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| As striking steelworkers flee from the Chicago Police attack from their rear, many fall over the dead and injured in the panicked stampede. Police continued fireing into their backs and beating anyone, man, worman or child within arms reach. Note the cop lower right taking aim with his pistol. |
Eighty
years ago yesterday it was a hot,
muggy day. But the sun was shining brilliantly. Due to the week old strike and the Memorial Day holiday,
the giant mills nearby were not
belching their customary heavy smoke. Maybe those unaccustomed dazzling skies contributed to the air of a holiday outing as steel
workers, their wives in their finest
summer dresses, and their children
converged by bus, trolley, auto, and foot on Sam’s Place, an erstwhile dime-a-dance hall, turned into a makeshift soup kitchen and strike headquarters on Chicago’s
Southeast Side less than a mile from the Republic Steel mill.
It was May 30, 1937. The
Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC),
the pet project of John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), had shocked the nation earlier in the year
by bringing industry behemoth U.S. Steel under contract by infiltrating the company unions and having them vote
to affiliate. Faced with rising demand from an apparent recovery under way from the depths of the Depression on one hand and a popular,
labor friendly administration in Washington on the other, the nation’s dominant steel company quietly surrendered.
Buoyed
by the success, organizers turned their attention to Little Steel, the smaller,
independent operators in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Chicago and other grimy industrial cities. But
the bosses of Youngstown Sheet and
Steel, Republic, Bethlehem, Jones and Laughlin and others were a tougher bunch than the Wall Street stock manipulators that ran the huge rump of the old Steel Trust. In fact they had nothing but contempt for the monopolists,
their old business enemies, and
their “weakling” attitude toward
unionization. Little Steel vowed to fight. Tom
Girdler, President of Republic,
had said that he would go back to hoeing
potatoes before he met the strikers’
demands.
The ferocity of the opposition to unionization was not just empty rhetoric either.
They had shown they meant
business in blood on more than one occasion. Famously in Youngstown, Ohio back in
1916 strikers accompanied by their wives and children marched from the slums to
the gates of the Sheet and Tube mill
to keep strike breakers from reporting to work.
Inside the gates a small army of
private security forces responded by throwing
dozens of tear gas bombs. As the thick, poisonous haze hung over the
workers obscuring their vision, guards
unleashed volley after volley of rifle fire directly into their ranks. The exact
toll may never be known as workers were afraid to bring the wounded to medical attention. At least three
were killed, probably twice that many including women. Twenty-seven
injuries were confirmed, but strikers made oral reports of more than a
hundred. Enraged as the dead and wounded lay bleeding on the ground the strikers attacked the guards with stones
and bricks and perhaps a pistol shot
or two before retreating to town.
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| Little Steel strikers remembered Youngstown 21 years earlier. |
In rioting over the next two days, workers burned much of the town’s business district only to be eventually crushed by Ohio National Guard troops.
The memory of those events
was still fresh to workers more than
twenty years later. Especially when
Little Steel bosses quietly let it be
known that they had been stockpiling
armories for years and were ready,
even eager to repeat the carnage.
The USWOC had called their national strike against Little Steel a week
earlier. In Chicago it had been marred by predictable violence,
particularly on the part of the Chicago
Police Department which had a long
history of being used as armed
strike breakers. Beatings and arrests on the picket lines were occurring
daily. Some strike leaders had been kidnapped and held incommunicado. For
their part senior police officers
were “subsidized” by corporate bosses who also bought political clout with the usual campaign contributions and bribes to local officials. They also pledged to reimburse the city for police over time during the
strike. In addition the still largely Irish Catholic force was kept inflamed by homilies preached in their parishes
deriding USWOC as “Godless Communists.”
Despite this, moral among the strikers was high.
After only a week out, families
had not yet felt the full pinch of lost incomes and strike soup kitchens kept them fed. Organizers made a point of engaging workers’ wives from the beginning, including them in planning and giving
them important support roles.
This was critical because many a strike had been lost in the past
when families went hungry and the women urged their men to return to work.
As the large crowd gathered at Sam’s
Place for the first mass meeting of the
strike, vendors plied the crowd
with ice cream, lemonade, and soft drinks. Meals
were passed out from the soup kitchen.
Other families munched on
sandwiches wrapped in wax paper
brought from home. Many of the men passed friendly bottles as they settled
into a round singing—mostly old Wobbly songs including Solidarity
Forever and Alfred Hayes’s I
Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.
Then came the rousing speeches. Joe Webber, USWOC’s main organizer pointed his finger at
the distant plant. The plan was to establish
the first mass picket at the gates of the Republic Works. Some workers carried homemade signs.
Organizers passed out
hundreds of pre-printed placards stapled
to lathing emblazoned with slogans.
With a sense of a gay holiday parade the strikers marched away from Sam’s
Place behind two American flags singing
as they went one block up the black top
and then turned into the wide, flat
prairie that separated them from
the distant plant.
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| Many of the surviving press photos--the police confiscated and destroyed as much film as they could lay their hands on--was damaged. Still, they tell an unmistakable story. Police continue to beat the helpless in the pile while launching more tear gas as firing at those still fleeing. |
Historian/novelist Howard Fast later described the scene.
…snake-like, the line of pickets
crossed the meadowland, singing at first...but then the song died as the
sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policemen took
up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed—but
they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened… now it was to unarmed men
and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches,
this is as far as you go!”
About two hundred and fifty yards
from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding,
striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun
for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of
holsters.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line
leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”
The cops said, “You got no rights.
You Red bastards, you got no rights.”
Even if a modern man’s a
steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol
equalizes him with a weakling—and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail
now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic,
and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for
breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was
pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as
the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing
ran like fire through the police.
They began to shoot in volleys. It
was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and
children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with
excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their
backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their
faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above
her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport,
wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their
pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers—at a time when Chicago
was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until
ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained
field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they
seen anything as brutal as this.
Because workers were afraid to bring their injured to hospital,
the exact casualty count may never be known for sure. Ten
men were confirmed dead. All shot in the back. More than 50 gunshot wounds were reported. At
least a hundred were badly injured,
many more with scrapes, bruises, and turned ankles from police
clubs and the panicked stampede to
escape.
Many reporters and photographers were on the scene. Police confiscated
most of their film. Newsreel cameras caught the action, but
the companies were pressured not to show
the footage. The next day, led by
the rabidly anti-union Chicago Tribune, most of the press dutifully recorded that the police had come
under attack by fanatic Reds and had acted
in self-defense.
 |
| The rabidly anti-union Tribune spread the lie that Communist radicals had attacked police. They threatened their own reporters who knew better. |
Although covered in the labor press, the nation as a whole was kept in the dark about what had
happened. Even the workers supposed friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, pretty much accepted the official account and told reporters that “the majority
of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”
A Cook County Coroner’s Jury ruled
the deaths that day as “justifiable
homicide.” Not only was no action taken against any of the police
involved that day, but senior
officers were commended and promoted.
The truth about what happened was very nearly suppressed, as so
many atrocities committed against working people had been. But a
single newsreel cameraman saved the
footage he shot from the roof of his car.
Some of the photographers on the scene retained their shots. The stills and the moving pictures were placed
on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel Strike held by a subcommittee
of the Senate Committee on Education and
Labor almost a year later. A shocked nation saw for itself the
senseless, unprovoked brutality of the police.
 |
| The Ladies Day massacre outside of the Yousgstown Sheet and Tube plant later in July showed that Little Steel Bosses were still committed to smashing the strike with brutal force. |
As for the strike, it dragged on through the summer, as did regular violence on picket lines. Then on July 19th it was Ladies Day on the picket line in front of the Republic Steel mill
in Youngstown. After company
guards assaulted one of the women, they were pelted with rocks and bottles.
Retreating into the plant, in
an eerie replay of the 1916
violence, guards let loose with tear gas and then opened fire, many firing down on the crowd from virtual
snipers’ nests. At least two were
killed and dozens wounded. Once again
the National Guard was called in and the town became a virtual occupied territory. The strike was crushed and workers went back.
But the Steel Workers turned to the
new National Labor Relations Board
for help. They complained of unfair labor practices by the Little Steel
companies. The case took years to resolve. But
in 1942, with another war on and the need
for industrial peace, the NLRB ordered
the companies to recognize what had become the United Steel Workers Union.
 |
| The Memorial Day Massacre victims remembered. |
Today a local union hall stands on the site of Sam’s Place. The Republic Mill and other Little Steel
plants are closed and pad-locked
eyesores. The City seeks desperately to find some way to redevelop what are now
called simply Brown Fields. At one time the site was suggested as one
possible future home for Barack Obama’s
Presidential Library but it was passed over. USW members and the Illinois Labor History Society sometimes gather in remembrance of that terrible day. And the last
aging survivors, including some of the children
present, fade away one by one,
their stories untold.
This year despite the nice round
number anniversary, there was scant mention of the Memorial Day Massacre or coverage
of commemorations. Seems like Chicago is still eager to forget.
