maying

Though the day will not pass without celebration and demonstration and maybe riots, in more than eighty countries around the world, there is no need for a general strike as 1. May is a national holiday. And although the roots of the of many popular movements can be traced back to upheaval and abusive working conditions in America, the International Workers’ Day itself a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, the US has seemingly for some time been peddling a smear campaign against a workers’ holiday and the striving for social justice that it represents, no to mention the older rites and traditions of the cross-quarter event. With the onset of Cold War polarization, the first of May across the Atlantic became known as “Americanization Day,” after having already established a separate labor day in order to minimize connotations with lurking Communists and Anarchists. Well before the threat of Soviet expansion was considered eliminated, the US dropped this celebration of manifest destiny, by name, in favour of calling it instead—and still to this day—“Loyalty Day.”