On Monday, we are celebrating Labor Day. That means there will not be any mail delivery on Monday. The day that is full of backyard barbeques, retail sales and is the official end of wearing white for the year, had a unique beginning that has more to do with mail delivery than you may know. How did we get this national holiday? In the midst of the industrial age, labor unions began to organize and flex their collective muscle. Labor Day was made an official U.S. holiday in 1894 when Grover Cleveland signed it into law six days after the end of the Pullman Strike. This was a bloody conflict involving the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of railway cars in Chicago, and their workforce.

Pullman had created a company city where its unskilled workers and their families lived. Pullman had reduced wages in the wake of the economic depression known as the Panic of 1893. However, they did not reduce the rent that workers paid to live in the tenements of Pullman City. Union activist Eugene Debs organized many of the Pullman workers around the American Railway Union (ARU). When Pullman refused to negotiate with the ARU, Debs called for a strike. ARU members refused to allow any train with a Pullman car to travel on the tracks in which they were working. 250,000 members of the ARU took part in the boycott and effectively shut down rail traffic across the U.S. In a day when the traveling of any distance happened on a train, this was significant. Not only did the railroads carry people across the country, they also moved products such as food, clothing, coal, and money. Anything that had to do with the staples of life was moved aboard a train.That included the U.S. mail.

To combat this work stoppage, the railroads hired strikebreakers to take the jobs of the striking ARU members. Violence broke out. Union rallies turned into mob scenes where buildings were torched and locomotives were derailed. Strikebreakers were threatened, injured and killed. The railroads fired and blacklisted the strikers. President Cleveland used the stoppage of mail as a means to take action against the strikers. He sent U.S. Marshals and the U.S. Army to put down the strike and open the rail lines. Cleveland also took legal action through the attorney general against Debs and the union organizers if they did not stop the strike. Debs refused and called on all other labor unions to join the strike to shut down all commerce across the country. He was arrested and charged with failure to comply with the federal injunction. This had a polarizing impact on the public. Some sided with the union, claiming it was the right of the workers to dissent, especially after the federal government had intervened with force. Some sided with the railroads claiming that no disgruntled group had the right to shut down commerce. Townspeople found themselves at odds with each other. Shop owners, church leaders, farmers, newspaper reporters - all took sides.

In the summer of 1894, the strike finally fell apart and railway traffic began to move again. There was talk that there needed to be some sort of national holiday where opposing sides could come together and the wounds of the strike could begin to heal. Many thought that the feds had grossly overstepped in putting down the unions and there needed to be some sort of contrition on the part of the president. It had been argued that labor needed a day to show their solidarity to the public. Some states had celebrated a Labor Day for a decade. So the Congress and President Cleveland hastily signed a law proclaiming the first Monday of September to be a national holiday where work at federal offices would cease to honor the American worker. Of course that meant that the mail would not be delivered, the very thing that landed Debs in prison.