May 1st: Illuminating History—From Empire State Lights to Secret Holidays

On May first, 1931, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in the White House. And with that single, symbolic act, he switched on the lights of the newly completed Empire State Building in New York City. It was a broadcast moment of national pride, a beacon of progress shining in the dark gloom of the Great Depression. But what no one said on the radio that day, what was completely lost in the celebration of this new steel titan, is that May first was already a holiday. A very different kind of holiday. One that Hoover and the men who built that tower would have preferred everyone, especially in America, simply forgot.

Looking back, this isn't just a coincidence of the calendar. It’s a collision. A perfect, accidental summary of a battle for the soul of the twentieth century, played out on a single date. So let’s set the scene. The Empire State Building itself was an act of pure, distilled ambition. It was born from a rivalry between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors. A classic "mine is bigger than yours" contest between two titans of industry, played out in steel and limestone on the skyline of Manhattan. And the result was breathtaking. One hundred and two stories. One thousand, two hundred and fifty feet tall.

It shot up from its foundations in a staggering display of speed and organization. Construction progressed at a rate of four-and-a-half stories per week. Think about that. A new floor every day and a half. The whole thing, from the first shovel in the ground to Hoover’s button-press, took just over a year. It even came in under budget, at forty million dollars. For a nation mired in economic despair, with unemployment soaring, this building was a miracle. It was proof that America could still do things. Big things. But while the newspapers were printing those glorious statistics, another story was being written, or rather, ignored.

May first is International Workers' Day. And it's not a Russian invention or a European import. It was born right here, in the United States. On May first, 1886, more than three hundred thousand workers across thirteen thousand businesses walked off their jobs. They weren't demanding a revolution. They were demanding something that seems utterly basic to us now: an eight-hour workday. The movement started peacefully, but it culminated in violence, most famously at the Haymarket affair in Chicago. It was a brutal, bloody fight for the simple idea that a worker's life should consist of more than just labor and sleep. And by 1891, it was being recognized as an official annual event by labor organizations around the world.

It’s an official holiday in sixty-six countries today. But not, officially, in the country where it began. Instead, we have Labor Day in September. A deliberate, political move to distance the American labor movement from its more radical, internationalist roots. And just to add a little more flavor to this incredible day, May first also gave us some magnificent rebels. Calamity Jane was born on this day in 1852. A frontierswoman, a scout, a storyteller who was half-fact and half-legend, a woman who lived entirely on her own terms in a world that had very strict terms for women. And then, in 1923, Joseph Heller was born. The man who would give us Catch-22, the novel that so perfectly captured the soul-crushing absurdity of giant, bureaucratic systems.

So on this one day, you have the ultimate symbol of the system, the ultimate symbol of fighting the system, and two people who made a life out of ignoring the system altogether. You couldn't make it up. So let’s go deeper into this collision. Let's stand in 1931 and look at these two May firsts, because they represent two completely different theories of progress. On one hand, you have the Empire State Building. This is progress as a monument. It’s the Great Man theory of history, written in steel. It’s Raskob versus Chrysler. It’s individual genius, competition, and capital combining to create something awe-inspiring that lifts the spirits of the masses.

The story we tell is about the vision of the architects, the drive of the financiers. We even celebrate the logistics—the way materials arrived on site just in time, a dance of trucks and cranes that was a marvel of efficiency. Up to three thousand four hundred men worked on the building per day, and their labor is presented as part of this grand, harmonious machine. The building, in this narrative, is a gift to the city. A source of pride. But there’s a catch. The story we don’t tell as often is that for its first few years, it was a commercial failure. So few tenants could afford the rent during the Depression that it was nicknamed the "Empty State Building." By 1932, only twenty-five percent of its office space was actually rented.

So it was a symbol long before it was a successful business. It was an icon of capitalism that wasn't, at first, very good at capitalism. It was an idea about prosperity, not prosperity itself. Now, let's look at the other May first. The one that started in 1886. This is not the Great Man theory of history. This is history from the ground up. This is progress as a movement. It's not about one man's vision; it’s about a collective demand. Three hundred thousand people. That’s not a protest, that's an economic force. They weren't building a monument; they were trying to build a better life. The eight-hour day—eight for work, eight for rest, eight for what we will—was a radical dream.

For people working ten, twelve, fourteen-hour days in dangerous conditions, it was the difference between life and a life worth living. And here’s the crucial part. The two stories are not separate. They are intrinsically linked. Who do you think built the Empire State Building? Who was climbing those steel beams, a thousand feet in the air? Who was riveting those girders, mixing that concrete? It was the three thousand four hundred workers. They were the descendants—both literally and figuratively—of the very people who marched in 1886. The fight for the eight-hour day, for safer working conditions, for the right to organize… that struggle is what made a project like the Empire State Building possible without killing hundreds of workers.

The building is a monument to capital, yes. But it is also, undeniably, a monument to labor. So when President Hoover presses that button on May first, 1931, he’s performing an incredible, unintentional act of historical erasure. He is celebrating the magnificent achievement of American labor on the very day dedicated to the international struggle of labor—a struggle whose American origins were being actively suppressed. It's a sublime irony. The United States government chose to co-opt the date, overlaying the story of a building on top of the story of a movement. They celebrated the hive, while trying to make everyone forget about the bees.

And looking back now, from our vantage point, what does this retrospective teach us? It teaches us that what we choose to remember, and what we choose to celebrate, is a political act. The dedication of the Empire State Building wasn't just about architecture. It was an argument. It was a statement that the American way is the skyscraper, the individual competition, the grand gesture. It was an attempt to drown out the other argument being made that day, in parades in sixty-six other countries: that progress comes from solidarity, from the collective, from the fight for dignity. Even the birthdays tell this story. Calamity Jane, defying social norms on the frontier.

Joseph Heller, writing Catch-22 and exposing the insane logic that traps the individual inside the machine. They are the voices that question the grand narratives. They’re the ones who would look at the Empire State Building and ask, "Sure, it’s tall. But is it sane?" The tension of May first has never gone away. We are still arguing about whether progress is a monument you build or a movement you join. We are still debating whether our focus should be on the magnificent heights we can reach, or on the conditions of the people who do the climbing. The skyscraper reaches for the heavens, but its foundation is always on the ground, built by human hands.

And on May first, we are reminded to look at both.