Chicago's Haymarket Square and the Politics of Monument Making

Not long after the Gilded Age incident of a bombing and the execution of four anarchists accused of the crime, a struggle began over the use of Haymarket Square as a memorial site. I will discuss the rival monuments created at different sites by two parties of memory: the police and the business community and the left and the labor community.  The destructive history of the police statue, blown up twice in 1969 and 1970, will lead to the main focus of the paper: the contested process that took place over the next 34 years to agree on a new monument for the square with a universal meaning assigned to it.