Today’s Almanac-May 1, 2010
Alexander Berkman addresses a crowd in Union Square on May Day, 1908.
May Day may be the universally recognized worker’s holiday around the globe. But in America, where the celebration began in memory of the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886, the holiday has long languished forgotten. Indeed it was stolen from American workers by a terrified employing class in a corrupt bargain with a conservative sliver of the labor movement of the late Nineteenth Century. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) made a deal with Mark Hanna of the Civic Federation. The AFL was a federation of skilled craft workers on the model of British trade unions. Its members were the princes of the working class. The AFL was opposed to the old Knights of Labor, who had attempted to organize wall workers into one semi-secret fraternal organization, and to the emerging industrial unions which sought to organize the skilled and masses of unskilled labor together in each industry. These industrial unions, concentrated in the labor intensive mining and extraction industries, tended to be radical in their demands. Likewise the AFL avoided identification with the emerging socialist parties or with the older anarchist labor tradition. The Civic Federation was a kind of union of bosses which was also closely aligned with the dominant Republican Party. It was Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio who had carefully assembled it and who also personally selected William McKinley to sit in the White House. The Civic Federation promised to ease up its implacable resistance to all labor union and recognize the AFL, even invite Gompers and other labor leaders to personally join the club. In exchange the AFL would withdraw all support from the fledgling industrial unions and actively fight the extension of unionism to the mass of unskilled, largely immigrant workers. The AFL would also abandon May Day, which it had once fostered and supported. Indeed it had been the AFL that had proposed to an international meeting of trade unionists that May First be adopted as workers holiday world wide in memory of the executed Haymarket leaders. In just a few short years the holiday swept the world and its annual celebrations transcended national boundaries. Giant parades around the world reminded workers of their own united power and further energized and radicalized them. The Civic Federation wanted more than anything to quash the American celebration. They agreed to recognize instead an obscure local labor holiday celebrated in some New York building trades in early September as a safe and harmless alternative. Outside of the conservative AFL, American labor militants never surrendered the May Day holiday. Socialists of all stripes and unions like the United Mine Workers (coal), Western Federation of Miners (hard rock metal miners,) the Industrial Workers of the World, and various dock workers unions, continued to recognize and celebrate May Day while scorning the “official” September Labor Day. In the Cold War years Americans were dished up annual pictures of menacing military parades in Red Square and elsewhere where dictators smiled at missiles and tanks on parade. The people were told that May Day was a Communist celebration and thus tainted by association. Conservatives tried to completely co-opt the day by declaring it Law Day, supposedly celebrating American rule of law versus Commie tyranny. In recent years, as the power of American unions shrank, even the AFL (now merged with CIO-the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the industrial unions of basic industries) began has recognized what it has lost. In Chicago the unions came together a few years ago to erect a new monument to the Haymarket martyrs on the site of the famous “riot.” It depicts speakers from the back of a wagon just as the police began their charge from the rear and the infamous bomb thrown. The old memorial to the police killed in the riot was removed years ago after twice having been blown off its pedestal by small bombs. It stood in Police Headquarters for a number of years before being relocated yet again to a new Police Academy. Even the city itself has adopted the cause and Mayor Richard M. Daley’s name is on the plaque dedicating the new memorial. The Chicago Federation of Labor and other unions now rally each May 1st at the Haymarket memorial. For the past three years immigrants have scheduled marches on May Day demanding comprehensive reform. To its credit, the Chicago labor movement that in the past was not always supportive of immigrants, have embraced the cause and integrated their celebrations with the immigration marchers. In Chicago labor leaders are endorsing the march and are incorporating their own May Day observances at the Haymarket in the day’s events.
(This post was adapted from an entry in this blog from April 20, 2006.)