Welcome to the New Day Cafe! This is an open thread.
The Smithsonian has recently shared a bit of Labor Day history.
“Conflicting accounts trace the first American Labor Day to the inspiration of a local New Haven, Connecticut machinist, Matthew Maguire, or to that of the influential leader of the Carpenters’ union, Peter McGuire. In both accounts, 1882 became the key moment when the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a movement of craft unions and local central labor federations, solidified their young and fragile institutions. Largely German and Irish in most places, these unions and federations had traditions of summer holidays, and the institutional support to make the day’s events successful combinations of speech-making, beer drinking, and family fun.
In the era of bitter and often violent conflict between labor and capital, Republican and Democratic parties competed, especially at the local level, for workingmen’s votes. These votes had been especially crucial for Democrats, who claimed the loyalty of the lower classes since at least the presidency of Andrew Jackson. This loyalty was later reaffirmed by the connections of craft unions with local political decisions on urban construction projects of all kinds. However, waves of strikes from the early 1880s to the middle 1890s found Democratic officials, at the behest of manufacturers and merchants, calling out the police against strikers, thus threatening political loyalties. The Pullman Strike of 1894, where the army was used for the first time against striking workers (including the highly organized railroad engineers), seemed to push the problem to the breaking point.
The Pullman Strike, led by future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, was crushed, and Debs himself imprisoned…
Within days of the strike’s end, Democratic President Grover Cleveland rushed a bill recognizing Labor Day through Congress. Not a single elected official in Congress voted against this measure—a fitting symbol for the claim, accurate or not, that American society was unique for its social compact between rich, poor, and middle classes.”
Grab a cup of coffee,
a treat,
and share what’s on your mind this Labor Day morning.
This is an open thread. Please join us.