Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [864]
To make its new voice heard in the wider city, the CLU revived the tradition of artisanal festivals and parades, which had once been integral to New York’s working-class world. The CLU proposed that one day each year be set aside as a holiday dedicated to and celebrated by working people, and under its aegis the United States’ first Labor Day parade was held on September 5, 1882. Wearing their regalia and hoisting transparencies, the contingents formed up in Park Place near City Hall. The Jewelers Union of Newark led off smartly behind their own band. Then came the bricklayers in their white aprons, the jewelers in derby hats and dark suits, and a group seven hundred strong from Big Six (the typographical union). The marchers were festive but sober; no drinking was allowed. They carried mottos proclaiming: LABOR BUILT THIS REPUBLIC AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT, NO MONEY MONOPOLY, and (most shocking to next day’s dailies), PAY NO RENT. Twenty thousand strong they strode north past Broome and Canal streets to Union Square, as hundreds of seamstresses at windows along the route waved handkerchiefs and blew kisses. Finally, after passing by a reviewing stand filled with labor dignitaries, the participants adjourned, via the elevated, to an uptown picnic at Elm Park. There they danced to jigs played by Irish fiddlers and pipers and were serenaded by the Bavarian Mountain Singers while the flags of Ireland, Germany, France, and the USA flapped in the autumn air.
Union Square Demonstration, September 5, 1882—the first Labor Day parade in the United States. As the head of the column passes the reviewing stand on the north side of the park (17th Street), thousands more can be seen marching up Broadway in the distance. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 16, 1882. (Library of Congress)
The following year, in an effort to broaden its constituency, the CLU reached out in two directions. On March 20, 1883, it sponsored an enormous gathering at Cooper Union to commemorate the recent death of Karl Marx. Most speakers were socialists, but the packed crowd was composed of workers of many ideologies, nationalities, and trades, who joined in raising funds to publish an English-language edition of the Communist Manifesto. Their second initiative was to induct Henry George into the Knights of Labor.
PROGRESS AND POVERTY
A few weeks after the bloody finale of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, with New York and the country still mired in depression, Henry George, a young San Francisco newspaperman, sat down to write a book. He was determined to make sense of the awful economic storms that periodically wracked the republic and to grapple as well with the terrible paradox of misery amidst plenty.
The short and scrappy redhead—friends called him the bantam cock—had been battered by economic depressions for most of his life. His father had published Episcopalian books until hard times drove him out of business and thrust the family into poverty. He himself had taken up the printer’s trade, only to be pitched into unemployment by the depression of 1857. After the war he founded a penny paper with reformist principles; his sheet decried the way America’s bountiful riches flowed into the pockets of a few. In 1869 George made a trip to New York City, in a failed attempt to get a franchise from the Associated Press. The metropolitan experience underscored for him just how profound the contrast could be between “monstrous wealth” and “debasing want.” Then came the crash of ‘73, which sank his theretofore successful paper. Thus galvanized, and with shoestring support from a job inspecting gas meters, he wrote Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and