The Roar at Indianapolis

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 24, 2026 — 23:05 PHST

Every Memorial Day, my mother and I went to the cemetery.

That part of the ritual never changed. Flowers, driving across Chicago, searching for graves, trying to remember where flat markers disappeared beneath the grass. My mother took the day seriously. She believed the dead should be visited, and because of that belief, I spent much of my childhood walking cemetery rows beside her.

My father usually was not there.

For years, I thought that absence meant less than it really did. I understand it differently now.

My father’s Memorial Day ritual was the Indianapolis 500.

The Race

For Americans of my father’s generation, the Indianapolis 500 was not merely another sporting event. It was part machine worship, part engineering spectacle, part national ritual. It belonged to an industrial America that still believed speed, machinery, and technical skill represented progress itself.

This was before endless sports channels, before internet streaming, before every race on earth became permanently available on demand. Indianapolis stood alone in the American imagination in a way younger generations may have trouble understanding now.

There was one race.

This was the race.

My father liked Le Mans and Formula One well enough, but those always felt foreign to him. Indianapolis was American. Loud, dangerous, mechanical, Midwestern, and unapologetically industrial.

He did not care much for NASCAR. Too Southern for his tastes. My father had Southern roots he spent much of his life trying to outgrow. Indianapolis felt different to him. Cleaner somehow. More technical. More Northern. More modern.

Closed-Circuit America

People forget how differently major events once worked in the United States.

Today, nearly everything arrives instantly through phones and television screens. But for years, the Indianapolis 500 existed partly through delayed broadcasts and closed-circuit screenings. Fans would gather in theaters, auditoriums, and special venues to watch races transmitted from Indianapolis itself.

Whenever he could afford it, my father went to those screenings somewhere in Chicago. I say “somewhere” because the locations changed over the years and I was too young to remember the details clearly.

He usually went alone.

Partly because of the expense.

Partly because, I suspect now, it gave him several uninterrupted hours away from work, responsibility, family obligations, and ordinary life.

I understand that better now than I did when I was young.

Memorial Day Before the Monday Holiday

People also forget that Memorial Day itself once worked differently.

Before the Uniform Monday Holiday Act shifted several American holidays to Mondays during the early 1970s, Memorial Day was observed on May 30 itself regardless of the day of the week (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 2025).

The Indianapolis 500 traditionally aligned closely with Memorial Day culture. Blue laws and older social norms complicated Sunday racing for many years, and the race schedule evolved alongside broader changes in American society, television economics, labor schedules, travel patterns, and commercial broadcasting priorities.

Eventually, Indianapolis moved toward the modern Sunday-before-Memorial-Day structure Americans know today.

That change sounds minor until you think about what it represented culturally.

America itself was changing from a country organized around fixed civic rituals into a country increasingly organized around television scheduling, long weekends, and consumer travel.

The race changed because the country changed.

My Father’s Holiday

While my mother and I walked cemeteries, my father listened to engines.

That sounds colder written down than it actually was.

He was not ignoring the dead. He was participating in his own version of American memory. The Indianapolis 500 belonged deeply to the generation that fought the Second World War and built postwar industrial America afterward. The race carried with it ideas about machinery, progress, engineering, danger, courage, and national confidence.

For several hours each Memorial Day, my father disappeared into that world.

In his own way, he was a good man.

I understand him more sympathetically now than I once did. Age does that sometimes. You eventually realize your parents were not symbols or permanent authority figures. They were simply people trying to survive their own lives while carrying histories you only partially understood as a child.

The Roar in the Distance

I sometimes think Memorial Day in our family existed as two parallel rituals happening at the same time.

My mother and I searched for the dead among cemetery rows.

My father sat somewhere listening to the roar from Indianapolis.

One ritual centered on stillness. The other centered on motion.

One dealt directly with memory. The other dealt with escape, machinery, and the surviving mythology of mid-century America.

Looking back now, I think all three of us were participating in Memorial Day in our own way.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

References

ESPN Front Row. (2016). ABC’s first Indianapolis 500 broadcast in 1965. https://www.espnfrontrow.com

Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (2025). History of the Indianapolis 500. https://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com

U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (2025). Federal holidays and the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. https://www.opm.gov

Photo by Adriaan Greyling on Pexels.com

The Tree by My Parents’ Graves

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 24, 2026 — 23:05 PHST

Every Memorial Day, my mother and I went to the cemetery.

Not occasionally. Not when it was convenient. Not when somebody remembered at the last minute. We went every year. It was simply what we did. By the time I was old enough to understand what was happening, the ritual already existed. Memorial Day meant flowers, driving across Chicago, walking through rows of graves, and stopping to remember people I never really knew well enough to remember on my own.

We visited her parents. We visited her aunts and uncles. Uncle Louis. Eventually Aunt Augusta too. The dead slowly accumulated over the years the way they do in most families if enough time passes.

My sisters usually were not there. My father usually was not there either. This was mostly something my mother and I did together. Looking back now, I understand it was less about obligation than continuity. She was making sure the dead remained visible to somebody.

The Problem with Flat Headstones

I have never liked flat headstones.

Cemeteries prefer them because they make lawn maintenance easier. The grass can be cut evenly. The grounds look orderly. Maintenance becomes efficient. Administratively, flat markers solve problems.

Humanly, they create others.

Flat stones disappear.

Grass grows over them. Dirt settles into the engraving. Leaves collect across the surface. Time presses them downward visually until they stop standing out from the landscape around them. Eventually, unless someone already knows exactly where to look, the dead become difficult to find.

I could never reliably find Uncle Louis’ grave.

That bothered me even when I was young. It still bothers me now.

My parents both have flat markers too. I dislike that immensely. A flat marker slowly turns memory into geography homework. You begin searching for landmarks instead of names.

In my parents’ case, there is now a tree growing nearby. It was only a sapling when they died. Now it is large enough to serve as the real marker. I locate my parents less by the stone than by the tree beside it.

The tree grew while they were gone.

What Memorial Day Actually Was

People often describe Memorial Day in patriotic terms. Flags. Veterans. Military sacrifice. National remembrance.

For my mother and me, it was quieter than that.

It was walking.

It was looking for names.

It was making sure people who once existed still occupied physical space in the world.

The older I get, the more I suspect many family rituals operate exactly this way. They are not merely traditions. They are systems for resisting disappearance.

The dead vanish physically first. Later they begin disappearing socially. Eventually they disappear historically as well unless somebody keeps repeating the names.

Memorial Day, in our family, was one method of repeating the names.

The Dead Should Remain Findable

One of the things that unsettles me most about modern memorial culture is how efficiently it sometimes hides the dead in the name of convenience.

A cemetery optimized entirely around maintenance eventually starts resembling a park where names accidentally happened instead of a place of remembrance.

That strikes me as backward.

The point of a grave marker is not landscaping efficiency. The point is visibility.

A grave should remain findable.

A person should not visually disappear because maintaining visible markers requires slightly more work from groundskeepers. That is what weed whackers are for.

Perhaps this sounds overly emotional to some people. Maybe it is. But I have spent enough years walking cemeteries to know the difference between remembering someone and merely storing them.

Those are not the same thing.

What I Remember Most

Oddly enough, I do not remember every conversation my mother and I had during those cemetery visits. Memory rarely works that cleanly after enough decades pass.

I remember movement more than dialogue.

Walking across grass. Looking down at names. Trying to locate flat stones hidden beneath overgrowth. Holding flowers. Listening to traffic somewhere beyond the cemetery walls. Chicago heat beginning to arrive by late May.

Mostly, I remember the fact that we went.

Every year.

Without fail.

That consistency mattered more than I understood at the time.

The Tree

The tree beside my parents’ graves may eventually become the thing I remember most clearly.

Not because it was planted as a memorial. It was not. It simply happened to grow there while time moved forward.

The tree became a witness.

It marked the passing years while the people beneath it remained still.

In a strange way, it now performs the job the flat stones were supposed to do.

It tells me where they are.

And perhaps that is ultimately what Memorial Day always was for my mother: making certain the dead did not become impossible to find.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

References

National Cemetery Administration. (2025). Memorial Day history and traditions. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.cem.va.gov

Sloane, D. C. (1991). The last great necessity: Cemeteries in American history. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tarlow, S. (2000). Landscapes of memory: The nineteenth-century garden cemetery. European Journal of Archaeology, 3(2), 217–239.

May 1 and the Chicago Bomb That Shaped the World

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 1, 2026

May 1 is Labor Day in much of the world. In the United States, however, Labor Day is observed in September. That difference traces back to a single city, a single rally, and a single bomb thrown in Chicago in 1886.

The event is known as the Haymarket affair. It was not planned as a riot. It began as a labor demonstration connected to a nationwide campaign for an eight-hour workday.

In the late nineteenth century, twelve-hour and even fourteen-hour workdays were common in American industry. Workers across multiple trades began pushing for an eight-hour standard. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers across the United States went on strike or marched in support of that demand.

Chicago was one of the movement’s centers.

The Rally at Haymarket

On May 4, 1886, a rally was held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. It followed several days of strikes and a deadly clash between police and workers at the McCormick Reaper Works factory.

The Haymarket gathering itself began peacefully. Speakers addressed a crowd that reportedly shrank as rain fell. Late in the evening, as police moved in to disperse the remaining demonstrators, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb into the line of officers.

The explosion killed one officer immediately and wounded many others. Police opened fire. Several officers later died from injuries. Civilian deaths are harder to document precisely, but multiple protesters were also killed or wounded.

The identity of the bomber has never been definitively established.

The Trial and Executions

In the aftermath, authorities arrested eight anarchist activists. The prosecution argued that their rhetoric had incited the violence, even though there was no clear evidence tying any of them to the bomb itself.

The trial was widely criticized at the time. Nevertheless, all eight men were convicted. Four were executed by hanging in November 1887. One died in jail before execution. Three were later pardoned in 1893 by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who sharply criticized the fairness of the proceedings.

The Haymarket affair became a symbol, not just of labor unrest, but of state power and the limits of dissent.

Why May 1 Matters Globally

Following the events in Chicago, labor movements in Europe and elsewhere adopted May 1 as International Workers’ Day. It became a day of rallies, marches, and demonstrations focused on labor rights and social reforms.

In much of the world today, May 1 is an official public holiday.

The United States took a different path. In 1894, amid fears of radicalism and social unrest, Congress established Labor Day in September. That move separated American observance from the international May Day tradition.

The divergence was political. May 1 had become associated with radical labor activism and, in some circles, anarchism and socialism. September Labor Day offered a more domesticated alternative.

Law, Labor, and the American Model

The Haymarket affair did not immediately produce sweeping labor reforms. The eight-hour day would take decades of struggle, negotiation, and legislation to become standard.

In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act established federal protections for certain types of labor organizing and collective bargaining. That law reshaped the relationship between employers and employees.

Later, the Taft–Hartley Act placed limits on union activity, including restrictions on certain types of strikes and political labor actions. The American system evolved into a structured, regulated labor environment distinct from many European parliamentary models.

Today, most employment in the United States is at-will. Workers may leave jobs without cause, and employers may terminate employment for most non-protected reasons. That structure influences how labor disputes unfold.

Market Signals and Worker Agency

Large-scale labor action does not always take the form of formal strikes. In recent years, labor economists have pointed to mass voluntary job changes — sometimes labeled the “Great Resignation” — as a form of market signal. Workers left positions in significant numbers, often seeking better pay, safer conditions, or more flexibility.

Such movements are not centrally organized in the traditional union sense. They reflect shifts in labor supply and demand, worker confidence, and broader economic conditions.

When labor markets are tight, workers typically hold more bargaining power. When unemployment rises, that leverage declines. These dynamics shape what forms of labor action are sustainable.

A Chicago Event With Global Impact

The Haymarket bomb altered public perception of labor activism overnight in 1886. What had begun as a campaign for shorter workdays became associated, in the public imagination, with violence and radicalism.

That reputational shift influenced how labor movements were treated in the United States for decades. It also elevated May 1 into a global symbol of worker solidarity.

The eight-hour workday — once considered radical — eventually became standard practice in many industrialized nations. What was contested in 1886 is routine in 2026.

The Ongoing Conversation

May 1 is not simply about one rally or one bomb. It is about the tension between labor and capital, protest and order, reform and repression. It reflects how economic systems respond to pressure and how societies define acceptable forms of dissent.

The Haymarket affair remains a case study in how quickly events can reshape public narratives. It demonstrates how legal systems, media framing, and political power interact in moments of crisis.

In Chicago in 1886, the world watched an industrial democracy struggle with questions of fairness, authority, and reform. Those questions did not end with the executions. They became part of an international labor memory that still surfaces every May 1.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

APA References

Avrich, P. (1984). The Haymarket tragedy. Princeton University Press.
Green, J. (2006). Death in the Haymarket: A story of Chicago, the first labor movement, and the bombing that divided gilded age America. Pantheon Books.
Foner, P. S. (1995). May Day: A short history of the international workers’ holiday, 1886–1986. International Publishers.

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