Anarchists among immigrants provide a strong intellectual, cultural, and organizational infusion to American anarchism and American labor organizing more broadly. Anarchists made a point of organizing among and with every kind of person on all kinds of issues. Anarchist newspapers in German, Czech, Yiddish, and more circulated broadly. In fact, the depiction of anarchist as bearded bomb-throwers likely stems from anti-worker newspapers depicting Johann Most, a German anarchist and polemicist who was so influential in US politics that his visage became the icon of anarchism for generations of liberal critics.

As worker exploitation became more savage, anarchists were increasingly the people most willing to directly resist exploitation. Throughout the 1870s, workers in general found their efforts for labor relief frustrated at every turn. Strikes were met with incredible violence from private security and the police alike, worker parades and demonstrations faced threats from business owners and court challenges (the first gun control law in the US that went to the Supreme Court was a law restricting the right of working people to form community defense groups with longarms), and voting efforts were defeated by political machines or enacted only toothless laws. Anarchists, with their willingness to engage in direct confrontation, became more appealing than the moderates to many workers: when moderate means are getting you killed the radicals make a lot of sense.

In the early 1880s, union workers pushed their unions to convene meetings to push towards a general strike for an 8 hour work day. May 1st 1886 was picked, giving organizers a couple years to prepare. While many anarchists were initially skeptical it became clear that there was massive support among working people, and anarchists quickly moved to organize for the fight that was wanted. After all, anarchists don't believe in lording over people, so even if the 8 hour day sounded too modest to many anarchists, who were they to tell their fellow workers to pick a different fight?

Throughout the 1860s and 70s states and municipalities pass 8 hour workday laws, but they're largely unenforceable in the face of the increasingly concentrated power of the capitalists. Throughout the US workers organize for their mutual aid and protection, and the bosses respond with security crackdowns, harsher worker conditions, and more union busting. In business districts the small business owners frequently form their own militias to shoot at protesting or parading workers. The Know-Nothings move from a secret society of racist anti-immigration zealots to an important bloc in formal politics. Meanwhile, unions in the US West refuse to organize with Chinese workers, dividing worker power. In the East, unions often refuse to organize with the Irish and Germans. Across all of the US, Black workers are excluded from unions. Even the Marxist International Workingmen's Association splits worker power by insisting that women's struggles be secondary.

In this backdrop, anarchism comes to the fore in American organizing.

The spirit of May Day is fundamentally anarchist and it can never be otherwise. It is a reminder that the working class is made up of every race, creed, and gender, that we must organize among and with every kind of people, and that the power of the working class is found in the struggles that workers take up for themselves. No union boss, no vanguard party, no politician, can impose their will on the workers; to be a working class leader is to be part of the struggle of your fellow workers, receptive to them, willing to take on fights alongside them in solidarity because those are the fights they are inspired to. To be a labor militant is to agitate and educate and take on more work, but it also must be to include and involve and uplift and share the burdens. The 8 hour work day wasn't a fight that was chosen by a communist vanguard or by union bosses from on high or even by influential anarchist leaders; the reason that anarchists died for the 8 hour work day is because we were enmeshed in the broader labor struggle and we found that workers were spoiling for a fight, and we set to work alongside our fellows. No party or organization or enlightened caste can ever stand above the working people to guide them from on high and build a lasting labor peace.

It is a subterranean fire. It cannot be put out.