Enjoy Your Non-Socialist Day of Rest, Laborers!
Did you know that the beloved "Labor Day Weekend" wasn't always a week-long fuckoff that ended in an orgy of Monday afternoon BBQ and booze to celebrate finally sending the goddamned kids back to school? The origins of Labor Day are shrouded in mystery -- because, really, who cares about the origins of Labor Day? -- but like so much in industrialized American history, it was basically about keeping the working man down and not giving people any crazy ideas about socialism, which was becoming very popular not only in the United States but around the world.
Communists and socialists claimed May Day as their particular holiday, and it was immediately popular because "May Day" was already a beloved spring hippie festival that had been going on since the first ravers met at Stonehenge in 6.000 BCE, much like the Roman church popularized "Christ Mass" by holding it during the existing solstice/Saturnalia/ Natalis Solis Invicti winter festival when everybody gave each other presents and fucked their slaves.
This is why it was crucial that America's corporate/political class steer American workers away from a formal May Day celebration, because that would obviously lead to Communism and then we'd all be speaking Russian and share the means of production or whatever. Also, on May 1, 1886, there was the Haymarket Riot in Chicago, with protests and anarchist mobs and car bombs and workers killed by cops, etc., along with other General Strikes and riots all over the country, and somehow that led to the eight-hour workday that socialists had been demanding.
So the president, Grover Cleveland -- who earlier had a bunch of railroad workers murdered when he ordered federal troops to bust up the Pullman strike -- made Labor Day the first Monday in September . Frustrated and confused, the Communists all moved to Russia and made it Communist, as seen in the movie "Reds," the end.
American Unions' Long March for Labor Day [Voice of America]