Illustration by Britt Spencer
To answer that question, we must ask another: Which May Day—the violet crowns–and–maypole dancing one, or the workers-marching-through-the-town-square-with-red-flags one?
Let’s start with the flowery springtime festival. Those May flowers have deep roots, dating back to the ancient Celtic holiday of Beltane and the Romans’ Floralia. According to the National Museum of American History, the United States began celebrating May Day in the late 19th century, when reformers began advocating for “wholesome play,” including May Day festivals at schools. Local papers overflowed with descriptions of playground maypoles and classroom floral displays.
Labor leaders had other ideas, and it had nothing to do with daisy chains. A 1939 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article claimed our May 1 celebrations began in 1888, the year that the American Federation of Labor held its convention here. May 1 was officially codified in 1889 by the Marxist International Socialist Congress in Paris as a way of commemorating both May 1 protests for the eight-hour workday and Chicago’s Haymarket Square incident. St. Louis had its share of May Day celebrations, as it was a center of radical politics at the time, home to influential socialist publication The National Rip-Saw and a frequent lecture stop for writer and anarchist Emma Goldman.
By 1929, however, the St. Louis Star declared, “Today is May Day. Usually bombing time for communists, anarchists, revolutionaries and labor demonstrations of passionate intensity the world over, May 1 has lost such significance in this country… It is a change for the better. Quiet enjoyment, a return to the fine old May Day celebrations by the children—that is the meaning of America’s May Day.”
Mayor Joseph Darst finished the job 20 years later, issuing a proclamation that May 1 was Loyalty Day, an observance that grew out of the national holiday of Americanization Day, specifically designed to cancel May Day. Which it did—it became an official federal holiday under Dwight D. Eisenhower—and it’s still celebrated in some cities. In other places, like St. Louis, May Day was toned down, shifted to September, and renamed Labor Day.
Now, St. Louis’ major May Day celebration is the Annie Malone May Day Parade. It rarely lands on May 1 proper and has nothing to do with the workers’ parades or maypoles of yore. It’s something much better: a 132-year-old tradition that grew organically out of St. Louis history and culture. This year, on May 16, it will stream online, led by a virtual parade marshal: Congresswoman Cori Bush.
Der Maibaum
Peter Moszyk fled Eastern Germany in the ’50s and relocated here in the mid-’60s. Trained as a woodcarver, he worked for years as a cabinetmaker. In the early 2000s, he put his woodcarving skills to work building an authentic German maibaum, or maypole.
“It won’t be a little one, like those put up now for small festivals, but a 30-foot-tall version, like those that mark nearly every village, town and city in Germany and Austria,” the Post wrote in 2004. “The pole will sport hand-carved emblems of 16 organizations that preserve German culture in this area.”
One of those organizations was the German Cultural Society of St. Louis, which oversees a venue called Donau Park in House Springs, where the maibaum was installed. A few years earlier, at a meeting of the German American Committee, Moszyk had raised his hand and suggested they build a maypole. “They told me, ‘Great idea—why don’t you make one?’ So I got stuck with it.”
