This is the BBC.
This podcast is supported by advertising outside the uk.
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.
If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it.
I hope you enjoyed the program.
Hello.
On the 4th of May 1886, at a workers rally in Chicago, somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman and the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe.
This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an 8 hour working day following a call for a general strike.
The bomber was never identified, but two of the speakers at the rally, anarchists, and six of their supporters were blamed as inciting murder and four of them were hanged.
The May International Workers Day was created in their memory.
With me to discuss the Haymarket affair are Ruth Kinner, professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University, Christopher Phelps, Associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Gary Gerstel, Paul Mellon, professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.
Gary, there have been tensions growing in America between workers and industry for some time.
Can you highlight how it had arrived at the point it talking about?
Well, the 19th century was the century of industrialization led by Britain and the world.
America began that century on the periphery.
But during and after the Civil War began to industrialize at a ferocious rate.
Capitalist development was unregulated, it was raw, it was rapid.
And if you leave capitalists and their industries to their own devices, you get a cycle of boom and bust.
Inequality is spreading.