Directions: Use this newspaper excerpt to answer the questions that follow.
Question 1: Explain why a historian might think that this passage alone does not provide enough
evidence to fully understand the effect of the Haymarket Affair on the growth of anarchism?
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Question 2: Three documents are described below. Explain whether each document could be
used to support this newspaper’s claims about the extent of anarchist activity in the U.S. in the
late 1800s and early 1900s?
a.) An article in an anarchist newspaper from 1910 describing steady growth in the anarchist
movement over the previous 40 years.
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There was no anarchism as an organized movement in the United States until the Haymarket
bomb throwing affair in Chicago, which took place May 4, 1886. Now there are scores of local
. . . dens, district federations and a national federation of anarchists. . . . In the past twenty years
there have been more anarchistic outbreaks . . . in America than have occurred in all our
previous history . . . the Haymarket affair marked the real birth of the hydra-headed horror in
this country.
Source: Part of a 1908 Utah newspaper article titled “Anarchy and Anarchists of the New
World.”
Source: An English visitor’s description of African Americans on the streets of New York City
in the 1850s.
CONTINUE ON BACK
Vocabulary
Anarchism: A belief in eliminating all government and social organizations.
Score: a large amount or number of something.
Den: A place where people meet in secret, often to do something illegal.
Federation: An organization that has smaller groups within it.
Hydra: a mythical snake with many heads that can regrow its heads if one is cut off.
b.) An editorial in the Chicago Tribune a few days after the Haymarket bombing about the
sudden and growing danger of anarchism throughout the United States.
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c.) Statistics on the growth of labor union membership from 1888-1908.
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