Origins of Labor Day

By Ken Fuller

COMMENTS

04/29/2008

As Labor Day (or International Workers’ Day, or simply May Day, as it is known elsewhere) is celebrated, it might be timely to recall its origins.

Some believe that Labor Day is slavishly patterned after the huge pageants held in Moscow’s Red Square before the demise of the Soviet Union. They could not be more wrong.

Originally, of course, May Day was associated with the arrival of spring or summer. Some think its origins can be traced to the spring fertility festivals held in India and Egypt. Quite possibly, these influences spread to Europe where, in the pre-Christian period, pagan agricultural rituals could be found around this time of the year. The Roman festival of Flora, goddess of spring, was celebrated between April 28 and May 3.

By the second (Christian) millennium, each year Europeans could be found celebrating (often prematurely, in the northern parts of the continent) the arrival of summer on May Day. Most medieval practices included the gathering of flowers in the countryside. With the adoption of the Protestant religion, which was initially rather more austere than the deposed Catholicism, by the 16th century, conservative voices could be heard in England, protesting against May Day frolics on religious and “moral” grounds.

Writing in 1583 (note the Olde English spelling) in his Anatomie of Abuses, the ultra-conservative Puritan Phillip Stubbes complained: “I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood overnight, there have scarecely the thirde parte of them returned home againe undefiled.”

During the historically crucial but unfortunately joyless years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth period, “bringing in the May” was banned, along with dancing around the (obviously phallic) Maypole. Such practices were restored after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and survived a further 150 years, when they died a natural death during the industrial revolution (although the less carnal of them are still revived annually as tourist attractions).

Appropriately, it was due to the process of industrial development that, later in the 19th century, May Day was given a more political dimension by organized labor. Although the credit for this is usually given to American workers, in a short article written in 1894 Rosa Luxemburg accords the honors to the Australian, who in 1856 first linked the concept of a workers’ holiday with the demand for an eight-hour working day. The holiday (strike, actually) took place in April, and was so successful that it was repeated in subsequent years.

The cause of the eight-hour day spread throughout the industrialized world, and thus, on May 1, 1886, 200,000 American workers struck in support of this demand. The actions continued for several days, and on May 3 several workers were killed in Chicago when police fired upon a demonstration. The following day, anarchists held a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. When rain had driven most people away, the police again arrived, but this time a bomb was thrown, killing several police and protesters. Seven anarchists were arrested, four of whom were, despite the lack of evidence that they were in any way responsible for the bomb, found guilty and hanged. These became known as the “Haymarket Martyrs.”

Three years later, meeting in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution, the International Workers’ Congress (this became known as the Second International, the First International having been founded under Marx’s leadership in London during the 1860s) decided that May 1, 1890 should see an international work stoppage in support of the eight-hour day.

Luxemburg says, when a French delegate proposed the stoppage, the US delegation drew the Congress’ attention to the fact that American unions had already decided on a May 1 strike to honor the Haymarket Martyrs, and the Congress fell in line.

The 1890 stoppage went ahead and, reflecting the Australian experience, was so successful that at its Congress the following year, the Second International proposed that it become an annual event. Since then, of course, May Day has been adopted as an official holiday in many countries, and is still an event for the celebration of labor in others.

Ironically, the USA is out of step with the rest of the world. While some unions argued for an official holiday on May 1, the Knights of Labor had started to commemorate labor’s own day in 1882 but in September. In 1887, reluctant to associate Labor Day with the Chicago events of the previous year, President Grover Cleveland ordered the national holiday in September, and there it has remained.

The first labor movement’s hymn to gain worldwide recognition is often associated with the 1890 May Day, although the connection appears somewhat coincidental. The words to “The Red Flag, The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead” were written in 1889 by Irishman Jim Connell as he rode a train to his south London after attending a lecture on socialism. Connell was inspired by the Haymarket Martyrs and the London Dock Strike of 1889.

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