On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of US workers went on strike and marched to demand the eight-hour workday - a day of action called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the precursor to the American Federation of Labor. While the epic of the Haymarket affair has rightly been told and retold countless times, the story of this battle over historical memory - and how it specifically played out in Chicago - remains relatively unknown. They instead tell a story of exploited workers struggling for human dignity, having their lives deliberately destroyed, and yet meeting their fate with courage and thus inspiring a movement for working-class liberation. As recently as October 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot compared the current moment to the 1880s, when “people feared for their safety from groups of anarchists who routinely created chaos in the streets.”īut generations of Chicagoans - including many that voted out Lightfoot this year and elected progressive trade unionist Brandon Johnson - have rebuffed that narrative. Reactionaries and those in power have typically presented the Haymarket affair as the quintessential story of “the thin blue line,” in which heroic police officers saved civilization from a lawless mob of terrorists. But as Galeano’s fruitless search for a memorial demonstrates, in the United States - particularly in Chicago - the memory of the Haymarket martyrs has traditionally been suppressed, and the meaning of what happened to them has been contested for well over a century. In Uruguay, as around the globe, the Chicago anarchists executed in the 1880s while fighting for the eight-hour day have long been considered labor martyrs. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” Galeano lamented a few years later. On a visit to Chicago in 1988, Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano asked local friends to take him to Haymarket Square, the place forever associated with, as he put it, “the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st.” He was quickly disappointed by what he found.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |