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When Labor Day was about labor

by Jack Neely

Labor Day’s gotten to be a peculiar holiday here in my hometown. We know it better as Boomsday, and every year for the last several years, it’s been about the same. Stores on every suburban strip mall across the county are open; many have Labor Day sales. Most restaurants along the strip-mall strips are open, too.

Meanwhile, bracing to host hundreds of thousands for the annual Boomsday bash, most of downtown shuts down cold. Visitors walk through a deathly empty CBID. In the past, it’s been one of the rare days downtown that you can’t find lunch or a beer or even a Coca-Cola at any price. Last year, two middle-aged couples stopped me mid-afternoon on Gay Street and asked where they could get a bite to eat. I told them I was looking for one, too. I hear it’ll be different this year.

Knoxville first started celebrating the holiday in a big way in 1889, 115 years ago this week. Labor Day had existed in theory before that, in a few big cities up north, but had generally been shunned in the South. Knoxville business embraced the new holiday, with some exceptions.

Some stores, nervous about competitors seizing the advantage, wanted the public to know that they respected Labor Day, and would close for it—if only their competitors would, too. One year the newspaper published a list of them. It’s unclear how effective the pleas were.

The concept of the half-day holiday—the holiday that doesn’t start until noon—is a lost pleasure. It doesn’t encourage leaving town, or sleeping late. But it must have been a joy to have a good excuse to close the store or leave the factory late on a sunny morning, like an early dismissal from school. In 1889, factory workers, tradesmen, and contractors of all sorts got out at 11:30 and made their way by foot or street rail to Gay Street.

The parade was an unapologetic celebration of labor. Those who paraded, cheered from the sidewalks and windows above, were laborers.

The Knights of Labor, the Cigarmakers’ Union, the Tailors’ Union all marched. Painters, plasterers and bricklayers were there, too. Tinners, harnessmakers, marble cutters. Railroad engineers and firemen. The tailors in the parade were always dressed impeccably; the ironworkers, by contrast, wore neither coats nor vests. Reporters found it remarkable that the ironworkers marched wearing blue shirts with blue collars, “prominent in their manly appearance.”

Maybe the biggest faction every year was the Typographical Union, or typos, as they were called, the men who set type for newspapers and magazines; they typically mustered more than 100 men in the parade.

Clerks and secretaries, most of them male in 1889, apparently weren’t invited. Neither were shopkeepers and cooks. Nor writers and editors, though they were welcome to comment. “The most prosperous country on earth is the country in which labor is freest and most respected,” wrote the Journal. “The laboring man who does his work well is the king of men, and there’s no reason on earth why he should not esteem himself the social equal of any other man.”

Bringing in the rear, right after the GAR’s drum corps, middle-aged musicians who had been Union soldiers, were mounted farmers.

The working men marched north up Gay Street, the same direction parades go today, more than 600 that first year. They paraded to the train station, where the paraders broke ranks, and people boarded the steam train for the three-mile jaunt to Elmwood Park, later known as Chilhowee.

There, a crowd in the thousands—3,000 was the estimate that first big year—enjoyed a variety of organized competitive events.

We flatter ourselves that running as a popular sport is a new thing. We like to think of the Victorians as a sluggish people who, weighted down with canes and watch chains and three-piece suits and derby hats and corsets and bustles and cigars and parasols, never moved very vigorously.

But through the Victorian era, running events were de rigeur at big public picnics, especially 100-yard dashes and one-mile runs. That first year, they also featured one sport missing from today’s track meets, the 50-yard backward dash.

In 1891, Knoxvillian Will Biddle reputedly ran a mile in four minutes, a feat some were striving to achieve 60 years later, when Roger Bannister finally surpassed Biddle. Unfortunately, Biddle’s Chilhowee Park feat didn’t make it into the international record books.

The same year featured a walking event in which male competitors were judged on how many times they could lap a small circular track of about 100 yards in two hours. Once again, Will Biddle, the same guy that had just run a four-minute mile, walked 214 laps, or about 12 miles.

About eight years later, Biddle, a machinist by trade but also a bicyclist and bicycle mechanic, helped in the construction of the first automobile ever seen in Knoxville.

Running events tended to be all-male. Women dominated some other, more ladylike events, like donkey-tailing and waltzing. Interestingly, though, several early Labor Days featured rowing races between teams of women in the park’s lake, then known as Lake Ottosee.

Also, every Labor Day sponsored a fiddling competition, in which fiddlers tended to please their discerning audience with “the sweet old songs of bygone time.” One Bartley Giffin was a regular favorite. Some historians cite these contests as significant in the awakening of commercial interest in country music.

And there were always demonstrations of the laborer’s skills, bricklaying, cigar-rolling, opportunities for men to show off what they did on more typical days, when they didn’t have a half day off. Each Labor Day afternoon tended to present a typesetting competition that seemed to get more attention than the others. In 1891, Journal printer Deaderick Million set 1,500 ems—standard square pieces of type—in one hour “without a single error.”

The organizer of the whole event was the Knoxville office of the Central Labor Union. Labor Day was, in those days, a holiday that made some folks, especially richer folks, uncomfortable.

At the 1890 picnic, the chief speaker, John H. McDowell, exhorted the crowd: “In union there is strength, strength to fight the millionaire capitalists in their crusades against the working man.”

The festivities went well into the evening, as Crouch’s Band played waltzes, square dances, whatever the crowd wanted. It went on always until midnight, or “from dark to early morn,” reported the Journal.

There was sometimes a target-shooting event with Winchester rifles, but that seems to be as close as those original Labor Day celebrations ever got to fireworks. Today, of course, the millionaire capitalists of America tend to vote for a similar roster of candidates as the blue-collar workingman does. And today, our Boomsday is far louder, brighter, and more expensive that those original Labor Days, that celebrated common work well done, ever were. Still, and this is no criticism of the pyrotechnic art, I can’t help but wonder if we’re missing something.

September 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 36 © 2004 Metro Pulse