On 4 May 1886, an anonymous individual threw a dynamite bomb at advancing police who had begun to violently disperse a crowd of labourers in Haymarket Square on Chicago's West Side. The group had assembled to protest police brutality in response to a recent strike at McCormick's Reaper Factory, a large producer of agricultural machinery for the Mid-West. The strike had been part of a far-larger campaign by a variety of trade union and workers’ societies in Chicago for fairer pay and conditions, called the Eight-Hour Movement. The bomb killed one policeman, Mattias Degan, instantly and twenty-three officers were injured enough to disable them. Six policeman died of injuries in the following weeks and months – though it is not known whether these were sustained from the bomb or friendly fire in the chaos following the explosion. The police response to the bomb was panicked and disorganised. They shot into the crowd with live ammunition, failed to identify participants from by-standers, and reports exist suggesting they even fired into their own lines. Accounts vary quite widely as to the number of civilians killed, as no official count was taken by police or the newspaper syndicates, although the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests ‘three civilians were killed near Haymarket that night of May the Fourth’ and ‘several dozen’ sustained bullet wounds (3). The lack of an accurate headcount was likely because the workingmen and women involved were unwilling to reveal themselves as present at the time and so face a potential death penalty for conspiracy or other forms of extrajudicial violence that were promoted in the press as legitimate responses to what was framed as, but did not always refer to itself as, ‘anarchism’.