We Americans have no idea that American labor union members in Chicago fought and died for the right to work no more than an 8-hour day, and their sacrifice is remembered the world over and commemorated on May Day. A policeman died, too – but although he may have been there to protect strikers and strikebreakers from each other, he was identified with the kind of thugs corporations send to break up labor disputes. Actually, several policement and an unknown number of workers died, all told.

Utah Phillips speaking at the Haymarket Martyr’s Memorial for the 100th anniversary

We Americans have almost completely forgotten (or were never taught) that labor activists and shaggy anarchists rallied at Haymarket Square in Chicago in response to a previous “incident” where 2 striking workers at Chicago’s McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant were killed in a scuffle with police and strikebreakers at the end of the workday. This was on May 4, 1886, several days after the May Day rallies organized by labor unions, where in Chicago alone 80,000 people turned out to march.

A policeman was killed at the end of the mostly-peaceful rally by a pipe bomb thrown by someone in the crowd, and the police began firing wildly in response, wounding mostly each other in the darkness. Some in the crowd also fired back; in the end, 8 policemen and at least 4 workers died from gunfire, with many more wounded.

After a celebrated trial and many appeals, eventually 4 men were executed, rather horribly, after singing the Marseillaise (which was the trade union anthem)5 at the gallows. A fifth man had committed suicide in his prison cell the night before, also rather horribly. 2 others had their sentences commuted to life in prison, and the eighth man was given a sentence of 15 years. A ninth man was charged, but had escaped to Europe. Several of the convicted workers were German, or of German descent.

The actual “bomb-throwing anarchist” was never identified; the 8 convicted men were organizers or connected to the rally one way or the other.

We Americans have mostly forgotten, but a few remember; after it had been vandalized many times over the years, the Weathermen blew up a commemorative statue to the policeman who was killed in the Haymarket riot. Twice. Eventually the statue was rebuilt a third time and moved into a more secure location in the courtyard of the Chicago Police Academy. The empty pedestal from the previous location (it was moved several times) continued to be an anarchist landmark (and target of vandalism) until it was finally removed.

Apparently, the Haymarket massacre and its significance is still remembered locally by certain people, as only yesterday I happened to notice a custom license plate that was an abbreviated reference to “Haymrkt.” There are fresh flowers left at the Martyr’s Memorial in Forest Park to this day.

I didn’t become aware of this, and of the reason why the US celebrates these struggles and martyrdoms on Labor Day in September, while the rest of the world celebrates them on May Day, until I got involved in Second Life. A German woman I met inworld always throws a May Day party, and she plays a lot of rabble-rousing, Red Lefty anthems and rousing pro-labor rock tunes by people like Billy Bragg. I was shocked to find out that Chicago, and something called the Haymarket Massacre, is important to trade unionists the world over as a galvanizing and historic moment in the international movement. When she found out I lived near Chicago, she was deeply moved and told me all about how important the martyrs’ sacrifice was to her personally and to all Red Lefty Socialist Communist Labor Union types.

I was… surprised and not a little embarassed to be so ignorant of my own country’s history.

Labor Day as a legal holiday was originally to commemorate the struggle for the right to work an 8-hour day, but it got detached, by the politicians that rushed it through Congress, from the international May Day holiday and moved to September. The original date in May celebrated by most international labor movements was deemed to have “negative associations” with the violence (and radicalism) of the earlier Haymarket Affair. Let’s remember that, America — if we’re lucky enough to have a full-time job, that is.

America used to have a proud history of good old fashioned Lefty activism, complete with a bunch of great protest songs. This history has been mostly forgotten. Socialism has been conflated with liberalism while both systems of thought were demonized by the Right – to the point that “liberal” has become a dirty word, and even the word “progressive” is becoming a target for eliminationist rhetoric. Unfortunately, the “bards” of the old movement are getting pretty old – think Pete Seeger or Utah Phillips.

So who will sing the protest songs when they are gone?

The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre or Haymarket riot) was a demonstration and unrest that took place on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at the Haymarket Square[3] in Chicago. It began as a rally in support of striking workers. An unknown person threw a bomb at police as they dispersed the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of eight police officers, mostly from friendly fire, and an unknown number of civilians.[4][5] In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were tried for murder. Four men were convicted and executed, and one committed suicide in prison, although the prosecution conceded none of the defendants had thrown the bomb.

The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant for the origin of international May Day observances for workers.[6][7] In popular literature, this event inspired the caricature of “a bomb-throwing anarchist.” The causes of the incident are still controversial. The deeply polarized attitudes separating business and working class people in late 19th-century Chicago are generally acknowledged as having precipitated the tragedy and its aftermath. The site of the incident was designated a Chicago Landmark on March 25, 1992.[8] The Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in nearby Forest Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark on February 18, 1997.[2]

via Haymarket affair – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UPDATE: WEIRD! I swear I didn’t read digby’s post about Haymarket before starting this one.

Do you really want to elect someone to national or local office who actually believes in witches, and that angels and demons are constantly at war, kept at bay only by the actions of prayer warriors?

Do you think that people with such extreme religious views should dictate whether you can marry the person you love, or whether you or your female partner should be forced carry every potential pregnancy to term, even if it’s against her will?

Do you think it’s a good idea for a large number of voters to be so willfully and deliberately mal-informed, by just a single news source, that they reject all facts or issues that don’t support their very narrow-minded and intolerant world view?

Do you think it’s a good idea to de-fund education, cut social services to the bone, and hobble effective health care for all but the well-off? Especially since your children will grow up and be educated under such a crippled system?

Do you think it’s okay for the middle and lower socio-economic classes in this country to shoulder the greatest burden of taxes for the least share of the wealth, while a tiny percentage of the super-rich controls the greatest bulk of the nation’s purse-strings?

Do you really think that it’s a good idea to elect people who are prepared to bring our economy down just to prevent their political opponents from fixing the mess the previous batch of reality-denying conservatives left behind?

Do you actually believe that it’s perfectly all right if corporations feel free export jobs to other countries, shutter factories and technology companies, and corrupt the very leaders you consider to be such spiritual paragons? After all, the companies must make a profit for their shareholders. Not that you know anything about the stock market or investments, because you lost your job when the plant closed and money’s tight. Just hold on, and eventually something from above will trickle down on you — no matter how bad it smells.

Would you like to hear about a wonderful opportunity? It’s a sure-fire chance to get in on the ground floor – all you have to do is drink the Kool-Aid, stop thinking, and above all don’t question authoritarianism wearing a crisp dress shirt and professorial hornrims. You, too, can have a steaming load of hypocrisy and propaganda delivered to your home — and if you act now, you can get a fresh supply straight from the horse’s ass. Just pick up the phone to start investing in your golden, glittering future… operators are standing by.

If you and a lot of other people ignore the lessons we learned from history – the kind of history that actually happened as opposed to the kind that gets re-arranged by people who control and manipulate your opinions for their own financial gain – you can have your imaginary country back.

That’s right, that fantastic and immeasurably powerful country you long for, where everybody looked like you and believed like you. Where you lived without paying for any kind of social service, public utilities, food and drug safety agencies, Federal law enforcement, highways, or health care. That country you dream of, that didn’t need to concern itself with “human rights” or international trade, or poverty, or natural disasters. Those things just aren’t your problem, or shouldn’t be.

You can have that country back, and arrange it into the kind of “populist” theocracy that worked out so terribly well for the Puritans, and all the “witches” they burned at the stake.

You can have that country back, but only if you promise to give it back again when your cynical leaders betray you and ruin it with war, incompetence, greed, and corruption (again). If you get that country back, it won’t be what they told you it would be, over and over again. Eventually, you’ll come running back to reality crying out that they lied to you and you were temporarily insane, or mesmerized by spiritual flim-flammery, sex appeal, and snake oil.

But to get it, you have to drink the Kool-Aid, get indoctrinated, and soak up all the propaganda you can to inoculate your mind against the onslaught of facts, policy statements, corrections, logic, and that dreaded rhetoric.

Those so-called “progressives” will try to appeal to your better nature, can-do spirit, compassion, and sense of fair play – those old fashioned American virtues that have no place in the good old USA! USA! USA! you so desperately want back. Who needs progress? Who needs roads? Who cares about poor people? Jesus sure didn’t… did he?

You’d better get yourself an infusion of thoughts and opinions, in the company of other people who need validation just like you do, before you remember how to think for yourself. Then you can have your American dream back – and the nightmare begins for everyone else.