The eight anarchists were tried in what was one of the biggest kangaroo courts in American History, and seven of the eight were sentenced to death. Four were hanged (brutally with ropes too short, so they slowly choked to death rather than dying from a broken neck). One of the accused committed suicide (or was murdered by police the night before he was to be hanged), and three lived. Of the survivors, two had their sentences commuted to life in prison, and the other was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1893, Governor James Altgeld pardoned the three living convicts, finding that they and the other men had been convicted by "hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge."
To quote Mr. Elmer's article once again: "There was an international outpouring of support for the condemned Haymarket anarchists. Protest meetings, some featuring prominent people, were held in Paris, London, The Hague, Vienna, Brussels, Lyon, and elsewhere. This was, in fact, the etiology of the worldwide observance of May Day. In the United States, however, the Haymarket trial led to reaction and a Red Scare--the first of several Red Scares in U.S. history. Illinois passed a law making it illegal to advocate "destruction of the existing order." Similar laws were passed in other states and at the federal level. Cornell Professor H. C. Adams was one of many who lost his job after speaking out about the injustices of the Haymarket trial. Later Red Scares in the United States included the post-World War I Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920; and, of course, the post-World War II McCarthy era."
It was because of the cultural hysteria with which labor was broadly seen in America that President Grover Cleveland in 1894 moved America's official Labor Day to the first Monday in September.
Worker rights in America reached their peak in the era of FDR's New Deal and the Second World War. During this period, the Wagner Act and its National Labor Relations Board went far in rectifying the unequal distribution of power between employers and their employees. Unfortunately, the rights of labor were in full force for less than ten years.
The struggle for workers' rights is part of the struggle for basic human rights. That struggle, except for the recognition of civil, voting, and privacy rights in the 1960s and early 1970s, has been been steadily losing steam ever since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.
To quote Jefferson Crowe again, "The overt class conflict of the late '70s ended a while ago. Workers have learned to internalize and mask powerlessness, but the internal frustration and struggle remain. Any questions about quality of work life, the animating issue of 1970s unrest, have long since disappeared--despite the flat-lining of wages in the decades since. Today the concerns of the working class have less space in our civic imagination than at any time since the Industrial Revolution."
The concerns of the bottom 95 percent of our population (in terms of income and wealth) must once again become paramount in our country's civic imagination. The wealthiest five percent have demonstrated their resilience to maintain their power in every circumstance except in cases of outright revolution and confiscation of their wealth.
What progressives must do now is to once again struggle for the common good, to help give precedence in our country to our physical and social infrastructure. That will take a concerted effort by the entire spectrum of America's Ninety-Five Percent, from the poorest of our people to our upper-middle class. For many of us, a principal part of that effort must be union mobilization and the strike. We need to reclaim the original spirit of May Day to win back our fair share from the plutocrats of the ownership class and reclaim control of our country.
This article is written in memory of Justice Brandeis, the martyrs of Haymarket, and every worker in America who has ever said no to The Man and paid the price.
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