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  • America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960
  • Matthew Dennis
America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960. By Donna T. Haverty-Stacke (New York: New York University Press, 2009. x plus 303 pp. $45.00).

May Day is particularly worth remembering—and analyzing historically—for the very reasons that it has been largely forgotten. As Donna T. Haverty-Stacke demonstrates, May Day became a barometer of labor and radical politics and offered a forum for expressing alternative visions of working-class Americanism in the United States since the 1860s. Yet from the start its celebration was contested, its meaning disputed, and its public memory subjected to tendentious manipulation, revision, or even erasure.

Using May Day observances as her historical lens, the author traces the complicated contours of the American labor movement, especially its most radical elements, its struggle with American capital, its internal conflicts, and the challenges it faced in negotiating allegiances locally, nationally, and internationally. Holidays may seem ephemeral, but, as Haverty-Stacke shows, May Day mattered. Organizers and celebrants deployed its power (to build solidarity, protest, strike for better working conditions, or even agitate for social revolution), and its opponents feared and repressed it. In some cases, May Day became not a walk in the park but a matter of life and death. [End Page 594]

Like many recent scholars of American festivity and public memory, Haverty-Stacke exposes the constructed and malleable quality of a significant American holiday. Like others, she demonstrates that holidays have histories and that such histories are up for grabs. Festive occasions can be dynamic moments to mold and perform identities and advance or oppose material arrangements and political programs. May Day was particularly potent in this sense, as a key medium for shaping and rehearsing working-class identities, redefining ways of being American, and effecting reform or even (some hoped) a revolution in social and economic relations.

Among the most disputed features of the May 1 holiday was its origin. In fact it was homegrown, emerging in the United States in 1867 with demonstrations that hailed passage of eight-hour workday bills in Illinois and New York and that demanded compliance by employers. The date would acquire significance, augmented by the fact that May 1 marked the beginning of the contract year in the building trades and functioned in many cities as Moving Day, when urbanites renewed leases or took to the street to occupy new dwelling places.

The 1860s eight-hour day laws had little effect, and in the 1880s trade unionists renewed their push, joined and propelled by militant anarchists and socialists. Together they staged massive demonstrations on May 1, 1886 in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. In Chicago, the workers' parade had struck out from Haymarket Square. There, four days later, the infamous Haymarket tragedy exploded, producing radical martyrs and violent reaction, and coloring May Day black and red—as an anarchist, socialist, or eventually communist fete. Still, Samuel Gompers and the moderate American Federation of Labor set May 1, 1890 as the date for strikes culminating a series of events advocating the eight-hour day. In Paris the 1889 Marxist congress, the Second International, endorsed the act and called for worldwide demonstrations. The success of these festive protests and the subsequent radicalization of the annual occasion encouraged some to lay foundational claims to May Day as an international Marxist labor day, obscuring its American origins. Ever since, different organizations and factions in the United States and throughout the world have variously and inconsistently claimed, denied, or reclaimed authorship of May Day—and sought to characterize it as American or un-American—to suit their shifting political needs. Today May Day flourishes internationally but in the United States is a forgotten holiday.

Haverty-Stacke's chronological narrative of May Day's history, mostly in New York and Chicago through the 1950s, follows and analyzes the complicated trajectory of organized labor and radical working-class politics—labor's success and failures, its internal struggles between trade unionists, socialists, and communists, and its external assaults by capital and the state. This is a familiar if complicated story, but its examination through the experience of...

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