May Day

In 1946 May Day was making a return after a wartime hiatus. This time around the city's top labor leaders were conspicuous by their absence. The AFL had repudiated the march as Communist-controlled and had asked that none of its unions participate. Six AFL union officers did participate as well as some rank-and-file members, mostly from the garment trades. Among the CIO affiliates marching, The Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union. the Furriers Joint Council and the Maritime Union provided the largest union contingents according to The New York Times. Other unions represented included the United Office and Professional Workers of America, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, United Furniture Workers and United Show Workers.

The biggest groups in the four-hour parade marched under the banners of the Communist Party and the International Workers Order. The Communists led off with a contingent of veterans in uniform headed by an African American major. Left-wing labor historian Philip Sheldon Foner, whose brother worked for the Wholesale Workers Union, repeated the organizer's estimates as fact in his history of the holiday, May Day. He claimed that 500 veterans in uniform, including 50 officers, were in the Communist Party contingent. Although the Army and Navy had declared that it would be illegal to march in uniform, no arrests were made for this violation. However, eight men were arrested for desecrating the flag by carrying it flat so it could catch coins tossed by onlookers to provide assistance to the families of Phelps Dodge strikers. The Times noted that this was the first time arrests ever had been made over this fairly common practice, a violation of the penal code.

Organizers claimed that 60,000 marchers had taken part but the police put the assembly at closer to 21,000. Organizers estimated the onlookers at 250,000 but The New York Times reported that in the Garment District, where union support was strongest, the crowds were only two to three people deep and enthusiasm lacking. A few people cheered, others jeered "Go back to Russia" but most watched impassively according the The Times. The head of West Side Chamber of Commerce, which had protested the parade for disrupting business on Eighth Avenue and its side streets, was quoted in the paper as declaring the parade "the sorriest showing that the left-wing element had made in a parade in the last ten years."

According to Foner, the official theme was "World Labor Unity, Peace and Progress." The official slogans were "End Diplomatic Relations with Franco Spain," "Withdraw British Troops From Greece," "Liberate India," "Abolish the Rankin Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities" and "Preserve the Office of Price Administration." The marchers carried placards and banners supporting these demands, Like other Communist-influenced or dominated gatherings of the day, the May Day event tied support of civil rights, racial equality, higher wages, improved working conditions, and consumer protections with an unquestioning support of Stalin's brutal totalitarian state.

The chants and shouts of the marchers echoed the themes of the speeches denouncing "imperialists" and "warmongers" and calling for close relations between the US and the Soviet Union. The Times reporter noted that the same cries had rung out at the last May Day rally in 1941 when Stalin's pact with Hitler was still in effect and the speakers and crowd denounced FDR as a warmonger trying to drag the US into the European war between Fascist Germany and Imperialist Britain. Back then the assembled crowd, many of them Jews, were told that France and England were more of a threat to the Jews than was Hitler. England was the real enemy. Two months later Hitler invaded the USSR and overnight the dutiful Stalinists vociferously called for America to join the fight against Fascism. lauded Churchill and FDR as heroic leaders and depicted the US and England as Russia's dear friends. Communists had canceled their annual rallies during the war when the call to crush the corrupt Capitalist system was seen as counter-productive. Now the militants were back, purged of the wartime leadership who had preached an American Communist party that operated within the nation's democratic framework. England, despite its Socialist government, and Truman, even though he had been Roosevelt's vice president., were the enemies of workers democracy. The Soviet Union was the workers true friend (unless he felt like killing you)..

The keynote speaker was Communist Party secretary, William Z. Foster, an ardent Stalinist who rejected the idea that the Party need achieve its objectives through democratic means. He warned the crowd that reactionaries were seeking to foment another war. This was proof, he declared, that Capitalism was bankrupt and that the people of the world would be turning to Communism (particularly, I suppose, in those nations where the Red Army was stationed to make sure that they did). Foster had reversed the focus of the Party from the Popular Front strategy of achieving domestic goals through united action to unwavering support for Stalin's imperialist postwar ambitions. The Reds at this time hoped to add Spain, Greece, India and perhaps Italy and France to their portfolio of war trophies without a military confrontation with the US or Britain. The May Day mob cheered demands that the US government embrace the Soviet Union as their true friend on one hand and cheered the destruction of Capitalist society by the Soviets on the other. The other speakers that day included three city councilmen, Peter V. Cacchione and Benjamin J. Davis of the Communist Party and Eugene Connolly of the American Labor Party.