Today in Chicago History: ‘May Day' born after workers take to the streets to demand an eight-hour workday

Chicago Tribune

01-05-2025

Here's a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on May 1, according to the Tribune's archives.
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Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
High temperature: 90 degrees (1951)
Low temperature: 30 degrees (1943)
Precipitation: 2.35 inches (1873)
Snowfall: 1.6 inches (1940)
Why May Day is an international workers' holiday — and how it began in Chicago
1867: Illinois quickly passed an eight-hour workday law, which went into effect on this date. Workers thought the vague language of the law could be enforced, and employers thought otherwise. Thousands of workers marched through Chicago to support the eight-hour workday, but a failed general strike proved the employers right.
1886: Three days before the Haymarket Affair — in which a bomb was thrown during a Chicago labor rally that resulted in the death of eight police officers and at least four civilians — tens of thousands marched on Michigan Avenue in a campaign to reduce the customary 10- to 12-hour workday to eight hours.
Though the U.S. honors workers in September — with Labor Day, which also has Chicago roots — the May 1886 events are commemorated in Chicago by a memorial on Desplaines Street, north of Randolph Street: A bronze statue of a wagon that served as a speakers' platform during the labor meeting.
1893: The World's Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago. Beating out New York to host the spectacular world's fair was a miracle considering just 22 years earlier the city was in shambles following the Great Chicago Fire.
The Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack and zippers were new-fangled things introduced to the more than 20 million attendees before the fair closed five months later.
1897: Louisa Luetgert, wife of Adolf Luetgert, owner of the A.L. Luetgert Sausage & Packing Co., disappeared. Luetgert was convicted of her slaying on Feb. 9, 1898, and dissolving her body in a vat of lye and sentenced to life in prison.
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Gwendolyn Brooks, a 32-year-old housewife and part-time secretary, has won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 'Annie Allen,' a ballad of Black Chicago life on May 1, 1950. Brooks is the first Black woman to capture one of the famed awards. (ACME photo)
1950: Poet Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, for 'Annie Allen,' a collection of works about a Black girl growing into womanhood while wrestling with racism, sexism, poverty and loss. A review in the Tribune praised its 'quick sense of the life of many people, the small intensities and the big disasters.'
1951: Minnie Minoso became the first Black player to play for the Chicago White Sox, homering in his first at-bat against Vic Raschi of the New York Yankees.
1960: Comiskey Park's exploding scoreboard debuted. Al Smith stepped up in the home half of the first inning of a doubleheader on May 1, 1960, and put the defending American League champs ahead with a two-run homer off Jim Bunning. Then the fun began.
Smith triggered the public debut of owner Bill Veeck's biggest, baddest pinball machine — his $300,000 exploding scoreboard. The tradition of saluting White Sox home runs continues to this day.
1974: The Tribune became the first news organization to publish the entire 246,000-word transcript of the Watergate tapes, scooping even the government printing office by several hours.
President Richard Nixon resigned Aug. 9, 1974.
1997: WMAQ-Ch. 5 evening news anchor Carol Marin quit after management hired talk show host Jerry Springer to deliver news commentaries. She had been at WMAQ for 19 years. Co-anchor Ron Magers quit two weeks later.
2004: Farnsworth House, a steel-and-glass masterwork by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rhode, opened for tours after preservationists spent $7.5 million to buy and keep the icon of 20th century modernism in Illinois.
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