I have a complicated relationship with Labor Day. Growing up at the Jersey Shore, the holiday marked the end of summer and the return to school. Surfing and hanging out with friends gave way to alarm clocks, school buses, and homework. It also marked the departure of the summer crowds during the best season for the beach and waves. Our communities became small towns again.
America also has a complicated relationship with labor. Slavery fulfilled an insatiable desire for cheap labor on a continent with plentiful amounts of land and a shortage of workers. Later, young girls and women would provide low-cost labor in the mills of New England. Ultimately, waves of immigrants staffed our expanding manufacturing economy. We do not even celebrate Labor Day in May as the rest of the world does to avoid the odor of communism.
America’s adoption of a national day to recognize workers is largely thanks to Eugene Debs. The Encyclopedia Britannica sums up Debs’ early life. He “left home at age 14 to work in the railroad shops and later became a locomotive fireman. In 1875 he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, of which he was elected national secretary and treasurer in 1880. He also served as city clerk of Terre Houte (1879-83) and as a member of the Indiana legislature (1885).” *
Debs organized the 1894 strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. The resulting federal intervention caused the “deaths of more than a dozen workers” and the need to recognize labor became unavoidable. Congress passed an act creating Labor Day and on “June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.” *
Debs spent six months in prison for organizing the Pullman Boycott. As so often happens, jail-time radicalized him and in 1897 he left the Democratic Party to found the Socialist Party of America, running for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. Ultimately, Debs fell afoul of Woodrow Wilson’s war against free speech when he publicly opposed America’s participation in World War I. Convicted of sedition and sentenced to ten years, Debs lost his citizenship but managed to earn his greatest number of presidential votes from prison. **
My view of Labor Day has changed from my young days as a “clamdigger” in New Jersey. I see the fight for labor rights as an inseparable part of America’s continuing struggle to live by the Constitution and our founding ideals. I am not endorsing the ideas of Eugene Debs, but I am endorsing his right to have them, to express them freely, to form associations, and run for president. So, hats off to him for his bravery, to all of the men and women who dare to speak up, and to our fellow citizens who are always there to provide the goods and services necessary for a prosperous and civil society.
Happy Labor Day!
* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eugene-V-Debs
** https://debsfoundation.org/index.php/landing/debs-biography/