Bread and Roses in Heaven

Happy May Day

“[May Day] was always a celebration of all that is free and life-giving in the world… Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work.” – Peter Linebaugh

There was an era in Europe, shortly after the worst of the black plague, when some 50% of the year was celebrated as a public holiday and ordinary people did not work. That means that every other day, or about 182 days annually, people rested, feasted, danced, cared for one another, explored the land, honored their gods, created art, and talked.

Peter the Elder - Peasant Wedding

This was possible, of course, because everyone was dead. Well, obviously not everyone, but a big enough portion of the working population had perished from disease that those who remained were in very high demand. The farmers, foresters, herdsmen, day laborers, and craftsmen who remained had a very credible power over would-be employers. “If you don’t want to give us what we want, we’ll move on.” So the landowners and merchants, the jewel-wearers and cake-eaters gave in, and the workers danced every other day, and society did not collapse. Work still got done, food was grown, babies were born, the dead were buried, and history advanced.

On May Day, we honor the survival of these ancestors and the power they drew from knowing themselves to be precious and rare. And we remember what they taught us about the sacredness of their own time.

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Growing up, I was taught that there was nothing in life more sacred than work. Maybe it would have been different had we not been transplants, ones with no family graves to visit, no old and precious heirlooms, no honored sites in a town where only I was born. My mom took us to church every week, but my dad didn’t, which revealed that even the Catholic church wasn’t a true font of meaning for all. Not like work, anyway. After all, work had brought my parents to the place to begin with.

My mom was a nurse, and that meant that there wasn’t an hour of the day or a day of the year that was safe from seizure by work. I remember the years when she did shift work before she finally earned enough seniority to work four-twelves instead. I remember the goodnight phone calls, the mom-less Christmases, the 5am, pre-work Easter egg hunts, the trips to visit family that she couldn’t go on. Honestly, I don’t remember being particularly sad about it. Kids only know what they know, after all, and this was our normal.

What I do remember is the sheer, unimpeachable force of the words, “I have to work.” Those words were nails in the hands and feet of any possible plan or idea. They brook no argument, they cannot be negotiated or reasoned with. They are the alpha and the omega, the final word on the subject. They reigned over my childhood like the dictates of some distant and all-powerful emperor called Work, a force to which all other forces– affection, loneliness, want, even love– must yield.

It did not shock me then, when I got my first paid job at the ripe old age of 10, that I had joined the sacred ranks of the soldiers of Work, and could therefore wield a power that even my parents could not question. I found that I could get out of any event, occasion, or obligation I didn’t care to attend(even church!) with the words, “I have to work.” And unlike other excuses (“I’m sick,” “I have another commitment,” “I don’t want to”), “I have to work” came with no sidelong glances, no raised eyebrows, no skeptical, “really?” At worst there was a slight droop to the shoulder, a small sigh, and a delicate, “that’s a bummer, but I understand.” And while you’re clocking in, you can feel confident that people aren’t disdaining your absence. They’re saying things like, “she really wanted to be here, but unfortunately, she had to work,” and everyone will pity you and admire you for my incredible commitment to the most holy of holies.

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Very few people outside Wyoming remember the Johnson County Cattle War. It’s easy to forget, and even easier to misremember as a time when old west cowboys assembled a posse to clear out a hotbed of violent, no-good cattle rustlers holed up in Buffalo, Wyoming.

Of course, that is not what happened. The cowboys were not the rootin’, tootin’ heroes of the old west, they were cattle barons. And the barons were themselves the rustlers (or, at least, the rustlers were on the payroll), stealing not only cattle from poor and working-class homesteaders, but also the land itself. After all, the barons and their friends had once convinced the government to murder all the indigenous people, so why wouldn’t the government murder all the homesteaders for them too? All they had to do was paint the townspeople as criminals and thieves, then the American masses would cheer on their slaughter.

They did a good job of it too, assisted by the governor, senators, bankers, and powerful newspaper men throughout the state and across the country. The barons convinced the world that the poor toilers and townspeople of Buffalo deserved to be dealt with, cleared from the land and locked up at best, hanged or shot in the back at worst. Once that deed was done, the barons could go back to raising their cattle on the public land of the West, making their millions, without the interference of pesky peasants. But when they grew impatient with the slow progress of their hitmen, they decided it would be cheaper and quicker to just invade the county instead.

When the army of hired gunmen arrived in Johnson County by train, they rode on Buffalo by way of the KC Ranch. A homesteader by the name of Nate Champion lived there, and he was a well-respected local, and thus at the top of the kill list.

Working in the favor of the homesteaders and townspeople was the invaders’ ineptitude and unfamiliarity with the landscape One man at the ranch with Nate Champion, named Flagg, managed to escape before the place was fully surrounded. He left behind two others besides Champion, all three of whom were killed. In the end, a baron-owned newspaper man would record it this way:

“Nate Champion, king of cattle thieves and the bravest man in Johnson County was dead. Flat on his back, with his teeth clinched and a look of mingled defiance and determination on his face to the last, the intrepid rustler met his fate without a groan and paid the penalty of his crimes with his life.”

The historical record proves Champion was no thief, but was instead the target of thieving by baron-hired men. The crime he committed was the crime of standing up to the rich, the powerful, and those who felt entitled to take his land, the fruits of his labor, and in the end, his life.

The hours that Nate Champion and the others held out at the KC Ranch proved decisive. Flagg roused the town of Buffalo, and by the time the invaders had moved on just a few miles, they were pinned down by a force of hundreds of townspeople who came to defend their homes and community. In the end, a detachment came from a nearby fort, and the invaders were taken away to Cheyenne, where none of them were tried, none of the barons were tried, and the murderers of Nate Champion and many others went free.

Justice was not served in Johnson County, but the people there lived to fight another day. They and their contributions were not scrubbed from the historical record. Their legacies survived long enough for us, their heirs, to discover and rediscover their struggle, their heroism, and their love for one another and the place they called home.

On May Day, we honor those people who were branded as outlaws in order to be disempowered, and yet who never gave up the fight for space, resources, and one another. And we remember what they taught us about the sacredness of their own place.

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I went home a couple of years ago to visit my parents. They’re both retired, technically, but my mom got a job during the pandemic, just to keep busy and to get a little extra spending money. She’s a checker at a local grocery store– a job she, by all accounts, hates.

I was just home for a weekend, flew in on Friday afternoon, departed on Sunday. It was my dad’s birthday weekend, and I hadn’t been home in some time. My mom told me a little in advance, “sorry, I won’t know my work schedule until about a week before you come.” She’d already used up all her requestable time off for the year.

She got her schedule the week before, and found out she had to work every day I was there.

“Can’t you call in one day?” I asked, hurt that I was coming to spend time with someone who’s time was already committed to a faceless grocery conglomerate who’s labor abuses I was quite familiar with.

“I’m not some high school kid who just ‘calls in,’” she retorted. “That’s not who I am.”

“But you don’t need the money, you don’t need the job, and they’re not going to fire you for calling in sick one time anyway,” I foolishly replied, realizing only later that I was only galvanizing her commitment.

“It’s not about the money,” she replied coldly. “It’s about the principal.”

And so I went to visit my parents, and I saw my mom only during the few morning hours before she left for work each day.

The whole plane ride home, I thought about it. I thought about how far I’d come, personally, from believing that work is more important than anything else, including my own family. I tried to see my mom’s actions in the best possible light, to understand it as something other than her being more committed to the cult of work and the supremacy of employer loyalty than she is to spending time with her actual flesh-and-blood child. But I couldn’t figure out how to convince myself that it was all okay, or at least, not a big deal.

Afterwards I remember talking to her about it, and asking, as gently as I could, “If you were like, on your deathbed, do you think you’d regret calling in sick, or spending more time with your daughter?” She didn’t really answer, and only then did I start to realize why. For my mom, this is a false choice. Work always comes first. It’s not possible to place something above it, not even herself.

My mom doesn’t go to church anymore, not since the pandemic. She goes to the gym and the car wash, goes shopping with her spending money, and she goes to work. All hail work.

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It was Rose Schneiderman, ironically, who is credited with saying, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.” Maybe her labor activism was driven, in part, by a refusal to be denied her namesake simply because flowers are not “essential to survival.” We deserve more than just survival, she declared, we deserve to live a life of beauty and meaning. We deserve to own, treasure, and enjoy our lives and ourselves, starting with our labor. After all, we did build this country, with all its wealth and beauty, together.

Rose Schneiderman was a working girl in the truest sense– a girl with a job. She was a former garment worker, and in the aftermath of one of the deadliest labor disasters of her time, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, she declared, “Too much blood has been spilled. I know from experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the only way is through a strong working-class movement.”

Rose came by this opinion honestly. She came of age in an era when parents effectively sold their daughters to the garment industry, which claimed most of their less-than-subsistence wages to pay for their room and board in company housing. Women and girls burned to death in fires because doors were shut and exits blocked to prevent “theft.” When women went on strike, they were beaten until their ribs broke by the police, ignored in the media, and ridiculed by a society who thought that if they were worth anything, they wouldn’t be in a factory in the first place.

Rose’s cry for more than bare survival is a salve for the wound inflicted by the words, “don’t be greedy, you have enough,” an idea that’s often used to brutalize workers and labor unions. And the words of activists like Rose, and much more importantly, the deeds of workers and organizers of her generation, helped win child labor protections, the five five day work week and eight hour work day, and union protections. They gave us childhoods and weekends, 4th of July picnics and minimum wage. These rights were not gifts from grateful bosses, they were demands torn from bloody-knuckled fists.

Wealth, power, and the cult of work are prevalent and vehement. Love, strength, courage, and care are rare and weary. James Baldwin told us, “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There’s more than one would think.” But too often we look to the wealthy and powerful for humanity, for generosity and dedication to the common good. We are looking in the wrong places. Medieval peasants, the townspeople of Buffalo, and Rose Schneiderman knew. Don’t look up to the boss, the government, the rich. Look around, hold your ground, and whenever you can, dance.

The worker does not want bread and roses. She must have them. And on May Day, we honor this demand, and celebrate the hard-fought victories of our ancestors.

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It’s required painful effort to file away the words, “I have to work,” from where they’ve been engraved like a VIN number on my soul. I haven’t finished yet. I can still feel the outline of the letters, the way they rub against my feelings, my intellect, and my sense of purpose in the world.

It’s partially because my desire to have worth and be worthy swells up from the very depths of myself, and since the first time I felt it it has been tied up with work and money. But now I’ve felt the pain that comes from that linkage, when even maternal love is subjugated to economic loyalty, and so I’ve begun the lifelong task of repossessing the sacredness that I gave to Work, and redistributing it to the people, places, and ideas in my life that actually deserve it.

Sometimes, when I struggle with this effort, or I backslide into my worship of work, my partner soothes me by saying, “Heaven is vast and the emperor is far away.”

To me, this Chinese proverb is not about the relief that the emperor, the fulcrum of economic power and punishment, is far away and therefore unlikely to exact retribution (at least not immediately). No, to me this is a reminder that we live in heaven. This place, this time, this life, it reminds us, is vast and glorious. Our universe is the biggest place we’ll ever live in, our lives the longest thing we’ll ever do. No one has ever stood on more shoulders, no one has ever had so much inspiration, no one has ever been heir to so many great leaders and thinkers and artists and fighters as we are now. What more worthy, more precious place and time is there to live and fight for than heaven itself? Our ancestors knew it, and so can we.

So on May Day, we celebrate. We celebrate all that we have, all who came before, and all that we plan to leave for those who come next. We remember our sacredness, and the sacredness of the people and places around us. If we can, we may honor a sabbath, a time from which work is excluded, a defiant day on which we remember that it’s not just living we’re after, we must live well.

Now more than ever, most people do not have the freedom to rest today (or any day). For those who do, this is a day to fight to expand that freedom. Enjoying a day of rest should not come at a cost to others– so firstly, avoid shopping, buying, and consuming in ways that obligate others to work. Then, support workers in their many and multi-faceted fights for power and dignity. Demonstrate. March. Join a union, or support others in doing so. Learn about the erased history of labor in the United States– about the garment makers and the farmworkers, the miners and the sex workers. Sit with and challenge your own ideas and priorities around your work and the work you expect of others, especially people who work for you either as servers or employees. Ask yourself and your family hard questions about how much is enough, and what you are willing to extract from yourself and others to achieve it.

May Day is a day for all of these things. A day to rest and to act. A day to fight and to protect. A day to eat and to remember those who have used their hunger to secure a freer, better, less exhausting world for us. If you must work, consider working slowly, in honor of the effort. If you must shop or buy things, acknowledge the workers who make those transactions possible however you can. If you have resources today, be it money, time, or skills, consider sharing them not in exchange for work, but to help forge freedom from a culture of work that excludes all else.

May Day is a day for remembering that life is not something we do in between shifts. Remembering that humans are social animals, not economical ones. Remembering that our value and worth doesn’t flow from jobs or paychecks or the approval of some distant, uncaring boss. Our worth is a product of our dreams and delights, our care and kindness, and the hardships we overcome, alone and together. Remembering that we live in heaven, and that the far off emperor is not worthy of our unquestioning loyalty. Remembering that there is enough bread and roses, enough land, even enough time, for us all to enjoy a fulfilling share, if we could only remember the collective power we have over those who would declare us undeserving.

And we remember that work is not a true imperative– we do not have to do it. We have to breathe, to eat, to be warm and to be with other humans. But we do not have to work. Despite all the fear, of poverty, of isolation, of feelings of inadequacy and social hatred, it is possible to forgo work, and some do. I am not ready to take that step, but I am ready to stop prioritizing work. After all, work is a bad boyfriend– it’s never going to treat me better, it’s never going to meet my mom, it’s never going to stop asking me to do too much with too little time and no recognition. The least I could do is treat it like what it is, and help others do the same.

So Happy May Day to you. And thank you for all your work. It is sacred and precious, and so are you.

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If you are intrigued by the history of land-occupying outlaws, the commons, and enclosure, the work of Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh, and the fate of agrarian radicals, listen to “It’s Highway Robbery,” episode 4 and “Raise Less Corn and More Hell,” episode 5 of The Only Thing That Lasts.