The Brief Origins of May Day
By Eric Chase - 1993.
Most people living in the United States know little about the
International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an
assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries
like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that
May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as
baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of
Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.
In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant
struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and
it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions.
Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such
books as Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle and Jack London's
The Iron Heel.
As early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday
without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized
labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday.
This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by
many of the working class.
At this time, socialism was a new and attractive idea to working
people, many of whom were drawn to its ideology of working class control
over the production and distribution of all goods and services. Workers
had seen first-hand that Capitalism benefited only their bosses,
trading workers' lives for profit. Thousands of men, women and children
were dying needlessly every year in the workplace, with life expectancy
as low as their early twenties in some industries, and little hope but
death of rising out of their destitution. Socialism offered another
option.
A variety of socialist organizations sprung up throughout the later
half of the 19th century, ranging from political parties to choir
groups. In fact, many socialists were elected into governmental office
by their constituency. But again, many of these socialists were
ham-strung by the political process which was so evidently controlled by
big business and the bi-partisan political machine. Tens of thousands
of socialists broke ranks from their parties, rebuffed the entire
political process, which was seen as nothing more than protection for
the wealthy, and created anarchist groups throughout the country.
Literally thousands of working people embraced the ideals of anarchism,
which sought to put an end to all hierarchical structures (including
government), emphasized worker controlled industry, and valued direct
action over the bureaucratic political process. It is inaccurate to say
that labor unions were "taken over" by anarchists and socialists, but
rather anarchists and socialist made up the labor unions.
At its national convention in Chicago, held in 1884, the Federation
of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American
Federation of Labor), proclaimed that "eight hours shall constitute a
legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." The following year, the
FOTLU, backed by many Knights of Labor locals, reiterated their
proclamation stating that it would be supported by strikes and
demonstrations. At first, most radicals and anarchists regarded this
demand as too reformist, failing to strike "at the root of the evil." A
year before the Haymarket Massacre, Samuel Fielden pointed out in the
anarchist newspaper, The Alarm, that "whether a man works eight hours a day or ten hours a day, he is still a slave."
Despite the misgivings of many of the anarchists, an estimated
quarter million workers in the Chicago area became directly involved in
the crusade to implement the eight hour work day, including the Trades
and Labor Assembly, the Socialistic Labor Party and local Knights of
Labor. As more and more of the workforce mobilized against the
employers, these radicals conceded to fight for the 8-hour day,
realizing that "the tide of opinion and determination of most
wage-workers was set in this direction." With the involvement of the
anarchists, there seemed to be an infusion of greater issues than the
8-hour day. There grew a sense of a greater social revolution beyond the
more immediate gains of shortened hours, but a drastic change in the
economic structure of capitalism.
In a proclamation printed just before May 1, 1886, one publisher appealed to working people with this plea:
- Workingmen to Arms!
- War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS IDLENESS.
- The wage system is the only cause of the World's misery. It is
supported by the rich classes, and to destroy it, they must be either
made to work or DIE.
- One pound of DYNAMITE is better than a bushel of BALLOTS!
- MAKE YOUR DEMAND FOR EIGHT HOURS with weapons in your hands to
meet the capitalistic bloodhounds, police, and militia in proper manner.
Not surprisingly the entire city was prepared for mass bloodshed,
reminiscent of the railroad strike a decade earlier when police and
soldiers gunned down hundreds of striking workers. On May 1, 1886, more
than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States
walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In
Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on
strike with the anarchists in the forefront of the public's eye. With
their fiery speeches and revolutionary ideology of direct action,
anarchists and anarchism became respected and embraced by the working
people and despised by the capitalists.
The names of many - Albert Parsons, Johann Most, August Spies and
Louis Lingg - became household words in Chicago and throughout the
country. Parades, bands and tens of thousands of demonstrators in the
streets exemplified the workers' strength and unity, yet didn't become
violent as the newspapers and authorities predicted.
More and more workers continued to walk off their jobs until the
numbers swelled to nearly 100,000, yet peace prevailed. It was not until
two days later, May 3, 1886, that violence broke out at the McCormick
Reaper Works between police and strikers.
For six months, armed Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and
beat locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. Most of these workers
belonged to the "anarchist-dominated" Metal Workers' Union. During a
speech near the McCormick plant, some two hundred demonstrators joined
the steelworkers on the picket line. Beatings with police clubs
escalated into rock throwing by the strikers which the police responded
to with gunfire. At least two strikers were killed and an unknown number
were wounded.
Full of rage, a public meeting was called by some of the anarchists
for the following day in Haymarket Square to discuss the police
brutality. Due to bad weather and short notice, only about 3000 of the
tens of thousands of people showed up from the day before. This affair
included families with children and the mayor of Chicago himself. Later,
the mayor would testify that the crowd remained calm and orderly and
that speaker August Spies made "no suggestion... for immediate use of
force or violence toward any person..."
As the speech wound down, two detectives rushed to the main body of
police, reporting that a speaker was using inflammatory language,
inciting the police to march on the speakers' wagon. As the police began
to disperse the already thinning crowd, a bomb was thrown into the
police ranks. No one knows who threw the bomb, but speculations varied
from blaming any one of the anarchists, to an agent provocateur working
for the police.
Enraged, the police fired into the crowd. The exact number of
civilians killed or wounded was never determined, but an estimated seven
or eight civilians died, and up to forty were wounded. One officer died
immediately and another seven died in the following weeks. Later
evidence indicated that only one of the police deaths could be
attributed to the bomb and that all the other police fatalities had or
could have had been due to their own indiscriminate gun fire. Aside from
the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the police, not the
anarchists, who perpetrated the violence.
Eight anarchists - Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden,
Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis
Lingg - were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were
even present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all when
the bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of business
leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti case
thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and Black Panther members in
the seventies. The entire world watched as these eight organizers were
convicted, not for their actions, of which all of were innocent, but for
their political and social beliefs. On November 11, 1887, after many
failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were hung to death.
Louis Lingg, in his final protest of the state's claim of authority and
punishment, took his own life the night before with an explosive device
in his mouth.
The remaining organizers, Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, were pardoned
six years later by Governor Altgeld, who publicly lambasted the judge on
a travesty of justice. Immediately after the Haymarket Massacre, big
business and government conducted what some say was the very first "Red
Scare" in this country. Spun by mainstream media, anarchism became
synonymous with bomb throwing and socialism became un-American. The
common image of an anarchist became a bearded, eastern European
immigrant with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other.
Today we see tens of thousands of activists embracing the ideals of
the Haymarket Martyrs and those who established May Day as an
International Workers' Day. Ironically, May Day is an official holiday
in 66 countries and unofficially celebrated in many more, but rarely is
it recognized in this country where it began.
Over one hundred years have passed since that first May Day. In the
earlier part of the 20th century, the US government tried to curb the
celebration and further wipe it from the public's memory by establishing
"Law and Order Day" on May 1. We can draw many parallels between the
events of 1886 and today. We still have locked out steelworkers
struggling for justice. We still have voices of freedom behind bars as
in the cases of Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. We still had the
ability to mobilize tens of thousands of people in the streets of a
major city to proclaim "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!" at the WTO
and FTAA demonstrations.
Words stronger than any I could write are engraved on the Haymarket Monument:
THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES YOU ARE THROTTLING TODAY.
Truly, history has a lot to teach us about the roots of our
radicalism. When we remember that people were shot so we could have the
8-hour day; if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were
burned to the ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend;
when we recall 8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in
the streets protesting working conditions and child labor only to be
beat down by the police and company thugs, we understand that our
current condition cannot be taken for granted - people fought for the
rights and dignities we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to
fight for. The sacrifices of so many people can not be forgotten or
we'll end up fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why
we celebrate May Day.
