The trial of the Haymarket Anarchists

"The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists is the culmination of seven years of research into the 1886 Haymarket bombing and subsequent trial. It not only overturns the prevailing consensus on this event, it documents in detail how the basic facts, as far as they can be determined, have been distorted, obscured, or suppressed for seventy years. Based on both a reexamination of well-known sources and the discovery of many new ones, Timothy Messer-Kruse demonstrates that the received wisdom regarding Chicago's anarchist leaders--that they were tried and convicted for their ideas in a trial in which little evidence of their guilt was presented--is absolutely false"--Provided by publisher. "The Haymarket Trial rewrites the history of the most iconic event of American labor history, the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886, using thousands of pages of previously unexamined materials. Contrary to longstanding historical opinion, the trial was not "a travesty of justice" by the standards of criminal procedure of that era. Prosecutors succeeded in rallying a daunting amount of evidence revealing the inner-workings of an anarchist conspiracy to spark an insurrection by attacking police and connected their plans to the bomber through a solid chain of evidence. Rather than being an example of "judicial murder" the Haymarket trial was a tragic case of judicial suicide as the defense chose to use the trial as a grandstand for anarchism rather than deploy a sound legal defense. Though bumblers in a court of law, the anarchist lawyers proved adept in the court of public opinion and succeeded in influencing the way historians and activists would remember this event for the next 125 years"--Provided by publisher.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.