On the evening of May 4, 1886, a bomb went off in a drizzle at Haymarket Square, Chicago, at the end of a peaceful rally for the eight-hour day. Seven policemen and at least four workers died — most of them, the record quietly concedes, by police gunfire in the panic that followed. The state needed authors for the bomb. It chose eight men who organized workers, edited newspapers, and gave speeches.
None of the eight were proven to have thrown it. The prosecution argued, and the court accepted, that their words had thrown it — that to publish anarchist papers and to speak at the meeting was conspiracy enough. The jury pool was assembled by a special bailiff who bragged about packing it. Four hanged. One died in his cell. Three were pardoned in 1893 by Governor Altgeld, who wrote that the trial had been unfair — and spent the rest of his career paying for saying so.
What the file records
The dead of Haymarket became May Day. Not the maypole — the international workers’ day, marked on every continent, born from an American trial the American calendar tries not to remember. The men the state filed as conspirators are filed here as what they were: organizers of the eight-hour day, editors, machinists, printers, a Methodist preacher turned socialist.
This file keeps their names in circulation: Spies. Parsons. Fielden. Schwab. Fischer. Engel. Lingg. Neebe. The archive holds what the gallows could not close.