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Labor Day: From Protest to Picnics
by Joshua B. Freeman
Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
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| Workers joining
the rails at Promontory Point, May 10, 1869 (GLC04481.01)
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In the 1880s a surge in growth of the American labor movement
led to the creation of two workers’ holidays, Labor
Day and May Day. May Day soon spread abroad, as European
unions and socialist groups adopted it as an occasion
to display their strength. Eventually the holiday came
to be celebrated in almost every part of the world. In
the United States, however, workers more broadly celebrated
Labor Day, successfully pressing to have it made a national
holiday. Today, Labor Day marks the unofficial end of
summer and a chance for a final bit of vacation as much
as it commemorates the toils and achievements of workers
and their organizations.
The organized labor movement in the United States dates
to the earliest days of the republic. However, in the
nineteenth century it remained fragile, expanding during
periods of economic growth but imploding during economic
downturns. A depression that began in 1873 decimated the
movement, but in the early 1880s, as the nation began
recovering, many workers again turned to unions to better
their circumstances and contest the growing power of capitalists
as the nation rapidly industrialized. As they had in the
past, skilled artisans played a leading role in the labor
movement, but to a greater extent than before, unskilled
workers joined them in organizing. New labor organizations
sprung up and old ones expanded in a wave of militancy
and activism that peaked in 1886 in the “great uprising
of labor,” when union membership reached a new high,
huge strikes shook the nation, and independent labor political
parties surfaced in community after community.
To provide for mutual support among unions and allow them
to act together on broad issues, craft unionists took
the lead in organizing central-city labor bodies with
which local unions could affiliate. In New York City,
a region of labor strength, a dozen small unions banded
together in 1882 to found the Central Labor Union (CLU).
Members of CLU-affiliated unions came from many ethnic
backgrounds, creating an unusual arena for solidarity
across national and language divides. Politically, too,
the CLU bridged boundaries: Most CLU leaders were socialists
or radicals, but a wide range of political opinion could
be found within the group.
As one of its first projects, the CLU took up a proposal
to sponsor a “monster labor festival” -- the
beginning of what would become Labor Day -- in September
1882. The CLU hoped both to unite and inspire workers
and to impress the general public and politicians with
the power of organized labor. To this end, it developed
a plan for a parade followed by a picnic on September
5th , which coincided with the scheduled opening of a
convention of the Knights of Labor, the foremost national
labor organization, being held in New York. Since September
5th fell on a Tuesday, participation in the day’s
events meant staying away from work.
The first Labor Day proved a huge success. Some 10,000
men and a few women marched in the parade, which began
on lower Broadway, went past reviewing stands set up in
Union Square, and then continued uptown to Forty-second
Street. Estimates of the size of the crowd watching the
march were as high as a quarter-million people. Continuing
a tradition that went back to the artisan parades in the
early days of the country, marchers grouped according
to their craft and carried with them the tools of their
trade. Carrying on another tradition of worker parades
and pageants, patriotic themes figured prominently in
the march, which included large American flags and a drum-and-fife
corps. Banners carried by the marchers demanded, “Less
Work and More Pay,” and proclaimed, “To the
Workers Should Belong All Wealth,” and “Labor
Built This Republic, Labor Shall Rule It.”
After the parade marchers met up with their families for
a giant picnic at Wendel’s Elm Park at Ninety-second
Street and Ninth Avenue. Through the afternoon and into
the evening, picnickers drank, danced, sang, watched fireworks,
and generally amused themselves. While individual unions
and ethnic associations often sponsored similar events,
the heterogeneity of the picnic crowd was unusual, manifesting
the desire of the CLU to represent the interests and needs
of the entire working class, rather than the particular
concerns of one group of workers or another.
In 1883, the CLU repeated its Labor Day festivities. The
following year, the Federation of Organized Trades and
Labor Unions, a national union alliance, which in 1886
became the American Federation of Labor (AFL), called
for all workers to celebrate Labor Day annually on the
first Monday in September, which has remained its date
ever since. Within a few years, Labor Day celebrations
had become common across the country. The festivities
generally followed the New York example of holding a picnic,
a parade, or some combination of the two. Some of the
celebrations were very large. For example, 35,000 people
marched in the 1886 parade held in Chicago.
Labor Day quickly began to win official recognition. In
1885 and 1886, a few city governments designated the day
an official holiday, and in 1887 Oregon made Labor Day
a state holiday. By 1894, twenty-three other states had
followed suit, generally at the instigation of labor or
Populist lobbying. Labor Day received federal recognition
in 1894, when President Grover Cleveland signed a bill,
which had moved quickly through Congress with few objections,
making the day a “legal public holiday.” For
Cleveland, who had just used federal troops to crush a
nationwide railroad workers’ strike, the bill provided
an opportunity for a gesture of conciliation toward labor.
Even with official recognition, most employers at first
did not give their workers a holiday on Labor Day. The
federal law only mandated a day off for employees of the
federal government and the District of Columbia. State
laws, too, generally did not force private employers to
give workers a day off. To celebrate the holiday, workers
in effect had to go on strike for a day. Only slowly did
businesses begin to close for the holiday, first in centers
of union strength like New York, where by the end of the
1880s many factories and shops shut down for the day,
and later in areas where labor had less clout. California
businesses did not generally close for Labor Day until
the early twentieth century; Georgia businesses began
shutting down only well after that.
The political tone of Labor Day moderated as it evolved
in relation to the rival holiday of May Day. In 1884,
the same year that the Federation of Organized Trades
and Labor Unions began promoting Labor Day, it called
for unions across the country to hold demonstrations and
strikes on May 1, 1886, demanding an eight-hour work day.
(At the time most workers worked considerably longer hours.)
Workers in great numbers responded, but the eight-hour
movement came to a crashing halt in the face of repression
that followed a bomb explosion at a May 3, 1886 rally
in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, which killed eight
policemen. Eight anarchists were convicted of conspiring
to commit the violence, and four of them hung, even though
there was little evidence against them. In the years that
followed, May Day became an occasion for protesting the
arrests of socialists, anarchists, and unionists following
the Haymarket explosion, as well as for continuing to
push for shorter hours. May Day jumped abroad, when in
1889 an International Socialist Convention convened in
Paris called for demonstrations on May 1st of the following
year, leading to the rapid spread of May Day celebrations
across Europe.
In the United States, in the face of the post-Haymarket
repression, the AFL, whose city labor councils had sponsored
many of the Labor Day celebrations, moved to distance
itself from radicalism and to more firmly associate itself
with national traditions. Accordingly, red flags, radical
speakers, and internationalist slogans, all common at
early Labor Day events, became forbidden.
Especially before the Haymarket riots, May Day events
in a few cities rivaled the size of Labor Day events.
But as the twentieth century unfolded, May Day generally
did not catch on, leaving Labor Day as the main or only
workers’ holiday.
The deradicalization of Labor Day made it easier for the
union movement to win its designation as an official holiday
and to force businesses to shut for the day. This very
success, though, lessened the focus of the day on organized
labor, as more and more non-unionists were given the day
off. In an era when six-day work weeks were common, holidays
few, and paid vacations very exceptional, many workers
viewed Labor Day as an opportunity to relax on their own
or with their families. In the first decades of the twentieth
century, the labor movement continued to sponsor parades
and other events but on a less regular basis than in the
past, with some cities going years at a time between marches,
only holding them at moments of crisis. During the 1920s,
attendance at Labor Day events tended to be modest, and
the events themselves increasingly conservative, with
union leaders inviting middle-class and business organizations,
like the Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club, to participate.
The revival and expansion of the union movement during
the 1930s refocused Labor Day on organized labor. Celebrations
grew in size and number. In Los Angeles, a city where
labor traditionally had been weak, the size of the Labor
Day parade had expanded to 100,000 participants by 1941,
with a half-million spectators lining the way. In the
immediate post-World War II years, large Labor Day events
continued to be held. It became a tradition in presidential
election years for the Democratic candidate to kick off
his campaign with an appearance at a Labor Day rally in
Detroit.
Gradually, though, attendance at Labor Day events again
began declining. As unionists moved to the suburbs, many
became less interested in parades on city streets. In
Detroit, a mere 6,000 marchers took part in the 1966 parade.
The Detroit News reported that, “Workers spent the
three-day holiday enjoying backyard barbecues, boats and
summer cottages: the fruits of their victories”.
As attendance at Labor Day events dwindled, unions in
many cities stopped sponsoring the events. A New York
City Labor Day parade in 1981 was the first to be held
there for 13 years. That year labor held parades in many
cities to protest President Ronald Reagan’s firing
of striking air traffic controllers and, more broadly,
to try to energize a movement suffering declining membership
and a string of strike defeats. Some of the revived parades
were massive: 200,000 marchers in New York in 1981, 170,000
marchers and onlookers in Detroit the next year. But by
the 1990s, attendance waned once again, and official celebrations
became less frequent.
In most of the country, Labor Day no longer has strong
ties to organized labor. The president and other political
leaders issue statements extolling workers, but these
get little public attention. Instead, private leisure
is the main order of the day. In the northern part of
the country, Labor Day generally marks the end of the
summer vacation season and the reopening of schools.
Still, Labor Day remains one of the few national holidays
to mark the contributions of a particular segment of the
population to society. (Some see Martin Luther King Jr.
Day similarly, although it also fits the more common pattern
of holidays marking the birth of a great leader.) The
establishment of Labor Day reflected the growing power
of organized labor in Gilded Age America, while the decline
of its formal celebration marks the waning power of labor
and the general privatization of American life.
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