may day:
THE EFFORT to win “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will” became a crusade for U.S. labor in the years after the Civil War of 1861-65.
(...) “The way to get [the eight-hour day],” Peter McGuire of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners wrote in 1882, “is by organization...We want an enactment by the workingmen themselves that on a given day, eight hours should constitute a day’s work, and they ought to enforce it themselves.”
(...) Everywhere, workers joined the campaign. Historian Philip Foner describes workers smoking “Eight-Hour Tobacco” and wearing “Eight-Hour Shoes”--as products produced in shops that already had the shorter working day were known--and singing the “Eight-Hour Song”:

We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours.
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill:
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

(...) MAY 1 was a huge success. About 200,000 workers went on strike across the country, and nearly that number won shorter hours just by threatening to strike. The heart of the eight-hour day movement--and the political center of the left in the U.S.--was Chicago. On the first day of the strike, some 80,000 strikers and supporters--almost one in every six people living in the city at the time--paraded down Michigan Avenue.
(...) As he was led to his death, August Spies called out: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
(...) “If you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement...the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in want and misery expect salvation--if this is your opinion, then hang us!” Spies said. “Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”