The Accused, The Accusers: The Famous Speeches of the Chicago Anarchists in Court (1886)

About this record

The closing courtroom statements of the eight Chicago anarchists convicted in connection with the May 4, 1886 Haymarket Affair: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe. Delivered during the August–October 1886 trial before Judge Joseph Gary in the Cook County Criminal Court, and published the same year. The speeches — particularly Spies's, Parsons's, and Lingg's — became canonical political-prisoner texts of the late-19th-century U.S. labor and anarchist movements. Four of the eight were executed by hanging on November 11, 1887; Lingg died by suicide in his cell on November 10. The remaining three were pardoned by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893 on the explicit ground that the trial had been unjust.