S9E6 (Ep 103) How Labor Day Actually Became A Holiday / Ranking Every Labor Day Tradition

Labor Day started as a day of protest for exhausted workers. Now it's a three-day weekend of mattress sales, beach traffic, and cookouts. This week we cover how we got from one to the other. Christina takes the science-and-history chair for the history of Labor Day itself. She walks through the labor movement that made the holiday necessary, the union parade in 1882 that became the blueprint, the strike that shocked the country and pushed Congress to make it federal in 1894, and the quiet reason a president who was actively fighting striking workers signed it into law anyway. It's a shorter history than you'd think, and messier. Then Caleb takes it live. He built a ranking sheet of every major way Americans celebrate Labor Day now, and ranks them in real time. Backyard cookouts, road trips, pool parties, the Southern 500 at Darlington, the actual Labor Day parade (the whole original point), the 45 million people traveling this weekend, the ever-present mattress sales, and the one option that's arguably the most historically accurate of all: doing absolutely nothing. Two hosts. Two unrelated topics. One episode that somehow makes sense by the end.