In 1882, the New York Central Labor Union called for a "festive parade through the streets of the city" as it campaigned to limit the workday to eight hours. The march in early September, which drew more than 10,000 people, became the precursor of the Labor Day we observe every year.
Yet strangely, there’s a simmering debate about who came up with the idea. The AFL-CIO credits pioneering activist Peter J. McGuire, one of the early leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, for what became the national holiday enacted in 1894 by Congress and President Grover Cleveland.
In one of those you-can’t-make-it-up oddities of history, McGuire’s authorship of Labor Day is hotly disputed by those who say the real father of the holiday celebrated on the first Monday of September was a man who bore virtually the same last name (and an equally impressive mustache): Matthew Maguire, who was the secretary of the Central Labor Union and later secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists.
It was the Machinists’ Maguire, not the Carpenters’ McGuire, who sent out the invitations for the march and had the honor of riding in the first carriage. A subhead on the US Labor Department’s website sums up the quandary: “McGuire v. Maguire: Who Founded Labor Day?”
Matthew Maguire, left, and Peter J. McGuire were prominent labor activists. (Photos: US Department of Labor)
In a piece published August 23, 2000, special collections librarian Grace-Ellen McCrann of the New Jersey Historical Society asked the key question: “If Matthew Maguire was so instrumental in the establishment of Labor Day, why haven’t we heard about him before this?”
The answer seems to be politics. Maguire’s labor advocacy was far more controversial than McGuire’s. In fact, he would go on to become the 1896 vice-presidential candidate of the National Socialist Labor Party.
McCrann cited a booklet by Ted Watts, “The First Labor Day Parade,” making the case that “Maguire’s radical politics were unacceptable to the mainstream of American Labor and in particular to Samuel Gompers and his American Federation of Labor. Mr. Watts suggests that Matthew Maguire’s involvement in the establishment of the first Labor Day was essentially swept under the rug to give labor a more moderate, non-political public face.”
The descendants of McGuire and Maguire are still at odds over the matter.
In Cadillac Square
Labor Day’s connection to politics has persisted, though in a different register. For decades, the September holiday would signal the semi-official start of the presidential general election campaign.
Democratic candidates from Harry S. Truman up until Jimmy Carter traditionally rallied in Cadillac Square, Detroit on Labor Day, according to the Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore. (This year, Kamala Harris is expected to campaign in Detroit before joining Joe Biden in Pittsburgh on September 2.)
The theory of Labor Day as an electoral milestone was that voters who tuned out during the summer would only focus seriously on the campaign once students return to school and people clock back in after vacation.
In practice, Kilgore noted four years ago, “there’s not actually much empirical evidence for the proposition that presidential elections are really shaped by post-Labor Day developments.”
Was 2020 an exception? Joe Biden led Donald Trump by an average of 8 points in the early September polling but beat Trump by only 4.5 points in November. Did that reflect a problem with the polls, which have often underestimated Trump’s support….or did some voters change their minds after Labor Day and shift back to the incumbent president?
Early debate
For this cycle, any pretense of Labor Day being the start of the general election campaign crumbled when President Joe Biden agreed to an exceptionally early debate with Trump on CNN.
The June 27 debate, Biden’s strategists calculated, would contrast an undisciplined Trump to a judicious and grounded incumbent president. Instead, viewers saw a halting Biden struggle to mount a coherent case against Trump.
That undeniable disaster for Democrats prompted pundits and officeholders who had certified Biden’s fitness for another four-year term to concede that he really wasn’t up to the challenge of defeating Trump this time around. They persuaded Biden to abandon his re-election bid, clearing the field for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Fresh off a unified and ebullient Democratic convention, Harris was leading Trump as of Friday by 3.4 points in the 538 polling average.
On Labor Day 2016, polls showed a 3.7 point lead for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. In November, she edged out Trump in the popular vote by a bit more than 2 points, which wasn’t enough to overcome the Republican advantage in the Electoral College, and Trump spent the next four years in the White House.
The presidential election as a marketing opportunity. (At Hudson News, JFK Airport)
VPs in the hot seat
As Marc A. Thiessen noted in the Washington Post, sitting vice presidents face an uphill battle when they run for the top spot. Case in point: In 1968, Hubert Humphrey couldn’t overcome the unpopularity of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and he lost to Richard M. Nixon.
In 1988, George H. W. Bush became the only sitting vice president to win the White House since 1836. “Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term...”
According to Thiessen, a Republican, Harris’ novel strategy is “running as an insurgent and treating Donald Trump as the incumbent. In her telling, she is the fresh new face on the political scene, while Trump is the one running for reelection.” He said it’s “absurd” for Harris to try to duck blame for Biden’s perceived failures, but admitted, “so far, that strategy is working.”
‘Massive new energy’
Chris Cillizza observed on Substack that “Harris has breathed massive new energy into the party. Democrats are excited again. They feel optimistic.”
“And they should! They were dead in the water six weeks ago. Now they are very much in the mix.” He said though that some Democrats appear over-confident and predicted a “very close” election.
Harris has been endorsed by long-time Republican J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge whose roots in conservative legal circles go all the way back to the Reagan administration.
Luttig acknowledged that he isn’t in Harris’ camp on most matters of policy, but asserted that the only issue worth concentrating on this year is the fate of “America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law.” As Margaret Sullivan wrote in the Guardian, “what really matters, in Luttig’s view, is getting past January of next year with US democracy intact. We can argue later about how to govern.”
“With that in mind, he sees Trump as utterly unfit and existentially dangerous.”
“Luttig’s statement ought to be a clarion call,” Sullivan added. “It should be emulated by every conservative with a conscience and a sense of patriotism.”
Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, is out with a new book following a stint of a little more than a year in the White House.
Reviewing At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House for CNN, Peter Bergen commented, “In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as ‘exercises in competitive sycophancy’ during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, ‘Your instincts are always right’ or, ‘No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.’ Meanwhile, Trump would say ‘outlandish’ things like, ‘Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?’ in Mexico or, ‘Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?’”
Lobsta
Historian Scott Ellsworth traveled to Maine to write a New York Times guest essay on what the election looks like to the state’s lobstermen in a congressional district that has “voted for Donald Trump twice by decent margins.”
He vividly described a seven-hour journey on Cap’n Morgan, a 40-foot lobster boat, as the crew picked up the catch and re-baited scores of lobster traps. The pro-Trump sentiment of the “sternmen,” Logan Leach and Nick Amaro, should worry Democrats, Ellsworth wrote.
“For young workers like Mr. Amaro and Mr. Leach and millions of other Americans like them who are busting their humps week in and week out trying to get ahead, the price of gas, groceries and housing is perhaps the most important factor in determining their vote. Not abortion, not Gaza, not the war in Ukraine. As long as the perception that Mr. Trump will do a better job with the economy remains unchallenged, the Democrats will pay a price at the polls, perhaps a dear one.”
Matthew Yglesias, who also spent part of his summer in Maine, didn’t dispute that conclusion, but noted in his Substack newsletter, “The weird thing about the piece is that it is extremely focused on things that New York Times opinion section readers are interested in — climate change, vibes, the idea that people vote badly due to bad information — while completely ignoring specific issues related to the Maine lobster industry. The most glaring omission, to me, is the longstanding dispute between lobstermen (and Maine elected officials) and the Biden administration over lobster regulations.”
Kamala and Tim: The big interview
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sat for an interview with Dana Bash on CNN Thursday, the first extended opportunity for a journalist to question the newly nominated Democratic ticket.
In the Financial Times, Edward Luce wrote, “That Kamala Harris has been averse to giving interviews is a problem. Harris’s opponents think it is because she is scared of flubbing her answers, as she has a couple of times as vice-president. The cure is to sit down for a grilling.”
Luce questioned the ideas that the traditional media has become less relevant and that it is monolithic. “Everybody reviles the media, including most of the media. But most people make exceptions for the particular bits of it that they like…”
“Everybody reviles the media, including most of the media.” — Edward Luce
“Most Americans still do not know Harris well. They want to see more. The election remains close, which means she will have to convince independents. Not every anti-Trumper is caught up in Kamalamentum.”
In the interview Thursday, Harris steered clear of some political landmines while committing to appoint a Republican to the cabinet if she is elected. Writing in the New York Times, Maggie Haberman described it as “essentially an introductory interview. It probably didn’t change anything in terms of attracting new voters, but she most likely did not do herself harm, which was the goal.”
What’s next
At the moment, it seems that there really will be a Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate on September 10 on ABC, perhaps the only such encounter we’ll see before November.
CBS is due to host a vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on October 1. Given what happened in June, these two debates are among the few scheduled events that could shake up a race where so many people have already mentally committed to one or the other party.
Quick takes:
“The Bear” is one of the best shows on television hands down. Its focus on people under extreme stress in the back and front of the house of fine dining restaurants is sensitive, sometimes relentless, and always illuminating. But the season 3 finale left viewers hanging on the cliff a little too long: They will have to wait till next season to find out whether Sydney will take that high-profile chef de cuisine job at a new restaurant and go into competition with Carey. (The same sense of unjustified deferral goes for the Season 2 finale of “House of the Dragon,” which Vulture’s Amanda Whiting rightly called “evasive and deflating.” When will the dragons finally fight it out?)
Ok, so Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deposited a bear’s carcass and a bicycle near the Central Park bike lanes to leave the false impression that the animal had been killed by a cyclist, ostensibly as a joke. Only a few weeks after we absorbed that unsettling information, comes word of an even more ill-advised alleged incident: “On Monday, the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a progressive environmental organization,” the New York Times noted, “called on federal authorities to investigate an episode, recounted by Mr. Kennedy’s daughter in a 2012 magazine article, in which she said Mr. Kennedy chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Mass., bungee-corded it to their vehicle’s roof, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, N.Y… The whale has now joined a baby bear, at least one emu and a worm whose deaths have been intimately associated with Mr. Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate — and environmental lawyer — who last week joined forces with former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.” Enough said.
NASA decided not to trust the fate of two astronauts on the International Space Station to the troubled Boeing spacecraft that brought them there. Instead the Starliner will return uncrewed to Earth, which sets up a potentially revealing dynamic. If it returns without incident, will it give the embattled aviation company some renewed confidence? Or if Starliner fails, how badly will that set back Boeing’s space business? Meanwhile astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who trained for an eight-day mission in space, will be spending the holiday season on the ISS and are due to travel back no sooner than February on a SpaceX vehicle.