Biography
August Spies was a German-born anarchist labor organizer and editor of the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung, the leading German-language anarchist newspaper in the United States. He had spoken at the McCormick rally on May 3 and convened the Haymarket meeting the following day. Hanged on November 11, 1887, his last words from the gallows — 'There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today' — became a labor-movement touchstone.
On May 4, 1886, a rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square in support of an eight-hour workday and against the police killing of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper plant the previous day was nearing its end when an unknown assailant threw a bomb into a column of police advancing to disperse the crowd. The explosion and the police gunfire that followed killed seven officers and at least four civilians. Eight Chicago anarchist organizers were arrested and tried together for the bombing, although no evidence ever connected most of them to the device or the bomb-thrower. The 1886 trial, presided over by Judge Joseph Gary, was widely condemned at the time and since as a political prosecution. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887; one died in his cell the night before the executions. Three years later, on June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three surviving prisoners and issued a long public statement excoriating the trial as a miscarriage of justice. The case helped establish May 1 as International Workers' Day around the world.
