1. Daily Worker, 05 4, 1925, 1, 2Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. Ellen Litwicki has studied the history of civic education through holidays in the public schools during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Paula Fass has studied the “political behavior of college youth” during the 1920s. However, there has not been a focused study of how children and teens have developed particular political identities through their participation in public events, like Loyalty Day and May Day (see Litwicki, Ellen, America's Public Holidays, 1865–1920 [Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002], 174–90Google Scholar; and Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977])Google Scholar. The growing field of the history of childhood and youth also has not engaged the question of the development of (and the adult concern over the development of) youth political consciousness. Instead, as Harvey J. Graff has noted, historians in this relatively new field have tended to follow one of four general approaches: psychohistorical (John Demos); sociocultural (Joseph Kett); transition in the life course (Tamara Hareven); or a study of institutions and social policy related to children and youth (Robert H. Bremner) (see Graff, Harvey J., Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987], xiiGoogle Scholar; and also, Hawes, Joseph M. and Hiner, N. Ray, “The Historiography of American Childhood,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook ed. Hawes, Joseph M. and Hiner, N. Ray [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985], 3–13Google Scholar; and Illick, Joseph E., American Childhoods [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002])CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. I discuss several examples of these different individual interpretations of children's participation in May Day events later in this essay when I address the May Day memories of Peggy Dennis, Robert Schrank, and others from when they were members of the Young Pioneers or the YCL in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

5. The ADS was a voluntary association established among prominent business leaders in New York during World War I that originally carried out its mission to “Serve at Home” by compiling proposals for Congress that included the internment of alien enemies and pro-German sympathizers and the banning of German-language publications. After the war, the ADS attempted to rename and reclaim May Day as American Day. Working in conjunction with the National Security League, the ADS planned patriotic-themed parades and mass meetings around the nation on May 1st from 1919 to 1921 (see the ADS Records, Special Collections, New-York Historical Society. The SMOC was a loose organization of military men in New York who supported the Ceremony of the Massing of the Colors. General Oliver Bridgman, New York State National Guard retired, founded this commemorative event in 1920. Held every year thereafter until 1944, this gathering of the colors from the city's regiments and patriotic societies both marked the anniversary of Armistice Day and provided an opportunity for a secular veneration of the Stars and Stripes. It, too, became an occasion for a public definition of Americanism in the 1920s that purposefully excluded political radicals (see SMOC Collection, Manuscripts Division, New-York Historical Society.

6. MacLeod, David, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA and Their Forerunners (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 19, 35–44Google Scholar.

7. Paul Harris, a lawyer in Chicago, founded the first Rotary Club as a businessmen's club where members would assist and promote each other's business ventures. By 1912, the focus of what became a nationwide network of clubs with several hundred members had shifted to public service and volunteerism, including educational and recreational work with boys (see Oren, Arnold, The Golden Strand: An Informal History of the Rotary Club of Chicago [Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966], 18–26, 119, 135, 144)Google Scholar.

8. The club's work among boys began as wartime service during the Great War (see, for example, Spokes in the Wheel of the Rotary Club of New York 6, no. 7 [06 1918]: 21)Google Scholar.

9. New York Times, 05 2, 1920, 1Google Scholar; and Oren, , Golden Strand, 135–37Google Scholar.

10. New York Times, 05 2, 1920, 1Google Scholar.

11. New York Call, 05 2, 1920, 6Google Scholar.

12. New York Times, 05 2, 1920, 1Google Scholar.

13. Ibid.

14. Oren, , Golden Strand, 135–36Google Scholar. In 1921, for example, 50,000 boys marched down Michigan Avenue in “demonstration of their loyalty, their courage, and their spirit of Americanism.”

15. New York Times, 05 2, 1923, 21Google Scholar.

16. Ibid., and Oren, , Golden Strand, 136Google Scholar.

17. For example, in 1921 it sponsored a float on which a boy, dressed as a bottle of milk, chased away two other boys dressed as a cup of tea and a mug of coffee, the caffeine-laden “enemies” of healthy childhood development (New York Times, May 1, 1921, 12).

18. New York Times, 05 2, 1920, 1, and 05 2, 1923, 21Google Scholar.

19. New York Call, 05 2, 1920, 1Google Scholar.

20. These elements of the Loyalty Day parade, along with the educational and recreational activities planned for the rest of Boys' Week, most likely explains the presence of the Henry Street Settlement House children in the events. Lillian Wald, founder of the settlement located in Manhattan's working-class Lower East Side, supported progressive reforms in health and education and even looked favorably on the work of Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), and on the work of the SP It is unlikely that she would have strongly supported the martial patriotism heralded by the Rotary and the BSA, especially given her support of peace efforts during and after the Great War. The presence of the settlement-house boys in the Loyalty Day parades nonetheless demonstrates how those who joined in the line of march may not have shared in the official position of the event's main organizers (see Wald, Lillian, Windows on Henry Street [Boston: Little, Brown, 1934], 25, 45–46, 144, 156–59, 290–310)Google Scholar.

21. For example, BSA headquarters relied on wealthy donors, who provided the bulk of the organization's budget. Some of the top donors were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Mrs. Russell Sage (see MacLeod, , Building Character, 151)Google Scholar.

22. Chicago Daily Socialist, 04 29, 1911, 7Google Scholar.

23. Over 50,000 American soldiers died in six months of fighting (see Keene, Jennifer D., “American as Warriors: ‘Doughboys’ in Battle During the First World War,” OAH Magazine of History 17, no. 1 [10 2002], 15)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. MacLeod, David, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 2–13, 23–33Google Scholar; and, MacLeod, , Building Character, 6–28Google Scholar.

25. Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 82–89Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 9–10.

27. See note 5 for a brief discussion of the SMOC. On Armistice Day, see Dennis, Matthew, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 235Google Scholar.

28. The Boy Scouts' loyalty oath taken to parents and the country, and its military-style organization and discipline, controlled outdoor physical excursions, and community service projects, satisfied the middle-class parent's need to raise obedient, disciplined, strong, and patriotic boys (see MacLeod, , Building Character, 171–87)Google Scholar.

29. New York Call, 05 1, 1921, 7Google Scholar.

30. Women were often relegated to the sidelines during civic events, especially during the 19th century. They applauded men who marched in parades on the Fourth of July and for George Washington's birthday, for example, but did not march in those parades themselves (see, for example, Ryan, Mary P., Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 248Google Scholar; and, Glassberg, David, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century [Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1990], 18)Google Scholar. May Day celebrations were unusual in this respect, allowing women to participate in the line of march itself since the mid-1890s (see, for example, The People, May 5, 1895, 1).

31. See, for example, New York Times, 05 1, 1921, 12Google Scholar.

32. Oren, , Golden Strand, 136–37Google Scholar. In Chicago, the Rotary organized Boys' Week into the 1960s. According to Oren, the Loyalty Day parade was suspended because there were too many boys who were interested in joining and it became too difficult to organize.

33. See, for example, the rally of the Brooklyn Citizen's Patriotic May Day Celebration Committee in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on May 1st, 1926 (New York Times, May 3, 1926, 12), and the VFW's parade on May Day, “in patriotic demonstration against Communism,” in 1930 (New York Times, May 3, 1930, 2).

34. Hoover, Herbert, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 2: 31–32Google Scholar.

35. Holt was the medical director of Babies Hospital of the City of New York who also wrote a best-selling child-rearing manual (see MacLeod, , The Age of the Child, 35–38, 49–51)Google Scholar. On his advice to Hoover, see Glover, Katherine, The Story of May Day, 1924–1928 (New York: American Child Health Association, 1928), 1Google Scholar.

36. Glover, , Story of May Day, 2Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., 12.

38. Letter from Herbert Hoover to President Calvin Coolidge, February 18, 1924, in Glover, , Story of May Day, 23–24Google Scholar.

39. Hoover, , Memoirs, 2: 98Google Scholar.

40. Hoover voices this chauvinistic assumption in his letter to Coolidge, cited in note 38. Katherine Glover, in her contemporary history of Child Health Day, also advanced this perspective, citing Hoover's dismay at America's failure to feed and care for its own children, especially when it had been able to do so for those of Europe (see Glover, , Story of May Day, 2)Google Scholar.

41. By the early 20th century, there was a steady decline in the birth rate among the native-born middle class, while that of the arriving immigrants, who were mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, remained steady. As David MacLeod argues, “contemporary concern [that the latter population was about to eclipse the former] centered on the great cities of the North” where the children of immigrants predominated (see MacLeod, , Age of the Child, 11)Google Scholar. That concern took the shape of both Progressive reform efforts, of which the ACHA was a part, and nativist reaction, which supported the popularity of race theory, eugenics, and the eventual restriction placed on immigration by 1924 (see Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 2nd ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 150–56, 324Google Scholar.

42. Glover attributes the idea to Aida de Acosta Breckinridge (Glover, , Story of May Day, 8)Google Scholar.

43. May spring pageants, maypole dances, and special craft activities were already familiar to schoolteachers and their students. Several guidebooks were published at the time. See, for example, Kellogg, Alice Maude, Primary Recitations (Philadelphia: Penn, 1925), 16, 21, 44Google Scholar; Kellogg, Alice Maude, Spring and Summer School Celebrations (Philadelphia: Penn, 1923), 65–90Google Scholar; and Snodgrass, Catherine, Springtime: A May Day Pageant (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1924)Google Scholar. The new messages of health and hygiene were added to these familiar activities. See, for example, the photos between pages 44 and 45 in Glover, Story of May Day, and Hallock, Grace T., ed., May Day Festival Book, 1927 (New York: American Child Health Association, 1927)Google Scholar.

44. Glover, , Story of May Day, 3–4Google Scholar.

45. Ibid., 13, 15.

46. Ibid., 81.

47. Hoover, , Memoirs, 2: 99Google Scholar.

48. Samuel Gompers, Press Release for Information and Publicity Service, AFL, March 25,1924, in the American Federation of Labor Records: The Samuel Gompers Era, microfilm edition, 5632, reel 118, in the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, M. P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (hereafter cited as Kheel).

49. “Report of the Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Held at Los Angeles, California, October 3 to 14, Inclusive, 1927” (n.p., n.d.), 94.

50. Ibid.

51. Turner, Grace, “May Day-Child Health Day,” American Federationist 35, no. 5 (05 1928): 558–59Google Scholar; and Green, William, “May Day Child Health Day,” American Federationist 35, no. 5 (05 1928): 534Google Scholar.

52. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Education, Child Health Day: Hearing Before the Committee on Education (17th Cong., 1st sess., 04 13 and 29, 1928), 1Google Scholar.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. This was known as Senate Resolution 89. In the House it was identified as House Joint Resolution 184 (see U.S. Congress, Child Health Day, 1Google Scholar).

56. Ibid., 2–3, 4–5.

57. Ibid., 19.

58. Ibid., 14, 16, 26.

59. Ibid., 14, 22.

60. Ibid., 18–19.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., 19, 23, 30.

63. Ibid., 31.

64. Ibid.

65. “Congressional Joint Resolution, Designating May 1 as Child Health Day,” in Glover, , Story of May Day, 28Google Scholar.

66. Coolidge, Calvin, “President's Proclamation-1928,” in Glover, , Story of May Day, 27Google Scholar.

67. ACHA, American Child Health Association, Teamwork for Child Health (New York: ACHA, 1929), 12–21Google Scholar.

68. Ibid., 31–39, 67–68.

69. ACHA, American Child Health Association, Celebrating May Day in 1929 (New York: ACHA, 1929), 13–15Google Scholar.

70. For a lengthier discussion of this process of redefinition, and of the history of May Day in the United States, see Haverty-Stacke, Donna Truglio, “Constructing Radical America: A Cultural and Social History of May Day in New York City and Chicago, 1867–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2003)Google Scholar.

71. “Report of the Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Convention, Held at New Orleans, Louisiana, November 19 to 28, Inclusive, 1928” (n.p., n.d.), 84. The implication here, too, was that May Day did not advance the cause of America's children, a charge that would be vehemently refuted by the CP, as discussed in the next section of this essay.

72. Daily Worker, 04 30, 1927, 4Google Scholar.

73. Ibid., April 26, 1929, 6.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., April 23, 1932, 4.

78. Ottanelli, Fraser M., The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 15–16, 18–19, 47Google Scholar.

79. Ibid., 20–37.

80. The IWO was a benevolent organization, made up of several language fraternal associations, which was founded in 1930 by members of the CP and the Jewish Workmen's Circle. The individual associations sponsored various sporting and cultural activities, and the IWO as an umbrella group provided insurance for its members. The IWO remained closely connected to the CP, supporting many of the party's causes. The IWO Juniors were its youth section that was eventually reorganized along the lines of the different language associations (see Ottanelli, , Communist Party, 125–26Google Scholar; and Bedact, Max, “I.W.O.: Ten Years of Our Order, 1930–1940,” Fraternal Outlook (06-07 1940): 10–14Google Scholar.

81. Pevzner, Sam, “The Gang Learns About May Day,” in Ten Plays for Boys and Girls, ed. Blake, Ben (New York: Federation of Children's Organizations and Junior Section of International Workers Order, 1935), 24–34Google Scholar, IWO Publications, box 48, International Workers Order Records, in Kheel.

82. Blake, Ben, introduction to Ten Plays for Boys and Girls, ed. Blake, Ben (New York: Federation of Children's Organizations and Junior Section of International Workers Order, 1935), 7–8Google Scholar, IWO Publications, box 48, International Workers Order Records, in Kheel.

83. Pevzner, , “The Gang,” 24–28Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., 31–32.

85. Ibid, 33.

86. Ibid. 33–34.

87. The play also taught other lessons: to question authority figures, like Milhooey, Finchley, and the mayor and to view society as divided fundamentally by class, like the working-class gang's social separation from the fat rich kids with special mayoral tickets for the maypole dance. It also advanced a masculine militancy in the character of Butch and the banners and chants of his Pioneer brethren, which were poised in opposition to the florally festooned maypole, the effeminate and weak fat boy who is intimidated by Spike, and the maypole dance, which is mocked by Skinny as girlish. Here the political left characterizes the wealthy as unmanly in their idleness (the fat boy) and their indifference (Finchley), while posing itself as represented by the virile, young working-class boys Butch, Spike, and the Pioneers.

88. The party's Socialist Sunday Schools began organizing separate special children's processions on May 1st in 1912. There were fourteen of these schools in New York City where staff members instructed children in basic socialist tenets during two-hour sessions once a week. In their May Day parades, the children marched through the streets surrounding their schools in the Yorkville and Brownsville neighborhoods, for example. Anywhere from one to three thousand children paraded in a given year and attended the postprocession exercises that included speeches, songs, recitations, and short plays held in their community meeting halls (see New York Call, April 30, 1912, 1, 2; May 2, 1912, 2; May 2, 1913, 2; April 30, 1914, 1; May 2, 1914, 2; April 29, 1915, 2; May 2, 1915, 1; and, April 30, 1916, 1).

89. These institutions were important within local communities for reinforcing both ethnic/language identifications and radical political identities. In Harlem, the Lower East Side, and the Bronx, for example, Jewish radicals favored Yiddish shuls both for their teaching of the Yiddish language within a secular Jewish context and their adherence to socialist ideology. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party supported summer camps for children and different youth groups, (see below re. Young Pioneers, YCL, Pioneer Youth, and YPSL), because they understood these institutions to be a line of defense against the infiltration of youth organizations and curriculum in the public schools that advocated militarism and antiradicalism (see, for example, Abridged Minutes, National Executive Committee Meeting, April 15 and 16, 1933, 7, YPSL, Series II, Youth and YPSL Papers, Socialist Party Records, microfilm, reel 81, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, New York [hereafter cited as Tamiment]; and Thesis and Resolutions for the Seventh National Convention of the Communist Party of U.S.A., Central Committee Plenum, March 31-April 4, 1930, Series 6:15, CPUSA Convention Proceedings, 1921–1972, Earl Browder Papers, microfilm, reel 7, in Tamiment.

90. Mishler, Paul C., Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 42Google Scholar. Working-class children of parents who were not radical were educated by the city's public schools or Catholic parish schools, and socialized within neighborhood networks dominated by these antiradical institutions. On the persistence of local ethnic-based neighborhood institutions in the 1920s, see also Cohen, Liz, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 53–97Google Scholar.

91. Mishler, , Raising Reds, 44Google Scholar.

92. For example, in 1929, about one thousand Pioneers walked out of school to join in the parade; three were arrested for distributing leaflets (see Daily Worker, May 3, 1929, 1, 5). In 1930, about eighty Pioneers were arrested on May Day and in the days immediately following for handing out party leaflets (Daily Worker, May 3, 1930, 1).

93. Daily Worker, 05 3, 1926, 1, 3Google Scholar.

94. New York Times, 05 2, 1927, 2Google Scholar.

95. Daily Worker, 04 26, 1930, 6Google Scholar.

96. See, for example, New York Times, May 2, 1930, 20. That year some fifty arrests were made that included a group of six boys who had painted “Cut School May 1-Join the Young Pioneers” on the walls and stairways of their junior high school in the Bronx.

97. Cohn, Fannia, “Pioneer Youth of America,” reprinted from American Federationist (09 1925)Google Scholar, in Fannia Cohn Papers, microfilm, reel 12, Rare Book and Manuscript Division, Lenox, Astor and Tilden Foundation, New York Public Library, New York, New York.

98. The YPSL of Chicago was established first, gaining the official support of the SP in 1912. The YPSL became a national organization by 1915.

99. See, for example, letter to YPSL of Greater New York from Executive Secretary, Morris Novick, April 28, 1923, in Youth and YPSL Papers, Series II, Socialist Party of America Papers, microfilm, reel 81, in Tamiment; and Addition to Report of Bronx YPSL, April 27, 1927, in Youth and YPSL Papers, Series II, Socialist Party of America Papers, microfilm, reel 81, in Tamiment.

100. The YPSL later stood at the center of the split within the SP between the young, militant wing that came to favor forming a united front with the communists on May Day in the 1930s and the Old Guard of the party, based in the unions of the garment trades, who did not.

101. This reinforces Mishler's conclusions (see Mishler, , Raising Reds, 42)Google Scholar.

102. Dennis, Peggy, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925–1975 (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1977), 20Google Scholar.

103. Ibid., 21.

104. Schrank, Robert, Wasn't That a Time? Growing Up Radical and Red in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 28Google Scholar.

105. Ibid., 49.

106. Ibid., 28.

107. Ibid.

108. Pinkson, Ruth, “The Life and Times of an Elderly Red Diaper Baby,” in Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, ed. Kaplan, Judy and Shapiro, Linn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 232Google Scholar.

109. Ibid., 232.

110. Schrank, , Wasn't It a Time? 82–87Google Scholar.

111. Ibid., 126.

112. Ottanelli, , Communist Party, 48Google Scholar. With the onset of the Great Depression, second-generation ethnic Americans, especially Jews in northern American cities, like New York and Chicago, turned to the party as a vehicle for social change. As a result, the CPUSA began to make the shift to the Popular Front, which, as Ottanelli argues, was then made official in Moscow. He argues persuasively that the major shifts in the CPUSA's policy positions came from both changes at the grassroots level within America, like this one, and broader policy declarations sent down from Moscow (see esp. 49–80).

113. Joe Preisen, quoted in Gornick, Vivian, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic, 1977), 45Google Scholar.

114. Once the Communist Party supported the creation of a Popular Front by early 1938, welcoming a broad coalition of progressive and reform groups, it did manage to host some of the largest May Day parades in the event's history. For a few years, these demonstrations offered a glimpse of what such a progressive front, which included a celebration of a democratic ethnic pluralism, looked like in America. In these grand parades of almost a quarter of a million participants, the May Day holiday reached its climax in numerical strength and cultural resonance in New York City and Chicago (see Haverty-Stacke, Donna Truglio, “Partisan Conflict and the Popular Front: May Day, 1930–1941,” in “Constructing Radical America: A Cultural and Social History of May Day in New York City and Chicago, 1867–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2003), 266–318Google Scholar.

115. For example, Mario, Robert Schrank's working-class friend, who is Italian and a Roman Catholic, had ties to ethnic and religious associations in his neighborhood that also taught him a hostility to socialism and communism (see Schrank, , Wasn't It a Time? 87)Google Scholar.

116. Both parties experienced a decline in membership during the height of the Red Scare. The CP, which had an initial membership of anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 in 1919 (scant records make it hard to determine), went underground in 1920 and shrank down to a membership of about 9,300 by 1929 (see Ottanelli, , Communist Party, 10–15)Google Scholar. The SP experienced a rise in its membership during World War I for its initial antiwar stance, and polled 919,000 in 1920, but its numbers also declined during the Red Scare and the 1920s due to competition from the fledgling CP The party shrank to about 8,000 members by 1928 (see Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982], 325)Google Scholar. Both parties revived in the 1930s as a result of the Great Depression and their appeal among the unemployed. The CP fared better, rising to 19,000 in 1933, 27,000 in 1935, and 65,000 by the late 1930s, drawing also on the second-generation American-born children of immigrant radicals (see Ottanelli, , Communist Party, 43–44Google Scholar). The SP bounced back to a membership of 16,000 by 1932, but because of its internal split in the mid-1930s, its support never rose above 20,000 again (see Salvatore, , Debs, 336)Google Scholar.