May Day has a long-standing tradition around the world, especially in this country where it all began. The first May Day, started in Chicago in 1886, was a call for the eight-hour workday. The typical workday was anywhere between ten to sixteen hours long. Tens of thousands of protestors were met on the street with guns and clubs. A subsequent protest ended with a bomb explosion that killed one police officer and random gun fire that killed dozens of others, protestor and police alike, in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. Eight Anarchists were tried in a mockery of justice and sentenced to death. Four of the eight were hung, one committed suicide in jail and the other three were later released when it became more evident that the trial was rigged.

May Day in Olympia has less of a dramatic history though nonetheless interesting. Throughout the Northwest, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) were organizing the timberworkers. Seen as a job befitting only the "dregs" of society, recent immigrants and hoboes, the IWW organized these workers into one of the most threatening forces to capitalist interests. All through the First World War, the IWW called General Strikes within the timber industry on May Day. May 1st 1916, 1917 and 1918 were marked by strikes in the Northwest that hamstrung the supply of timber to the war effort. With the notions that the work ing class of America has more in common with the working class of Germany than it does with any president or general, the IWW called for (unofficially) "No War except Class War!"

Many of the records and documents of this time period were destroyed by the United States Department of Justice during the Palmer Raids of the 1920's. Some old timers recall that May Day was celebrated in many of the nearby timber camps and picket lines throughout the Olympia and Puget Sound area, but accounts of any downtown labor parades are missing. As early as May 1st, 1919 though, Olympia sponsored a May Day festival that had less to do with labor and more to do with nature. Most certainly connected to the pagan roots, Olympia High School hosted the festival boasting that over 250 pupils would participate in a theme of "Voices of the Wood". The Morning Olympian did note that riots in Cleveland and Boston organized by the IWW and socialists claim the lives of strikers and police alike.

By 1920, on the heals of the Centralia Massacre and the Seattle General Strike and amidst the raiding of IWW union halls, leftist political party offices, disappearances, murders and mass deportations, the Olympia American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars declare May 1st as Americanization Day. With a big party and feast in Priest Point Park, speakers described the "Americanization Program" and other ultra-right patriotic themes. According to The Morning Olympian, the party was attended by between 4000 and 5000 people, an unlikely number considering the number of residents in Olympia at the time and the amount of room at the park.

Much like the American Legion try ing to erase the original May Day with it's xenophobic rhetoric, the following year the First M.E. Church of Olympia held its own "May Day Musicale". In an appropriation of the pagan Beltane festival and celebration of spring, the First M.E. Church stated that "The first day of May is universally celebrated as a festival of merriment and sung in honor of the so called Queen of May. Adapting this idea to the Christian program, this concert is working out as a May-Day crowning of Christ, creation's King."

None of these attempts to rewrite history or sway May Day away from its pagan and labor roots lasted. By 1924, Olympia's May Day festival though lacking in its labor message (in part due to a huge federal and state effort to quell any "leftist" groups) had moved its celebration to Sylvester Park. Several hundred people attended the crowning Catherine Redpath as May Day Queen as the Olympia High School girls performed a dance around the May Pole. Elementary school children were dressed in costumes and an orchestra played for the community. May Day tickets were sold to raise funds to buy athletic equipment for the elementary school.

May Day was a community event, but Olympia was not necessarily all of one mind. That same year, the IWW was struggling to raise money for many of its members languishing in prison for anti-war protests or for just having an IWW union card. Membership in the IWW had been made a felony offense. Meanwhile the Olympia Ku Klux Klan burned a 50x100 ft cross above the Deschutes waterway.

By 1925, the May Day celebration in Olympia is overshadowed by the new festival named "American Forest Week". Overflowing into the streets with numerous floats, a Boy Scout Marching band and parade route lined with American Flags and presided over by the Governor, and sponsored by local businesses with forest interests, the "forest Week Parade" was called "Olympia's most pretentious parade". The original May Day fest in Sylvester Park was less publicized and more interest seemed to be in Queen Dolores Shugart's dress than anything else. Of course the Olympia High School girls continued to dance around the May Pole.

The following year, there seems to be no mention in The Morning Olympian of any May Day festival, but the American Legion does award an Omak youth for a Patriotic Poetry Competition. The official May Day festival seemed to have stopped being celebrated.

Throughout the 1930s, as the Great Depression sent many people into poverty and a life on the road, and the American Communist Party started to grow. The New York Veterans of Foreign Wars declared that May 1st will now be called Dewey Day. Both the VFW and the Communists agree to avoid clashes since thousands were expected from both groups. Olympia seemed relatively quiet. By 1934, the New York City Police Department expected over 200,000 people in the streets for May Day. In Olympia, according to The Morning Olympian, fifty Communists gathered in Sylvester Park to march to the capital and deliver demands to the governor. "American Vigilantes and other law enforcement representatives lined the sidewalks as a safeguard against any outbreak". It was quite common for pseudo-legal para-military vigilante groups to act outside the law, but in the interests of big business and government. Today, we call these groups "death squads".

It appears that May Day celebrations became less and less prevalent in Olympia. Once in a while the tradition would rear up, but would be quietly put down by a conservative patriotic backlash, mostly it would live in the hearts and minds of individuals and neighborhoods where adopted pagan notions of fertility were played out by children leaving flowers on neighbors doorsteps and the occasional May Pole (the symbolic phallic representation of fertility) projects at the schools. In the 1950s, almost all reference to the International Workers' Holiday had been erased by the mechanisms of the latest Red Scare and many had declared May Day as "Law and Order Day".

In 1996, the IWW started rebuilding its Olympia branch, and by May 1st of 1997 organized some 200 people to march on the capital to turn themselves in as felons under the Anarchy Sabotage Act RCW 9.05.020 enacted after World War I to repress the IWW and all leftist political organizations. Though the Washington State Patrol declined to arrest the IWW members and their supporters, the ball was set in motion for further May Day actions in Olympia.

By 2000, several hundred protestors would occupy the intersection of Black Lake Blvd and Cooper Point Road, erecting barricades and reclaiming the festival that once was part of Olympia's "annual frolic". Labor education and perma-culture workshops, and lectures on neighborhood gentrification abound. Live music, food and dancing are commonly the fair and Olympia is seeing a rebirth of the community holiday as more and more individuals and organizations get involved each and every year. In an environment where entertainment and culture have been usurped by the powerful and become a commodity, isn't it time to take back what is ours? What will you be doing this May Day?