What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st
American general strikes—or
rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los
Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general
assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.
The last real general strike in this
country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city,
was in Oakland, California in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has
suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of
general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we
refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or
explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American
working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have
suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think
about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with
a past we've mostly forgotten.
So it makes sense that this year’s call
for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls
on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by
American workers, crushed by the American government, incubated abroad,
and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.
The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday
is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour
day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the
labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.
Perhaps the first nation-wide labor
movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to
agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a
natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day
allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue
education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work
day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers
celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new
lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a
broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized
together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even
religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour
Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and
strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its
first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work
hours.
The demand for an eight-hour day was about
leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power.
When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours,
they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government
regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers
sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through
declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions
they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over
their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a
demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage
increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up
their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the
beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.
The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into
effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers
celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen
on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse,
ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11
hours. The city erupted in a general strike--workers struck, and those
who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues
roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs.
After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied
working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they
controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours.
The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline
in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for
almost two decades.
The Illinois law and its defeat, however,
were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in
Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant
workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad
workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took
control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard
and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President
Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the
strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of
the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it
appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.
So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor
Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like
August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight
for 10”--that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the
winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small
victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries,
where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then
they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a
general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an
eight-hour workday.
The demands of the militant Chicago
anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements.
Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic
railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and
spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic,
society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian
to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a
‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy
plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative
commonwealth.’”
Four days later, it all came crashing
down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick
Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into
an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an
outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest
the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his
speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the
charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd.
“But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t.
Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the
course of American history changed.
To this day we do not know, nor will we
likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent
provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist,
it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made
bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know
that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled
by the police bullets.
We also know that the effect of the
Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on
the police.
Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial
for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any
of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented
that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and
seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences
commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and
militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and
blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons,
Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They
went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the
international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted
out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be
more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
Before that happened, the state ensured
more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided
radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered.
In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s
rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and
conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until
the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act
of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.
May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the
international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that
May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket
Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the
International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In
countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became
the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations,
often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May
Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to
India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.
Yet in the United States, with some
exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was
because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in
September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland,
glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic
power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,”
and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the
holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight
Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at
the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few
if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on
the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like
International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S.,
International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world
celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.
Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been
rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006,
immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide
strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest
demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants,
mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and
in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for
immigrant workers.
It is appropriate that when the Occupy L.
A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the
strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on
foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in
the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices
the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And
regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general
strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what
activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action
for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We
have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through
new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded
us.
Jacob Remes teaches history and public affairs at Empire State College, SUNY’s college for adult learners.
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