Whose labor day is it really?

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the September 1.1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Who founded Labor Day -- and what difference does it make?

Probably not much -- or does it? It's been 113 years since 25,000 workers from 53 unions marched through New York City's Union Square in the nation's first Labor Day parade on September 5, 1882. And it's been 101 years since President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day an official holiday.

Most of us were taught -- to the extent that we were taught anything about labor history -- that Peter J. McGuire was the founder of Labor Day. But in 1968 the International Association of Machinists (IAM) challenged that version of history.

The headline article of the Sept. 5, 1968 Machinist said, "It's time to toast the real Maguire," and went on to document the claim that Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, N.J., was the real father of Labor Day.

W. Willard Wirtz, then secretary of labor, settled the matter at the next IAM convention. "There is no question as to who is the father of Labor Day," he told the delegates, " ... so far as the Department of Labor is concerned, he is Matt Maquire, the machinist."

But what difference does it make? Isn't it enough that there is a Labor Day -- a day that recognizes the contributions of the millions of working men and women who create the nation's wealth?

If all that's involved is setting history straight, we could end here. But there's more to history than great men and women. There are also ideas -- and history is the clash of ideas just as it is the battle between classes -- between those who work for a living and those live off those who work. And that helps to explain why, for nearly 75 years, Peter J. McGuire was passed off as the father of Labor Day.

According to Murray Zuckoff, whose research did much to straighten the historical record, Maguire was a socialist -- a special kind of socialist. As Zuckoff put it, Maguire was "a man deeply imbued with the ideas of Marx." In today's world he would probably be a member of the Communist Party.

That -- Maguire's deep commitment to socialism as a follower of Karl Marx -- was enough to send shivers up the spine of America's ruling elite and their supporters in the leadership of the labor movement. Thus, as they saw it, the need to find a "founder" for Labor Day: someone not "tainted" as an advocate of socialism -- a society based on common ownership of the means of producing wealth and distributing it, a society where those who create the wealth share equitably in the fruits of their labor.

That person was Peter J. McGuire, conservative head of New York's Carpenters Union, who once urged "the propriety" of setting aside a day for labor at a New York Central Labor Union meeting. After that it was easy -- and McGuire stood beside the president as Cleveland made it official in 1894.

Only the capitalists -- the class workers call "the Bosses" or "Big Business" -- benefit from division in the ranks of workers. Thus the development of "divide and rule" -- a tactic the capitalist class here has refined to the nth degree.

Part of that tactic is to keep the U.S. working class and its unions separated from the world working class movement and from the ideas of socialists and Communists. That is why, when the powers that be finally acceded to the workers' demands for a national holiday recognizing labor, they set it for September while workers in other countries celebrate their holiday on May Day.

In this way, American workers were further separated from their brothers and sisters in other countries -- a tragedy made even more tragic because it was AFL President Samuel Gompers who asked the international labor movement, at that time led by associates of Karl Marx, to establish an international day of labor solidarity to commemorate the May 1, 1886 strike by American workers for an 8-hour day!

Another essential of "divide and rule" is to deny people their heritage, to convince them that things have always been the way they are and that nothing can -- or need -- be done about it.

Another way is to deny or distort the contributions that syndicalists like "Big Bill" Haywood, socialists like Eugene V. Debs and Communists like William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Gus Hall made to the struggles of American workers. And, when it comes to Labor Day, create and perpetuate the myth that someone -- anybody but a socialist -- was the father of Labor Day.

Without the men and women who shared a vision of a just society, where no person could profit from the work of another -- without the struggles they led and the ideas they fought for -- the American labor movement and, for that matter, American society would be much different from what it is today.