Happy May Day, And Its Cursed Alternative
Happy May Day (or International Worker’s Day)! I’m a worker, and I celebrate workers. May Day is an excellent day to remember the sacrifices the labor movement has made to ensure the (relative) quality of life that workers experience today.
Yet, whenever a progressive idea gains prominence, a reactionary analogue always rises: the popularity of veganism as a climate solution, for example, powers conspiracies that Joe Biden will take our burgers.
May Day too has a reactionary alternative: Loyalty Day, originally Americanization Day.
This holiday is a product of America’s two red scares–that of the 1920s, and its more famous sequel, featuring HUAC and Wisconsin’s Joe McCarthy, in the 1950s. Americanization Day was first celebrated in the early 1920s, and President Eisenhower made Loyalty Day an official holiday in the 1950s.
Nothing really happens on Loyalty Day. While some reactionary ideas gain traction, Loyalty Day has few loyalists. Aside from a few parades, the most persisting tradition associated with this holiday is the president writing some brief declaration commemorating the holiday. That Biden’s first such proclamation mentions International Worker’s Day and the importance of the labor movement in America, the day’s initial purpose, to brand all those who sided with labor as disloyal to the American cause, is faded. Not even President Obama’s Loyalty Day addresses mentioned International Worker’s Day. Having briefly perused the Loyalty Day proclamations of previous Democratic Presidents who may have been inclined to mention May Day, such as, perhaps, LBJ or Carter, I was not able to find any such reference, making Biden’s proclamation unique.
For all the authoritarian undertones of pledging loyalty to the state, Loyalty Day was never more than a vacuous copycat with little identity of its own. Now, instead of vacuously decrying communism, it admits defeat, and vacuously tells people to return to the true reason for the season: the value of labor.