America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960 (review)

As Haverty-Stacke notes in America's Forgotten Holiday, most Americans associate May Day with Cold War Soviet military might parading on Red Square. Yet its origins as a modern holiday were American, dating from 1886, when the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called a nationwide strike for an eight-hour day. Haverty-Stacke contributes the first detailed history of the holiday's evolution, contested meanings, and ultimate demise in the United States, seeking the contours of its malleable form along a spectrum ranging from vernacular to official, local to global, and practical to dogmatic. She also argues for May Day's broader significance and interpretive value in limning the dimensions of "American identity." It offered an "alternative to the martial, masculine, assimilationist, and, sometimes, reactionary definition of American nationalism forged between the late 1880s and the mid-twentieth century" and helped to make clear "the limits of acceptable political expression"(5, 3). By 1960, a "new Cold War Americanism" had erased May Day from the American calendar, removing a counterpoint to the "anti-communist consensus" and the "free market"(223). The broad lines of this story are not surprising. However, the evidence mined from radical political and union archives at Cornell and New York Universities, the New York Historical Society, and the Chicago History Museum illuminates fascinating corners in the history of American radicalism. Haverty-Stacke demonstrates how "alternative" visions of May Day emerged from ideological rivalries and strategic debates between and within worker and radical political organizations as each vied to control the holiday's symbolic meaning on a landscape of narrowing possibility. Samuel Gompers relocated the American Federation of Labor's marching celebration to Labor Day, symbolically separating his organization from more radical visions. Even the Communist Party, as it traded a revolutionary public face for the "Americanism" of the Popular Front, went so far as to suspend its May Day parade during World War II. The author's thorough tracking of the ways in which ideology, political realities, internecine battles, and national culture shaped the holiday, and ultimately silenced it, comprise the most useful and revealing aspect of this study.

Haverty-Stacke's wider claim, however, that May Day's "expression of radical Americanism" helped to shape "national identity" never snaps into focus. It implies a measure of dialectical equality with the mainstream that much of her narrative argues against (7). For example, her focus on May Day events in New York and Chicago, especially useful because of the richness of available sources and the presence of vibrant radical cultures, leaves one wondering about May Day's influence on the heartland. She also draws a political lesson from May Day's history, that "to be both a patriotic and a dissenting American has remained a formidable challenge" (231). These broad lessons seem unwarranted by her fine-grained examination and distract from Haverty-Stacke's otherwise valuable rescue of a largely forgotten but significant celebration.