It's Labor Day... But How Did It Originate?

It's Monday, September seventh. Labor Day. Most people know it as the end of summer, the last barbecue before fall, the weekend when you're not supposed to wear white. Almost nobody knows it exists because thirty workers were shot to death by federal troops in a Chicago railyard, and the president who sent them needed a way to say sorry without actually saying sorry.

The town was called Pullman, Illinois. It sat just south of Chicago. About twelve thousand people lived there. Every house, every store, every church, every school — all of it was owned by one man: George Pullman, who had made his fortune building railroad sleeping cars. The Pullman Palace Car Company didn't just employ the town's workers. It owned the town. It owned their homes. It owned the shops where they bought food. It owned the church where they prayed.

This was a company town, and Pullman ran it accordingly. He believed a clean, orderly environment would produce clean, orderly workers. The streets were paved. The lawns were manicured. But there was no elected government. There were no independent newspapers. If you lived in Pullman, you rented from George Pullman. You bought your groceries from George Pullman. You lit your home with gas you paid George Pullman for. And if you complained, you were evicted.

In 1893, a nationwide depression hit. Pullman laid off hundreds of workers and cut wages for the ones he kept by about thirty percent. The rent and the price of goods in the company stores did not change. Workers were going home with poverty wages after the deductions came out. Families were hungry.

A delegation of workers went to George Pullman to ask for relief. They didn't ask for higher wages. They just asked that rents come down to match what they were now earning. He refused to meet with them. He ordered them fired. On May eleventh, 1894, nearly four thousand workers at the Pullman factory walked off the job and went on strike.

What happened next turned a local strike into a national crisis. The American Railway Union, led by a man named Eugene V. Debs, voted to support the Pullman workers. The union declared a sympathy boycott: its members would refuse to handle any train pulling a Pullman sleeping car. This was devastating. Pullman had a near-monopoly on sleeper cars west of Chicago. The boycott effectively shut down rail traffic across twenty-seven states, from Chicago to the West Coast. Mail delivery stopped. Commerce stopped. The country's arteries were blocked.

The railroads panicked. A group called the General Managers Association — representing Chicago's railroad companies — appealed to the federal government to shut the strike down. And in Washington, an attorney general named Richard Olney found his justification. During a Debs speech in Blue Island, Illinois, on June twenty-ninth, some people in the crowd set fires to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. mail train. Olney used that single act of violence — committed by people in a crowd, not by the union — to get a federal injunction against the entire strike.

This was the first time in American history a federal injunction was used to break a strike. It forbade Debs and the union from doing anything to support or direct the work stoppage. On July third, President Grover Cleveland sent twelve thousand federal troops into Chicago. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld was livid. He had already called out state militia to prevent violence. He told Cleveland the federal intervention was unconstitutional and unnecessary. Cleveland ignored him.

Until the troops arrived, the strike had been mostly peaceful. That changed immediately. On July seventh, 1894, after days of building tension, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of strikers and their supporters. Thirty people died. Dozens more were wounded. Railcars were burned. The strike collapsed.

And five days before sending those troops, Cleveland had signed something else into law.

On June twenty-eighth, 1894 — the very same week he was preparing to dispatch federal soldiers to Chicago — President Grover Cleveland signed a bill making the first Monday in September a federal holiday. It was called Labor Day.

This was not a coincidence. Cleveland was a Democrat. Labor unions were a key Democratic constituency. He was about to send troops to crush the biggest labor action in American history, and with midterm elections coming up in November, he needed to do something — anything — to signal that he was still on the side of the working man. So he gave them a day off.

But why the first Monday in September? Why not May first, which was already celebrated as International Workers' Day across most of the industrialized world? That goes back to something even bloodier.

On May fourth, 1886, a labor rally demanding the eight-hour workday gathered at Haymarket Square in Chicago. As police moved to disperse the crowd, someone — to this day nobody knows who — threw a dynamite bomb. Seven officers were killed. At least four civilians died. In the aftermath, eight anarchists were convicted in a trial that legal scholars now consider a sham. Four were hanged. One killed himself in prison.

The Haymarket Affair made May first radioactive in America. Socialist and anarchist movements in Europe seized on the date. By 1889, the Second International in Paris had declared May first International Workers' Day. Workers in dozens of countries marched under red banners. To an American president in the 1890s, linking a federal holiday to May first meant linking it to socialism, anarchism, and a bombing that had terrified the political establishment.

So Cleveland picked September. The date wasn't random. Union workers in New York had been organizing a "labor holiday" on the first Monday of September since 1882. In 1887, Oregon became the first state to make it official. By 1894, thirty states already had their own September Labor Day laws. It was domestic. It had no connection to the Haymarket bombing. It carried no ideological weight. It was a parade and a picnic, not a rally. A barbecue, not a red flag.

There is even a dispute over who actually founded it. Two different men — both New York labor organizers, both involved in the first parade on September fifth, 1882, both with nearly identical last names. Peter J. McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, is usually given the credit. But the New Jersey Historical Society has argued it was actually Matthew Maguire, a machinist and secretary of the Central Labor Union. Matthew Maguire also happened to be a committed socialist who later ran for vice president on the Socialist Labor Party ticket in 1896 — which may explain why the more conservative AFL preferred to credit the other guy.

It's a perfect irony. The holiday might have been founded by a socialist whose name was erased from the record. It was made federal by a president who needed cover for shooting workers. And the date was chosen specifically to avoid any association with the international labor movement.

Eugene Debs went to prison. He served six months in Woodstock, Illinois, for violating the injunction against the strike. While he was inside, friends visited and brought him books. One of them gave him a copy of Karl Marx. Debs walked out of jail a committed socialist. He went on to run for president of the United States five times on the Socialist Party ticket, once from a prison cell after being convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing World War One. In the 1912 election, he won nearly a million votes — six percent of the popular vote — despite having no advertising budget, no party machine, and no access to the newspapers that were owned by the people he was trying to unseat.

George Pullman's reputation never recovered. A federal commission investigated the strike and concluded that his company town was "un-American." Other industrialists called him a "God-damned fool" for refusing to negotiate. A court forced the Pullman Company to sell off the town, which was eventually annexed into Chicago. But Pullman himself refused to even discuss what had happened. When he died in 1897, his family buried him in a vault covered in reinforced concrete because they were afraid union workers would dig up his body.

And the holiday? It detached from its history almost completely. Union membership in the United States has fallen from about thirty-five percent of the workforce in the nineteen-fifties to roughly ten percent today. The fashion rule about not wearing white after Labor Day gets more public attention than any labor issue. The holiday most Americans celebrate is not the one Cleveland signed into law. It's not the one Peter McGuire or Matthew Maguire organized for. It's a day off that exists because a president gunned down workers and then tried to buy back their union's support with a barbecue.

More than ninety countries celebrate workers on May first. The United States and Canada are the only ones that chose September. It's worth remembering why. Not because the date didn't matter — because it mattered so much that the government went out of its way to pick a different one.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.