Monday, September 01, 2003

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a national holiday less than a week before he sent federal troops to break the Pullman strike in the summer of 1894.

The story of the origins of the day set aside for workers reveals the contradictory feelings about labor that still run deep in the United States.

In the last decades of the 19th century, the owners of railroads, mines and mills that fueled the economic growth of the nation became extremely powerful. But at the same time, labor was growing into a stronger political and economic force.

The idea of giving workers a day of their own arose around 1880, and on Sept. 5, 1882, New York City became the first place to hold a Labor Day celebration.

It was an elaborate demonstration/parade organized by the city's Central Labor Union, with between 20,000 and 25,000 workers in three divisions participating, according to Linn Orear of the Illinois Labor History Society.

Hundreds of trades, from marble polishers to paper hangers, were represented. The German Bricklayers marched in white aprons, with uplifted arms clasping white trowels with blue trim; the Newark Manufacturing Jewelers marched four abreast wearing derby hats and dark suits with boutonnieres, and bearing canes held against their shoulders.

	On the Net For more information on the University of Pittsburgh labor archives, see http://www.library.pitt. edu/labor_legacy/. Related story Most Americans would trade pay for day off each week Labor Day closings

The holiday caught on, and by 1894, 30 states and the District of Columbia had Labor Day holidays, according to the Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania Labor Legacy Web site of the University of Pittsburgh's Archives Service Center.

The Pennsylvania Legislature made Labor Day a state holiday on April 25, 1889.

There was also a movement to make it a national holiday. In September 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of a national day.

By 1894, there was proposed legislation to make it happen.

There were also a deep economic downturn, powerful industrialists bent on breaking unions, and an ambiguous attitude among many Americans about what the roles and rights of workers should be, as well as fears about labor ties with socialism.

Those conflicting forces erupted in the spring of 1894 at the Pullman works in Chicago.

George Pullman had built the town of Pullman near Lake Calumet more than a decade earlier to manufacture his famous railway sleeping cars. All buildings in the town were company-owned.

The company cut wages a number of times in the 1880s and '90s, but failed to reduce the rent in company housing. There were layoffs and more pay cuts in 1893, and car workers went on strike May 11, 1894.

The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, got behind the striking workers, and by late June, sympathetic railway workers had agreed to boycott trains carrying Pullman cars nationwide.

Cleveland, faced with answering to nervous railroad executives, declared the strike a federal crime and deployed troops to break it. The official justification for federal intervention was that trains with Pullman cars also had mail cars.

"If it takes the entire Army and Navy to deliver one postcard in Chicago, that card will be delivered," Cleveland proclaimed, though the railway union had offered to make special arrangements to carry the mail.

On July 3, 12,000 troops were dispatched to keep trains moving and to break the strike. Violence erupted, and two men were killed when U.S. deputy marshals fired on protesters in Kensington, near Chicago.

With the arrest of Debs and other leaders in Chicago later in July, the strike collapsed, and workers returned Aug. 2, 1894.

That Sept. 3, the first national Labor Day was celebrated.

Cleveland had signed an act declaring the first Monday in September a national holiday -- it had been unanimously passed by both houses of Congress -- on June 28, even as plans to crush the strike with federal troops were already made.

Like many politicians, he danced an uncomfortable two-step, declaring workers worthy of respect and attention, while treating strikes as unacceptable.

Many news accounts of the day mirrored that attitude: Parades are fine, strikes and socialism are not.

The New York Times on Sept. 4, 1894, reported that Labor Day participants were "well-dressed and well-behaved" and that the "chief feature of the parade was the excellent and military bearing of those who marched. There was not one inch of red ribbon to indicate sympathy with Anarchy."

The Pittsburgh Press wrote that the first National Labor Day was "befittingly observed," and added that "for the first time in their history, all the local labor organizations unified for a common purpose without squabbles or jealousies and did honor to the occasion."

The Press had expressed relief at the end of the Pullman strike in an editorial on Aug. 6, 1894, advising that "now that the A.R.U. has the strike off its hands, it may employ itself in a useful manner for its members in devoting its attention to politics, and try to help its members in the only sensible way -- through the ballot."

Within a few years, Labor Day became firmly entrenched, usually following the pattern laid out in the legislation creating the national holiday -- a street parade to exhibit to the public "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations" followed by a festival for the workers and their families.

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