Every year May 1st is celebrated as a day of workers resistance and solidarity. But the reasons behind this tradition, its origins and its true history are forgotten, hidden in obscurity.
The history begins in the USA in 1884 at convention of the Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions, the predecessor to the American Federation of Labour (congress of reformist US business unions). This convention marked the beginning of the movement to win the 8-hour day (at that time days of 10, 12 or even 16 hours were standard for American workers). The plan was to spend two years persuading employers to adopt the 8-hour day as standard. The campaign was to climax on May 1st 1886, at which time all workers not yet on an 8-hour day would stage a nation-wide strike until the demand was met.
Many employers did not meet the deadline, and accordingly on May 1st great demonstrations took place all across the US. The largest was in Chicago, an estimated 80 000 people marching down Michigan Avenue. The business leaders saw it as a prelude to ‘revolution’ and demanded a crackdown. So when a strike broke out at Chicago's McCormick Reaper plant it was brutally repressed by police, who fired on strikers and their supporters, killing and injuring several workers, on May 3rd 1886.
A mass protest was organised for the following day at the city’s Haymarket Square. Some 20 000 people attended the rally. As the last speaker was finishing it began to rain and a force of 200 police arrived to disperse the crowd. Up until then the meeting had been peaceful, a fact later testified to by the mayor of Chicago in court. But as the police moved in someone threw a bomb at the police, killing one. They opened fire, killing at least four workers and wounding many more. Several more police were killed, whether by workers or ‘friendly fire’ is unknown.
In the aftermath, unions and the homes of labour organisers and anarchists were raided all across the country. The 8-hour movement was derailed, not being enshrined in law until 1935. Eight anarchists were arrested and put on trial. They were not accused of the bomb throwing itself but that by their words and publications they had incited the attack.
Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe, Adolph Fischer, August Spies, Louis Lingg, George Engel and Samuel Fielden were arrested. Albert Parsons evaded arrest, but in a show of amazing solidarity presented himself at the courthouse to be tried with his comrades. The trial was a fraud, the jury packed with people hostile to the cause of Labour. Parsons, Spies, Fischer, Engel and Lingg were sentenced to hang. Lingg escaped the noose by committing suicide in his cell. Schwab, Neebe and Fielden were jailed until June 26th 1894, when Governor John P. Altgeld ruled the trial a miscarriage of justice and pardoned all eight defendants. Scant comfort to the four hanged on November 11th 1887 despite world wide outcry.
A monument to the Martyrs stands in Forest Home Cemetery, Chicago. In 1998, it became a national historical site, the dedication of which was another attempt to obscure the history of the Martyrs. A representative of the US Government and a priest issued pronouncements over the grave of atheists who were hanged by the state they had resisted. The irony was not lost on the anarchists who turned up to show their disgust, only to be reproached and threatened for doing so.
2002 – THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES
If we look around today, we see many of the gains that people like the Chicago Martyrs fought for being swept away, whether it is the privatisation of our public services, the right of workers to do their jobs free from intimidation and attack, the assault on the ‘welfare state’ or the huge rise in casualisation and use of ‘temp’ / agency workers.
If we are to reclaim the true history of May Day, it is most fitting that we do so by renewing the struggles begun by the comrades we commemorate and celebrate today. By fighting PPP / PFI, resisting casualisation and its sometimes fatal effects, resisting attacks on people on benefits, refusing to tolerate the intimidation or murder of our fellow workers by either bosses, the state or paramilitaries, in the ongoing battle against global capitalism, we will fulfil the prophecy of August Spies, whose words are inscribed on the bottom of the Martyrs monument:
“The time will come when our silence will be more powerful
than the voices you strangle today”