Labor Day, like Obamacare and much else that is distasteful about American public life today, is a product of American liberals’ desire to be Canadians. The ’Nucks started celebrating labor on the first Monday in September in the 1880s; this holiday grew out of a parade celebrating a typographical workers’ strike in 1872. Soon, U.S. labor bosses, especially the Marxist Central Labor Union, wanted a holiday of their own. If there is anything we learned from the 20th century, it is that Communists love a parade. President Cleveland, feeling a bit of political pressure after having dispatched Brigadier General Nelson Miles to crush the Pullman strike and chucking Eugene Debs in the hoosegow, calculated that an end-of-summer barbecue for the riffraff might be just the tonic for his ailing administration.
His main point is that the labor-capital juxtaposition is a dichotomy that long ago outlived its usefulness.
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