The Memorial Day Massacre--American Tragedy, 1937, by Philip Evergood was based on a press photograph.
Eighty seven years ago today it was hot and muggy in Chicago. But the Sun was shining brilliantly. Due to a week old strike and the Memorial Day holiday,
the giant steel 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
the 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.
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 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 overtime
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, morale 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.
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 Youngstown
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 or have been torn
down for largely undeveloped parkland.
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 again there will be scant
mention of the Memorial Day Massacre or coverage of commemorations. Seems like Chicago is still eager to forget.
