We Don't Need No Stink'n Commie-Fascist Holidays!

Irony of Ironies:

Citing Obamacare, 40,000 Longshoremen Quit the AFL-CIO

Red Monday | National Review Online

SEPTEMBER 2, 2013 By Kevin D. Williamson

We don’t need this quasi-Canadian, crypto-Communist holiday. 

There isn’t much good to say about Labor Day, except maybe that it could be worse — it could be on May 1, which would make it a full-on Communist holiday instead of a merely crypto-Communist one. For that we can thank Grover Cleveland, the last pretty-good Democrat (seriously: gold standard, anti-tariff, vetoed twice as many bills as all of his predecessors combined — Rand Paul is a fan), who pushed for the creation of a labor festival in September as cultural competition to the international workers’ celebration in May, sort of the reverse of the strategy of the early Church fathers’ choosing the dates of heathen festivals for the new Christian holidays.

So, from the two out of three working-age Americans who are gainfully employed, a round of applause for President Cleveland.

But crypto-Communist holidays are not so great, either.

In 1894, a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company
spread across the nation as the American Railway Union
organized a national boycott and strike against all trains
hauling Pullman cars.

Labor Day, like Obamacare and much else that is distasteful about American public life today, is a product of American liberals’ desire to be Canadians. The ’Nucks started celebrating labor on the first Monday in September in the 1880s; this holiday grew out of a parade celebrating a typographical workers’ strike in 1872. Soon, U.S. labor bosses, especially the Marxist Central Labor Union, wanted a holiday of their own. If there is anything we learned from the 20th century, it is that Communists love a parade. President Cleveland, feeling a bit of political pressure after having dispatched Brigadier General Nelson Miles to crush the Pullman strike and chucking Eugene Debs in the hoosegow, calculated that an end-of-summer barbecue for the riffraff might be just the tonic for his ailing administration.

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