May Day
By Scott Molloy

An ancient holiday marked by celebrations in praise of spring and by symbolic evocations of fertility, this day perhaps inevitably became the revolutionary holiday of the nineteenth-century workers' movement. As in British artist Walter Crane's famous May Day drawings (much reprinted in the U.S. socialist press), the vision of socialism seemed to speak at once to the natural yearnings for emancipation from the winter season and from the wintery epoch of class society.

In May 1886 several hundred thousand American workers marched into international labor history when they demonstrated for the eight-hour day. An unusual and informal alliance between the fledgling AFL, local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, and disparate tendencies within the anarchist movement ignited a pent-up demand for shorter working hours. The social and labor ferment that crested in 1885-86 also marked the maturing of the Knights of Labor into the first meaningful national labor organization in the United States. The leadership of the Knights, however, envisioned the eight-hour day as an educational, political, and evolutionary achievement rather than an agitational and revolutionary one. On the other hand, the infant AFL, soon to molt from the impotent Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, tied its star to the militant eight-hour actions. The third grouping in the labor triad comprised that section of the anarchists, mainly European immigrants, who emphasized trade union work as a vehicle to social revolution.

This uneasy and unsettled coalition targeted May 1, 1886, as the day of industrial reckoning. In Boston, Milwaukee, New York City, Pittsburgh, and especially Chicago, tens of thousands of workers rallied and struck for "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will." The nation's newspapers warned that the spirit of the Paris Commune was loose in the land and pointed to specific personalities among the anarchists to prove the point. But the day passed peacefully except in the migrained minds of some employers who reluctantly capitulated to the eight-hour day.

Whether that May day would have been a one-time workers' holiday or "forever remembered," in the words of Samuel Gompers, "as a second Declaration of Independence," is a moot point. The events of a few days later projected it into an international framework and seared the conscience of labor activists ever since. A rally by striking lumbermen near the scene of a labor conflict at the McCormick-Harvester works in suburban Chicago led to a clash with scabs at the famous farm-implement company. Chicago police, already seasoned in labor brutality, mortally wounded several demonstrators.

The Chicago anarchists, who only a few days earlier had organized the peaceful eight hour parade locally, called for a protest demonstration against the killings. The following night, on May 4, a thousand rallied at Haymarket Square in the city. The mayor of Chicago listened warily in the crowd until a thunderstorm sent His Honor and most of the throng home for the evening. Inexplicably, a large contingent of police seemingly waited for the mayor's departure to forcibly disperse the remaining 200 demonstrators. As the officers sallied into the depleted group, a bomb was thrown into their ranks. Dozens of policemen were injured and eventually seven died, although some may have perished from their comrades' panicked shooting. That response led to widespread but undocumented wounding of many nameless protesters.

The media's failed predictions of violent upheaval for the May Day rallies three days earlier was now easily transferred to the "Haymarket Affair." The forces of law and order understood that the carnage at Haymarket, regardless of who threw the missile, could credit the labor movement and eradicate its more radical European appendages through a nascent Red Scare. The ensuing show trial in Chicago blessed the miscegenation of May Day and the Haymarket bombing in the popular mind. The concept of May Day had meanwhile spread rapidly to the international working movement, one of American labor's (and radicals') most important innovations. In 1889 the International Socialist Congress in Paris, with full knowledge of the American precedent, designated May 1 as an eight-hour holiday for workers of the world. Already by 1891 May Day became the occasion for violent clashes between police and radicals, as in Rome. Elaborate ceremonies soon evolved, with songs, banners, uniforms, even dioramas to mark the date, often with drawings of the Haymarket victims uplifted as a martyrology. Anarchists, understandably, expressed this particular aspect with the most fervor.

While some labor historians and commentators have claimed that the reaction to the Haymarket bombing debilitated the Knights of Labor and severely curtailed the growing ascendancy of organized labor, the puzzle contains many more pieces than that. The AFL, for example, continued its agitation over the eight-hour day with annual May Day rallies and ceremonies during the 1890s. The proliferation of May Day was thereafter increasingly intertwined with socialist politics, because spiraling conservatism by Gompers and the AFL elevated Labor Day over May Day as the preferred holiday of the American House of Labor.

Immigrants who had participated abroad in May Day events brought the celebrations back to the United States around the turn of the century. More than twenty nationalities held ceremonies-often both miniature versions of events in homelands and a time of joining symbollically with other American workers - from urban neighborhoods to mining camps and farm districts. Finnish Americans, following in part premodern festivities, erected huge bonfires, around which they sang the "Internationale" in Finnish. Immigrant children's musical and theatrical groups, a major focus of leisure activities for all ages, staged their epiphanic performance of the year. Older participants listened to speeches, drank and danced from night to early dawn.

English-language socialist May Day ceremonies, and even those conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World, although impressive at times, could hardly rival the intensity of the ethnic celebrations. The May Day demonstrations and marches, especially in New York City, perhaps most effectively combined the various groups and sentiments. The advent of World War 1, widespread repression, and the division of the movement into Socialist and Communist camps dampened May Day and fairly ended celebrations among mainstream unions. Communists led a partial revival during the 1930s, when the slogan "All Out for May Day" regained a resonance. The Cold War, the isolation of the Left unions, and the aging of the ethnic constituency fairly ended public ceremonies. Radical student-based movements of the 1960s-1970s occasionally attempted, without much success, a revival of the holiday. Most Americans remain oblivious of the continued May Day celebrations of labor, socialist, and communist movements across Europe.

To many Americans (whose elected leaders had, by the 1950s, attempted to institute a celebration of Law Day on May 1), May Day evoked only images of missiles and tanks on display in Red Square. The real spirit could be found elsewhere, as among black South African miners who, at tremendous personal risk, took off that day to demonstrate for better working conditions and to remember the Haymarket martyrs.