Labor Day History

This will be the 122nd national celebration of Labor Day. The bill establishing it as a federal holiday was sponsored in 1894 by South Dakota Sen. James Henderson Kyle, a congregationalist pastor turned politician who the year before had assumed the chairmanship of what is now the HELP Committee, and Rep. Amos Cummings,, a Civil War veteran and former newspaperman from New York. Kyle was an independent who caucused with the Democrats (though later he would caucus with the GOP); Cummings, a Democrat. The bill was signed into law by Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), a Democrat, who was looking to appease labor after using the Army to put down the Pullman Strike earlier that year.

If you want to go back to the very first Labor Day, before it was a national holiday, this will be the 134th celebration. The first was observed in New York City in 1882 at the likely suggestion of Matthew Maguire, a Knights of Labor machinist. For decades credit went to Peter McGuire, an organizer for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a big shot with the American Federation of Labor, then ascendant even as the Knights of Labor was in decline. But lately historians have tended to favor Maguire instead. No one really knows for sure

via Politico