Who started Labor Day? The bloody and confusing history of an American holiday.
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FROM THE WASHINGTON POST
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The paragraph does little to suggest the decades of confusion that would swirl around the holiday’s origins, Cleveland’s role in its creation or the blood spilled along the way. Labor leaders with similar names spawned much debate as to who was the holiday’s true founder, and the caretaker of the nation’s leading Cleveland museum insists that the president’s signing of the law was not the politically motivated gesture widely reported ever since.
The first Labor Day celebrations took place more than a decade before it became a federal holiday. Many sources point to Peter J. McGuire — founder of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America and an early leader of the American Federation of Labor — who suggested the celebration to the Central Labor Union of New York as the holiday’s progenitor. Others claim that Matthew Maguire, secretary of the Central Labor Union, proposed the holiday.