May Day

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If the dew falls on May-day morning it foreshadows a good butter year
(Weather Wisdom of 1889).

At 6am on May Day, the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford in England sings from the top of the Great Tower. This event is preceded by all-night partying all over Oxford, and draws large crowds.

Banned by the Revolution after the overthrow of Charles I, this was the most popular festival after Christmas, when much merrymaking took place. Since it is basically a fertility festival, probably this was one where (from the Christian point of view), a ban was essential to the religious government of England.

Dancing around the Maypole was traditional. It would be set up in the village square, painted and decorated with garlands and flowers collected the previous night by the youth of the village. The dancers would hold onto long streamers attached to the pole, and weave in and out of each other, the intricacies of the dance ensuring that no tangling took place. Morris dancing is another popular traditional pastime even today in parts of England.

Mrs Pepys thought May dew 'the only thing in the world to wash her face with' - and got up at 4 am to do it! The dew collected in May was thought to have special properties, but particularly that which fell on May Day itself. The tradition of collecting May dew persisted until the 1950s.

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Recipes for May

Spring Gateau

Across the Northern hemisphere, May Day (1st May) has been a cause for celebration for centuries, possibly millennia. It was the annual Spring festival in many places, with celebrations dating back to pagan times, and many of these traditions are continued to this day, for example 'Obby 'Oss Day in Padstow, Cornwall, UK (and see also Furry Day in Helston, Cornwall, UK).

Most May Day celebrations derive from Beltane and similar celebrations, such as Walpurgisnacht in Germany. There is usually a strong emphasis on fertility symbolism, and spring herbage and greenery are used as decorations and symbols. In England, Maypole and Morris Dancing are common components and in the US there may be a May Day parade and a May Queen. In recent times many Pagans and Wiccans have begun to reconstruct and celebrate traditional May Day concepts on 1st May.

In many communist controlled countries, May Day was used as an occasion for displaying the military might of the country, with the population obliged to attend and cheer enthusiastically. Since there are now few such regimes, this practice is mainly confined to such places as North Korea.

After Poland escaped from Soviet control, the May Day holiday was renamed State Holiday to distinguish it from the former holiday glorifying Communism.

Since the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago, USA, May Day has been used in parallel as a commemoration and celebration of workers' rights. The international socialist movement has chosen this date as International Workers Day or Labour Day, a fact which led to the suppression of May Day as a holiday by the rabid right wing leader, Margaret Thatcher. To this day in the UK, the Early May Bank Holiday (as it is officially called in that country - which itself has a deliciously Orwellian feel about it) is celebrated on the first Monday of May, rather than on May Day itself.

Similarly, in the United States, the association of May Day with the communist states brought about the establishment of the first Monday in September as Labor Day. This is also the case in Canada, where it is called Labour Day. Similarly, other countries have chosen different days for Labour and Worker-related holidays and celebrations. These include New Zealand (fourth Monday in October) and Australia, where the state and territorial governments determine their own dates.

The Haymarket Riot

As already mentioned, the reason that May Day came to be associated with workers' rights was because of a riot in Chicago, USA. In actual fact, the riot took place on 4th May, but the unrest which led up to it started on the 1st, which was the date designated by the US and Canada Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) for the introduction of an 8-hour work day, and failing this, a General Strike. Large demonstrations of thousands or workers took place across the US on 1st May, the biggest in Chicago, with some 90,000 participants. In all around 350,000 workers went on strike.

On 3rd May, 4 workers at a Chicago picket line were killed by police and several wounded. The following day, police ordered the dispersal of a rally at Haymarket Square and marched in en masse (as it seems they still do in situations like this, to this day). At this point an anarchist threw a bomb which killed a policeman called Mathias J Degan, whereupon the police opened fire, killing another 4 workers (and 7 of their own men) and injuring others. How many were injured is not clear, as many were too afraid to seek treatment.

The subsequent trial of eight men as anarchists led to the execution of four men: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel. Another man, Louis Lingg, committed suicide before he could be executed. Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden were sentenced to life imprisonment and Oscar Neebe was sentenced to 15 years. It has been called "one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in US history.". It also resulted in protests around the world.

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