Jerseytodd

“After another clash erupted between striking workers and Chicago police at the Reaper Works in May of 1886, anarchist groups organized a rally at the city’s Haymarket Square as a memorial for the strikers killed by the police. Two thousand workers gathered to hear speeches by anarchist leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons. When the police moved in to break up the rally, an unseen assailant tossed a dynamite bomb at the officers, killing one immediately and maiming several others. Gunfire erupted; by the time the mêlée ended, seven officers were dead, along with at least four protestors. As many as a hundred others were injured in the riot. The Haymarket Affair sparked an immediate crackdown against the radical groups; Parsons and Spies were both arrested, along with six others, and accused of being accessories to the murder of the officer killed by the bomb. During the trial, key evidence was supplied by the lead Pinkerton undercover agent, Andrew C. Johnson, who claimed firsthand knowledge of the anarchists’ murderous plot. In response, Albert Parsons denounced the Pinkertons as “a private army…at the command and control of those who grind the faces of the poor, who keep wages down to the starvation point.” In the end, the jury sided with Johnson, and all eight were condemned to death. Four of them—including both Spies and Parsons—were executed, despite the fact that no evidence ever directly connected them to the infernal machine that had exploded during the rally. A fifth condemned prisoner committed suicide the night before the executions, detonating a dynamite blasting cap with his teeth in his prison cell.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective