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Vienna, 30 April, 1890. The soldiers are alerted, the house doors are bolted, people are laying in stocks of food at home as though preparing for a siege. The shops are deserted, women and children are afraid to go into the streets, the spirits are oppressed by heavy anxiety. This is the picture of our city on the workers’ holiday.

But for that give-away last sentence, this might well have read like a doomsday novel. In truth, this was the highly-regarded Viennese daily Neue Freie Presse providing a bird’s-eye-view of Austria’s capital city on the eve of Vienna’s first-ever May Day demonstrations. Many of the city’s elites had fled with their families to safer locations. Army cooks went shopping accompanied by armed patrols with bayonets on the ready. Some fearful factory owners had “heated their cauldrons and gathered the firemen and veterans of their parish around them, ready to respond to a possible attack on their factories by pouring boiling water on the rebels”.

The governor of the Archduchy of Austria had put the ‘rebels’ on notice that “the arbitrary refusal to work on May 1 is legally impermissible and those [wilfully abstaining from work] will be faced with the consequences of their illegal conduct” including, the governor didn’t forget to add, arrest and immediate dismissal.

In the end, how did May Day 1890 pan out in the great capital of the Habsburgs? Not quite like how the authorities would have liked it to, as this report in Victor Adler’s Arbeiter Zeitung tells us:

The workers allowed nothing to stop them from celebrating May Day … Total abstention from work was almost general … A wonderful sight, that will never be forgotten by anyone present, was the procession of over one hundred thousand Viennese workers in the Prater … (I)n the bright beauty of the May Day, the celebrating workers streamed past … in endless enthusiastic hordes, their faces beaming with joy … Amid the loaded rifles and cannons, from one-hundred-thousand throats simultaneously, the Song of Work (Leid der Arbeit) rose to the sky. Every heart was filled with the glad knowledge that the workers had become a power, that a new era had begun. On that day Vienna was ruled by the proletariat.

May 1, 1890 was the first workers’ May Day ever. As extraordinary as it may seem today, that first May Day had not been envisioned by its originators to look at all like what it eventually did. The founding Congress of the Second (Socialist) International in Paris in July 1889 – the hundredth anniversary of the great French Revolution – had, among other things, resolved on a synchronised world-wide demonstration the following year to press for a legalised eight-hour workday.

The choice of the date for the demonstration was largely fortuitous. The American unit had already decided to demonstrate across the United States on May 1, 1890, to commemorate the victims of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre of May 1886 in which several striking workers had lost their lives to a police force gone berserk. The Congress agreed to time the planned demonstration to coincide with the American commemoration of May 1, 1890.

Soviet May Day, 1929. Photo: Viktor Deni, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But no great importance appears to have been attached to the decision at that point. Even the report of the Congress’s proceedings made no more than a passing mention. At that point, at any rate, the International didn’t visualise the next year’s demonstration as anything but a one-off event.

The effect of that first May Day on organised workers in many countries across Europe was electric, however, as the Austrian experience demonstrated. Even in traditionally circumspect Britain, an astonishing three hundred thousand workers........

© The Wire