P.S. Its not politics – its #History, lest you might be led to believe that communism/socialism is a “new” influence in America.
What’s more important is that we learn and teach each other how to identify these powerful yet subtle influences of communism.
Happy Labor Day, or as history might more honestly call it, Happy Proletariat Day! (In socialist and Marxist theory, the proletariat is the social class of wage-earners who do not own the means of production and must sell their labor power to survive.)
Did you know that Labor Day was a holiday demanded by socialists in America and designed by a hardcore socialist named Peter Maguire who ran for Vice President of the United States in 1896, under the Socialist Labor Party ticket?
If you didn’t know, don’t worry, it’s not your fault. The government leaders of the day went to great pains to hide the source and origin of Labor Day in America.
The American labor holiday began on September 5, 1882, when New York City’s Central Labor Union organized a massive workers’ parade. It was designed to demonstrate the strength of organized labor and advance the demands of the growing labor movement, including the eight-hour workday.
For years Peter J. McGuire received the credit for originating the holiday. However, real historical evidence points to Matthew Maguire, secretary of New York’s Central Labor Union and an organizer of the first Labor Day celebration in 1882.
Maguire was not merely a labor organizer. He was a socialist. His politics were sufficiently identified with the socialist movement that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor reportedly did not want the new Labor Day associated with Maguire’s radical political views. And there is little ambiguity about Maguire’s political allegiance: in 1896, just two years after Labor Day became a federal holiday, Matthew Maguire ran for Vice President of the United States on the Socialist Labor Party ticket.
In other words, one of the strongest historical claimants to the title “Father of Labor Day” was an actual Socialist Party candidate for national office.
That is not an inconvenient footnote to Labor Day’s history. That is Labor Day’s history. Then came Haymarket. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of American workers participated in the movement for an eight-hour workday. Three days later, at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb at police. Gunfire erupted. Police and civilians died. Eight anarchists were prosecuted. Four were eventually hanged despite serious questions about the evidence connecting them to the bombing itself. The radical international labor movement had its martyrs.
In 1889, the international socialist movement selected May 1 for demonstrations by workers around the world. May Day became International Workers’ Day and increasingly became associated with socialism, anarchism, class struggle, and ultimately communism. There was just one problem: Americans weren’t particularly fond of socialism at that time. Because of all those messy facts, America did not adopt May 1 as its national workers’ holiday. Instead, we got September.
The political usefulness of that distinction became especially apparent in 1894. Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union launched the massive Pullman Strike. Rail traffic was disrupted across the nation. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to suppress the strike, violence followed, and Cleveland suddenly had a serious political problem with organized labor. Congress moved quickly. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed legislation making the first Monday in September a federal holiday honoring labor. The government could now recognize the labor movement without asking Americans to celebrate on the international socialist movement’s May Day.
Different date. Different packaging. Same historical movement.
That is perhaps the most interesting part of Labor Day’s history. The socialist and radical roots of the nineteenth-century labor movement did not disappear simply because America put its workers’ holiday on the calendar four months later. Moving the celebration from May to September made the holiday more politically palatable to an American population deeply suspicious of socialism. And after more than a century of cookouts, mattress sales, and one final trip to the beach, almost nobody remembers any of it.
So fire up the grill. Enjoy your three-day weekend. Take advantage of that 40%-off sale. But at least know what you’re celebrating.
