Immigrants and the origins of May Day

By Stephen Millies

May Day is the international holiday of the working class. It’s a public holiday in 110 countries, according to the website of the Nigerian Labor Congress.

Most workers get the day off in South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Italy, Haiti, Germany, France, Egypt, Cuba, China, Brazil, North Korea, Bangladesh, Belgium and Argentina—and many other countries. But not in the United States, where May Day was born 120 years ago.

Back in 1886, it was the norm in northern cities like Chicago for workers to put in 60, 70 or more hours a week, while Black workers and farmers in the post-bellum South toiled under conditions only a notch above slavery, held down by the terror of organized lynchings by agents of the huge landowners.

The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions—soon to be renamed the American Federation of Labor—demanded an eight-hour day. It called for workers to strike on May 1, 1886, to make it a reality.

An estimated 340,000 workers walked out that day from 12,000 factories and other workplaces. Many were immigrants. In New York City 40,000 went on strike. Eleven thousand tramped through Detroit. Six thousand Black and white workers marched together through a segregated park in Louisville, Ky.

Chicago was the heart and soul of this movement. As many as 80,000 workers went on strike there.

The wealthy counterattacked. Six Polish workers were killed in Milwaukee. Chi cago cops fired on strikers in front of the McCormick reaper works, killing at least two.

Organizers called a mass meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4 to protest. Police attacked the rally as it was about to disperse. Someone threw a bomb.

Seven police died. The capitalist newspapers and politicians went wild. They didn’t care about the workers at this rally who were shot by police. Or that several of the officers were actually killed by other cops.

The bloody episode gave the millionaires the chance to try to destroy the movement for an eight-hour day. Worker org anizations and newspapers were raided. Hundreds were arrested.

Eight leaders were brought to trial: Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolf Fischer, August Spies and Albert Parsons.

None of them was accused of throwing the bomb. Only two were even present at Haymarket. Yet they were all charged with murder because they allegedly “incited” the bomber by what they wrote and said.

While these defendants were the best fighters for the eight-hour day, they had a broader vision. They were revolutionaries. They wanted to abolish an economic system where millionaires ruled while millions lived in poverty.

August Spies was editor of the German daily Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Gazette). Albert Parsons edited the biweekly Alarm.

Parsons had been driven out of Waco, Texas, for publishing a newspaper support ing Reconstruction and African-American rights. In Waco he met his partner, Lucy Gonzales Parsons, a woman of color.

The trial of these worker leaders was a legal lynching. A special bailiff who hand-picked the jury bragged, “These fellows are going to be hanged.”

While Oscar Neebe was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, the seven others were condemned to death. Spies told the judge, “If death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Call your hangman!”

An international defense movement tried to save their lives. AFL president Sam Gompers denounced the verdict. Irish writer Oscar Wilde—who a few years later would be railroaded to jail because he was gay—signed an appeal, along with Fred erick Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx.

The eldest son of the martyred Aboli tionist John Brown supplied fresh grapes to the prisoners every day.

Fielden and Schwab were reprieved the day before their scheduled execution and given life imprisonment instead. Louis Lingg either committed suicide or was murdered in his cell.

On Nov. 11, 1887, Engel, Fischer, Spies and Parsons mounted the gallows in Cook County Jail. Parsons was the only one of these martyrs to have been born in the United States. The other four were immigrant workers from Germany.

As a hood was pulled over the head of Spies, he declared: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Parsons proclaimed, “Let the voice of the people be heard …” as the trap door was sprung.

Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí assailed the executions of these labor leaders in La Nación, a newspaper published in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In 1893 Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining Hay market prisoners.

May Day is workers’ day

The struggle for an eight-hour day
didn’t end with the executions. The 1888 AFL convention called for strikes and demonstrations on May 1, 1890.

U.S. workers couldn’t win this struggle by themselves. President Samuel Gom pers sent a delegate to the founding congress of the Socialist International, which opened in Paris on July 14, 1889.

Among the parties that eventually joined this international were the Bol sheviks, led by V. I. Lenin, which carried out the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The AFL’s call for demonstrations was enthusiastically endorsed by this congress. May Day was born. Frederick Engels greet ed the half-million who marched in London two days later on May 3, 1890.

While raising two children, Lucy Parsons never gave up struggling. In the 1930s she fought for the Scottsboro defendants, eight young Black men framed on phony rape charges. In 1942 Lucy Parsons died in a suspicious fire. She was 89 years old. The FBI promptly confiscated her 1,500-book library.

The anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s wiped out the May Day marches that used to be held here.

But this year will be different. Immi grant workers are calling for a “Great American Boycott” on May 1.

It was largely European immigrants who established May Day over a century ago. African Americans—who had their own “Great Migration” to Northern cities —have played a vanguard role in every progressive struggle. Now immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Americas are spearheading the revival of May Day in the country whose multinational working class gave it to the world.

Millies is an Amtrak signal tower operator and member of District 1402 of the Transportation Communications Union.

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