May Day's Radical History
AlterNet / By Jacob Remes
May Day's Radical History: What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st
Occupy actions planned on May Day are tied to the generations-long
movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police
brutality and repression of the labor movement.
April 27, 2012 |
American general strikes—or rather, American calls for general
strikes, like the one Occupy Los Angeles issued last December that has
been endorsed by over 150 general assemblies—are tinged with
nostalgia.
The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the
last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, California
in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw
in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike.
When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a
current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly,
to some of the most militant moments in American working-class
history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have
suggested that next week's May Day is highly symbolic. As we think
about and develop new ways of "general striking," we also reconnect
with a past we've mostly forgotten.
So it makes sense that this year's call for an Occupy general
strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day
is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers,
crushed by the American government, incubated abroad, and returned to
the United States by immigrant workers.
The history of May 1 as a workers' holiday is intimately tied to the
generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant
workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and
to the long tradition of American anarchism.
Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States
started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day.
This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition
of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with
their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In
other words, a shorter work day meant freedom.
It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of
July by singing "John Brown's Body" with new lyrics demanding an
eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass
movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The
movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions.
Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also
used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones.
That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative
victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.
The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement
and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues
agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding
what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry
for the advantage of workers.
And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the
government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions,
under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more
radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that
employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer
of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by
employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours
was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power
over their workers.
The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That
day, tens of thousands of Chicago's workers celebrated in what a
newspaper called "the largest procession ever seen on the streets of
Chicago." But the day after, employers, en masse, ignored the law,
ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11 hours.
The city erupted in a general strike--workers struck, and those who
didn't leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues roaming
through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After
several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied
working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they
controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long
hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive
decline in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such
numbers for almost two decades.
The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the
1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more
radical and was dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They
remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad workers spread around the
country. For a brief moment, as strikers took control of St. Louis and
Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and local police, nobody
knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes called out
the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the
state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also
remembered the brief shining moment when it appeared that there might
be an eight-hour day.
So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an
eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert
Parsons, this renewed movement demanded "eight for 10"--that is, eight
hours' work for 10 hours' pay. Throughout the winter of 1886, they
successfully organized and won a series of small victories, largely in
German butchers' shops, breweries and bakeries, where owners agreed to
recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they issued a new
demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike and
not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.
The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a
massive upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers
were rebelling against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of
Labor were rapidly organizing and spreading their vision of a
cooperative, rather than capitalistic, society. "What happened on May
1, 1886," writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible
historian to have written about it, "was more than a general strike;
it was a `populist moment' when working people believed they could
destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new
`cooperative commonwealth.'"
Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot
to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing
labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten
dozens more.
On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square
called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader
Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the
same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before,
moved in to disperse the crowd. "But we are peaceable!" Fielden cried,
and just then somebody wasn't. Somebody threw a bomb at the police,
the police open fire, and the course of American history changed.
To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw
the bomb. Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an
anarchist. If it wasn't an anarchist, it surely could have been, since
there were indeed anarchists who made bombs and would have thrown one
given the opportunity. But we also know that many of those who died
that night, including police, were felled by the police bullets.
We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater
on the labor movement than it was on the police. Eight anarchist
leaders were rounded up and put on trial for the murder of a police
officer. No evidence was ever given that any of them threw the bomb,
and only the flimsiest evidence was presented that any of them were
remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and seven were sentenced
to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a third—Louis
Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the
hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw.
The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and
George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They went to their
deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the international
revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted out his
famous last words: "The time will come when our silence will be more
powerful than the voices you strangle today."
Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike
collapsed. Police around the country raided radicals' homes and
newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered. In the place of the
radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s rose the American
Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and conservative
organization that would dominate the labor movement until the 1930s.
Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to
finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.
May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist
Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the international
and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be
celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket
Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the
International adopted the day as an international workers' holiday.
In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1
became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their
organizations, often with direct and explicit reference to the
Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an official holiday in countries
ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of
countries in between.
Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers' tradition
of May 1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had
already established a labor day in September.
Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland, glommed onto
the Knights' holiday in order to diminish the symbolic power of May 1.
In 1921, May Day was declared "Americanization Day," and later
"Loyalty Day" in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday.
Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added
"Law Day" to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket
anarchists who declared, "All law is slavery."
Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although
both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are largely
forgotten. Like International Women's Day (March 8), which also
originated in the U.S., International Workers' Day became a holiday
the rest of the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion,
if they notice at all.
Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United
States in the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized
"a day without an immigrant," a nationwide strike of immigrant workers
and rallies. It was perhaps the largest demonstration of workers in
United States history. These immigrants, mostly from Latin America,
had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they
resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers.
It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for
a general strike this May 1, it said the strike was "for migrant
rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace." The
order was significant, for migrants in the United States have been the
ones who have made sure that the voices the state strangled that
November day have remained so powerful. And regardless of what happens
on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in which cities
grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is
unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working
class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a
opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through new
tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded us.
Jacob Remes teaches history and public affairs at Empire State
College, SUNY's college for adult learners.
http://www.alternet.org/story/155182/may_day%27s_radical_history%3A_what_occupy_is_fighting_for_this_may_1st_?page=entire
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see
http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at
http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
The water tower also contains residential flats
This part of the leaflet assures residents that their residence will not become a terrorist target 
WordPress.com
