Where Labor Day Came From

For most people, Labor Day is the last long weekend of the summer. That's fine, and it's roughly what the people who invented it had in mind. Nobody handed the holiday down as a gift, though, and it didn't start as a paid day off. It started as a day thousands of workers chose to give up a day's wages for, in an era when few could afford to, so they could walk down Broadway together and be counted.

This is our trade's holiday as much as anyone's, and its history is rougher than the cookouts suggest.

The first one nearly didn't happen

On the morning of September 5, 1882, spectators packed the sidewalks of lower Manhattan near City Hall. The police, expecting a riot, had columns of officers and club-carrying mounted patrols surrounding City Hall by nine in the morning. By ten, Grand Marshal William McCabe and his aides were in position and ready to step off.

Almost nobody had shown up, though, and the handful who had brought no music. Spectators started telling McCabe to call the whole thing off.

Then Matthew Maguire of the Central Labor Union came running across the lawn with the news that two hundred marchers from the Jewelers Union of Newark Two had just come off the ferry, and they had a band. Just after ten, the jewelers turned onto lower Broadway playing a tune from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. McCabe and his aides fell in behind them. Then the spectators started stepping off the curb and joining the line. Seven hundred men filled out the first of three divisions, and by the end, estimates of the total number of marchers ran from ten to twenty thousand.

The New York Tribune reported that the windows, the roofs, the lamp posts and the awning frames were all occupied by people trying to see it. From one in the afternoon until nine that night, roughly twenty-five thousand union members and their families filled Wendel's Elm Park uptown, with speeches, a picnic, an enormous quantity of cigars, and, as one account put it, lager beer kegs mounted in every conceivable place.

Two claims to who thought of it

The U.S. Department of Labor lays out both claims without declaring a winner, though it leans toward Maguire. Some records credit Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, who in 1882 proposed a "general holiday for the laboring classes" to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

Other research points to Matthew Maguire, the machinist who later served as secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, New Jersey, and who was secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York in 1882. After Cleveland signed the federal holiday into law, the Paterson Morning Call ran a piece arguing that the souvenir pen belonged to Maguire, "the undisputed author of Labor Day as a holiday."

A carpenter and a machinist, their names one letter apart, and both of them marched in that first parade. For this particular holiday, it seems right that the credit belongs to two tradesmen and never got sorted out.

Why September and not May 1

Most of the world observes International Workers' Day on May 1, and that date is also American. It commemorates the Haymarket affair in Chicago on May 4, 1886, when a rally supporting the eight-hour day ended with a bomb, gunfire, seven dead police officers and at least four dead civilians, and a set of convictions that historians have argued about ever since. In 1889, the Second International chose May 1 as the international workers' holiday specifically because of it.

The United States went the other way, and the reasons were political. May Day carried socialist and anarchist associations that Grover Cleveland's administration wanted no part of, and the September date already had a track record: parades every year since 1882, and state holidays on the books. Choosing September was a way to honor labor without endorsing the movement's more radical wing.

So two labor holidays grew from the same roots. One is observed nearly everywhere else. The other is observed here.

State by state, then all at once

Before it was federal, Labor Day was won locally. Municipal ordinances passed in 1885 and 1886. New York introduced the first state bill, but Oregon passed the first one, on February 21, 1887. Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York followed that same year; Connecticut, Nebraska and Pennsylvania before the decade was out. By 1894, twenty-three more states had adopted it.

And then the federal holiday arrived very suddenly, for reasons that had nothing to do with celebrating anybody.

The strike that got it signed

In May 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago walked out. Pullman had cut wages during a downturn without cutting the rents in the company town where his workers were required to live. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, backed them with a national boycott: union members refused to handle any train carrying a Pullman car. Rail traffic across the Midwest seized up.

On June 28, 1894, with the boycott only days old and the strike still going, Congress rushed the Labor Day bill through and President Cleveland signed it. The timing was not a coincidence. Organized labor was a Democratic constituency. Cleveland, a Democrat, was about to do something that would cost him with them.

Within days, Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago over the objections of the Illinois governor, to enforce a court injunction against the strike. In the violence that followed, roughly thirty people died (sources vary on the exact toll) and hundreds of rail cars were destroyed. Debs was arrested and convicted of violating the injunction, and he served six months. The strike was broken.

None of that makes the holiday worth less. The day exists because working people had enough organized weight that a president felt he had to offer them something. They built that weight slowly, local by local, often with unpaid days off.

Where our trade sits on that timeline

Right in the middle of it. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was founded in 1891, nine years after the first Labor Day parade and three years before the federal holiday, by ten electrical workers meeting in a St. Louis boarding house. The trade they were organizing killed its own at roughly double the rate of other industrial work at the time, and in some cities local accounts put the toll near one in two.

Seattle's own local traces to 1901, rechartered as IBEW Local 46 in April 1914. Our electricians are Local 46 members. Their apprenticeship and safety standards, along with the eight-hour day they work, trace back to the same decades this holiday came out of.

If you want that part of the story in full, it's here:

The Lincoln quote you'll see on Monday

Every Labor Day this one turns up in speeches and on union hall walls, and it's all over social media, credited to Abraham Lincoln:

Lincoln never said it. It appears nowhere in his speeches, letters, or papers, and Lincoln archives file it among the spurious quotations.

It belongs to a whole family of invented Lincoln material that took hold in the twentieth century. The best-documented cousin is the "Ten Cannots" ("you cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift," and so on). A clergyman named William J. H. Boetcker wrote them in 1916, and a 1942 political leaflet attached Lincoln's name. Roy P. Basler, the editor of the definitive Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, debunked that one in the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly in December 1949.

Being debunked slowed none of it down. John F. Kennedy used the labor version in a 1960 campaign speech in Oregon. Ronald Reagan quoted Boetcker's Ten Cannots as Lincoln at the 1992 Republican convention. Presidents repeating a quote doesn't make it real.

We're pointing this out because it would be easy to put on a graphic, and because a holiday built on people telling the truth about their own working conditions deserves better than a quote somebody made up.

The good news is that Lincoln did say something on the subject, and it's stronger. From his First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861, fully documented and sitting in the Collected Works:

A sitting president told Congress that labor comes first and capital is downstream of it. It's in the record, and it says something considerably bolder than the version people share.

What it comes down to

Labor Day is the one holiday on the calendar that exists because tradespeople did hard work and organized to be recognized for it. Nobody handed it over. People asked for it in 1882 and paid for the privilege out of their own wages. States granted it one at a time over seven years. Washington finally signed it as a peace offering in the middle of a strike the government was breaking.

So take the Monday. Sit down. That part was the whole point.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Labor, "History of Labor Day," on the 1882 parade, the McGuire/Maguire dispute, Oregon's 1887 law, the state-by-state adoption, and the June 28, 1894 act.
• U.S. Department of Labor, "Labor Daze: Pride, Chaos and Kegs on Labor's First 'Day'," the detailed account of September 5, 1882, including McCabe, the Newark jewelers, and the Elm Park picnic.
• Britannica, "Labor Day," and "Why Is Labor Day Celebrated in September?" on the May Day divergence and Cleveland's conciliatory motive.
• Britannica, "Pullman Strike," on the May 1894 walkout, the ARU boycott, Debs's arrest and six-month sentence, and the federal troop deployment.
• HISTORY, "How a Deadly Railroad Strike Led to the Labor Day Holiday," on the timing of the June 28 signing relative to the boycott and troop deployment.
• National Constitution Center, "On this day, the Pullman Strike changes labor law," on the July 1894 casualties.
• Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861 (American Presidency Project), for the authentic labor-and-capital passage. Also available via the Miller Center and Dickinson College's Lincoln's Writings.
• On the spurious "All that serves labor" quotation: the text quoted here is as delivered in Senator John F. Kennedy's remarks at Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company, Eugene, Oregon, May 17, 1960 (JFK Presidential Library). Lincoln archives classify it as spurious; it appears in no Lincoln source.
• On the related "Ten Cannots": Roy P. Basler, editor of the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, debunked that text in the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, December 1949, identifying William J. H. Boetcker (1916) as its author. See also the Baltimore Sun, "So Abe Didn't Say It, But He Should Have" (August 30, 1992), on the 1942 leaflet that attached Lincoln's name to it and its use at the 1992 Republican convention.
• International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, "Our History & Museum," on the 1891 founding convention.
• IBEW Local 46, "History: 1901-1914," on the Local 217 to Local 46 transition.

This is general historical background, not a substitute for a historian's account. Where sources disagree, notably on the Pullman Strike casualty count and on who first proposed the holiday, that's noted in the text rather than papered over.

You're welcome to quote this article elsewhere with attribution and a link back to the original at hancoelectric.com.