The first Labor Day was a Tuesday, and it opened with eighty men in City Hall Park, no music, and a sidewalk of hecklers; the holiday that grew out of it was signed into law twelve years later by a president who was breaking a strike at the time.

William McCabe had a police permit for twenty thousand men and a route mapped out up Broadway. What he did not have, at nine in the morning, was a crowd.

Why the first Labor Day parade almost fell apart

McCabe was a printer, and he had been handed the grand marshal's job for a demonstration his own local had barely mobilized for. Thirty or forty men from the Advance Labor Union of Brooklyn stood around in City Hall Park. Counting them, he could muster eighty in all, and then he waited.

The sidewalk was merciless.

"Hundreds of men who could find no work to do were standing about having great fun at our expense," McCabe recalled, in an account the writer Richard P. Hunt drew on for American Heritage in 1982. Worse, McCabe said, were the taunts from people along the route who did have work. Somebody advised him to call the whole thing off.

Then a ferry from New Jersey put ashore about two hundred Newark jewelers, every one carrying a cane, met at the slip by their New York counterparts. They had brought Voss's Military Band of Newark with them. When it swung onto Broadway playing an air from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, McCabe called it the first gleam of light in what had threatened to be an awful day.

What the marchers gave up to be there

Pay.

A skilled hand in New York in the early 1880s earned something like two dollars for a ten- or twelve-hour day, six days a week, and nobody was reimbursing anyone for a Tuesday spent on Fifth Avenue. Several of the city's cigar factories closed so their employees could turn out. The New York Times reported the closures the next morning, and noted that plenty of union members had skipped the march for quiet excursions to Coney Island.

Ten thousand men eventually formed up, in three divisions that gathered at City Hall Park, Cooper Union and Washington Square. The organizers had told the police to expect twenty thousand and privately hoped for forty. "Considerable disappointment was therefore expressed," the Times wrote.

What the banners said

The procession went up Broadway to Fourteenth Street, along Fourth Avenue and Seventeenth Street, then up Fifth Avenue to Reservoir Park at Forty-second (the site is Bryant Park now). The reviewing stand was the cottage on the plaza at Union Square, where the labor editor John Swinton watched the divisions pass.

Painted and stitched mottoes went by in the hundreds. Bricklayers' Union No. 30 carried a silk banner reading "To the Workers Should Belong the Wealth." The printers marched under "Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule It." The cigar-makers, who had the most to say, demanded "Eight Hours for a Legal Day's Work" and also advised the public to "Smoke No Republican Jawbreakers and Democratic Stinkers." The Brooklyn men who had turned up first carried a banner reading simply "Pay No Rent."

Afterward almost everybody went uptown to Elm Park, at Ninth Avenue and Ninety-second Street, a picnic ground run by a saloonkeeper and political operator named Louis Wendel. Admission was twenty-five cents; women and children got in free. The Central Labor Union cleared about $230 on the day.

Who invented Labor Day?

Nobody can say for certain, and the Labor Department has given up pretending otherwise.

Two men are credited, and their surnames are close enough to have confused a century of writers. Peter J. McGuire was a carpenters' union officer who wrote in 1897 that he had urged a workers' holiday at a meeting in May 1882. Matthew Maguire was a machinist and the Central Labor Union's own secretary; by the account of the New Jersey Historical Society he sent out the announcements and rode in the carriage at the head of the parade. An 1896 newspaper report had Maguire claiming authorship of the holiday for himself.

Jonathan Grossman, the Labor Department's own historian, went through the surviving records and concluded that it is impossible to determine which of them deserves the credit.

There is a political reason the question was ever lopsided. Maguire ran for vice president on the Socialist Labor Party ticket in 1896, which made him an awkward founder for an American Federation of Labor that wanted its holiday respectable. McGuire, an AFL co-founder, got the memorial; his descendants got the White House ceremony for the first American labor stamp. A later Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz, named Maguire the true originator instead.

Why is Labor Day in September?

Because a New York committee liked the gap in the calendar.

The 1882 parade was meant as a one-off. The disappointment over the turnout did not stop the Central Labor Union from staging it again on September 5, 1883, a Wednesday, and in 1884 the union fixed it on the first Monday in September. McGuire's stated reasoning was the long empty stretch between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

The September date is often read now as a deliberate snub to the international workers' holiday on May 1, and the chronology will not carry that. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago was four years in the future when McCabe assembled his eighty men, and the Second International did not adopt May 1 until 1889. The American date came first; the contrast between the two hardened afterward.

How it became a federal holiday

Oregon moved first, on February 21, 1887, when Governor Sylvester Pennoyer signed House Bill 102. The Oregon law set the holiday on the first Saturday in June, which is a fair measure of how unsettled the whole idea still was. The Oregonian called it "about the silliest of all the demagogical methods of 'aiding labor.'" Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York passed laws of their own the same year, and 23 states had one by 1894.

Washington took longer. Senator James H. Kyle of South Dakota introduced S. 730 on August 28, 1893, and it sat for ten months without reaching the floor.

What moved it was Pullman. Workers at George Pullman's company town outside Chicago walked out on May 11, 1894; the American Railway Union began a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars on June 26. The Senate had passed Kyle's bill on June 22, four days before the boycott; with rail traffic seizing up, the House took it up on the 26th and passed it without objection. Grover Cleveland signed it on June 28. Five days later he ordered federal troops into Chicago; by late July the boycott was broken and the railway union's president, Eugene Debs, had been arrested.

That sequence gets garbled often enough to be worth stating flatly: the holiday was signed in the middle of the strike, not after it. A day off in September cost the administration nothing and bought a gesture toward the men its soldiers were about to face.

What the day is now

Retailers own the weekend; the beaches close. The organizations that invented the day are a great deal smaller than they were: the Bureau of Labor Statistics put union membership at 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers in 1983 and at 10.0 percent in 2025, about 14.7 million people.

Read against that, McCabe's morning is worth studying as a working model. There was no legal holiday to take and no guarantee that anyone would show up. Ten thousand men took the day anyway and absorbed the cost. Two years later the date was fixed, three years after that a state wrote it into law, and seven years after that a president signed it.

Congress has never invented a holiday out of nothing; it ratifies days that people have already started taking. Whatever the next one turns out to be, somebody is going to have to lose the pay first.

Sources

• New York Times, "Working Men's Parade and Picnic" (September 4, 1882) and "Working Men on Parade: An Orderly Labor Demonstration — Ten Thousand Men in Line" (September 6, 1882)
• Richard P. Hunt, "The First Labor Day," American Heritage, Volume 33, Issue 5 (1982)
• Wikipedia, "Labor Day" and "Pullman Strike"
• Time, "Who Founded Labor Day?" (2020)
• Michael Helquist, "Oregon Passes 1st State Law for Labor Day Holiday in 1887"
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Union Members — 2025" (released February 18, 2026)