Labor's Days Explained
by Jim Barrett
SYMBOLIC "HOLIDAYS"
Not usually considered a union-friendly society,
the United States recently celebrated its 109th
annual Labor Day. In recent years Labor Day is mostly
a matter of picnics and barbecues, but it could
be more. We had our own enthusiastic observation
of labor's vital role here in Champaign-Urbana.
For the second year in a row, the Champaign County
Federation of Labor sponsored a successful Labor
Day parade and related festivities at West Side
Park. Champaign's Labor Day parade, successfully
resurrected last year after many years of dormancy,
is on its way to becoming a new tradition. The event
had all the requisite high school bands and trucks,
as well as signs and banners conveying Labor's political
agenda and issues of vital concern like the Living
Wage. What we did not have was much discussion of
what is actually happening to Labor in the United
States (or Champaign-Urbana) at the beginning of
a new century. Everyone had a good time, but did
we really understand what we were doing?
By far the most
important workers' holiday internationally is May
Day -- the first day of May, not the first Monday
in September. We also have an annual celebration
of this more radical holiday in town with speeches
on the Quad by folks from labor and socialist groups
and post-modern protest music by Paul Kottheimer,
who manages to blend the historic with the funky.
The Altgeld Hall chimes, normally reserved for patriotic
airs and Illini fight songs, ring out with the Internationale
and picket line tunes.
These two holidays
have different origins and meanings. Surprisingly
perhaps, it's radical May Day that has the firmest
roots here in the Midwest. How did we get two different
holidays and what do they represent?
MAY DAY
Celebrated for centuries in many parts of the world
as a time of rebirth, May Day had its own rebirth
as a worker's holiday in the late nineteenth century
-- not in Europe but out on the Illinois prairies.
Throughout the 1880s workers poured into labor reform
organizations, demanding equal rights and a curb
on corporate power.
The Knights of Labor
symbolized, and to a considerable degree, organized
this great labor upsurge. Pursuing a program of
education, self-improvement, workers' cooperatives,
electoral politics, and ultimately, the abolition
of the wage labor system, the Knights captured the
imaginations of American workers and reformers.
They recruited nearly a million workers by 1886,
including thousands in Illinois manufacturing and
mining towns. A newer smaller organization, the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions
(later renamed the American Federation of Labor)
focused on trade union organization and strikes,
particularly among skilled male workers.
When the nascent
Federation called for a general strike on May 1,
1886 in support of the radical demand for an Eight-Hour
Day, the Knights, a variety of socialist and anarchist
groups, and workers throughout the country joined
the movement. The response was particularly strong
in midwestern industrial cities and coal mining
towns, however, and the movement found its heart
in Chicago where about 80,000 workers struck, crippling
the city's industries.
Police and industrialists
moved quickly, attacking workers and their organizations.
On May 3, police fired into the ranks of Eight-Hour
strikers at the International Harvester Works, killing
at least two and wounding many more. The International
Working Peoples' Association, an anarchist group,
called a protest meeting for the next day at Haymarket,
the city's wholesale market area just west of the
Loop. When a bomb exploded killing one policeman
and mortally wounding others, the cops opened fire.
The fusillade killed one protester instantly and
wounded several other people, including policemen.
The "Haymarket Riot" signaled a massive
attack on labor and civil liberties. The contemporary
press was full of the term "anarchist,"
which was used loosely in somewhat the same fashion
that the word "terrorist" is employed
today -- to associate dissidents and radicals in
the public mind with meaningless violence. A fear
gripped respectable society, providing support for
an extreme political reaction that helped employers
to break the back of the radical labor movement
in Chicago and elsewhere around the country.
Eight labor radicals
were eventually convicted of a "conspiracy"
leading to the "riot". In fact, there
was no evidence that any of them were responsible
for the violence at Haymarket. Rather, their crime
was to demand basic rights for American workers
and to project the vision for a new, more democratic
society. Four of these men were hanged in November
1887 and another committed suicide in his cell.
The remaining four were imprisoned but later pardoned
in 1893 by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who noted
the striking lack of evidence against them and the
hysteria that surrounded their trial. (Altgeld,
who advanced the vision of a great democratic "peoples'
university" in Champaign-Urbana, is fondly
remembered by some at the University of Illinois
as a supportive governor who opened the way for
a variety of new programs by vastly expanding the
university's budget.) Altgeld's courageous pardon
ended his political career.
Throughout the world,
the "Chicago Martyrs" became the focal
point for labor protests, and May Day emerged as
the international working class holiday, proclaimed
as such officially by the Socialist International
in 1889. Even in the U.S., the Depression era witnessed
large May Day parades and celebrations in Chicago,
New York and other cities. Just after World War
Two, with millions of American workers once again
on strike, the European Left gathering steam, and
the Cold War just beginning, Congress declared May
First "Loyalty Day" in 1947 – a clear
effort to displace the popular radicalism associated
with the celebration. Throughout the Cold War years
the communist regimes did their part to discredit
May Day by rolling around tanks and missiles and
displaying their armies out on Red Square and Tiananmen
Square. For them, it became a day to confront the
swelling American military machine with their own
power. In the United States during the 1950s, May
Day marchers were equated with the international
communist conspiracy and often attacked. Not surprisingly,
the May Day tradition declined here. Still, workers
took to the streets in most other parts of the world
on May First, which they continued to claim as their
own.
LABOR DAY
Labor Day was established as an official holiday
by act of Congress and signed into law in September
1894 by President Grover Cleveland – the same
Grover Cleveland who had dispatched Federal troops
to Chicago and other railroad towns to crush the
Pullman Strike just two months earlier. Labor Day
is usually thought of as a conservative alternative
to May Day, and it was certainly promoted as such
during our various Red Scares and the Cold War.
But Labor Day too has deep roots in the workers'
movement. Long before Congressional action, New
York's Central Labor Union launched a "Great
Labor Parade" on September 1, 1882 and the
event gradually spread through the labor movement.
Based particularly on the trade unions, Labor Day
lacked the radical vision of May Day, but it was
originally intended by labor activists to demonstrate
both the power and the grievances of organized workers.
Unions took the opportunity to outline their program
- shorter working hours, for example, and the legal
right to organize and bargain collectively. It's
not the founders' fault if the holiday has lapsed
into baseball tournaments and long-winded speeches
by political candidates representing business –
not labor – interests.
CONCLUSION
For a long time now, American labor has embraced
this more conservative tradition and run away from
its radical past. But if labor's celebrations have
any significance beyond hot dogs and patriotic music,
it lies in this history and the lessons we might
find there. Weakened and under almost constant attack
by business and conservative politicians, the time
for labor complacency is long past. Workers need
to maintain their own traditions and culture and
employ them to help reinvigorate the movement. A
new, more diverse and progressive labor movement
can still emerge from the vision embodied in the
histories of Labor Day and May Day. If the new labor
movement springs once again from fertile fields
of the prairies, this would be only fitting.
Although an academic,
Jim Barrett, who comes from a blue collar Chicago
family (his Dad was a policeman), has never abandoned
his roots. He even teaches a course specifically
on “Chicago” as part of the undergraduate
curriculum in History. His area of interest is broadly
defined as Labor History but specifically he’s
interested radical politics, immigration, and race
relations of working class populations. His current
research, with David Roediger, focuses on relations
between the Irish who settled in industrial cities
and how they influenced other immigrant populations
of Eastern Europeans who would settle later. They
are looking at the non-institutionalized ways of
being indoctrinated into “American-ism.”
Ways such as street gangs and labor unions. His
partner at home, Jenny Barrett, shares his interest
in unions. She is an organizer for the Union for
Academic Professionals on campus. They have lived
in Champaign since 1984. They always thought they
would eventually retire back to Chicago. Jim says
that lately they have been thinking that living
is pretty easy right here in C-U.
