Nearly everywhere else in the world, the First of May is celebrated as International Workers Day. Here in the U.S., of course, May Day will be pointedly ignored. Strange, since this is where it began.
On May 1, 1886, 200,000 workers across the country held a general strike, demanding an eight-hour day. Cops did their job: beating workers on behalf of the bosses. Workers persisted. On May 4th, things literally blew up. Show trials followed and four anarchists were hanged. That, in brief, is why, from 1890 to this day, on May Day, workers remember the workers who once fought for their rights—everywhere, that is, but here. It sounds crazy, but it makes sense once you ask the right question: “Who’s got the power?”
Coincidentally, today is the 37th anniversary of the official certification, by New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, of our current editor’s right to the trade name of this newspaper. This happy coincidence prompts us to reflect on what led to this day. Daniel Fowle, the editor’s third cousin five times removed, published our first edition on October 7, 1756, assisted by his enslaved pressman, called Primus.
By 1839, Daniel and Primus were both long dead, but the Gazette outlived the Maryland Gazette, thus achieving national seniority. Fast forwarding a dozen decades, we land in 1960, when The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ had a near-death experience.
The Gazette had been published as a weekly, in tandem with the Portsmouth Herald, since 1898. But then, at about the time of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the managers of the Herald decided to change the name of what had been its Saturday edition from the Gazette to The Herald Weekend Edition.
Their motives for this change are unknown to us—indeed, they are unimaginable. Just four years earlier, in October, 1956, then-editor Ray Brighton had devoted pages of the Herald to stories celebrating the Gazette’s history. Fortunately they had the wit to add a new line of type to the Herald’s masthead: “Continuing The New Hampshire Gazette.” As long as the Herald published, the Gazette was still alive.
In 1968, the managers sold the Herald [and Gazette] to a Canadian named Kenneth Thomson—aka 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, the world’s 9th richest man. He had so many newspapers that a certain detail, a tradename registration, got overlooked. That enabled our hostile takeover, which succeeded on May 1, 1989. After a decade of publishing episodically, we brought the paper back home to Portsmouth, where we began publishing on our current schedule on… ta-daa! May 1, 1999. That was, by our count, 702 fortnights ago. Thanks to a host of volunteers, and the generous support of our advertisers, we’re still here.