Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation! It’s May Day!

Note—I just wrapped up thirty straight days of epic poetry posts with repeats or reposts.  I am exhausted!  Glad May Day is here and I can take a rest.  I’ll put on my red shirt and black tie and go abroad in the world singing Solidarity Forever and The Internationale.  And it will be good.  In the mean time, I glad to share my annual post about why May First is the only and authentic  International Labor Day.

Chicago was a-boil with labor turmoil in 1886.  The burgeoning city had become a major manufacturing center and tens of thousands of immigrants had 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 as 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 ongoing in the city that spring.  The largest was at the giant McCormick Harvesting Machine plant on the South Side where strikers had been replaced by scabs under police protection and daily clashes were occurring at the factory gates.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 which had been called 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 lay 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 strike through the use of the Pinkerton Agency and bands of thugs and criminals hired off the streets. 

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 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!” as inserted by a militant typesetter. 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 massed near by not to interfere.  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 disburse.  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 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—most by friendly fire, but so were dozens of workers, including Fielden.

The crowd ran away 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, but Parsons disguised himself and fled to Wisconsin.  He later decided to turn himself in and stand trial in solidarity with his German comrades. 

In addition to Spies, Parsons and Fielden authorities charged Adolph Fischer, George Engel, 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 smuggled blasting cap. 

After appeals had been 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.

The base of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery is inscribed with the words of August Spies from the scaffold.

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 more 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.

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 American cities until the post World War II anti-Communist hysteria when the press successfully identified May Day with military parades in the Kremlin.

In recent years, even conservative unions have revived the May Day tradition.  The Chicago Federation of Labor funded a new Haymarket Memorial featuring a speaker on a wagon at the exact location of the original and hold annual commemorations.  For the past several years Hispanic and immigration activists have staged huge marches for immigration reform on May Day, increasingly with the support of the labor movement.

So Happy May Day, Fellow Workers! 

It’s Official Labor Day—We’ll Take it but Our Heart Lies With Another

It officially Labor Day in the United States, a Federal Holiday celebrated on the first Monday of September since 1894.  For most people it is just the last hurrah of summer, an occasion for one last cookout and the gate way to fall and football season.  In most cities and towns the labor movement is not even perfunctorily acknowledge.  The press uses the occasion to annually either write the obituary of unions or to denounce them as powerful and greedy bullies, depending on the political inclination of the outlet.

While most of us working schlumps are grateful for the day off (if we get one), I for one, wish I could officially celebrate Labor Day with virtually the whole rest of the world on May 1.  International Labor Day was proclaimed by the Second International in honor of the memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs at the suggestion of none other than American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers himself and quickly spread around the world.  American unions celebrated it too.

But within just a few years Gompers was at the heart of a deal that substituted the September observance for May Day, a few crumbs from the Boss’s table, and a pat on the head by the Civic Federation in exchange for a promise to oppose labor radicalism and the growth of industrial style unionism in rapidly expanding basic heavy industry and the extractive industries—mining, forestry, agriculture, etc.

It is true that a September Labor Day observance pre-dated the 1886 Haymarket Affair.  In 1882 the New York Central Labor Union, made up of skilled craft unions belonging to a prototype of the AFL and lodges of the rival Knights of Labor cooperated in a call for a giant parade followed by picnics, games and amusements, and educational talks.  It was designed to show case the pride and power of the labor movement and also to press for the chief demand of labor reformers—the Eight Hour Day—the same cause that would be marked by an attempted nationwide General Strike on May 1, 1886, an event that led up the attack by police on a worker’s rally in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4 and the bomb blast blamed on the mostly German and anarchist leaders of the local labor movement.

New York City officials, eager to appease workers after a number of local strikes were suppressed with violence, gave their official approval to the parade.  On September 5, 1882 an estimated 30,000 workers marched in military order behind elaborate banners representing local unions of all of the trades, job shops, and Knights of Labor lodges.  It was an impressive display, but despite later claims by the AFL that observance of Labor Day spread quickly, only a few other cities, mostly in New York, began holding September celebrations.  

In the meantime huge May Day parades and rallies spread across the country.  But the late 1880s and early 1890s  were the beginning of a nearly 40 year period of virtual open class warfare with worker’s strikes being violently suppressed by local, state, and federal authorities and armies of private goons and strikebreakers.  And workers often fought back with equal violence.  Episodes like the Homestead Steel Strike with its running gun battles between Pinkertons and workers, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1882, and virtually continuous battles in the coal fields and hard rock mines nationwide, made many fear for revolution or civil war.

Democratic President Grover Cleveland, who ordered out the Army to crush the Pullman Strike, wanted a symbolic peace offering to Labor without actually granting the movement any of its demands. 

Republican king pin Ohio Senator Marc Hanna, soon to anoint William McKinley the next President, was even more ambitious—he proposed a pact of cooperation between capital and “responsible labor.”  He offered Gompers, the Cigar Roller’s Union  chief who headed the AFL, a seat in his new Civic Federation alongside the robber barons and captains of industry.  Hanna did not make the same offer to Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly of the Knights of Labor, who personally opposed strikes and advocated arbitration of disputes, because the members of Knights lodges included unskilled workers clamoring for recognition in heavy industry.  Gompers AFL would be allowed to pursue organizing skilled workers strictly by trade but not organize the great mass of unskilled, largely immigrant workers.  Gompers would also be called on to use his unions to oppose labor radicalism, and even to break strikes led by unions outside the grand agreement.

With Gompers in his pocket, Hanna engineered enough Republican support in Congress to get Cleveland’s official Labor Day proposal passed.  Cleveland signed it in to law just six days after Eugene V. Debs’s industrial union of railroad workers was smashed in the end of the Pullman Strike. 

Within a few years all states either aligned their existing Labor celebrations with the Federal holiday or enacted state proclamations echoing the U.S. call. 

Meanwhile authorities everywhere tried to suppress May Day observances, which continued to be supported by militant unionists and radicals of every sort—social democrats, anarchists, and left wing Marxists.  The Knights of Labor withered away, but aggressive industrial unions, especially in the mining industry, continued to fight both the bosses and the AFL’s attempt to divide the aristocracy of labor from the mass rank and file.  In little more than a decade the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would be formed to intensify that battle.

During the Depression and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of labor.   Labor Day became the official kick-off of Democratic election campaigns. Labor Day parades and rallies often seemed more of platform to launch candidacies than a labor union celebration.

Even that has faded as the percentage of Americans in unions continued to shrink year after year after a high tide in the early ‘60’s.  By the Clinton era, Democrats continued to get support from labor, but seemed to try to disassociate themselves from it, shunning identification as the party for of labor in favor of being seen as the champion of the Middle Class.

As half-assed a holiday as Labor is, I hope we all will take a moment to thank the American Labor movement for largely creating that Middle Class.