The irony that May Day is celebrated passionately in so much of the world, but not in the United States, where it was founded, continues today. After the people of South Africa freed themselves from the apartheid system, for example, their new government quickly made May Day a legal workers\' holiday. This May 1, there were demonstrations from Paris to Istanbul, from Rio to Sydney. But, with the exception of the wonderful but not specifically labor-centered festivities in the Twin Cities at Powderhorn Park, the United States did not take part in the fun. It will wait until September for its labor holiday.

Whatever the prospects for reviving American celebrations of May Day, its history is worth revisiting. To appreciate May Day\'s origins as a holiday for working people involves looking at both the American Midwest in the 1880s and the much longer history of May Day as a day of change, light, warmth and possibility for working people.

The role of the American Federation of Labor in the events of the 1880s is especially remarkable. In the early 1880s, the Federation of Organized and Labor Unions, which would become the AFL, simply declared that on May 1, 1886, it would usher in the system of an eight-hour working day in the United States. This was an astonishingly bold promise, since the AFL had fewer than 50,000 members at the time. Moreover, the eight-hour day was at the time a visionary demand, with many workers still laboring from sun-up to sundown.

But -- and there is perhaps a lesson here for those of us who think the huge labor movement of today is too weak to undertake great projects -- the AFL did build massive eight-hour strikes and demonstrations on May 1, 1886. It did so by cooperating with local leaders of the much larger Knights of Labor and by energetically organizing immigrant workers. The strikers "tramped" from workplace to workplace, spreading the demand. By May 3, perhaps 750,000 workers had struck or demonstrated. Some 2,500 struck in the Twin Cities.

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Mayhem at Haymarket
In Chicago, where as many as 100,000 participated, police violence claimed the life of a striker on May 3. The small group of revolutionary labor activists there, who had promised to defend the strikes from attacks, tried to show their fearlessness by demonstrating in Haymarket Square the next night. The memorial gathering was uneventful until police attacked the few people who had stayed to hear the last speech. A sputtering bomb landed in front of the charging police, killing one and wounding 50. Seven more police died in the chaos and heavy police gunfire that followed the bombing. Demonstrators took heavy casualties, with at least one death.

The Haymarket bomb\'s origin remains unknown. Labor radicals had little luck in arguing that a police agent threw it. Prosecutors of Neebe and others at the trial that followed the bombing were allowed to pursue a very loose conspiracy theory that did not require attention to whether the defendants made, hurled or even knew about the bomb. Their past "bomb-talking" was enough to convict the eight leaders.

Thousands took part in a massive campaign to protest against the trial, the executions and the continued imprisonment of the surviving defendants. The AFL joined the defense efforts. Its leader, Samuel Gompers, took part alongside an impressive group of international supporters, which included William Morris, George Bernard Shaw and many European socialists.

In late 1888, the AFL renewed its efforts for a shorter working day by picking a single craft to organize for eight hours in 1890. Ultimately the carpenters were chosen, as was a familiar target date: May 1. Gompers, somewhat cool toward working with European radicals, nonetheless was accustomed enough to cooperating with them in eight-hour and Haymarket defense initiatives to send a letter informing the 1889 founding meeting of the Socialist International that U.S. labor planned May 1, 1890, demonstrations for shorter hours. The International chose to coordinate its efforts with the AFL\'s May 1 date. Within a few years, the Socialist International would formally adopt May Day as labor\'s holiday.

While such accounts of dates, organizations and leaders are worth remembering, there is another side to May Day which goes even further toward explaining why so many U.S. workers responded to the AFL\'s call and why so many European workers quickly adopted May Day as their holiday. In choosing May 1 as a target date, the AFL identified with a long-established connection of that date with renewal, joy and change. In Europe and the United States, leases traditionally expired on May 1, or Moving Day. Visitors to 19th century U.S. cities described mad scrambles in which working people packed belongings and started over at new addresses. The first day of May also marked the time for setting the new terms and conditions of work for building tradesmen and others who worked outdoors. Love charms and divination predicted future marriage partners at May Day festivities.

Above all, even in St. Paul and Chicago, May 1 brought warmth, spring and new growth. For centuries, Europeans had celebrated these changes. In Puritan England, peasants and workers resisted efforts to stop celebrating May Day by playing the Robin Hood games. In Puritan New England, the great dissenter Thomas Morton and his followers erected a huge Maypole on May 1, 1627. Partying around it, they joined Native Americans in celebration. The first lines of poetry written in North America in English were pinned to Morton\'s Maypole. In England, chimney sweeps dressed as women on May Day and collected gifts. Milk maids wore garlands of flowers and milk was distributed without charge.

The AFL tapped into the profound desires for changed and new lives for working people which the older traditions of May Day represented. The eight-hour day, however much we take it for granted even when it is under fierce attack, meant a chance to be outside, to be at home, to organize, to study, and to relax. Those seeking this huge increase in leisure sang of gaining "hours for what we will" and spoke of "adding time to our lives."

The AFL, weak as it was, won the shorter working day for 200,000 workers in 1886 because it knew that those who sang, "We want to feel the sunshine/We want to smell the flowers" would also sing "We mean to have eight hours." However May Day is celebrated, one of our goals should surely be to renew such connections between organized labor and the deepest, strongest and most longstanding desires of working people.

Dave Roediger, formerly a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, is now at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of numerous books, including Haymarket Scrapbook.

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