ABSTRACT
If “terrorism” means the use of unexpected violence to intimidate or coerce people in the pursuit of political or social objectives, it has played many parts in U.S. history. On May 4, 1886, a small group of labor militants called a demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square as part of a larger campaign advocating an 8-hour working day. When police attempted to disperse the crowd of 1,500 or so, a bomb exploded. In the explosion and riot that followed, seven police and four demonstrators died. In the pariance of the day the organizers were called anarchists, eight of whom were convicted for inciting violence despite the lack of evidence linking them to the bombing. Had such an incident occurred in 1987 journalists would have called the organizers revolutionaries and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would have categorized the event as terrorism. 1 As it was, the episode entered U.S. history as the Haymarket Riot (Adamic 1931; David 1936, 1958; Kogan 1959).
