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The Origins of
Labor Day
(Source:
Online NewsHour:
Origins of Labor Day)
The observance of Labor Day
began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America's labor
unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation
sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress
amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover
Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.
Pullman, Illinois was a company town, founded in 1880 by
George Pullman, president of the railroad sleeping car
company. Pullman designed and built the town to stand as
a utopian workers' community insulated from the moral
(and political) seductions of nearby Chicago.
The town was strictly, almost feudally, organized: row
houses for the assembly and craft workers; modest
Victorians for the managers; and a luxurious hotel where
Pullman himself lived and where visiting customers,
suppliers, and salesman would lodge while in town. Its
residents all worked for the Pullman company, their
paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, and their rent, set by
Pullman, deducted automatically from their weekly
paychecks.
The town, and the company, operated smoothly and
successfully for more than a decade. But in 1893, the
Pullman company was caught in the nationwide economic
depression. Orders for railroad sleeping cars declined,
and George Pullman was forced to lay off hundreds of
employees. Those who remained endured wage cuts, even
while rents in Pullman remained consistent.
Take-home paychecks plummeted. And so the employees
walked out, demanding lower rents and higher pay. The
American Railway Union, led by a young Eugene V. Debs,
came to the cause of the striking workers, and railroad
workers across the nation boycotted trains carrying
Pullman cars. Rioting, pillaging, and burning of railroad
cars soon ensued; mobs of non-union workers joined in.
The strike instantly became a national issue.
President Grover Cleveland, faced with nervous railroad
executives and interrupted mail trains, declared the
strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 troops to
break the strike. Violence erupted, and two men were
killed when U.S. deputy marshals fired on protesters in
Kensington, near Chicago, but the strike was doomed. On
August 3, 1894, the strike was declared over.
Debs went to prison, his ARU was disbanded, and Pullman
employees henceforth signed a pledge that they would
never again unionize. Aside from the already existing
American Federation of Labor and the various railroad
brotherhoods, industrial workers' unions were effectively
stamped out and remained so until the Great Depression.
It was not the last time Debs would find himself behind
bars, either. Campaigning from his jail cell, Debs would
later win almost a million votes for the Socialist ticket
in the 1920 presidential race.
In an attempt to appease the nation's workers, Labor Day
is born
The movement for a national Labor Day had been growing
for some time. In September 1892, union workers in New
York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union
Square in support of the holiday. But now, protests
against President Cleveland's harsh methods made the
appeasement of the nation's workers a top political
priority. In the immediate wake of the strike,
legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of
Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland's
desk just six days after his troops had broken the
Pullman strike.
1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the
chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born. He was
not reelected. In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the
American Federation of Labor, called it "the day for
which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when
their rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that
the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools
of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch
shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for
it."
Labor Day: a good-bye to summer
Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though,
Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer
rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less
than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions,
down from a high in the 1950's of nearly 50 percent,
though nearly all have benefited from the victories of
the Labor movement.
And everyone who can takes a vacation on the first Monday
of September. Friends and families gather, and clog the
highways, and the picnic grounds, and their own backyards
-- and bid farewell to summer.
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This
page was last updated August 26, 2003.
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