August Spies' Autobiography (1887)

About this record

Autobiography of August Spies — German-American anarchist, labor organizer, editor of the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung, and one of the Haymarket Martyrs hanged by the State of Illinois on November 11, 1887 for the May 4, 1886 Haymarket Affair bombing. Spies wrote the autobiography in his cell at the Cook County jail in 1887 prior to his execution, alongside the autobiographies of his co-defendants Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and Louis Lingg. A founding document of the U.S. anarchist political-prisoner tradition and an account of the 1886 eight-hour-day labor movement that culminated at Haymarket.