For most Cantabrigians today, as well as most people across the nation, Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer. Students and teachers prepare for the return to school and white pants make their exit from the “approved” seasonal wardrobe – at least among those who adhere to long-standing rules of fashion. Many see the long weekend as a chance to get away one last time before the fall routine begins, and the holiday is marked by cookouts, beach trips and blowout sales.
Few people today know the history of Labor Day and how it came to be celebrated locally and around the country, but this holiday has long been seen as an opportunity for working people to advocate for higher wages, better working conditions and public appreciation of their critical role in American cultural and economic life.
Rooted in the late 19th century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity and well-being, Labor Day was first celebrated on the state and local levels at varying times during the year depending on location. After municipal ordinances were passed in 1885 and 1886, a movement developed to secure state legislation. New York was the first state to introduce a bill, but Oregon was the first to pass a law recognizing Labor Day – on Feb. 21, 1887.
During 1887, four more states – Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York – passed laws creating a Labor Day holiday. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska and Pennsylvania had followed suit. Twenty-three more states had adopted the holiday by 1894; on June 28 of that year Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday.
The purpose of Labor Day, according to those who championed its addition to the official holiday calendar, was to celebrate the economic contributions of working people to their communities and to recognize workers as fully developed members of society with families, cultural and religious traditions and intellectual pursuits.
The sporting events, concerts, plays and picnics that had long been part of other holiday celebrations became integrated quickly into the ways Cambridge residents marked Labor Day, with many treating it as a hard-earned day off in a culture whose working classes often labored seven days a week. Cambridge’s workers and families enjoyed baseball games, boating parties and running races at the city’s fields, parks and waterfronts, and members of the city’s increasingly popular cycling clubs took advantage of the long weekend to plan excursions to destinations in New Hampshire, Maine and the Berkshires. Local stores had sales on everything from food to clothing to furniture, and church fairs and picnics abounded.
But Labor Day was also a symbol of the importance of working people to the city’s – and the nation’s – economic prosperity, and the holiday also functioned as a means of both celebrating and contesting these contributions. Cambridge’s first official Labor Day was celebrated in 1887, and already there was talk in the local newspapers of divisions within the working class over the holiday’s legal status.
An August 1887 article in The Cambridge Press notes that “the feature of the day’s celebration will be a grand parade of representatives of all the industries of Boston and vicinity through the principal streets of the Hub. In this procession many of our local trade organizations will participate.” For the first years of Labor Day celebrations, Cambridge’s workers marched in the Boston parade, which integrated many surrounding communities. This combined effort represented a united show of worker strength, underscoring the idea that laborers were part of a regional and nationwide movement.
Not all workers were pleased with the institution of Labor Day as a federal holiday.
On the same day in August 1887 that The Cambridge Press reported on the enthusiastic participation of Cambridge trade unions in the Boston parade, The Cambridge Chronicle states that “to all workingmen this ought to be a great day, but among the strongest opponents last winter to establishing another holiday were many of those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. They argued that already there were too many holidays, so many, in fact, that they were obliged to work on some of them to make both ends meet.” The local and national legislatures may have made symbolic gestures to recognize working people in creating the Labor Day holiday, but for many workers it meant (another) day without wages that left them scrambling to make up for lost revenue.
The broader climate of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also contributed to the division in views on labor in general and the Labor Day holiday in particular. During what is known as the Gilded Age of roughly 1870-1900, a small number of industrial capitalists gained a tremendous amount of wealth and power as they consolidated their control over large sectors of production. It was a time of great extravagance among the elite class and of a growing consciousness among workers of their importance to the economic system – as well as their exploitation by owners and managers.
Strikes and other mass labor actions began to dominate the headlines, the most notable being the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago that followed workers’ protests in support of an eight-hour workday.
Calls for safer working conditions, fairer hours and increased pay spread across the country and raised public awareness of the plight of the working class, even as they caused division in public opinion about the role of laborers in society. These tensions were exacerbated by the socialist movements sweeping across Europe and other parts of the world during the period, as many workers sought to realign themselves based on class rather than on national identity, thereby threatening established political systems at home and abroad.
At home in Cambridge, many local labor unions continued to march in the Boston Labor Day parades as a show of regional unity, even as small Cambridge-specific parades began to pop up in the 1890s. Throughout the period, disputes continued about the “proper” way to celebrate the holiday, as well as who exactly qualified as “working class”; a 1900 article in The Cambridge Tribune argues that “a ludicrous feature of the Labor Day parade in Boston was the appearance of 1,000 white-jacketed bartenders in line, who were quite the feature of the procession. A bartender masquerading as a workingman is a sight to make a cat laugh.” To some in turn-of-the-century Cambridge, not all who labored were fit to be called “workingmen,” and the perceived intrusion of “higher-order” workers was an insult to those whose labor was more physically demanding.
These kinds of disputes about who and what was considered worthy of celebration on Labor Day would continue well into the 20th century, even as the holiday became a fixture on the public calendar.
For many contemporary readers, Labor Day remains a day of rest and relaxation – a reality made possible in large part by the contributions of the working class to Cambridge’s cultural and economic landscape. As we celebrate with cookouts, pool parties and weekend getaways, we cannot forget the history of the holiday and the efforts of working people and labor organizers that have enabled our celebrations.
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