New York's Workers Throw Their Own Parade

On September 5, 1882, the Central Labor Union of New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City organized a parade for the working people of the city, starting outside City Hall and moving up to Union Square before the marchers rode the elevated train to Elm Park for an afternoon of music and picnicking. Roughly 20,000 people joined, from the Jewelers Union of Newark to the printers of Typographical Union No. 6, and they gave up a day's wages to do it, since the CLU scheduled the march on a workday specifically so the sacrifice would make a point. No liquor was allowed on the route. It became the first Labor Day parade in the country and the model for the holiday itself, and the following year New York unions did it again on the same date, a pattern that spread to other cities long before Congress made it a federal holiday in 1894.