, did pardon three of the original eight defendants implicated in the Haymarket Affair. The following cartoon depicts one opinion that Altgeld had put the social order in harm's way by granting clemency to the anarchists.