May Day!
While working on my blog post for April Fool’s Day last month, I came across the following quote in The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber. “May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival.” Prior to reading this, I had thought it was pretty curious that both holidays are on the same date, but I had never taken the time to investigate it. And it also brought up another question. Why don’t we celebrate May Day in the United States?
May 1st, known as May Day, is an ancient European seasonal holiday half way between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. The most famous symbol of this day is the May pole, which flower clad young people dance around. The earliest known May festivals are from ancient Rome: Floralia, the festival for the goddess of flowers and Maiouma, a month long festival celebrating Dionysus and Aphrodite, celebrated every 3 years. Floralia îs the festival that grandmothers celebrated with their grandchildren. Maiouma, which was also known as The Orgies and celebrated with licentious all night revels, was celebrated after the children went to bed.
One of the reasons why we don’t celebrate May Day, the seasonal festival, in the US is because of its connection with, ahem, fertility. Needless to say, the Puritans found it to be too pagan and would not allow it to be celebrated. And the reason why we don’t celebrate the other May Day is because it made the businessmen who ran our government in the late 1800’s very uncomfortable. While writing this I ran out of time to research where Graeber got his idea about how International Workers Day came out of the timing of ancient peasant uprisings. But I did discover an interesting story from the beginning of the US Labor movement which explains why we don’t celebrate May Day here.
In 1889, the International Workers Congress in Paris, adopted a resolution in support of workers demands for an eight hour work day. May 1st was chosen by the American Federation of Labor, a federation of US labors unions that continues today as the AFL-CIO, to commemorate a general strike for the 8 hour day that had begun on May 1, 1886 and ended at the Haymarket Affair on May 4th. The Haymarket Affair, also known as the Haymarket Riot or Massacre, was the aftermath of a bombing that occurred during a labor demonstration in Chicago. A dynamite bomb was thrown at the police while they were dispersing the crowd and they reacted by shooting into the crowd. Seven police officers and 4 civilians were killed and many others injured. Anarchists were blamed, then sentenced to death, for their alleged roles in the bombing.
The Haymarket Affair and its consequent arrests and trials is considered to be the end of what is known as The Great Upheaval. This was period of intense labor unrest in the US, when there were many strikes and demonstrations across the entire country, fighting for shorter working hours and better conditions. The government, both at the federal and state level, responded by suppressing the unrest with police and military force. After the Haymarket Affair, there was a harsh clampdown on unions and employers returned to 10 hour or longer workdays.
I’m sure you can see how the date May 1st might leave a bad taste in the mouths of capitalists. May 1st, with its association with the bloody Haymarket Affair and all the strikes, had too much of a connection to radical labor tactics. Labor Day, occurring at the beginning of September, was a much more palatable date. President Grover Cleveland feared that a labor holiday on May 1st would strengthen the socialist and anarchist movements. So, in a way, Labor Day was chosen to create a division between American laborers and the workers of the world.
The first court decision that found collective negotiation to be legal was in 1842. Labor activism and actions began at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and have been battling each other ever since. I don’t know about you, but I am just about sick of it. Why do we allow these capitalists to act like they own us? Why do they get to make so many decisions about how our society functions? We don’t need any more knowledge to figure out how to create an ecological and humane society. The evidence is in. What we need is the will and the commitment to solving humanity’s most egregious problems - poverty, disease, violence and greed. Let’s get to it!