The Creator of Labor Day Was An Anti-Labor Asshole

Grover? His real name was Stephen.

Americans love to tut-tut communist and socialist countries around the world for “cults of personality” around their leaders. Well, at least their leaders are actual revolutionaries who put in the work.

Our only revolutionary president was George Washington, a slave owner with hippo teeth who went to war over taxes. The rest of them (other than the noble Warren G. Harding) are some mixture of war criminal, racist, sex pest, or reactionary Big Business hobgoblin. And yet we are taught to revere these freaks during 12 years of public schooling where we begin every morning by chanting fealty to a piece of cloth under God.

Take Grover Cleveland, the only man to serve two nonconsecutive terms as president until Donald Trump inevitably duplicates the feat in 2024. How many Americans do you think would recognize ol’ Grover if he were walking the other way down the street? My guess is roughly 12%, if that.

And that’s for a reason.

From explorethearchive.com:

Cleveland was also opposed to imperialist intervention in foreign countries, was an advocate for the gold standard, and sought a reduction in tariffs, as the U.S. government was running on a surplus due to exorbitant tariff revenue.

However, despite his love affair with the power of veto and his formidable policymaking skills, Grover Cleveland also signed into law many policies that decimated Indigenous communities and excluded minority groups.

The man loved gold and hated tariffs… but he also committed genocide and saw other minorities as lesser-than… so who’s to say what was bad and good about him?

Did you know he is also the only president to execute a man and botch another?

From Stacy Condradt of mentalfloss.com:

Knowing that Sheriff Cleveland had been wrestling with doing the deed, Deputy Richard Harris volunteered to do it for him. “Big Steve” had the right to appoint a surrogate executioner for $10, but Cleveland declined in the end, feeling he should hand down the punishment himself.

On September 6, 1872, the future president pressed the lever that released the trapdoor under Morrissey. “... this little tragedy made Mr. Cleveland a sick man for several days thereafter,” The New York Times [PDF] later reported—and, unfortunately, he had another one looming.

The second execution went even worse. John Gaffney had been convicted of fatally shooting a man in the head while playing cards at a saloon. As with Morrissey, Gaffney was sentenced to die by hanging. Once again, Cleveland insisted on carrying out the punishment himself. Unfortunately, when the sheriff pulled the lever, the 5-foot drop broke Gaffney’s neck but didn't kill him. It took the man 23 minutes to die.

Even if Gaffney were guilty of shooting a man in the head during a card game, he didn’t deserve to suffer for 23 minutes while hanging from a rope by his neck. But that was our boy Grover: Sick about murdering a man for “several days” before brutally torturing another convict to death. This man was made of presidential timber from an early age!

Most notably, however, Grover became one of the first Democratic presidents to sell out the labor unions that helped elect him to the highest office in the land when he brutally crushed the Pullman Railroad Strike in the spring of 1884.

From Sarah Pruitt of history.com [brackets mine]:

The Pullman strike effectively halted rail traffic and commerce in 27 states stretching from Chicago to the West Coast, driving the General Managers Association (GMA), a group that represented Chicago’s railroad companies, to seek help from the federal government in shutting the strike down.

…

On June 29, some crowd members attending a [Eugene] Debs speech in Blue Island, Illinois, set fires to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. mail train. U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney used the incident as an excuse to ask for an injunction against the strike and its leaders from the federal district court in Chicago, which he got on July 2.

“This was the turning point, because it enjoined the ARU and Debs from doing anything to support or direct the strike,” says Richard Schneirov, professor of history at Indiana State University. “Labor has for much of its history been hemmed in by injunctions, but the Pullman injunction was the first big instance where it really came to the attention of the public.”

The following day, President Cleveland dispatched federal troops to the city to enforce the injunction. Illinois’ pro-labor governor, John Peter Altgeld, who had already called out state militia troops to prevent violence, was outraged, calling the government’s actions unconstitutional. With the arrival of federal troops, the Pullman strike turned bloody, with some rioters destroying hundreds of railroad cars in South Chicago on July 6, and National Guardsmen firing into a mob on July 7, killing as many as 30 people and wounding many others.

The most diabolical part is Congress passed and Grover signed the legislation enacting Labor Day mere days before he sent federal troops to Chicago to crush one of the most successful strikes in the young country’s history.

This was a premeditated strike by the capitalist class to rob workers of their history and misdirect them from the original (socialist) workers’ holiday, May Day, which came to prominence as a way to honor the martyrs of the Haymarket Affair who the government wrongfully hanged after trial in a kangaroo court.

I hope that moldy binch Grover Cleveland enjoys the dustbin of history. He certainly deserves worse.

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