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THE HAYMARKET AFFAIR & THE ANTI-ANARCHIST ERA (1886–1903)
After a bomb killed police at a Chicago labor rally on May 4, 1886, eight anarchists were convicted with no evidence linking them to the device; August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887, and Louis Lingg died in his cell. Eugene V. Debs was jailed during the 1894 Pullman Strike, and after Leon Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901, Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 — the first federal law to bar immigrants purely for their political beliefs.