May Day! May Day!!

“May Day! May Day! May Day!?! What the hell is that?”

If you watch Airplane!, the movie, this line will stick in your head, just as well as “The tower! The tower!Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” and so many other slapstick lines.

May Day is celebrated on May First in many of the countries of the world to mark International Workers’ Day to recognize the fight to protect rights of workers, like an eight-hour workday, the weekend, and protection in the workplace.

Although there will be marches and celebrations in the United States, and the fact that modern May Day to protect workers rights originated in the United Sates, our country doesn’t recognize May Day as a holiday.

Many Americans have celebrated May Day, but have no understanding of it, according to Jordan Grant in “May Day: America’s traditional, radical, complicated holiday.” He says many people associated May Day with dancing around the Maypole, and that it’s considered some European oddity.

Modern May Day did begin the United States, but May Day itself was known to the Romans as Floralia – a week-long celebration of spring and flowers – and the when the Romans arrived in Britain the Celtics were also celebrating Beltane on May 1. These holidays combined, and in Medieval Britain, Jordan Grant writes that:

Every year, villagers would go “a-maying,” venturing out in the early morning to collect flowers and decorate their town for the day’s festivities. During the day, villages would hold a number of games, pageants, and dances, and many would crown a young woman “May Queen” to preside over the fun. At the heart of the festivities stood the maypole. Pulled into town by a pair of flower-adorned oxen, the pole (usually cut from a birch tree) was raised and decorated with colorful streamers that villagers could hold as they danced. 

In America Puritan colonists in New England frowned on the spring holiday and its maypole, criticizing the latter as thinly veiled form of idolatry. May Day might have stayed a fun maypole holiday except that in for the influx of immigrants to the U.S. in the 1800s, which caused concern that the workers may fall on vice rather than retain a strong Puritan attitude. Some wealthy reformers wanted to give workers more opportunity to not fall into vice.

May Day traditions as we might envision them “began in the 1870s on women’s college campuses, where the children of wealthy families donned white outfits, danced traditional folk dances” and soon reformers introduced the traditions of “a-maying” to American schoolchildren. Generations of students in public and private schools were taught to gather flowers and dance around the maypole on the first of May. I feel I received this education in elementary school as well, to celebrate the idea of dancing around the May pole on may 1st.

In post-Civil War America unions began forming, demanding an eight-hour work day. On May 1, 1886, Jordan Grant continues, “more than 30,000 Chicago workers struck. Unions and labor organizations from the across the political spectrum organized parades and mass meetings, and workers in other industrialized cities like New York and Cincinnati took up the cause, marching in the streets to draw public attention to their demands and convince other laborers to join the fight.”

A couple days later, on May 3, members of the Chicago police fired at a group of striking workers at a McCormick reaper plant, killing at least two. The next day, Grant continues, “when laborers staged a protest meeting in Haymarket Square, a protester hurled a bomb at the police, killing one and injuring dozens more.” It was this incident, he says, that sullied May 1, forever tying the day to socialists, anarchists, and anyone else that doesn’t match mainstream American society.

The American Postal Workers Union tells the same story, concluding that “news of the tragedy sent shockwaves through the labor movement worldwide. In 1889, labor advocates declared May 1 International Workers Day – or May Day – to commemorate the struggle of the Haymarket Affair and to build international workers’ solidarity.

Telling much the same story, with the names of some of the organizers and slain activists fighting for basic workers rights in the late 1800s, Eric Chase, for the Industrial Workers of the World, add what we already know: “Ironically, May Day is an official holiday in 66 countries and unofficially celebrated in many more, but rarely is it recognized in this country where it began.” Instead, Jordan Grant says, wary of any association with radicalism, conservative unions in the U.S. dropped the May 1 holiday entirely in favor of celebrating Labor Day in early September.

It worth concluding by quoting Eric Chase’s last paragraph, just after he references the above quote on the HaymaAmerrket Martyr’s Monument:

Truly, history has a lot to teach us about the roots of our radicalism. When we remember that people were shot so we could have the 8-hour day; if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were burned to the ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend; when we recall 8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in the streets protesting working conditions and child labor only to be beat down by the police and company thugs, we understand that our current condition cannot be taken for granted – people fought for the rights and dignities we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The sacrifices of so many people can not be forgotten or we’ll end up fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why we celebrate May Day.