![]() ![]() It’s been a celebration of spring and fertility in places like Egypt and India, and in pre-Christian Rome it was the time of the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers. ![]() Its roots as a holiday run much deeper than the labor movement, however. It remains a day of rallies and protests in many parts of the world, and in 2006, protest returned to the United States on May 1st to call attention to immigrants’ rights. President Eisenhower tried to take back May Day during the Cold War by declaring it Law Day and Loyalty Day. Since many of the organizers of the strikes were communists, socialists, and anarchists, May Day has also come to be associated with communism, and was a big national holiday in the Soviet Union. In 1886, unions around the country went on strike in support of an eight-hour workday. It’s the date when many countries celebrate Labor Day, a tradition with its roots in the 19th-century labor movement in the United States. Today is May Day, the first of May, a date that may have more holidays than any other. “Old Roses” by Donald Hall from The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. ![]()
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