Foreword / Editor’s Note
I originally intended to write a short reflection this past May Day, and most of you received an earlier draft that was rescinded because immediately after I sent it I could tell it was incomplete. This draft is not perfect either, but I do think it at least better contextualizes its central question as compassionately grounded and better answers it.
Since the prior release, these are the main adjustments I made:
I read a broader range of primary and secondary sources that I link at the end of this email, correcting my own sense of the history and, in at least a couple cases, correcting Wikipedia’s as well.
I designed, deployed and analyzed my own global survey of thousands of respondents about May Day associated policies, much of which is referenced only briefly.
I traveled to a few key cities relevant to the Haymarket Affair’s origins, trying to understand the narrative at a human scale.
I added more info on historical context, included more background on the key characters, deepened the existing timeline, added narrative analysis and conclusions, and all-in-all over quintupled the length of the essay.
I know this is mainly a space where I share intermittent updates with friends and family, so please feel free to just skim headers and/or pictures. You can think of this as an optional draft that I’m sharing with you, and I will likely revise this to share on future May Day(s), so I am open to hearing likes/dislikes.
You may have feedback like “don’t use the word anagnorisis so much” or “stop spreading disinformation about the Chicago flag”. The only feedback I won’t incorporate is criticism of the historical present tense. Spellcheck really hates it. And clicking “ignore” when it gets triggered is a small way I assert my humanity and fight the rapid technological erosion of the storied craft of storytelling.
…And do you know who else was futilely resisting rapid technological dehumanization of their labor? (That’s as good a segue as we’re going to get, I think.) Skim away and you will find out, dear reader!
Have a happy May Day, no matter what month you find yourself in.
In Your Inbox,
Harry
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Happy Waning Day(s) of Summer!1
While most of my readers are friends and family in the US and Canada who wrapped up their Labor Day Weekends this month, I’m currently in Istanbul where they observed a completely different holiday that same weekend. Turkey instead celebrated Victory Day, which commemorates their victory at the Battle of Dumlupınar in 1922 which set the stage for the end of the 623-year-old Ottoman Empire. There’s something kind of cool about a country celebrating the end of their own empire.2
Turkey celebrates Labor Day too, of course, but they did it back on May 1st. Indeed, in most of the world's countries, Labor Day is celebrated on May 1st. And that’s not a plurality or driven by many small countries; May 1st is Labor Day for a full-on majority of people on the planet. Over two-thirds of the world’s population live in a country that celebrates Labor Day on May 1st. The explainer map on Wikipedia is so steeped in deep socialist red for May-celebrants, it has the aesthetic of a Reagan-era war game rapidly approaching checkmate.
This map in some ways overrepresents American counterprogramming to May Day:
The UK is engoldened to remind us that even though its “Early May Bank Holiday” overlaps with May Day septennually, it does NOT identify as May Day.
Australia’s green coloring is somewhat misleading, as their provinces independently choose when to celebrate labor day, with Queensland and the Northern Territory in the same; the Northern Territory’s holiday is explicitly called May Day.
Though Denmark and Greenland are gray on this map, the Scandinavian nation and its territory tend to follow the rest of the EU and give workers at least a halfday.
This map is from 2020, when Afghanistan was still US-occupied and there was no celebration of May Day; after American withdrawal from the conflict, Afghanistan seems to celebrate May Day again.
But putting aside the scheduling disagreement for a moment, it’s remarkable to note the widespreadness of Labor Day celebrations as a whole. Truly global holidays like this are actually somewhat of a rarity. If we gave out awards for holidays here at Middling Content, a “Middley” for Most Shared Holiday, how close would Labor Day be to earning that prize?
Middling Content Holiday Rankings
As I wrote about on the Vernal Equinox of 2024, the purpose of this Middling Content project is to reflect on the media's function as a grand societal centerpiece that provides a platform for discourse. A healthy media environment serves the public by providing a common “middle”, connecting people across lines of difference through shared touchstones. Individuals can know they’re consuming a healthy media diet when they have something to talk about in the elevator -- astrological phenomena, local sports and the weather. Such was easier in the days of a small handful of TV and radio stations; when the media fails to provide a common “middle”, people are more isolated and strangers feel further away.
And so when I think about how to rank the holidays, I’m influenced by the question “If not the people then who?”, a 1966 speech given by a man who built and shaped the organization where I learned the trade of media market research. In it, Art Nielsen Jr defends TV ratings with a take reminiscent of Churchill’s “Democracy is the worst form of government… except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. He invites us to consider alternative approaches to evaluating media, and arrives at the conclusion that indeed a people-centered approach is the optimal method to select programming available to the country.
So what holidays win in a raw count of government-directed observation? I collected data on each country and aggregated it to create the following ranker:
It’s perhaps a surprise that the most common holiday, with over 4 in 5 people on the planet in a municipality that honors it, is Labor Day AKA May Day AKA International Workers’ Day. It is bigger than Christmas by over a billion people. And it even ekes out New Year’s Day, that old holiday that gives us an annual opportunity to think about the Roman Empire that established it. Over four times as many people live in a region that recognizes May Day / Worker’s Day than speak the most-spoken language English (~6.8B vs ~1.5B).
Experiences that unite more than half the planet are phenomenally rare, so May Day is really something to marvel at. And indeed I have been marveling at it -- all summer long, from Labour Day (Intl) through Labor Day (US). And I suppose it all started when I decided to make my way into the American Interior and settle myself down in Wyoming.
Some Stats on States & Stadia
About a year ago, when I started centering my life in Wyoming to strongarm myself into getting more serious about writing and entrepreneurship, I was seeking out analogies to comprehend the state’s population. On one end, there are countries with roughly its population, such as Bhutan -- another mountainous landlocked polity that I visited last year. On the other, fewer people live in Wyoming than saw the Eras tour in London. (100k fewer! It’s not even close!)
A series of stadium events would be a great way to meet all the citizens of Wyoming. A dozen meetings with a dozen people each day, you could meet everyone in about 11 years assuming no days off. Too long! While Wyoming’s largest venue, War Memorial Stadium, is only a third the size of London’s Wembley stadium (30k vs 90k), you could introduce yourself to all ~587k Wyomingans in 20 gatherings. Maybe a matinee and a couple evening shows back-to-back?
This is all theoretical, of course. I have a strict “no friends in Wyoming” policy that I’ve been abiding by. I’m confident friends here would disrupt what I see as my life’s “mid-meal sorbet course”. For this sensory deprivation chamber to provide its productivity gains, I must be disciplined. But in theory: if I did want to say hello to everyone in Wyoming in a series of stadium events, and I were not restricting myself to only locally available mass assembly infrastructure, where would be the best place to hold it?
According to Wikipedia, the largest stadium in the world is Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat as of 2020, a year when it would find itself underutilized; with a capacity of 132,000 one could feasibly handle the population of Wyoming in four events. Wikipedia excludes stadia that no longer host athletics, so Prague’s “velký strahovský stadion” is ruled out (capacity 250k), even though this massive space famous for gymnastics could hold Wyoming in merely three gatherings. They also don’t consider motor sports athletics, disqualifying racing circuits like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (capacity 400k) which could easily handle it in two.
But the reason this exercise has stayed on my mind the past year is not because of the largest raceway nor the current largest stadium nor even the all-time largest stadium. But what sparks today’s newsletter in the twilight minutes of technically-May-somewhere is over a year of reflecting on the name of what was for over 30 years the largest stadium in the world: May 1st Stadium.
It resonated with me because the namesake of May 1st Stadium is the “eight-hour workday” march down that kicked off “the Haymarket affair”, a slice of American history that I’ve always found personally fascinating. I also found it amusing that this established a roughly ten-year period where Chicago both held the tallest building in the world (the Sears Tower) and was a namesake-of-sorts for the largest stadium in the world.
But this stadium named for Chicago’s labor movement is not in Chicago. It’s not even in the US. May 1st Stadium is actually known as 릉라도 5월1일 경기장. It’s on the Korean Peninsula, and not the part that allows Americans 30-day visa-free visitation.
More directly: the May 1st Stadium is in Pyongyang, North Korea.
From a May 1st Parade to a May 1st Stadium
There are really two parts to this journey: first there is the story of what’s called the “Haymarket Affair” which takes place between May 1st 1886 through November 11th 1887 -- a series of events resulting in the state-sanctioned murder of four men in a judicial process the government itself declared as corrupt and misled less than 6 years later.
Then there is “the story of the story”, which carries this tale from Chicago to Paris to Russia to China to Pyongyang, while also seeding the debate for the forty-hour workweek.
I break this out into the following sections:
Preamble: 15 Years Earlier
Part I: The Story of the Affair (May 1st, 1886 through November 11th, 1887)
Part II: The Spread of the Story (November 11th, 1887 through May 1st, 1989)
Representing the story of the Haymarket Affair is challenging because there is not one definitive telling of the story. There are thousands of pages of court documents available from the trial. There are books that have done additional research, recounting the events and hypothesizing about details. And then there’s somewhat of a mythical oral tradition distinct from everything recorded.
I do my best to capture a common version of the story and give context where aspects are disputed, occasionally in footnotes. I know many folks are already familiar with these events and their context, so you are welcome to skip to my conclusions and analyses. But if it’s been a while since you brushed up on the contours of this event, I’ll revisit the key dates connecting what some in the US still see as the most lethal anti-police act of violence of the 1800s to over 6.5 billion vacation days globally.
15 Years Earlier: a Confederation Consolidates, a Commune Collapses, a Cow Kicks a Candle
(I’m aware the “Miss O’Leary’s cow” origin claim is apocryphal. But I appreciate how folk historians are willing to stray from the “great man” theory of history and elevate the much more niche “dumb animal” theory of history.)
The 1880s, when the key events of this story take place, lacks a sense of specificity which can make the events hard to comprehend. For example, you could even be a history podcast so passionate about the Haymarket Affair that you make it the pilot episode of your series and still accidentally write that it took place in the 1860s.3
My point being: the 1880s are just a non-distinct old-timey time, and so giving some background will help process the story if it’s new to you.
Further, nearly all the secondary sources I consumed were told from a very American perspective, focusing on the more domestic mysteries of “who threw the bomb?” or “how did this impact the American labor movement?” But because the mystery I’m most interested in is the mystery of how this became such a global phenomenon, I think it’s helpful to view the story globally and begin, as most of the Haymarket defendants did, outside the country.
And if we’re going to allow ourselves some context for how the world saw the US in the 1880s, my advice would be to look to the year 1871. It’s a year that sets into motion both the forces that push our protagonists away from Europe and toward the United States. And the motivations it establishes help us see the entire arc of the narrative as an immigrant story.
So after the clock strikes midnight and “all acquaintance [of 1870] be forgot”, the world wakes to tidings of a pivotal year: European political upheaval and an American city’s global plea for support.
January 1st, 1871: The Empire/Reich’s Back
Having published and distributed a constitution on New Year’s Eve, the Northern German Confederation becomes a new German Confederation overnight -- expanding Prussian King Wilhelm’s militarist-authoritarian coalition further south and absorbing new states. This concludes a decades-long campaign of consolidation, earning elite support by crushing democratic uprisings in 1848 and expelling Austrian pluralists in the Austro-Prussian War. Wilhelm’s modern industrial state can at last reconstitute itself as the Second Empire or “Reich”, a nostalgic classification calling back to the 1007-year-lasting Holy Roman Empire.
The Prussians’ ability to operate a highly centralized system while savvily cloaking themselves in pseudo-democratic norms would bias those departing Germany against even seemingly well-meaning governance. This is part of what makes trust-building a challenge in the New World. For an example of this, you can look at their three-class franchise which is basically “what if the US Electoral College existed, but representing wealth instead of people”.
Most of the May Day Martyrs grew up in areas under increasing Prussian dominance and its accompanying rapid industrialization and rising authoritarianism. This political and cultural transformation not only drove them out of Germany but shaped their politics in the New World.
March 18th, 1871: The Communards Take Martyr Mountain
Meanwhile, in the Parisian working-class neighborhood of Montmartre, the civilian militia resists an attempt by the federal government to appropriate their cannons. Because the Prussian military had marched into Paris and forced the French military to disarm, the civilian militia alone is managing city security and is brimming with new recruits from artisan and manual labor classes. This gives them a numbers advantage that allows them to drive the military out of the city, putting Paris and its two million residents under complete local control.
For two months, the people of the Paris Commune experiment with self-governance. They held elections for a Commune Council with roughly half of all eligible voters participating. They created nine functional commissions to keep municipal services like railways and telegraph/mail delivery operational. They toppled the big statue of Napoleon as it was "a monument of barbarism". They decreed to bring back the old revolutionary calendar and its 10-day weeks.
After the military has time to regroup in Versailles, they return to take the city. It takes a week of violence, but the experiment is brought to an end and remains only an anecdote to be discussed and debated among historians.
I stayed in Montmartre last October and hope to write about it in greater depth at some point. But for now there are really two important factors to draw from this:
In crushing the commune, France proves not-so-friendly to the cafe radicalism that some may have otherwise associated with it. Leaders were demonstrating further that they were willing to use state violence just as they had in the suppression of the Revolutions of 1848. This makes a transatlantic journey seem more compelling to those seeking a life outside of government oppression.
The other is that all other cities globally would be on higher alert, with the Paris Commune’s bloody conclusion elevating the term “communist” as a political epithet. It raised awareness of these radical political ideas outside of esoteric theoretical circles.
Oh if only some major city would just burn itself to the ground, creating a blank canvas for these European radical refugees and their utopian schemes…
October 8th, 1871: A Great American Fire
It is global news when a three-day fire burns through the city of Chicago, destroying over 17,000 buildings and leaving over a quarter of the city homeless. The city’s critical location between the largest estuary in the world and the largest river system in North America made it a natural logistics hub to take goods further west, so it would take the opportunity to rebuild and modernize to serve a growing country. The city would nearly double in population in the decade following the fire, and it is in this rapidly developing Chicago where the May Day mythology takes shape.
Of the Haymarket Eight, only one was in Chicago by 1871 and even he had just been there a couple years. Most were not even in the United States yet. They would eventually all become involved in the same broad movement, loosely aligning with International Working People’s Association and its anarchist Pittsburgh Manifesto with a few sharing office space for their publications, but their closest association as a large group would be as co-defendants in their 1886 conspiracy trial.
I’ve summarized what I took from their autobiographies and layered in some independent research of time and place, giving them each epithets because eight is a lot of names to keep straight. It’s worth noting that I’m not in a position to verify their claims, but there are two points to be forewarned as likely spurious.
First, my source for Louis Lingg’s childhood home address is an unsourced claim on German Wikipedia that I have not been able to verify elsewhere, though I provide some reasoning on its inclusion in footnotes.
And second, despite it being directly and plainly stated in his autobiography, I’m skeptical that August Spies was born in a castle.
With that, let’s start with August Spies.
1871: Before They Were Martyrs
The 🏰 “Castleborn” August Spies 🏰 [rhymes with “keys”] turns 17 in 1871 in Kassel, Germany, having grown. I put “castleborn” in quotes because though he claims to be born in the ruins of an old mountain-castle, I’m honestly skeptical of this. I walked up the mountain this castle is on, and the idea that his deeply pregnant mother made this hike in labor seems doubtful? Was she hiking to induce labor? In December? Adding to the suspicion is that the castle in question is cited on German Wikipedia as being built in the totally-not-made-up-on-the-spot year of 1234.
By the time he’s writing his autobiography, he seems very aware of how he’s fitting into history, so it seems fitting he’s crafting himself a hagiography. The story of the mountain castle allows him to pivot adeptly and elegantly into his pitch for socialism -- a pitch that winds through the curves of history. The rise and fall of serf lords, of religious systems, of empires give him faith a future despite the bleakness of his own end.
But childhood for the “Castleborn” Spies was largely positive. Having been educated by private tutors, he attends a prestigious Polytechnikum in Kassel that educated five early 19th century scientists notable enough to have Wikipedia pages and plans to be a government forester like his father. Unfortunately, after his father passes away he and his family are driven to make the move to America in 1872, and he eventually settles in Chicago where he is reported in 1880 in the US Census as an upholsterer. That same year he joins the staff of a workers newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and he’ll be promoted to editor in 1884 which is the position he’ll hold during the Haymarket Affair.
The 💼 Journeyman Michael Schwab 💼 will eventually work with the “Castleborn” Spies as the Assistant Editor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung; he opens his autobiography pining about the Franconian forests which served as common property for him and his community growing up, and I imagine Schwab and Spies connected over their shared appreciation of forests.
In 18714, though, he is a 17-year-old apprenticing as a bookbinder in Würzberg, Germany. Having only recently arrived from his birthplace in Kitzinger, he completes his training and then his work search takes him to Bern, then Zürich, then Meerane, then Cologne, then Vienna, then Plauen. (And I am skipping over shorter stays in summarizing this.) It’s in Plauen working in a blank-book factory in 1879 that he decides to study English and try the United States.
He makes the trip to NYC, when he leaves for Chicago where he continues to study English and works a little in bookbinding. But Chicago doesn’t work out at first, and so he also tries Milwaukee, Kansas City, Denver and Cheyenne before returning to Chicago in late 1881. This time he’s more deeply networked in the social cause and finds work translating the book The Nihilist Princess for the “Castleborn” Spies at the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He is then offered a role as a reporter, and then promoted to Assistant Editor and Business Manager.
The third will-be employee of the AZ is 🍞 Understudy Oscar Neebe 🍞. Oscar Neebe is the only American-born of the German subset of the Haymarket defendants, though his parents' insisted he be educated in Germany, so like the “Castleborn” Spies he was educated in Kassel. By 1871, though, he was 21, living in NYC and manufacturing milk cans. In 1877, he’d return to Chicago, where he had spent some of his later teenage years earlier as a waiter.
In Chicago, he would find work at Adams' Westlake Manufacturing Company before being “discharged because [he] stood up for the right of working men”, after which he could not find other tradeswork, so he became a compressed yeast salesman and then started his own yeast business with his brother and some partners. He was on the publishing coop board that managed the AZ, and in that role he would step in when needed.
The 🤝 Liaison Adolph Fischer 🤝 is a 13-year-old in Bremen in 1871, a “free city” associated with the old league of merchant city-states. The city is perhaps most famous for a Grimm’s Fairytale about a quartet of farm animals that leaves their master to pursue a career as musicians in Bremen, an indicator of the sense of possibility a city like Bremen held at the time. The animals actually never make it to Bremen; instead they trick a group of robbers to give up their house instead. Kind of a “Babe meets Home Alone” vibe.
Liaison Fischer will move to the US in 1873 -- first to Little Rock where he is an apprentice compositor, then to Nashville, then to St. Louis and will make it to Chicago in 1883 with his wife and three children. In Chicago, he’ll serve as a typographer for “Castleborn” Spies’s Arbeiter-Zeitung while also co-editing a more radical publication Der Anarchist.
Liaison Fischer is important in the Haymarket trial because he is connected to both the Arbeiter-Zeitung and to “the North West Side Group” -- both are organizations connected with the anarchist IWPA, but whereas the the Arbeiter-Zeitung was simply a mouthpiece, the North West Side Group was focused on defense and direct-action.
It’s helpful to contextualize all this in the rise of private militancy in post-fire Chicago. Factory owners looking to ensure smooth productivity would hire their own security forces, and without much regulation and with Civil War veterans commonplace, it was pretty easy to find people to point guns at workers to keep them working. In response, laborers founded their own private militias, one of which was the “Lehr und Wehr Verein”. Wikipedia translates the name as the “Education and Defense Society”, but I think that misses the delight of how the name sounds. It says a lot about a militia that they commit to rhyming. “The Reflection & Protection Group”? “Maturity & Security Association”? “Skills & Kills Club”? I like to think they’re the kind of guys who would say “suns out, guns out”, but with actual rifles and muskets. The Lehr und Wehr Verein would be less active by the time of the Haymarket Affair, but the North West Side Group carried forward the principle that to balance power between owners and employees, the workers must be equally armed.
The next two defendants are not involved with journalism at all, but they were alleged to be at a “Monday Night Conspiracy” meeting connected with the North West Side Group of the IWPA.
The 🧸 Old Toymaker Georg Engel 🧸 is the only of the defendants that is already an adult in 1871. This is why I refer to him as old, not that his age is empirically such -- my take is that trees grow old and some maybe some species of sharks, but humans never do. But the Old Toymaker Georg Engel is the eldest of the group by over a decade, and so therefore I call him such.
On April 15th, 1871, the Old Toymaker Georg Engel turns 35 and he has already had a great deal of challenging life experience. Born in Kassel, he spent his earliest years in the same city where Understudy Neebe and “Castleborn” Spies attended private school. His experience there, though, would be much tougher. After losing his father at 18 months old, he would lose his widowed mother when he was 12. With no funds for schooling, he found a shoemaker who would apprentice him if only he had someone to pay for his washing and clothing, but alas had nobody.
He heard of others heading to the US, and realized this was likely his best path too. And so, for over 20 years, he will scrounge up what he can, constantly displaced by wars and economic distress, to make the voyage across the world to a country that will ultimately condemn him. At 14, he walked 100 miles from Kassel to Frankfurt, where after roaming the city starving he was eventually able to find someone to teach him the trade of painting in return for his labor. After training, he applied his skills in Mainz, Cologne and Düsseldorf until he arrived in Bremen in 1863, where he drilled with their militia to respond to a northern invasion from Denmark. (It’s worth noting that Liaison Fischer, from Denmark, would have also been in Bremen at this time, though he would have been just five years old.) He then made it to Leipzig but left to avoid the 1866 Austro-Prussian war. In 1868, he moves to Rehna, is married and starts his own business, but rapid industrialization and the factory system forces him to close down.
It is in 1873 that he finally makes it to the United States with his wife and young children. He spends a year in Philadelphia and though he initially finds some decent paying work at a sugar refinery, he quickly becomes ill and his family is starving. He moves to Chicago in 1874. As his life stabilized, he found more opportunities to read and become politically engaged, first becoming involved with the International Workingmen’s Association until it was disbanded in 1876, then helping to organize the founding of the Socialistic Labor Party of North America which would successfully elect four Chicago alderman, three Illinois House Representatives and one Illinois State Senator. In 1883, he would become an active member of the IWPA and its militarist North West Side Group.
He started his toy store with his wife in 1876 and she continued to run it after he was imprisoned.
At the start of 1871, 💣 Young Bombsmith Louis Lingg 💣 is only seven years old. He lives in the “Mannheimer Quadratestadt”, a unique number-letter planned grid system that as far as I can tell exists only in Mannheim. Instead of a street and a house number, each home would have a square with its North-South position dictated by a letter, its East-West position dictated by number, and then radial positioning by another number. See how easy it is?5 It’s the sort of radical design thinking that befits an engineering city that claims to have birthed the invention of the bicycle, the car and the plane. The Young Lingg would eventually be an engineer as well -- specifically, a bombmaker.
Even within the radically designed SquareCity, the Young Bombsmith grew up on a block with particularly radical history: Quadrat F56. This block housed the print shop that printed the Mannheim Evening Times, a radical democratic newspaper that would publish the Mannheim Petition of February 27th, a call for a bill of rights that spread revolutionary fervor across the country and sparked action across the country. This published call to revolution was the first of a wave of such calls in Germany and resulted in the imprisonment of the newspaper’s editor, Peter Grohe.
The specific rights in this call for a bill of rights were a major influence on both the formation and legislating of the Frankfurt National Assembly, Germany’s first freely elected parliament of all German states that was elected two months later on May 1st. (38 years before our May 1st.) They passed the Basic Rights of the German People reflecting the Mannheim Demands in December, and then the following March passed a German Constitution. When they offered the role of Emperor to the Prussian King, he declined the offer to rule a democracy, saying he “will not pick up a crown from the gutter”; as discussed before, Wilhelm and Bismarck would instead create their own unified Germany with “blood and iron” in 1871.
And so, in 1849, the Prussian state mobilized their military to crush the uprising in Mannheim. The 48ers fought for their democratic constitution while the monarchy forces occupied the city just south of Mannheim. Lingg’s radical F5 block was also home of Maria Theresia Canton, who founded the Concordia Women’s Society, a pro-democratic organization that supported the freedom fighters, and is documented gifting a legion from Poland a flag -- presumably the flag of the Frankfurt National Assembly government, which flew the same German tri-color design still used today. This would be deemed incitement, and after the Prussians crushed the uprising they banned the Concordia organization and denied Canton her pension.
And to speculate broadly: the freedom fighters defending Mannheim were being led by Ludwik Mierosławski, and so it’s at least a possibility that Louis Lingg, who was born “Ludwig Link”, was even named after the man who defended the city. It’s also true, though, that the occupied city south of Mannheim is called Ludwigshafen, named for the anti-revolution King Ludwig I. So, you know, I guess lots of people seem to be called Ludwig7.
Moving forward again to 1871, Young Louis was too young to experience the revolutions before his time, but the influence of this community was likely still felt. And further, many 48ers left Germany after the democracy movement failed and instead moved to the United States to fight for the Union Army, so it is unsurprising that he saw about United States as a place of freedom but I expect he grew up hearing old stories of evil reactionary rulers and the men chasing revolutionary dreams. I don’t see how such an environment wouldn’t cultivate a love of freedom.
If the political history of his neighborhood was not enough, the Young Lingg’s childhood alone will be sufficiently radicalizing. As a thirteen-year-old in fast industrializing Mannheim, Germany, he saw his father incapacitated by a lumber mill accident, made a victim by his own hustle. The accident broke his father’s spirit, which in turn resulted in him losing his job. For the next three years, the Young Lingg would watch his father die slowly. Determined to maintain control of his own life and career, Lingg trained as a carpenter, as a tradesman could have more agency than a day laborer. From ages 18 to 21 he set out into Germany and Switzerland, finding work and joining worker’s organizations. At 21, to avoid mandatory military service and with money secured by his mother from her new husband, he travelled to NYC and then Chicago to build a new life in the new world.
And the final two I group together as “Anglo Allies”. Whereas the IWPA is primarily a German-American association in Chicago, these two are drawn in despite not sharing that ancestry.
Only one of the Haymarket Eight was already in Chicago in 1871, and that man was ⛪ Lay Preacher Samuel Fielden ⛪. He was relatively new there, having left his family home in Lancashire, England only a couple years prior. Then 21-years-old, he headed to New York City where he briefly worked at a Brooklyn hat factory before packing cloth at a textile mill in Providence and working at a farm outside of Cleveland. Once in Chicago, he was a laborer on public projects like the Illinois and Michigan Canal and Douglass Park. The day of the fire, he was working on the drainage of Mud Lake near where today the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal runs north of Midway Airport. After about a decade of working for others in 1880, he used his savings to buy a team of horses and operated his own business hauling stone.
It’s around this time that two paths of his begin to merge. He had been religious in his upbringing, joining the Methodist church at 18, following in the footsteps of his mother who had passed back when he was 10. His involvement grew, and he was even “on trial” to serve as a local preacher but plans were interrupted and he chose to head to America. He continued with preaching while doing farmwork in Ohio, but in Chicago after a late night debate with D. L. Moody (of Moody Bible Institute fame) felt further from the church and instead found a use of his voice in the world of labor agitation.
He was involved with the creation of a Chicago Teamsters Union of which he was elected Vice President, though the union did not end up being effective and disbanded. He joined the Chicago chapter of the National Liberal League which advocated for separating church and state, and as an officer he represented them at a national convention. Most crucially to our purposes, he became a member of the IWPA and was a frequent speaker at their events, which is how he ended up speaking at Haymarket Square on May 4th, 1886 at the moment when the bomb was thrown.
Finally, we have 🇺🇲 American Idealist Albert Parsons 🇺🇲. In 1871 he was working in Austin, TX with the Texas state government, helping fill vacancies created by reconstruction era bans on ex-Confederate officials. In addition to his election as a secretary to the state senate, he also held one of the least anarchist jobs conceivable: an IRS tax collector.
Indeed, Parsons' resume is all over the place. Born 1848 in Montgomery, Alabama, he’d lose his mother at 2 and his father at 5 and be sent to Waco, TX to live with his sister. With a family with centuries of American heritage and several officers who fought in the American Revolution, it perhaps unsurprising that as a 13-year-old he snuck away to join his local military company -- though this being 1861 that meant he was on the side of the Confederates in what he would later call “The Slaveholder’s Rebellion”. After the war, he’d trade a mule for some corn for six months of college that prepared him to launch his own newspaper, the Waco Spectator; in his journalism and later in direct political action, he supported the rights of newly enfranchised Texans.
He would come to Chicago at 26 years old with his wife Lucy Parsons, getting a job as a typesetter for the Chicago Tribune. Investigating the accounts and activities of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society made him sympathetic to the worker’s plight, driving him to ultimately join the Social Labor Party of America and Knights of Labor. As a candidate with the Workingmen’s Party of the United States he would run for alderman three times, county clerk twice and US congress once; the Workingmen’s Party nominated him to be their presidential candidate, but he had to decline as at 31 he was too young to qualify. A speech to tens of thousands of striking workers during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike led to threats on his life, his firing from the Chicago Tribune and a general disillusionment with electoral politics.
In 1883, the American Idealist Albert Parsons will attend the Pittsburgh convention where the International Working People’s Association is founded, and it is in association with this group that he launches his anarchist weekly The Alarm. With this publication as his platform, he advocates for the eight-hour work day within a political frame of anarchism. He publishes from the same building as fellow IWPA publication the Arbeiter-Zeitung at 41 N. Wells St.
Viewed out of sequence, Parsons' politics seem almost chaotic; like a petitioner’s dream passerby, he seemed to join anything. But his arc is clear: a confederate at 13, to a Republican at 18, to a socialist at 26, to an anarchist at 32.
And he will be 37 when he and his family lead that first May Day Parade.
Okay, I think you’re caught up. Let’s dig in.
Part I: The Story of The Affair
May 1st, 1886: The Parade
On May Day, Parsons and his wife and his two young children marched in support of Eight-Hour Workday on a day that had been selected years in advance to enact a general strike.
This is of course the day commemorated as Labor Day in much of the world; its power is less in narrative nuance than in the sheer mass of people participating in a general strike for an eight-hour workday -- as many as half a million Americans by some estimates. Chicago, the center of the movement, sees 30k-40k striking and as many as 80k marching down Michigan Avenue. It’s a strong foundation for the lore that events to come will build upon.
This year, there were marches in Chicago again; to give a sense for relative scale, Block Club Chicago estimated the participant number as “thousands”, so the march of 1886 could easily have been ten times the size.
I spent the day working on an early draft of this blog post instead of attending the march (boo me!8), but I did attend the Haymarket Memorial Plaque Dedication, which occurs every year at the old Haymarket Square site since the current honorary installation was put up in 2004.
This year the plaque was from the Illinois AFL-CIO. Neither the AFL nor the CIO existed on May 1st, 1886, but the AFL would be founded later that year in December. I happened to learn the founding date of the AFL because I stayed in a Holiday Inn in Columbus, OH in June that happened to be on the grounds where the AFL was founded, with a plaque up as to mark the space.
Placing an AFL plaque on the Haymarket Memorial is a particularly interesting choice because it will be an AFL founding officer, Peter J. McGuire, who is credited with being the “father of Labor Day” as a September celebration. They say he proposed the idea in 1882 to the New York Central Labor Union.
The AFL-CIO website also calls McGuire the “founder of May Day”, as while serving as a delegate representing the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, he proposed that the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (a precursor to the AFL) directly enforce the eight-hour workday on May 1st, 1886. It is perhaps one of many examples where the invention is less consequential than the marketing; I’d say that McGuire is perhaps the Zune to Parsons’ iPod. An AFL marker on an IWPA memorial truly does embody solidarity forever.
What catches the world’s attention, though, is where things go from here.
May 3rd, 1886: The Escalation
After their Sunday day of rest, many workers are ready to carry out their general strike.
At the McCormick Reaper Works, strikers led by the “Castleborn” August Spies confront workers and when police become involved guns are fired and two workers9 are killed. Outraged at the killing, strikers use the printing presses of August Spies’s Arbeiter-Zeitung calling for a gathering to protest police violence.
I could not find any buildings from the McCormick Reaper Works still standing, but it was an absolutely massive plant in its time. From what I read, it seemed reminiscent of the massive factories we now associate with Chinese manufacturing. I believe some of it existed on the banks of the river across from the Daley Park Boat launch, which I visited on May 3rd.
It seems a bit unfair to me that this series of events is referred to as “The Haymarket Affair”, when the initiating events take place the day before the Haymarket gathering; by centering the story on the May 4th events instead of the May 3rd shooting, we lose the Monday context for the tension that likely sets Tuesday’s tragedy in motion.
After all, it is at the McCormick Reaper Works, not at Haymarket Square, where the first blood is drawn. And this was a repeat offense, with workers10 killed by McCormick’s private security forces during a strike the prior year, with no consequences faced by the Pinkerton guards responsible. Does it not make sense to instead call this whole episode “The McCormick Affair”? Or does that clash too strongly with McCormick Bridgehouse, McCormick Tribune Plaza and McCormick Place?
I do speculate that the McCormick Reaper Works is honored in historical iconography, regardless of how Americans refer to the series of events in their own history books. What symbol might you select to counter the mechanized farming technology McCormick develops? An old-fashioned reaping device of some sort? Though it’s merely conjecture, the “sickle” in the classic communist “hammer and sickle” could be seen as a historical allusion to the McCormick’s place in sparking a labor revolution.
Regardless, it is in response to this series of worker killings that the motivates the “Monday Night Conspiracy” meeting later this night, with Toymaker Engel and Liaison Fischer allegedly deciding that a designated codeword “ruhe” (German for “quiet”) will be published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, signalling to the broader labor militia groups that they should take arms -- the revolution is nigh.
May 4th, 1886: The Assembly
Thousands see the flyers printed by the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and as many as 3,000 gather in Haymarket Square to protest the killings. That evening, the “Castleborn” Spies, the Idealist Parsons and the Preacher Fielden deliver speeches to a crowd that the mayor would later testify was peaceful.
Around 10:30pm, police ask the crowd to disperse. The Preacher Fielden is just completing his remarks, and when the police ask the crowd to peaceably disperse, Fielden reinforces their message, saying “but we are peaceable”. Perhaps hearing “peaceable” as a reference to the call-to-revolution codeword “ruhe”, someone launches a homemade bomb into the air, and when it lands near a police officer, Mathias J. Degan, he is killed. The resulting gunfire and chaos lasts a brief five minutes, killing six more policemen and at least four workers. Many more are injured, including Preacher Fielden who is shot in the leg. The crowd quickly scatters to escape the violence.
Over the next few days, the police seek out those they see involved with the conspiracy. August Spies and Samuel Fielden are arrested for their speeches which are seen as riling up the crowd. Albert Parsons is sought out for his speech as well, but he has fled the state. Three employees of August Spies at the Arbeiter-Zeitung are also arrested (Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe and Adolph Fischer) for their connection to the flyers that drew together the crowd. Louis Lingg is arrested when his landlord reports him for assembling bombs in his apartment. George Engel is arrested for his attendance at a planning meeting for the event.
The detective’s lead suspect to have thrown the bomb is Rudolph Schnaubelt. He is captured by police, interviewed and then let go; after his release, he crosses the border to Canada, then escapes further to England and then to Argentina.
June 20th, 1886: The Homecoming
The police tell Albert Parsons’ wife, Lucy Parsons, that his evading capture in hiding gives credence to the conspiracy case. The four employees of the Arbeiter-Zeitung share an office with his own publication, The Alarm. To show solidarity with the fellow defendants and to demonstrate both his and their innocence, he realizes he must return and stand trial.
On the night of his 38th birthday, Parsons leaves Waukesha, Wisconsin and travels through the night back to Chicago. He reports to a police station and turns himself in. It is the Summer Solstice, and the days get shorter -- for everyone, and especially for Parsons.
June 21st, 1886: The Trial
The trial opens the same day Parsons turns himself in, and jury selection begins.
There are thousands of pages of testimony and evidence online in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection provided by the Chicago Historical Society. The trial runs roughly seven weeks, from June 21st through August 11th. The jury deliberates for only a few hours. Their verdict, delivered August 19th, is that all eight men are guilty. Seven11 are condemned to death.
On October 1st, the Haymarket defendants’ counsel motions for a retrial, naming 14 justifications and providing new sworn testimony that contradicts existing testimony. The concerns include how the jury was constructed12 with deliberate bias, how the instructions to the jury were inconsistent with the law, how the judge didn’t permit dividing the trial to handle the militant IWPA North West Side Group separate from those merely involved in writing and speaking, and how the “verdict is manifestly illegal, unjust and against the testimony”. On October 7th, though, the motion is overruled.
The executions are planned for December 3rd. Roughly a week before, on Thanksgiving Day, they are granted a “writ of error” from the Illinois Supreme Court -- putting the executions on pause and setting a date for their appeal on March 1st in the new year. Closing arguments are held on March 18th, but the court’s 220-page decision isn’t published until September 14th of that year, when it affirms the original conviction. A new execution date is set for November 11th.
Nov 10th, 1887: The Lineup Changes
An attempt to appeal to the US Supreme Court is unsuccessful, but the Governor of Illinois is conflicted by the case. A “Radical Republican” and former major general in the Union Army, he is no stranger to passionate and violent pursuits of noble ideals. And so, to those who ask for clemency, he will reduce the sentence to “merely” a life of hard labor in prison. Of the seven on death row, two take the deal: Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab. Less than 24 hours before their scheduled execution, they no longer face the noose.
Five remain on death row, with Louis Lingg the only of them with a clear connection to the violence in that he potentially assembled the bomb. As you recall, at 21 he was sent to the US by his mother to pursue his dream of moving to America. Now 23, Lingg has now spent the majority of his new-world-new-life held captive within the Cook County Courthouse and Jail. He was only in Chicago seven months before his apprehension by police, and he’s been awaiting his fate for over twice that time.
If Louis Lingg were to hang for associations with the bombing, then the county could at least know they were punishing one man with plausible direct connections to the violence. The trials did show bombs allegedly from Lingg’s apartment that were similar to the one used on that prior May 4th. While I’m not certain about his participation, and many claim the innocence of all seven martyrs, having a bombmaker among those persecuted would at least provide better optics to the state in their performed justice.
Alas, the night before executions would be carried out, Louis Lingg places a blasting cap between his lips like a cigar. He then, lighting it, blows up his own face. While he slowly dies over the next six hours, he scrawls “Hoch die Anarchie” (“up with anarchy”) on the jail cell floor in his own blood.
This leaves only four non-violent men scheduled to hang the next day: three journalists and a toymaker.
Nov 11th, 1887: The Martyrdom
Dressed in white robes, the four activists marched to the gallows by the Cook County Courthouse singing the Marseillaise. In the moments before their death, August Spies shared his last words, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today”. Adolph Fischer and Georg Engel shout “Hoch die Anarchie”, echoing the Young Lingg’s bloody scrawl.
I have often been dismissive of the term “leftist”, as asking “where would this person sit in the 18th century French parliament” has the same vibe of describing a foreign city’s neighborhoods with NYC boroughs. But something about these martyrs walking to their death singing the “Marseillaise” has me thinking differently about this. Something about the German-born Americans singing a French swan song captures the transatlantic identification with the revolutionary story that grows into the global labor movement.
On the anniversary of the Haymarket Bombing this year, I ate ramen across the street from the former Cook County Courthouse where the Toymaker Engel, the Liaison Fischer, the “Castleborn” Spies and the Idealist Parsons were executed. I was listening to an audiobook (finally getting around to Cobalt Red) but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out being bookended by two Hinge dates who seemed much less interested in the historic hangings that had taken place outside ~138 years ago.
While we do not get May Day off in the US, it’s somewhat ironic that the US does provide a Federal Holiday on November 11th, which is the anniversary of the martyrdom. What we now call Veterans’ Day was once called Armistice Day, honoring the day in 1918 when the people of the world decided to stop killing each other for a while. While many of the fighters were young men who weren’t yet born, anyone over 31 would have been alive when an American and three Germans died side-by-side for a loosely shared idea of freedom. And if you think of Veterans’ Day as a day where we celebrate those who risk their lives to protect their vision of the American Dream, perhaps there is room in your conceptualization to reflect on the May Day Martyrs.
After the four had died, a funeral procession was held where participants wore red ribbons and sang the Marseillaise. The more modern anthem “L’Internationale” was not yet composed, and would not be used ceremonially until the Second Internationale would assemble in 1889.
It would be at this meeting that the global journey of the Haymarket mythology begins.
Part II: The Spread of the Story
The world was watching as the executions provided a definitive conclusion to the Haymarket Affair, but the struggle that the May Day martyrs were fighting for was far from over.
July 14th, 1889: The Holiday
Over three years later, a gathering would take place in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The goal was to reorganize workers in the continued struggle for workers’ freedoms.
That gathering, “The International Workers’ Congress”13, would result in the formation of the “Second International”. The “First International” was the International Workingmen’s Association14; the “International Working People’s Association” was also called the “Black International” but it does not receive a number, only a color. (We honestly need an equivalent of those monarchy lineage charts but for all these labor organizations.)
Whereas the First International began its collapse when it kicked out the anarchists 8 years into its founding, the Second International was a new start and re-engaged with the anarchists in fellowship until kicking them out again 7 years later. (It’s important to recognize this was an earlier era when the Left struggled to hold together a broad coalition and would constantly become mired in counterproductive infighting.)
The constituency of The International Workers’ Congress was so divided, the people who had gathered for it were literally split into two separate factional meetings: The Marxists meeting at the Hall of Parisian Fantasies (“Salle des Fantaisies-Parisiennes” at 42 Rue Rochechouart) and the Possibilists meeting a 25-minute walk to the southwest at the Union for Trade and Industry (10 Rue de Lancry). It would be in the Hall of Parisian Fantasies and on the final afternoon of the congress where the motion to create a global May Day would be put forward and passed.
The holiday was first simply a decision to demonstrate on the 1890 anniversary of the original Chicago demonstration. The AFL in the US had already set this date, and the Second Internationale was presenting a broad global coalition of support. After initial success, it became recognized as an annual event the following year.
June 26th, 1893: The Pardon
Though 1893 had a particularly noteworthy May Day, with President Grover Cleveland giving his opening address at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the more remarkable date would be a couple months later when Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld would drop a 16,545-word pardon15 for the three imprisoned of the original Haymarket Eight. This was deeply controversial and even earned Altgeld a place in Profiles in Courage (the TV show, not the book).
One note here though: Altgeld calls the circulation of the IWPA-affiliated publications small, which is kind of sad for the state to do as a part of the pardon; he basically calls their life’s work of writing inconsequential? If I am ever murdered by the state for anything I write in this Substack, please don’t posthumously pardon me by saying that nobody even reads my Substack. I am aware that just a few friends of mine read my Substack to humor me, but that just feels unnecessarily hurtful.
Altgeld is remembered by a plaque in his birthtown of Selters that faces a skatepark.
Though Altgeld’s publication of his reasoning is titled “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab”, it is later republished under broader headers, such as a pamphlet published by Lucy Parsons titled “Gov. John P. Altgeld’s Pardon of the Anarchists and His Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot”. This later titling encourages a broader reading of the Altgeld pardon. Though he does not explicitly pardon the four men killed in 1887, his reason mostly focuses on discrediting the process as a whole -- including selection of jury, competence of jurors, fittingness of the charge and overall judge bias. This strengthens the martyrdom narrative and builds into the myth.
June 28th, 1894: The Other Holiday
The following year, President Grover Cleveland is back in DC and signs S-730 (“A Bill Making Labor Day A Legal Holiday”) into law.16 The bill had been proposed almost a full year earlier by North Dakota Senator James H. Kyle from the Populist Party, but now the country is deep in a summer-long strike and boycott of the Pullman Company and the government is looking to show solidarity with working people. Many states already recognize the first Monday of September as Labor Day, and this broadens the reach of the holiday.
As mentioned earlier, the September Labor Day was first celebrated in New York City in 1882 -- nearly four years before the May Day March that would escalate and capture the world’s attention. As for who to credit for the 1882 parade, historians dispute between two similarly surnamed strikeleaders, Peter McGuire17 and Matthew Maguire. It’s a topic for another essay.
I didn’t focus on the September Labor Day so much in my research, but I did enjoy how congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh tied the two together in her history explainer that covers the Pullman Strike in greater detail.
October 24th, 1938: The Workday
It’ll be on the other side of World War I before the US passes a broad eight-hour workday in The Fair Labor Standards Act. As one of the key components of New Deal legislation, it is signed into law by FDR on June 25th, 1938 and then takes effect on October 24th, 1938.
The bill is famous for guaranteeing time-and-a-half wages for time worked over forty hours, establishing the norm of a five-day workweek of eight-hour workdays. (The original 1932 draft from Alabama Senator Hugo Black actually set the workweek at 30 hours, which perhaps was merely shrewd negotiation.) In addition to encouraging limits on working hours, the bill also decrees a federal minimum wage and prohibits child labor. Bangers all.
It took over fifty years from the original May Day march, but at last the dream of the eight-hour day has been achieved.
December 21st, 1939: The Flag
And now let’s engage in baseless speculation.
When Chicago’s May Day March movement had finally achieved its mission, restricting work hours and protecting free time and free thinking, there were only three stars on the Chicago Flag.
Initially adopted in 1917, the Chicago flag had featured two stars for events already discussed: the Great Chicago Fire and the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago then adds a star to the flag as a promotional stunt18 for the WCE’s sequel in 1933.
And so here we are in 1939. Chicago’s historic and globally renowned labor movement has achieved a critical policy goal that liberates laborers across the country. The march and movement that captured the hearts and minds of people, though never finished, can finally call itself a success. Chicago City Council gathers. They have a new star in mind. Along with the fire that drew support from around the world and two world-famous fairs that drew global crowds, the Chicago Flag will add a star for… Fort Dearborn?19
I’m not going to talk about Fort Dearborn at all. I did read some about it. Someone wanted to name a bridge after Fort Dearborn and then the City Council was like “no let’s add a star to the flag instead”. And so they did.
It does lend itself to a conspiracy theory though: what if the “fort” is actually code for the “fort-y hour workweek”? Hmm? And the radical Chicago City Council of 1939 just knew that celebrating leftwing activism of the late 1800s would be too much for most people to swallow? So they had to do that thing that kids do on TikTok where they use “unalive” instead of “kill” to evade automated content moderation. It is perhaps a little open to interpretation.
I’m generally opposed to government speech regulations, but it does feel like there should be some regulation as to what can represent a star on a flag. When someone dreams of becoming a movie star, they are dreaming of becoming globally recognized -- a star is seen in the sky regardless of your provincial habitation. When Chicago burned down, drew donations from 2520 foreign countries making it a global affair. The World’s Columbian Exposition has at least 3421 countries represented and the followup Century of Progress has at least 1822 countries represented -- not including attendees which would span even wider. The May Day March not only set into motion nationwide policy achievements but it would become a holiday in 180 countries, making it more recognized than Christmas. What has Fort Dearborn done? Does anyone outside of Chicago know about it? I’m skeptical.
Those in Chicago can claim the stars mean whatever they want. Seen from abroad, though, I like to think the stars represent Spies, Fischer, Engel & Parsons. Four men whose origins were outside of Chicago, and whose legacy burns brightest outside the city and country where they made history. One needn’t obsess over the particular minutes of the Chicago City Council. We can disregard “alderial intent” and all that post-modern literary theory stuff.
May 1st, 1955: The Canonization
As May Day ages into its 60s, it starts to get religious.
The Catholic Church, in part attempting to deepen its solidarity with the working Catholics of the Soviet Union, gets in on the May Day hubbub. Pope Pius XII adds a second feast day for St. Joseph, supplementing March 19th. Saints Philip & James, who already have the awkward situation of sharing a Feast Day, must now also oblige as the church asks them to move their feast day a couple days later to May 3rd to accommodate the new holiday.
St. Joseph was a carpenter, just like the Bombsmith Louis Lingg and AFL President Peter McGuire. And so St. Joseph gets a feast day of St. Joseph the Worker on the same day as May Day / International Workers’ Day.23
May 1st, 1958: The Other Other Holiday
As May Day has grown globally, along with the central myth of the Haymarket Eight, the US feels it must counterprogram. The Eisenhower administration creates an American alternative to the seditious socialism of May Day: “Law Day”.
I like to think the parallel six-letter length was to trick communists into revealing themselves in a crossword puzzle clue “holiday that starts the fifth month”. It is evenly weighted in length to remind you that it is just as real a holiday as May Day is even though you maybe never had heard of it until just now.
Eisenhower rang in the first Law Day, reminding us: "In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law."
If the purpose of the day is about rejecting force, then I think the freedoms fought for in the May Day movement are broadly aligned.
May 1st, 1989: The Stadium
It is the year following the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and Pyongyang wants to show it too is a part of the global community. It, like the government in Seoul, celebrates May Day on the first of May. And it, like the Olympics-hosting city of Seoul, can build a big stadium. Bigger even than the stadiums that held Olympic athletes from all around the world! It is at the time the biggest stadium in Asia and would eventually be the biggest stadium in the world after Prague decommissions its giant gymnastic center.
Though they are politically isolated, the hermit kingdom wants the world to know that they are not so different maybe. They celebrate May 1st like just about everyone else. They like to gather around in a circle by the tens of thousands and cheer for/against teams and contenders. And they are around if you’re looking for an enormous sporting hall for a transnational athletic competition of some kind.
How To Go Viral in the Late 1800s
One of my first jobs out of college was working in Hollywood as a data analyst that helped major US broadcast networks like CBS, ABC and FOX decide what TV pilots to put on the air; I designed and developed a dashboard that was used to determine programming that over a hundred million people ended up watching. For better or for worse, it’s probably the most impactful dashboard I’ve ever made.24
Every day while eating my lunch I would listen to longform podcast interviews with writers talking about their processes and frameworks, so I’ve easily listened to over a thousand hours of interviews with TV writers. I hoped that one day maybe I would be more involved in creative details, but my career took off in the direction of researching new ad platforms. (There is always a sense of gravity toward “where the money is”, and there was a lot of money in then-tween-age Silicon Valley social media companies; on top of that, the network creatives generally wanted research folks to stay in their lane.) Still, I layer in these elements and frameworks to hopefully approach Story in a way that is not excessively clinical.
In TV pilot testing, the most important measure for deciding what shows got picked up was self-reported intent to view more episodes. We’d recruit people all over the United States to sit and watch the first episode of a TV show (“the pilot”). When we wanted to break down a pilot that wasn’t working, the diagnostics focused on three measures: characters, concept and execution. Ultimately, I see the May Day Myth as succeeding on all three core elements.
1.) The Characters: 3 Stolen Rules to Engineer Love
In the old days of television, researchers would highlight the importance of characters by emphasizing that by tuning into a program a viewer was inviting the characters into their home. We can think of modern programming whose casting seems to appeal more to our sense of curiosity, but while shock or strangeness can help initially draw attention, the longevity of a story relies on building a story world that people truly want to live in and return to, and to succeed at that we must feel connected to the characters.
The head of the TV pilot testing consultancy I worked at bought one book for nearly everyone who worked there: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book identifies a “monomyth” structure that identifies common threads in stories all across cultures, and it has a reputation in part for its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. Like any “theory of story” that is widely adopted, it can be used in tired ways by unimaginative risk-averse people to create dull art, and people in the creative industry hoping to achieve a kind of raw self-expression can resent it, but it’s a great place to start with Story.
That said, while Joseph Campbell’s anthropological approach is deeply researched and broadly applicable, it can also be unwieldy; I find that the practical wisdom of writers themselves can be useful. To understand Story, I tend to look to people who have been effective at captivating me in stories that also have published thoughtfully on their process. And at the risk of pigeonholing myself as a specific kind of person, the two monomyth-aligned creator-analysts I look to here are TV showrunner Dan Harmon and science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut25. And so when introducing people to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”, I tend to prefer to introduce Dan Harmon’s gloss, “The Story Circle”.
The story wheel is read like a clock, starting with a character (“You”) who has a need (“Need”). The specific insight I like here is that the first job of every story is to get a viewer to identify with the protagonist. As for how writers work this magic, I’ve always liked Kurt Vonnegut’s “eight rules for writing fiction” as a toolkit -- specifically the three rules that are character-focused: #2, #3 and #6. They speak to a character’s success at being relatable, motivated and vulnerable.
By these rules, a creator can achieve “soulbinding”; a good story will get you in the shoes of its protagonist(s) fast, activating your mirror neurons. If you can get the audience to fall in love with your characters, the rest of the story doesn’t even have to be that interesting. We can tolerate a great deal of dullness from those we love.
There is a classic situation writers can complain about, where they get a note from a production executive that asks them to give their main character a dog. In this situation, DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHARACTER A DOG. This is a hack move. Executives are not experts in how to write; they are simply experts in how they feel when they read a story. They are telling you they don’t feel connected to your main character. In business culture, it is generally frowned upon to just say you don’t like or get something, so instead people try to be solution-oriented; this is also a decision insecure people make to avoid flat out saying “they don’t get it”. But many executives are ill-equipped to resolve a problem, bringing characters to life is the explicit domain of the storyteller.
When you read about the May Day Martyrs, you don’t feel like they need a dog to be captivating. The people of the world fell in love with the Haymarket Eight in large part because they presented themselves as remarkably relatable, motivated and vulnerable.
Relatable: “[Someone] To Root For”
Relatability is admittedly a bit of an annoying concept, but the basic idea is that a story should have at least one character that a viewer or reader can connect with.
Vonnegut’s Rule #2
“Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.”
The Haymarket Eight are a diverse mix of characters that allow anyone to step into the story and feel connected.
As labor movement icons, it was probably most important that they cover different ground professionally. The Lay Preacher Fielden worked in textiles; the Bombmaker Lingg was a carpenter; the American Idealist Parsons was a government employee. Indeed, despite their anarchist philosophy, a number of them are actually business owners. Old Toymaker Engel of course owns his toy store; the Understudy Neebe is a shareholder in the collective that publishes The Alarm and The Arbeiter-Zeitung. Lay Preacher Fielden specifically jokes in his autobiography that when he bought his own horses to operate independently as a teamster he “became what Chicago Tribune calls a capitalist”.
Their biographies also are diverse. At the time of the affair, Young Lingg was 21 and Old Engel was 50. Religiously, we also see a mix of perspectives common to Europe at the time. Schwab begins his autobiography talking about his Catholic Bavarian upbringing, whereas Fielden talks about his service in the Methodist church. Their politics are also very broad. Even just from the four hanged men we get three different definitions of socialism and anarchy. It invites a broad coalition to see themselves in the story of their martyrdom.
Motivated: “Every Character Should Want Something”
This is relatively straightforward, and I think it’s clear that the May Day Martyrs were deeply motivated. Those motivations strong enough to be felt shared by their global audience.
Vonnegut’s Rule #3:
“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
They were motivated in different ways, but all wanted to see America live up to a promise of freedom. The Old Toymaker Engel wrote in his autobiography about his conversation with a dissident after arriving in the US: “I sang the praises of this ‘free and glorious’ country. […] I told him America was a free country, anybody could earn good wages if he wanted to, and save money besides.”
This motivation of seeking a better life was widespread and relatable at the time. Europeans in the 1800s were weebs for America as an idea. Seeing the Haymarket Martyrs betrayed by the country they crossed an ocean for pushes a shift from fandom to fear, leaving the international public disillusioned with the state of freedom in the US.
Vulnerable: “Be A Sadist”
When a person watches another person experience some sensory scenario, their brain will create similar patterns as if the event was happening to them; this phenomenon is said to be caused by “mirror neurons”. The more intense the experience, the more intense the connection. This motivates the third of the Vonnegut rules that apply to May Day Martyrs’ story.
Vonnegut’s Rule #6:
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
It’s a trope to achieve this by just killing a character of meaning and this is often hacky. And it can be problematic how often male protagonists demonstrate their vulnerability by killing a female character. But then Pixar will make the opening of Up where they do just that and people will be like “greatest opening ever”. So it’s hard to say what will or won’t break through.
Some of my favorite examples of this find creative ways to trigger multiple examples at one.
Walter White caught moonlighting at the carwash and getting made fun of by his students in the pilot of Breaking Bad, showing his vulnerability in a way that also highlights his broadly relatable motivation to earn more money.
In Train to Busan, we are introduced to protagonist Seok-woo as he gifts a Wii for daughter only to be told he gifted her one last year, showing a moment of weakness and framing his core motivation for the film.
The Battle at Lake Changjin, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unit that we follow is early on bombed from above on flat open ground, leaving them defenseless and vulnerable.
On page two of Stephen King’s writer’s guide On Writing, he tells a childhood story about being wasp-stung and the dropping a cinderblock on his own foot crushing his toes; this is explained makes no sense for a book on writing, except its demonstration of his deeply human fragility deepens the reader’s connection with him as a narrator of his memoir.
Because I’ve watched Edge of Tomorrow many times (mostly on planes), I’ve seen Major William Cage die horribly perhaps thousands of times, an incomparable display of vulnerability which makes me deeply and tragically soulbound to Tom Cruise.
The shoeless John McClane of Die Hard is vulnerable and motivated to find shoes.
The May Day Martyrs demonstrate their vulnerability early in their autobiographies listing out their childhood traumas. Fielden loses his mother when he is 10; Spies loses his father when he is 15; Lingg loses his father when he is 16. Schwab and Engel both are orphaned at 12 years old; Parsons is orphaned at just 5 years old. Their struggles to find decent work in a rapidly industrializing world stack atop social disruptions.
Their many trials and tribulations show not just their humanity but their strength to strive amid strife. In hard times, they offered hope that hard work could lead the way to success.
When many movies are star-driven, the writing doesn’t necessarily have to do much “soul-binding”; you’ve already attached yourself to the protagonist by seeing their trials in prior films (even if as other characters). But for stories without stars, the narrative does more work. And since the May Day martyrs were not yet stars before their history unraveled, their emphasis on relatability, motivation and vulnerability was particularly important.
2.) Concept: “It’s The Gospel Meets Serial”
While the characters are critical to retain an audience, the audience first must be drawn into the narrative. Today’s film industry relies heavily on marketing to draw in prospective filmgoers, generally spending as much on selling the movie as they spend on the movie itself; for a story without attached talent, though, it is the concept that draws in viewers.
The go-to book to understand Concept in the early 2010s when I worked with a story consultancy was Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat; looking at the wide range of consulting tools and workshops on their website, I get the sense it is still popular (and consequently rejected by certain artist types). The most succinct expression of the concept is the “logline”, which is a brief pitch intended to spark interest in the full story.
Snyder has four rules for a logline: (1) it must be ironic, (2) it must imply the story in full, (3) it must make an investment case to producers, and (4) it must include the (“killer”) title.
“The Haymarket Affair” is a title that seems deliberately designed to disengage, so there is a clear failure on the fourth criterion. And Snyder’s third criterion is more directed toward screenwriters trying to get their script optioned, so telegraphing factors like potential audience and production budget can be consequential.
The core irony in the May Day Martyrs logline is clear though, and to capture both the irony and the arc of the narrative in a sentence, you could write something like this26:
A group of tradesmen pursue freedom across the ocean to the “Land of the Free”, where their practice of free speech, free association and free assembly result in their arrest, imprisonment and state-sanctioned murder.
This kind of irony is perhaps trite for a modern American audience, and I’m certainly framing things from a particular angle and reducing complexity, but this is what would draw a reader in. Readers would want to understand how and why America, a place famous for choosing freedom over tyranny, would be so hostile to the immigrants who share its dream.
Who Is Heisting Whom
The book Save the Cat also breaks down stories into specific story archetypes; with the Haymarket Affair, we are looking at a “Golden Fleece” -- a reference to the 8th Century BC myth where Jason and his team of Argonauts engaged in a journey to capture this particular amber-hued pelt. The fleece is a proto-macguffin in this three-millennia-old ancestor to the heist film.
The three essential elements Snyder identifies in a “Golden Fleece”27 story are (1) a road, (2) a team and (3) a prize. The road does not have to be the paved sort. In the Haymarket Affair, the literal journey of metaphorical trials is rather the metaphorical journey of a literal trial. The team is evidently the defendants, made a distinctive cohesive unit seemingly only by the trial itself. The prize is the Eight Hour Workday that the May Day demonstrators were marching for. The workers are trying to reclaim a pre-industrial independence of working life that political and technological shifts have taken from them. Its heist movie is a heist of justice and freedom.
It’s not essential, and actually somewhat rare in Hollywood films, that many protagonists will die in an STC “Golden Fleece” story. Nearly all of the Argonauts in the original myth make it to the fleece and back home. But as you already know, the Haymarket protagonists will all pass on years before the Eight Hour Day prize is won.
Ingredients of a Tragedy
Roughly half a millennium after the times of Homer and the age of the Argonauts, Aristotle would also write his own theory of narrative in Poetics -- much older than Save the Cat or Harmon’s Story Circle or Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing but still very useful today.
In particular, he provides a series of elements that contribute to tragic “mythos”, a term generally translated as “plot” but relevantly also a cognate of “myth”. We find many of these within the story Haymarket Affair.
Peripeteia: a reversal of fortune
As already discussed when distilling the Haymarket Affair to a compelling logline, the grand reversal here is seen in the core irony of immigrants coming to the US to find freedom and instead being imprisoned.
The proceedings of a court case create frequent mundane reversals, as motions are introduced pointing toward hope only to be denied pointing again toward damnation. And the broader arc of the case is rife with reversals as well: its petition for retrial that is shut down, its appeal to the state supreme court that succeeds at earning a review but fails to change the fates of the defendants, and lastly its appeal to the federal supreme court that does not succeed.
Governor Oglesby’s commutation is a reversal for Journeyman Schwab and Preacher Fielden who learn they will not hang less than 24 hours before they are scheduled to hang. It’s a reversal again when the next Governor Altgeld pardons Schwab, Fielden and Neebe altogether, condemning the whole process.
Perhaps one of the most emotionally complex reversals is when Louis Lingg takes his death into his own hands, denying the state the possible justice of punishing the possible (if not likely) creator of the offending bomb.
Anagnorisis: a moment of revelation
Much as reversals are commonplace within court proceedings, so are revelations. The judge’s role in a court is simply to provide these revelations, elucidating what is in or out of order. Perhaps deliberately, the design of the court seems drawn heavily upon Aristotle’s Poetics.
And every trial has its highest stakes anagnorisis at its conclusion, when the judge reads the verdict. For the Haymarket Affair defendants, this was when they were sentenced to death.
But I think there is an ultimate anagnorisis after that. On the gallows, when four men are standing and sharing their last remarks, the American Idealist Parsons is the last to speak.
He cries out:
“Let me speak, oh men of America! Will you let me speak, Sheriff Matson! Let the voice of the people be heard! Oh—”
And with that, the trapdoor has swung open, and his voice has been quieted. This is the final revelation in Parsons’ experience of the Haymarket Affair. He hangs with three of his fellow defendants and slowly is strangled to death.
There will be no more twists for him.
His story is over.
Catharsis: an experience of clarification and redemption
The story of the May Day Martyrs can be gut-wrenching in that it provides catharsis to the audience that it denies to the characters -- a sort of dramatic irony created by the “theater of the mind” where history is viewed in the memories of the present.
The imprisoned three at least learn that Governor Altgeld redeems them and discredits the state institution he leads when he pardons them, but the five dead are denied such a catharsis even though his condemnation of the trial is broad, and undermines their judgments.
And further, we learn that the Eight-Hour Day eventually succeeds long after all the martyrs have passed on, valorizing their struggle.
These are critical moments that make the tragedy more resonant, even though these moments only occur outside the scope of the protagonists’ lives.
Hamartia: an inner flaw that renders one’s fate inevitable
For this last point, I expect some may dispute me here; it feels perhaps wrong to frame steadfastness in politics and solidarity as a flaw. I think there are at least a couple possible readings here. And because this is not a dramatization but history-in-itself, it can be harder to see what specific moment might ground a revelation.
We could perhaps see their refusal to disavow their politics in the trial as a flaw, whereas others maybe would be more practical, staying alive for their wives, their children, their friends. I wonder if Albert Parsons could have survived simply by not turning up to court, which he did as an act of solidarity. He had evaded capture and could have remained out of reach; others like Rudolph Schnaubelt (who the court believed had thrown the bomb) did this, and they were able to live out the rest of their lives.
I think the clearer read, though, is to see the tragic flaw as naivete. This is part of why it was resonant for me to visit the places they came from; these were the locations that they made their fatal choice, to pursue an ideal of freedom in America that in fact was not there to be enjoyed.
They were misinformed. They had the wrong address.
These tragic elements are in themselves powerful, but they are made more powerful by the analogies they enable to a central narrative to Europeans in the 19th century.
Cross Examination
Another three centuries after Aristotle, we approach the so-called “common era” and another story that would prove highly influential: that of Jesus of Nazareth, made famous when broadly published and distributed in The Bible.
The May Day Martyrdom can be read explicitly as a Christian allegory. It is, after all, a tale of a political execution. You have the moment where the martyrs can live if only they choose to disavow their Truth, with Governor Oglesby in the role of Pontius Pilate. They can survive if they only submit to local provincial authority, but many would rather die. Just as early Christians fed to lions by Romans would laugh in ecstatic excitement for reunion with their creator while being mauled to death by lions, May Day Martyr Fischer’s last words at the gallows are “This is the happiest day of my life”.
There is the presence of a Biblical frame in the casting of the Martyrs as well. Bible scholars see the Gospel’s authorship as designed to speak to two doctrinal paradoxes: the servant-leader represented by Matthew and Mark (a former Roman tax collector and a former slave) and the divine-incarnate represented by Luke and John (a doctor and fisherman28). The Haymarket Eight reflects the servant-leader paradox in Parsons and Engel (politician and indentured servant), and it reflects the divine-incarnate paradox in Lingg and Fielden (engineer and preacher).
Many of the countries that find the martyrdom meaningful today are heavily Christian, such as Mexico. At the 1939 May Day parade in Mexico City, Oscar Neebe's grandson was told the festivities were "how the world shows respect to your grandfather". Mexican muralist Diego Rivera featured the May Day Martyrs in his NYC mural, commissioned then decommissioned by the Rockefeller family, then moved to Unity House in Forest Park, PA where it would be destroyed in a fire in 1969. (Though admittedly Mexican sympathies for the May Day Martyrs may be driven less by Christian allegorical resonance and more by the fact that the US army’s invasion of Mexico City and the seizing of half their country’s territory was merely 40 years before the Haymarket Affair, easily in living memory. A bit of both, maybe.)
Having a new myth take a form so parallel to an old myth means that new myth can to some degree ride in the older myth’s draft to spread more quickly.
Open World Gaming, Participatory Sensemaking & the Sublime
Even beyond these more classical elements, though, there is an aspect of the Haymarket Affair that satisfies more contemporary theoretical tastes as well.
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan introduces his concept of hot and cool media in his 1964 work Understanding Media. Famous for his aphorism, “the medium is the message”, he defines “hot media” as “high definition” and optimized for low effort consumption, whereas “cool media” was the opposite. To him, “hot media” includes text, film and photography, whereas “cool media” included comics and TV, which was lower resolution. He attributed “cool media” as a label to the detached cool nature of jazz, but I find it easier to remember it analogizing media to food: “hot media” is cooked and ready to eat, whereas “cool media” requires your active participation and preparation.
Even in the present day, understanding the Haymarket Affair seems to require , it would have been a real time commitment to sift through and compare the various documentations about the events to piece together the narrative, using perhaps newspaper articles and eventually court transcripts and biographies. The transcriptions from court minutes online are low resolution and imperfect. Photography did not really exist much at the time, and so for visuals we rely on . Consuming “the story” of the Haymarket Affair requires an amount of activity that I can think of are reading in a choose-your-own-adventure novel, participating in an escape room or even participating in an open world video game.
In a similar framework, French literary theorist Roland Barthes lays out a somewhat similar but distinct framework in his 1973 book Le Plaisir du Texte. Whereas McLuhan focuses on the fundamental technology through which a message is delivered, Barthes is interested in the sense-making process within the message. He differentiates between “readerly” texts and “writerly” texts. Readerly texts are clear and effectively transmit the intended information to their audience, whereas writerly texts invite the reader to engage in the meaning-creation process.
The question that naturally follows then is: Which is better? As in, which do we enjoy more? Which has more staying power? Which draws us in? A pragmatically functional “readerly” text or an open-ended participatory “writerly” text?
Our instinct might suggest that the “readerly” text outperforms on these measures, as it does its job of passing forward ideas. This theory would anticipate that we like engaging with stories because we like conclusions and the peace that they provide.
But Barthes argues that while utilitarian “readerly” texts can occasionally provide pleasure (plaisir), only “writerly” texts can provide deeper bliss (jouissance). We are drawn to the conflict and enjoy the tension. A resolution will merely leave us bored, upon which we will let go of the text and move on.
Tension and complexity exists in the Haymarket Affair story in multiple ways. On one level, the story is disharmonious because the characters are disharmonious, with the Haymarket Eight not actually representing a cohesive politics or movement. Fischer and Engel and Parsons provide contradictory definitions of socialism in their published autobiographies.
Beyond this though, tension exists in that there is a lot of the story that is fundamentally unknowable. Testimonies from many witnesses contradict each other, and even minor details are not clear. It evokes the sublime “writely” bliss evoked by the enigmatic 2014 podcast Serial, which captivated its audience with its refusal to take a particular side.
Perhaps I haven’t been clear up until now that there is no member of the Haymarket Eight that I am absolutely certain is innocent.
From my readings at this point, it seems true that the Haymarket Eight were not demonstrated to have engaged in conspiracy in a way that would surpass the “reasonable doubt” standard. It seems clear that the trial was constructed to produce an outcome and was a miscarriage of justice. Even Judge Gary, who the Governor Altgeld the Pardoner considered the architect of the entire injustice process, felt that Samuel Fielden should have his sentence commuted.
But that doesn’t mean that I am wholly convinced that the “Monday Night Conspiracy” theory is not accurate. The idea that there was a meeting where Lingg was directed to provide bombs and Engel told Fischer to tell Spies (and fellow Arbeiter-Zeitung teammates Schwab and Neebe) to put a codeword in the paper, and then Parsons would draw a crowd and the police and then Fielden would say the codeword to trigger the bombing is plausible in a very distant sense. Much more likely is that some of these things happened deliberately and others happened accidentally. But specifically what was deliberate and what was accidental? The ambiguities and gaps, along with the disparate source material make this for a uniquely “cold” and “writerly” myth, that also perhaps make it particularly delightful to contemplate.
Ultimately, the rise of modernism in literature after WWI would create more complex works presenting complex concepts in complex fashions, more “writerly” in the Barthesian sense. And the rise of consumer gaming would create media experiences that depended more on user engagement, or “colder” in the McLuhanian sense. But back in 1887, in the wake of the Haymarket Affair, this would have been a distinctly cold and writerly text to engage with.
It’s reminiscent of Dao De Jing’s Chapter 11.29
Thirty spokes are joined in the wheel's hub.
The hole in the middle makes it useful.
Mold clay into a bowl.
The empty space makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for the house.
The holes make it useful.
Therefore, the value comes from what is there,
But the use comes from what is not there.
Like the functional emptiness implicit in a bowl or a window, the gaps in the story serve to deepen its experience and meaning. The gaps in the story create space for its audience to participate more deeply in the meaning-making.
This also means that many who read the tale of the Haymarket Affair may not optimally enjoy it. After all, we live in a time where black-and-white thinking permeates our politics, but a story like the Haymarket Affair is most resonant among those who refuse to fit it into a simple model. If you adopt an attitude of “the state is always violent and corrupt”, then that simplifies the story into commonplace dreariness. If you adopt an attitude of “the state must be strong to tend to criminals and miscreants”, that too will lose your attention. It is between these models of thinking that the story opens up.
The timelessness of the story is rooted in how the story is to some degree intrinsically unresolvable. As much as political violence is a part of American history, so is the rejection and opposition to that violence. And as long as they are unresolved in parallel, the story will maintain relevance and attention.
3.) Execution: Court-as-Studio & Product-Martyr Fit
One of the documents I find most interesting in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection shows that on October 20th, 1886, after the judge denies their motion for a retrial, all eight defendants do something quintessentially American: they co-found a start-up together.
Essentially, they declare shared collective ownership of the intellectual property they had shared over the course of the trial, creating the “Anarchist Publishing Association or Labor Press Association". (Not enough companies have names that are just two completely different names with “or” in the middle.) They were strategic from the start that they would get their message out to the world. And their execution contributed to the spread of their myth.
Meeting the Medium of the Moment
Many of the defendants were journalists who understood how information traveled.30 They understood how to tell a story, but they also understood how to get it out into the world.
We already discussed how court records inherently apply Aristotelian drama principles, but there is another challenge that faces a political minority attempting to make a point: establishing a trustworthy record.
The first video camera would be invented a couple years after the Haymarket Affair in 1888 by French inventor Louis Le Prince, and in that same year Kodak would release its first mass-market still photography camera. Back in 1886, though, you could not capture an event in a way that would inherently demonstrate authenticity. Edison’s phonograph had been recently invented but would not be broadly available until the 1890s, and not yet suitable for a group of guys like the Haymarket Eight to get into podcasting. It was a world without the blockchain. Writers could write or say whatever they want, and so how does a reader know what to believe?
The solution was having the government they opposed provide the very documentation of the government’s own offenses. After all, the government would have every incentive to make their opponents look bad, so if they can be convincing in the harsh light of the Cook County Courthouse, they can establish credibility. The Haymarket Eight were able to use this mundane feature of democratic governance to create an early antecedent to Cops, but viewed through the eyes of citizens rather than those policing them.
Another challenge with using journalism to advance political goals is that people generally don’t seek out journalism with the express purpose of altering their politics. Readers are trying to gather a basic understanding of the world, both to operate successfully within it and to connect with others in their communities. To break through, they had to create a story people would want to share.
Jack Shephard, editorial director at Buzzfeed when they dominated attention in the early social media age 2014, had two main principles to generate content that would be shared: (1) people like to share content that is about themselves, (2) people like to share content that highlights a positive emotional experience like awe-inspiring, emotional, positive or surprising.
As discussed already, the defendants’ mixed backgrounds helped a wide range of people relate to them, but the optimism of their visions despite their bleak circumstances made people want to identify with the message. The ideas they stood for were ones that others felt good standing behind. And that alongside using the tools of the state to verify their critique helped spread the word.
The Social Network of Holiday-Setters
It is important to note the importance that future geopolitical features of the world would play a key role in the global celebration of the May Day Martyrs. This was of course unknowable to the Haymarket Affair defendants at the time.
For marketers trying to induce virality, a strategy called “seeding” will be employed -- deliberately focusing on a small audience of influential voices that will spread the content. In this case, foreign governments of course have interest in spotlighting the failures of the American government to protect their documented freedoms. For much of American history, countries have engaged in zero-sum competition with the US for talent and other resources; it is, after all, governments that set their own holiday calendars.
There is deep irony that many states that honor these martyrs also use state violence against those who speak out against power, but do so without the transparent processes that the Haymarket Eight were able to utilize. So be wary that those who elevate great dead men often do so for exploitative political reasons; one shouldn’t equate the heroes with their ventriloquists.
The processes that have allowed the world to reflect on and learn from the Haymarket Affair should be celebrated, as transparency exists precisely for that purpose. But these processes also need defending, as even American governments can instead choose extrajudicial processes to handle perceived threats
If there must be ugliness and injustice in the system, it is better to have a loud and open ugliness that allows for reflection and improvement. Not every city in the world is so lucky to have the humble civil servants of 1886 Chicago’s deep state.
Five Lessons For Political Storytellers Today
Now with a better understanding of what intrinsic characteristics helped May Day spread around the world, I do think it’s worth sharing a couple thoughts on what we might be able to apply in our own political movements. And when I say “we”, I suppose I refer to anyone who seeks to increase public freedom and wellbeing; I don’t really affiliate strongly with any particular political organization.
I try to ground my takeaways, but I’m always open to revising these thoughts as I continue to reflect on the holiday in future years. These are simply the lessons that hit me now, and I’ll admit that this section is the most likely to be revised with time. But it feels prudent to share a few reflections and applications, so here we go.
[Editor’s note: This section is the most in need of revision! Caution ye who read ahead, sentences are particularly long, winding and disconnected!]
Lesson I.) Violence Alienates Local Support
My interest in this essay has been how May Day became a shared touchstone of the global calendar, because a main goal with Middling Content is understanding how our designed global environment connects people across lines of difference through shared experience. I wanted to understand: “Why do so many countries outside the US recognize this holiday?”
But if we were to ask the reverse question, “why is the US one of very few countries to not recognize May Day as a formal holiday?”, then that answer is very clear: to recognize it risks a tacit endorsement of violence against government employees. Even though the date was selected by someone unaffiliated with the Haymarket Affair and even though the Haymarket Affair took place four days later, the connection is too clear and too strong.
The way that violence had different impacts within the US and abroad is curious though. In some ways, it feels like the global escalation of the holiday depended on the act of violence and the resulting government overreaction. So it’s somewhat ironic that the very factor that made the holiday catch on abroad is what stunted its adoption at home. We don’t get to know what a non-violent path might have looked like.
The violence of the Haymarket Affair didn’t just hurt the possibility of a public May Day holiday; it also doomed the organizations associated with it. The International Working People’s Association (IWPA) that the Haymarket Eight were affiliated with dissolved the same year of the executions. The Knights of Labor’s Chicago chapter that Parsons had co-founded would name themselves the “Albert R. Parsons Assembly”, but the broader organization peaked in 1886 with the May Day march, and post-Haymarket participation declined over the next decade until it eventually dissolved.
It’s worth noting that other American labor organizations were able to survive their associations with acts of violence. In the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, an International Workingmen’s Party of the United States rally led to the raiding and looting of San Francisco’s Chinatown, killing four residents; they would change their name that same year but still exist today as the Socialist Labor Party of America. And in 1917, the AFL-affiliated Central Trades & Labor Union hosted a city hall meeting that similarly boiled over into the East St. Louis Massacre, killing what the local police chief estimated as 100 residents in the black community. While acts of violence like this against minority and immigrant communities were frowned upon, these killings of civilians were not the existential threat of a single anonymous bombthrower directed at the state.
It is worth noting that Parsons himself disavowed this kind of civilian violence in particular. He did not see immigrant labor as “the enemy” in the way that other labor movement leaders did.
"Here is a distinction between socialism and trades unions. The unionist fights the scab. [...] Gentlemen, socialism [does not] do this thing. [Socialists] regard these men as the victims of a false system, and to be pitied. These scabs I might say could be compared to the fleas on the dog. The unionist wants to kill the fleas, but the socialists would kill the dog, and that the dog is the wage system of wage slavery."
-- Testimony of Albert Parsons on August 9th, 1886
Putting aside that analogizing your political project to killing a dog seems to be microtargeting its appeal at Kristi Noem, this analogy is still hard to make sense of -- who or what is “the dog” here? And how do we attack a system?
Fully exploring this would be another essay entirely, so it is maybe enough just for the lesson to be that attacking systems and attacking people are not the same thing. Personal violence is destructive. The anonymous act of personal violence at Haymarket Square contaminated the cause of the IWPA and forced its dissolution. The responding act of personal violence against the May Day Martyrs created a global response of condemnation. But the systemic critiques published by the Haymarket Eight and their Anarchist Publishing Association helped take that condemnation and help it grow into a global community striving for more dignity in work.
Lesson II.) The Higher the Penalty Paid, The Higher the Perceived Honesty
One can imagine somewhere in a smoke-filled room in the late 1880s, a political strategist bemoaning: “We need a Democratic Albert Parsons”.31 But the iconic status Parsons achieves as a May Day Martyr is largely earned by the sacrifices he made -- his politics got him chased out of his home state, fired from his job at the Chicago Times and ultimately imprisoned and killed. The willingness to pursue one’s own truth relentlessly makes one overall less likely to adhere to a particular mass political party, which is why pure partisans will always struggle with credibility.
The term “martyr” is from the Greek word for “witness”, which makes the term a relative of others like the contemporary “woke” (from African-American English) or its rightwing equivalent “red-pilled”32 (from The Matrix). They suggest someone who has ventured out of Plato’s allegorical cave and learned enough for their cave-bound peers to find them annoying.
But the “bad faith” problem is less clear when framed as “wokeness” and better understood in the 1990s framing of “political correctness”. While the term initially was used to reflect political sensitivities -- that is, concerns about uneven distribution of power in society -- it also can be interpreted as prioritizing systems of power over authentic representations of fact. That is, a “politically correct” statement is one that savvily aligns with goals or interests. When so much of our speech is policed, it makes it challenging to know when people are merely performing their stated opinions. The alliance between social liberals and large corporations has created an environment where “leftwing” ideas are keys to senior managerial jobs, and as a result, a lot of this discourse is presumed to be argued in “bad faith”.
It is useful to think about how other institutions that rely on long-term perceptions of “good faith” can defy this skepticism. The Catholic Church has been around roughly two millennia and is thoughtful in having its frontline workers clearly sacrificing for their beliefs -- vowing celibacy and trading away the possibility of families.33 This is somewhat why recent scandals have hurt the church so much in the pluralist world; if priests are not sacrificing for their beliefs but are instead choosing a priestly life because it secretly enables their illicit interests, the whole model can collapse.
The more “woke” becomes a shibboleth for access to corporate-paying jobs, the more people will presume bad faith. As witnessed in SF’s recent “Performative Male Competition”, beliefs that become associated with a mate-signalling strategy will be viewed less credibly. So, ironically, we may not want the truths we hold sacred to become institutionalized and normalized in these ways. Seeing people occasionally punished for a point of view actually helps that point of view gain credence.
And further, as politics turn against “wokeness”, it will create the exact opposite effect. When expressing critical opinions about power systems becomes riskier, it makes those ideas more credible. The more people are punished for defending the values of diversity and inclusion, the more authentic-coded they become.
The May Day Martyrs took their ideology seriously, and they demonstrated that by paying the ultimate price. It is worth considering whether your most important beliefs are ones seen as currying favor with elites. And for anyone seeking credibility, it may simply be a matter of voicing a critique or two of contemporary dogma.
Lesson III.) A Radical Vision Can Be Incrementally Approached
The fact that “anarchism” to Parsons meant “an eight-hour workday” initially felt absolutely absurd to me. I associate anarchism with its much more extreme endpoint and with extreme actions to get there, but Parsons was able to balance a radical vision with an incrementalist policy goal in a way that was constructive.
Here was Parsons’ framing of anarchy, stated in language familiar to many Americans:
“[A]narchy is the social administration of all affairs by the people themselves; that is to say, self-government, individual liberty.” - Autobiography of Albert Parsons
In particular, he was concerned about how industrialization was changing work to make it much more demanding of their time. And so with the long-term goal to provide people absolute freedom from the demands of industrial labor, he focused on the short-term objective of restricting the windows of time where their labor could be demanded, seeing this as a step in a favorable direction. Rolling this up into a pithy popular policy promise like “the eight-hour workday” made organizing much more effective.
The term “radical” is off-putting to most people, but it fundamentally just means “root cause”. (This is why “square root” or “cube root” functions are called “radicals”.) And root cause approaches like the “five whys” toolkit is not just a tool of community activists but also of normcore business consultants. Understanding a problem’s root causes can be coupled with empathetic and coalitional approaches to action to great effect.
To be clear, though, I think this kind of “radical in vision, incremental in tactics” method can be hard in a couple ways.
First, I think our particular generation is unusually inclined to identify with abstract labels. Because so much of the social internet of the past couple decades has relied on sharing content, and because shareable content tends to play to “identity groups”, our generation is much more likely to frame our thinking in terms of the labeled “isms”. But broad ideologies with nebulous labels that are easy for opponents to redefine, derailing a policy discussion into pointless semantic debates.
Second, choosing a single “next step” is hard because any given moment has a wide range of sufferings to acknowledge. And I think our particular current moment feels uniquely deep with suffering. True solidarity feels like it should acknowledge the full slate of challenges, whereas identifying a single focus can feel cruel. A strong democratic movement should be broadly inclusive, but that can’t be an excuse to avoid specificity that enables progress.
Specific policy proposals that are deliberately coalitional can account for both these concerns. The May Day March was eventually effective because it rallied around a narrow goal, avoiding a loose concept like “anarchism” by centering the specific and popular “eight-hour workday”.
Lesson IV.) Broaden the Coalitions by Connecting to Popular Narratives
Another replicable element from the spread of May Day is its ability to draw on existing coalitions. I spoke specifically about both the variety of religious upbringings of the martyrs themselves, and I spoke about the way the Haymarket Affair plays out as a Christian allegory, but I think it’s also insightful to view how Parsons directly embed this coalitional approach in closing his autobiography.
He closes out his autobiography with two quotes deliberately intended to draw in a broad coalition. It’s worth looking at the actual images to see how he actually pastes in clippings of the primary sources a la scrapbook, perhaps even to prove to himself that he is not delusional.
On the 50th page of his 51-page account of his life and journey, he pastes a clipping of the preamble.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT."
(image on the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection)
And as his final statement, he cites Chapter 5 of the Book of James.
"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days." - James v.1-3.
(image on Haymarket Affair Digital Collection)
Often our instincts are to critique competing narratives, as we want to agree on every detail, but it is easier for someone to join a movement that doesn’t require them to fundamentally restructure how they think about the world. And even where such fundamental rethinkings are possible, they can be difficult and even traumatic for the person who rethinks their core narratives. In this way, a Parsonsian approach can be both more compassionate and more effective.
I think about this kind of coalition-building a lot these days, as my central objective is helping people identify with the global human story. This is the project of Middling Content -- to identify more ways to help the media serve as humanity’s “middle”, providing common ground so it’s easier to reach across lines of difference.
I grew up mostly on a series of foreign islands, interacting mostly with other expatriate children whose parents were also involved in the liberal globalist project. In the late 90s and early 00s, connecting the world seemed so inevitable, but that goal seems largely abandoned these days. The American right no longer claims to care about spreading American democratic ideals abroad, and the American left no longer claims that foreign factories will bring about world peace. Perhaps the cynics were correct and the right just wanted cheap oil and the left just wanted cheap manufacturing. While I know both these projects have worthy critiques, I do worry about the future of globally minded humanitarianism.
I do think the ideas and projects that grew out of the May Day Movement share this globally minded humanitarianism. And though I know “The Internationale” in concept is aligned with a socialist cause that sees itself as the opponent of the capitalist cause, they really only conflict in their recommendations of approach. Both ideologies promote a eschatological utopian vision, either driven by Hegelian Geist (socialism) or the Invisible Hand (capitalism). The closing line of each chorus, “L’Internationale sera le genre humain” (or “The International(e) will be the human race”) posits a broad inclusive politics; the song contrasts with the organization in that the song strives to not be factional but to support humanism.
And so I thought it would be interesting to evaluate policies mentioned in the lyrics of “L’Internationale”, just to see where the different policies would shake out. I had over one thousand people all over the world provide feedback on policies drawn from the lyrics, and then I matched zipcodes to voting skews to see what policies were more Democrat-aligned versus Republican-aligned.
While it is unsurprisingly true that most policy ideas mentioned in “L’Internationale” tend to skew toward Democrat-skewing districts. Examples include pushing support for workers’ councils (“producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes”), nationalizing Amtrak (“Les rois de la mine et du rail ont-ils jamais fait autre chose que dévaliser le travail?”), forgiving student debt (“du passé faisons table rase”) and starting a committee to redraft the Constitution (“le monde va changer de base”).
But there are policy ideas that are actually skewed toward Republicans! “L’Internationale” complains about how the wealthy avoid taxation (“l’impôt saigne le malheureux, nul devoir ne s’impose au riche”) and a flat income tax was preferred more in Republican-skewing zipcodes and less in Democrat-skewing zipcodes. Concerns about how the law/state are self-serving could be addressed by simplifying legal codes (“l’etat opprime et la loi triche”). And yet some wonkier regulations that appealed to individual work ethic could be favored in Republican-skewing areas, such as requiring that owners of business must work at least one week in the most commonly held job in their business (“l’oisif ira loger ailleurs”).
And then there were also policies that skewed toward normie swing district spots, such as increasing investment in domestic metalworks (“soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge, battons le fer quand il est chaud”) and easier migration for all working people (“l’Internationale sera le genre humain”). And some policies skewed both toward more extreme districts, like reducing celebrations of violence (“appliquons la grève aux armées”) and general debt forgiveness (“du passé faisons table rase”).
There’s more to analyze here, and I want to do additional research on this before drawing too many conclusions, so perhaps this is a place I can dig into more in future May Days!
Lesson V.) Nostalgia Is Not Just For The Right Wing
We tend to associate the May Day Martyrs more with the Democratic Party for a couple reasons: (1) because their pardoner Altgeld was a Democrat and (2) because after being sent into the wilderness for aligning with the Confederacy, Democrats were forced to reinvent themselves as a labor-oriented party that appealed to Midwestern voters.
But visiting some of their hometowns and imagining their upbringings gave me a more complex view of their politics that in many ways conflicts with how Democratic Party presents itself. Whereas Democrats can promote more of a technocratic solutionism, the Haymarket Eight were largely looking to be left alone to their own industriousness. Faced with a rapidly changing society where technology challenged their sense of meaning and autonomy in their work, they sought a specific kind of life that they had experienced firsthand but then lost.
It’s not completely disconnected, but I think there’s utility in articulating their particular vision of the American Dream.
Techno-Abundance vs Paleo-Abundance
There is something half-connected to the “abundance” framing in vogue in political conversations at the moment. But I think the abundance of contemporary liberalism is more of a futuristic techno-abundance, distinct in how it centers the elite managerial classes as saviors.
I’m not altogether opposed to the techno-abundance message. It sounds nice. But ultimately, it’s a bunch of politicians selling me something. I can believe it because I’ve been friends with people who work in or with Democratic politicians. I know that many are good people who are trying to achieve good in the world. But if I didn’t have that pre-existing trust, I don’t know if I would believe that this world of abundance can exist.
Focusing on the past is more tangible. Conservatism gets a home team advantage. When an idea can be rooted in history, it requires less faith in a particular politician’s vision; it’s easier to believe it can be done because it’s been done before.
One of the books that most deeply changed my life was David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As an economics major, I’d been taught that money was created to resolve difficulties in exchanging products of different value -- that is, so shepherds wouldn’t have to pay for everything in sheep, which are difficult to make change for. But Graeber’s analysis finds that this was not a problem for pre-money societies who simply would monitor the levels at which members were contributing and hold them accountable. Money was instead developed to enable “taxation”, or paying protection money to a ruling class.
Graeber’s anthropological background makes him persuasive in that he can frame societal designs as established and familiar, rather than experimental and novel. We’re much more comfortable taking a path that is well-trodden.
The Old Anarchist Dream
In his submission to the Haymarket Affair Autobiography Anthology, Journeyman Michael Schwab opens with a reflection on the Franconian forest where he was raised.
“These woods are common property; they are taken care of by the officials called foresters. Every year a certain number of trees and bush are hewn down and sorted into piles, after which the citizens repair to the woods and cast lots for the numbered piles. A certain part is kept back to defray expenses necessary for the cultivation of the forest, taxes, etc. [...] The custom dates from time immemorial. I am at a loss to understand why, for instance, cereals could not be raised in the same way.”
Where much contemporary leftism veers into “luxury space communism”, Schwab’s leftism merely yearns for an idyllic past. In its earliest days, the American colonies would provide space to Europeans who took the time and energy to make the trip. With the Homestead Act of 1862, the US again would simply give land plots to citizens willing to improve them. That whole free land thing was kind of cool, right? These programs were certainly not perfect, but it’s okay to romanticize a part of the past while acknowledging deep imperfections elsewhere.
A “left MAGA” would bring back the public option for accommodations. Rather than seeing our vision of the future as something radically different and new, we can just see it as a revival of Lincoln-era aggressive recruitment through land grants. This kind of framing is helpful whether you’re trying to win a senate supermajority or whether we’re trying to build a broad popular movement to re-liberalize a post-democratic police state.
A lot of great leftist pitches do this already. “Medicare for All” takes a successful policy and expands. I’ve ridden the convenient bus au gratis between LGA and NYC’s 7 train, which helps me see Zohran’s “Free Fast Buses” as possible.34 Radicalism on the right similarly benefits from grounding policy in an idea of the past. MAGA works as a radical message because it brands itself as non-novel with its embedded “again”.
In part because our culture prizes individualism, politicians can want to get in the weeds on some narrow wonky projects. Unique and novel policies can play to our egos, comforting us as immortality projects. But it also overcomplicates things when it is often more crowd-pleasing to channel nostalgia politics and “shut up and play the hits”.
There is a nostalgia politics in the current Democratic party too, as I see it. But its core issue is the preservation of the status quo -- a sort of “protect our endangered political class” strategy that rings as self-serving. This is a kind of conservative too, but it’s looking to conserve a power system rather than conserving cultural norms (social conservatism) or conserving distribution of resources (economic conservatism). I personally do think there are elements of our governance system that should be preserved, but I am not sure this is sufficient as a governing vision. It is also hard to see how non-politicians can participate in the project, which limits its transformative capacity.
The substance of “the abundance agenda” has more potential to connect with a broader and electorally significant audience, so the focus here makes sense to me. But rather than a solely futuristic techno-abundance, I’d encourage folks to also think about a historically grounded paleo-abundance -- the abundance that our ancestors used to have in our native homelands before the rise of oppressive state politics. An American abundance of this sort could revive the dream that four men died for on November 11th, 1887.
All in all, reflecting on the history of the Haymarket Affair and the movement that was involved in it has made me more appreciative of the informal nature in which it is celebrated.
If the US did observe May Day, I’m not sure it would actually absolve anything. We’d likely just accuse them of co-opting the day. There’s a quiet respect in choosing a different day to celebrate. The goal of the Haymarket Eight wasn’t to create a new better world with more holidays; it was to return to a sense of pre-industrial decency in working life that they themselves experienced.
Further, it sets a dangerous precedent if we let governments give themselves days off to celebrate the martyrdoms of the innocent people they kill. They could just keep killing more and more people and take more and more days off. If anything, the government should maybe work a little extra on May 1st. Let them keep their September celebration and the American public can keep May Day as a people’s holiday.
Until Next Inter-Labor-Day Season,
Back To Work,
Harry
PS. I still have many questions on how specifically this story and its holiday spread. So perhaps next May 1st (read: mid-to-late-September) I'll have more thoughts to share. How lucky am I to live in a country with both an official and unofficial Labor Day -- twice the opportunity to reflect!
PPS. If you are in possession of information demonstrating the feasibility of August Spies actually having been born in the ruins of an old castle, contact me at tips@middlingcontent.net.
PPPS. I am clearly not abiding by any remotely regular posting schedule, but I will try to reflect on another holiday at some point, hopefully not so long after it passes next time!
Works Consulted
Primary Sources
The Autobiographies (available on HADC)
The Speeches (available on HADC)
Altgeld’s Pardon (available on HADC)
Illinois Supreme Court Decision
Secondary Sources
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff Ep 1+2
BBC’s In Our Time, “The Haymarket Affair”
The Dollop “#454 Albert Parsons”
Officer Down Memorial Page for Mathias J. Degan
Guy Aldred’s Red May and the Physiognomy of Social Revolution (excerpts)
James Green’s Death in the Haymarket (excerpts)
(and lots of Wikipedia, but only cited confirmed facts unless noted otherwise)
Artistic Works about The Haymarket Affair
Haymarket: A New Folk Musical
Grillteller Fuer 2’s “Ballad of August Spies”35
Artistic Works for Political Context
Le jeune Karl Marx (2017 film)
领风者 (2016 Animated Series)
Eugène Pottier’s “L’Internationale”
Though I know many folks consider Labor Day the end of Summer, I consider the equinox to be the transition, and that means there are two days left! Enjoy them!
Having lived in Los Angeles’s Little Armenia neighborhood from 2013 to 2018, I know that the Armenians in particular have notes on this. The transition of empire to ethnostate did result in forced migration and killing of those who didn’t fit the ethnostate. And the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne would revoke the Kurdish people the ethnostate that the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres had promised. So my recommendation to any collectives deciding between an empire or an ethnostate would be that they should expand their option set.
Jokes aside, I really enjoyed this Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast episode and its part two! While my fanship of the Haymarket Affair runs deep, Margaret Read has a tattoo of the most metal of the Haymarket martyrs (Engel) and is way more legit than I am; I don’t even have a tattoo of one of the lesser martyrs. (I share a full list of the primary and secondary sources at the end of this email; her podcast episodes on this topic are great and worth a listen.) Spotify should add a feature to filter podcasts by the tattoos the hosts have.
Schwab mentions his preferred US history book is that written by George Bancroft who, as it turns out, was envoy (now called an ambassador) to Germany in 1871.
It’s easy as x, where x is the relationship between half the length of a perimeter where each point on the line is uniformly L distance from its midpoint and the length of L itself.
There is a high likelihood that Lingg’s association with Quadrat F5 is a spurious claim. My only source here is the German Wikipedia article on Louis Lingg. At 10 past midnight on the 28th of May, 2013, a user BKLuis made a pretty sizable edit to the article, mainly doing a lot of boring stuff like improving linkability, and along with that he lists the Quadrat F5 address; BKLuis seem like a pretty regular kind of guy, listing on his Wikipedia profile details that he likes “meinen Club (his sports team) und meine Biker-Kumpel (his biker buddies), [...] meine Heimat (his home)” and hates “Besserwisser (know-it-alls), Menschen ohne Humor (people without a sense of humor), [...] ein paar ex-Frauen (a couple ex-wives)”. He did link to the Mannheim city archives though (link-rotted but parts are available with the Wayback Machine), and he updated a link related to citations to a couple connected with a Mannheim labor historian named Harry Siegert, also link-rotted, but one of which is accessible through the Wayback Machine. (The other was link-rotted already in 2016, the first time the Wayback Machine tried to archive it.) Siegert has an essay in a history anthology that seems to be available through the German library system and also an essay in a local Mannheim history that is purchasable but not shippable to the US, so I’ll have to report back on this after my next visit. For now I’ll just continue to believe in this history as a sort of Harry-to-Harry solidarity.
Since his last name is “Link” though, which is “left” in German, he would presumably be the leftist/revolutionary Ludwik in a purely literary character name sense.
I tend to prefer “direct action” to protest, and so unless someone I know specifically asks me to support a protest, I’ll use my time trying to conduct research that can be useful in framing thought and building productive coalitions.
A critical flyer states that six were killed, but I believe the record states that there were only two.
Altgeld’s pardon mentions “several”, though a footnote on Wikipedia seems to only mention a single killing.
Neebe is excepted; he is sentenced to 15 years in prison seemingly for his mere association with the Arbeiter-Zeitung, one year above the minimum given from the court that any conspiracy member would receive. He serves six years before receiving a pardon due to the lack of any evidence of guilt. Unfortunately, he is unable to reunite with his wife who died during his imprisonment.
The theory behind the jury selection process was in some ways reasonable; they avoided a random selection process because they wanted to focus on a particular subset of the population who would sympathize neither with the owners nor laborers; they sought to stick to independent merchants since they operate as both managers and workers. It’s an interesting question to think about: who, if anyone, can adjudicate the class struggle impartially? I see how the defendants’ counsel went along with this thinking, but ultimately because it allowed the state more control of the jury selection process it was a mistake.
My familiarity with the Second International is from their adoption of the worker’s anthem “The Internationale” (with an “e”), which was written in the months following the Paris Commune and included a broad anti-state organizational platform. It was set to the French Revolution hymn “The Marseillaise”, which you may recall was sung by the May Day Martyrs as they walked to their certain death, but by 1889 it had the new melody that is better known today. It creates a sort of Ship of Theseus situation where because the words changed and then the melody changed, it perhaps is still in some sense “The Marseillaise”?
The International Workingmen’s Association is also distinct from the International Workers’ Association though both occasionally are summarized as “IWA”.
Originally this footnote was: “The pardon is so long that it’s somehow even longer than this post.” I ended up being slightly more verbose, and all while being much less consequential.
The bill text is a single page, but aspires to make Labor Day a public holiday “in the same manner as Christmas [and] the Fourth of July”, quite an aspiration.
At the risk of taking sides too intensely in the May vs September Labor Day standoff, it just feels worth noting that credited-father-of-September-Labor-Day Peter J. McGuire was eventually expelled from the AFL over embezzlement allegations.
I’m as big a World’s Fair fan as one can be, but even I think putting a star on a city flag for an event before it even happens is borderline diagnosably insane.
I am open to reading defenses of the star representing Fort Dearborn, because I’m not just being argumentative and contrarian, I have tried to open my mind to the idea but it is unconvincing. There is always more I can read and if I ever come to the conclusion that the Fort Dearborn star makes sense I will retract my criticism.
The records identify countries as far away as Singapore and India and Costa Rica and Panama, though looking at names I would guess that donors tend to be American expatriates.
This number is on page 7 of The Official Catalogue, though Wikipedia cites 46 and I couldn’t parse their sourcing.
This is the number cited on page 76 of The Official Book of the Fair.
If you read Latin, you can read the declaration!
The amazing people I worked with are now at NRG and Screen Engine which both offer services, and the facility in Las Vegas where we did testing is also amazing. I don’t get the sense that this is the kind of essay that is drawing attention from people who would be interested in pilot testing services, but I’m always happy to signal-blast my highly competent friends!
Random connection: Vonnegut’s great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut left Germany in 1851 in the wake of the failed 1848 Frankfurt National Assembly that also contributed to the emigration of the May Day Martyrs.
Full disclosure: I am very much NOT a writer but rather a mere analyst, but hopefully this hypothetical logline is illustrative.
The Save the Cat webpage features a “beat sheet” for The Brutalist as a “Golden Fleece” type story, as it is also about immigrants escaping totalitarian Europe and sailing to the US to uncover disappointment, both for themselves and -- so I hear -- for many friends of mine who watched the film. I liked it but hated that it fundamentally changed what brutalism was because I actually much like brutalism and am frustrated by how misunderstood it is in the US, but that’s another essay for another time perhaps.
The sea was as “beyond” as one can get in the era of the disciples; a fisherman was basically the first century equivalent of an astronaut.
Footnote: The Dao De Jing follows its own advice here. Reading like a book of riddles, it leaves space for the reader to engage in meaning-making, making it “writerly” in the Barthesian sense.
An aside, an odd feature of this story is how their media competitors were feeding antipathy toward the defendants, ultimately resulting in the killing of journalists they were competing with.
The Haymarket Affair is a reminder of how cancellation used to be much more severe, but didn’t seem to be all that effective at stifling messaging even then.
Or, related, black-pilled, blue-pilled, pink-pilled, etc.
It’s possible that the lack of families was a decision made to resolve land-inheritance issues, but I believe the effect still was clear.
My friends know that I prefer to walk it, or if I’m in a hurry I’ll use the Citibike stand.
I looped this for much of my hike to Spies supposed birthplace, and I quite enjoy it. It makes good use of Spies’s last words and it also opens with a poetic line “from Friedewald to the Land of the Free” that I quite enjoy. The artist only has 8 monthly listeners, so add it to your May Day playlists!