Why May Day Still Matters

A French May Day poster from around the turn of the 20th Century.

Chicago was a-boil with labor turmoil in 1886.  The burgeoning city became a major manufacturing center and tens of thousands of immigrants poured into the city since the Civil War to join displaced American born farmers and former independent craftsmen in giant factories.  Hours were long, working conditions hard and dangerous, bosses harsh, and pay cuts frequent. 

Since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 tensions had been building.  And so had a labor movement—craft unions loosely organized under a city central labor body, and the Knights of Labor, officially a benevolent society whose national leadership was opposed to strikes.  But unlike the craft unions, the Knights would enroll all workers—skilled and unskilled alike.  In addition, immigrant communities had their own radical leadership and press.  None was as vigorous or developed as the Germans, who were not only the largest immigrant community in the city but had a highly educated leadership steeped in European radicalism.  Many of these leaders identified with the growing international anarchist movement.

There were several major strikes in the city that spring.  The largest was at the giant McCormick Harvesting Machine plant where strikers had been replaced by scabs under police protection and daily clashes were occurring at the factory gates. 

On May 1st workers responded to a call for a General Strike for an 8 Hour Day was issued nationally by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (ancestor of the American Federation of Labor.)   In Chicago the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA) organized a march by 8,000 workers led by Albert and Lucy Parsons, the main English language figures in the anarchist labor movement.  The General Strike got so much support that even half of the scabs at McCormick laid down their tools to join.

Employers were in a panic at the turn of events.  They met with city officials demanding suppression of strikes and demonstrations and agreed among themselves to redouble their own efforts to violently suppress strikes through the use of the Pinkerton Agency and bands of thugs and criminals hired off the streets.  

                                        Chicago  Police attack pickets at the McCormick works on May 3 inspiring a protest rally at the Haymarket the next evening.

On May 3 a rally in support of striking McCormick workers was addressed by German anarchist leader August Spies.  When strikers confronted scabs emerging from the plant after the 4 pm end of shift, police opened fire killing six workers and wounding scores.  Outraged, Spies rushed to the North Side where his daily newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung was published.  He and his associates decided to call a protest meeting at the Haymarket just west of downtown for the next day.  Flyers in German and English were hastily printed and rushed into distribution.  Spies noticed that the flyers contained the words “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!”  He ordered the copies destroyed and new ones printed without those words.  Spies had consistently counseled non-violence.  Most of the thousands of flyers distributed omitted the words, but a few hundred of the first run were circulated before they could be recalled.

The evening of May 4, a huge crowd gathered at the Haymarket in a drizzling rain to hear speakers orate from the back of a wagon.  Mayor Carter Harrison stopped by and observed that the crowd was orderly and peaceful.  He ordered police already massed near-by not to intervene.  The last scheduled speaker of the evening, English-born Samuel Fielden, a Methodist lay preacher as well as a labor activist, was addressing a thinning crowd when the police officer in charge, Inspector John Bonfield, who was getting “supplemental” income and support from a coalition of major employers, decided to act. He ordered a phalanx of 175 officers to advance through the crowd from the rear.  Captain William Ward addressing Fielden on the wagon ordered the crowd to disperse.  Fielden protested that the assembly was peaceful and he was nearly finished anyway.  Ward issued a second warning.  Fielden said, “All right.”

Then someone—it has never been certainly determined who—threw a bomb from a side ally into the massed police.  Five officers were killed and others injured.  Police responded by firing wildly, wounding many of their own.  About 60 officers were wounded—mostly by friendly fire, but so were dozens of workers, including Fielden.

The crowd ran and Fielden limped away.

The press went, predictably, berserk.  The offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and regular meeting places and haunts of anarchists and unionists were raided.  Police quickly rounded up much of the German leadership. 

A warrant was out for Albert Parsons, who had spoken at the rally earlier but was gone when the attack occurred.  Parsons disguised himself and fled to Wisconsin.  He later decided to turn himself in and stand trial in solidarity with his German comrades.  

The men charged in the Haymarket case and the poster that called workers to the rally.

In addition to Spies, Parsons and Fielden authorities charged Adolph Fischer, George Engels, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe.  Some of the defendants had not been at the Haymarket that night at all, and Neebe was out of town.  21-year-old Lingg was known to be an advocate of propaganda of the deed and had written a provocative article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung advocating the use of dynamite.  But he was not at the rally.

The trial began on June 21 and was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary who made no attempt to conceal his animus to the defendants.  Although no evidence could be brought forward linking any defendant to the bomb, prosecutors argued that they were in a conspiracy and that the defendants were guilty because they had not actively discouraged the unknown bomber.  All eight men were convicted by the jury.  Seven were sentenced to death and Neebe to 15 years in prison.

Before sentence could be carried out, Lingg committed suicide in his cell by biting a blasting cap. 

After appeals were exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887.  The next day, November 11, the four remaining condemned men were led to a scaffold in a courtyard of Cook County Jail and hung.  Their execution drew outrage and protest from the labor movement around the world.

                                    Illinois Governor John Peter Alteld, a pro-labor Democrat defied public opinion to pardon the surviving Haymarket defendants.

In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld, a liberal Democrat, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab and concluded all eight defendants were innocent. The pardons and his opposition to calling in Federal troops to intervene in the Pullman Strike ended his political career.

In 1898 Samuel Gompers, head of the newly reorganized AFL petitioned the First Congress of the Second International (socialist) to designate May 1 to commemorate the Martyrs of Chicago and support a new general strike call for an 8-hour day scheduled for May 1, 1890.  The International enthusiastically agreed calling for “a great international demonstration” on that date.  Huge crowds responded around the world including a march by tens of thousands in New York City.  The event was so successful that it was made annual the next year and has been celebrated globally ever since.

But in the United States, where May Day was born, the holiday was officially abandoned within a few years.  Samuel Gompers stuck his historic deal with the employer’s organization, the Civic Federation, which gave craft unionists a “place at the table.”  Part of that deal was the abandonment of May Day, now associated with Socialism in exchange for recognition of a non-ideological Labor Day in September around the time of a local New York City building trades celebration.

A May Day rally in New York's Union Square in 1913.

Industrial and militant unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) kept May Day, as did socialists of all stripes.  Large celebrations persisted in many cities until the post World War II anti-Communist hysteria when the press successfully identified May Day with military parades in the Kremlin.

The Old Man at the Haymarket Memorial when it was still located on the original site after preaching a May Day sermon at a small Unitarian Universalist congregation

Begining in the last years of the 20th Century, even conservative unions helped revive the May Day tradition.  The Chicago Federation of Labor funded a new Haymarket Memorial featuring a speaker on a wagon near the exact location of the original and held annual commemorations there until the monument was relocated to Union Park on the outer fringes of Downtown.  Hispanic and immigration activists staged huge marches for immigration reform and to protest deportations on May Day, increasingly with the support of the labor movement.

This year those protests and labor observation will be part of a nation-wide No Work/No School/No Shopping Day action called for by a broad coalition of leading Resistance groups and organizations who have already mobilized millions to action against the Trump/MAGA regime. 

Sounds like a General Strike, doesn't it.

If Talk Could Exalt a Nation--Jerry Pendergast's Irish Roots —National Poetry Month 2026

 

Jerry Pendergast reading.

The work of Jerry Pendergast, Chicago poet, poetry slam emcee, and contributor to the Revolutionary Poets Brigade Facebook group, has regularly been featured in our National Poetry Month posts.  His work is influenced by jazz, Irish cultural identity, urban observation, and a keen sense of social justice.  Today’s verse is inspired by his Irish roots.

                               

                             Oscar Wilde.

If Talk Could Exalt a Nation

“We Irish are too Poetic to be poets…We are a nation of brilliant failures.

But we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks”. Oscar Wilde

 

If a stanza a river long

could sink a battle ship

If a run on sentence

taking a hearer through the mess u ages

could make a regiment

charging through a city street

drop their rifles.

 

If a tail end

of a narration

could disable a tank.

 

Wheels falling

with each change

Each embellishment

If an O’Carolan Concerto

Could misdirect a Cavalry

Put their commanders in a trance

If pipers could melt swords

Would Ireland be free?

Would it ever have been conquered?

 

If master fiddlers could make clergy

and officials scatter their thoughts

Dance like there were no floor director

Would Ireland imprison Wild Earnest Men?

 

Force young Women into work houses

for being young woman like?

or victims? Tell them their sins

are washed down the sink.?

Ban novels that win international awards?

 

Or would the state and the church

Be more well rounded.

Like the Ethiopian and Celtic crosses.

 

—Jerry Pendergast

Ireland's Formidable Eavan Boland—National Poetry Month 2026

 

Beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland, one of the greatest of Irish contemporary poets, died six years ago at the age of 75 at her Dublin home.  Her prolific body of work wrestled with often thorny issues of Irish identity and insisted on the recognition of the role of women including their domestic situations.  It became so central to the conversation about evolving modern Ireland that her poems are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate, the final exam of secondary students required for admission to a college or university.  Mary Robinson selected her to read a poem at her 1990 inauguration as the first woman President of Éire and Barack Obama quoted her at a White House St. Patrick’s Day reception. 

Eavan Frances Boland was born on September 24, 1944 in Dublin to career diplomat Frederick Boland and his wife, noted painter Frances Kelly.  When she was six in 1950 her father was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the most important Irish diplomatic post at a time when relations between the country were tense over Ireland’s neutrality during World War II and continuing claims on Northern Ireland.  As a child in London she first experienced anti-Irish sentiment strengthening her identification with her Irish heritage which she later described in her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951. 

Boland in academic robes with her friend and contemporary Mary Robinson, first woman president of Ireland and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

At 14, she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child School in Killiney and them Trinity College where she was a classmate of Mary Robinson and where she published a first pamphlet 23 Poems in 1962.  She earned her BA with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Trinity in 1966.

She held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism, and essays. Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and had two daughters. Her experiences as a wife and mother influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes.

Boland on her wedding day with husband Kevin Casey and her father Fredrick Boland.

She taught at Trinity College, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College in Main, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity and at the National Maternity Hospital.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University and divided her time between Palo Alto, and her home in Dublin.

Boland’s first book of poetry was New Territory published in 1965 followed by The War Horse in 1975, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.

 Boland reading in a pub.

She published dozens of collections most recently Eavan Boland: A Poet’s Dublin edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph and A Woman Without A Country both in 2014.

Boland’s many honors and awards on both sides of the Atlantic are too numerous to mention.  Her work best speaks for itself.

My friend and radical poet Jerry Pendergast selected this apt poem about the Irish famine and the typhoid epidemic that accompanied it to remember Boland.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

—Eavan Boland

This one cuts to the quick of shame and guilt.

Domestic Violence

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk

Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.

Pleased to meet you meat to please you

said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.

And after that we moved out to the suburbs.

How young we were, how ignorant, how ready

to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,

Their voices high, sharp:

nothing is ever entirely

right in the lives of those who love each other.

               2.

In that season suddenly our island

Broke out its old sores for all to see.

We saw them too.

We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,

the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes

we thought we knew

had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television

which gave them back as gray and grayer tears

and killings, killings, killings,

then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said

not then, not later,

fathomed what it is

is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

             3.

And if the provenance of memory is

only that—remember, not atone—

and if I can be safe in

the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

why is there another kitchen, spring light

always darkening in it and

a woman whispering to a man

over and over what else could we have done?

               4.

We failed our moment or our moment failed us.

The times were grand in size and we were small.

Why do I write that

when I don't believe it?

We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.

Children were born and raised here

and are gone,

including ours.

As for that couple did we ever

find out who they were

and did we want to?

I think we know. I think we always knew.

—Eavan Boland

How We Made New Art on Old Ground wan in Boland's collection Against Love Poems.

Finally, one on the complex interactions of history, the natural world, love, and art.

How We Made New Art on Old Ground

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and when bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

—Eavan Boland