Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - May Day

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Every year of May 1st, people all around the northern hemisphere celebrate the arrival of spring. A day we call May Day. But it is also the day that communist countries held military parades, and the Soviets would show off all of their military strength in public. Mayday is also the international distress signal for radio. How are these very different things all related? Learn more about May Day on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year on May 1st, people all around the Northern Hemisphere celebrate the arrival of spring, a day we call May Day. But it's also the day that communist countries held military parades, and the Soviets would show off all their military strength in public. And May Day is also the international distress signal for radio. So how are all these very different things related? Learn more about Mayday on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? The ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thulein podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by the Travel Photography Academy. In 2007, I sold my home to travel around the world. I bought an expensive camera that I didn't know how to use and took a bunch of terrible photos. Several years, 100 countries, and tens of thousands of photos later, I'd improved my photography to the point where I was winning national awards, being named Travel Photographer of the Year three times in North America.

I created the Travel Photography Academy, so you don't have to spend the many years that I did to improve your photography. Even though we can't easily travel right now, you can still work on improving your photography at home and in your own community. Just go to Travel Photographyacademy.com or click on the link in the show notes. to start improving your photography today. I've done several episodes now in the origins of holidays and the calendar, and there seems to be something that every single one of them has in common. Everything seems to have its origin in ancient Rome,

and May Day is no exception. The traditional celebration of May 1st dates back to the Roman Festival of Floralia, which honored the goddess Flora, who was the goddess of flowers, vegetation, and fertility. The celebration was much more lighthearted than many other Roman holidays, which were often more serious affairs. It was a six-day festival which was held from April 27th to May 3rd every year. There was another

Roman festival that also occurred in early May, but it was held only once every three years. Mayuma. Mayuma honored the god Dionysus and the goddess Aphrodite, and it was an event even more wild than the celebration of Floralia. A spring celebration certainly wasn't unique

to Rome. Most cultures that existed in places with seasons would have a celebration for each one. A mid-summer Festival, Harvest Festival, a Midwinter celebration, and one for the arrival of spring. Every country and culture had different May Day celebrations, and often there would be different celebrations even within the same country. However, there were a few traditions that were common to many different places. The biggest tradition is probably that of the May Pole. Maypole traditions can vary, but they all basically consist of a pole, which is usually garnished with flowers and garlands.

The pole would usually be set up in the center of a village, and there would be dancing and celebrations, which would take place around it. Often there would be ribbons attached to the pole, and young girls would each hold a ribbon and dance around the pole, making the ribbons wrap around it. It's believed that the May Pole is probably a Germanic pagan tradition, but it isn't known what the original purpose was.

Some scholars think that it was just a celebratory device with no real meaning behind it. As with so many pagan traditions, it survived as Europe adopted Christianity. In 2015, a German cultural group in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, set the world's record for the largest maypole dance, with 326 participants. The world's tallest maypole was erected in Ireland, in 2010. It measured 57.08 meters, or 187 feet and 3 inches tall.

The other big May Day tradition is the crowning of a May Queen. The May Queen is the personification of spring, usually in the form of a young girl. The girl is usually dressed in white, along with other girls who are in her court. She will usually wear a crown made of flowers, and she would be crowned by the previous year's May Queen. Many traditional May Day festivities would also involve a fair, known as a Mayfair. The term Mayfair today is a high-end area of London, which got its name from the annual Mayfair, which was held there in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In the United States, there are May Day celebrations, but it has never quite had the same importance that it did back in Europe.

The first English settlers in the United States were Puritans who didn't celebrate. May Day, which put a damper on things taking off over here. So, May Day as a celebration of spring, I think, is something that most of you can probably understand. But what does May Day have to do with communism? Why did the Soviet Union have May Day parades? Were they flaunting their military because of some pagan springtime rituals? The adoption of May 1st with socialist groups really has nothing to do with the traditional celebration of May Day. It's really more of a historical coincidence that it happens to land on May 1st. The date was selected to be the International Workers' Day, also known as Labor Day, in 1889 by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris.

The date was chosen to honor the Haymarket riots, which took place in Chicago three years earlier. On May 1, 1886, protests began in Chicago to demand an eight-hour workday. The protests eventually became violent, and four protesters and seven police were killed, with over 100 people injured. This subject will almost certainly be a future episode, as it's a really important part of history, which is almost completely unknown today. The day was selected to honor the Haymarket incident, and eventually many people began to call International Workers Day, or Labor Day, May Day, because it fell on the same date, even though they were celebrating something totally different. Countries that had communist governments kept celebrating May 1st as a holiday, and it was used for patriotic displays in countries like the Soviet Union, hence the parades of soldiers, tanks, and missiles. If you are an American, you might be thinking, but don't we celebrate Labor Day in September? You are correct, and the reason has to do with President Grover Cleveland. Prior to the Haymarket

incident, labor groups would often hold celebrations in early September. President Cleveland purposely selected a September date for Labor Day to avoid political overtones of having it serve as the anniversary of the Haymarket affair. States began celebrating a September Labor Day in 1887, and it became a federal holiday in 1894. What few people know is that May 1st is officially recognized as both Law Day and Loyalty Day in the United States. A fact which I'm guessing almost no one knows is I had never heard of it until I began researching this episode. Both Law Day and Loyalty Day were established by Dwight Eisenhower in the middle of the Cold War and were intended to serve as a counterbalance to the left-leaning May Day celebrations.

The American Bar Association will do some outreach on Law Day, and there are about a dozen small towns in the United States which still hold events for Loyalty Day. So we got the spring stuff and we got the communist stuff. Why in the world is May Day used as a distress signal for radio? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with May 1st and everything to do with a quirk of language. First, May Day, when used as a distress call, is spelled as one word, whereas the holiday, May Day, is two words. Prior to the development of voice radio, known as radio telephone, everything was done via radio telegraph and Morse code.

The international distress signal for radio telegraph is SOS, which is a very easy thing to transmit. It's just three short, three long, three short. The concern was that SOS wouldn't work while was spoken. The letter S could be confused with yes, or other words. The word Mayday was selected by Frederick Stanley Monkford, the officer in charge of radio at the Croydon airport in London in 1923. Most of the flights at the time went between London and France,

and it just turns out that the word mayday sounds identical to the French word for, help me. The use of mayday didn't really have any particular meaning in English, other than that, it was very easy to understand and not easily confused with anything else. In 1927, it was

adopted by the International Radio Telegraph Convention as the International Distress Signal for radio. So, you got a Roman flower goddess, dancing around a pole, a 19th century labor riot in Chicago, and a radio code for distress that are all things that intersect with each other on May 1st, aka May Day. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

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