Labor Day

For the labor side there were Eugene V. Debs, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and others. Their only weapons were courage and right. Opposing generals, super-rich industrialists, had names like Vanderbilt, Duke, and Gould, and were backed by armed federal troops, marshals and local police.

There were female generals in this war, too, fighting against the forces that would keep them subservient and dependent on men. Margaret Sanger was one, and Jane Addams, and from my hometown of Cleburne, Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons, whose husband Albert Parsons was one of the "usual suspects" hanged for their alleged participation in Chicago's infamous Haymarket Affair.
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Labor Day began September 6, 1894, to honor workers with a paid holiday to march in their parades. This is what President Grover Cleveland said. But a few months earlier, he had used the military to break the Pullman sleeping car strike, in which a number of strikers were killed. So what Labor Day effectively commemorates, Dr. Feldman told us many years ago, is the government's continuing willingness to support the plutocracy in its use of others in any way it sees fit to do the work, as cheaply as possible, work that it is unwilling, and unable, to do itself.

Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.