Labor Day Blues

If you are social distancing and masked, as I hope you are, this is a different kind of Labor Day. No community picnics with speeches by politicians, no concerts, maybe some fireworks on television. Annual parades across the country have been cancelled due to the pandemic. Maybe you’re shopping the sales online. However you’re marking this day, please stay safe.

Labor Day began back in the 1880s to honor working people—the first parade was in New York City in 1887, and the day became a Federal holiday in 1894. The last quarter of the 19^th century was a time marked by clashes, often violent, between labor and the robber barons who thought they ruled the world during the Gilded Age. It was also the era of the rise of labor unions, designed to protect laborers by stabilizing wages, limiting working hours, guaranteeing days off, and other measures so that men, women, and children had more to their lives than dawn-to-dusk work in sweatshops, factories, and the like. In some ways, those clashes of values are reflected again in our society today—we haven’t come as far as we thought or else we’ve slid backwards.

Perhaps the most notorious labor riot was the Haymarket which occurred in Chicago in 1886 after bombing disrupted a peaceful labor rally at the McCormick Reaper Works in support of the eight-hour day. Police killed one laborer and injured several others as they tried to disperse the demonstrators. Someone threw a bomb, and between that and the resulting gunfire seven police and at least four civilians were killed. Dozens others were injured.

A German immigrant, August Spies, was so angered at the police brutality that he rushed to the offices of an anarchist newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung, and issued a call to arms for workingmen. A second rally as held in Haymarket Square. Spies spoke, followed by his colleague Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned anarchist. The mayor of Chicago was even on hand to ensure that things remained peaceful—but he decided all was well and went home too early. Police tried to disperse the crowd, another bomb was thrown, and gunfire and chaos followed. Several police and civilians were killed.

The riot set off a nation-wide wave of violence, and police rounded up foreign-born protestors and labor organizers. In Chicago, seven men were sentenced to death—ultimately four were hanged, including Spies and Parsons, one committed suicide, and the remaining three were pardoned. It was not a pretty episode in the country’s history.

My research for the historical novel, The Gilded Cage, led me deep into the conflict surrounding the Haymarket Riot and indeed into the whole labor movement era in Chicago. Spies, Parsons, and their families became minor characters in the book. The Gilded Cage was published in the spring of 2016. At the time I had no idea how relevant that history would be to us in 2020, but today that bit of history speaks to me as an object lesson.

So today, if you’re having a family-only barbecue in the back yard or—as I will be doing, eating leftovers, raise a glad to the working men and women of the late nineteenth century who fought so hard to secure protections for those who work in nine-to-five jobs, often physical hard jobs.

And I hope you find some fireworks on TV because, well, there just ought to be fireworks!