May 1 · This Day in America
From the White House, President Herbert Hoover presses a button, and 102 stories of steel and limestone light up over Manhattan. The Empire State Building is suddenly the tallest thing humans have ever built — 1,250 feet — and it went up in just over a year, rising as fast as four and a half stories a week, raised by thousands of ironworkers swinging beams above a city sliding into the Great Depression. It is a strange, defiant gift: a skyscraper finished early and under budget while breadlines form in its shadow, so empty at first that New Yorkers call it the Empty State Building. None of that is the point. The point is that in the worst year anyone could remember, a country still chose to build the tallest thing in the world and turn the lights on. It would hold the record for nearly forty years.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1894
Jacob Coxey leaves Ohio in March with about a hundred jobless men and a simple demand: public works for the unemployed. By May 1 the column reaches Washington, hundreds strong — the first true protest march on the Capitol. Coxey tries to speak from the steps and is arrested for walking on the grass. The idea outlived the arrest. Fifty years later, in 1944, he finally gave the speech.
Source: history.house.gov