by
BILL
BENNETT

THE STORY OF ~MAY DAY

The

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AY DAY—the day af the workers—was born out of

holiday

working class struggle. May Day is not a z
any more than a respite in a battle means the en
of the fighting. It is but a momentary pause in the midst
Of a war which gives us an opportunity to calculate our
losses and gains and to redress our forces for further ad-

vance,

The struggle of the American workers for the eight-

hour day and the Chicago Mar-

S! These are the historic
Toots from which spring the May
ay we know. The workers of
‘the McCormick Harvester Com-
Pany in Chicago along with 80,000
other workers in that city, Struck
Work on May 1, 1886, The issue
Was the eight-hour day. On May

€y held a meeting on the
Picket line at the McCormick
Plant which was attacked by the
Police in a most brutal manner.
Six of the strikers were killed
8nd many wounded.

On the following day an in-
digation meeting was held at
“@ymarket Square to protest
’gainst the brutality of the po-
ice. The meeting was peaceful
Until almost the close when
Someone threw a bomb. Un-
doubtedly, a police agent! Four
Workers and seven policemen
Were killed.

Ten of the strike leaders were
atrested. One of them escaped
from prison, one died in jail,
She ratted. At the hypocritical
trial, presided over by that re-
Presentative of big business,
Udge Gary, one of them was
Sentenced to 15 years in the peni-
tentiary and the others were con-
demned to death by hanging.

Vo of them appealed for pardon
"nd had their sentences com-
Muted to life imprisonment from
Which they were released later
Y Gov. John P. Altgeld, who was
“envineeq of their innocence.

The other four, Parsons, Spies,

Scher and Engel, refused to
Plead for mercy and went to
their death like the heroes they
were. Their death on the scaf-
Old was a victory for the work-

ing class. The last words of
August Spies will be an inspira-
tion to our class as long as the
class struggle continues and a
treasured memory forever after:
‘The time will come when
our silence in the grave will be
more eloquent than the voices
you are strangling today.’
And the struggle for the eight-
hour day went on!
e.
N 1889, the first congress of the
Second International was held
in Paris, a revival of the Marx-
ist International which had been
destroyed by the reactionaries in
the labor movement 17 years be-
fore. At that congress a resolu-
tion originating in the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor the pre-

_vious year met with enthusiastic

acclaim by the whole congress-—
a resolution calling for support
for the eight-hour day move-
ment.

The congress decided that on
May 1, the following year, a
strike of all workers affiliated
to the International should take
place—for the eight-hour day.
Thus May ‘Day, conceived in the
struggle in Chicago, was born in
Paris in 1889 and was first cele-
brated in 1890 on an _ interna-
tional scale, ‘the first interna-

tional deed of the militant work-

ing class,’ Engels called it.
Engels was stirred by this
awakening of the workers. In
the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung, a few
days after the first May Day, he
wrote, ‘The most brilliant cele-
bration of the festival of the pro-

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other

letariat on the whole continent
was held in Vienna ... but Lonx
don put Vienna in the shade.’

And in a new preface he wrote
to the Communist Manifesto in
1890, he pointed to the full signi-
ficance of the first International
May Day “As I write these lines,”
he says, “the proletariat of
Europe and America is holding a
review of its forces; it is mobi-
lized for the first time as one
army, under one flag and fight-
ing for one immediate aim—an
.eight-hour working day estab-
lished by legal enactment, .
The spectacle we are now wit-
nessing will make the capital-
ists and landowners realize that
tuday the proletarians of all
lands are, in very truth, united.
If only Marx were with me to
see it with his own eyes!”

: = é

CROSS Europe and America

and into the colonial and sub-
jected countries, May Day.
spreads. And few of these May
Days have passed without the
spilling of workers’ blood. Paris,
Berlin, Milan, Madrid, Cleveland,
Montreal—in these and many
industrial -° centers, the
clubs, whips and bullets of
the gendarmes and police have
fallen on the workers in the May
Days of that half century.

From the eight-hour day slo-
gan, May Day grew in political
stature, until the concept of the
struggle of the working class
supplanted the demand for the
eight-hour day. The first great
response came from Russia. A
few days before May Day, 1912,
the tsar’s cossacks W.re tvvSeu ou
the striking miners of the Lena
goldfields in Siberia. The whole
world was shocked. 500 miners
were killed or wounded and on
May Day, 400,000 workers, in every
industrial center in that great
country, laid down their tools in
protest against the massacre ‘of
their fellow-workers.

May Day, 1916, in Berlin, saw
another example of the militant
workers in the tradition that has
been built around May Day. Karl
Liebknecht, the heroic leader of
the German youth, headed street
demonstrations against the im-
perialist war, in the face of the
whole German war-machine and
the revisionists in the Social De-
mocratic Party, his own party.

On May Day, 1919, despite the
‘opposition of the social demo-
cratic elements in the Socialist
Party of America, the workers

of Cleveland, led by Charlie Rut-

enberg, maintained the revolu-
tionary tradition of struggle in
their party and were set upon by
the state troopers and police, one
worker being killed and many in-
jured.

In 1929, the German Social
Democrats reached the apex of
their treason to the workers. A
Social Democratic government
was in power in Berlin. The S.D.
police president, Zorgiebel, issued
an edict that there was to be

no May Day celebration, no mass

demonstrations,
ades.

no street par-

Even Social Democrat workers
were amazed. The Kaiser, they
said, had never dared to go so
far as to forbid their May Day
demonstrations.

On May 1, they paraded in
spite of the S.D. edict. In two
districts particularly, Wedding
and’ Neukolin, they gathered for
the parades, Socialists and Com-
munists alike. The police at-
tempted to smash them up. The
workers fought back. Open bat-
tle surged in the streets. The
fighting lasted for four days and
the Social Democratic police bul-
lets did not select the Commun-
ists from the Social Democrats.
Thirty-three workers were killed
and hundreds wounded. The
police counted their own dead.
6

Te militant workers, in their

efforts to build and maintain
the tradition of May Day, did not
cnly have the bosses as oppon-
ents—they also had a section of
the labor movement to contend
with.

As early as the first May Day
in 1890, Engels wrote to Sorge,
“If next Sunday, a giant demon-
stration for the eight-hour day
is brought about here in London,
it is only Tussy (Eleanor Marx)
and Aveling we will have to
thank for it.”

These both belonged to the left
wing of the labor movement, as
Have most of those who have
made May Day what it is, and
they met with great opposition
from the reformist, social demo-
cratic elements who wanted to
make May Day into a Sunday
school picnic, ;

Even on the first May Day its
whole purpose would have been
distorted, the struggle in which
it was conceived would have
been covered up, it would
never have developed as a dem-
onstration of working-class pow-

er, of the will of the proletariat
to challenge the existing order
but would have become a thank-
offering of the revisers of Marx
to their capitalist masters, if
these traitors had been allowed
to have their way. But the work-
ers made May Day in spite of
them.
: e.

'HESE reformist, social demo-

cratic elements in the labor
movement were a worse handi-
cap to the establishment of May
Day than the bosses. They it was,
in Britain, in Germany, in the
U.S., in Canada and throughout
the capitalist world ,they whose
business it is to save capitalism,
who hate the fighting tradition of
May Day, who would split the
labor movement and make it
helpless on May Day as at all
other times, who tried to smother
it.

These people have opposed the
workers’ conception of May Day
ever since it became a working
class institution. These it was
who led the U.S. and Canadian
governments to believe they
could kill the May Day festival
of labor by giving the workers
a ‘legal Labor Day‘ in Septem-
ber. But that Labor Day can be
no substitute for May Day since
its inauguration was, of set pur-
pose, to draw the workers away
from May Day and everything
it symbolizes—the certainty of
working class emancipation from
capitalist exploitation.

On this May Day we may ex-
pect the flood-gates of the red-
baiters’ oratory to ‘open wide.
They will say that May Day is an
institution of foreign origin,
that it was foisted on the Ameri-
can and Canadian workers by the
‘Rooshians,’ that it is part of
some ‘plan’ to change our
American and Canadian way of
life. The whole history of May
Day casts that lie back in their
teeth for no part of the labor cal-
endar is so thoroughly identified
with the labor movement on this
continent, in its beginnings and
in its growth. It started as an
American institution and we are
proud to say that it has spread
to all other countries.

May it spread still further until
every worker becomes imbued
with the militant spirit of the
day and the ideas it symbolizes—
the forward surge of democracy
to the establishment of a so-
cialist society.