International Workers’ Day / May Day
—Chrissie
Listen here:
The marking of the first of May as International Workers’ Day began in the country that now least recognizes it: the United States. The last half of the nineteenth century saw people working under conditions little or never seen before: factories with heavy machinery were only about a century old. In that time, while the technology improved, working conditions got worse. Long hours (often 12 to 14 hour days), dangerous machinery, and a lack of the slightest consideration for workers’ safety by the owners and management prompted organizing movements all over the industrialized world. American workers led this charge, forming some unions for specific types of work and others which embraced all workers, no matter the trade. One of the latter, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (later known as the American Federation of Labor or AFL), made a declaration at their 1884 convention that by 1 May 1886 the eight-hour work day would be the legal standard. They had already been working on the goal, but now redoubled their efforts. The next year they were joined by members of the Knights of Labor. A general strike was planned for 1 May 1886. In Chicago, 40,000 workers walked off their jobs to join demonstrations for higher wages, shorter workdays, and safer working conditions. One of their chants was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours to do as we will.” These peaceful demonstrations continued into the next day; nearly 100,000 people took part.
Some of the demonstrators joined picketing steelworkers outside the McCormick Reaper Works. This strike had been going on for six months, with the management doing everything they could think to stop it, other than actually addressing the workers’ (quite reasonable) demands. They spent a great deal of money on private Pinkerton guards and also involved the local police. Neither of these had qualms about physically attacking the workers in order to encourage the strikers to leave. On the third day of the demonstrations, the strikers responded to the Pinkertons attacking one of the men by throwing rocks. This prompted the police, who had been ignoring the Pinkertons beating the strikers, to start shooting. Two demonstrators were killed, and many were wounded.
A meeting of about three thousand people came together the next day in Haymarket Square, to protest the brutality shown to the workers and the actions of the police. As was often the case with such events, workers brought their families with them, to show, most importantly, that they were more than simple “biological robots” to be worked until they were broken and because the presence of women and children tended to discourage violence. Toward the end of a speech by local leader August Spies, a report came to the police from two detectives who claimed to have heard “inflammatory language.” This claim was refuted many times during subsequent retellings of the events, most importantly the ones given under oath in the trials of the men blamed for what was to come. Even the mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, was in attendance at the events and said he never saw any indication of violent intent on the part of the speakers or the crowd. As the police tried to push the demonstrators out of the square a bomb was thrown into their ranks. They reacted by firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Seven of the demonstrators were killed and forty wounded. Eight police died, one on the scene as a direct result of the bomb and seven afterward. The officer who died on the scene is the only fatality that can be directly attributed to the bomb, all of the other injuries and fatalities of both demonstrators and police appear to have been caused by their own haphazard gunfire. It has never been determined who threw the bomb, but it seems most likely it was someone working as an agent provocateur and not one of the demonstrating workers. Eight men associated with local labor and anarchist groups were arrested, tried, and convicted for murder. Only three of the men had been in attendance on that day and all three were in full view of the crowd and were not seen to throw anything. Four of the men were hanged, and a fifth committed suicide to protest (and undercut) the state’s authority to execute him. The other three men were pardoned in 1893 by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who made a point of speaking about the obvious corruption in the trial.
Over the next few years, the first of May saw demonstrations and general strikes commemorating the 1886 protests in Chicago and the “Haymarket Martyrs,” not just in the United States, but throughout the industrialized world. They were often paired with traditional May Day celebrations marking the change of seasons. May Day became a public holiday in much of the industrialized world, with the United States being a glaring omission. An American holiday for workers, Labor Day, was created and placed at the beginning of September. This pointedly dissociated it from worldwide May Day celebrations which had come to be associated with Communists and Socialists, two groups the United States government actively sought to suppress. By the middle of the twentieth century, the holiday had become so associated with the Soviet Union that not celebrating May Day was seen as a patriotic act. Today, most of the world still celebrates workers on May Day and celebrations in the US have increased, generally associated with the various workers’ movements that have become more prominent in recent years.