The Day That Got Erased
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Labor · Memory · May 1st
The Day That Got Erased
May Day started here. In Chicago. In blood and a courtroom packed with business leaders. We forgot it on purpose.
Today is May 1st. Most people I know will not think anything of it. Maybe a passing awareness that somewhere, people are marching — in some other country, for some vague cause, under a red flag. That's the image. That's what stuck.
It stuck because someone worked hard to make it stick.
I have been turning this over for a while now — the specific mechanism of forgetting. Not the accidental kind, where something just fades. The deliberate kind. The kind where you rename a thing, file it under a different drawer, and wait for the original to go quiet. That is what happened to May Day in America. The holiday was born here, in the stockyards and the rail yards and the shop floors of Chicago, and then we — or more precisely, the people with the most to lose from workers organizing — methodically buried it.
In 1886, more than 300,000 workers walked off their jobs across the country on a single day. Not in response to a single event. In response to years of 14-hour days, of children losing fingers in machines, of a life expectancy in some industries that didn't clear your mid-twenties. They were asking for eight hours. Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of what they called their own.
The companies responded the way companies respond when they feel the ground shift. They called in the Pinkertons. They called in the police. Two days after that first May Day, at the McCormick Reaper Works, strikers were shot dead on the picket line.
A rally was called in Haymarket Square the following evening. Families came. The mayor came and watched from the crowd. A speaker addressed a few thousand people, calmly, and the mayor left, satisfied that nothing was wrong. Then the police moved in anyway. A bomb went off — thrown by someone never identified, possibly an agent of the state — and in the chaos that followed, police fired into the crowd. Several civilians died. Several officers died, most likely from their own crossfire.
Eight organizers were arrested. Three of them weren't even at Haymarket when the bomb went off. All eight were convicted. Four were hanged. The jury was made up of businessmen.
The trial was not about what happened at Haymarket. It was about what these men believed. About what it meant that workers were organizing at all. The verdict was delivered not on evidence but on ideology — on the idea that certain ideas, held by certain kinds of people, constituted a threat worth hanging.
After the executions, the backlash moved fast. Anarchism became synonymous with terrorism. Socialism became un-American. The image that got printed in newspapers — the bearded immigrant, the bomb, the dagger — was a deliberate construction. A story told to make forgetting feel like common sense.
I think about the deliberateness of that a lot. The early 20th century U.S. government went so far as to establish "Law and Order Day" on May 1st — a counter-holiday, installed in the exact same date slot, designed to crowd out the memory. That's not passive forgetting. That's active erasure. Someone sat in a room and decided: we will put something else here.
May Day is now an official holiday in 66 countries. It is not a holiday here, in the country where it began.
I don't spend a lot of time in the language of movements or causes. That's not the register I work in, and most of the time when I encounter it, something feels performed. But the Haymarket story sits with me in a different way — not as ideology but as a straightforward account of what people were willing to risk so that other people could work fewer hours. People died for the eight-hour day. That is not a metaphor.
We didn't inherit the weekend. Someone fought for it, and the people who fought for it lost everything.
I have been in jobs that asked a lot. Most people have. The calculus of how much of yourself you give to work — how many hours, how much wear — is something most of us negotiate quietly, privately, as if it's a personal failing to need rest. That framing didn't arrive from nowhere. It was cultivated, over a long time, by people who benefited from it.
The men who were convicted at Haymarket weren't saints. Some of them published things that were violent in their language and their imagination. But they were convicted for their beliefs, not their actions. And the world they were responding to — where children worked until their bodies gave out, where death on the job was just a cost of doing business — that world was also violent. It was just a violence everyone had agreed to call normal.
The monument at Haymarket has a line engraved on it: The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.
August Spies said that from the gallows.
I'm not sure what to do with that. I'm not sure I'm supposed to do anything with it, other than hold it, and not forget that it happened, and understand that the conditions that made May 1, 1886 necessary didn't vanish when the bodies were cut down. They evolved. They got more sophisticated. They got better at making themselves invisible.
Today is May 1st. It started here.
What actually happened
- The eight-hour workday was declared by organized labor in 1884 — without employer consent — to take effect May 1, 1886.
- On that date, over 300,000 workers across the U.S. went on strike in the first May Day in history.
- Two days later, strikers were killed at the McCormick plant. A rally at Haymarket Square ended in a bomb, a police fusillade, and deaths on both sides.
- Eight organizers were tried for murder. Most weren't there. All were convicted. The jury was composed of businessmen.
- Four were executed. Three were later pardoned. The governor called the trial a travesty.
- May Day is now an official holiday in 66 countries. It is not recognized in the United States, where it originated.