Labor Day, the holiday just over, now means the end of summer, the start of school, the kick-off for football season, the occasion of a NASCAR race, the last day at the municipal pool or the last weekend at the beach. And quadrennially, it is traditionally the start of presidential elections.
Not a hint of labor in there anywhere. Young kids must be confused about the meaning of the name. When I was a young kid in the Rust Belt, there was no confusion. Labor Day was the holiday that celebrated laborers, working stiffs, Union guys from the rolling mills and the coal mines and the auto plants.
Back then, the Rust Belt had not acquired that name. It was the industrial heartland — the American Ruhr or Midlands — stretching from the coal fields of Pennsylvania to the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, the greatest conglomeration of industrial-economic power on earth.
It was the creation of men like Carnegie in Pittsburgh, Rockefeller with his Standard Oil Refinery #1 In Cleveland, Sieberling in Akron, Ford in Detroit. But it was also the creation of millions of lunch pail guys like my Dad and the fathers of school friends like John Shane and Nelson Weber. And of our grandparents and great grandparents.
From the 1880s on, bloody fights took place for fair treatment of labor and for the right to unionize. The culmination in some ways was the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894 that shut down the nation’s rail system.
President Grover Cleveland said the boycott was illegally disrupting mail delivery and commerce. His Attorney General, a railway attorney still on a retainer larger than his government pay, called out the Army and U.S. Marshals who shot and killed 30 strikers and wounded another 57.
The strike ended, but public opinion shifted in the workers’ favor in the wake of the massacre, and Cleveland hastily signed into law a bill proclaiming Labor Day an annual holiday celebrating “the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity and well-being of our country.”
When I was a kid the kickoff of presidential campaigns on Labor Day invariably entailed a pilgrimage to Detroit to court the union voter — certainly by Democratic candidates and often by their less enthusiastic Republican rivals as well. Recently this has often seemed a quaint artifact of an earlier era.
But this year the disgruntled blue-collar worker looms large, so on Labor Day Hillary and her surrogates blanketed the Rust Belt. She was in Cleveland, Joe Biden was in Pittsburgh and Bill Clinton was in Detroit. The once solidly Democratic blue-collar vote is now as likely to go Republican, and Democrats know that without nailing down most, if not all, of the Great Lakes states they are in trouble.
Trump, the self-proclaimed paladin of the working class, put in his first appearance in a black neighborhood over the weekend in Detroit, and he hit Cleveland and Youngstown on Labor Day, perhaps to see where the steel mills used to be. But he is heading south to Virginia, North Carolina and Florida for the rest of the week.
It is a sign of how low we have fallen that workers, or former workers, are clutching at this particular straw — a billionaire with a history of screwing workers out of their pay, running on a message of isolationism, lower taxes for people in his bracket but no increase in the minimum wage because workers are already paid too much. Instead of preaching American competitiveness, he promises to protect us from overseas workers by putting an end to foreign trade and shutting the borders.
The parents of the guys I grew up with, who won World War II, rolled the steel, produced the tires and bent the metal that made the T-Bird and the ’57 Chevy, would have laughed Trump out of the Union Hall, the VFW Hall, and the bowling alley. As the poet sings, “Oh Earth, what changes thou hast seen.”