SOPHIA CASA: Thank you so much for talking with me today, Professor Boyle. So my first question is just to sort of dive into May Day, just starting with the basics, what exactly is May Day for those unaware?
KEVIN BOYLE: So May Day is a workers’ holiday that was created in the late 1800s. It was created by the kind of international socialist movement as a day of worker action and worker protest honoring events that had taken place a couple years before in Chicago, and has become, in many countries, a major holiday of worker action, less so in the United States, where there’s this kind of competing event of Labor Day in September.
CASA: Can you go into a bit more depth about what exactly the Chicago connection is?
BOYLE: Yeah, I can go in all sorts of depth, but you may not want that. So in 1886, the largest labor union in the United States, which was then the Knights of Labor, staged a nationwide strike on the 1st of May that was aiming to secure for working people in the United States the eight-hour workday.
The strike started nationwide, um, on 1st of May 1886 but its real center was Chicago. And Chicago was very much as it is now, a working-class city at a high level of working-class action. So there was this massive strike. The first day went very well for the strikers. The third day, there was a clash between the Chicago police and strikers at one of the largest factories in the United States, then, the McCormick Reaper Factory, which made farm equipment, has something of a name on Northwestern’s campus as well, the McCormick family. And in that clash, the police killed two strikers. When that happened, a a group of anarchists involved in the strike called for a protest rally the following evening, May 4th of 1886, they held it on a side street in downtown Chicago that has the kind of grand name of Haymarket Square, though it isn’t a square. It’s a side street. About 3,000 people showed up to hear a whole evening of anarchist speeches, by the time it ended, there were about 500 people still in the street. And just as it was breaking up, the Chicago Police which were out in major force started to move up the street in formation to clear out the street. And at that moment, as the police were advancing up the street, somebody, it’s still a point of argument today, um, tossed a homemade bomb into the police line.
It exploded in the police line. It killed seven policemen and injured any number of more, and those who were still standing, the policemen who were still standing, then opened fire on the crowd. They killed four people in the crowd, and injured dozens of people. That’s the famous Haymarket tragedy. What happened subsequently is the Chicago authorities indicted the union leadership, and particularly the anarchist movement in Chicago.
The Knights of Labor essentially collapsed after that. And it was a couple of years later that the International Socialist movement, in commemoration of these events from 1886, created this International Workers’ Day, May Day.
CASA: What have been the outcomes of May Day being established?
BOYLE: So it really depends country to country that, as I mentioned before, in the United States, May Day certainly has people who engage in activism, and actually more in recent years than an awfully long time, but it never became, or it hasn’t in an awfully long time, become this kind of center of working class activism out in the streets.
But there are other nations where it certainly became that and maintains that around the world. Often ones that have stronger socialist traditions than the United States has.
CASA: Do you have any thoughts on what might be behind-
BOYLE: Oh, gosh, yes
CASA: This sort of resurgence?
BOYLE: Yeah. That’s a great question. What’s happened in the United States, as has happened in other countries, is a growing concern about the gross inequalities in American society.
As part of that growing concern, there’s been a resurgence of left-wing activism in the United States. I think this is one of the higher points of working-class left-wing activism in the United States. There’s been a resurgence of anarchist movements. There’s been a resurgence of socialist movements that really is quite striking given the way that American politics has proceeded over the last 30, 40, 50 years. So I think that’s a good part of it.
CASA: It has been, you know, hundreds of years since May Day became, not exactly a holiday but something in the public consciousness. So thinking about how far back that is, where we are now, how have we grown in labor since then? And what still needs to be done?
BOYLE: It’s a really tough question. So we’ve gone backwards in terms of labor’s rights and labor’s place in society.
So after the May Day, the events at Haymarket Square in 1886, the labor movement in the United States kind of moved in two… It kind of split in two different directions. One was towards the organizing of skilled workers inside this kind of emerging industrial order, and that’s a side of labor that was driven by a brand-new organization formed the same year called the American Federation of Labor, by people who were in the Knights of Labor. The organizers basically said, “Look, the Knights were a great idea, but, you know, it’s a bit too dramatic. What we need to do is make our settlement with the industrial order that was then emerging.” Then there was another side that said, “No, we need to keep trying to organize on a massive scale.”
That strand, that second one, I think you could trace, in a complicated way, but you can trace up to the great triumphs of organized labor in the 1930s. So in the 1930s and then in the 1940s, workers suddenly were able to organize mass unions in the most important, what were most important, then, the most important industries.
The United States was never more economically egalitarian than it was in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the 1940s. We have moved so far away from that in the years since then. The labor movement in the United States has shrunken dramatically. We have one of the smallest labor movements of any industrialized nation in the world.
It’s tied with de-industrialization. It’s tied with changes in the law. It’s tied with changes in politics. But I think the most fundamental transformation that goes all the way back to the Knights is that what the Knights of Labor took as its core principle was they wanted to create what they called the cooperative commonwealth.
What they wanted to say, what they said over and over again, is that what industrialization was doing was creating this intense individualism in American society, and they insisted that’s un-American.
We also, at our founding, believed that once you’ve secured rights, what people are also obligated to do is to commit themselves to the greater good.
What they were saying is, “We’re losing that, and we need to restore it.” We are now in a society where individualism has become so powerful that people can’t even imagine a society where your commitment is to the greater good. And what the labor movement does kind of inherently is say, “No, we need to be committed to each other.”
That’s what the labor movement stands for in the United States in the great scheme of things, is this argument that has long been there about what’s the nature of American society and what are our obligations to each other.
CASA: I think that that’s a really great place to end. So thank you so much for talking with me today.
BOYLE: Sure. It’s always fun. Thank you.
Kevin Boyle is a professor of American History at Northwestern University. Currently, over 1000 demonstrations and events are planned nationwide in observance of May Day.
For WNUR News, I’m Sophia Casa