May Day celebrations

The year that Willem III died, 1890, was also the first year of the international call for a day to commemorate labour, 1 May. Amsterdam’s various strands of anarchists and Socialists gathered for meetings on May Day 1890, formulating their struggle for the eight-hour day.31 Only four years before, a major riot had broken out in a working-class district and police control and surveillance of the street was sharp.32 The socialists were not given permission by the mayor to parade or march. However, as free citizens there was no legal way to prevent them from simply walking the streets. Year after year, after the labour day meetings on 1 May ended, those gathered would walk to the centre of the city, penetrating to the Dam Square, often encountering skirmishes with the police if someone unfurled a banner or began to sing. The police chief usually took draconian measures to prevent the ‘walk’ of the Socialists from turning into a ‘parade’ by having a squadron of policemen accompany them.33

Public control was a fixed feature of demonstrations by anarchists and Socialists. While the police were in force to control the massed popula­tion who came to view royal processions, it was the procession itself that police controlled when the Socialists marched through the city. In 1893, an editorial in the Algemeen Handelsblad, the leading liberal newspaper, argued that the middle of the city was the least appropriate space for demonstrations, citing a recent riot in Trafalgar Square which was compared to the Dam.34 Before royal events in the city, Socialists were rounded up, and anarchists and foreign agitators who might disrupt the peace were ferreted out. Despite the Socialists’ consistent claims that May Day was intended as a peaceful holiday rather than rebellion or riot, their actions were under continual surveillance. In the event, there were only minor clashes during May Day activities in Amsterdam. Orangists would occasionally taunt the Socialists, the police would force a forbidden red flag to be dropped or break up groups that were singing, but otherwise conflict did not arise even though the marchers treated injunctions against banners and song as rules to be broken.

In 1894 the parliamentary Social Democrats broke with the anar­chists to form a political party, the Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SDAP), and from 1901 the mayor permitted them to parade, though at first without music bands or floats. Singing and banners promoting universal suffrage and the eight-hour workday were permitted. The Socialist newspaper Het Volk wrote triumphantly: ‘The great event of the May march of this year is the conquest of the public street for our demonstrations in Amsterdam.’35

The first two years the Social Democrat’s May Day trajectories echoed those previously established by the anarchists’ illegal but tolerated walks, moving from the meeting place into the heart of the city.36 But after the great railway strike of 1903, they were no longer allowed into the centre. For over ten years, their varying routes describe the working-class districts of Amsterdam, the areas of their greatest support, primarily those arising outside the seventeenth-century boundaries but also including several of the working – class districts within the old city, with no presence at all on the main canals or the Dam (Figure 5.6). Unable to march to the centre of the city, the Socialists marked the city by other means, starting marches simultaneously at different locations so that the participants could walk toward a central point, finally meeting to form one large band. In this way, more of the city could be included in the path of the march.37 Meanwhile, Social Democratic partici­pation in municipal government grew. By 1913 with 15 members on the city council they had the largest faction and in 1914 a Social Democrat was elected alderman. With this increase in legitimacy and power, permission was granted in 1914 to march into town, indeed to parade with elaborate bands and floats, although the route did not take them all the way to the Dam.

In the following years, however, the Social Democrats’ May Day parades reached the Dam. The exile had been for 13 years, but the chairman of the SDAP commented that it was the first time in 20 years that they had been able to demonstrate in the heart of the city.38 For the crowds that surged along the routes that had been previously reserved for royal and other events in the centre of Amsterdam, the victory was complete.

Over the next decade the May Day demonstration followed a path that always ended in the city centre. However, the labour day parades never marched along the major canals. Their history as suppressed expressions of political opposition formed a complete counterpoint to the annual carriage parade of the university students which, like the socialists’, began in the periphery, generally from the Rijksmuseum, and then noisily and joyously proceeded into the city and along the Herengracht and Keizersgracht39
(Figure 5.7). That move from periphery to centre was a home-coming, welcomed by the parents and relatives who watched from the houses of the elite. The socialist trajectory was an assault on the social, economic and political base of the city, an act of occupation tolerated by the authorities, and a physical demonstration of the Socialist’s assumed place in the public sphere. It mapped the desire of the working-class districts on the periphery to be heard in the public forum in the centre of the city.