Remember This Day: Molly Maguires and the Eight-Hour Men

On June 21, 1877, the corporate-owned justice system in the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennysylvania hung 10 men for the crime of daring to demand their human rights.

They were framed by the same Pinkerton goons the railroad magnates (who owned the coal mines) hired to break the strike. "Break the strike" is a euphemism. For more than a year the goons beat the miners, blacklisted the fired miners so their children starved, shot and killed the miners.

None of it worked. The union held. So they smeared the mostly Irish immigrant miners by calling them Molly Maguires, the terrorists of their day. Demonizing immigrants worked then as well as it works now, only the consequences were more severe.

It was then that the New York World reporter wrote, "The demeanor of the men on the scaffold, their resolute and yet quiet protestations of innocence ... were things to stagger one's belief in their guilt ... They were arrested and arraigned at a time of great public excitement, and they were condemned and hanged on 'general principles.'"

Nine years later, on June 21, 1886, the trial of the Eight Hour Men began in Chicago.

At the end of a remarkably peaceful protest by 100,000 workers in Haymarket Square, corporate plutocrats, enraged by the demand for an eight-hour day, paid provocateurs to throw a bomb that could be blamed on the Eight Hour Men. It worked like a charm.

An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they dispersed the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of eight police officers, mostly from friendly fire, and an unknown number of civilians. In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists (sic)* were tried for murder. Four men were convicted and executed, and one committed suicide in prison, although the prosecution conceded none of the defendants had thrown the bomb.

Demand human rights, suffer in protest, get framed, end up hanged. You could write the entire history of America on that theme.

* Shame on Wikipedia for spreading 125-year-old propaganda. Demanding human rights for workers does not make you an anarchist. Organizing workers into a union does not make you an anarchist. Condemning corporate owners for making virtual slaves of their workers does not make you an anarchist. Daring to defy the Plutocratic Power does not make you an anarchist.

Here's what a real anarchist does: eliminate millions of good American jobs in order to break unions, force wages below subsistence level and eliminate the middle class. Real anarchists repeal laws that protect the economic system from catastrophe. Real anarchists gamble the nation's savings in wild speculation that plunges the world into near-Depression.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?