August Spies

August Spies (1855 to 1887) was a German-born American upholsterer, radical labor activist and newspaper editor who became one of the most prominent German-speaking anarchists in the United States during the 1880s. He was among the speakers at the Haymarket Square rally in Chicago on 4 May 1886, where a bomb was thrown at police and the ensuing violence killed police officers and civilians. Spies was tried with seven other men for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of an officer and was found guilty. Four of the defendants, Spies among them, were executed in November 1887 at the age of thirty one. The Haymarket affair became a landmark event in the history of the American labor movement and in later debates over the fairness of the trial.