Labor, Memory, and the Boundaries of Print Culture: From Haymarket to the Mexican Revolution

Abstract

In this essay, the constellation of events known as “Haymarket” serves as a hinge between the Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. These events, which together comprise one of the most notorious episodes in US labor history, include huge demonstrations in Chicago on 1 May 1886 in support of an eight-hour day; 3 May 1886 attacks in which police fired on strikers at the McCormick Reaper plant in that city, killing at least two; the gathering of 3000 workers the next day at Haymarket Square; and finally, the interruption of that peaceful meeting by the police and the throwing of a bomb, which killed several policemen and workers. As is well known, the state charged eight of Chicago's labor leaders with murder, though the identity of the bomb-thrower was never discovered. After an outrageously unfair trial, all were convicted: four were hung, one was found dead in his cell, and three others received long prison sentences.1 Despite the Red Scare and the repression of public speech that followed the 1887 executions, however, in newspapers, pamphlets, books, plays, poems, images, speeches, commemorations, and through other modes of memory-making, radicals and working-class advocates repeatedly returned to Haymarket to understand the past and make meanings for the present.2 In order to contribute to the larger project of situating US labor history and culture within a global frame, this essay focuses on the connections some of these radicals made among the US Civil War, Haymarket, and the Mexican Revolution.

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