20th century pioneers gave Labor Day meaning

Two thousand strong, they marched through the streets of Bangor, a new kind of army, seeking to show the world their determination and solidarity. Thousands of onlookers cheered along the parade route on that Labor Day, 1904.

These “soldiers of industry,” as the papers called them, were waging a war for working conditions most of us take for granted today.

In the first “division” were the carpenters and joiners, the iron moulders, the stove mounters, the journeyman barbers, the railroad men, the bricklayers, plasterers and masons, and the papermakers.

In the next division came the sawmill workers, the building laborers, the plumbers, and gas and steam fitters, the longshoremen, the cigar makers, the painters and decorators, and the sheet iron workers.

Three more divisions followed. They included granite cutters, weavers, typographers, retail clerks, teamsters, textile workers and others. A dozen bands blaring martial music were interspersed the length of the 30-minute parade, which ended at Maplewood Park, known as Bass Park today.

This was Bangor’s fourth annual Labor Day parade. The union movement was enjoying a resurrection following the last depression in the 1890s. A new Maine State Branch of the American Federation of Labor, the burgeoning trade union cooperative, was founded in 1904, reporting 14,000 members the next year. Other reform elements, from socialists to anarchists, also were vying for the hearts and souls of the workers.

The first Labor Day parade in the country was in 1882 in New York City. Five years later, Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day a legal holiday. Maine joined ranks in 1891, three years before the national holiday was established.

Bangor’s celebration in 1904 was one of two “monster parades” in Maine that day, the other being in Rockland, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial. The Bangor parade attracted workers from as far away as Augusta, Madison, Bar Harbor, Waldoboro and Vinalhaven. R.B. Hall, the famous composer and director, was there, leading the Waterville Band.

At Maplewood Park, the keynote address was delivered by John F. Sheehan, a union leader and former member of the Massachusetts Legislature from Holyoke. He was a powerful speaker. His voice echoed through the park and beyond, occasionally interrupted by shouts of encouragement.

His words were a mix of sympathy for the downtrodden American worker and hostility to foreigners, who also wanted good jobs.

“I have stood by the doors of a factory and seen its toiling hundreds pour forth, – not human beings but living machines, their hopes and their ambitions crushed by an employer to whom they were but the instruments of gain,” he said. “Mankind strives constantly to improve material conditions. Have we reached the limit of civilization, I ask, when an American girl, proud, ambitious, with all the hopes and aspirations of young womanhood, is forced to toil day after day in some sweat shop, receiving the magnificent compensation of six cents for the making of a shirt, when the Chinaman at the street corner received 12 cents for simply doing it up?”

He continued, “What are we to say of the merchant prince – almost invariably the enemy of organized labor – who employs young women, bright, stylish, attractive, for the tremendous total of $3 per week? What wonder that crime stalks abroad and poverty exists in many homes.”

Afterward, a baked bean dinner was served to the multitudes, followed by a baseball game in which the papermakers employed in Madison at the Great Northern mill soundly trounced a handpicked team from Hampden and South Brewer. That night a concert and a ball rounded out events.

The cordiality and solidarity reflected in newspaper coverage of the event patched over the underlying tensions existing between management and workers in 1904. That year, Mother Jones, the incendiary labor activist, spoke in Portland. Bath firemen launched the first public strike in the 20th century. The new Women’s Label League advocated buying only goods with union labels, while the Maine Federation of Women’s Clubs launched an investigation of child labor. The state’s factory inspection system was deemed inadequate. In Bangor, trade unionists demanded higher pay and the eight-hour day.

The Bangor Daily News took the opportunity to urge workers to vote Republican in the coming elections. What were needed were more laws and better enforcement of laws already on the books.

In two editorials on Sept. 3 and 6, the paper listed laws that it said had been secured by the Republican majorities then in power. It mentioned protective tariffs and regulations prohibiting “the importation of pauper and contract labor” and excluding “the degraded and heathenish Chinese from the United States.” Maine’s most famous Republican, James G. Blaine, was given credit for being “the warmest advocate” of the latter bill.

The paper listed as other Republican achievements child labor limts, a law giving workers priority in claims stemming from bankruptcy suits, a law requiring employers to pay workers in cash at least every two weeks, fire escape regulations and laws protecting insurance obtained from benevolent societies.

These various bits and pieces of legislation were precedent-setting in their day, even if they were often ineffective or went unenforced. And, of course, there were much greater changes to come, aimed at making the workplace safer and more secure.

Today, Labor Day has lost much of its meaning because of the effectiveness of these pioneering campaigns by organized labor during the 20th century.

Publications by Charles A. Scontras were consulted for much of the context for newspaper accounts of the Labor Day celebration of 1904. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.