Built by labor

The first Labor Day was celebrated on Sept. 5, 1882, when the Central Labor Union marked it with a demonstration and picnic in New York City. The day's popularity grew along with the labor movement.

By 1885, a “workingman's holiday” was observed in many industrial cities.

Eventually, a third of the states had their own holiday. In 1894, Congress passed a law, signed by President Grover Cleveland, that declared the first Monday in September Labor Day, a national holiday.

Although President Cleveland was no friend of organized labor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was. Forty-two years after the first official Labor Day, President Roosevelt made a radio address from the White House on Sept. 6, 1936, after he returned from a tour of drought-ridden states.

His celebration of American work — and the dignity of the worker — is worth remembering today.

I saw drought devastation in nine states. I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost their garden, and come through to the end of the summer without one dollar of cash resources, facing a winter without feed or food — facing a planting season without seed to put in the ground. …

Yet I would not have you think for a single minute that there is permanent disaster in these drought regions, or that the picture I saw meant depopulating these areas.

No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children who have carried on through desperate days, and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity, and their courage.

It was their fathers' task to make homes; it is their task to keep those homes; it is our task to help them with their fight. …

Beginning in 1934, when we also had serious drought conditions, the state and federal governments cooperated in planning a large number of projects — many of them directly aimed at the alleviation of future drought conditions. … Spending like this is not waste. It would spell future waste if we did not spend for such things now. These emergency work projects provide money to buy food and clothing for the winter; they keep the livestock on the farm; they provide seed for a new crop, and, best of all, they will conserve soil and water in the future in those areas most frequently hit by drought. …

Every state in the drought area is now doing and always will do business with every state outside it. The very existence of the men and women working in the clothing factories of New York, making clothes worn by farmers and their families, of the workers in the steel mills in Pittsburgh, in the automobile factories of Detroit, and in the harvester factories of Illinois, depend upon the farmers' ability to purchase the commodities they produce.

In the same way, it is the purchasing power of the workers in these factories in the cities that enables them and their wives and children to eat more beef, more pork, more wheat, more corn, more fruit, and more dairy products, and to buy more clothing made from cotton, wool, and leather. In a physical and a property sense, as well as in a spiritual sense, we are members one of another. …

Dependable employment at fair wages is just as important to the people in the towns and cities as good farm income is to agriculture. Our people must have the ability to buy the goods they manufacture and the crops they produce. Thus city wages and farm buying power are the two strong legs that carry the nation forward.

In other countries, the relationship of employer and employee has more or less been accepted as a class relationship ... In this country we insist, as an essential of the American way of life, that the employer-employee relationship should be one between free men and equals. …

All American workers, brain workers and manual workers alike ... know that our needs are one in building an orderly economic democracy in which all can profit and in which all can be secure from the kind of faulty economic direction which brought us to the brink of common ruin. … There is no cleavage between white-collar workers and manual workers, between artists and artisans, musicians and mechanics, lawyers and accountants, and architects and miners.

Labor Day belongs to all of us. Labor Day symbolizes the hope of all Americans. … The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom — a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.