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It may have escaped your attention: Today, May 1, is International Tuba Day.
Distinguished as the largest of all brass instruments that delivers the lowest, mellowest tone, the tuba nonetheless often oom pah pahs in an invitingly comic way. While tuba’s booms presage the appearance of movie monsters (think King Kong, Godzilla, Jaws, or Jabba the Hut), the big horn more memorably accompanies the debut of circus clowns and the pratfalls of cartoon characters.
Bugs Bunny, appearing as a conductor, memorably tormented a haughty operatic tenor with a tuba in “Long Haired Hare” (1943), sabotaging his performance. (On early Saturday mornings in the late ‘50s, local stations played the cartoon over and over and over; that’s how I know it by heart.) The singer, Giovanni Jones, you see, outraged at the rabbit’s jazzy rendition of “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba,” had damaged Bugs’ banjo. And Bugs was out for revenge.
It’s somehow fitting that May 1 should be International Tuba Day, because if there has been a traditional day of play, the first of May—halfway between the equinox of spring and the solstice of summer—is it. It’s also a day to even the score, but more of that below.
The celestial occasion hints at Iron Age roots. In central Europe, where the winters are long, dark, and cold, celebrants welcomed spring with Walpurgisnacht, where men dressed as bears would throw snowballs at the harbingers of spring. Bonfires showed the way. And in Celtic Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, even today, neo-pagan revelers nod to the ancient feast of Beltane, placating the fairy-folk in this season.
Folklorists and Freudians have speculated that the erection of maypoles in European villages both welcomed the return of warmth in spring and focused the parties that celebrated manifest fertility as the re-fructifying world again turned toward the sun.
As the World Turns
Maypoles, the focus of village festivity and the symbolic center of the world, the axis mundi decorated with greenery, organized the circular dances. Young women, in bright dresses that they had toiled over during the dreary interval, took up the streaming, colored ribbons, winding themselves around seven magical times. Villagers celebrated worldly, bodily release, a kind of group therapy.
Mid-Century Appropriation
The vernal merrymaking with deep origins in pre-Christian Europe often featured the crowning of a Queen of May who stood in frankly for exalted budding fertility.
Much later, however, in parochial schools in the 1950s in the United States, an era of aggressive postwar anti-secularization where liberation contended with control, a “May crowning” devoted to the holy Virgin both plainly appropriated the pagan tradition and angled to replace it.
Typically, the parish sodality chose an exemplary eighth-grade girl to lead a procession to a floral “May altar” to accept the honor of a tiara. The rest of us, and not quite yet understanding how the ceremony resonated with messages of chastity and devotion, sang the soaring hymn, “Immaculate Mary.”
“Our hearts are on fire,” we sang, “That title so wondrous/Fills all our desire!”
Action and Reaction
As it turned out, May 1 was up for grabs. In 1955, the Roman Catholic Church declared May 1 in veneration of Mary’s husband, the patron saint of craftsmen, devoting the day to “St. Joseph the Worker.” A deeply austere and traditionalist Pope Pius XII meant to countervail the labor movement, which, a half-century before, in pursuit of the “eight-hour day,” had declared May 1 as Labor Day, or as socialist and Marxist circles termed it, “International Workers Day.”
The date of that secular holiday had been chosen to commemorate strikers agitating for the eight-hour day who were killed in Chicago in 1886, a notorious incident valorized as the Haymarket Massacre. On May 1, 1886, as many as half a million American workers at factories and lumber mills joined in a mostly peaceful national general strike. Their slogan: “Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep, eight hours for what we will!”
The history of what transpired in Chicago is nuanced and filled with claims and counterclaims. But to summarize events briefly, a bomb hurled at the police (killing one and injuring 15) provoked them to fire on strikers. Two outrages, one anarchic, the other authoritarian. Soon after, police rounded up hundreds of “usual suspects”—labor activists. Eight were arrested, and four were hanged. As it happened, only two of those charged had been at Haymarket Square that day.
Acknowledging the scare that prevailed and the miscarriage of justice, the Illinois governor pardoned the survivors.
Four Dead in Ohio
In fresher memory, on May 1, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, a few hundred activists had gathered to protest the unpopular Vietnam War. The governor called them “bums.” Three days following, the Ohio National Guard, which had been called in to keep order amidst continuing protests, turned and fired at unarmed, fleeing students, striking 13, many in the back, and killing four.
The massacre proved to be a turning point as antiwar sentiment gathered and deepened.
In June, the musical group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young released the rallying anthem, “Four Dead in Ohio,” which charted for nine weeks.
Today, May 1, Again Up for Grabs
This extraordinary year, May 1 again carries urgent springtime momentum in the wake of the No Kings! rallies that had attracted 8 or 9 million protesters a month before.
Disparate issues mount daily to motivate protest.
After federal agents killed two unarmed activists in Minneapolis, protesters with shrill whistles gathered outside the motels that housed sleepless federal enforcement agents. Skeptical judges have dismissed weak, vindictive cases brought against the President’s personal adversaries. In response to an undeclared war, school districts cancelled classes in Michigan and North Carolina.
This May 1, as the world turns on too many shocking events to list, many thousands of marchers are gathering in for “May Day Strong” events in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The signs they carry read “Healthcare Not Warfare,” “Kids Over Corporations,” “War Can’t Make Us Forget Epstein,” and “Protect Democracy!” In what seems an echo, Bruce Springsteen’s searing “Streets of Minneapolis” which plays at rallies, has attracted 10 million on YouTube.
This May 1, the rising tide leaves not much room for playful merrymaking. Gathering in 1,000 American cities, an estimated 6,000 rallies will unfold as Americans yearn for release.
