August Vincent Theodore Spies (/spiːs/, SPEES; December 10, 1855 – November 11, 1887) was an American upholsterer, radical labor activist, and newspaper editor.

An anarchist, Spies was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder following a bomb attack on police in an event remembered as the Haymarket affair.

Spies was born on December 10, 1855, in a ruined castle converted into a government building on the mountain Landeckerberg in the Electorate of Hesse, Germany.

In 1883, Spies was a leader in the Revolutionary Congress held in Pittsburgh that formally launched the International Working People's Association in America.

[5] Speaking to a rally outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Plant on May 3, 1886, Spies advised the striking workers to "hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed.

Spies was to stand trial with three others (Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe), separated from the "Monday Night Conspirators" (Louis Lingg, George Engel and Adolph Fischer), the more extreme defendants alleged to have attended a planning meeting in the Greif's Hall basement the night before the bombing.

Foster shocked his colleagues and Spies by telling the judge the motion of severance musn't delay the trial and was merely perfunctory.

Spies would maintain his innocence and, despite the costly courtroom mistake, showed solidarity with his comrades through the trial, appeals, and at the gallows.

)[12] During the trial, the jury was allowed by the judge to consider as evidence articles written by the defendants in support of political violence, conversations about their desire for revolution, and other past materials.

On the stand, Spies confirmed he had received an 1884 letter from Johann Most, an anarchist author of a how-to pamphlet on dynamite.

Theodore Fricke, the Arbeiter Zeitung's bookkeeper, testified that Ruhe was written in the hand of August Spies.

Witness Harry Gilmer testified he saw Spies climb down from the wagon and light the fuse for the bomb thrown by Schnaubelt.

"[17] Spies also charged that one witness, Gustav Legner, could prove his alibi but was threatened by police and paid to leave Chicago.

Legner sued the Arbeiter-Zeitung for libel for repeating Spies' claim of bribery, denying he was told to leave town.

Two of the defendants, Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden, asked for clemency and their sentences were commuted to life in prison on November 10, 1887, by Governor Richard James Oglesby.

As he faced his demise on the gallows, Spies shouted, "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.