America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960.
America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960. By Donna T. Haverty-Stacke (New York: New York University Press, 2009. x plus 303 pp. $45.00).May Day is particularly worth remembering--and analyzing historically--for the very reasons that it has been largely forgotten. As Donna T. Haverty-Stacke demonstrates, May Day became a barometer of labor and radical politics and offered a forum for expressing alternative visions of working-class Americanism in the United States since the 1860s. Yet from the start its celebration was contested, its meaning disputed, and its public memory subjected to tendentious manipulation, revision, or even erasure.
Using May Day observances as her historical lens, the author traces the complicated contours of the American labor movement, especially its most radical elements, its struggle with American capital, its internal conflicts, and the challenges it faced in negotiating allegiances locally nationally, and internationally. Holidays may seem ephemeral, but, as Haverty-Stacke shows, May Day mattered. Organizers and celebrants deployed its power (to build solidarity, protest, strike for better working conditions, or even agitate tot social revolution), and its opponents feared and repressed it. In some cases, May Day became not a walk in the park but a matter of life and death.
Like many recent scholars of American festivity and public memory, Haverty-Stacke exposes the constructed and malleable quality of a significant American holiday. Like others, she demonstrates that holidays have histories and that such histories are up for grabs. Festive occasions can be dynamic moments to mold and perform identities and advance or oppose material arrangements and political programs. May Day was particularly potent in this sense, as a key medium for shaping and rehearsing working-class identities, redefining ways of being American, and effecting reform or even (some hoped) a revolution in social and economic relations.
Among the most disputed features of the May 1 holiday was its origin. In fact it was homegrown, emerging in the United States in 1867 with demonstrations that hailed passage of eight-hour workday bills in Illinois and New York and that demanded compliance by employers. The dare would acquire significance, augmented by the fact that. May 1 marked the beginning of the contract, year in the building trades and functioned in many cities as Moving Day, when urbanites renewed leases or rook to the street to occupy new dwelling places.
The 1860s eight-hour day laws had little effect, and in the 1880s trade unionists renewed their push, joined and propelled by militant anarchists and socialists. Together they staged massive demonstrations on May 1, 1886 in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. In Chicago, the workers' parade had struck out from Haymarket Square. There, four days later, the infamous Haymarket tragedy exploded, producing radical martyrs and violent reaction, and coloring May Day-black and red--as an anarchist, socialist, or eventually communist fete. Still, Samuel Gompers and the moderate American Federation of Labor set May 1, 1890 as the date for strikes culminating a series of events advocating the eight-hour day. In Paris the 1889 Marxist congress, the Second International, endorsed the act and called for worldwide demonstrations. The success of these festive protests and the subsequent radicalization of the annual occasion encouraged some to lay foundational claims to May Day as an international Marxist labor day, obscuring its American origins. Ever since, different organizations and factions in the United States and throughout the world have variously and inconsistently claimed, denied, or reclaimed authorship of May Day -and sought to characterize it as American or un-American--to suit their shifting political needs. Today May Day flourishes internationally but in the United States is a forgotten holiday.
Haverty-Stacke's chronological narrative of May Day's history, mostly in New York and Chicago through the 1950s, follows and analyzes the complicated trajectory of organized labor and radical working-class politics--labor's success and failures, its internal struggles between trade unionists, socialists, and communists, and its external assaults by capital and the state. This is a familiar if complicated story, but its examination through the experience of May Day (and alternative, competing holidays--particularly Labor Day, an official national holiday after 1894, and even more consciously anti-radical nationalist fetes, such as Loyalty Day and "I Am an American Day") lends depth and nuance to our understanding of the labor and social history of working people in these years. The book's workmanlike prose and repetition make the narrative lucid but sometimes cumbersome. Certainly the author has ably synthesized a vast, complex subject and presented it with clarity and coherence, and the book makes a number of contributions.
Haverty-Stacke gives us the fullest account we have of May Day, demonstrates its importance, and expands our understanding of American nationalism. She takes particular care to distinguish between the pronouncements and prescriptions of leaders and the thoughts and actions of common people--women and children as well workingmen--who did not necessarily march in lockstep either with civic and corporate officials or with union and patty officers.
It is perhaps not surprising that May Day failed as a national holiday. Although some continued to use the day to promote bread-and-butter issues, and though some like the socialist Eugene Debs sought to associate it with America's revolutionary founding principles, May Day assumed an increasingly more radical and foreign, even anti-national character, particularly after it was appropriated by the Communist Party in the 1930s and its adherents hounded during the postwar Red Scare. From the start it was a day of protest, not one of celebration, national unification, or hagiography. It never gained (or seemed to court) a mainstream American constituency; its appeal was persistently particular and local, on the one hand, or broadly international on the other. In the end, it's not clear what "success" might have meant, beyond a place in the American annual calendar as a meaningless St. Monday. And perhaps May Day is represented there, in negative fashion, on the first Monday in September--that is, on Labor Day. Haverty-Stacke perhaps underestimates the latent political (even radical) possibilities of officially established holidays like Labor Day and the Fourth of July, but as she implicitly laments May Day's demise, she perceptively notes its impact on the shaping of American (reactionary) polities, national identity, and even the public calendar itself.
Matthew Dennis
University of Oregon
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| Author: | Dennis, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of Social History |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Dec 22, 2010 |
| Words: | 1030 |
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