Is Labor Day our most American holiday?

Did you know that Labor Day isn’t just mattress sales and barbecues? Did you think Labor Day was designed to be some sort of semi-official day of rest, the summer finale after finishing the family vacation and heading back to the office full-time? That’s a shame, because while other holidays might look more patriotic, there may be no more American a holiday than Labor Day.

One thing most Americans believe about our country is the idea that we are the land of opportunity. Millions of people for nearly 250 years have arrived on these shores (yes, we’re all immigrants) and taught their children the importance of that belief. That through hard work and our democratic system, you could achieve anything. The reality however was, that by the end of the 19th century, America was living in what became named the Gilded Age, a time when opportunity was trampled by the rapacious nature of a society that was devastatingly dividing Americans into haves and have-nots.

It was the height of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, when the average American worked 12-hour days and sevenday weeks just to avoid not being thrown in jail for being in poverty. Children, sometimes as young as 5 or 6, earned pennies working gruesome, backbreaking jobs. Business owners locked workers in buildings with no windows or bathrooms. People regularly got sick and had no access to doctors or medicine. Sometimes they died when those locked buildings caught fire. What today’s Republicans call the good old days.

But no, this isn’t going to be one of those columns calling out the evils of what a huge chunk of the Republican Party has metastasized into, that’s for another day. Because for this Labor Day, I want to accomplish two things. Firstly, I want to help reclaim the honor and heritage of the progressive movement. Slavish watchers of Fox News may reflexively recoil at the word “progressive,” but that’s their fault for drinking the stupid-flavored Kool-Aid. Yet it’s hard for many of us to imagine life in America without the fruits of the original progressive movement. You see, it was out of those barbaric roots of that Gilded Age, where 1 percent had everything and 99 percent could barely survive, that the American middle class and the social safety net was constructed.

Progressives fought and sometimes died for your 40-hour workweek, your weekend, overtime, sick pay, and child labor laws, along with fair and honest wages. And after that for clean air, civil rights, access to health care and voting rights. It took decades of strikes, elections, resistance and people marching in the streets to give birth to that middle-class America we sometimes think (incorrectly) is a Constitutionally enshrined right. And why did they do it? Let’s let the words of Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor provide an answer. “What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.” Or in other words, the opposite of what’s happening today.

Meanwhile, Labor Day itself is credited to a 1930s union leader named Peter McGuire who suggested a holiday midway between Independence Day and Thanksgiving that would recognize all those working class and middle class Americans that, “would publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.” Give me McGuire or Gompers over any of our current phony populists.

Secondly, it needs to be pointed out that not only do we take those progressive advances we always assumed were our birthright for granted, but we’ve forgotten that it’s those liberal democratic ideals that shaped this country into the most admired and respected nation in history. The rest of the world wanted to be us, not because of our “freedom” or our military or our money, but because of our fairness and inclusiveness. Because of the emphasis we place on the common good, which progressives and labor fought to create. All of which our current leaders and ruling party, through both neglect and deliberate calculation, are tragically reducing to ashes.