Why Labor Day Ends the Summer

On the first Monday in September, the country sits down to a meal it has agreed to call the last one. The grill cools in the dark. The folding chairs get wiped clean and carried into the garage. The potato salad bowl comes back empty, the watermelon rinds go out to the compost, and somewhere a pool cover gets rolled out or a lake house is shut up until the leaves change. The sound in the air is not the buzz of a holiday but the particular quiet of a thing finishing.

None of this was planned. The holiday that became summer's full stop began as a workday, and the people who invented it were not thinking about picnics at all. They were thinking about the one thing they never had enough of: time.

The Tuesday that started it

The first Labor Day parade stepped off in New York City on a Tuesday in September 1882. There was no law behind it, no long weekend, no sale. The city's labor unions had simply declared that working people should have a day of their own, and by that morning thousands of them had closed their toolboxes and walked into the street. They marched craft by craft, each local behind its own banner, and when the route ended they sat down to a tremendous picnic and listened to speeches, and the general mood was that of something which had been a long time coming.

The complaint behind it was old and plain. In the mills and foundries and railyards of the 1880s, men and women worked ten hours a day, often twelve, often every day of the week, and the holidays of the national calendar were not for them. Independence Day belonged to everyone in theory, but the people who built the country usually worked on it. Labor wanted one day a year that belonged to working people by their own claim, the way the shorter workday was a claim: time as part of the wage.

Two men would spend the rest of their lives arguing over which of them had proposed it first, and the historians have never quite settled the quarrel. The credit, such as it is, generally goes to the organization that actually had to plan the thing — the Central Labor Union of New York, which did the unglamorous work that neither claimant had to do.

The next year the holiday fell on the first Monday, and the year after that, and the custom took. Oregon made it a state holiday in 1887, and several other states did the same that season. The holiday was an idea in motion, not yet a line in the American calendar. That would take a strike.

A line drawn in the calendar

In the spring of 1894 the railroads shut down. The strike began at the Pullman Company, outside Chicago, where the workers lived in a town the company owned, and it spread along the tracks until the trains stood still in the yards and the federal government had to decide what to do. Congress, weighing the labor vote and the angry mood of the country, reached for the workers' holiday instead. The bill moved quickly, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law in late June, a gesture of reconciliation offered even as the strike dragged into the summer heat.

The law fixed the date for Washington and the territories. The states followed one after another, and a holiday that had begun as a radical request — a demand that the republic acknowledge the people who did its work — became, within a generation, a piece of the furniture. That is when the meaning started to change.

It changed first in the schoolrooms. For a long run of American childhoods, the Tuesday after Labor Day was the first day of school, and the Monday before it was the last day of freedom. Parents felt the line too. The white summer clothes went to the back of the closet, the sandals went into the basket by the door, and the rule about not wearing white after Labor Day — no one has ever said precisely where that rule came from, but every fashion columnist of the early twentieth century enforced it like law — gave the first Monday in September the weight of a door closing.

Department stores noticed the door and stocked for it. In many towns the pools and beaches set their closing day on the holiday, so the lifeguards could go back to school. Football put a game there. The long drive home from the lake got folded into it. By the middle of the twentieth century the holiday was no longer simply a labor parade; it was the country's agreed-upon full stop, a line drawn straight through the first week of September.

The odd thing is that the full stop holds even where the reasons have loosened. In much of the country school now opens in August. The fashion rule has retired. The pools close on whatever schedule the budget requires. The line on the calendar has stayed anyway, because the line was never really about school or shoes. It was about the feeling of the first Monday in September, which arrives the same way every year: the season at its height, and a door, somewhere just ahead, that says it will not last.

The month the line gave us

What the holiday marks off is not, strictly speaking, the end of summer. Summer keeps on the calendar for weeks after it, and in much of the country the warm weather stays up into October. What ends on the first Monday in September is a kind of attention — the open-ended ease of July, when the tomato plant is left to do what it will and the evenings are long for no better reason than that they are.

What comes after the holiday is September, which has its own excellent claims. The mornings have a bite that the coffee knows how to answer. The goldenrod comes on along the roadsides, not yet the full blaze of high autumn but the first yellow motes of it. The crickets take over the dusk, and their song, slowed by the cooler nights, is the metronome of the month. The garden gives up its last tomatoes all at once, which is why half the kitchens in the neighborhood smell like the same pot of sauce going down to a simmer. The harvest moon — the full moon nearest the equinox, which in most years comes in September — rises soon after supper and behaves for a few nights as if it has work to do and means to be useful.

This is the season the first Labor Day was pointing toward. The marchers of 1882 wanted time — time belonging to them, not to the shop floor — and September, of all the months, hands time over. The work will come, but it has not come yet. The days are shorter, the light goes amber in the late afternoon, and the best of the month is the shared part of it: the county fair waking up on its lot, the school buses appearing again on the back roads, the game in the yard that runs until the porch lights come on, the supper eaten outside while there is still enough day left to eat it by. The holiday invented for workers became a holiday for everyone who carries a chair out onto the lawn on the same Monday.

The good full stop

The people who planned that first parade would not recognize the Labor Day of now. The mattress sales would puzzle them. The back-to-school aisles would puzzle them. The etiquette of white shoes would puzzle them, and they might reasonably wonder what any of it had to do with the dignity of work. But they would recognize the shape of the thing. A day on which nobody has to work, and the whole country takes the same Monday off at once, so that a family can sit down to the same table in the middle of the afternoon — that was the wish. That was what they were marching for.

That is the tradition. Not the date itself, and not the line it draws, but the arrangement: the one Monday when the whole country agrees to sit still, and the meal is shared. The pools will close, and the lake houses will be shut up for the winter, and the school doors will open, and the season will turn when the season turns, not when the calendar says so. But on the evening of that first Monday, the last of the daylight holds on over the picnic table, and the company makes the most of it. That was, from the very beginning, the entire idea.

Photos: skua47 (CC BY 2.0)