AUT: P.Linebaugh:Incomplete, True & Wonderful History of Mayday (Green & Red)

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks: What follows is the text (minus images) of a pamphlet produced by
historican Peter Linebaugh (THE LONDON HANGED) for May Day 1986. Unlike
most histories which begin with Haymarket, Linebaugh also celebrates the
older Green May Day. Enjoy.

Harry


The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of
MAY DAY

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The little history that you're holding in your hand has grown from
an earlier version published last year called "The Silent Speak."
There's more information this year, thanks to conversations in
Quincy with John Wilshire and Monty Neill and thanks to
newspaper research by Jonathan Feldman and John Roosa.  Bryn
Clark made a portable Maypole last year which we capered around at
the Bank of Boston.  We were gratified by the interest shown by
lunchtime workers but also struck by how widespread May Day
amnesia had become.  So, this year we have added some 'how  to'
sections, on games (p.5), on the Maypole (p. 11),and on getting to
Merry Mount (p. 16), which we hope may make it more practical.
Last year's May Day demonstration against Kruggerand gold
encouraged us to add (an incomplete) list (p. 16) of the many May
Day events this year.  We especially thank Gene Bruskin and Jim
Green who have helped to plan the demo against apartheid and the
centennial celebration at Faneuil Hall, respectively.  Dana Moser
helped with the graphics.  Hohn Flym, DeAnn Burrows, Mike
Ryan, and friends in Texas, Rochester, Nigeria, Big Indian,
Somerville, Belize, and Tufnell Park have provided support and
encouragement.  And thanks to the workers at Copy Cop.

In San Francisco, they used to say that if you didn't like the history
we have so far, go out and make some that you do like.  The same
can be said of this story, so if it is to continue to grow please submit
new contributions for next year to Peter Linebaugh, 16 Netherlands
Road, Brookline, Mass.  02146.(No longer valid, Peter is now in Dept of
History, University of Toledo, Toledo.)

May First, 1986.


A Beginning


	The Soviet government parades missiles and marches
soldiers on May Day.  The American government has called May
First "Loyalty Day" and associates it with militarism.  The real
meaning of this day has been obscured by the designing propaganda
of both governments.  The truth of May Day is totally different.  To
the history of May Day there is a Green side and there is a Red side.

	Under the rainbow, our methodology must be colorful.
Green is a relationship to the earth and what grows therefrom.  Red
is a relationship to other people and the blood spilt there among.
Green designates life with only necessary labor; Red designates
death with surplus labor.  Green is natural appropriation; Red is
social expropriation.  Green is husbandry and nurturance; Red is
proletarianization and prostitution.  Green is useful activity; Red is
useless toil.  Green is creation of desire; Red is class struggle.  May
Day is both.


	THE GREEN

	Once upon a time, long before Weinberger bombed north
Africans, before the Bank of Boston laundered money, or Reagan
honored the Nazi war dead, the earth was blanketed by a broad
mantle of forests.  As late as Caesar's time a person might travel
through the woods for two months without gaining an unobstructed
view of the sky.  The immense forests of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America provided the atmosphere with oxygen and the earth with
nutrients.  Within the woodland ecology our ancestors did not have
to work the graveyard shift, or to deal with flexitime, or work from
Nine to Five.  Indeed, the native Americans whom Captain John
Smith encountered in 1606 only worked four hours a week.  The
origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of
History.

	In Europe, as in Africa, people honored the woods in many
ways.  With the leafing of the trees in spring, people celebrated "the
fructifying spirit of vegetation," to use the phrase of J.G. Frazer, the
anthropologist.  They did this in May, a month named after Maia,
the mother of all the gods according to the ancient Greeks, giving
birth even to Zeus.

	The Greeks had their sacred groves, the Druids their oak
worship, the Romans their games in honor of Floralia.  In Scotland
the herdsman formed circles and danced around fires.  The Celts lit
bonfires in hilltops to honor their god, Beltane.  In the Tyrol people
let their dogs bark and made music with pots and pans.  In
Scandinavia  fires were lit and the witches came out.

	Everywhere people "went a-Maying" by going into the
woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their
persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands.  Outside
theater was performed with characters like "Jack-in-the-Green" and
the "Queen of the May."  Trees were planted.  Maypoles were
erected.  Dances were danced.  Music was played. Drinks were
drunk, and love was made.  Winter was over, spring had sprung.

	The history of these customs is complex and affords the
student of the past with many interesting insights into the history of
religion, gender, reproduction, and village ecology.  Take Joan of
Arc who was burned in May 1431.  Her inquisitors believed she
was a witch.  Not far from her birthplace, she told the judges, "there
is a tree that they call 'The Ladies Tree' - others call it 'The Fairies
Tree.'   It is  a beautiful tree, from which comes the Maypole.  I
have somtimes been to play with the young girls to make garlands
for Our Lady of Domremy.  Often I have heard the old folk say that
the fairies haunt this tree...."  In the general indictment against Joan,
one of the particulars against her was dressing like a man.  The
paganism of Joan's heresy originated in the Old Stone Age when
religion was animistic and hamans were women and men.

	Monotheism arose with the Mediterranean empires.  Even
the most powerful Roman Empire had to make deals with its
conquered and enslaved peoples (syncretism).  As it destroyed some
customs, it had to accept or transform others.  Thus, we have
Christmas Trees.  May Day became a day to honor the saints, Philip
and James, who were unwilling slaves to Empire.  James the Less
neither drank nor shaved.  He spent so much time praying that he
developed huge callouses on his knees, likening them to camel legs.
Philip was a lazy guy.  When Jesus said "Follow me"  Philip tried to
get out of it  by saying he had to tend to his father's funeral, and it
was to this excuse that the Carpenter's son made his famous reply,
"Let the dead bury the dead."  James was stoned to death, and Philip
was crucified head downwards.  Their martyrdom introduces the
Red side of the story, even still the Green side is preserved because,
according to the Floral Directory, the tulip is dedicted to Philip and
bachelor buttons to James.

	The farmers, workers, and child-bearers (laborers) of the
Middle Ages had hundreds of holy days which preserved the May
Green, despite the attack on peasants and witches.  Despite the
complexities, whether May Day was observed by sacred or profane
ritual, by pagan or Christian, by magic or not, by straights or gays,
by gentle or calloused hands, it was always a celebration of all that
is free and life-giving in the world.  That is the Green side of the
story.  Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work.

	Therefore, it was attacked by the authorities.  The repression
had begun with the burning of women and it continued in the 16th
century when America was "discovered," the slave trade was begun,
and nation-states and capitalism were formed.  In 1550 an Act of
Parliament  demanded that Maypoles be destroyed, and it outlawed
games.  In 1644 the Puritans in England abolished May Day
altogether.  To these work-ethicists the festival was obnoxious for
paganism and worldiness.   Philip Stubs, for example, in Anatomy
of Abuses (1585) wrote of the Maypole, "and then fall they to
banquet and feast, to leape and daunce about it, as the Heathen
people did at the dedication of their Idolles."  When a Puritan
mentioned "heathen" we know genocide was not far away.
According to the excellent slide show at the Quincy Historical
Society, 90% of the Massachusetts people, including chief
Chicatabat, died from chicken pox or small pox a few years after the
Puritans landed in 1619.  The Puritans also objected to the
unrepressed sexuality of the day.  Stubs said, "of fourtie,
threescore, or an hundred maides going to the wood, there have
scarcely the third part of them returned home again as they went."

	The people resisted the repressions.  Thenceforth, they
called their May sports, the "Robin Hood Games."  Capering about
with sprigs of hawthorn in their hair and bells jangling from their
knees, the ancient charaders of May were transformed into an
outlaw community, Maid Marions and Little Johns.  The May feast
was presided over by the "Lord of Misrule," "the King of
Unreason," or the "Abbot of Inobedience."  Washington Irving was
later to write that the feeling for May "has become chilled by habits
of gain and traffic."  As the gainers and traffickers sought to impose
the regimen of monotonous work, the people responded to preserve
their holyday.  Thus began in earnest the Red side of the story of
May Day.  The struggle was brought to Massachusetts in 1626.


THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY MOUNT

	In 1625 Captain Wollaston, Thomas Morton, and thirty
others sailed from England and months later, taking their bearings
from a red cedar tree, they disembarked in Quincy Bay.  A year later
Wollaston, impatient for lucre and gain, left for good to Virginia.
Thomas Morton settled in Passonaggessit which he named Merry
Mount.  The land seemed a "Paradise" to him.  He wrote, there are
"fowls in abundance, fish in multitudes, and I discovered besides,
millions of turtle doves on the green boughs, which sat pecking of
the full, ripe, pleasant grapes that were supported by the lusty trees,
whose fruitful load did cause the arms to bend."

	On May Day, 1627, he and his Indian friends, stirred by the
sound of drums, erected a Maypole eighty feet high, decorated it
with garlands, wrapped it in ribbons, and nailed to its top the antlers
of a buck.  Later he wrote that he "sett up a Maypole upon the
festival day of Philip and James, and therefore brewed a barrell of
excellent beare."  A ganymede sang a Bacchanalian song.  Morton
attached to the pole the first lyric verses penned in America which
concluded.


With the proclamation that the first of May
At Merry Mount shall be kept holly day


	The Puritans at Plymouth were opposed to the May Day.
they called the Maypole "an Idoll" and named Merry Mount "Mount
Dagon" after the god of the first ocean-going imperialist, the
Phoenicians.  More likely, though the Puritans were the  imperialist,
not Morton, who worked with slaves, servants, and native
Americans, person to person.  Everyone was equal in his "social
contract."  Governor Bradford wrote, "they allso set up a Maypole,
drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the
Indean women for thier consorts, dancing and frisking togither (like
so many faires, or furies rather) and worse practise."

	Merry Mount became a refuge for Indians, the discontented,
gay people, runaway servants, and what the governor called "all the
scume of the countrie."  When the authorities reminded him that his
actions violated the King's Proclamation, Morton replied that it was
"no law."   Miles Standish, whom Morton called "Mr. Shrimp,"
attacked.  The Maypole was cut down.  The settlement was burned.
Morton's goods were confiscated, he was chained in the bilboes,
and ostracized to England aboard the ship "The Gift," at a cost the
Purtans complained of twelve pounds seven shillings.  The rainbow
coalition of Merry Mount was thus destroyed for the time being.
That Merry Mount later (1636) became associated with Anne
Hutchinson, the famous mid-wife, spirtualist, and feminist, surely
was more than coincidental.  Her brother-in-law ran the Chapel of
Ease.  She thought that god loved everybody, regardless of their
sins.  She doubted the Puritans' authority to make law.  A statue of
Robert Burns in Quincy near to Merry Mount, quotes the poet's
lines,

A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.

	Thomas Morton was a thorn in the side of the Boston and
Plymouth Puritans, because he had an alternate vision of
Massachusetts.  He was impressed by its fertility; they by its
scarcity.  He befriended the Indians; they shuddered at the thought.
He was egalitarian; they proclaimed themselves the "Elect".  He
freed servants; they lived off them.  He armed the Indians; they used
arms against Indians.  To Nathaniel Hawthorne, the destiny of
American settlement was decided at Merry Mount.  Casting the
struggle as mirth vs. gloom, grizzly saints vs. gay sinners, green
vs. iron, it was the Puritans who won, and the fate of America was
determined in favor of psalm-singing, Indian-scalpers whose notion
of the Maypole was a whipping post.

	Parts of the past live, parts die.  The red cedar that drew
Morton first to Merry Mount blew down in the gale of 1898.  A
section of it, about eight feet of its trunk became a power fetish in
1919, placed as it was next to the President's chair of the Quincy
City Council.  Interested parties may now view it in the Quincy
Historical Museum.  Living trees, however, have since grown,
despite the closure of the ship-yards.



ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC

	In England the attacks on May Day were a necessary part of
the wearisome, unending attempt to establish industrial work
discipline.  The attempt was led by the Puritans with their belief that
toil was godly and less toil wicked.  Absolute surplus value could be
increased only by increasing the hours of labor and abolishing
holydays.  A parson wrote a piece of work propaganda called
Funebria Florae, Or the Downfall of the May Games.  He attacked,
"ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers,
maid-marians, morrice-dancers, maskers, mummers, Maypole
stealers, health-drinkers, together with a rapscallion rout of fiddlers,
fools fighters, gamesters, lewd-women, light-women, contemmers
of magistracy, affronters of ministry, disobedients to parents,
misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, &c."

	At about this time, Isaac Newton, the gravitationist and
machinist of time, said work was a law of planets and apples alike.
Thus work ceased to be merely the ideology of the Puritans, it
became a law of the universe.  In 1717 Newton purchased London's
hundred foot Maypole and used it to prop up his telescope.

	Chimney sweeps and dairy maids led the resistance.  The
sweeps dressed up as women on May Day, or put on aristocratic
perriwigs.  They sang songs and collected money.  When the Earl of
Bute in 1763 refused to pay, the opprobrium was so great that he
was forced to resign.  Milk maids used to go a-Maying by dressing
in floral garlands, dancing and getting the dairymen to distribute
their milk-yield freely.  Soot and milk workers thus helped to retain
the holyday right into the industrial revolution.

	The ruling class used the day for its own purposes.  Thus,
when Parliament was forced to abolish slavery in the British
dominions, it did so on May Day 1807.  In 1820 the Cato Street
conspirators plotted to destroy the British cabinet while it was
having dinner.  Irish, Jamaican, and Cockney were hanged for the
attempt on May Day 1820.  A conspirator wrote his wife saying
"justice and liberty have taken their flight... to other distant shores."
He meant America, where Boston Brahmin, Robber Baron, and
Southern Plantocrat divided and ruled an arching rainbow of people.

	Two bands of that rainbow came from English and Irish
islands.  One was Green.  Robert Owen, union leader, socialist, and
founder of utopian communities in America, announced the
beginning of the millenium after May Day 1833.  The other was
Red. On May Day 1830, a founder of the Knights of Labor, the
United Mine Workers of America, and the Wobblies was born in
Ireland,  Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a., "Mother Jones."  She was a
Maia of the American working class.

	May Day continued to be commemorated in America, one
way or another, despite the victory of the Purtians at Merry Mount.
On May Day 1779 the revolutionaries of Boston confiscated the
estates of "enemies of Liberty."  On May Day 1808 "twenty
different dancing groups of the wretched Africans" in New Orleans
danced to the tunes of their own drums until sunset when the slave
patrols showed themselves with their cutlasses.  "The principal
dancers or leaders are dressed in a variety of wild and savage
fashions, always ornamented with a number of tails of the small
wild beasts," observed a strolling white man.



MAY DAY EVENTS IN BOSTON (1986)

May First

Dawn:	Morris Dancers on pedestrian bridge over Charles.
9:00:	Sacco & Vanzetti Debate, C.P.C.S.
11:00:	Maypole Games & Poetry, UMass/Boston.
12:00:	Parade from Commons, Mass. College of Art.
2:00:	Cruise to Merry Mount, inquire of Pre-Law Society
UMass/Boston.
Afternoon:	March & Demo against apartheid, boycott Shell.
Evening:	Dragon Dance at UMass/Boston.  Other dances.

May Second

7:30:	Margo Adler, witch, speaks on "Neo-Paganism" at the
Interface Center, 	Watertown.
7:30:	Faneuil Hall, Labor Remembers:  100th Anniversary of the
Great Hour-	Strike.

									


Visiting Merry Mount:  If driving take Rte.3A to Butler Road or
Merry Mount Road and go up to Samoset Ave.  If taking the T get
off at Qunicy Center and stroll up Coddington or Hancock St.  On
the map opposite, x marks the spot.



THE RED:  HAYMARKET CENTENNIAL

	The history of the modern May Day originates in the center
of the North American plains, at Haymarket, in Chicago - "the city
on the make" - in May 1886.  The Red side of that story is more
well-known than the Green, because it was bloody.  But there was
also a Green side to the tale, though the green was not so much that
of pretty grass garlands, as it was of greenbacks, for in Chicago, it
was said, the dollar is king.

	Of course the prairies are green in May.  Virgin soil, dark,
brown, crumbling, shot with fine black sand, it was the produce of
thousands of years of humus and organic decomposition.  For many
centuries this earth was husbanded by the native Americans of the
plains.  As Black Elk said theirs is "the story of all life that is holy
and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-
leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are
children of one mother and their father is one Spirit."  From such a
green perspective, the white men appeared as pharoahs, and indeed,
as Abe Lincoln put it, these prairies were the "Egypt of the West".

	The land was mechanized.  Relative surplus value could only
be obtained by reducing the price of food.  The proteins and
vitamins of this fertile earth spread through the whole world.
Chicago was the jugular vein.  Cyrus McCormick wielded the
surgeon's knife.  His mechanical reapers harvested the grasses and
grains.  McCormick produced 1,500 reapers in 1849; by 1884 he
was producing 80,000.  Not that McCormick actually made reapers,
members of the Molders Union Local 23 did that, and on May Day
1867 they went on strike, starting the Eight Hour Movement.

	A staggering transformation was wrought.  It was:
"Farewell" to the hammer and sickle. "Goodby" to the cradle scythe.
"So long" to Emerson's man with the hoe.   These now became the
artifacts of nostalgia and romance.  It became "Hello" to the hobo.
"Move on" to the harvest stiffs.  "Line up" the proletarians.  Such
were the new commands of civilization.

	Thousands of immigrants, many from Germany, poured into
Chicago after the Civil War.  Class war was advanced, technically
and logistically.  In 1855 the Chicago police used Gatling guns
against the workers who protested the closing of the beer gardens.
In the Bread Riot of 1872 the police clubbed hungry people in a
tunnel under the river.  In the 1877 railway strike, Federal troops
fought workers at "The Battle of the Viaduct."  These troops were
recently seasoned from fighting the Sioux who had killed Custer.
Henceforth, the defeated Sioux could only "Go to a mountain top
and cry for a vision."  The Pinkerton Detective Agency put visions
into practice by teaching the city police how to spy and to form
fighting columns for deployment in city streets.  A hundred years
ago during the street car strike, the police issued a shoot-to-kill
order.

	McCormick cut wages 15%.  His profit rate was 71%.  In
May 1886 four molders whom McCormick locked-out was shot
dead by the police.  Thus, did this 'grim reaper' maintain his profits.

	Nationally, May First 1886 was important because  a couple
of years earlier the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions
of the United States and Canada, "RESOLVED... that eight hours
shall constitute a legal day's labor, from and after May 1, 1886.

	On 4 May 1886 several thousand people gathered near
Haymarket Square to hear what August Spies, a newspaperman,
had to say about the shootings at the McCormick works.  Albert
Parsons, a typographer and labor leader spoke next.  Later, at his
trial, he said, "What is Socialism or Anarchism?  Briefly stated it is
the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of
production and the right of the producers to their product."  He was
followed by "Good-Natured Sam" Fielden who as a child had
worked in the textile factories of Lancashire, England.  He was  a
Methodist preacher and labor organizer.  He got done speaking at
10:30 PM.    At that time 176 policemen  charged the crowd that had
dwindled to about 200.  An unknown hand threw a stick of
dynamite, the first time that Alfred Nobel's invention was used in
class battle.

	All hell broke lose, many were killed, and the rest is history.

	"Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards," was
the Sheriff's dictum.  It was followed religiously across the country.
Newspaper screamed for blood, homes were ransacked, and
suspects were subjected to the "third degree."  Eight men were
railroaded in Chicago at a farcical trial.  Four men hanged on "Black
Friday,"  11 November 1887.

	"There will come a time when our silence will be more
powerful than the voices you strangle today,"  said Spies before he
choked.



MAY DAY SINCE 1886

	Lucy Parsons, widowed by Chicago's "just-us," was born
in Texas.  She was partly Afro-American, partly native American,
and partly Hispanic.  She set out to tell the world the true story "of
one whose only crime was that he lived in advance of his time."
She went to England and encouraged English workers to make May
Day an international holiday for shortening the hours of work.  Her
friend, William Morris, wrote a poem called "May Day."




WORKERS

They are few, we are many:  and yet, O our Mother,
Many years were  wordless and nought was our deed,
But now the word flitteth from brother to brother:
	We have furrowed the acres and scattered the seed.


EARTH

	Win on then unyielding, through fair and foul weather,
	And pass not a day that your deed shall avail.
And in hope every spring-tide come gather together
	That unto the Earth ye may tell all your tale.

	Her work was not in vain.  May Day, or "The Day of the
Chicago Martyrs" as it is still called in Mexico "belongs to the
working class and is dedicated to the revolution," as Eugene Debs
put it in his May Day editorial of 1907.  The A. F. of L. declared it a
holiday.  Sam Gompers sent an emissary to Europe to have it
proclaimed an international labor day.  Both the Knights of Labor
and the Second International officially adopted the day.  Bismarck,
on the other hand, outlawed May Day.  President Grover Cleveland
announced that the first Monday in September would be Labor Day
in America, as he tried to divide the international working class.
Huge numbers were out of work, and they began marching.  Under
the generalship of Jacob Coxey they descended on Washington D.
C. on May Day 1894, the first big march on Washington.  Two
years later across the world Lenin wrote an important May Day
pamphlet for the Russian factory workers in 1896.  The Russian
Revolution of 1905 began on May Day.

	With the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the Red
side of May Day became scarlet, crimson, for ten million people
were slaughtered in World War I.  The end of the war brought work
stoppings, general strikes, and insurrections all over the world,
from Mexico to Kenya, from China to France.  In Boston on May
Day 1919 the young telephone workers threatened to strike, and
20,000 workers in Lawrence went on strike again for the 8-hour
day.  There were fierce clashes between working people and police
in Cleveland as well as in other cities on May Day of that year.  A lot
of socialists, anarchists, bolsheviks, wobblies and other "I-Won't-
Workers," ended up in jail as a result.

	This didn't get them down.  At "Wire City," as they called
the federal pen at Fort Leavenworth, there was a grand parade and
no work on May Day 1919.  Pictures of Lenine and Lincoln were
tied to the end of broom sticks and held afloat.  There speeches and
songs.  The Liberator supplies us with an account of the day, but it
does not tell us who won the Wobbly-Socialist horseshoe throwing
contest.    Nor does it tell us what happened to the soldier caught
waving a red ribbon from the guards' barracks.  Meanwhile, one
mile underground in the copper mines of Bisbee where there are no
national boundaries, Spanish-speaking Americans were singing
"The International" on May Day.

	In the 1920s and 1930s the day was celebrated by  union
organizers, the unemployed, and determined workers.  In New
York City the big May Day celebration was held in Union Square.
In the 1930s Lucy Parsons marched in Chicago at May Day with her
young friend, Studs Terkel.  May Day 1946 the Arabs began a
general strike in Palestine, and the Jews of the Displaced Persons
Camps in Landsberg, Germany, went on hunger strike.  On May
Day 1947 auto workers in Paris downed tools, an insurrection in
Paraguay broke out, the Mafia killed six May Day marchers in
Sicily, and the Boston Parks Commissioner said that this was the
first year in living memory when neither Communist nor Socialist
had applied for a permit to rally on the Common.

	1968 was a good year for May Day.  Allen Ginsberg was
made the"Lord of Misrule" in Prague before the Russians got there.
In London hundreds of students lobbied Parliament against a bill to
stop Third World immigration into England.  In Mississippi police
could not prevent 350 Black students from supporting their jailed
friends.  At Columbia University thousands of students petitioned
against armed police on campus.  In Detroit with the help of the
Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, the first wildcat strike in
fifteen years took place at the Hamtramck Assembly plant (Dodge
Main), against  speed-up.  In Cambridge, Mass., Black leaders
advocated police reforms while in New York the Mayor signed a bill
providing the police with the most sweeping "emergency" powers
known in American history.  The climax to the '68 Mai was reached
in France where there was a gigantic General Strike under strange
slogans such as

Parlez a vos voisins!
L'Imagination prend le pouvoir!
Dessous les paves c'est la plage!


	On May Day in 1971 President Nixon couldn't sleep.  He
order 10,000 paratroopers and marines to Washington D.C. because
he was afraid that some people calling themselves the May Day
Tribe might succeed in their goal of blocking access to the
Department of Justice.  In the Philippines four students were shot to
death protesting the dictatorship.  In Boston Mayor White argued
against the right of municipal workers, including the police, to
withdraw their services, or stop working.  In May 1980 we may see
Green themes in Mozambique where the workers lamented the
absence of beer, or in Germany where three hundred women
witches rampaged through Hamburg.  Red themes may be seen in
the 30,000 Brazilian auto workers who struck, or in the 5.8 million
Japanese who struck against inflation.

	On May Day 1980 the Green and Red themes were
combined when a  former Buick auto-maker from Detroit, one "Mr.
Toad," sat at a picnic table and penned the following lines,

	The eight hour day is not enough;
We are thinking of more and better stuff.
So here is our prayer and here is our plan,
We want what we want and we'll take what we can.

Down with wars both small and large,
Except for the ones where we're in charge:
Those are the wars of class against class,
Where we get a chance to kick some ass..

For air to breathe and water to drink,
And no more poison from the kitchen sink.
For land that's green and life that's saved
And less and less of the earth that's paved.

No more women who are less than free,
Or men who cannot learn to see
Their power steals their humanity
And makes us all less than we can be.

For teachers who learn and students who teach
And schools that are kept beyond the reach
Of provosts and deans and chancellors and such
And Xerox and Kodak and Shell, Royal Dutch.

An end to shops that are dark and dingy,
An end to Bosses whether good or stingy,
An end to work that produces junk,
An end to junk that produces work,
And an end to all in charge - the jerks.

For all who dance and sing, loud cheers,
To the prophets of doom we send some jeers,
To our friends and lovers we give free beers,
And to all who are here, a day without fears.

So, on this first of May we all should say
That we will either make it or break it.
Or, to put this thought another way,
Let's take it easy, but let's take it.


LAW DAY/U.S.A.

	Yet, May Day was always a troubling day in America; some
wished to forget it.  In 1939 Pennsylvania declared it "Americanism
Day."  In 1947 Congress declared it to be "Loyalty Day."  Yet, these
attempts to hide the meaning of the day have never succeeded.  As
the Wobblies used to say, "We Won't Forget."

	Like in 1958, at the urging of Charles Rhyne, proclaimed
May  First "Law Day/U.S.A."  As a result the politicians had
another opportunity for bombast about the Cold War and to tout
their own virtues.  Senator Javits, for instance, took a deep
historical breath in May 1960 by saying American ideas were the
highest "ever espoused since the dawn of civilization.  Governor
Rockefeller of New York got right to his point by saying that the
traditional May Day "bordered on treason."  As an activity for the
day Senator Wiley recommended that people read Statute Books.  In
preaching on "Obedience to Authority"  on May Day 1960, the
Chaplain of the Senate believed it was the first time in the 20th
century that the subject had been addressed.  He reminded people of
the words carved on the courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts:
"Obedience to Law is Liberty."  He said God is "all law" and
suggested we sing the hymn, "Make Me a Captive, Lord, and Then
I shall be Free."  He complained that  TV shows made fun of cops
and husbands.  He said God had become too maternal.

	Beneath the hypocrisy of such talk (at the time the Senate
was rejecting the jurisdiction of the World Court), there were
indications of the revolt in the kitchens.  In addition to the
trumpeting Cold War overtones, frightened patriarchal undertones
were essential to the Law Day music.  Indeed, it attempted to drown
out both the Red and the Green.   Those who have to face the law
and order music on a daily basis, the lawyers and the orderers, also
have to make their own deals.

	Among the lawyers there are conservatives and liberals; they
are generally ideologues.  On Law Day 1964 the President of the
Connecticut Bar wrote against civil rights demonstrators, "corrupt"
labor unions, "juvenile delinquency," and Liz Taylor!  William O.
Douglas, on the other hand on Law Day 1962 warned against
mimicking British imperialism and favored independence
movements and the Peace Corps by saying "We need Michigan-in-
Nigeria, California-in-the-Congo, Columbia-in-Iran" which has
come true, at least judging by what's written on sweat shirts around
the world. Neither the conservative nor the liberal, however, said it
should be a holiday for the lawyers, nor did they advocate the 8-
hour day for the workers of the legal apparatus.  In Boston only the
New England School of Law, the Law and Justice Program at
UMass., and the College of Public and Community Service
celebrate the Green and the Red.

	Among the orderers (the police) Law Day isn't much of a
holiday either.  Yet, police, men and women, all over the United
States owe a lot to May Day and the Boston police.  It is true that
more than 1,000 Boston men of blue lost their jobs owing to Calvin
Coolidge's suppression of the Boston police strike of 1919.  They
had been busy earlier in the summer during May Day.  At the same
time there were lasting gains:  a small pay increase ($300 a year),
shorter hours (73-90 a week had been the norm), and most
important, free uniforms!



AN ENDING

	Where is the Red and Green today?  Is it in Mao's Red
Book?  or in Col. Khadafy's Green Book?  Some perhaps.  Leigh
Hunt, the English essayist of the 19th century, wrote that May Day
is "the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature,
and the love of each other."  Certainly, such green union is possible,
because we all can imagine it, and we know that what is real now
was once only imagined.  Just as certainly, that union can be
realized only by red struggle, because there is no gain without pain,
as the aerobiticians say, or no dreams without responsibility, no
birth without labor, no green without red.

	The children used to celebrate May Day.  I think schools
stopped encouraging them sometime around when "Law Day" was
created, but I'm not sure.  A correspondent from East Arlington,
Mass., writes that in the late 1940s,  "On any given Saturday in
May, anywhere from 10-30 children would dress up in crepe paper
costumes (hats, shirts, &c.); we would pick baskets of flowers and
parade up and down several streets (until the flowers ran out!)  The
whole time we would be chanting,  'May Party, May Party, rah,
rah, rah!'.  A leader would be chosen, but I don't remember how.
(Probably by throwing fingers out).  Then, we would parade up to
Spy Pond at the edge of the Center off Lake Street and have a picnic
lunch."  This correspondent now teaches kindergarten.  "In recent
years," she continues, "I have always decorated a May Pole for my
kindergarten class (they do the decorations actually), and we  would
dance around it.  It would always attract attention from the older
children."



RESEARCH


The best way to learn more is to participate in May Day activities and
to talk to your neighbors.  Using your library's newspaper
collection, talking to school teachers, and getting people to talk
about their childhood, their strikes, and their working conditions are
good ways too.  For those who wish to read more, here are  few
suggestions.

William Adelman, HAYMARKET REVISITED (Illinois Labor
History  Society, 1976); Charles Francis Adams, THREE
EPISODES IN MASSACHUSETTS HISTORY (1894); William
Bradford, HISTORY OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION 1620-1647;
Jeremy Brecher, Strike!  (1972); R. Chambers, THE BOOK OF
DAYS:  A MISCELLANY OF POPULAR ANTIQUITIES (1864);
Henry David, THE HISTORY OF THE HAYMARKET AFFAIR
(1936); J.G. Frazer, THE GOLDEN BOUGH:  A STUDY OF
COMPARATIVE RELIGION (1890); James R. Green and Hugh
Donahue, BOSTON'S WORKERS:  A LABOR HISTORY (The
Public Library, 1979); Jane Hatch, THE AMERICAN BOOK OF
DAYS, (1976); William Hone, THE EVERY-DAY BOOK (1824);
Thomas Morton, THE NEW ENGLISH CANAAN (1637);
Edward Thompson, THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH
WORKING CLASS (1963); Alexander Trachtenberg, THE
HISTORY OF MAY DAY (1947);  Midnight Notes,  THE
WORK/ENERGY CRISIS AND THE APOCALYPSE (1981).




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