Chicago’s rank-and-file workers in the 1880s reviled few industrialists as intensely as they did Cyrus McCormick, Jr. With a finely clipped beard and a steady gaze, he had taken over the McCormick Reaper Works from his father at the age of twenty and ruthlessly began cutting costs. Employing economics lessons freshly learned at Princeton, he ordered a company accountant to calculate labor costs per unit of output. He was presented with a finding that he believed showed shocking inefficiencies. Wages would have to be cut.1
McCormick’s response to the inevitable strikes and worker protests was textbook for the times. Pinkerton men—the private army of choice for captains of industry—were hired to protect replacement workers, smash heads, and generally lend an air of authority to the area around his factory. Appealing directly to Chicago’s mayor, McCormick also made sure the police were ready to lend a hand, including the most notorious labor buster in a police uniform, Captain John Bonfield, who led a detachment of burly police known as “Bonfield’s Bully Boys.” So harsh were McCormick’s tactics that in one round of wage cuts, in April 1885, even the city’s other industrialists felt he was going too far. Meatpacking king Philip Armour pleaded with him to treat his workers better.2McCormick summed up his philosophy to a journalist that spring: “The right to hire any man, white or black, union or nonunion, Protestant or Catholic, is something I will not surrender.”3
Few were surprised that it was outside the gates of a McCormick plant that blood was eventually shed. At midafternoon on Monday, May 3, 1886, some two hundred strikers gathered at the entrance of McCormick’s reaper factory. Tensions were running high on both sides. On May Day, hundreds of thousands of workers around the nation had walked off the job and joined massive parades in support of an eight-hour workday, two hours shorter than the average.4 In Chicago alone, sixty thousand marched down Michigan Boulevard and brought the city’s business to a standstill.
As the bell signaled the end of the shift, replacement workers who had taken up the vacant jobs began to file out. Angry words were exchanged, and strikers threw rocks at the scabs, who retreated back inside the factory compound. Summoned by watchmen, scores of police on foot and in clattering paddy wagons raced to the scene. Much confusion remains about what happened next, but when calls to disperse were met with taunts and jeers, the police unholstered their pistols and began firing into the mass of strikers. A number were wounded and two were likely killed, though the number could never be confirmed.5
Anarchists, conditioned to interpret any whiff of violence as a sign that revolution was finally at hand, sprang to life. Radical newspaper editors hastily penned scathing attacks on the police, inflating, perhaps intentionally, the number of dead. They circulated some 2,500 copies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung carrying the headline REVENGE! WORKINGMEN! TO ARMS! Some editions carried the code word Ruhe—German for “rest”—in an upper corner as a signal to workingmen to make ready to bomb police stations. Still other pamphlets were hastily handed out around the front gates of the McCormick Reaper Works.6 A demonstration was planned for the evening of May 4, 1886, near Haymarket Square, not far from McCormick’s.
Located near Chicago’s meatpacking and lumber districts, the Haymarket Square was the sort of earthy venue that appealed to anarchists. Produce was sold from pushcarts during the day, and the rank odor of rotting vegetables and horse manure hung in the air at night. The rally on the fourth would not take place in the square proper, rather in an alley just off it, behind the brick wall of Crane Brothers metal products factory. A wooden wagon pulled to one side would serve as the speakers’ platform, dimly illuminated by a single gaslight. By around eight o’clock, some two to three thousand people had arrived. They were eager to hear Parsons, the main draw of the evening.
The mood around Haymarket that night was tense, so much so that Chicago’s mayor, Carter H. Harrison, decided to swing by on his way home from city hall. He made his presence known by repeatedly striking a match, as if to light a cigar, illuminating his bearded visage. Although undeniably one of the city’s power brokers—the former real estate magnate wore silk underwear and smoked fine Havana cigars—Harrison sympathized with the plight of the workingman, or at least found it politically advantageous to do so, and had appointed socialists to important city posts. That he could circulate in this crowd was a testament to the respect he had earned. “I want the people to know that their Mayor is here,” he said.7
Possibly because the mayor was on hand, or just as likely because he lacked the energy for a fiery speech after a long day, Parsons struck a moderate tone, sticking to well-trod calls for workers’ rights. Addressing the crowd for almost an hour, he championed a shorter working day and described the miners he had recently met in Pennsylvania and Ohio. “Do you know that the military are under arms, and a Gatling gun is ready to mow you down?” he asked. “Is this Germany or Russia or Spain?” One voice called out from the crowd: “It looks like it.” Yet Parsons also spoke against murdering those whom the crowd blamed for their problems. “To kill an individual millionaire or capitalist would be like killing a flea upon a dog,” he said, because others would simply take the dead man’s place.8
Harrison, relieved to hear there would be little new from Parsons this night, concluded that the evening would pass without incident and walked to the Desplaines Street police station. He met old blood-and-guts Bonfield and told him that he didn’t have anything to worry about. From there, the mayor swung his large frame into the creaking saddle of his white horse and left for dinner at his mansion on Ashland Avenue.
Parsons finished up around ten o’clock. Hopping down from the wagon, he took a seat with his wife and two children, Albert and Lulu, on the back of another cart and waited for his friend Samuel Fielden to finish the evening program. Strong gusts of wind swirled scraps of paper in the air and violently rattled street signs. Lifting his eyes upward, Parsons could see a large dark cloud, pregnant with moisture, blowing in from the north. Hurrying to escape what looked like a downpour, Parsons gathered up his family and walked half a block north toward Zepf’s Hall, a tavern he knew well at the corner of Lake and Desplaines streets. It was one of the last carefree moments the family would spend together.
With Parsons gone, Fielden rushed through the end of his address, taking on an edgier tone. Newspaper artists would later depict him wearing a long beard and heavy coat, leaning forward, pumping his fist in the air. He exhorted the remaining die-hard listeners, “You have nothing more to do with the law except to lay hands on it and throttle it until it makes its last kick.… Keep your eye upon it, throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it—to impede its progress.”9
Two plainclothes officers who had decided to brave the weather scowled at such talk. They had stayed precisely to ensure that violence and lawbreaking were not championed. Slipping from the crowd, they rushed along the cobblestone street to the police station and reported to Bonfield that an inflammatory speech was under way.10
Orders were barked out in the halls of the station. Captain William Ward and seven lieutenants gathered 176 police officers, laid on that night from around the city, and formed them into ranks. Not knowing what to expect, the men tugged caps down on their foreheads, pulled their blue jackets over their shoulders, affixed double rows of brass buttons and assembled in an alley next to the station. In double time, they moved down Desplaines Street toward the rally, filling the street from side to side.
By now the gathering had melted away to only a few hundred people, and Fielden was wrapping up, literally saying “In conclusion” when someone shouted that the police were coming. Receding to either side of the street, the crowd allowed Captain Ward to lead his men close enough to Fielden’s wagon to touch it with his club.
The rain now started to fall. The wind whipped stinging drops against the faces of the officers and soaked into Fielden’s beard. Captain Ward bellowed, “In the name of the people of the State of Illinois, I command this meeting immediately and peaceably to disperse.”
Fielden answered, “Why, captain, this is a peaceable meeting.” An awkward moment of silence passed before Ward repeated his command and ordered his men forward. “All right, we will go,” Fielden said, and climbed down from the wagon.11
Then someone, history will never know who, struck a match and lit the wick on a round, lead object a bit larger than a baseball. As the flame sparked to life, the man cocked his arm. Witnesses would later say they could see red sparks twinkling in the dark night and that it made a “spluttering” sound as it arched toward the second row of police officers. Lieutenant J. P. Stanton, a Civil War veteran, recognized immediately what was happening. “Look out!” he shouted. “Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell.”12
Mayor Harrison had just undressed and was about to slip between the covers when the faint thump of something that sounded like an explosion reverberated through the house. He first thought it might have been a thunderclap. But then he heard fainter rattling, what sounded like shooting. He quickly threw his clothes back on and got his horse ready.
Comfortable in the warmth of Zepf’s Hall, Parsons was holding a schooner of beer and looking out the window when he saw the explosion, a “white sheet of light” followed immediately by a booming roar. “What is it?” cried his friend Lizzie Holmes.
“I don’t know,” Parsons replied. “Maybe the Illinois regiments have brought up their Gatling guns.” An instant later, bullets whistled past the bar’s open door and anguished men rushed inside.13
Made from dynamite packed with metal projectiles, what the newspapers called an “infernal machine,” the bomb created an explosion strong enough to shatter windows and leave a small crater in the street. Whether from the concussion of the blast or the shrapnel itself, several officers were knocked to the pavement. Patrolman Mathias J. Degan, a widower and member of the force for just a year and a half, fell hard on the wet cobblestones. A piece of shrapnel had severed an artery in his left leg, and thick blood soaked his uniform, hardly visible in the darkness but sticky to his touch. Other officers staggered about, groping at wounds and crying for help.14
The policemen still standing responded with blind rage. Unholstering their Colt revolvers, they fired madly into the darkness in a scene of “wild carnage” as The Chicago Herald would call it. “Fire and kill all you can!” shouted Lieutenant James Bowler, who emptied his revolver and then reloaded and began shooting again. Police fired as rapidly as their fingers could squeeze the triggers. Inspector Bonfield seized a second revolver from the hand of a fallen officer and fired with both hands into the darkness.15Shadowy figures collapsed on the sidewalks and street, blood streaming from their wounds. The crack of pistol fire nearly drowned out cries for help. “Oh God, I’m shot,” “Please take me home,” “Take me to the hospital.” “Oh, God! Oh, God! Save us.” Bleeding workers crawled on all fours to escape the line of fire; others who could walk limped into shops for help. Some fled into bars, barricading themselves with overturned tables or hiding behind counters.
Whether anyone in the crowd fired back at the police is a matter of conjecture. Almost surely, some carried pistols. Yet eyewitnesses would later say they didn’t see anyone other than the police actually firing their weapons. In the space of only a few minutes, around one hundred people were hit. The exact toll of civilian casualties remains unknown, but historian Paul Avrich estimates that seven or eight were killed, and thirty to forty were wounded.16
The police casualties were just as serious. Although Degan was the only one killed that night, six other officers would die of their wounds in the coming weeks. Some sixty policemen were injured, many apparently the result of their own fire.17 The next day, pools of dried blood still caked the street for an entire block.
At Zepf’s, Parsons’s first thoughts were for his family. With shooting still echoing in the street, he hurried his wife and children, as well as a group of friends, into a back room where they huddled in darkness for a quarter of an hour, straining their ears for sounds from outside. Whatever had happened, Parsons’s instincts told him that he would likely be blamed. With considerable trepidation, he led his family out into the rain-slickened streets. Going home was unthinkable. In a matter of hours the police would come pounding at his door. Instead, Parsons would go home with Holmes to her house in Geneva, a suburb of Chicago, not likely to be investigated for a few days at least. All knew that the situation was grave. Parsons turned to his wife with a “sad, almost prophetic, tone” and tenderly whispered, “Kiss me, Lucy. We do not know when we will meet again.”18