This Day in History September 5th

The First Labor Day

Labor Day parade,
Main St., Buffalo, N.Y., ca. 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America's first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall, past reviewing stands in Union Square, and then uptown to 42nd Street, the workers and their families gathered in Wendel's Elm Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was eagerly organized and executed by New York’s Central Labor Union, an umbrella group made up of representatives from many local unions.  Debate continues to this day as to who originated the idea of a workers' holiday, but it definitely emerged from the ranks of organized labor at a time when they wanted to demonstrate the strength of their burgeoning movement and inspire improvements in their working conditions.

Miners with Their Children, at the Labor Day Celebration, Silverton, Colorado,
Russell Lee, photographer, September 1940.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1933-1945
The FSA/OWI collection has more than 60 photographs documenting Silverton, Colorado's 1940 Labor Day celebration. To see this mining community's parade and other festivities, search on Silverton.

New York's Labor Day celebrations inspired similar events across the country. Oregon became the first state to grant legal status to the holiday in 1887; other states soon followed. In 1894, Congress passed legislation making Labor Day a national holiday.

For many decades, Labor Day was viewed by workers not only as a means to celebrate their accomplishments, but also as a day to air their grievances and discuss strategies for securing better working conditions and salaries. Nowadays, Labor Day is associated less with union activities and protest marches and more with leisure. For many, the holiday is a time for family picnics, sporting events, and summer's last hurrah.

• Read about other significant days in the history of labor. Search the Today in History Archive onlabor to find features such as the history of the eight-hour workday.
• For images and documents pertaining to labor unions, search across the American Memory collections on the term labor union.
• American Memory contains an extensive array of materials related to  parades and processions. Search the collections of photographs and prints using the keyword parades, or the name of a specific parade.  The collections of motion pictures also document many different kinds of parades including a small Massachusetts town’s celebration of Labor Day.

The Outlaw Jesse James

Part of Briggs Avenue Looking South:
Park River, Dakota Territory,
 [188-?].
The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920: Photographs from the Fred Hultstrand and F. A. Pazandak Photograph Collections

The infamous Jesse James was born on September 5, 1847. At seventeen, James left his nativeMissouri to fight as a Confederate guerilla in the Civil War. After the war, he returned to his home state and led one of history's most notorious outlaw gangs. With his older brother Frank and several other ex-Confederates, including Cole Younger and his brothers, the James gang robbed their way across the Western frontier targeting banks, trains, stagecoaches, and stores from Iowa to Texas. Eluding even thePinkerton National Detective Agency, the gang escaped with thousands of dollars.

Despite their criminal and, often, violent acts, James and his partners were much adored. Journalists, eager to entertain Easterners with tales of the Wild West, exaggerated and romanticized the gang's heists, often casting James as a contemporary Robin Hood. While James did harass railroad executives who unjustly seized private land for the railways, modern biographers note that he did so for personal gain—his humanitarian acts were more fiction than fact.

Jesse James' outlaw days ended abruptly in 1882 when fellow gang member Robert Ford fired a bullet into the back of his head. Ford hoped to claim the $10,000 offered for James' capture but received only a fraction of the reward. He did, however, secure himself a place in Western outlaw lore that lives on in literature, song, and film.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY BELOVED SON, MURDERED BY A TRAITOR AND COWARD WHOSE NAME IS NOT WORTHY TO APPEAR HERE

Jesse James's epitaph, selected by his mother, Zerelda James

• Listen to one of many songs written about Jesse James. Search on Jesse James in these two collections of field recordings: Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941 and in Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip.
• View The Great Train Robbery, the 1903 film classic inspired by Western outlaws. It is just one of several hundred early films available in Inventing Entertainment: the Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of Tthe Edison Companies.
• For personal accounts of Jesse James' activities, search on Jesse James in  American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940. Of particular interest are the interviews with "James McGuire," who grew up with the James boys, and "L. A. Sherman," who had a memorable encounter with Jesse James in a Quincy, Illinois, mess hall.