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Labor Day [1]

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Date: 2024-09-01  

Labor Day is traditionally celebrated with a day off from work, end-of-summer picnics, and Presidential speeches. In a 1902 Labor Day speech in Rutland, Vermont, President Theodore Roosevelt told the assembled crowd, “The law of successful national life is the law of work." On September 1, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the country that “American labor now bears a tremendous responsibility in the winning of this most brutal, most terrible of all wars.” On September 2, 1963, President John F. Kennedy declared “The history of the United States is in vital respects the history of labor. Free men and women, working for a better life for themselves and their children, settled a continent, built a society, and created and diffused an abundance hitherto unknown to history.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan honored “some of the greatest heroes of the American story,” working men and women. In his 2023 Labor Day speech, President Joseph Biden was proud to call himself “the most pro-union president, according to the experts, in American history.”

Unofficial Labor Day parades and celebrations started in New York City in 1882, organized by the Central Labor Council. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday. New York, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Jersey made it an official one year later. By 1894, when Labor Day became a federal holiday, it was already recognized in thirty of the forty-four states. It was signed into federal law by President Grover Cleveland as a counter to the more radical May Day and because the 1890s was a period of labor unrest and mass strikes.

One of the more radical Labor Day speeches was delivered by Eugene Debs in 1903 in Chicago, Illinois. Debs was a President of the American Railway Union, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States five times. In 1920 he ran for President while in prison for challenging U.S. entry into World War I. Below are excerpts from the speech.

Eugene Debs: “In a Just Society, Every Day Would Be Labor Day”

Labor Day must be regarded not as a privilege to be thankful for, but as a right to be enjoyed. We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day. The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.

Upon every hand we see the signs of preparation. The working class are mustering their mighty forces for political and economic conquest. While the capitalists are capitalizing, the industrial conditions are revolutionizing, the working class are organizing, the Socialist sentiment is crystallizing and in due time the cooperative commonwealth will be materializing. The liberation of the toilers of earth from the bonds of wage slavery is a mission worthy of the great international movement historically commissioned to render that inestimable service to humanity.

Courage is needed and intelligence, and both will be furnished in abundance by the working class itself. Organization, based upon the mutual economic interests of the working class, is the demand of the day. All workers, men, women and children, of all races and countries are included in the call to action. The only line that is drawn is between the working class and their exploiters and that must be drawn straight and reach around the globe.

Workingmen, this is the day for you to realize that your interests are the same, that divided you are helpless, that united you can and will conquer the earth! United political action will place the working class in control of government, and the abolition of capitalism will inevitably follow.

To work for wages, no matter how high, or how short the work-day, is to acknowledge a master and be at his mercy. The full-grown workingman of the future will be free with his fellow workers to employ themselves, be their own masters and enjoy all the fruit of their labors. Let every intelligent workingman resolve this day to do his share to abolish the wage system and emancipate the sons and daughters of toil.

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