Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America » (Reprint)

James Green is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He grew up outside of Chicago and now lives with his family in Somerville, Massachusetts.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial, that culminated in four controversial executions, and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic twenty-year struggle for the eight-hour workday. Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, Death in the Haymarket is an important addition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.

Publishers Weekly

As Green thoroughly documents, the bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) "radicals and reformers" and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others. Shortly after, labor leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons, along with six more alleged anarchists, stood convicted of murder on sparse evidence. Four of them went to the gallows in 1887; another committed suicide. The surviving three received pardons in 1893. The Knights of Labor, at that time America's largest and most energetic union, received the blame for the riot, despite a lack of conclusive evidence , and many Knights locals migrated to the less radical American Federation of Labor. Labor historian Green (Taking History to Heart) eloquently chronicles all this, producing what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation. Green is particularly strong in documenting the episode's long aftermath, especially the decades-long efforts of the white Parsons's black wife to exonerate her husband. B&w illus. (Mar. 7) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

List of Maps     ix
Prologue     3
For Once in Common Front     15
A Paradise for Workers and Speculators     28
We May Not Always Be So Secure     39
A Liberty-Thirsty People     53
The Inevitable Uprising     69
The Flame That Makes the Kettle Boil     85
A Brutal and Inventive Vitality     102
The International     126
The Great Upheaval     145
A Storm of Strikes     160
A Night of Terror     174
The Strangest Frenzy     192
Every Man on the Jury Was an American     209
You Are Being Weighed in the Balance     231
The Law Is Vindicated     247
The Judgment of History     274
Epilogue     301
Notes     321
Acknowledgments     363
Illustration Credits     367
Index     369