America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

Open Access Published by New York University Press 2008

America’s Forgotten Holiday

May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

Volume 2 in the series American History and Culture

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479844845.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Though now a largely forgotten holiday in the United States, May Day was founded here in 1886 by an energized labor movement as a part of its struggle for the eight-hour day. In ensuing years, May Day took on new meaning, and by the early 1900s had become an annual rallying point for anarchists, socialists, and communists around the world. Yet American workers and radicals also used May Day to advance alternative definitions of what it meant to be an American and what America should be as a nation.
Mining contemporary newspapers, party and union records, oral histories, photographs, and rare film footage, America’s Forgotten Holiday explains how May Days celebrants, through their colorful parades and mass meetings, both contributed to the construction of their own radical American identities and publicized alternative social and political models for the nation.
This fascinating story of May Day in America reveals how many contours of American nationalism developed in dialogue with political radicals and workers, and uncovers the cultural history of those who considered themselves both patriotic and dissenting Americans.

Author / Editor information

Haverty-Stacke Donna T. :

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches courses in U.S. cultural, urban, labor and legal history. Haverty-Stacke is the author of America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 – 1960 (NYU Press, 2009) and Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR (NYU Press, 2015) and co-editor with Daniel J. Walkowitz of Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756 - 2009 (Continuum, 2010).Donna T. Haverty-Stacke is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches courses in U.S. cultural, urban, labor and legal history. Haverty-Stacke is the author of America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 – 1960 (NYU Press, 2009) and Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR (NYU Press, 2015) and co-editor with Daniel J. Walkowitz of Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756 - 2009 (Continuum, 2010).

Reviews

Haverty-Stacke recounts how after WW II, American labor avoided contact with the communists and May Day celebrations. Instead, more workers and their unions became active in the new Labor Day holiday. This readable book, which blends US labor, political, and cultural history, can be used as a companion to any US history or labor history text.

Paul Buhle,Brown University:
Donna Haverty-Stackes Americas Forgotten Holiday offers a welcome reminder that not many generations ago, May Day brought more outbursts of idealism than new home construction, more social solidarity than consumerism, and the hopes for a democratic future that we need ever more urgently in the torrents of imperial wars today.

Daniel J. Walkowitz,New York University:
Americas Forgotten Holiday details the long and proud history of May Day and compels us to recall both its contested meanings and wonder at the forces and motives of those who have obliterated our memory of it. Haverty-Stacke ties together the study of memory with that of public space while nimbly navigating the troubled, sectarian waters of communist and anti-communist history.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
1. Out of America’s Urban, Industrial Cauldron The Origins of May Day as Event and Icon, 1867–1890 Open Access Download PDF	15
2. Revolutionary Dreams and Practical Action May Day and Labor Day, 1890–1903 Open Access Download PDF	44
3. Working-Class Resistance and Accommodation May Day and Labor Day, 1903–1916 Open Access Download PDF	73
4. Defining Americanism in the Shadow of Reaction May Day and the Cultural Politics of Urban Celebrations, 1917–1935 Open Access Download PDF	105
5. May Day’s Heyday The Promises and Perils of the Depression Era and the Popular Front, 1929–1939 Open Access Download PDF	142
6. World War II and Public Redefinitions of Americanism 1941–1945 Open Access Download PDF	174
7. May Day Becomes America’s Forgotten Holiday 1946–1960 Open Access Download PDF	193
Conclusion Open Access Download PDF	223
Notes Open Access Download PDF	233
Index Open Access Download PDF	289
About the Author Open Access Download PDF	303

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Keywords: both; compels; contested; Details; forces; have; history; long; meanings; memory; motives; obliterated; proud; recall; those; wonder

eBook

Published: December 1, 2008
ISBN: 9781479844845