Happy Mayday!
Well I’m a day late, but regardless I always think its appropriate to discuss a little bit of the history behind May 1. Celebrated around the world as a worker’s holiday, it has been ignored in the very country of its origin. Instead, it has hideously been named National Law Day in a final insult to its significance.
The holiday was born of a labor dispute in Chicago 1886. Workers went on strike beginning on May 1 to demand an 8-hour workday. The industrial revolution had brought with it unrest for the working classes and socialists and anarchists such as August Spies and Albert Parsons were giving convincing arguments to an unhappy labor force. From The Dramas of Haymarket, an online project produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University:
From the point of view of labor, the May 1 labor demonstration was a great success, as hundreds of thousands of workers across trades nationally, and tens of thousands in Chicago, lay down their tools. Among many demonstrations in the city was a parade along Michigan Avenue, with Albert Parsons as one of its leaders. These demonstrations took place without serious incident. But such events would make the anarchist leaders marked men when violence did break out three days later in the Haymarket. The Chicago Mail of May 1 told its readers that any turmoil that lay ahead should be attributed to Parsons and Spies.
“Mark them for today,” an editorial warned. “Hold them responsible for any trouble that occurs. Make an example of them if trouble does occur.”
A dispute between union and non-union workers on May 3
ended when police arrived. They were taunted and rocks were thrown, and when police fought back two workers were killed. Spies was infuriated.
The sounds of this battle drew others from the Lumber Shovers’ meeting, including Spies, to the scene. What he saw appalled him. “Well, as a matter of course,” Spies recalled at the trial, “my blood was boiling, and I think in that moment I could have done almost anything, seeing men, women and children fired upon, people who were not armed fired upon by policemen.” He hastily returned to his office in the Arbeiter-Zeitung building, where he poured his outrage into a deliberately inflammatory bilingual broadside exhorting laborers to stand up like men to their murderous oppressors. He titled this broadside “Workingmen to Arms!”, but the person who set the text in type had, without asking Spies, added the heading, in full capitals, “REVENGE.”
Though the large retaliatory demonstrations started out peaceful, as they dwindled they grew more intense. A bomb went off and gunfire erupted, killing several policemen. Anarchist organizers were blamed and indicted for the incident. “The Chicago Seven,” as they came to be called, were eventually convicted and executed. However, they were later exonerated from the crime posthumously. It is largely these events that led to the creation of an 8-hour workday, solidifying the significance of the day for workers everywhere.
I challenge that any such compelling historical argument exists for the U.S. September Labor Day, and instead this day was largely ignored because of supposed Communist influences. While the holiday was well-celebrated in the former Soviet Union, it is also a colorful and exuberant holiday in Western Europe, Australia, South America and throughout the rest of the world.
While it cannot be celebrated officially in this country, it has traditionally been used as a day for demonstration. One often slighted example is massive anti-war civil disobedience in Washington, D.C. 1971. The resulting arrests broke records for arrests in a single day. From Ending a war Inventing a movement Mayday 1971 by Kauffman:
The Mayday civil disobedience, moreover, was larger than any action organized by Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, more protesters were arrested on the first day of the action than in any other single event in U.S. history. According to one of the few historians to have studied the event, Mayday so unnerved the Nixon administration that it palpably speeded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. White House aide Jeb Magruder said that the protest had “shaken” Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday “a very damaging kind of event,” noting that it was “one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.”
For more information check out the Metafilter thread on Mayday, where many of these links can also be found.