Biography
Louis Lingg was a 22-year-old German-born carpenter and the youngest of the Haymarket defendants. He had not been at the rally and prosecutors did not allege he was — they argued only that he had built bombs. On the night of November 10, 1887, the eve of his scheduled execution, he killed himself in his cell with a smuggled blasting cap, denying the state his execution.
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.
