Odd Wisconsin Archive
To most of us, Labor Day is just the last long weekend of summer. But we have this long weekend only because more than a century ago working men and women insisted on public recognition of their contributions to American life.
The direct inspiration for Labor Day occurred in New York City on Tuesday, September 6, 1882, when 10,000 workers paraded through Manhattan demanding an eight-hour workday, then adjourned for speeches and a picnic. The organizers called it "Artisans' Day" and encouraged workers in other cities to follow their example. Within a few years, the practice had spread all across the country.
In Wisconsin, Labor Day became an official state holiday in 1893 and a day of great celebration for the Federated Trades Council of Milwaukee. This souvenir program from their 1900 celebration features articles on labor issues, labor stories and songs, and advertisements from sympathetic businesses. Historical pictures of Labor Day parades and celebrations from Milwaukee to Bayfield can be found at Wisconsin Historical Images.
This silk ribbon worn during an Artisan's Day parade in Milwaukee in the 1880s evokes the time when Labor Day meant something bigger than one last cookout. After parading through Milwaukee on Artisans' Day 1888, thousands of iron molders, carpenters, shoe and boot makers, cigar makers, iron and steel makers, printers, and stonecutters assembled Schlitz Park with their families for an afternoon of speeches in both English and German, athletic contests, and a grand ball.
Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894. President Grover Cleveland, after breaking the American Railway Union with considerable violence and loss of life, signed a bill making the first Monday in September a national holiday for American workers, in a vain attempt to win back their support.
Workers were not so easily fooled. The 1900 Milwaukee program mentioned above includes this advice:
"Point me to one state that has ever passed any laws favorable to the working man. And yet year after year we walk up to the polls and vote the old party ticket, and put our necks under the yoke of the capitalist just as the well-trained ox walks under his master's yoke, and then we wonder why we are no better off than the ox. The great majority of the working men realize that they have hands to work with and a stomach to feed, but they appear to have entirely forgotten that they have brains to reason with. Come now and let us reason together. Let's swear off being oxen and nominate and elect men from the ranks of labor, whose interests are our interests… We have been oxen long enough."
The Wisconsin Historical Society began actively collecting historical materials related to labor and working-class people in the 1890s. As a result, the Society's Library-Archives division and Museum contain a vast array of labor history resources. Read more about these collections and how to use them here.
The Society has also put the most important eyewitness accounts and historical documents about labor in Wisconsin online at Turning Points in Wisconsin History. Its section on "The Birth of the Labor Movement" contains early accounts, and "Depression and Unemployment" contains labor documents from the 20th century. Important labor leaders, reformers, and events are individually described in the online Dictionary of Wisconsin History.
Our goal in this work is to help people -- especially young people learning history for the first time -- discover that our common heritage is much richer and more complex than it appears at first glance. History is not simply one long, boring story entombed in a high school textbook, but rather a world-wide web of interconnected, truly amazing stories that made us who we are today.
:: Posted in on August 31, 2008
Did You Know?
The Wisconsin Historical Museum is currently featuring Odd Wisconsin objects in the latest exhibit: Odd Wisconsin. And don't miss the Odd Wisconsin book by author Erika Janik published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
|
