Arizona republican., 1914-02-14
U l1ze U Great Trials
 %
 History
TRIAL OF HAY MARKET RIOTERS

The Spring of 1886 saw an unusual amount of agitation among labor or
 ganizations looking to a higher rate of wages and schedule of shorter work ing hours. The revolt was mostly in the west. Chicago was sort of storm center. In May forty thousand work ! men struck in Chicago to enforce the demand for an eight-hour labor day During the early part of the month several workmen had been shot by po- lice and by PinkertOn detectives.
 On the evening of May was an- nounced a public indignation meeting for the following day in Haymarket
 Square, at which good speakers would be in attendance. About fifteen hundred workmen assembled on May 4. Most of the addresses were com paratively mild in tone, but about ten o'clock, after the mayor had gone and part of the audience had dispersed, Samuel Fielden gave utterance to ve- hement incendiary remarks, referring with derision to such men as Washing ton, Jefferson and Patrick Henry, and concluded, The law is your enemy. We
 are rebels against it. You have been
 robbed and will be starved into a worse condition
 At this point a body of about 1S0 policement marched up. Captain Ward
 addressed the crowd: T command you, in the name of the people of the state of Illinois to immediately disperse"
 They arrested Fielden. As the police were carrying him off a deafening ex- plosion occurred and a third of the
 policemen fell wounded, the result of bomb.
 The officers still on their feet dashed against the mob, of whom over fifty fell. the rest fleeing. A storm of wrath fell upon the anarchists, who had thus
 for the first time tried their methods in America The actual thrower of the bomb was probably Rudolph Schaubelt;
 but by shaving off his beard immedi- ately he avoided identification, though twice arrested, and finally escaped to parts unknown
 Efforts were made to bring the heads of the Chicago conspirators to justice.
 The bomb used was probably the pro- duction of Louis Lingg, who all the afternoon before the riot had, with his assistants. been filling bombs similar to the one thrown.
 Lingg was arrested, as well as seven other men connected with the anarchist newspapers conducted by Albert R. Parsons and Augustus Spies. The prosecution was based mainly upon extracts from these papers As ec- cessories before the fact, equally guilty with the unknown principal having by speech and print advised the commits sion of murder, Augustus Spies. Mi chael Swab, Samuel F'ielden, Albert R. Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engle and Louis Lingg were. on August 20, 1 1SS6 sentenced to death, and Oscar | Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years | imprisonment at hard labor. The trial had consumed a number of weeks, having been begun early in July.
 It was with much difficulty that jury
 was obtained. On August IT, Captain
 Black, who was the leading counsel for ' the anarchists, begun his closing
 speech. He claimed that the whole of | the murder rested on the shoulders of
 the man who threw the bomb, and he argued that the defendants could not
 be convicted as accessories before the 1 fact
 | On August 19, Judge Gary, before whom the trial had been held. charged
 the jury, in which he set out that all conspirators were equally guilty, con-
 cluding his speech at 2:50 P. M., after
 which the jury retired and had com
 pleted and sealed their verdict by | eleven o'clock.
 With the approval of the judge and
 the district attorney, the sentences of l Schwab and Fieden were to life im-
 prisonment. Lingg escaped the gal
 lows by suicide, or as his friends main tained, by murder at the hands of the
 police, a bomb, his chosen weapon, be- | ing exploded in his mouth. Four more | bombs were found in his cell. Engle failed in an attempt to kill himself by | poison.
 In November, 1887, Engle, Parsons,