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This article presents information on the first Labor day parade being organized at Boston. Thousands lined the side-walks of the parade route, while hundreds more stood on balconies and rooftops to catch a glimpse of this army of organized workers. At the head of the three mile procession were leaders of the Knights of Labor and the trade unions. Although day laborers and factory operatives participated in the demonstration, the skilled trades comprised the main body of the marchers. The events of 1886 marked the emergence of a viable and growing workers movement in Boston. The thousands of working people at Boston's first Labor Day parade marked the strong existence of the union of wage-earners. However, the kind of "self protection" the movement would ultimately promote is not clear. That would largely depend on the resolution of tensions and ambiguities within the labor movement in the future. The events of 1886 marked the emergence of a viable and growing workers movement in Boston. The upsurge in labor activity in recent times has revealed a movement undreamed of a year before.

The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.