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Just how was one supposed to celebrate Labor Day yesterday? Other holidays have traditions -- big dinner and gratitude at Thanksgiving, tree and presents at Christmas, fireworks on Independence Day, hangover on New Year's Day -- but I'm not sure anyone knows how to celebrate Labor Day properly.
In grade school, a teacher explained to us that, while much of the world celebrated a labor day on May 1, with boisterous parades under scarlet banners, we Americans were different. Their laborers were seditious, while ours behaved themselves. To honor that difference, our Labor Day was in September.
That explanation made sense when I was 10, but my bad habit of reading made me aware that our laborers really hadn't been all that different.
In Colorado, we had the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, with the state militia firing machine guns at a strikers' tent colony, and Mother Jones leading marches down the streets of Trinidad. There were big miners' strikes and Leadville and Cripple Creek, accompanied by bombings and martial law.
One of two Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall, William
Dudley Big Bill
Haywood, once operated out of
Denver, which had the offices of his militant Western
Federation of Miners -- an ancestor of the infamous
International Workers of the World: the Wobblies.
Woodrow Wilson, that president so beloved by American liberal historians, managed to smash the Wobblies during World War I, using the usual lame excuses. Because they wanted a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, they were hampering the Allied war effort, which made them traitors, and wars always provide a rationale for purification.
The Federation believed in the Second Amendment. Miners'
locals in Colorado and Idaho were urged in 1897 to form
rifle companies, so that in two years we can hear the
inspiring music of the martial tread of 25,000 armed men in
the ranks of labor.
But usually the guns were pointed the other way. Over in
Utah, there's Joe Hill, author of Pie in the Sky
and
other labor lyrics, likely framed for murder and then
killed by a firing squad in 1915.
Then as now, people were always accused of fomenting
class warfare
when they dared to wonder aloud why the
company president was paid 500 times more a year than most
employees.
That's a clever way to control the dialogue. Here's
somebody standing over me with his foot on my neck. If I
try to move that foot away from me, I'm the one starting
class warfare.
Anyway, American labor has a long and interesting history -- the Sons of Liberty in 1776 were rampaging lower-class workers feared by the Patriot gentry; the sit-down strikes at Flint, Mich., in the 1930s; clear up to the Teamster strike against UPS last month -- but Labor Day apparently isn't part of it.
I say that because I haven't been able to find out anything about the origins of our Labor Day -- why in September, which state started making it a holiday, whose idea it was, etc.
Checking the usual references just told me what I already knew -- Labor Day was May 1 in all of the civilized world except the United States.
An otherwise informative book (Toil and Trouble: A
History of American Labor,
by Thomas R. Brooks)
contained, as nearly as I could tell, not a single word
about the origins of Labor Day.
I figured the AFL-CIO would certainly know when, how and
why Labor Day began, but my inquires to that organization,
which began more than a year ago, produced We'll have to
get back to you on that.
And so far, they haven't.
Without that information, I really have no idea how we're supposed to celebrate Labor Day.
I do, of course, know how to celebrate Labor Day in the traditional mountain way. I stay home, biding my time until Wednesday or Thursday, when the hordes have departed.
Then I get outdoors as much as I can, since September is our reward for putting up with Colorado the rest of the year.
And maybe Labor Day is on our calendar, not as a day for
organized workers to march in parades, but because
LABOR
is an acronym for Live A lot Better after
the Outsiders have Retreated.
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