As some of you know, my mom passed away a few weeks ago. Her funeral is in a few more. I’m working on the eulogy, and today I went through a box of things my grandma gave to me from when mom was young. It was like a window into a world I never saw - one where she wasn’t a mom, but a child, a young woman, with dreams and hopes. I saw so much of myself in her things. A treasure box full of foreign coins from her travels and a big hunk of sparkly pyrite (mom and I both loved to collect rocks). A sketchbook full of drawings, most half-finished. She was a better artist than I, but I have a sketches and drawings, some done, some half-finished, in my things, too. And plenty of treasure rocks.
I think Mom was a romantic at heart, just like me (or perhaps more accurately, I’m just like her). When I was growing up, we always celebrated holidays no one else seemed to. Old-fashioned ones, like May Day. We’d make pretty paper cones, and fill them with candy and flowers, and I would take them to the neighbors, hang them on the front door, ring the doorbell, and run away. Maybe we only did it one year - I don’t remember. But clearly it left a mark on my memory.
Making May baskets used to be a more widespread, but these days hardly anyone seems to do it. Perhaps because we’ve made the out of doors far less conducive to walking to our neighbors’ houses. I grew up in a house built in 1901, with plenty of mature trees, sidewalks, and within walking distance from my neighborhood elementary school. Where I live now even the local elementary school doesn’t have sidewalks outside.
May Day has its roots in the Pagan European holiday of Beltane - the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. Historically it’s a fertility celebration, and many an innocent child has danced around a May pole without fully realizing the symbolism behind the thing they’re twining ribbons around. For Mom, I think it was always more about the flowers, which she loved, and the end of winter in North Dakota, which, as folks recently have seen, can hang on for a lot longer than anyone expects.
I have spent the last decade or so slowly building up flower beds around my little rented house - the daffodils come in first, then the grape hyacinth, then the bleeding heart (and now Dutchman’s Breeches, too!), then the second crop of daffodils - the double-ruffled and multi-flowered narcissus that smell so sweet. The lilacs and dogwoods and shadbush (a.k.a. juneberry) are just starting to bloom, and the peonies, columbine, lily of the valley, hosta, and coral bells are all coming up, too. The skies seem brighter, the air cleaner, and seeing bees return, especially my favorite bumble bees, always gives me a boost. I think Mom got that same boost from flowers and gardening and the natural world.
The other obscure holiday we started celebrating when I was in high school was Walpurgisnacht, which was last night, April 30th. Our local Swedish Society would have a potluck and then go out to a rural farmer’s field where the year’s deadwood and downed trees were burned in an enormous bonfire. Fiddling (often by me!), dancing, Swedish songs, and toasting ourselves in the chilly April evening air. I love all of the obscure Swedish holidays, but that is perhaps the most obscure and my most favorite. The slightly darker sister to the more innocent (well, these days, anyway) May Day.
May Day is also International Workers’ Day. Although it’s scarcely celebrated in the United States at all these days, the labor roots of May Day were created in the United States. After two years of deliberation and planning, on May 1, 1886, the American Federation of Labor declared a general strike in support of an eight hour workday. Between 200-300,000 people struck nationwide; 30,000-60,000 of them in Chicago alone. Although several states, including Illinois, had passed laws in the 1860s guaranteeing an eight hour workday, the laws were poorly written, rife with loopholes, and rarely enforced.
In Chicago, IL, workers were striking at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which made agricultural implements including the famous McCormick reaper. But the company brought in strikebreakers, protected by police. As the strikers protested the strike breakers on May 3, Chicago police fired into the crowd, killing at least two people.
The following day, strikers gathered in Haymarket Square for another protest, this time against police brutality. The protest was much smaller, and by end of the day, only 200-300 people remained. Over 170 armed Chicago police turned out to attack, when someone threw a dynamite bomb, which killed one officer and wounded dozens more. In the darkness and confusion, police fired at each other. Seven officers were killed, but only one from the bomb - the rest from a combination of shrapnel from the bomb and friendly fire. An additional sixty were wounded. Between four and eight civilians were also killed, and countless others wounded.
The police, reluctant to admit that they had wounded their own, claimed the strikers had returned fire. Martial law was declared and remained in effect for eight weeks in Chicago. The police arrested hundreds of labor activists and anarchist political operatives, subjecting them to beatings and shutting down the anarchist press. They ultimately charged over thirty people as culprits of the bombing. A sham trial of eight of them, all of them major leaders in the anarchist movement (The Chicago Tribune offered to pay jurors for a guilty verdict) found them all guilty and sentenced seven to death. One died by suicide, four were executed, and the remaining three were held until they were pardoned in 1893 - seven years later. Even at the time, the trial was widely considered to be a mockery of justice nearly everywhere except Chicago.1
Nearly six months later, in October of 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated and opened to the public. The irony is not lost on me.
The “Haymarket Affair,” as it is often now innocuously called, had two ultimate consequences. It strengthened socialism, anarchism, and communism abroad, and nearly destroyed them in the United States. The wild-eyed, foreign-born anarchist with a bomb became a convenient boogeyman for those opposed to modifying the extremely profitable status quo. In Chicago, the backlash against Haymarket was swift and cruel. Companies who had agreed to shorter workdays reneged on their promises. Subsequent strikes largely failed. But although the event may have set back workers’ rights in the United States, it didn’t quell them. In 1889 the Second International Socialist Committee declared May 1st to be International Workers’ Day, in part to memorialize the events of Haymarket and 1886.
Despite this, just under a decade later, things hadn’t changed much. In 1894, in the midst of a severe economic depression caused by the Panic of 1893, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. The Depression had caused Pullman to lay off workers as railroad use slowed, but many lived in company towns. And while wages were cut and people were laid off, rents were not reduced. When George Pullman refused arbitration with his employees and fired those who had come to him with grievances. They went on a wildcat strike on May 11, 1894. Other railroad workers joined the strike, refusing to operate or service trains that pulled Pullman cars.
By June the Pullman Strike and its supporters had completely snarled railroad traffic across the Midwest. In one incident, frustrated strikers set fire to train cars, some of which held U.S. Mail. President Grover Cleveland got involved, issuing a federal injunction against the American Railroad Union and sending federal troops (against the wishes of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld) to get the trains moving again. Enraged by the presence of federal troops and cut of from communication with labor organizers by the injunction, 6,000 strikers rioted, destroying railcars in Chicago and clashing with police, state militia, and federal troops.
Sadly, the strike was ultimately unsuccessful. The violence turned the tide of public opinion against them, and many railroads started hiring non-union strikebreakers. Pullman offered to rehire all the strikers, on the condition that they sign a pledge to never join a union. But it did make one difference. Labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, who had been arrested and defended by lawyer Clarence Darrow (who would gain fame two decades later in the Scopes-Monkey Trial), shifted from labor organizing to political activism as a socialist. He helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the Wobblies), ran for president on the Socialist ticket five times, and became one of the most famous socialists in America.
By the fall of 1894, eager to put the disastrous Pullman Strikes behind him, President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a federal holiday. But not May Day - concerned about its association with socialists and anarchists, he instead chose to elevate the less-radical Labor Day holiday as it was celebrated by some states already in the fall. It was first celebrated in September of 1882 in New York City. As an olive branch, it was a sneaky one. Like many subsequent presidents, he was more interested in preserving the status quo, quelling unrest, and ensuring the rich stayed rich than he was in worker protections. But this, too, would have consequences. Thanks to his inaction, the Panic of 1893 turned into a profound Depression that lasted until 1897.
The issues of income inequality, labor exploitation, and lack of social safety net did not solve themselves. Additional bank panics, recessions, and depressions plagued the United States in 1902-1904, 1907, 1910-11, 1913-14 (which resulted in the formation of the Federal Reserve), 1916-1917 (not usually noted in economic histories, but we’ll get to that in a minute), and 1918-1919, following the end of the First World War. A post-war agricultural recession plagued the 1920s as overextended farmers, who had ramped up production for the war effort, watched prices plummet as Europe recovered. The stock market crash of 1929, brought on by a lack of business regulation, stock market speculation, and an overextension of credit, sent the United States and the world into a global Great Depression. It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt copied most of his cousin’s policies to create the New Deal that we finally got a social safety net and business regulation.
So what does all this have to do with food history, you might be asking yourselves? The cost of living. And living means eating. Pullman car workers making less money while still owing high rents meant less food to eat. A common theme throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The French Revolution was built on a foundation of bread riots. Southern bread riots during the Civil War helped undermine the Confederacy. Meat boycotts in 1902, 1910, and food boycotts in 1917 all led to food-related riots in the U.S. Internationally, also in 1917, women-led bread riots in Russia led to a political revolution that ultimately took down an empire. After the First World War, the federal government engaged in food aid for the explicit purpose of avoiding the spread of “bolshevism,” “anarchy,” and other “red” ideologies. Better to spend a little now, and avoid a revolution that might shake up the world order.
How does all of this fit in to today? Well, for one, that lingering stigma against socialism (Thanks, McCarthy!) hasn’t gone away as quickly as some progressives would like. But even so, organizing, shopping for, preparing, and serving food (plus the washing up after) are all labor, whether you get paid to do them or not. We don’t often recognize them as such in our modern society, but we should. In fact some people, including me, think that the 19th century eight hour work day slogan - “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for recreation” doesn’t really apply anymore if you have to do 8 hours of paid labor, have a long commute, and have to do several more hours of unpaid labor (including childcare, food prep, and household labor) when you get home. The 8 hour workday was a little easier when you could support a family one one income, so the other person could stay home and devote their labor, albeit unpaid, to household management.
So this May Day, go ahead and get the person who makes your food some flowers (even if it’s yourself), read up on some labor history, and give some thought to today’s state of employment. My florist/gardener mom, who also loved to discuss politics and was an avid consumer of history, would be proud.
I’m going to spend mine doing some good, old-fashioned, unpaid, household labor. And while I’m not going to buy myself any flowers, I think my oodles of daffodils and bleeding heart might get a trimming so some of them can come indoors.
Happy May Day, everyone.
If you’d like to read more about the high cost of living and World War I, check out these past Food Historian blog posts:
Christmas, 1918 - discusses the role of postwar food aid in avoiding anarchy and bolshevism.
Onion Markets, Then and Now - discusses the 1917 food boycotts and their effects on farmers
Read a more in-depth account of the Haymarket Affair from the Northern Illinois University
Thank you for this terrific piece, Sarah.
Also, again, my condolences. So glad you have these childhood treasures of your Mom. ❤️
Great!