Chicago Haymarket Centennial

Abstract

As six hundred dignitaries watched the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty one hundred years ago, eight Chicago working-class leaders sat in the Cook Coun ty Jail. They had been convicted of conspiring to throw a bomb that killed a policeman at a May 4, 1886 labor rally in Haymarket Square. Four of them, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fisher, would be hung on November 11, 1887. Except for Parsons, they were all immigrants. Just as the juxtaposition of the epigrams underscores the inconsistency be tween the image of justice and freedom promised by the Statue of Liberty and the reality as nineteenth-century workers experienced America, the conviction one hundred years later of church workers for providing sanctuary to refugees fleeing Central America stands in stark contrast to the glitz and glitter sur rounding the statue's rededication. The statue's promise has proven chimerical while the words of George Engel have proven prophetic. In 1886 the Haymarket affair was vastly more important than the dedica tion of the Statue of Liberty. Yet today advertisers and conservative ideologues have been able to rivet national attention to the patriotic symbolism surrounding the statue while Haymarket is all but forgotten. This underscores just how seri