Thirty thousand demonstrators assembled at 7:30 the next evening, May 4. The meeting was peaceful until police appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse. When one of the leaders protested, police pushed their way to the speakers's stand. Seconds later, a "sputtering bomb" flew through the air and exploded near the policemen. The remaining officers regrouped and fired into the panic-stricken protesters. When the smoke cleared, one police officer was dead and more than 70 were injured by the bomb; in the days that followed, seven more policemen died from their wounds. Two hundred protestors were wounded by police gunfire, at least one fatally.
In Milwaukee, reaction to the Haymarket incident precipitated a "bloody massacre" on May 5. On May 1 marches to support the eight-hour day closed several businesses. On May 4, militia prevented demonstrators from closing the Chicago Rolling Mill in Bay View, Wisconsin. The next day, the day after Haymarket, city fathers clamped down. They banned crowds on the streets or in other public places and asked employers to request help if demonstrators tried to close their businesses. The governor called out more troops.
Strikers, insisting they wanted only to show they had not been intimidated, marched out to close the North Chicago Rolling Mill. The militia commander ordered them to stop, then fired into the crowd. Nine marchers were killed. Nearly fifty of the demonstrators were indicted and some sentenced to prison terms for "riot and conspiracy" or "riot and unlawful assembly."
In the aftermath of those and other demonstrations and tragedies, many strikes were defeated. But "the eight-hour movement was far from a failure," says Foner. Nationwide, thousands of workers gained a shortened workday, some industries instituted the Saturday half-holiday, and some eliminated Sunday labor. "Federal statistics show that the working week of all those who struck over hours in 1886 went down from just under 62 to less than 50 hours per week."
Two years later, in 1888, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) announced that on May 1, 1890, labor would again enforce the eight-hour day with strikes and demonstrations. In 1889, they sent a delegate to the Marxist International Socialist Congress to ask for their cooperation. The Congress passed a resolution declaring that a "great international demonstration" for the eight-hour day would take place on May 1, 1890, "in view of the fact that such a demonstration has already been resolved upon by the American Federation of Labor."
