May Day, May Day!

The importance of May 1 to the labor movement began with the fight for an eight-hour workday; American union leaders said they wanted to make the rallying cry a reality by May 1, 1886. Hundreds of thousands of workers took to city streets that day, kicking off a general strike across the nation. Two days later in Chicago, the epicenter of the effort, police fired on a crowd of striking workers, killing at least two of them. A bombing the next day, and the subsequent execution of anarchists accused of planning it, later remembered as the Haymarket Affair, led to May 1’s rapid spread abroad as a cri de coeur for workers. But amid another wave of American strikes a decade later, Grover Cleveland designated September’s Labor Day as the official holiday for federal workers — shortly before using federal troops to quash the 1894 Pullman Strike outside Chicago. 

Labor Day did have real roots in the labor movement as well, but in the decades that followed, it would become better known as a day of rest — and consumption — for American workers, rather than a day for making the kinds of collective demands associated with the more confrontational tradition of May Day protests. In this collection, read about May Day’s importance to the Midwest, the aftermath of the fight for the eight-hour workday, and the history of an object essential to the more recent history of the American strike: Scabby the Rat.

This collection was featured in Continuum, the joint newsletter of Bunk and HNN, on April 30, 2026: https://tinyurl.com/Continuum4-30-26