When half a million workers struck on May 1, 1886—the original “May Day,” (although not memorialized until the next year to honor the executed Haymarket anarchists), still celebrated now most places in the world except in the United States, where it began—the strikers called it Emancipation Day. How archaic that sounds. Such hortatory rhetoric has gone out of fashion. The eight-hour day movement of 1886 and the mass strikes that preceded, accompanied, and followed it were a freedom movement in the land of the free directed against a form of slavery no one would recognize or credit today.
