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223 Conclusion By the early 1960s, May Day had essentially disappeared from urban America. Radicals no longer marched through the streets of New York City and Chicago on May 1 as they had done since the 1880s. What public gatherings they managed to host during the 1960s and 1970s generally consisted of only a few hundred participants, a pale comparison to the great mass meetings of the 1930s, when a half million people turned out. Thanks to the efforts of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Fourteenth Street Association, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), most Americans thought of May Day as a foreign affair celebrated only by workers and communists in the Soviet Union and behind the Iron Curtain . Yet, May Day had functioned as a foil in the creation of American nationalism for so many decades. Now that it was gone, what difference did it make? What effect did its absence have on the shape of American nationalism? What were the consequences of May Day’s decline for political discourse in the United States? And why should we recall the holiday’s history when it eventually waned to insignificance here? The process of forgetting May Day helped birth the new Cold War Americanism that dominated the nation’s political culture from 1947 through the 1960s. In opposition to this holiday, Americans sustained an anticommunist consensus and extolled the promise of democracy and the free market during Loyalty Day, “I Am an American Day,” and even Labor Day celebrations. In these ways, the marginalizing of May Day became central to the construction of a new form of popular American nationalism . After 1960, once May Day parades diminished so that they no longer remained a point of contrast against which to define loyal Americanism at home, the holiday continued to cast a shadow from overseas; political radicalism and its greatest holiday still existed in other nations around the world. At the precise moment when Americans redefined their nationalism on a global stage, May Day became increasingly identified as a foreign event. It still functioned as a foil to Americanism, but it was now fully 224 Conclusion identified with the communist enemy in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and throughout Latin America: an enemy Americans opposed as they laid claim to their identity as the defenders of the free world. As Americans came to see the struggle against political radicalism as something external to the nation, they shifted their focus from the “social question” of class, which had been at the core of May Day celebrations for decades. Intrinsic to the Cold War Americanism that they now embraced was a sense of classlessness. Since by the mid-1950s some 60 percent of the population enjoyed a middle-class standard of living for the first time—including workers who benefited from the extensive benefits and cost-of-living adjustments that their unions secured for them—many Americans believed that the old problems of class had been answered in the postwar boom and the Treaty of Detroit.1 Inherent in this Americanism was a belief that class divisions no longer existed in the United States, and that even to engage in a discussion of such concerns was un-American . This outlook presumed that such problems belonged to Europe, or some other faraway place. Such attitudes perpetuated the forgetting of May Day’s history in the United States, and fostered the disbelief that such an event could have originated here. And that process, in turn, significantly narrowed the range of political discourse in the United States.2 Cold War Americanism sustained an exceptionalist nationalism in which class differences were believed to have eroded under the benevolent wave of postwar democratic capitalist expansion. But such perceptions belied reality. Class divisions did not disappear during the Cold War. Many workers in the nation’s basic industries, who were protected by large industrial unions and benefited from the “Great Bargain” of the postwar years, may have been better able to enjoy the fruits of the nation’s affluence, but not all workers were so fortunate. There were still many people—male and female, black and white—who struggled to organize unions, to have them recognized, and to use them to obtain the most basic workplace protections during the postwar years.3 Yet, somehow most Americans, then and now, have considered these struggles to be peripheral to the perceived norm of America’s affluence, stability, and equality. Attempts to protest otherwise have remained at the margins...

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