May Day

May 1, International Worker's Day, fell on a Friday this year, so we spent the long weekend in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (more on this in a future post). The night before, in my German Conversation class, we discussed how May 1 is celebrated in different countries--we're a very international group. As the only American, I had to say that we don't celebrate on May 1, instead we have Labor Day in September. Then, a man from Vietnam said, auf Deutsch of course, "But Worker's Day started in the USA." Our teacher said that this was what she had also been told. So, when I got home, I went straight to Wikipedia, and I learned that not only does May 1 commemorate a worker's strike and riot in the US, but in Chicago!

May 1 marks the anniversary of the Haymarket Riots. It is embarrassing for me that I didn't know this, because back in the Reagan-Bush years, I became very interested in anarchy, and for reasons that are not clear to me, labor unions and strikes seem to be always organized by so-called anarchists. Well, I did a lot of reading about the Haymarket Strikes and Riots back then. I made a special trip to the Near West Side to see what was left of the monument marking the spot of the riots. And I knew that five of the eight men tried for starting the riots are buried in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park. But I never knew that the riots resulted in an international holiday (a guy from Spain thanked me for this holiday, even though I was totally ignorant about it). I always thought of the Haymarket as a slice of Chicago history, not even American history.

I had to move to Germany to learn about its impact on the rest of the world.