LABOR DAY CELEBRATES AMERICA’S HEROES-WALT WHITMAN WAS DOING THIS IN 1860

America was built by the people who lived here.

We’ve got some celebrated songs about unions and working people: “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land,” by the incomparable Woody Guthrie, who also authored “Union Maid, also made famous by the Almanac Singers; “I’m the Man Who Built the Bridges,” by the outstanding folksinger, Tom Paxton; “Sixteen Tons,” written by Merle Travis, sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford; and of course, we’d never want a list like this that does not include Johnny Paycheck’s “You Can Take This Job and Shove It!”

If you’re looking for poems that celebrate the American worker, the starting point should always be “I Hear America Singing,” by Walt Whitman. In this beautiful epic poem, “The Good Gray Poet” extols the virtues and importance of all American workers, who he believes are what unites us as a nation. (The poem was written in 1860, and will appear in any edition of Leaves of Grass published on or after that date, meaning you won’t find it in the 1855 or 1856 editions. Always best to get the final, 1892 edition, unless you are a scholar or an antiquarian.)

For something a little shorter but equally powerful, read “The Tired Worker,” by Claude McKay, one of the great Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance era. (One again, I thank Queens College Professors Professors Michael Wreszin and Frank Warren, who in 1968 established one of the first two-semester courses in America for what was called “Black History.”…