"All I know is that my happiness is built on the misery of others, so that I eat because others go hungry, that I am clothed when other people go almost naked through the frozen cities in winter; and that fact poisons me, disturbs my serenity, makes me write propaganda when I would rather play …"
—Jack Reed
And so, it is May 1. May Day. The worker's day (and appropriate, considering how mine went ...). A good day, I think, to take a [brief] look at propaganda. While both the former Soviet Union and the American government (conservatively called "Loyalty Day" or "Americanism Day") associate May Day with militarism, the origins of this day have been obscured (and this is a testament to the power of it) by the specific designs of propaganda. The truth of May Day is two sided. There is a Green and there is a Red. The green is the day's relationship to the natural earth, its abundance and the necessary aspects of life; the red (as red often is) is blood spilt, class struggle, and social exploitation. Historically, both sides of the propaganda machine have used May Day as a tool to further their agendas. And both sides are equally adept with their use of powerful textual and visual imagery; the green tending toward creation and desire and the red of class struggle.
Green May Day, being closer to the earth, is also more ancient in nature and its traditional celebrations. Its modern day form takes shape as expressions of freedom from oppression—and this stems from historical efforts to fight the relentless attempts to establish industrial order of the factory owners. Led by the Puritans and their desire to spread word that to toil was be godly and that less toil was wicked. The green could only be destroyed by increasing the workday and abolishing holidays. There is an historic piece of propaganda about this called "Funebria Florae," or "The Downfall of the May Games." In it, the author attacks "ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers, maid-marians, morrice-dancers, maskers, mummers, Maypole stealers, health-drinkers, together with a rapscallion rout of fiddlers, fools fighters, gamesters, lewd-women, light-women, contemmers of magistracy, affronters of ministry, disobedients to parents, misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, &c." For the green represents thought and doubt. Decadence. It is hedonism and free love—"all the scume of the earth," as one colonial governor wrote. Sounds like my kind of group.
While my tendency is to associate more with the green on a personal level, my interest tends to lean more to the Red; the modern and political associations of propaganda, particularly that of the early twentieth century with its stark cubist visuals and black & white world view expression of it. The beginnings of the red of May Day is generally associated with the events of Haymarket and "The Day of the Chicago Martyrs," particularly with regard to the American view of the day and its "revolutionary" nature—sad that revolution after 1776 in this country means "union"—but it is the1917 Bolshevik victory in Russia (and as an aside, the 1905 Revolution began on May 1) and its Red associations that really advanced the day's shift to the Red and truly rearranged it to its modern associations, while transforming the style of modern propaganda. The fear extracted by that political shift in the general population of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, was celebrated by union organizers and those the day was meant for to begin with, the workers. It became a day of political action, and a time for the radicals to offer up their pamphlets attempting to manifest class solidarity, strengthening the socialist movements throughout the world. And as is often the case with radical movements, many of the artists of the time were fascinated by the upheaval of political thought and used the new and exciting world view to create and explore new aspects of the arts; new ways to express the world. Activists and artists such as Jack Reed (quoted above), Emma Goldman, Max Eastman and Isadora Duncan (to name a very few), actively provoked through their creative and nofiction work, and later, in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald published one of his earliest short stories, "May Day," The tale represented his fleeting curiosity about naturalistic fiction and it related his personal frustration at his soul-deadening work at an advertising agency, the fruitless nature of labor in a society that has no respect for the worker, as well as his failure to conform. In "May Day" he writes:
"Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.... During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more."
In the late sixties, all of the social, sexual, and political movements of the time brought back renewed interest in May Day with new slogans (the poster below, roughly translated means "Be Young and Be Quiet" or "Be Young and Shut Up," is one of the more well-known posters from the French civil actions) and radical expression. In 1968 ('68 Mai), that storied year, some European events saw Allen Ginsberg made the "Lord of Misrule" in Prague (just before the 
Russians arrived, appropriately enough, to effectively shut expression down); students in London protested Britain's Parliament against a bill to stop Third World immigration into England; and most notably, the student strikes in Paris, that eventually extended throughout France and ended with over ten million workers following suit in support, paralyzing the country across all industries and all parts of French society in a general strike of near-revolutionary proportions. Here in the United States, African-American students in Mississippi could not be disuaded from protesting their jailed friends, while locally, Columbia University students petitioned against armed police on campus. Union workers also actively organized themselves for the first time in over a decade with the help of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) who aided a wildcat strike at the Hamtrack Assembly plant in Detroit, in a fight against management's "speed-up" productivity requirements. And while the movements in the U.S. were less unifying, and tended to either be political or artistic in nature (rather than a melding of the two), the extensive nature of the unrest, and their manifestations on May Day, attest to the historical significance and its meaning for both.
The nineteenth century essayist, Leigh Hunt, said of May Day that it is "the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other." I would say this is definitely true of the "green" aspects, but, for the "red," there is less the union of the world and more awareness of the division and the only way to a semblance of unity may be seen as the continuing struggle. And the struggle is for the workers to realize and overcome—it is they who have the responsibility, who exist in a world defined by the pushing aside of dreams; of pain before joy—and it is they who must fight for relief against this in order to create social change. As Reed wrote:
"And yet I cannot give up the idea that out of democracy will be born the new world—richer, braver, freer, more beautiful. As for me, I don’t know what I can do to help—I don’t know yet."
"Poets and intellectuals—who are paid little, and who are usually ignored by the general population—have this consolation, at least: they are the ones the tyrants go after first." - Frederick Smock, Poetry & Compassion
"vanished" thousands upon thousands of their own populations and kidnapped and tortured thousands more. The artists often have direct links to the tragedy, either as workers in the resistance; family of the "disappeared"; or living as exiles themselves.
