Schaack, Michael J.

Anarchy and anarchists : A history of the Red terror and the social revolution in America and Europe : Communism, socialism, and nihilism in doctrine and in deed : The Chicago Haymarket conspiracy, and the detection and trial of the conspirators by Michael J. Schaak, Captain of Police. (Chicago : F.J. Schulte & Company, 1889)

Terrorists were active in Europe, Britain, and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Typically they saw themselves as anarchists and the bombs they used resembled shot-puts with wicks. Novelists such as Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), and Henry James, in The Princess Cassamassima (1886) wrote about anarchists and the fear they engendered into the populace of London.

Schaack's book has detailed descriptions of the methods of the anarchists, for example the way in which they manufactured their bombs. In 1889, when this book was published, the Chicago Haymarket riot was still fresh in people's memories. This incident had taken place on 4 May 1886 when radicals had met in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the actions of police on the day before. On 3 May police had attacked a group of strikers who had gathered outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company's works to demonstrate against the use of scab labour. This was part of ongoing action by workers seeking an eight-hour day. One of the strikers was killed in this altercation. The Haymarket rally was peaceful until the police began to disperse the crowd, then a bomb was thrown, and a riot started. Seven police were killed. Eight anarchist labour leaders were arrested and found guilty. Four were hung on November 11, 1887, and another committed suicide. The remaining three were later pardoned, in 1893. There was much debate surrounding the trial; some of the accused were not present at the riot but were condemned for supposedly conspiring to commit violence.

This was a turning point in American labour history. Many workers blamed the Knights of Labor, the major union pushing for the eight-hour day, for being involved in the riot, and there was a general drift towards the less radical newly-formed American Federation of Labor.