Alien Anarchism

Abstract

This chapter investigates the Haymarket Square rally in 1886, which solidified the presumed connection between aliens and undesirable worker radicalism. Reaction to the Molly Maguires and the Great Railroad Strike had established the practice of blaming immigrants and associated foreign ideologies for the industrial era's loss of workplace harmony, but the stigma did not prevent employers from fulfilling their growing labor needs by hiring large numbers of alien workers. Those recruited regularly included strikebreakers whose presence angered established workers. Through the early 1880s, laborers—not capitalists—tended to harbor animosity toward recent arrivals. When the Haymarket affair renewed and intensified fears of working-class violence, employers resorted to the pattern of implicating the immigrants who labored at their mills, mines, and factories, even as they continued to employ them.