Attention workingmen! Great Mass-Meeting To-Night, at 7:30 o'clock, Haymarket, Randolph St. Bet. Desplaines and Halsted [...] Achtung, Arbeiter! Grosse Massen-Versammlung [&c]

[Chicago: May 4, 1886]. Second edition, with text revised to omit the call for arms. Octavo broadside (25.5cm x 17.5cm). Printed in black on newsprint; text in English and German, in 19 lines; German-language portions printed in gothic type. Mild toning to margins, with closed tear into left margin; a few small chips; Very Good. Small ink pressure-stamp of the Chicago Historical Society at left margin (as usual; see note below).

A quite good copy of one of the most sought-after pieces of American labor memorabilia. This broadside, distributed by hand and posted on walls on the afternoon of May 4, 1886, calls workers to a mass meeting at Haymarket (truncated) Square in Chicago to protest the police murder of a striking worker at the McCormick plant the day before. It was at that meeting that a bomb was thrown – the bomb-thrower's identity has never been determined – killing seven policemen and four civilians; the ensuing trial of eight Chicago anarchists would become one of the most famous trials of the century, culminating in the dubious conviction of all eight, six of whom were either executed or died in prison.

The first version of the broadside to go to press included a line of type calling on workers to arrive at the meeting armed and prepared to defend themselves. An indefinite number of these were printed – certainly no more than a few hundred – before the line was deleted, at the insistence of anarchist August Spies, who refused to address the rally if the line were included. A revised version then went to press, omitting the line; an estimated 20,000 were printed. Paul and Beth Garon, in their article in The Haymarket Scrapbook, have noted at least four variants of the broadside; this version, with the test "Massen-Versammlung" in Roman type and the hand-stamp of the Chicago Historical Society, is their version 2b.2. The Garons note two other states, with minor variations in punctuation (nos 3 and 4), without priority.

Though there has been some suggestion over the years that version 2 is a later reproduction, printed after 1900, the Garons offer several effective counter-arguments, noting among other points that it is this Version 2 that is pictured in Captain Michael Schaack's account of the affair, Anarchy & Anarchists (1889). The Chicago Historical Society must at some point have obtained a small remainder of these broadsides, as almost all versions seen by the Garons and by us have included the stamp. The current copy was originally sold in the Sotheby sale of manuscripts from the estate of Fanny N. Rolfe (1984). We do not trace any copy of Garon's version 1, with the unedited text, in the auction record. KEBABIAN 51. GLENN 490. See also: GARON, Paul & Beth, "The May Fourth Broadside" in Rosemont & Roediger The Haymarket Scrapbook, 1986, pp.68-70. (Inventory #: 81168)