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18941776 Club

Cleveland signs Labor Day into law; September beats out May, and the reason is deliberate

Thirty states already marked the day; the federal act sets the first Monday of September, keeping clear distance from Haymarket and the socialist calendar.

By the summer of 1894, thirty states already observed Labor Day — but the federal government had not made it official. On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation designating the first Monday of each September a holiday for federal workers, codifying what the labor movement had been building toward since the first New York City parade in 1882. Cleveland's choice of September over May 1 was deliberate: he wanted no association with the Haymarket affair, and no fuel for socialist or anarchist movements. All U.S. states and territories eventually followed the federal lead…

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More from June 28
1776

Parker's nine warships bombard Fort Sullivan; Moultrie's palmetto walls swallow the cannonballs

Clinton's land assault stalls at an unwadeable channel, one British ship sits grounded on a sandbar, and the fleet withdraws up the coast.
1776

Washington's own bodyguard hangs before 20,000 in New York

Thomas Hickey, an Irish-born private in the Life Guards, was caught passing counterfeit money, then talked too freely in prison about a far larger plot against the Commander-in-Chief.
1865

Meade stands down the Army of the Potomac; it ceases to exist, two years to the day after he took command

The army that bled at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness is disbanded before summer is out.
17451776 Club
Four thousand New England volunteers with no British regulars have cracked the "American Dunkirk," the stone fortress France spent thirty million livres to make impregnable.
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More from Gilded Age & Progressive Era
1901

Roosevelt takes the oath in a borrowed library; at 42, he is the youngest president yet

McKinley died that morning; by afternoon Judge John Hazel had sworn in his successor at Ansley Wilcox's house.
1881

Arthur takes the oath before dawn, in his own parlor

A New York judge administers the presidency at 2:15 in the morning, hours after Garfield dies of his wounds.
1908

First production Model T leaves the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit

Twenty horsepower, vanadium steel, and a price aimed square at the middle class.
1889

Gunmen behind a boulder hit Wham's paymaster convoy; eight Buffalo Soldiers wounded, $28,345 gone

A dozen riflemen firing from pre-built breastworks above an Arizona gorge stripped the Army payroll; Frankie Campbell's horse was still picking around the obstacle when the ambush opened.
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