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On May 1st, people in dozens of countries all over the world celebrate May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day. But the United States does not - instead, it celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday in September (which is today). But the weird thing is that International Workers’ Day is actually held on May 1st in the first place in order to commemorate a tragedy that happened within the United States. Europeans, who picked the date of International Workers’ Day, decided to hold a party in honor of the Americans, but the Americans never came! Pretty bad manners.¹ But there’s an interesting history here, and it dates back to the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. During a time of rapid industrialization and unprecedented wealth inequality in the United States, the U.S. labor movement fought for better working conditions, an eight-hour work day, and better pay. With workers facing similar conditions in many other countries, labor, trades union and socialist movements were springing up all over the industrializing countries. In 1889, representatives of these movements got together in Paris and decided to pick a date for a day of protest. They eventually settled on May 1st, and they did so to honor the recent struggles of the American labor movement. Just a few years before, there had been a major outbreak of violence in Chicago during a wave of strikes and protests by the U.S. labor movement. In what became known as the Haymarket affair, police had first shot on a crowd and then themselves been targeted by a dynamite attack. Dozens of people were injured and 15 died in the violence. The movement did not get its demands met, and the events contributed to a wave of repression against the labor movement which was still unfolding in 1889. Although they had plenty of their own problems to worry about, members of the labor movement around the world watched these events with alarm. They were sufficiently shocking that they decided they wanted to commemorate them with the first May Day on May 1st, which is when the strikes that had led to the violence started. International Workers’ Day subsequently became an annual event, one marked by most countries in the world. But it never caught on in the United States because the authorities there didn’t want to remember the Haymarket affair. The Chicago labor movement contained a mixture of anarchists and socialists, a threat which in the mind of much of the public was linked to that of out-of-control immigration from undesirable parts of Europe. For more on that anti-immigrant panic, you can read my previous post here:
Still, even though respectable U.S. politicians didn’t want to celebrate a movement they associated with crazed violent Italians, pressure did rise for some sort of recognition of the labor movement and workers in general. In 1887, Oregon became the first state to establish a “labor day” in September, and the idea soon caught on. Many states followed suit, and eventually President Grover Cleveland made it a federal holiday as well. The U.S. now had its own, duelling workers’ day. But that wasn’t the end of it. When he was in office, President Dwight Eisenhower decided that something ought to be celebrated on May Day, but he still didn’t want it to be the darned Commies. And so he proclaimed May 1st to be both “Loyalty Day” and “Law Day”. This was a pretty blatant attempt to pre-empt any celebration of May Day during the Red Scare of the 1950s, much as some states today try to pre-empt the federal Martin Luther King Day holiday by declaring duelling days of their own. Alabama, for instance, instead celebrates "Robert E. Lee/Martin Luther King Birthday". Today, grassroots protests and events do take place on May 1st - certainly swamping any observance of “Loyalty Day” - but there’s not any big push within the United States to officially recognize and mark May Day. Which is a shame, because remembering the Haymarket affair would be a nice way to learn about U.S. history, and perhaps reflect on its parallels with today. 1 May Day was also a separate holiday across Europe dating back to pre-Christian times. In England, it was celebrated with the famous maypoles. The Puritans soon put a stop to that in the early colonial period, cutting down Thomas Morton’s 80-foot beauty and booting him out.
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