Postcard Thursday: Labor Day

If you've ever taken our tour of Union Square and environs, you may be familiar with the above picture. It depicts the very first Labor Day parade on September 5, 1882. Though the parade wended its way from City Hall to Union Square and finally up to 42nd Street, it's Union Square that is most associated with the events of that day, perhaps because of this image. (Union Square became so connected to the American labor movement that you will sometimes hear that the "union" the square is named after is a labor union. That's not true: the small square marked the place where Broadway and the Bowery met on the original 1811 grid plan of the city.)

The history of Labor Day in America is muddled. Many -- including the AFLCIO -- claim the holiday was the brainchild of Peter J. McGuire, the founder of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. Others claim Matthew Maguire of Paterson, New Jersey, was instrumental in getting the holiday adopted. Certainly Maguire led the parade in 1822, sitting beside noted abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn in the lead carriage.

By 1894, Labor Day was a national holiday, despite the fact that May Day was associated with labor in many parts of the world. Eight years earlier, on May 4, 1886, in Chicago, a rally to support striking workers turned into a riot when someone threw dynamite at the police. Quickly dubbed the "Haymarket Affair," the events became the catalyst for turning May 1 into an International Workers' Day -- a day often marked by protest. To distinguish the new Labor Day holiday from the violence of Haymarket -- and divorce it from any questions of labor unrest -- the Cleveland administration instead picked the early September date of New York's commemoration. Within a few decades, it would come to signal the unofficial end of summer.

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AND NOW THAT FALL IS HERE,

it's the perfect time for a walking tour!

Check out our full menu of options at www.walknyc.com.

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

February 27, 1860: Lincoln at Cooper Union

A lot of our posts recently seem to have focused on the East Village and we return there again today to celebrate the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s “Right Makes Might” speech at Cooper Union.

Lincoln had been invited to address the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, but the parish—led by noted abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher*—realized that the crowd would be too large for their Orange Street home and the speech was rebooked for the Great Hall at the Cooper Union. The Great Hall had opened only two years earlier and was one of the largest public gathering spots in the city.

In the speech, which historian Harold Holzer persuasively argues made Lincoln president, the “noted political exhorter and prairie orator” (as the New York Times called him the next day) forcefully laid out his case for barring the spread of slavery into the territories. Afterwards, the New York Tribune wrote: “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”

It was a busy day for Lincoln. In addition to the speech, he had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady. Both the speech and the photograph were distributed across the country, significantly raising Lincoln’s profile. According to McSorley’s lore, Peter Cooper brought Lincoln around for beer after the speech. This is unlikely. Instead, Lincoln went to the Athenaeum Club with some members of the Young Men's Central Republican Union for dinner.

The complete text of Lincoln’s speech can be read at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.

* We’ll visit the Plymouth Church in a future post.

For more about Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union, and the city during the Civil War, be sure to pick up a copy of our book Inside the Apple.

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