There are indeed some major problems with this mindset. First, it illustrates a broad misunderstanding and even ignorance of American social and political history. All of the aforementioned laws and regulations, one should readily notice, are twentieth century phenomena, not components of American capitalism of the early Industrial Revolution. Second, without a broad understanding of America's labor history one might conclude that the federal and state governments are the high moral protectors of workers' rights. This, too, is an erroneous assumption. From the founding of this great country through the 1930s, laborers fought arduously through organizing, protests, strikes, and individual and collective sacrifice to secure this governmental support. Finally, with this history of civil disobedience and mass organizing has come the not-so-accurate notion that violence was the most common modus operandi employed to achieve these ends. And it is this assertion that needs to be examined first.
In tracing the history of the Left's supposed contempt for America, Daniel J. Flynn argues that the industrial age of the late 1800s brought the foundation of anti-Americanism he claims is present today. Militant labor groups of the late 19th Century, Flynn argues, advocated the violent overthrow of the American government and that "bombs and bullets, rather than soapboxes and pamphlets," served as American labor's "megaphone of choice." To support such a claim, he pulls a few examples of violence committed by the "American Left," among these the Haymarket Affair of 1886:
On May 4, 1886, seven policemen were killed in Haymarket Square in Chicago when an anarchist hurled a bomb at a group of policemen.1
Notwithstanding Flynn's conspicuous penchant for oversimplification (after all, his book's title is Why the Left Hates America), he removes this event from its context and ignores the historical facts in order to support his narrow argument. A meeting of anarchists did occur on May 4, 1886 in Haymarket Square. Certainly a bomb did explode and it did kill seven police officers. But Flynn omits some rather important facts, the first of which is what the rally was in response to from the previous day: Police fired into a crowd of strikers who were heckling and attacking strikebreakers outside the McCormack factory, killing four and wounding many others.
