Connecting seemingly far-flung topics as only Uncle John can, here’s a trip into the origins of “May Day” — and we’re covering all of its many meanings.
Mayday as a distress call
Following World War I, commercial air travel between the U.K. and continental Europe rapidly developed. The industry, including pilots and air traffic controllers, realized they needed some kind of distress call that could be uttered when trouble arose which would be understandable across languages. Adopting the “SOS” long used by ships wouldn’t work because it didn’t translate from morse code into verbal radio signals very well, and the phrase could be misheard. So, in 1923, Stanley Mockford, senior radio officer at the U.K.’s Croydon Airport, which sent most of its traffic to France, came up with a distress call word that sounded familiar in both English and French. “Mayday” is actually an anglicized spelling and derivation of “m’aider” — French for “help me.” Within four years, airports and pilots around Europe were all using “mayday,” and the U.S. adopted it in 1927.
May Day as a spring celebration
In ancient Greece and Rome, people celebrated the arrival of spring with festivals that fell right around where May 1 falls on modern calendars. Persisting throughout Europe and into medieval times, what came to be known as May Day involved lots of flowers and natural things to celebrate fertility rituals or to ensure good spring harvests. A May king and queen may be crowned, or a flowery Maypole was erected, around which much dancing would occur. The meanings behind the rituals faded over time, until it was just a secular spring party celebrated in hundreds of different ways around Europe. May Day didn’t take off in the U.S. because this country was founded in part by the Puritans. They were opposed to May Day parties, finding them to be distastefully pagan and irreligious, so they didn’t celebrate them when they settled in New England.
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May Day as Labor Day
In the U.S., Labor Day is a minor holiday recognizing hard work in general with a federally-issued period of respite. In many other countries around the world, the concept is celebrated as International Workers’ Day, and that’s on May 1, also known as May Day. In early May 1886, the Haymarket Affair took place in Chicago. On May 3, a protest by workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company arguing for an eight-hour workday turned deadly when police attempted to quell the situation killed two demonstrators and injured several others. The next day, the protest continued. When police tried to break up the peaceful gathering, an unknown party threw a stick of dynamite, turning the protest into a riot. Eleven people died in the chaos. The Haymarket Affair is thus considered the first moment in the fight for better working conditions and treatment of workers, and so a holiday in early May, commemorating the Haymarket tragedy, was selected by American labor groups in 1889 before the idea spread into Europe where it could coincide with the early spring celebrations happening there for centuries.