Pagan Origins

Labor Day

For more than 125 years, Americans have celebrated Labor Day on the first Monday of every September—which means Labor Day falls on Monday, September 6 in 2021. But the origins of this holiday have been somewhat lost to time. Now it's seen as the unofficial end of summer, the dreaded return to school for kids across the country, and a time to score a great deal on a mattress. But with more than a century of history to sift through, you'd be forgiven for not knowing about the holiday's roots. 

1.   THE FIRST LABOR DAY PARADE WAS HELD IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1882.

If you were a factory worker in the 1880s, you were probably toiling away at your job for an average of 60 hours a week, and it wasn't unheard of for textile laborers in New York to make only 75 cents a day, which was a paltry sum, even for the time. To bring attention to these unfair working conditions, labor organizers coordinated the first Labor Day parade on Tuesday, September 5, 1882.

Close to 10,000 people attended the parade, according to a New York Times article published on September 6, 1882. Marchers carried signs bearing slogans like “Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work” and “Less Hours and More Pay.” The New York Times called the demonstration “pleasant” and “orderly,” although it noted that the parade’s organizers expected closer to 30,000 or 40,000 laborers to show up and support the march.

2.   THE ORIGINS OF LABOR DAY ARE STILL DISPUTED.

Historians often credit Peter J. McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, as the first to propose a holiday celebrating workers. According to the modern-day American Federation of Labor, McGuire brought up the idea in an 1882 meeting of the New York Central Labor Union, saying workers should lead a parade to “publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”
But researchers from the New Jersey Historical Society suggest the true founder may have been someone else with a very similar name: Matthew Maguire, a machinist from New Jersey who led several strikes in the 1870s, and by 1882 had become the secretary for the New York Central Labor Union. In an 1894 editorial about the holiday, which President Grover Cleveland had just signed into law, a New Jersey newspaper said the honor should go to Maguire, the “undisputed author of Labor Day as a holiday.”

However, some historians suggest that labor organizers may have deliberately tried to cloud Maguire’s association with Labor Day’s origins, concerned that the holiday might become associated with his “radical” politics (he was a member of the Socialist Labor Party).

3. THERE’S A REASON AMERICANS CELEBRATE LABOR DAY OVER MAY DAY.

On May 1, 1886, 35,000 workers went on strike in Chicago as part of a larger organized labor protest across the country. For the first two days, the protests and demonstrations were peaceful, but by May 3, violence broke out between laborers and police during a protest at Chicago's McCormick Reaper Works factory, leaving several workers wounded or dead. The incident encouraged anarchist labor leaders to call for another protest the following day in Haymarket Square, where violence broke out again after police attempted to disband the crowd. At that point, an anonymous individual threw a bomb at the police, killing one officer at the scene. The police retaliated, and when all was said and done, seven officers and (at least) one civilian were killed in the chaos, and plenty more in the crowd were injured.

Following the riot, police arrested eight anarchist leaders on charges of conspiracy. Seven of the eight were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, despite the fact that six of the defendants weren’t even in Haymarket Square at the time the bomb was thrown. At the Second International Socialist Conference in 1889, members voted to celebrate May 1 as International Workers’ Day, often referred to as May Day, to commemorate the Haymarket affair. President Cleveland wanted to avoid the socialist and anarchist connotations of May Day, so when he established a holiday to celebrate America's workers, he chose the first Monday in September, calling back to previous traditions from New York's labor movement.