Labor Day 1907 sent a message to employers

Workers in many cities on Labor Day a century ago put on a show of solidarity that employers viewed nervously with good reason. Radicals were calling for the downfall of capitalism. Pay was low and job security nonexistent. Many workers toiled six days a week for as long as 60 hours. There were no pensions, health insurance, worker compensation or other types of safety nets beyond the charity of a few large companies or the benefit funds fledgling unions maintained for their members. Safety conditions were abysmal, and child labor was common. Unions had no protection from employers. The promises of socialists sometimes sounded enticing.

Such conditions help explain the display put on during Labor Day festivities in Bangor in 1907. Before 7 a.m., delegations of union men from Bangor, Brewer Waterville, Augusta and other towns were gathering at various spots downtown, many attended by their own band or drum corps. “There was music all over the city,” reported the Bangor Daily Commercial that afternoon.

“The trains from Dover and Foxcroft, Millinocket and Bar Harbor, and the trolleys and scoot trains from Old Town and Hampden brought in hundreds of labor men and their friends to attend the big celebration. The visiting labor unions were met at the station by delegates from the local unions and escorted to their assembling point,” the Commercial reported. By 9:30 a.m. there was a general movement toward Stetson Square at the intersection of State Street and Broadway, where the parade was scheduled to begin in half an hour.

Two thousand union men assembled. The line of march was up State to Fern “and countermarch to Broadway thence through Oak, Hancock, Exchange, Hammond and Main streets to Maplewood Park [now Bass Park].” The best-looking union delegation was awarded a prize parade flag.

All the unions were in uniform or else exhibited some other insignia of the work they did. The longshoremen were dressed in “black trousers, blue flannel shirts, and black slouch hats. The plasterers and masons were attended by a float bearing a partly built brick building and a stationary engine which vomited smoke … The papermakers from South Brewer … marched like trained soldiers. Several of the unions rode in buckboards and barouches, the barbers, iron moulders, typographical union, railroad employees and cigar makers.

“The barbers had a float … a barber shop in which Murty Hughes [a carriage driver who had defied the Maine Central Railroad’s new rules regarding parking public carriages in front of the Union Station] received a shampoo and manipulated the razor.

“The cigarmakers had a … cigar factory in operation. Cigars were made enroute and thrown into the crowd … to the great delight of small boys … The stone cutters from Hall Quarry made a fine appearance … 100 strong, wearing the stone cutters’ aprons and white caps.”

Throngs of cheering people filled the sidewalks and windows along the parade route. Flags decorated houses and office buildings. “The labor men were given as much attention from the people of the city as any civic notable would have been accorded,” noted the Commercial reporter.

Papermakers were there in force, including 100 from Millinocket. The baseball game that afternoon at Maplewood pitted teams from the Orono Pulp & Paper Co. and the Eastern Manufacturing Co. of South Brewer. Other athletic events included a hose reel race for a purse of $100, a tug of war and a “burlesque boxing match, five rounds by two men in barrels.”

After the parade and before the sports, a union organizer for the American Federation of Labor, Stuart Reid, addressed the audience. He struck a moderate tone unlike such radical groups as the International Workers of the World, which were trying to make inroads into Maine. “Strikes … should be measures of last resort, and only applied when employers absolutely refuse to grant terms that are positively fair,” he said

Often strident, sometimes violent, the nation’s labor movement was in its adolescence. Agitators such as Mother Jones were rattling at the gates of capitalism. Big Bill Haywood, one of the founders of the International Workers of the World, had recently been acquitted of having helped in the labor-related murder of the former governor of Idaho. The year before, the IWW had established a chapter in Skowhegan, becoming involved in a strike there against the Marston Worsted Mills.

Things were relatively quiet in Bangor that year. Cigar makers and typographers asked for raises and received them. A strike that fall over wages at the Sawyer Boot and Shoe Co. remained unresolved, according to the annual report of the Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics. About 20 moccasin sewers, all union men, walked off the job. A story in the Commercial on Oct. 8 said the company had replaced 12 of the strikers and planned to go to Boston to hire Italian harness makers to replace the rest.

Labor Day parades like the one in Bangor, full of martial music and military trappings, were a message to employers. Maine had 225 unions enrolling about a fifth of its approximately 75,000 workers. They seemed a moderate group, but one never knew how the winds might shift.