This article is taken from the September 2022 issue of Fraternal Review titled, “Freemasonry and the American Labor movement”.
The first Labor Day was celebrated in New York City on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. However, it was not yet an officially recognized federal holiday, nor would it prove easy to make it one.
Pullman, Illinois, was a company town, founded in 1880 by a Freemason named George Pullman (Renovation Lodge No. 97, Albion, New York), president of the railroad sleeping car company. Pullman designed and built the town to stand as a utopian workers’ community, insulated from the moral (and political) seductions of nearby Chicago. The town was strictly, almost feudally, organized: row houses for the assembly and craft workers; modest Victorians for the managers; and a luxurious hotel where Pullman himself lived and where visiting customers, suppliers, and salesman would lodge while in town.
Its residents all worked for the Pullman company, their paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, and their rent, set by Pullman, deducted automatically from their weekly paychecks.
The town, and the company, operated somewhat smoothly for a little over a decade. But in 1893, the Pullman company was caught in the nationwide economic depression. Orders for railroad sleeping cars declined, and George Pullman was forced to lay off hundreds of employees. Those who remained endured wage cuts, even while rents in Pullman remained consistent. Take-home paychecks plummeted. And so, the employees walked out, demanding lower rents and higher pay. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by a young Freemason named Eugene V. Debs (Terre Haute Lodge No. 19, F&AM, Terre Haute, Indiana) came to the cause of the striking workers, and railroad workers across the nation boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars on all railroads. ARU members across the nation refused to switch Pullman cars onto trains. When these switchmen were disciplined, the entire ARU struck the railroads on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars.
The strike instantly became a national issue. President Grover Cleveland, faced with nervous railroad executives and interrupted mail trains, declared the strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 troops to break the strike. Violence erupted, and many men were killed when U.S. deputy marshals fired on protesters in Kensington, near Chicago; but the strike was doomed. In total, 30 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded, many of whom were Freemasons. Property damage exceeded $80 million.
On August 3, 1894, the strike was declared over. Debs went to prison, his ARU was disbanded, and Pullman employees henceforth signed a pledge that they would never again unionize. Aside from the already existing American Federation of Labor and the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial workers’ unions were effectively stamped out and remained so until the Great Depression.
It was not the last time Eugene V. Debs would find himself behind bars, either. Campaigning from his jail cell, Debs would later win almost a million votes for the Socialist ticket in the 1920 presidential race.
Beloved by many contemporaries as a man “too good for this world” who would give the clothes off his back to anyone in need, the Freemason “Gene” Debs went on to organize and found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. The “Wobblies,” as they were then known, called on all workers to join “one big union” and seize direct control of industry through mass strikes.
Following the deaths of 30 workers during the Pullman Strike in June of 1894, President Grover Cleveland made reconciliation with the labor movement a top priority of his administration. It was an election year, and President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation. Labor Day was born, making it an official federal holiday in 1894.
In the years since, labor unions have served as a united voice for workers of all professions by bargaining collectively with employers to advocate for better wages and working conditions, and to establish parameters of working life that have become commonplace, and enacted into laws such as the eight-hour-workday, five-day workweek, protections for children in the workplace, and the federal minimum wage.
In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called Labor Day “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
Well over a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is now seen as the last long weekend of summer, rather than a day for political organizing. In 2022, less than 12 percent of American workers belong to unions, down from a high in the 1950’s of nearly 50 percent; even though nearly all have benefited from the hard-earned victories of the Labor Movement. And everyone who works can take a “vacation” on the first Monday of September. Friends and families gather—they clog the highways, and picnic grounds, and their own backyards—and they bid farewell to summer.
Written by Justin Cole