Picnic & Protest, the Origins of Labor Day

May 8, 1882: Peter J. McGuire, at that time the general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners… suggested the first Monday in September for the holiday he had in mind, “as it would come at the most pleasant season of the year, nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and would fill a wide gap in the chronology of legal holidays.”

Mr. McGuire’s resolution was adopted and a committee was appointed to plan a demonstration inline with his suggestion of a street parade, “which would publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations”, to be followed by “a picnic or a festival in some grove.”

Origin & Significance of Labor Day, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1936.

It’s Labor Day weekend, though unless you’ve been a member of the pipefitter’s union or the Wobblies, you may not realize that does not refer to doing household projects before the bad weather starts or going back to work after summer vacation. Labor Day has a very special history in the United States, even though the influence of organized labor is not what it was in 1882 when the holiday was designed. It’s worth a pause to remember why it’s there. What may be more interesting is why it’s then. Choosing an early day in September was a feature, not a bug, of the union organizers, nearly 150 years ago. Well-played, I say.

It is the end of summer in America, and I don’t know about you but my summer just flew by with teaching some classes on modern art and finance, rushing to meet a writing deadline, and having my knee chopped up and replaced more bits of metal. Shoulder last year, ankle back in the ‘oughts–eventually, I’ll set off metal detectors from afar. Maybe I should install a data center in there, who knows? There hasn’t been much time for blog writing, so I thought I ought to rectify that with at least one before the equinox.

Maybe you wondered, as I always did, why we bother calling this holiday Labor Day rather than Summersend or The Last Picnic or something more romantic. Plus, I thought that the international folks preferred May Day. In fact, the French led the charge in creating an multi-country day of protest on behalf of organized workers in 1889 , but there was some confusion over the date, and, by then, America had its Labor Day firmly fixed in September. Also, we wanted the picnic part.

Showing Off the Esprit de Corps

The idea for Labor Day arose in a New York meeting of labor leaders in 1882. I’ve written before about the long history of Labor Day (and it’s a chapter in my upcoming book), but it’s worth noting that this couldn’t have happened until unions won the right to become unions. Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1842’s Commonwealth v. Hunt, the legal precedence in America was that workers banding together to improve wages and other conditions were considered a criminal conspiracy. (If we also call them woke, left-wing resistance, and DEI, pretty much nothing has changed. But I digress…)

By 1880, unions were forming locally everywhere and starting to form national groups. However, the largest cities had the largest unions, which is New York acted as a trend-setter. At May 1882 meeting of the Central Labor Union, they brainstormed about holding a “monster labor festival,” beginning with a march and ending with a picnic in Elm Park. Twenty thousand “tickets” were distributed among the members, though it wasn’t clear whether anyone would show. It’s never clear the first time, and, after all, there was no social media or even telephones to spread the word.

The date of September 5 was chosen because there was a Knights of Labor convention in town. It was a weekday, so whoever marched would lose a day’s wages, which was part of the goal. Verbal commitments were one thing, but about as useful as a “like” on Instagram. When we’re talking a day’s pay, that’s where you see who is really committed.

According to a nice recap by Pamela Foster, when the organizer William McCabe showed up in the morning, nothing was prepared, and the whole thing looked “a little dubious.” McCabe bullied the local printer’s group into creating signs and lining up, and they started off the march. Police had been summoned as technical “escorts,” but they mostly lounged around and jeered, initially outnumbering the marchers. After a block, though, 50 craftsmen from the Jeweler’s Union joined the group. Another block, another group of bricklayers, then piano-makers, horseshoers, and so on. Counts were not official, but somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 people marched, which was remarkable given the lack of communication and organization involved. It was a spontaneous success.

The Central Labor Union held a second parade the following year, on September 5, and voted to make it a permanent annual event in 1884. By then, the idea was spreading like wildfire.

They Need Marchers and Good Note-Takers

Oddly enough, the minutes of the meeting of the Central Labor Union in New York are somewhat unclear about who launched the idea. It was either Peter J. McGuire or Matthew Maguire, an unresolvable side story that has prompted historical explorations, e.g. at least twice by the Bureau of Labor, Estelle Stewart in 1936 and Jonathan Grossman in 1972. People who might have been there later “chose sides,” either leaning towards Knight of Labor Maguire or to the co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, McGuire.

If I laid a bet, I’d say that the AFL’s McGuire’s had better name recognition, so he got the early credit, but perhaps the lesser-known fellow may have said the actual words. Curiously, Estelle Stewart’s 1936 article quoted McGuire’s directly. Yet she didn’t put in a footnote, so did she invent what he said? These remain historical conundrums. The 1936 version of a deepfake.

There’s a similarly amusing confusion over the organization of the first international May Day. Americans are practically universally credited with providing the impetus for it at an 1889 conference. The encyclopedias say “the date was chosen because the AFL had planned a protest….” It’s true, the AFL had planned some meetings for May 1, 1890 to advocate for an eight-hour workday, but not so much a protest, and they held meetings other days as well, in February and July. Some scholars even say that AFL didn’t send a delegate to the 1889 Paris Conference.

If I parse this correctly, it means the French and their fraternitie internationale voted to hold a giant, multi-national labor rally on May 1, 1890–and every year since–because the Americans were doing something on that day, but that wasn’t what the Americans were doing, and they never did join in. Americans already had their Labor Day on September 5 and kept to it, as the rest of the world coalesced around May 1st.

The moral of the story to all you progressive organizers out there is take better notes at these meetings,. For sure, if you let a robot do it, double check the spelling of all the names.

Potato Salad and Politics

Meanwhile, whoever had the idea, it was a planned full-day festival, not just a march, but also an after-march with food, relaxation, and a lot of talking. There were scheduled speeches–people do seem to like to talk and to have other people listen to them, which was always my problem with the marches. (I know why I’m there, you don’t have to spend three hours explaining it to me.) Still, if there is food, and families could join, and the kids would run around, and it was a balmy early September–sign me up!

Elm Park in New York was a beer-garden, and nothing makes for lively dialogue among the disgruntled and feisty than a lot of beer. Officially, the word in the meeting notes say that alcohol was banned, but that seems unlikely. Plus, who took those notes? They don’t even write down the correct names! In the park, several bands played dance music–the hip-hop of the day being the waltz and polka. Choral groups, singers, and likely a few roving accordionists probably rounded out the music.

It was a beer-garden, which meant sausages, potato salad (full of vinegar, I suspect), pickles, cold ham, good dark bread. Hmmmm, my menu for this afternoon is still pretty open. The organizers apparently cleared a little over $600, which is not bad given that 20,000 people showed up. Hard to say how many actually marched.

This set a model for the day. It wasn’t just about a picnic, but about The Picnic, a mass community of proletariats, rubbing shoulders, breaking bread together. The tables were grouped by trade but many brought their “home” country flags–Ireland, Italy, and Germany planted next to the Stars and Stripes.

The day fulfilled multiple goals. First, there was the desire for people to see solidarity among their fellows, that sense of invigoration in joining others seeking a similar goal. Then, there was the attempt to put on a positive show for the public, to gain public support. The more engaging the protest sign–Plutocracy Steals Our Soul and Calls Us the Great Unwashed!!--the better. In Los Angeles, the Screen Actors Guild parade was always one of the bigger groups, Ziegfield Follies bathing beauties walking next to famous celebrities. In the afternoon and evening, there was the chance to relax and network in a pleasant setting.

City by City, Big and Small

Within a few years, more than 400 cities had followed suit with Labor Day Parade and Picnics. The parades among the biggest cities were well-attended: 35,000 in Chicago; 18,000 in Baltimore; 15,000 in Boston and in Newark; 10,000 in Detroit.

But the event was extremely popular nationwide 100 years ago. From mid-sized cities like Buffalo or Seattle to small towns like Valparaiso, Indiana or Hanna, Wyoming, the photos suggest crowds that were pretty large for the town. Maybe it was the excitement of having parade, any parade, in some small towns. But also a reminder that, once upon a time, unions had a very positive reputation among the general public. That whittled away for a variety of complicated reasons, including well-financed propaganda campaigns against them, infighting, corruption of the people at the top, etc.

Plus, at other times, worker protests turned violent, sometimes from government or troops hired by corporate overlords to break it up, and occasionally from anarchists (1886 Haymarket). It was difficult to keep the optics positive. And there was success, as labor regulations were passed, wages rose, hours reduced in response to so much effort and advocacy by these organizations. Over time, workers who didn’t join unions took the gains for granted as their due.

Plus racism, frankly. Post-war, some of the largest groups joining the unions were people of color, along with influxes of refugees from Eastern Europe. The old guard from northern Europe, which held much of the union leadership by the late 1940s, was not as comfortable rubbing shoulders with the newcomers, not in an era of Jim Crow and anti-semitism. In the 1950s, the picnics got smaller, driven by specific trades.

To this day, there are still parades in the largest cities of 10-25,000 people, reasonably large crowds. It’s just that it’s no longer reported, certainly not front page news. Cynical writers, for instance, in the Wall Street Journal recently, say that working class doesn’t mean anything because everybody’s working (!?!) and plus Burning Man is so expensive. The New York Times today has nothing about Labor Day, except some suggested types of hand cream.

But unions are still there, and they still work on everyone’s behalf, even if we don’t agree with their tactics. For example, it’s worth remembering that the screenwriters went out on strike for months in 2023, three years before A.I. started consuming writing jobs. They fought hard, and won, some provisos that prevented further incursion into their script-writing. Collective bargaining remains one of the best weapons we have, along with letting feet and funny signs catch the eye of the media, followed by cold ham, pickles, and a good discussion about how to coordinate with our colleagues better. But someone take notes!