LABOR DAY, WHAT DOES IT CELEBRATE?

By Edwin Cooney
Monday, September 3rd, 2007

Okay! Ascribe this to what you will: I assert that Labor Day—with all of the deservedly high sounding phrases that have been welded together to describe what it stands for—is the least enthusiastically celebrated holiday on the American calendar. It rates right down there with National Prune Day in our patriotic regard.

Think about it. How much did your mother, father or even your teacher tell you about the significance or history of Labor Day?

Labor Day was celebrated for the first time in New York on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882 under the sponsorship of the Central Labor Union of New York City. There is something of a dispute as to who was the actual father of Labor Day. The contenders, as you might guess, are two Irishmen both named McGuire (to further confuse matters, I’ve seen both men’s last names spelled interchangeably —Maguire and McGuire.)

For many years it was thought that Peter J. Maguire Secretary of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners was the force behind the original promotion of Labor Day by the Central Union of New York City in 1882. However, it’s been recently discovered that Matthew McGuire, Secretary of both local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson N.J. as well as of the Central Union of New York City, sent out the invitations to workers to attend the scheduled parade and picnic. Keep in mind that since it was an unofficial holiday, attendees would be sacrificing a day’s pay in order to participate in the first Labor Day, so the invitations had to be pretty compelling. Hundreds of people so sacrificed and Labor Day became, first a municipal, next a statewide and finally a nationally celebrated holiday.

Some people have concluded that the reason Peter J. Maguire was favored over Matthew McGuire--as the father of Labor Day—had mostly to do with Matthew McGuire’s politics. Though both men dabbled in Socialism as young labor activists, Matthew McGuire had the audacity to run as the Vice Presidential nominee on the Socialist Labor Party ticket in 1896 under the party’s presidential candidate Charles Horatio Matchett. Thus, because of labor’s early association with Socialism both here and abroad, Americans who insist that they admire nothing more than hard work have been quite touchy about celebrating the value of the American laborer because of labor’s link to socialist doctrine.

The state of Oregon was the first to adopt Labor Day as a state wide holiday in February of 1887 followed by Colorado, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts that same year. By the mid 1890s, Labor Day was celebrated in nearly thirty states.

To further blur the legitimacy or respectability of the labor movement in the minds of the American people, there exists another unfortunate historic reality. The president, who signed the legislation creating the American worker’s holiday we call Labor Day, wasn’t really very friendly to the American worker. In fact at the time President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day proclamation on Thursday, June 28th, 1894, the Nation was in the middle of the infamous “Pullman Strike” against the Pullman railroad car maker George Pullman. Five days after signing the congressional legislation creating Labor Day, President Cleveland sent troops to Kensington, Illinois just outside of Chicago, to enforce a court injunction declaring that the strike was “interfering with delivery of the mail” and thus the strike was in violation of interstate commerce and illegal.

Shortly thereafter, the president declared that he’d insure the delivery of the lowliest postcard if it took the whole army to deliver it. What the president didn’t so readily acknowledge was that he was doing this in part to appease his Attorney General Richard Olney. Olney had been a railroad director and was, even while in office, the attorney for several railroad companies.

It appears that President Cleveland wasn’t cruel or unfeeling toward the working man or woman, it’s just that he had an old fashioned idea that the owners of private property possessed behavioral activity rights on their own property that superseded the rights of the working -- man, woman or even child who had only conditional rights on someone’s private property. Thus, Stephen Grover Cleveland was able to both kiss and kick labor at the same time and in all good conscience.

President Cleveland’s conscience aside, one of the most common threads that runs through American history is our confusion about and the inconsistency we display on the value of labor or work.

Let’s start from the very beginning. For as far back as I can remember, I was taught to regard Jamestown Colony founder Captain John Smith’s assertion that “…those who don’t work, don’t eat,” as a statement reflecting the Protestant work ethic.

That pronouncement was made by the twenty-eight-year-old Captain Smith at a time when the less than two-year-old colony, made up largely of the British upper class who were not used to hard labor, was facing a combination of disease epidemics, environmental challenges and Indian attacks which were threatening to destroy Great Britain’s second attempt to establish a colony in Virginia.

Young Smith had recently been returned to the colony by Algonquin Chief Powhatan after having spent four weeks as a captive in the wake of an attack which had killed his companion. (Smith, who believed that he’d been saved by the chief’s daughter Pocahontas, was probably saved by the “magic” in the compass that the chief most likely confiscated from his person.) Thus, Smith’s wide experiences had taught him situational lessons more than they had taught him moral precepts. Hence, when John Smith said “…those who don’t work, don’t eat,” he was telling the truth more than he was preaching a sermon. Had Captain Smith actually been preaching a sermon, his congregation in Jamestown hardly got the moral force of his message. A decade after Smith’s departure from Jamestown, Smith’s former neighbors began importing black slaves from West Africa to do the work they couldn’t or wouldn’t do themselves. Not even Captain Smith would assert that chattel slavery was established for the moral upgrading of black Africa.

Of course, during the two-hundred plus years following John Smith’s observation or pronouncement, which ever you prefer, work was a way of life primarily because it was intensely personal. One had to work in order to eat, get shelter, and be adequately clothed as well as to be protected against disease, malnutrition or from hostile attack.

Not until the dawning of the industrial revolution in the 1830s did Americans en masse begin working for someone else who needed their labor to sustain or advance his or her wealth. As working conditions and worker’s pay made life increasingly unsafe and unprofitable in an increasingly cash-oriented society, workers began banding together to use the sheer weight of their numbers to improve their working and living conditions. Hence the American Labor Movement was born in all its infamy or glory.

Then, of course, there is the distinction between labor and work. Labor, in the minds of most, is hard physical (usually unskilled) toil which drains the energy and, if prolonged, the spirit of the laborer. (Thus, new Moms suffer “labor pains” rather than work pains.)

Work, on the other hand can be both skilled or unskilled. Thus the American Labor Movement has such divisions as craftsmen, carpenters and joiners, assembly workers, musicians, plumbers, garment workers and so on.

What it all boils down to is the value we put on labor or work. We say we value the “work ethic” as a cornerstone to our fundamental religious affiliations, but do we?

Who gets more monetary compensation?
The teacher who can provide both the inspiration and the information to our children that creates industry and hence their future employment or the sports hero who entertains us all;
The nurse who eases our pain or the movie star who expresses our cultural values:
The preacher we say we believe can provide sufficient counsel to save our souls or the Black Jack dealer in one of our major resorts?

It should also be kept in mind that work is required to perform some pretty unsavory activities: A masterful bank robbery requires precision planning. The same goes for the successful planning of other dastardly crimes such as embezzlement, murder and war.

Then, of course, there are the perfectly legal and hard working men and women — in many cases our own sons daughters, brothers, and sisters — whom we disdain as “bureaucrats. These are very often conscientious people who have worked hard for their college degrees in preparation for honest employment. Yet, even with all of the industry and initiative these men and women possess, we still eagerly vote for politicians who promise to put them in unemployment lines.

Finally, do any of us really and truly compare our monetary compensation to the personal satisfaction we derive from our enterprise or employment? Even more, would we -- if we could afford to?

As we celebrate Labor Day, we, of course, celebrate the laborers or workers who built our homes, our towns, our roads, our schools, our places of worship. We celebrate the labor or work of our teachers, our preachers, our business entrepreneurs and caregivers—and all of those who labor and work for the genuine enhancement of a peaceful, prosperous and equitable society.

Samuel Gompers, the Scotsman immigrant who founded the American Federation of Labor, explained the meaning of Labor Day as follows:

"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or Nation."

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.
It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

That sounds good enough to me, Sam, as long as we celebrate (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln) the better angels of our labor or work.

One more thing: I’m all for celebrating Labor Day as long as we don’t forget the picnic that goes with it.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY