The historical roots of Labor Day are unknown to most Americans today. It is a symbol of the divisions in our culture today.
Labor Day is a federal holiday in the US and Canada that is designed to honor the efforts of the workers who produce the goods and services that power the economy., as the trade union and labor movements grew, trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate labor.
On March 4, 1858 South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond instructed his colleagues on how things work. “In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” That class, he said, needed little intellect and little skill, but it should be strong, docile, and loyal.
Hammond celebrated the fact that southern leaders had made certain their enslaved people were denied access to political power. He warned that northerners had made the terrible mistake of giving their “slaves” the vote. As the majority, they could, if they only realized it, control society. Then “where would you be?” he asked. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not…with arms…but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.
Lincoln himself had worked his way up from poverty while Hammond had married into a wealthy family. Lincoln went on to say, “[T]he opponents of the ‘mud-sill’ theory insist that there is not…any such things as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.” “A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Lincoln’s day,” Richardson writes, “but on this Labor Day weekend, it strikes me that the worldviews of men like Hammond and Lincoln are still fundamental to our society.
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