Why indeed! It seems appropriate to recall its circumstances.
Background
The occasion for the inauguration of Labor Day was the Pullman Strike of 1894. Democrat Grover Cleveland was in the White House. His intervention in the Pullman Strike of 1894 to keep the railroads moving angered labor unions nationwide. During the economic panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demands for their train cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained of the low wages and sixteen hour workdays and the company's failure to decrease rents or the price of goods (in the company owned town). Paternalistic company owner George Pullman "loftily declined to talk with them.
Many of the workers were already members of the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, which supported their strike by launching a boycott in which union members refused to run trains containing Pullman cars. The strike effectively shut down production in the Pullman factories and led to a lockout. Railroad workers across the nation refused to switch Pullman cars. The ARU declared that if switchmen were disciplined for the boycott, the entire ARU would strike in sympathy. Adding fuel to the fire the railroad companies began hiring replacement workers (that is, strikebreakers), which only increased hostilities. Many African-Americans, fearful that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market, crossed the picket line, which added a racial division to the union's predicament. Elsewhere in the United States, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking strikebreakers.
The strike eventually was broken up by United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops sent in by President Grover Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and subsequent deaths of workers led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld was incensed at Cleveland for putting the federal government at the service of the employers, and for rejecting Altgeld's plan to use his state militia to keep order, instead of federal troops.
- Concurrent with the settlement, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to serve time of 6 months. He was not then a socialist. However, during his time in prison, he read the works of Karl Marx, and after his release in 1895, he became the leading socialist figure in America, marking in fact the birth of socialism and the Socialist Party in the United States.
- Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 after the strike when President Grover Cleveland and Congress made appeasement of organized labor a top priority. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the strike ended.
- Two years later, in 1896, there was an overwhelming Republican victory over William Jennings Bryan and his Democratic Party, then repeated in 1900. It restored business confidence and inaugurated a long epoch of prosperity.
So what exactly does Labor Day celebrate?
- The birth of socialism.
- The usurpation of a state militia by Federal government.
- The murder of a mob by Federal troops.
- The appeasement of that mob
- The racism of the US labor movement
- The end of capitalism
It's hard to figure anything else that this day might signify.
