Politics on Trial: The Haymarket Eight vs the Police

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

History, News, Society & Culture, Politics, Philosophy

4.7 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s political trial is one of the most notorious in American history: eight men charged with and convicted of murder in 1886 for a terrorist outrage that none of them committed. A bomb had been thrown at the police during a workers’ rally in Chicago but this trial was not about punishing the person who threw it. Rather it was a witch hunt of the men and the movement that were thought to have inspired it. Anarchism was put on trial and condemned in the Haymarket case. Who promoted and who resisted the invasion of paranoia and conspiracy theories into an American courtroom? And was it anarchists or was it the forces of law and order that were ultimately responsible for Chicago’s descent into violence and retribution? For all the information about our autumn season of screenings and live recordings, 'Films of Ideas', and to book tickets, go to our website: https://www.ppfideas.com/events Next time in Politics on Trial: Charles Parnell vs the English Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, my name's David Rumserman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.
0:16.9	Today, in politics on trial, I'm talking about one of the most notorious cases in American history.
0:23.6	It's the trial in 1886 of the Haymarket Eight, eight men, four were executed, one committed suicide, two were given life imprisonment, one was given 15 years, all convicted of murder, even though
0:40.4	none of them threw the bomb or fired the guns that caused the deaths. So why were they found
0:48.7	guilty? This is the first case that I talked about in this series when there is more than one person in the dock, eight people charged.
1:01.9	In all the other trials I've talked about, it's just the one.
1:05.2	And in this case, these are eight relatively obscure people who came to prominence through this trial. Four were executed,
1:14.3	and another died, one committed suicide. It's in relation to an event which took place on May
1:19.9	4, 1886 in Chicago, in Haymarket Square, when at a workers' rally that had been called
1:27.1	to protest against an event that had happened
1:30.0	a few days earlier in which two workers had been killed. A bomb was thrown into a crowd of
1:36.1	policemen and protesting workers. Seven policemen died, an unknown number of workers were also
1:42.9	killed. And this is the trial of the men who were
1:46.3	accused of those deaths. But here are some of the things that the trial did not try to establish.
1:53.1	It did not try to establish who threw the bomb. There were one or two moments in the case
1:59.5	when accusations were made, one moment in the
2:02.6	trial in particular, when a witness, when asked, pointed at one of the accused and said,
2:08.6	he threw it. I saw him through it. I recognize him. But no one believed that witness.
2:14.6	Who threw the bomb was not the question. How many people died was not the question.
2:20.7	Seven policemen died, but the number of others who were killed was unspecified. How they died was not
2:28.2	the question. Some were killed by the bomb, it is assumed, but some, including some of those policemen, were killed by gunfire.
2:37.2	What happened was when the bomb was thrown and exploded. All hell broke loose. It was chaos.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from D&HR Media Ltd, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of D&HR Media Ltd and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.