September 1, 2013
by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
1. For most people, Labor Day has become an end of summer holiday for having a barbecue and shopping (now rivaling Black Friday), or even a day for changing clothing rules, such as the end of wearing white during the summer (particularly womens’ shoes). Its origins and purpose are mostly forgotten or only vaguely thought of. We shall consider the question of the meaning of Labor Day and UU views of it from a historical perspective.
2. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom this past week should remind us of the link between labor concerns and broader civil rights concerns. The director of the March was A. Philip Randolph, who was also the founder and longtime president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the mostly African-American group who worked the Pullman sleeping cars. In 1941 he threatened such a march, which led FDR to end racial discrimination in hiring in federal jobs. Randolph had been an active supporter of the US Socialist Party and also close the Progressive movement from the 1920s on.
3. Labor Day was first celebrated in Toronto, ON, Canada, the only other nation besides the US that has a celebratory holiday on the first Monday of September honoring workers and the labor movement in 1872, with “labour festivals†celebrated annually after that. The first Labor Day in the US was celebrated in New York on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York, organized by the Central Labor Union, a part of the Knights of Labor, in support of the 8-hour working day, which would become the central demand of a rising international labor movement. It was marked by a parade, speeches, along with music and eating. In 1884 the date was shifted to the first Monday of September, and Labor Day parades have been held on that date in New York ever since, with the practice rapidly spreading to other cities in the US. Ministers and priests were also encouraged to preach about the labor movement on the day before Labor Day, “Labor Sunday,†which is today, and I am following in this tradition.
4. The movement for an 8-hour working day was initiated in the 1830s in Britain by the utopian socialist, Robert Owen, who argued for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation, 8 hours of rest.†Owen founded the first labor federation, the Grand Consolidated Trades Union, and also coined the word “socialism.†Ironically, he had been a successful capitalist, reforming the town of New Lanark in Scotland to improve living and working conditions. Owen would also be the founder of the British cooperatives movement, still strong in parts of the British economy and society.
5. May Day would arise as a rival to this September celebration as a result of a resolution at the founding conference of the Second Socialist International in Paris in 1889 in response to a request from Samuel Gompers, President of the US American Federation of Labor (AFL), to honor those who died in the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago on May 4, 1886, who had been demonstrating in favor of the 8-hour day. This was declared to be the Day of International Worker Solidarity and began to be celebrated around the world, and in some US cities as well. It is now an official holiday in over 80 nations around the world. But the September date continued to be celebrated in most American and Canadian cities.
6. May Day coincides with the Celtic Beltane, the only one of the four main days of the Celtic calendar that had not been made into a Roman Catholic Church holiday, being viewed as too much of a rival of Easter as a spring life festival. The day before is St. Walpurga’s Day, an 8th century English saint who preached to the pagan Saxons in Germany and was the first woman in Christian history to leave writings. The evening of her day is Walpurgisnacht, celebrated in Germany as the Witches’ Sabbath. After the spread of celebrating workers’ rights on May Day around the world, in 1955 the Church made it St. Joseph’s Day, noting that St. Joseph was a carpenter and thus a worker, thus making that workers’ holiday into an official church holiday.
7. The matter of which day would become the official national holiday to honor workers and the labor movement was resolved in 1894 when the September date was chosen by President Grover Cleveland after he sent federal troops in to stop the Pullman strike, which led to two strikers being killed. Needing labor support, Cleveland supported the holiday, but after violent May Day demonstrations in his home town (Cleveland) that year, he wanted to avoid having it linked the more socialist and radical May Day, thus choosing the September date, with Samuel Gompers supporting him in this. Gompers had opposed the Pullman strike, and this would mark the move of the AFL to becoming a more conservative labor organization compared to those in most other nations. The Pullman strike was called to protest cuts in wages without any cuts in prices in the company town of Pullman, Illinois where the sleeping cars were made. This cut in wages came with a decline in business in the depression that began in 1893. Outrage over the deaths in the Pullman strike led to the end of the company owning the town, which became a neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. It must be noted that the two events associated most closely with the two international labor days both happened within the current city limits of Chicago.
8. Traditionally both the Unitarian and Universalist strands of our denomination have been sympathetic with the problems of the poor and the working class. However, the story is not as simple and straightforward as many might like. While both branches strongly supported abolitionism and the civil rights of African Americans, the record of support for the labor movement was not as strong, with the more upper class Unitarians not always so clearly in support, in contrast to the Universalists, who tended to come more from the working class.
9. The most socialist strand in American Unitarianism in the early 1800s was with the interest by many Transcendentalists in efforts to establish communes and cooperatives, following ideas of the European utopian socialists, notably Robert Owen and the French philosopher, Charles Fourier. The most famous of these efforts was Brook Farm in the 1840s near Boston, founded by Unitarian minister, George Ripley, with such such Unitarian luminaries as Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne participating. Other important figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing (the acknowledged founder of American Unitarianism), and Henry David Thoreau, visited it and were interested in it, while resisting joining it. Two decades later Emerson would criticize it for not paying attention to individual incentives and self-reliance, a theme among Unitarians that often led to support more for businessmen and capitalists than the labor movement.
10. This pro-business and capitalist strand in Unitarianism, especially strong in the late 1800s, arose from the social and economic position of Unitarians in and around Boston, the home of American Unitarianism. As it developed gradually in the 1700s among certain congregations of Puritans, rational and scientific thought from the British Enlightenment led to questioning of the literal truth of the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This movement was strongest among more urban, better educated, and higher income congregations. The split really happened in 1808, when an effectively Unitarian, Henry Ware, was appointed Professor of Theology at Harvard, and Unitarians took over Harvard, basically running it for more than a century, with more traditional Congregationalists establishing their own theological seminary at Andover. The churches joining the Unitarian Association of America in 1825 tended to reflect this tendency to higher education and income, with the Boston Brahmins who were the most socially elite group in the US in the late 1800s being heavily Unitarian, such as the Adams and Lowell families (Episcopalianism was the main rival of Unitarianism within this group, with UUs today being among the most educated and well-off of American denominations, with only Hindus and Jews clearly surpassing them in these categories). That many of these were wealthy and involved in business did not incline them to strongly support the labor movement, despite their history of strongly supporting abolitionism (the victory of which in the Civil War was part of why they became such a powerful ruling elite). This group was very much involved in the leadership of the more progressive wing of the Republican Party, with some more liberal Republicans in New England still being Unitarians, such as William Cohen in Maine. It must be noted that while these people were not major supporters of the labor movement, they were from the branch of the Republican Party that tended to reach out more to the labor movement and support it than other parts of the party.
11. On the other hand, Universalists were more likely to be open and firm supporters of the labor movement. Both Unitarians and Universalists strongly supported abolitionism, although they tended to disagree about the Civil War, given the pacifist strain in Universalism, in comparison with the more militant views of Unitarians, symbolized by Unitarian Julia Ward Howe composing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
12. Two important Universalists who strongly supported the labor movement were Adin Ballou and Horace Greely. Ballou was also a supporter of socialism and founded the Hopedale community in 1841, along with abolitionism and pacifism, his writings influencing Leo Tolstoy in Russia. However, at the end of his career, Ballou would become a Unitarian minister, a harbinger of the convergence of views of the denominations that would end in their ultimate merger in 1961.
13. Greely was most famous for editing the New York Tribune and declaring in 1865, “Go west, young man.†He strongly supported the labor movement and socialism, along with vegetarianism, sharply criticizing monopolies in particular. He did not support the Civil War, due to his pacifism, although an abolitionist, but after the war supported the Radical Republicans. He had strongly supported the Whigs in the 1830s and 1840s, and when the Republican Party was founded in 1854, he made the New York Tribune, its most important journalistic supporter in the nation. He would also hire Karl Marx to be his European correspondent for many years. In 1872, disgusted by the corruption of the Grant administration, he founded the Liberal Republican Party and ran for president, but died before the electoral college counted the votes, with his party dying with him.
14. On the other hand it must be noted that it was Universalism that produced one of the most infamous of anti-labor movement figures in US history: George Pullman of the sleeping cars and the Pullman strike. Pullman was a Universalist by birth and funded the building a Universalist church in Albion, New York in honor of his parents. While he clearly was guilty of trying to lower wages and then asking for federal troops to come in to break up the Pullman strike of 1894, with the deaths occurring leading to the establishment of Labor Day as a national holiday, he had many progressive elements about his character prior to this fall from grace. After inventing the Pullman railroad sleeping car, he became the first major American businessman to hire African Americans, going to the South after the Civil War to hire former house slaves to be porters in his sleeping cars, which would later lead to A. Philip Randolph and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While the company town of Pullman would become reviled, it was initially built partly inspired by the utopian communities favored by Owen and Fourier and the Transcendentalists, with it having a record of some of the best health outcomes of any American town or city after it was initially founded. Pullman would lose his town and die a year later in disgrace, but it should be recognized that there was a Universalist and progressive element in what he was trying to do before it ended up in disaster.
15. Having looked a bit at the dark side of Unitarian Universalism here, let me quote from a sermon given 11 years ago today on Labor Sunday, September 1, 2002, by the Reverend Marc Frechette, in First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with which I agree:
“We take for granted the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, child protection laws, sick days, paid vacation, retirement benefits, unemployment compensation, and OSHA [health and safety] laws. But it was the power of unions that brought these rights and protections to the workers of America. And workers of today, especially workers at the bottom of the wage scale, still need protection and advocacy.
‘Whose side are you on?’ was once a popular rallying cry of the labor movement…Religious traditions of all times and places tell us which side to be on…compassion and justice dictate that we stand with the poor and oppressed…rather than the rich and powerful. Unitarian Universalism is a faith committed to democracy, to freedom and justice for all, and to the worth and dignity of every person. We must stand on the side of the worker.â€
16. Let me conclude by noting that while the labor movement both here and abroad have not always behaved perfectly, I have no doubt that if the trend towards a lower percentage of the US labor force belonging to unions were to be reversed and this percentage were to rise, this would help lead to halting and reversing the trend to economic and social inequality, unfairness, and injustice that we see creeping over our society. Standing on the side of the worker is standing on the side of love.