Rather than May Day, Americans have the anemic Labor Day three months later, a date that more than anything exists for barbecues and appliance sales, while officially marking when the ruling classes should stop wearing white to events far more swanky than an annual picnic. As with the metric system and soccer, the U.S. eschewal of May Day is another instance of our annoying anti-internationalism, our know-nothing, America-firster entitled sense of exceptionality, though it’s certainly an ironic one since from Berlin to Bangkok, Santiago to Seville, what’s being commemorated is a martyrdom in Chicago. Indeed it was Americans who pushed for the recognition, the establishment of May Day among left-wing groups first advocated by the American Federation of Labor when members attended the 1889 Marxist International Socialist Congress, or Second International, in Paris. The abandonment of May Day for Labor Day is, arguably, a capsule parable of the compromises and capitulations of the American labor movement, of the disavowal of the appearance of radicalism, of compromises made on behalf of criminality and corruption, of rejecting communists and anarchists but not the mafia, of genuflection before the arrayed forces and interests that they ostensibly were to stand in opposition towards. If May Day is the IWW and Eugene Debbs, Emma Goldman and Occupy Wall Street, then Labor Day is the AFL-CIO and the hard hat rioters, Samuel Gompers’ advocating for World War I and George Meany supporting Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam then endorsing Richard Nixon for president. May Day is Joseph Yablonski, defeated in a corrupt election for the presidency of the United Mine Workers and later murdered alongside his wife and daughter on New Year’s Eve in ’69; Labor Day is Tony Boyle, the man who beat him in that rigged contest and ordered the assassination. All of it a tragedy, since May Day isn’t just an estimably American holiday, it’s a particularly Rust Belt holiday, forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. As material conditions in the Rust Belt were what made May Day, it’s ours as much as anyone else’s, Buffalo’s as much as Beijing’s, not just for Chiappas, but Chicago too.
May Day is a Rust Belt Holiday
Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
