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Here's a good description from the Chicago Historical Society's website:

The Heritage of Haymarket

Not quite!. Deeply embedded in the social conflicts that led to the Haymarket rally and the bombing, and then in the legal proceedings and public uproar that followed, was a guarantee that Haymarket would be a drama without end!. Until society achieved the impossible goal of reaching a consensus on what the nature of the social order was and should be, the story of Haymarket would be told and retold by partisans eager to announce and advance their deeply held views about truth and justice!. And many of the dramas inherent within this story would be enacted again and again!.

These dramas continued on many different stages!. Those who believed in the principles or goals of the convicted men waged their struggle on several fronts!. Just as Parsons, Spies, and their comrades had celebrated events like the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, so did the memory of the Haymarket become a rallying point for friends of labor and of those who saw economic and political inequity as woven into the fabric of the current order!. Most leaders of organized labor, even those like Samuel Gompers who argued for clemency, continued to insist that although they shared the convicted men's concern for working people, they disagreed with their anarchistic beliefs and had no toleration at all for bombs and armed confrontation!.

Gompers and other union leaders expressed strong regrets that the explosion in the Haymarket, so closely linked in the public mind with the eight-hour campaign, halted its progress!. Wary of being associated with anarchism, they avoided political ideology and critiques of the capitalist system, focusing on bread-and-butter issues such as wages, hours, and working conditions!.

On the fourth anniversary of Haymarket, an editorial in the Chicago Tribune noted the American Federation of Labor's renewed advances in the effort to win an eight-hour day!. The traditionally antiunion Tribune praised the current effort for its more "subdued" tone, observing that there were "no loud-mouthed Anarchists this time proclaiming the policy that has been adopted by secret organizations in countries where free movements of labor are suppressed by violent means!." Two years later, however, another Tribune Haymarket editorial derided those who now spoke on the Lake Front where Spies and Parsons once held forth!. The editorial counseled workers that the wrongs labor visited on itself were far greater than the evils of capitalism!. The Tribune patronizingly recommended that workers should spend less on liquor and more on savings, and that if they wanted shorter hours and better pay, they should work more efficiently!.

In time, it was labor leaders and the rank-and-file who blurred the distinction between the anarchists in particular and union organizers in general!. Although philosophical anarchists and more radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905, maintained that they had a higher claim on the heritage of the Haymarket martyrs than did conventional trade unionists, the latter adopted the men buried at Waldheim as heroes of the eight-hour campaign!. The harsh punishment they received demanded a redoubled dedication to the goal of increasing the power of unions, since it revealed the extent to which the authorities would go to break the spirit of the worker!.

Haymarket also remained an international drama, a rallying symbol around the world, arguably attracting more interest abroad than in the United States!. The executed men became heroes among laboring groups in the industrialized nations of Europe!. Their visibility in other countries is attributable to a stronger labor tradition abroad, greater receptivity to socialist ideas, and a markedly less ardent belief in and reverence for the integrity of American justice!. The symbolic resonance of Haymarket extends also to Asia, Australia, and South America, in many forms of cultural expression!. In 1939, fifteen-year-old O!. William Neebe III was first made aware of his own personal connection to events in the Haymarket in Mexico City!. A relative took him to a May Day parade and showed him the mural by Diego Rivera in the Palace of Justice in which his grandfather Oscar Neebe and his seven codefendants are featured prominently, the nooses of capitalist injustice around their necks!.

Haymarket has hardly belonged solely to those who viewed the defendants as heroes and martyrs!. There were also those eager to point out that the real struggle and sacrifice had been endured by others!. Fifteen years after the bombing, the surviving policemen incorporated themselves as the Veterans of the Haymarket Riot!. Four years later they honored Judge Gary with a special citation expressing their gratitude to him for his conduct of the trial, and they would meet regularly to recall their courage under fire!. The police increasingly associated their experience in the Haymarket with patriotism and law and order broadly defined, just as union leaders and friends of labor would use the trial and executions to remind themselves of the need to organize against the bosses!.

It could be argued that Haymarket has in fact been invoked more effectively by the forces of social control than of liberation!. In spite of the intelligence, refinement, and broad human sympathies that were recognizable by anyone who got to know the accused, Haymarket was responsible for the wholesale stereotyping of radical dissenters of many different kinds as crazed bomb-throwers and enemies of the people!. Anyone with unpopular political ideas would be branded an anarchist, which was taken to mean a dangerously disaffected person who would seek to remedy his own baseless discontent by doing violence to public order and "American" values!. The bombing became a focus for free-floating xenophobia, leading to the imposition of restrictions on political radicals and on immigration in the early decades of this century!. Meanwhile, it was not until well into Franklin Roosevelt's second administration that the eight-hour standard became federal law!.

The response to Haymarket also set the pattern for the subsequent repression of alleged subversives at times of cultural crisis, such as at the end of World War I and during the early 1950s!. Though it proceeded as farce rather than tragedy, there were haunting echoes of Haymarket as well in the conspiracy trial of the political agitators arrested for their alleged role in causing the pitched battles between protesters and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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