Labor Day once brought Americans together. Imagine that.

I committed a little Labor Day heresy on Monday.

I suggested maybe it was time to put Labor Day to bed.

Not because working people don’t deserve a holiday. Not because unions never served a purpose. And certainly not because the people who built industrial America didn’t need somebody standing up for them.

They did.

What happened to workers during the Industrial Revolution could be brutal. Men lost limbs and were simply replaced by the next immigrant waiting for a job. Children worked in conditions we would consider unthinkable today. Factories could be death traps. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire remains one of the most horrifying examples of what happened when human beings became less important than production.

Those abuses demanded reform.

So no, I am not anti-union.

I am anti-leftist. There is a difference.

And that’s where my friend Dean Kariannis came in Monday. Dean is our official Rush Hour historian, a longtime friend and, importantly to me, an alumnus of the Rush Limbaugh Show, where he worked as a web producer. When you spent time around Rush’s operation, you learned something about questioning the conventional version of things, so I asked Dean to take us back to the beginning.

The first Labor Day parade was held in New York City on September 5, 1882.

What Dean described didn’t sound much like the Labor Day politics we’re accustomed to today.

It was called a “working men’s holiday.” About 12,000 people marched from City Hall to Union Square. These were working people celebrating work and demanding recognition for the people whose hands were quite literally building America.

But here’s the part that struck me.

It wasn’t built around hating everybody else.

Merchants, bankers, politicians and lawyers stood alongside bricklayers and other laborers. People took the day off to join the festivities. There was an understanding that these people occupied different places in the economy but were still part of the same country.

Imagine that.

You didn’t have to hate the factory owner to care about the factory worker. You didn’t have to believe capitalism was evil to believe a man shouldn’t lose an arm at work and be discarded like a broken machine.

And you certainly didn’t have to be a communist to believe in organized labor.

That’s another piece of history we’ve managed to scramble.

American labor leaders were often fiercely anti-communist. The Solidarity trade-union movement helped bring communism to its knees in Poland. Even Franklin Roosevelt — hardly anybody’s idea of a right-wing capitalist — opposed the unionization of federal government employees.

History is inconvenient that way.

It refuses to fit neatly onto bumper stickers.

There were good unions and bad unions. There were good employers and terrible employers. Capitalism produced enormous prosperity and also produced abuses that needed to be corrected.

All of those things can be true at once.

My problem with some of today’s biggest unions, particularly government and teachers unions, isn’t that workers shouldn’t organize. It’s that too many of these organizations seem less interested in representing workers than functioning as political machinery for the left.

That’s not the same thing as the bricklayer marching through Manhattan in 1882.

And Dean made an observation that I kept thinking about after our conversation. Today, almost nothing is allowed to simply be what it is.

A holiday can’t just be a holiday. A sports team can’t just be a sports team. Entertainment can’t just entertain. Everybody has to grab a piece of it, plant an ideological flag in the middle and announce which side owns it.

Eventually there isn’t much common ground left.

Maybe that’s what Labor Day has lost.

Not labor.

The common ground.

The original celebration recognized something pretty simple: work matters. The people who build things, repair things, drive things, teach things, sell things, invent things and keep this enormous country functioning deserve respect.

You shouldn’t need a union card to believe that.

You shouldn’t need a Republican card either.

And you certainly shouldn’t have to consult somebody’s politics before deciding whether his work has value.

Maybe we don’t need to put Labor Day to bed after all.

Maybe we just need to give it back to the people who work.

— Bo Snerdley