America's Forgotten Holiday

May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814790717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Though now a largely forgotten holiday in the United States, May Day was founded here in 1886 by an energized labor movement as a part of its struggle for the eight-hour day. In ensuing years, May Day took on new meaning, and by the early 1900s had become an annual rallying point for anarchists, socialists, and communists around the world. Yet American workers and radicals also used May Day to advance alternative definitions of what it meant to be an American and what America should be as a nation.

Mining contemporary newspapers, party and union records, oral histories, photographs, and rare film footage, America’s Forgotten Holiday explains how May Days celebrants, through their colorful parades and mass meetings, both contributed to the construction of their own radical American identities and publicized alternative social and political models for the nation.

This fascinating story of May Day in America reveals how many contours of American nationalism developed in dialogue with political radicals and workers, and uncovers the cultural history of those who considered themselves both patriotic and dissenting Americans.

1

Out of America’s Urban, Industrial Cauldron

The Origins of May Day as Event and Icon, 1867–1890

On May 1, 1867, workers paraded in Chicago in celebration of a new state law that had established the eight-hour workday.¹ Several dozen trade associations marched to demonstrate their approval of the legislation, which went into effect that day. That morning, “thousands of local workers set out to the accompaniment of bands” carrying banners that announced: “Eight Hours and No Concession,” “To the Advantage of the Coming Generation,” and “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”² Cited by some historians as the first modern May Day demonstration, this event was really an important social, political, and cultural precursor to what would become an annual holiday later in the century.³

The parade, “more than a mile long,” formed on Lake Street, “set out at ten [o’clock],” and made its way to the lakeshore. According to a newspaper account, “all along the procession route, the stairways and doorways, even roofs, were jammed with curious spectators.”⁴ In addition to the many banners proclaiming the importance of the eight-hour day, these spectators would have seen the city’s workers organized according to their particular craft and wearing the uniforms of their trade. Many workers also demonstrated their skills and displayed the results of their work as they rode on floats through the streets. The “tanners. … had a wagon on which two men were working intently on a beam,” and “ship carpenters and caulkers had erected a completely rigged ship on which the caulkers were working” for the duration of the parade.⁵ In its most basic manifestation, then, this was a celebration of labor by workers proud of their skills and the contributions they made to the development of their city. As they marched, they ritually defined and reinforced their identity as hard-working and productive members of their community.

Demonstrations like these were not new to the 1867 celebration. Workers had long taken part in civic processions organized along the lines of their trade. In those parades they proudly displayed the badges, tools, processes, and products of their trade to celebrate publicly their identity as craftsmen and show support for particular political causes.⁶ What was new in this parade was the assertion of that identity in support of the eight-hour day, a uniquely working-class concern. Chicago’s laborers manifested their working-class consciousness again in the days following this celebration of the eight-hour law, when they went on strike to enforce the shorter day against their employers’ opposition. In 1867, however, the workers’ efforts were unsuccessful: under the mayor’s orders, the local police and the militia had broken the laborers’ militant stand for shorter hours.⁷

Although the movement for the eight-hour day would be sidetracked for much of the 1870s, a revived trade unionist movement in Chicago and in New York took up the cause again in the 1880s. These cities’ nascent socialist and anarchist communities joined it in a massive demonstration on May 1, 1886. By then, craft unions, like those of the tanners, no longer dominated the ceremonial expressions of this public debate. Instead, they became part of a broader, if tenuous and short-lived, coalition that reflected the economic, social, and political changes of the intervening two decades. The 1886 event was marked not only by traditional laborite rituals, but also by demonstrations of politically radical sensibilities, echoing the agenda of anarchists and socialists who joined the line of march. These different constituencies, coming to the May 1 demonstrations with their overlapping yet distinct concerns, forged a precarious alliance that year. That alliance, however, quickly fell apart, too weak to sustain the weight of its differences.

In turn, as trade unionists, anarchists, and socialists forged separate paths for their economic and political activities, they vied for control of May Day as both an event and an icon. This annual holiday, particularly once it became an international workers’ day, became a focal point in the contestation among these groups. The debate among trade unionists and radicals over the meaning and use of May Day was more than just a reflection of their different political positions. That argument contributed to their public self-definition; the way these groups observed May Day became a part of their creation as distinct movements in a turbulent, urban industrial landscape.

One of the main components of this turbulent landscape was the struggle that laborers waged for reduced working hours. Although the demonstration in support of the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, was unique in its massive scale and reach, it was not the first time workers expressed their desire for the shorter workday. As far back as the early national period, when changes in merchant capital resulted in a reduction in work breaks and an increase in hours, a ten-hour movement emerged in city workshops. The desire for a shorter workday soon spread, as more and more trades encountered similar changes in their work rhythms and work patterns during the nineteenth century. In their study of American labor and the working day, David Roediger and Philip Foner chart the history of this shorter-hours movement.⁸ By the 1860s, workers across the country had formed groups to support the implementation of reduced working hours.⁹ By 1867, the eight-hour laws passed in Illinois and New York seemed initially to have secured important victories for workers in those two states. But when it soon became evident that employers were regularly flouting these new regulations, workers realized they needed to continue their struggle.¹⁰

Throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, carpenters, bricklayers, and painters in the “mostly English-speaking building trades” and German-American furniture makers in New York spearheaded small-scale, local campaigns.¹¹ While these workers met with some success because their demands could be made against small employers, members of other trades encountered greater resistance from larger manufacturers.¹² This resistance was strengthened in New York, for example, when “an alliance of very wealthy businessmen and middle-class reformers” displaced the political machine of Tammany Hall in 1872 and took over the reins of city government. They now had the police and the militia at their disposal and did not shy away from using them to break up eight-hour strikes and demonstrations.¹³ Chicago’s strikers met with similar resistance.

The movement for shorter hours was derailed temporarily by the depression that lasted from approximately 1873 to 1879. Workers faced other concerns in these years, including unemployment and hunger. While these issues were not new to the 1870s, they were exacerbated by the economic downturn. The events of these years changed the social and economic landscapes of New York City and Chicago. Out of the struggles waged against hunger and unemployment during the 1870s, some laborers turned to more aggressive trade union organizing. Others welcomed more radical solutions. Organized labor’s fight for the eight-hour day instigated the first urban May Day demonstration of 1886, but anarchist and socialist political agendas would also come to characterize the holiday as it evolved during the 1890s.

The roots of this holiday, then, sank deeply into the social and economic soil from which both the modern American trade union movement and the socialist and anarchist movements grew. Beginning in the decade or so after the Civil War, New York City and Chicago became the epicenters for all three groups, as intense demographic and economic change altered these urban communities. The 1870s witnessed rapid population growth in New York and especially in Chicago, mostly from immigration. By 1880 “four-fifths of New York’s 1.2 million population were either first generation immigrants (foreign born) or their offspring (second generation).”¹⁴ Chicago’s population grew by 69 percent between 1870 and 1880.¹⁵ Many of those who came to these cities were able to find work in the expanding industrial sectors, but their jobs were not necessarily secure. In Chicago, the slaughterhouses and lumberyards became neighbors to iron and steel foundries and machine shops, as the city’s economy shifted from one dominated by commerce to one dominated by manufacturing in the years after the Great Fire of 1871.¹⁶ In New York, the garment, printing and publishing, cigar-making, and furniture-making industries continued to grow. But the quick and uneven expansion of the manufacturing base in Chicago and the intensely competitive and mainly decentralized nature of the industries in New York did not make for secure employment, particularly for those workers who filled unskilled or semiskilled positions.¹⁷ The widening employment pool that resulted from rapid population growth made workers who held those positions easily replaceable as well. Economic insecurity became something most workers had in common.

In both cities, these workers came to understand their circumstances in different ways. Socialism, anarchism, and trade unionism offered laborers distinct means with which to make sense of their experiences in the rapidly developing industrial metropolis. Newly organized socialist and anarchist associations and recently established or reorganized trade unions provided them with resources to work for different kinds of change. The history of how the ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse American working class was drawn to one or another of these movements is vast and complex. One way to make sense of this is to follow the paths taken by Albert Parsons in Chicago and by Samuel Gompers in New York. Taken together, their journeys in 1870s and 1880s urban America illuminate the working-class and radical worlds out of which May Day originated.

Albert Parsons, who arrived in Chicago from Texas in 1872, became a member of the city’s Typographical Union 16. He soon found work at the Chicago Times, remaining in the newspaper trade that he had become familiar with as a young man in the South.¹⁸ As a new resident of the Northern industrial city, he quickly became aware of the great disparity that existed between Chicago’s very wealthy and very poor citizens. Specifically, Parsons witnessed the neglect that the Relief and Aid Society showed to those who were most in need of help after the Great Fire. When the poor attempted to protest this neglect during the winter of 1872, the police beat them in the streets. After hearing about this tragedy, Parsons quickly became attracted to the city’s growing socialist community.¹⁹ In his view, neither municipal charities nor trade unions provided an adequate response to the economic deprivation and “its collateral evils” that he witnessed in his city. Only the socialists seemed to have “made any protest or offered any remedy for the enforced poverty” of the modern industrial city.²⁰

His interest in socialism piqued, Parsons soon entered the movement wholeheartedly. He became an active member of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), formed at a congress in Pittsburgh in 1876, then, when the WPUS changed its name in 1877, of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP).²¹ Although Parsons was a native-born American of English descent, the SLP in Chicago had its strongest base of support among the city’s German workers. The traditions of republicanism and free thought that many brought with them from their experiences in the revolutions of 1848, and the “dense network of social organizations” they transplanted into their new neighborhoods, contributed to the shape of Chicago’s socialist movement.²² In addition to the affiliation of certain trade associations in the city with the SLP, much of the party’s strength came from these German members. They blended their social activities in the workingmen’s halls and clubs of their North Chicago neighborhoods into a socialist political culture of meetings, parades, picnics, dances, and shooting competitions, and used that “as a base for recruiting and maintaining socialist membership.”²³

The SLP initially favored electoral socialism with a platform that dealt with issues of concern to the city’s workers. It called for the eight-hour workday, the repeal of prison labor, conspiracy and vagrancy laws, the abolition of child labor, and the institution of municipal ownership of streetcars and gas works.²⁴ Viewing the nationwide protest for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, as part of this larger program, the SLP’s membership and affiliated unions gave it their support. Parsons eventually embraced the eight-hour demand as well, seeing it as the first step toward the broader socialist program for state control of the means of production.²⁵

In advocating this program, socialists went far beyond the demands of most trade unionists, who were focused on the issues of hours, pay, and working conditions, not grand schemes of revolution. Yet, socialists who hoped to achieve state control of the means of production planned to use the ballot, not the bullet, to do so. While their goals were quite radical, then, the means they used to reach them were not. Despite this fact, and the fact that socialists only made up a small percentage of Chicago’s population, employers, the middle class and the urban elite disdained them, seeing them as threats to the existing order. Even more feared were anarchists who were willing to embrace direct action (including violence) to bring down capitalism. Although they, too, constituted only a small segment of the population in Chicago, the anarchists’ radical tactics and rhetoric brought them considerable negative attention.²⁶

As he became increasingly disillusioned with the slowness of political change, Parsons was soon to be found among these more radical Chicagoans. As a worker in the city, he had seen how the long hours that men worked left them with little or no time to participate in politics. As a political activist, Parsons also witnessed the “intimidation, duplicity, corruption & bull-dozing” that met laborers at the urban ballot box. Both pressures, he believed, had virtually disenfranchised workers. Parsons therefore decided to turn his attention “toward an effort to reduce the hours of labor,” as many within the trade union movement were doing.²⁷ Yet, he also gravitated toward the emerging American anarchist movement and its tactics of direct action, embracing what has been termed the “Chicago idea” of revolutionary unionism.²⁸ In 1880, the left wing of the SLP split off to form the International Revolutionary Socialists, and Parsons went with it. He was elected as a delegate to its convention in Pittsburgh in 1883, where the American branch of Johann Most’s anarchist International Working People’s Association (IWPA) was founded.²⁹ Active in Chicago’s IWPA, Parsons became editor of its main English-language newspaper, The Alarm.

While Parsons argued that “anarchism nor anarchists either [sic] advises, abets nor encourages the working people to the use of force or a resort to violence,” he did not shy away from armed resistance as a form of self-defense. He argued that anarchists did not have to encourage direct action because they knew workers “will be driven to use it in self-defense in self-preservation against those who are degrading, enslaving and destroying them.”³⁰ This understanding of workers as the enslaved of the capitalists initially placed most anarchists in opposition to the demand for the eight-hour day in 1886 because they thought it was too limited a goal. Instead, they favored more thorough, systemic change, which they tried to instigate through public demonstrations.

Consequently, anarchist agitation in the early 1880s did not rely on violence so muc...