Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

This day, May 4,86, this is the Haymarket Riot or the Haymarket Massacre, I suppose which side of the clash you're looking at.

But it is a clash that takes place in Chicago, a violent confrontation between police and labor protesters that ended in bloodshed.

Seven police officers killed, 60 others wounded, civilian casualties estimated at 4 to 8 dead and 30 to 40 injured.

Those kinds of numbers, you can rattle them off and sort of history can reduce a moment like

this to that.

But we want to spend some time trying to understand

exactly how things got to that moment of violence and including the fact that this

was the culmination of several days of protests and largely peaceful protests around the fight for an eight hour work day.

Those protests started on May 1st, which a couple years later would be chosen as a day to fight

for workers' rights and commemorate the hay market protests.

But let's talk about the very complicated stew

that is in Chicago in these first days of May 1886.

Here to do that, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of

Wellesley hello there hello Jody hey there so I'm drawn to this story in part

because if anyone talks about this it's this bookend situation where okay we know

what May 1st is we know May Day and then we know the massacre on May 4th and then

it's like well what about May 2nd and 3rd and those times in between and so you know I want to paint a picture of kind of this ongoing thing that's happening in Chicago.

That said, on May 4th, we have this massacre.

You know, walk us through the beats of how it does tip over into this level of violence.

...