[On May 4th,
1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of
a
nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket
Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important
current scholarly voices on labor.]
On a motivation,
a debate, and an effect of one of the earliest nationwide strikes.
One of the
scholarly works I read as an undergraduate that left a lasting impression on me
was historian Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight
Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920
(1983). It wasn’t just the depth and detail with which Rosenzweig narrated and
analyzed new leisure possibilities and spaces in the late 19th
century, although that certainly impressed me. Instead, it was the overall
paradigm shift that Rosenzweig’s book effected in my perspective, as I really
considered what the absence of
work-hour regulations (and thus the push for an eight-hour workday) meant
for 19th century American workers. The issue isn’t as blatant or
horrifying as child labor practices or the absence of safety regulations or the
like, but it was a vital cause through which workers
and the labor movement could take a bit more control over their own lives.
So vital, in fact, that the May 1st,
1886 nationwide strike of more than 350,000 industrial workers was
undertaken specifically to agitate for the creation of an eight-hour workday.
Not every labor
leader and organization supported the use of a nationwide strike for that
purpose, however. Terence
Powderly, leader of the influential national union The
Knights of Labor (which had a membership of more than 700,000 in 1886),
opposed the strike and forbid Knights of Labor members from taking part in it. Powderly
preferred other tactics, from negotiation with management to boycotts, to
strikes, a sharp divide from the perspective of the nation’s other most
prominent labor union, the Federation
of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (an immediate predecessor to the
American Federation of Labor, which was founded later in
the year). The debate reflects the widely divergent views and tactics that
characterized the labor movement at this still early stage, and reminds us that
the May Day strike, significant (indeed, unprecedented) in scale and scope as
it was, nonetheless represented only a subset of American workers (again, the
Knights of Labor had a membership more than twice the size of the number of
workers who struck on May 1st).
Despite those
divergences the May 1st strike was an important labor milestone, and
(despite the Haymarket catastrophe and the negative press and narratives it
engendered) had a number of both immediate and long-term positive
effects. Some employers did institute an eight-hour workday, while others
offered higher wages or other benefits. Yet it was a pair of commemorations
that proved the most enduring, if partly ironic, legacies of the strike: in
1889 the Paris
Second International designated May 1st as International Workers’ Day
in remembrance of the strike; and when President Grover Cleveland designated
the first official federal Labor
Day in September 1887, he did so in large part to commemorate organized
labor separately from lingering May associations with the Haymarket Affair. Those
might seem to be distinct and even opposed effects and commemorations, but both
represent the power of organized labor and of events like the May 1st,
1886 strike to affect and change national narratives and collective memories.
Next Haymarket
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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