“Labor Day” is one of those holiday names we repeat so often we stop thinking about what the words originally meant. Some people set aside time to remember the human price of war on Memorial Day. Most of us give some kind of thanks on Thanksgiving. But the only ritual for Labor Day is taking the day off, and many see it only as the three-day weekend that marks the end of summer.
Yet Labor Day is as political in its history as the Fourth of July or the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. The first Labor Day celebration on the first Monday of September was in New York City in 1882, an era when labor activism was often illegal and always dangerous. Workers and police alike were killed when a labor protest near near Chicago’s Haymarket Square turned violet in 1886, and federal troops fired on strikers in that city’s Pullman Strike of 1894. Later that year, in a bid to calm a rising storm, Congress made Labor Day a legal holiday, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.
Over time, Labor Day became the American version of May Day or International Labor Day, an occasion to celebrate working people and their causes, often associated with the political left. For the major U.S. political parties, it also became the unofficial starting gate for fall election campaigns of the old-fashioned kind – largely done outdoors in person with no screens of any kind.
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