May Day – A Global History of a Global Holiday

Growing Across the Globe

In 1903, people from Manila and its suburbs gathered in front of the Malacañang Palace, then-residence of the American governor-general, to demand that 1 May become a public holiday. The crowd, which one historian claimed numbered 100,000 people, drove away 200 American soldiers as the man at its head, Dominador Gómez, told the crowd that “The workers should always bear in mind that their emancipation must be achieved by themselves” (Guevarra, 1991, 21-2).

It was Gómez who brought the idea of May Day to the Philippines. A medical student in Madrid, Gómez had witnessed size and scope of the Spanish socialist movement’s May Day demonstrations before he returned to the Philippines in 1902. He returned to find the country’s nascent labor movement in shambles after a failed strike in August 1902 and set about rebuilding a national union: the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina.

In China, the first May Day was not organized by the soon-to-be Communist Party but by Russian socialists in Harbin, who celebrated May Day on 14 May 1907, 1 May on the old Russian calendar (Wolff, 1999, S. 143). Five years later, a group of socialists in Shanghai, calling themselves the Chinese Socialist Party had a May Day meeting, where the speaker was an unnamed Belgian socialist who spoke to the Chinese socialists about the “Belgian situation” (Bernel, 1967, S. 316-7).

Across colonial Africa, May Day spread along racial lines. White Portuguese workers were celebrating May Day as early as 1902 in Mozambique. The situation was the same in South Africa, where the first May Days in the 1900s were all whites-only events. In colonial Algeria, French and Spanish socialists organized joint events every year—from 1890 to 1914—without the suggestion that they would include the country’s Arab majority.

A Dream Can Spread

The history of May Day, like the history of the international socialist movement, is not exclusively positive. The idea of a common, global, socialist event became an annual tradition thanks to our shared experiences of struggle and solidarity. In 1890, that solidarity was limited to white workers in the Atlantic world. It has since expanded, like May Day, to cover the entire world.

Andrew Pfannkuche, Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

Sources and literature

Bernal, Martin: Chine : Le socialisme avant 1915, in Haupt, Georges; Rebérioux, Madeleine (Hrsg.): La deuxième Internationale et l’orient, Paris, 1967, S. 294–318.

Donno, Gianni C. (Hrsg.): Storie e Immagini del 1° Maggio: Problemi della storiografia italiana ed internazionale, Manduria, Bari und Rom, 1990.

Foner, Philip S.: May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–1986. New York, 1986.

Guevarra, Dante G.: History of the Philippine Labor Movement, Manila 1991.

Hobsbawm, Eric: Birth of a Holiday: The First of May, in Wrigley, Chris; Shepherd, John (Hrsg.): On the Move: Essays in Labour and Transport History Presented to Philip Bagwell, London & Rio Grande, 1991.

Lafargue, Paul: Der erste Mai und der Stand der sozialistischen Bewegung in Frankreich, in: Die Neue Zeit 1890–91, S. 295. https://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/nzpdf.pl?dok=189091b&f=289&l=304

Panaccione, Andrea (Hrsg.): The Memory of May Day: An Iconographic History of the Origins and Implanting of a Workers’ Holiday. Venedig 1989.

Peterson, Abby; Herbert Reiter (Hrsg.): The Ritual of May Day in Western Europe: Past, Present and Future, London und New York, 2016.

Rodríguez, Miguel: Mexico: The First of May 1913, in Panaccione, Andrea (Hrsg.): The Memory of May Day: An Iconographic History of the Origins and Implanting of a Workers’ Holiday, Venedig 1989, S. 661–662.

Wolff, David: To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914, Stanford 1999.

May Day has been an international holiday since the beginning. But it is also not the only one. Why is it that on the first of May we are reminded that we are taking part in a global demonstration for social justice and in affirmation of our shared left-wing identities? And how true is it when we say that May Day is the true internationalist holiday?

Transatlantic Origins

The First of May’s origins are international, crossing the Atlantic in the suitcase of an activist from the American Federation of Labor: Hugh McGregor. McGregor was traveling to Paris in July 1889 to attend two international socialist congresses that were organized by Europe’s various socialist movements.

First, McGregor went to the congress at the rue Rochechouart, organized by the SPD and other Marxist parties that were, without knowing it, in the process of founding the Second International. The day after, McGregor went to the other international congress on the rue de Lancry that had been organized by French reformist socialists, called possiblistes. McGregor brought the same letter to both congresses, written by the American trade-unionist Samuel Gompers that implored the divided European socialists to unite in the cause of labor and support his union’s plan to strike for the eight-hour day for the first time since 1886. While McGregor was ignored by the Possibilistes, he arrived at the Second International’s congress at the perfect moment.

Two French delegates—Raymond Lavigne and Jean Dormoy—drunk on the relative success of a national protest they organized that February, proposed that all member parties of the International organize a common demonstration to show the world their socialist unity. The leaders of the SPD had already agreed to this idea before the congress, so when McGregor read his letter at the rue Rochechouart he inadvertently gave Lavigne and Dormoy a date—1 May 1890— and a raison d’être—the eight-hour day—for their planned demonstration.

When the congress voted on Lavigne and Dormoy’s resolution on 20 July 1889, only the Russian delegation, afraid of how the tsar would react to an public socialist demonstration, voted no. There would be a common socialist demonstration on 1 May 1890.

A Transatlantic Tradition

That common demonstration, was a smashing success. Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote that “In Roubaix [northern France], the workers found that one day of strikes was not enough, so they celebrated for three.“ (Lafargue, 1890-91, S. 295) 1 May 1890 was a day of festivities, and people did not want it to go away. Socialist leaders listened and the May Day tradition was born. In 1890 there were May Days across western Europe, in New York, Buenos Aires, and French ruled Algeria. In 1891 Russia saw its first May Day in St. Petersburg; in Mexico the first May Day was in Chihuahua in 1892 (Rodríguez, 1989, 661).

But western Europe, Russia, and parts of the Americas are not the world. For decades, the story of May Day has been limited to these transatlantic voyages. Historians have attributed the total globalization of May Day to the global Communist movement, which spread the idea of social revolution beyond the borders of Europe and America into East Asia and Africa.

This is not the case. May Day spread across the globe in the years of the Second International (1889–1917) despite the mental limits of the Second International. Showing this history also shows us that the idea of social justice and a common working-class identity can spread regardless of our own biases and limits.