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  The largest was at the giant McCormick Harvesting Machine plant where strikers had been replaced by scabs under police protection and daily clashes were occurring at the factory gates.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.

Behind the Magnificent Moustache Terence V. Powderly was America’s First Great Union Leader

Knights of Labor Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly.

Terence V. Powderly may have been the man with the tiniest spectacle lenses and most impressive moustache in American history.  He also became almost by accident the leader of this country’s first great national labor union. 

That’s because the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 as a fraternal benevolent society and a lodge with the secret rituals and handshakes popularized by Masonry.  It was organized in Philadelphia by Uriah Smith Stephens, and James L. Wright and five other members of a local Taylors Union. It was not meant to itself become a labor union, but to provide social connections, moral uplift, general advocacy for reforms like an 8 hour day, and provide protection and benefits for injured members and surviving spouses and families.  

From the beginning the fledgling organization was unique in the breadth of those welcomed to belong—all workers regardless of craft or skill, men and women, all ethnic and religious groups, and all races, except, as we will see later, Asians.  In a throwback to the days of guilds, even master craftsmen and owners of small shops, farms, and manufacturing businesses could join if they still worked by the side of their employees.  This later group never represented more than a tiny fraction of the organization’s membership but deference to their sensibilities restrained action in its earlier years. 

Two events contributed to the Knights beginning to take on the functions of a union.  First was the collapse in 1873 of an earlier attempt to form a national labor body, the National Labor Union.  Left behind were a hodge-podge of local unions, a few central labor councils in major cities, and a handful of craft unions struggling to establish national federations.  Without a national body to look toward for cooperation, and most importantly, solidarity during labor actions, many of these organizations elected to become Knights Assemblies.  Others maintained their separate identity but encouraged or allowed their individual members to join the Knights. 

The Knights of Labor seal after re-organization and the dropping of Masonic style ritual and secrecy. 

By default, although the Knights officially discouraged strikes, Knights Assemblies and members were soon engaged in the full range of job actions. 

Secondly was the ongoing near open warfare between coal mine operators and their largely Catholic and immigrant work forces in Pennsylvania.  Conditions were harsh, wages low, hours long, and there were regular mine disasters.  The infancy of the company town turned miners into virtual serfs.  Strikes, boycotts, and rebellions became common, all met with ruthless suppression.  Workers found that the ritual secrecy of the Knights, like that of the Irish fraternal organization the Loyal Order of Hibernians were the perfect cover to organize in secret.  By the mid 1870’s membership in the anthracite fields was exploding. 

And that’s where Powderly first encountered the Knights. 

Powderly was the 11th of 12 children of an Irish immigrant family born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania in the heart of the coal fields on January 22, 1849.  He was something of a sickly child losing the hearing in one ear to scarlet fever and nearly dying from the German measles.  His relative frailty probably spared him the fate of going to the mines at age 7 or 8 as a breaker boy.  Instead, he was allowed to continue a rough sort of schooling until the ripe old age of 13 when he went to work for the Delaware & Hudson Railroad and the next year was promoted  to car inspector due to his intelligence.  

He was mature for his age and keenly interested in the world around him.  In his later memoirs he was able to recall in detail the Presidential Election of 1856 which elevated Pennsylvanian James Buchannan to the Executive Mansion.  He recalled his mother’s anguish over not being able to cast a vote and then and there became a lifelong supporter of women’s suffrage. 

In the meantime, he apprenticed as a machinist and was working in the locomotive shops in Scranton by 1869.  He joined the Machinist and Blacksmiths Union in 1871, and he was elected president of a local in 1872.  From then on his life centered on his dedication to the labor movement.  In 1873 he was fired for union activity and blackballed on the railroads. 

Powderly drifted from job to job, but always kept up his connections to his union.  And although he never personally worked in the mines, he was keenly aware of the struggles in the major industry in his home region. 

He signed a membership card in the Knights as early as 1874 but became active in his local Assembly in 1876.  He rose quickly, elected to the key position of Recording Secretary, which put him in communication with Assemblies across the country. 

Powderly was elected General Worthy Foreman of the Order at St. Louis in January 1879 and became General Master Workman soon afterward. 

Powderly had other interests.  He married in 1872 and began to raise a family and was active in local politics.  The same year He was elected Mayor of Scranton and was re-elected for two more two-year terms which coincided with his rise in the Knights.  He was asked to run for Lieutenant Governor by the Greenback Labor Party in 1882, but declined the nomination. 

When Powderly assumed office, the Knights reported a national membership of 10,000.  Probably two or three times that number were in sympathy or in locals and assemblies not properly reporting to Headquarters, a common problem for the loosely organized Order with few employees. 

But due to a combination of an explosion of national labor unrest and his own growing reputation, Powderly saw the Order grow to 700,000 then to 1 million members, including 10,000 women and 50,000 African Americans in 1886. 

The Great American Railroad Strike of 1877 was largely spontaneous, but the Knights of Labor were credited or blamed despite Terence V, Powderly's attempt to order his members back work.  The event spurred rapid growth by the Knights.

The Great American Railroad Strike of 1877 was responsible for a lot of that growth.  Although largely spontaneous and unorganized, the bloody riots exploded from the Baltimore & Ohio shops in Maryland and soon engulfed much of the nation with particularly hard fighting between strikers and authorities in the Knight’s cradle in Pennsylvania.  The Order was blamed by authorities for the strikes, and credited for them by workers across the country although the organization was not initially involved. 

In fact, Powderly was appalled by the violence and at first called on Knights members to remember their no-strike pledges and return to work. In the West in places like St. Louis and New Orleans, where local Assemblies had time to organize responses before the violence struck, they were able to conduct disciplined actions with little of the mayhem and property damage in the East. 

There remained a stumbling block to growth.  Although a large majority of members were, like Powderly, Catholics, the Church objected to the trapping of freemasonry and a secret society.  The Archbishop of Quebec had specifically forbidden membership.  American prelates seemed ready to follow suit.  Powderly worked closely with Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore who convinced the Pope not only not to condemn the Knights, but to broadly offer support for the right of unionization.  In return, Powderly led the Knights in dropping the Noble and Holy Order from their name and jettisoning secrecy and masonic style ritual in 1882. 

Pro-Knights cartoons and publications were at pains to paint Powderly and the Knights not as radicals, but as reasonable and fair reformers.

Now, for better or worse, the Knights were a virtual union in everything but name.  Membership shot up faster than effective organization could accommodate them all. “In 1885 we had about 80,000 members in good standing,” Powderly wrote in his autobiography, “ in one year that number jumped up to 700,000 of which at least four hundred thousand came in from curiosity and caused more damage than good.” 

One spur to growth was a successful strike in 1885 against the Wabash Railroad, part of the Southwestern System controlled by railroad baron Jay Gould.  Despite his opposition to strikes, Powderly helped negotiate a favorable settlement, including a non-discrimination clause protecting Knights members from retribution.  It was the first significant national victory of any labor strike and sent the prestige of the organization and its leader through the roof. 

                                 Powderly and the Knights officially supported the inclusion of all workers including women, Black, and the unskilled.                        

Powderly was no radical.  He took a dim view of socialism and an even greater aversion to the anarchism that was taking root in parts of the labor movement.  He favored what might be called benign or cooperative republicanism (small “r”) with an emphasis on inclusion and fairness.  He advocated reforms like the Eight Hour Day and elimination of child labor was well as wages that allowed working people to live with “simple dignity.”  His vision was egalitarian and inclusive of women and most minorities. 

In general, the Knights followed these precepts.  But they were not perfect.  Although Blacks were allowed to join, Powderly looked the other way when segregated Assemblies were established in the South.   

On the West Coast Knights Assemblies spearheaded the attacks on "coolie labor."  Powderly endorsed Oriental Exclusion.

In the West, he went along with the virulent anti-Asian bias that erupted after the large-scale introduction of coolie labor in railroad construction.  It was the almost universal opinion of White workers on the West Coast that Chinese labor drove down wages.  The Assemblies in Seattle urged the expulsion of all 10,000 Chinese in the city.  In Rock Spring, Wyoming local Knights organized a pogrom style riot in September of 1885 in which 28 Chinese miners were killed, 15 were injured, and 75 homes and business were burned. 

Powderly condemned the violence but supported Oriental Exclusion immigration legislation.  He was not the only labor leader or radical to do so.  So did the California affiliate of the International Working People’s Association—the First International.  Immigration issues became a major personal interest of Powderly and, as we will see, propelled a second career. 

Two events in 1886 proved disastrously pivotal to the Knights. 

A second round of strikes against Gould’s Southwest System broke out early that year and spread even farther to more components of the system.  Violence broke out in several cities and soon there were the familiar pitched battles with authorities and company thugs.  Powderly desperately tried to reign in control of the strike while trying to negotiate a settlement.  This time Gould and his forces were adamant.  By March the strike petered out with no gains and local Assemblies in disarray. 

Then in Chicago on May 1 strikes in support of one of Powderly’s favorite causes, the Eight Hour Day, engulfed the city.  These were in response to a nationwide call by the Knight’s rival craft union competitor which would soon become known as the American Federation of Labor (AFL).  Locally they were organized by member unions of the Central Labor Union and promoted by anarchists.  The eight hour strike coincided with several ongoing strikes in the city, including a major confrontation at the McCormick Reaper Works. 

On May 2 police opened fire at picketers around the McCormick Works gate killing several.  The McCormick strikers included members of several craft unions and of the Knights but were generally under the leadership of the craft unions. 

Although Chicago's Central Labor body, local craft unions, and anarchists were mostly responsible for the May 1, 1886 Eight Hour Day strike as well as the bloody battles at the McCormick Reaper Works, the Knights were targeted after the Haymarket Square bombing as well.  Membership plummeted in the nation-wide suppression that followed.

Local anarchists, most of them German, organized a protest at the Haymarket on May 4.  A bomb was thrown by an unknown assailant as police moved in to attack the end of the peaceful rally.  The ensuing melee left several workers and five cops dead.  The anarchists, some of whom were not in attendance or even involved in the meeting, were rounded up and arrested.  Eight were charged.  One committed suicide, seven were convicted and four hung. 

Even though the Knights were only involved peripherally in the McCormick strike and the May 1 Eight Hour strike and not at all in the anarchist protest, the press laid the whole Haymarket Affair largely the feet of Powderly and the Knights. 

Nationwide suppression followed.  Worse over the next five years the Knights lost several badly organized but widely publicized strikes, shaking the confidence of workers.  The AFL began to emerge as a more effective alternative, although it excluded most unskilled workers and minorities.   Membership evaporated. 

In addition, the Knights were wracked with internal dissent, and Powderly found his leadership increasingly under attack. By 1890 the Knights had shrunk to numbers like those when Powderly first took the reins.  

Powderly was defeated for re-election as Master Workman in 1893.  The organization’s decline only accelerated and by 1900 was essentially irrelevant except for a handful of local pockets of support. 

Powderly studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1894.  He established a successful practice in Scranton and dabbled in business.  Eventually he would even become part owner of a coal mining operation and other, largely unsuccessful industrial businesses. 

Powderly in his second career as an immigration bureaucrat in Republican administrations for more than 20 years.  Shown in his Washington office, Powderly kept the tiny spectacles and impressive mustache and acquired a toupee.  

He was making a name for himself as an expert on immigration.  He concluded that not only was Asian immigration harmful to working people, but that the un-restricted flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe would destroy the standard of living of American workers. 

Trying to court labor votes away from their traditional loyalty to Democrats or the emerging Populists, President William McKinley appointed to Powderly to an important post, U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration in 1897.  He enjoyed the continued support of Theodore Roosevelt who in 1902 made him Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration from 1907 to 1921.  In these positions he crafted the proposals that would result in the great curtailment of unrestricted immigration in the Immigration Act of 1924 which included an almost total ban on Asian immigration and a strict national quota system for Europe. 

In 1916, Powderly posed for this photo with two other veterans of the American labor movement, Mother Jones and United Mine Workers of America president John P. White. Mother Jones began her career as a labor agitator with the Knights and many former Knights Pennsylvania Assemblies became the nucleus of the United Mine Workers in the anthracite coal fields.

After his first wife died in 1901, Powderly married his long-time secretary at the Knights.  Together they lived comfortably in Washington.  After a brief retirement Powderly died on June 24, 1924.  His wife survived him until 1940. 

Seventeen years after his death, Powderly’s manuscript autobiography was discovered and published giving us one of the most detailed accounts of the formative years of the American labor movement.