The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy

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The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy

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The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy Michael Dennis

THE MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE AND THE MOVEMENT FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

Copyright © Michael Dennis, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61821–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dennis, Michael, 1967– The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy / Michael Dennis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61821–3 (hardback) 1. Memorial Day Massacre, Chicago, Ill., 1937. 2. Little Steel Strike, U.S., 1937. 3. Strikes and lockouts—Steel industry—Illinois—Chicago— History—20th century. 4. Demonstrations—Illinois—Chicago. 5. Police brutality—Illinois—Chicago. I. Title. HD5384.I521937 D4 2010 331.892⬘869142097731109044—dc22

2010014274

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Dedicated to Richard Fuke, an exemplary historian and gifted teacher


CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Forgotten Memorials

1

One

Fire, Steel, and the Coming Crisis: The 1920s in Chicago and America

13

Two

Out of Despair

35

Three

Hammer and Tong: The Struggle for Steel

51

Four

Loading the Charge: The Steelworkers Organize

67

Five

Irresistible Forces: Conf lict at Republic Steel

85

Six

“Trouble Is Certain to Follow”

121

Seven

A Sunday to Remember

137

Eight

Counterrevolution: The Campaign against Industrial Democracy

163

Nine

“A Major Breakdown of Democratic Government”

177

Ten

“Ruthlessness and Disregard for the Law”: After the Massacre

203

“The Day Is Coming . . .”

219

Eleven Notes

237

Bibliography

265

Index

273


AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

The staff at the Chicago History Museum’s Special Collections department deserves special recognition for all of the assistance they lent during my research trips there. Their professionalism and diligence are highly appreciated. I can’t thank Rod Sellers of the Southeast Historical Society enough for his assistance during a research trip to the Calumet Park Fieldhouse in Southeast Chicago. Rod not only picked me up and dropped me off at the Metra station, but gave me a tour of the former steel district that was essential for understanding the cultural and physical geography of the East Side. He made it possible to negotiate an enormous amount of archival material efficiently, and has acted as an invaluable source on the history of steel in South Chicago ever since. For this, and for all of his patience with multiple inquiries since, I am grateful. Les Orear of the Illinois Labor History Society was equally generous with his time, memories, and the society’s library. His recollections of the era and his insight into its struggles made that visit invaluable. James Quigel at the Historical Collections and Labor Archives of Penn State University also provided essential assistance during a research trip there. He identified collections that proved critical to the study and generously shared his abundant knowledge of steel, the CIO, and Philip Murray. I’m grateful to him and to the entire staff of the Special Collections department. What a fantastic place to conduct research. No less felicitous was the interlibrary loan staff at Acadia University. Darlene Sweet, Wilma Carty, and Patricia Gallant once again went beyond any reasonable definition of duty to locate secondary and primary sources essential to this study. Molly Kennedy provided essential research assistance, as did Jane Stoeff ler of the Catholic University of America, who hunted down and photocopied key elements of the CIO collection there. Debby Cooney and Tab Lewis, rendered invaluable

x

Acknowledgments

assistance at the National Archives. I thank them all sincerely. My wife, Melanie Dennis, deserves special recognition for persevering through microfilm, compiling the bibliography, and supporting the project from beginning to end. Brynne Sinclair-Waters did a stellar job on the index. I’d also like to note the sterling professionalism of Chris Chappell, Erin Ivey, Sarah Whalen, and Rohini Krishnan at Palgrave Macmillan. They have been genuine allies and thoughtful critics at each stage, and I wish to express my gratitude for their support. The external readers for Palgrave pushed me to sharpen the analysis and expand the research; their input has improved the final product—gracias. Finally, I’d like to express my appreciation for the steelworkers and supporters who crowd the former union hall on Houston Avenue each year to commemorate the events of May 30, 1937. Their commitment to community-based unionism, racial equality, and authentic social justice is simply profound. In an era when the term solidarity is often used cynically or ironically, they demonstrate that it is a living, breathing idea, one that’s inseparable from the search for human decency.

Introduction: Forgotten Memorials

Industrial decline has become such a familiar trope in American public discourse that it runs the risk of becoming a cliché. The image of communities imploding under the weight of faltering industrial fortunes became standard journalistic fare, however, long before General Motors and Chrysler began their steady decline. Bruce Springsteen songs, academic lamentations, and documentary exposés have chronicled the decline of the American Dream in the post-Depression world. It was the loss of the steel mills, however, that seemed to symbolize the collapse of American economic hegemony. Reduced to a cautionary tale about business “competitiveness,” portrayed as lamentable but irreversible, the story of industrial decay obscures the place of organized labor in building those monuments of American ingenuity. But it also overlooks how working-class Americans at a specific moment in time joined movements that advanced basic social decency. They championed a set of principles that challenged the class inequalities of a society convinced that classes did not exist. Those principles competed against forces that would eventually spell the industry’s decline, the nation’s misfortune, and the intensifying insecurity of working Americans. In 1937, few contemporaries could anticipate those developments. In the midst of the nation’s worst economic crisis, “industrial democracy” became the rallying cry of workers on the march. A product of the breakdown of managerial control and the outburst of labor activism during First World War, the idea of industrial democracy would continue to resonate long after the guns fell silent. The slogan embodied the promise to curb the arbitrary authority of employers who had held sway throughout the Gilded Age. According to legend, this era has delivered unparalleled benefits to all.1 Yet industrial democracy also promised to bring the rule of law and representative governance

2

The Memorial Day Massacre

to the despotic factories that fueled industrial growth. It aimed at restoring the connection between political and economic democracy. Above all, it envisioned a day when workers would overcome the debilitating individualism that prevented them from achieving a measure of security in their lives and control over their workplace. Those objectives drew on the democratic inheritance of the Progressive Era. Despite the spasmodic repression of the postwar years, containing corporate despotism became the enduring theme of the working-class movement. By the 1930s that vision would be inextricably linked to the idea of collective bargaining under the protection of a benevolent federal government.2 Our own era has difficulty making sense of “workers,” let alone industrial ones, in large part because of the seemingly inexorable decline of the manufacturing sector.3 Without sentimentality, we might think of them as the 1930s equivalent of the men and women who now make a predominantly service-oriented economy function. Workers fixed on industrial democracy as the solution to the paradox of poverty in a land of plenty. It seemed to resolve the conundrum of grinding uncertainty for the many and relative comfort for the few. With all necessary deference to injunctions against f lippant historical analogies, our dilemma was theirs. Laborers were not the only Americans drawn to the promise of industrial democracy. Middle-class reformers of the Progressive Era also believed that the solution to the “labor question” could be found in promoting industrial democracy. They saw it as a key element of a larger vision of social harmony in which “the people” triumphed over the narrow self-interest of the urban machines and industrial magnates. Yet this vision of progressive reform, which legendary reformers such as Jane Addams and John Dewey embraced, could never reconcile with the class divisions that had persistently torn apart industrializing America. While middle-class reformers championed the idea that a rejuvenated democratic community might overcome social divisions, cataclysmic strikes and the violent repression of working-class activism seemed to suggest otherwise. From the sweatshops of New York to the coal mines of Colorado, labor activists insisted that a fundamental realignment of the social system was necessary before any measure of harmony might be achieved. The injustices fostered by a system of class privilege would have to be resolved before Americans could meaningfully speak of democracy.4 Battered by the antilabor hysteria of the 1920s, this vision of industrial democracy would endure into the New Deal era. Catapulted into

Introduction

3

action by a federal government that recognized the urgency of resolving the “labor question” in this time of crisis, American workers took up the standard of industrial democracy once again. The vision of a classless society that the progressives first espoused lived on in the form of New Deal liberalism, which imagined that state activism could generate the material abundance that would contain social discontent. Abandoning national economic planning for mechanisms designed to foster consumption, New Deal liberalism ended up producing an industrial relations regime that increasingly accepted the class divisions at the root of the nation’s malaise. The liberal penchant for denying class tensions would run headlong into the more radical vision of industrial democracy inherited from the labor upheavals of 1919. The steelworkers who found themselves embroiled in the events surrounding Memorial Day of 1937 would challenge not only the industrial fiefdoms of Little Steel, but also the equivocating labor reforms of the Roosevelt administration.5 The principles of industrial democracy were distinctively American, but they had little to do with rugged individualism. Instead, they took their inspiration from the cooperative ideal inherited from the Populist Movement and the great labor upheavals of the nineteenth century. Although progressive reformers believed that enlightened citizens could establish a more efficient industrial order that would reconcile owners and industrial laborer, workers rarely subscribed to that view. By the 1930s, the cooperative ideal had been merged with the struggle for industrial democracy. At the center of this amalgam was the proposition that workers should exercise control over the conditions under which they worked. They should enjoy something approximating the rule of law.6 The historiographical thrust and parry that is of interest primarily to scholars is deliberately muted in this study, although the footnotes and a few key interlocutions provide a pretty clear sense of where it falls on the interpretive spectrum. I emphasize the narrative here, since, I would argue, the narrative delivers greater historical insight than just about any authorial intervention conceivable. I can imagine. Indeed, it is the narrative that has been obscured, one might argue deliberately, and this loss of historical memory says more about the changing character of American society in the years since 1937 than we might care to admit. The narrative is analytical, but I’ve tried to allow the historical actors rather than the director to take center stage. That said, historians and readers want to know where you are coming from, if only to decide whether to endure the rest of what you

4


have to say. So, here it is. Against the judgments of many contemporaries and first-wave historians, some interpreters have portrayed the industrial unionists of the 1930s as a fairly conservative lot governed by a generally pragmatic Roosevelt administration, neither of which set out to accomplish much in the way of fundamental change. Though one might be able to make the case that the New Deal was, after all, a matter of restoring business confidence rather than fostering social transformation, that cannot be said for the forces it set in motion. Some of these forces operated within the New Deal state. Nor can that be said of the progressive and radical forces that stirred Depression-era America before the New Deal. Southeast Chicago became a crucible in which a wide spectrum of social and political alternatives became possible. The drive to organize steel and the larger union movement of which it was a part created the conditions in which workers challenged the most venerable assumptions of the Gilded Age. They were in the process of forging a new culture, a new social alignment. Although Chicago’s craft unions moderated the impact of corporations on working-class life and mediated the implementation of the New Deal at the local level, they did not champion a social movement. What is critical to understand is that the frontline industrial unionists who spearheaded that drive did not know what shape that new alignment would take. That is the very nature of dramatic social change. Indeed, that is the nature of revolution.7 In this struggle, wage gains were seen as part of a larger effort to humanize a political economy seemingly predicated on exploitation. Labor activists were not motivated by some utopian blueprint. Instead, they drew their inspiration from the exhilarating but amorphous vision of industrial democracy inherited from an earlier generation and reinterpreted in the context of the Great Depression. The organizing drive and the Little Steel Strike generated possibilities of economic reorganization and social democratization that only years later would seem implausible. What this suggests is that historians should not read back into the 1930s a conservative consensus that seems consistent with the limited, though significant, achievements of the era. Rosemary Feurer’s observation about the electrical workers of District 8 in St. Louis sheds light on the experience of Chicago’s steelworkers: “The degree of workers’ militancy and the limits of their aspirations were not the product of some predetermined level of class consciousness.” Rather, they were the results of a measured analysis of the “chance for success with the forces of repression and repercussion waiting in the wings.8 By the time of the Little Steel Strike, Chicago’s industrial workers had discovered how willing the “forces of oppression” were to crush labor activism. That workers challenged them at all testifies to the radical potential of this movement.

Introduction

5

This interpretation also challenges the assumption that the Little Steel Strike, like the wider labor insurgency that produced it, was really a rather tame affair. Historian David Brody has illuminated how “workplace contractualism” came to define the labor relations regime that flowed from the New Deal years. Brody has convincingly illustrated the material benefits generated by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) breakthrough as well the conservative forces at work in creating a centralized and authoritarian union. Yet the emphasis which he and historian Irving Bernstein placed on union tactical maneuvering tended to obscure the percolating movement below—which practitioners of the “new” social history have explored in some depth—and its connection to the larger movement beyond. Brody submits that the early years of the movement exhibited “some radical potential,” but he contends that the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “operated within essentially conventional terms of American trade unionism that would have prevailed over contrary tendencies even in the absence of the New Deal.”9 It also questions Brody’s assertion that the “mass-production sector was probably the least capable of any part of American industry of generating the demand for workers’ control and the functional shop leadership without which no militant movement could long sustain a rank-and-file character.”10 For Brody, the primary measure of grassroots militancy in the steel movement was the consciousness of predominantly white, male laborers on the shop f loor as they grappled with the question of industrial unionism. Historians have complicated this analysis by underlining the significant achievements of the employee representation plans in developing rank-and-file commitment.11 This study builds on these insights but tries to move beyond them by examining the transformative impact of the organizing drive and the strike itself. In the context of that moment, organizations beyond the steel mills, including the women’s auxiliaries, as well as racial groups within, such as African American and Mexican American steelworkers, joined white labor unionists in the mills to organize a movement that mirrored the dynamic egalitarianism of the era. They exhibited a measure of class consciousness and social democratic conviction that could not be contained simply in the demand for a signed contract. The story cannot be reduced to John Lewis, or Republic Steel, or even militant skilled workers. It has to include the strike and what that did to those who challenged the most formidable industrial opponents since Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. In the aftermath of stunning defeat, contemporaries and historians would lose sight of the possibilities generated by that moment of mobilization. This has little to do with counterfactual “roads not taken” and

6


everything to do with evidence that has been neglected or interpreted contrarily.12 Even so, historians should be mindful that the participants themselves did not try to map out the precise coordinates of the destination they hoped to reach by building a democratic union movement.13 That’s not all. Historians have also underestimated how fragile those movements are. They frequently neglect to consider how effectively violent repression can subvert a social movement that was only then beginning to institutionalize its achievements.14 The cataclysmic union struggles of the 1930s were not simply for higher wages and better pensions. For the workers who f locked to the standard of the renegade CIO, the union offered a vehicle for democratizing the very industries that turned the nation’s powerful economic wheels. For industrial laborers, the CIO’s commitment to economic security and racial egalitarianism meant that the movement would eliminate the despotic practices that made industrial labor a degrading experience. While government policy makers defended labor unions as a critical tool for restoring a faltering consumer economy, workers turned to unions because they addressed the nagging injustices that industrial capitalism could no longer ignore. More than any isolated grievance, the Little Steel Strike was propelled by the realization that workers lived in a country dedicated to democratic freedom, but worked under conditions of near autocracy. In the steel mills, textile mills, retail outlets, sweatshops, packinghouses, and automobile factories across the country, basic civil liberties meant next to nothing. Managers and foremen expected workers to be subservient and compliant, to accept their unchecked authority in everything from work hours to washroom facilities. “All you had to do is work at Republic Steel at that time to see the deplorable conditions that existed there,” recalled Casey Klimkowski, who started at Republic in 1934. “Job security or seniority, you had none. You could work there for 10 or 15 years. If the boss had a favorite nephew . . . the boss’s nephew would work while you were laid off.” Klimkowski was one of thousands of employees who joined the Little Steel Strike in 1937, the most divisive and deadly labor conf lict of the twentieth century. “We were arrested, we were jailed. . . . We’ll never forget the guys who shed their blood.”15 Workers embraced the vision of industrial democracy because it promised to deliver them from the oppression of modern industrial life. “As the curtain rose on CIO,” remembered United Auto Worker president Walter Reuther, “injustice was as commonplace as streetcars. When men walked into their jobs, they left their dignity,

Introduction

7 16

their citizenship, and their humanity outside.” Although the industrial democracy that engineers, social scientists, and human resource experts imagined included schemes of rational production and harmonious efficiency, the vision that industrial laborers of the 1930s espoused meant something far more elemental. It meant protection from the irresponsible authority of factory foremen and supervisors, an authority representative of the larger system that had plunged working Americans into the miasma of the Depression. It meant deliverance from the insecurity that made it impossible to plan for the future. It meant the ability to protect oneself in the often perilous world of modern manufacturing. It meant being able to work in conditions that did not threaten life and limb. “During July,” autoworker and union organizer Henry Kraus recalled, “a torrid heat wave sent the thermometer boiling over 100 degrees for a week straight. But the assembly line pounded away mercilessly while the workers fell at their stations like f lies. Deaths in the state’s auto centers ran into the hundreds within three or four days.” For workers in the nation’s manufacturing sector, industrial democracy promised an end to this kind of exploitation.17 In the vision of industrial democracy that animated the labor movement of the 1930s, unions became the instruments of social transformation. For many CIO activists, achieving control over the murderous pace of production was inseparable from gaining decent housing, health care, racial tolerance, job security, full employment, and rational economic planning for the entire country. In this vision, workers would fashion institutions that ref lected the interests of people who had never really exercised any power at all. “In all the noise of industrial warfare,” observed labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, people often forgot the central issue at stake: “the enhancement of human dignity, since a worker enrolled in a labor union has something to say about the conditions under which he will work.” It was the “change from a semislave status to that of a man full of self-respect which is one of the most important aspects of a labor movement.”18 According to this perspective, collective bargaining was part of a larger struggle for justice. The drive for industrial democracy burned intensely in the years before Americans ever imagined a war to end fascism abroad. Carrying forward the cooperative ideal of an earlier generation, working-class Americans and middle-class intellectuals established the foundations of security for years to come.19 Yet the movement that laid the groundwork of that security was anything but a tepid affair. Neither was it a case of distant labor bureaucrats manipulating a largely docile workforce for conservative ends. Contemporary labor leaders paid

8


doting homage to an American standard of living, but that notion could hardly summarize the moral and political imagination of workers in the midst of the labor uprising of 1937. And that is exactly what it was: an uprising that drew strength from the unemployed movement and labor organizing efforts of the 1930s. Like the electrical workers of UE District 8 in St. Louis, whom historian Rosemary Feurer has documented in her vitally important study, the steelworking coalition that crystallized in the 1937 uprising embraced a vision of community-based organizing that was the “basic starting point for a national and international movement for social transformation.” 20 Guided by a committed group of activists, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party, steelworkers and their supporters struggled to build a community-wide coalition that privileged racial equality and economic democracy over narrow self-interest.21 Yet it was a struggle, and one that did not simply pit the workers against the company. Steel activists operated within constraints imposed by a CIO leadership that proved unwilling to champion a more progressive agenda. If anything, they were determined to curb democratic practices at the grassroots level. The appeal for security, then, was not a modest ambition. Nor was it simply a case of substituting government paternalism for the now discredited company paternalism under the guise of “moral capitalism.” Striking workers did not plan for revolution. Certainly most would have objected to the assertion that they wanted to take the plants over and run them. Yet in the drive for democracy in steel, they developed cooperative values that challenged paternalistic and unilateral control. As historian Robert McElvaine explained years ago, and as historian Alan Lawson has recently recapitulated, the central struggle of the 1930s was over values, not simply power; for a nation more closely resembling a cooperative commonwealth than the one conjured in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.22 In establishing a cross-class alliance based on Popular Front ideals, they challenged the political presumptions of industrial capitalism. In asserting greater control over the production process, in compelling the steel companies to raise wages, in supporting government regulation of industry, and in agitating for a political system geared to the interests of the working-class majority, they necessarily endorsed a redistribution of profits and power. This was precisely the significance of industrial democracy, since it aimed to eliminate the random uncertainty of work in a steel mill and in the wider society they inhibited. The workers who espoused industrial democracy wanted to alter the character of a political economy based on

Introduction 23

9

arbitrary power. When labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse famously asked what workers wanted from the surging labor movement of the 1930s, she answered “collective security.” Yet this was not simply a call for a chicken in every pot and a pension at the end of the road. It was, Heaton Vorse explained, a form of mutual responsibility. It struck directly at the venerated individualism that industrial capitalists used to justify the suppression of labor.24 This search for greater economic security as well as a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth was inextricably linked to democratization. “They are restating in union meetings, in large halls, that they believe that it is the function of good government to promote the welfare of the people rather than that of the small class whose one aim is profits. . . . They are reaffirming what all our greatest statesmen have said—that a political democracy cannot coexist with an industrial despotism.” The workers that Heaton Vorse lived with, marched alongside, and documented during the Little Steel Strike of 1937 understood that the drive for decent wages was inseparable from the larger movement to return power “back from a small group of employers to the majority of people, in whose hands, under a democratic society, it was intended to be.” The significance of the yellow dog contracts, black lists, spies, strikebreakers, and “industries transformed into fortresses with arsenals of munitions and tear gas” was not the pedestrian issue of wages. Instead, as Heaton Vorse understood, it was the question who governs?25 Legislation would never completely resolve the “labor question” inherited from Gilded Age America. Nor did American business consider unionization an inconvenient but inevitable reality. Only a tooth and claw struggle could determine the outcome. In that struggle, professional strikebreakers enjoyed more freedom to operate than the union organizers they sought to crush. In this era, police batons and company intimidation worked hand-in-hand to contain the union threat. Labor organizers routinely found themselves vilified as anti-American subversives. When 11,000 unemployed workers crowded into New York’s Union Square in 1930, police waded into them with a viciousness that had become all too familiar. When a New York World reporter observed “women struck in the face with blackjacks, boys beaten by gangs of seven and eight policemen, and an old man backed into a doorway and knocked down time after time, only to be dragged to his feet and struck with fists and club,” he looked into the face of the 1930s.26 In moments like these, the worker “ceases being an isolated, powerless individual” and gained the “dignity which men throughout the ages have had when

10


they have been banded together for a higher purpose,” noted Heaton Vorse. It was a “dignity which is the antithesis of mob spirit.”27 The Memorial Day Massacre was the singularly most significant moment in the drive for what Franklin D. Roosevelt described as “freedom from fear.” Just as significant, that moment captured the determination of forces opposed to “collective security” to restore the status quo. Radical author Howard Fast understood the massacre’s larger significance. “We find that far from being an isolated case of managerial violence, it was a focal point for the theory and the technique of reactionary capitalism in the organizational struggles of the thirties.” In 1937, the steel industry became “the battleground for the open shop— against industrial unionism.”28 If so, Chicago became the battleground for the idea of industrial democracy. Looking back at the Memorial Day Massacre reminds us that the issues they confronted have not been washed away by the beneficent march of progress. At the center of the Little Steel Strike was the demand for union recognition; underlying that demand was the question of fundamental human rights. As Heaton Vorse understood, “in the dramatic incidents of a strike, people are apt to lose sight of the fact that the workers are striking for women and children at home—for human dignity and democracy.”29 The desire for a modicum of control over their lives and the belief that work should not be degrading were inextricably connected to the drive for decent wages. The demand for decent pay was a demand to uproot the authoritarianism at the core of industrial America.30 The Little Steel Strike challenged the management prerogatives of the Gilded Age as much as any labor uprising since the Haymarket affair. If those terms sound quaint, then we might profitably consider the frame of mind of most contemporary American workers. Uncertain about the security of their jobs, working longer hours than their predecessors and most of their contemporaries in Western industrialized countries, scrutinized by company officials who have little to fear from unions, and reminded on a daily basis that democracy means little in the modern workplace, American workers today would find the steelworkers’ experience hauntingly familiar. The issues that the American working class confronted in the 1930s have surprising resonance today. Some might even suggest that the world Americans workers confront today looks more like it did in 1937 than in any intervening year. Even so, what’s most compelling about this period is not how it anticipated developments of the late twentieth century. Rather, it is how

Introduction

11

average people confronted an unprecedented political crisis by doing more than searching for scapegoats and distractions. So, too, did they do more than invoke a supposedly timeless ideal of rugged individualism while waiting out the storm.31 If anything, the industrial laborers who f looded into the SWOC implicitly testified to the widespread belief that democracy meant more than casting a ballot. They were neither passive observers nor helpless victims, nor virtuous angels, for that matter, but active participants in the events that unfolded in that troubled and promising decade. Motivated by a sense that the time for change had arrived, and guided by a producer ideology inherited from the Populist Movement, they believed that cooperative action might overcome their individual deficiencies. That, in and of itself, is reason enough to remember Memorial Day 1937. The tragedy of Memorial Day was not only the loss of life, but also the lost opportunity to expand the liberating promise of the New Deal. The failure to solidify the achievements of that era is explained not by the nation’s allegedly resilient individualism, but by the inability of the movement to champion democracy over union recognition. For all of their insights, however, historians of “alternative unionism” overlook the impact that violent repression had on the labor movement. The violent response to the Little Steel Strike received the stamp of approval not only from organized business but also from a powerful coalition in Congress that was determined to reverse the achievements of the New Deal.32 They opposed it not because it threatened “individualism,” but because the program and the social movements that supported it challenged powerful vested interests.33 Never again would public authorities handle striking workers so brutally and so callously. Yet the union that eventually signed a contract with Republic Steel and its counterparts looked remarkably different from the one that took to the streets of South Chicago in 1937. That union privileged job security in its narrowest sense over shop-f loor democracy and social reform. One of the central reasons for that development was the outcome of the Memorial Day Massacre. The incident of May 30, 1937, and the series of events that followed were catalysts of change in their own right. Their greatest importance, however, is how they encapsulated the expectations, ambitions, and misconceptions of a coalition of labor reformers brought together in the exhilarating years of the “turbulent” decade. As our own era combs through the history of the 1930s in search of direction following the Great Recession of 2008, we should ensure that this part of the story is not forgotten.


CH A P T E R

ON E

Fire, Steel, and the Coming Crisis: The 1920s in Chicago and America

Chicago was the quintessential Gilded Age city, and the south side was its nerve center. As German and Czech immigrants filtered into the neighborhoods surrounding the meatpacking industry, Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants drove stakes into the soil of steelmaking Southeast Chicago. Yet new arrivals soon eclipsed their numbers and cultural inf luence. Throbbing with industrial vitality, Gilded Age America drew millions of southeastern European newcomers to its shores. By 1930, one out of every ten Americans in a total population of 123 million was foreign born.1 From the beginning of the century until America’s entry into the First World War, the Golden Door was kept swinging by waves of Europeans in search of something better. In those years, as many as 14 million immigrants landed in the country, most heading to places like Chicago and New York. Between 1900 and 1935, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, and Slovenian immigrants f looded into the city’s southeast district, drawn by the hope that billowing smokestacks meant jobs. Soon, African Americans from points south of the Mason-Dixon Line as well as Mexicans from below the Rio Grande were vying for space and employment in the crowded Calumet region. By 1919, St. Michael’s was not the only church to occupy sacred space above the row houses of Southeast Chicago. The Croatian Sacred Heart, the Mexican Our Lady of Guadeloupe, the Irish St. Patrick’s, the German East Side Baptist, as well as a handful of other testaments in stone had joined the religious mosaic.2 By the beginning of the Depression, Poles were in the majority. For them,

14


St. Michael’s Cathedral was the anchor in their new world. Semiskilled European transplants crafted independent communities defined by language and custom. A Babel of languages filled the grimy air of the steel district. Along with dreams of prosperity came traditions of community cohesion that would prove vital in periods of crisis. As multicultural as Southeast Chicago may have seemed to outsiders, the region’s settlement followed patterns defined by steel and ethnicity. The Calumet area was divided into four distinct areas, each marked by the steel factories that served as their centers of gravity.3 In Southeast Chicago, where the Calumet River f lows into Lake Michigan, the Carnegie-Illinois South Works Plant dominated the horizon. Inland Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube prevailed in Indiana Harbor in East Chicago on the Indiana side. Imposing as they were, U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, across the state line in Indiana, eclipsed them all. Although it was not the largest operation, employing only just over two thousand workers in the 1930s, Republic Steel in southeast Chicago would gain a level of notoriety that would overshadow its larger competitors. By 1920, according to the census data, 32.4 percent of the semiskilled male workers in the steel industry were born of foreign or mixed parents; 47.2 percent were foreign born. Out of a total of 411,574 male employees in Chicago manufacturing, a full 53.9 percent were foreign born “whites.” By 1907, Slavs and Italians comprised more than 80 percent of the unskilled workers in the Carnegie Steel Company. Like most of the city’s heavy manufacturing, steel was an immigrant worker’s industry.4 The local demand for steel, the proximity to major rail lines, the availability of navigable waters, and the access to an expanding pool of labor transformed Southeast Chicago into an industrial powerhouse of the twentieth century. It also transformed the landscape. Slag heaps, scrap depositories, and cavernous, interlocking factories stood alongside cranes, smokestacks, and holding tanks that jutted into the sky like temples to some strange metallic deity. At night, the blast furnaces issued burnt offerings that lit up the night sky in a pastiche of otherworldly colors visible to the cultured residents of Hyde Park.5 Tramping about the country, trying to shed his middle-class origins and live the life of the itinerant laborer, future CIO leader Len De Caux remembered seeing Chicago for the first time in 1921. Gazing out of a freight car door as the train rumbled into the south side, “I thought of Dante’s approach to hell,” he wrote. The scene was one of industrial desolation. “No green fields. No hills or streams. No life or habitation. Flatlands covered with swamps and trash dumps. Soot smoke smarted

Fire, Steel, and the Coming Crisis

15

the eyes, dried nostrils and lips. Afar oil-stinking refineries, the hellish glare, the shooting f lames of steel mills.”6 De Caux probably captured the sentiments of most newcomers to the city since the 1870s. “Chicago was the center, the hard core of the United States,” the Oxford-trained New Zealander observed. Probably because the city seemed to embody the Gilded Age ethos of ruthless competition, it seemed to the peripatetic radical that “there was something abrasive about Chicago.” While New York had its “superstructural graces,” and other cities their “special, even romantic appeals,” the city of Big Shoulders was “just a hasselhole to earn or swindle money and slug it out in the struggle for existence.” Despite the unf lattering observations, De Caux believed that he found there a “working class wonderfully organized to work together for production.” 7 The massive freighters plowing through the choppy waters of the Great Lakes carrying their leaden loads from the ore valleys to Calumet Harbor; the railcars lurching toward the manufacturing sector, and the infernal activity of the factories and city streets reminded any visitor that this was a city on the move. The steel mills dominated the landscape of South Chicago, but they were inextricably connected to the lives of the workers who operated them. This was a world of immigrant laborers in which recent arrivals clung to customs, languages, and traditions imported from the home country. Those ethnic traditions provided a bedrock for immigrants in the disorienting world of Gilded Age America. They also defined the neighborhoods that grew up alongside the steel mills. Around the South Works plant at the terminal point of the Calumet River, the “Millgate” and “the Bush” became home to Polish immigrants, while “Slag Valley” and “Irondale” harbored Serbian, Croatian, and Italian workers. In Greenbay, the area’s red light district, Mexicans and other post–First World War arrivals congregated. Mexicans would soon move into Irondale. On the “East Side,” a neighborhood that housed employees of Republic Steel, Slovenes, Serbs, Croatians, and Italians also settled. By the 1930s, Southeast Chicago had become a honeycomb of ethnic neighborhoods. Scandinavians, Germans, Mexicans, Jews, Greeks, and southern Europeans of Slavic and Latin origins mixed in its working-class precincts. Living in close proximity, competing for housing and jobs, and subject to the efforts of employers to keep workers divided, Chicago’s industrial laborers inhabited a world defined by ethnic antagonism. As late as the 1970s, one sociologist noted, the divisions between Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbians inherited from the ethnic turmoil of Yugoslavia persisted.8 The patchwork labor market

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ref lected the racial and ethnic kaleidoscope of early twentieth-century Chicago.9 The world of Chicago’s immigrant workers was also shaped by the squalid tenements that housed them. In Southeast Chicago, crowding, unsanitary conditions, infectious disease, and generalized squalor had diminished only slightly since the late nineteenth century. Narrow, dark passageways cluttered by miscellaneous refuse; frame houses backing onto each other, sometimes three deep on grassless, muddy lots; the alleys a dumping ground for rotting food, cadaverous animals, and human waste. These are the scenes that would have been familiar to workers as late as the 1930s. The crowding was not as chronic as in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, next to the packinghouses. In one case, seventeen renters and a couple occupied a six-room apartment. Poorly heated and ventilated, the frame houses of South Chicago looked to social worker Edith Abbot like the “same drab tenement neighborhood” she had investigated in 1908. “Rear houses, some of them in a very wretched state of disrepair, are still being used for living purposes,” Abbot observed. “Dirty shacks and rotten sheds are numerous, and undoubtedly many of these are used for the fowls which were seen running about in some of the back yards.”10 The Calumet region was not an unrelieved wasteland, though. Pockets of working-class comfort did exist. For the most part, they were filled by workers of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, or German descent who lodged in neatly trimmed brick cottages and exhibited the pride of ownership typical of the skilled working class. For firstand second-generation immigrant workers, however, life in Southeast Chicago and in the Back of the Yards, life was bleak, sometimes violent, and always tenuous. Along Federal Street on the southside, conditions were chronically worse. Neglected by public officials, the street was dirty and unpaved. Joined by her cadre of Hull House reformers, Abbot negotiated alleys that “were almost impassable with mud and filth.” Garbage and debris from years gone by littered the alleys, making it difficult for ice trucks and wagons to get through. “In some places the odor from decaying garbage, and sometimes dead rats, was almost insufferable,” Abbot noted. The frame houses were in perpetual disrepair. Broken or missing windows, cracked f loorboards, unhinged doors, leaking roofs, and malfunctioning toilets seemed depressingly common in these homes. In apartment buildings, few occupants enjoyed more than two rooms. Children of the area had nowhere to play. Those who did seemed to be dressed in a uniform of ragged, threadbare clothing. “It is difficult


17

to exaggerate the wretchedness of the housing accommodations which the poor Negroes endure in this area,” Abbot concluded.11 As dislocating as the move to South Chicago was for southern Europeans, it never matched the difficulties that faced African Americans. Between 1910 and 1920, the black population of Chicago increased from 44,103 to 109,594. By 1930, it stood at 233,903, 6.9 percent of the city’s total population.12 Drawn by wartime opportunities and pushed by the repellant racial conditions in the South, blacks viewed Chicago as the Promised Land. White employers were happy for the inf lux of black migrants; it gave them a steady supply of cheap labor and strikebreaking leverage over unions. African Americans were also grateful for jobs that compared very favorably to anything they could expect in the South. Once workers were employed, packinghouses and other industries did everything possible to keep white and black workers divided.13 Steel communities also made black workers feel as unwelcome as the neighborhoods around Packingtown. The result was not surprising: Blacks clung together and populated the areas least desirable to whites. In Chicago, that area was the Black Belt. It was a stretch of tenement dwellings on the south side that one observer described as “so wretched as to be unfit for Chicago homes in the twentieth century.” Even while African Americans found work in the stockyards, packinghouses, and steel mills of the Windy City, they were steadily confined to areas that were exclusively black. They traveled across town, through unwelcoming neighborhoods, to work in meatpacking plants and steel factories. Separated from other blacks in the workplace, unable to stitch together the threads between the domestic and laboring spheres that proved so essential to working-class cohesion, blacks inhabited a world fraught with uncertainty.14 Sometimes, that uncertainty turned perilous. Since blacks had occasionally worked as strikebreakers before the war, whites had additional fodder for resentment. What white workers generally refused to do was understand the reasons that blacks chose to cross the picket line. Facing discrimination by white trade unionists and limited job opportunities in the North, African Americans and Mexican immigrants often found strikebreaking the only avenue through which they could gain a foothold in a unionized shop. Although blacks never constituted the majority of industrial strikebreakers, white workers transformed them into the image of the skulking, shifty scab. In reality, strikebreaking constituted a logical “form of working-class activism” that addressed the material needs of African American migrants to the north.15

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When combined with the very real competition for jobs and housing in wartime Chicago, this image of the unscrupulous black strikebreaker made for incendiary conditions. Eugene Williams, a young African American, was swimming at the 29th Street Beach on July 27, 1919, when he drifted past an invisible line separating the white and black sections. White swimmers retaliated, pitching rocks at him until he drowned. Sporadic fights quickly broke out. As Chicago police focused their attention on suppressing black indignation, whites were left to vent their hatred in a five-day orgy of violence. Much of it took place in the Black Belt, as white toughs destroyed black homes and attacked local residents. Yet 41 percent of the incidents happened in Packingtown, where whites attacked African Americans traveling to and from work. After the Illinois National Guard quelled the riot, the city was left to ref lect on how such a grotesque display of racial intolerance could have happened in the land of opportunity. Altogether, 40 blacks and 9 whites died in the riot, while 537 others were injured. Blacks may have left the South, but they had not escaped America.16 *** Underlying all of the racial and ethnic tensions of life in South Chicago was the reality of steelwork. Hovering over Italian and Croat alike, filling the air with acrid smoke and piercing it with the deafening whistle that signaled the shift changes, the steel mills dominated the landscape. By 1902, immigrant workers at the Illinois Steel Company’s South Works—later U.S. Steel—were already adjusting to the demands of a twelve-hour day. On alternating Sundays, 1,800 employees pulled twenty-four-hour shifts, in some cases ingesting chewing tobacco to stave off sleep.17 Dirty and cacophonous, belching putrid smoke and scorching f lames, the mills were also extremely dangerous. In 1906 alone, forty-six workers were killed on the job at South Works. They represented only the worst cases. Several others left the plant “burned, crushed, maimed, and disabled,” observed local reporter William Hard. According to Hard, that number totaled 1,200 in one year. Industry analyst Horace B. Davis reported that in 1930, 242 iron and steelworkers had been killed on the job; in all, 22,845 were injured in the steelmaking business that year. The steel plant could kill or injure a worker in any number of ways. Blast furnaces could unexpectedly discharge their lavalike contents and immolate workers. In 1926, twenty-one workers were killed at the Woodward Iron Company in Alabama when a blast furnace accidentally


19

poured 400 tons of molten steel onto its crew. In the yards, employees were regularly struck by engines charging relentlessly through the mills without signals or warning lights. In the open hearth department, cranes periodically dropped jagged objects on unsuspecting workers, killing or maiming them.18 Davis noted that the exposure of chronic dangers in the steel industry forced the companies to adopt a safety program in 1906. A determined effort to blame employees for their injuries accompanied the safety drive. In one particularly egregious case in 1929, a 40,000-pound load fell on an employee at a steel mill in Ohio. “For a few seconds we heard the heart-rending cry and then all lapsed into a deep silence,” one witness recalled. “We all trembled and stood speechless for a few minutes, around the bloody mass of f lesh and bones. The worker’s blood sprinkled the whole place. The sharp corner of the load had torn open his stomach and the internal organs were ripped out.” Immediately, management looked to assign blame, “first on the man who was killed, then on other workers.” In the rolling mill departments, workers faced the danger of red and white hot metal jamming the rolls. Under pressure, the object would be f lung like a piece of shrapnel at workers standing only a short distance away.19 Electrocutions and severe burns were also common, but so too was illness. In 1929, deaths from pneumonia exceeded deaths from accidents. In the sheet and tinplate rolling mills, workers faced the threat of the “hot mill cramps.” Exposed to temperatures that ranged between 100ºF and 120°F and, at times, to temperatures as high as 220°F, workers developed painful and debilitating cramps. At the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, six workers died from the disorder in the summer of 1933. As one steelworker recalled, “All week men had been passing out from heat cramps. Nearly 250 of them walked or were carried to the dispensary, and when the dispensary beds were full, the sick workers were laid out like cattle on the grass.”20 Some steel manufacturers fired their workers for begging off because of the cramps. At the Weirton Mill in West Virginia, one worker reported that employees stayed at their posts until they fell. In a two-day period, the observer noted, forty-five steelworkers were carried away on stretchers. Producing 3,000 tons of sheet a week, the mill drove workers to the breaking point. One exhausted employee who collapsed and was taken to the hospital “had been unconscious for several hours before anybody noticed him.” Exposure to gases and other fumes from the furnaces only increased the likelihood of illness. Even an industry publication sounded alarmed when it reported in 1929 that companies had installed “heat-treating

20


equipment operating at somewhere up to 2,500°F, blowing off white-hot furnace gases into a work room already superheated by a blazing sun.” The cramps were not the only illness workers feared; carbon monoxide poisoning was another silent killer.21 Looking back on a lifetime at Wisconsin Steel in South Deering, Chicago, Phillip Janik, a millright helper, remembered the danger of the open hearth. One incident in particular was seared into his memory. Slag pots were placed in rail cars to dispose of the refuse from the “heat,” the process that made molten steel out of coke and iron. Pins would hold the pots in place, but wear and tear routinely weakened them. Janik remembered a crane operator moving a slag pot into place, guided by a worker in charge of the pins. The slag was partially solidified, but for the most part, it was still molten metal. The operator lowered the bucket of slag, began pouring it into the waiting pot, and watched in horror as it cascaded out of the receptacle, showering the ground worker in superheated liquid metal. He “tried to run and he stumbled and fell,” Janik recalled. “And he tried to get up because he turned over. And that slag just hit him right on top. Big glob of molten slag.” Horrified, the crew used a pitchfork to retrieve the victim and place him on a stretcher. The six-foot steelworker was curled up in a defensive fetal position. He was killed in an instant.22 Danger united steelworkers, but ethnicity divided the work inside the mills as much as the neighborhoods of South Chicago. Since the 1890s, steel managers had assigned the skilled, relatively high-paying jobs to workers of Anglo-Saxon descent. The least-skilled positions went to Southeast European immigrants and African Americans. The unskilled positions also tended to be the most physically punishing and dangerous jobs. To some extent, the ethnic job-streaming ref lected the needs of the industry in the Gilded Age. Skilled machinists, molders, and puddlers were in high demand when the industry was in its infancy. English and Welsh immigrants supplied the demand, bringing years of experience acquired in the iron factories of the British Isles.23 Yet the ethnic division of labor continued into the twentieth century, even as the technology of metal production changed. In fact, the technological innovations reinforced the semiskilled nature of steelwork and reduced the companies’ reliance on craft labor. Turning to standardized chemical reactions and machinery that facilitated volume manufacturing, the steel industry whittled away at skilled workers’ control. The steel companies could invest in new labor-saving machinery and rely on the immigrant tide to fill the expanding ranks of the semi skilled.24 Steel management and foremen were perfectly pseudoscientific in their use of racial classifications. While native-born whites and


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Anglo-Nordic workers monopolized skilled positions, Eastern Europeans and African Americans were assigned jobs based on their alleged racial attributes. Polish workers were grouped together in the rolling mills, while Austrians and Italians were relegated to the sweltering furnaces. Mexicans and blacks were reserved for the least desirable, lowest-paying positions, which one commentator suggested was a ref lection of “their irregular habits and lack of stamina.”25 Before the 1920s, the steel companies operated on a crude system of ethnic divide and conquer. Grouping Poles, Croats, and Mexican workers together seemed like an ideal perfect strategy for maintaining a divided workforce. Yet managerial manipulation rarely worked out as planned. Ethnic isolation became ethnic cohesion. It could be used in moments of crisis as the basis of collective labor action. When Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Indiana Harbor tried to short change a group of Mexican workers, they staged a wildcat strike that lasted until their de facto leader was fired. Clearly, there were limits to ethnic solidarity.26 Group solidarity offered black Americans little protection against racial discrimination. By 1933, blacks accounted for 11.4 percent of all steelworkers in Illinois.27 When war interrupted the tide of European immigrant labor to the United States, and when Congress effectively shut off the spigot through prohibitive legislation in the 1920s, the steel companies became hungry for workers. They tapped the supply of black migrants eager to escape the clutches of Jim Crow. Mexican workers in search of a haven from poverty and political instability proved to be equally eager steelworkers. While their presence in the steel industry increased, their power did not. Black employees were almost entirely shut out of the skilled trades. Since whites were able to escape the dismal production jobs, blacks filtered into these positions. Blacks did achieve a degree of upward mobility there, moving from the position of helper into practitioner vacated by whites. Even when performing the same job as whites, though, black operatives were segregated. In some departments, such as machine operating, they were simply excluded. At plants such as U.S. Steel’s South Works, blacks languished as janitors or unskilled laborers. At Inland Steel’s operations in Chicago Heights and Indiana Harbor, blacks were consigned to the menace of the blast furnaces and the coke plant or the drudgery of the post shop. Lacking seniority, routinely overlooked for promotions, and frequently required to train whites for the high-paying jobs, black steelworkers had reason to wonder if steel was really an improvement over sharecropping.28

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William Young certainly did. A native of Winona, Mississippi, Young and his family moved to Southeast Chicago during the First World War, lured by the prospect of employment in the bustling steel mills. On his first day on the job at Inland Steel, Young found himself scraping scales from scorching steel and dumping them into a scrap car. The perilous conditions were only made worse by the chronic insecurity of the job. “You could be fired for asking how much a job paid. You could be fired for anything. The foreman could just look at you, not like you, and drive you out of the mill,” Young recalled. “Slavery hadn’t ended yet, not at Inland.”29 Union organizer John Howard remembered his appalling experience in the forty-four-inch blooming mill at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana. Working with a 150-pound pneumatic hammer amid seething-hot steel and sulfuric acid, chipping at ingots that produced shrapnel-like fragments that could become embedded in the skin, Howard quickly discovered how degrading steelwork was for most blacks. Most African Americans occupied the “hot, dirty, low-paying jobs. And where I worked was the most filthy place you’d ever seen.”30 What Young and many black workers discovered was that the steel companies had no interest in repaying their service during the strike of 1919 with upward mobility. In the 1920s, companies tried to use them to disrupt white ethnic cohesion on the shop f loor. While some held onto skilled and semiskilled positions, most African American workers occupied the lowest echelons once filled by southern and eastern Europeans. Employers also played blacks off against Mexican workers. As one Chicago plant manager noted, “We have Negroes and Mexicans in a sort of competition with each other. It is a dirty trick.”31 Working as a blacksmith’s apprentice after high school, George Patterson probably imagined that he would take up the life of a skilled craftsman in rural Scotland. That was until his father asked him if he would like to move to the United States. George’s father, John, had been a stationary engineer in a blast furnace and an activist in the British Enginemen and Boilermen’s Association. In 1922, the union led a national miners’ strike. After the failed drive, the companies turned to electricity for their internal cars, which put the elder Patterson out of a job. For a few months, he found work digging coal. Mounting travesty upon tragedy, the company for which Patterson worked shut the coal mine down. His livelihood shredded, John Patterson started traveling the coal mine circuit in the Lanarkshire region of Scotland. Yet he found that his past had followed him. After a few weeks of work in a mine, the


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company discovered his activist past and dismissed him. The antiunion blacklisting, Patterson remembered, was the main reason for the family’s immigration to the United States. The young blacksmith soon learned that the labor strife of the postwar period had left as much of an impression on his new home as on his old. Only years later would he realize how those early experiences inf luenced his worldview, setting him on a course that would change the character of American labor relations.32 Patterson arrived in a Southeast Chicago that bore all the marks of its ethnic, working-class origins. The jazz age had not magically transformed industrial workers into gin-drinking, Charleston dancing Gatsbys. Most of the gains in real wages came during the war; between 1923 and 1929, they improved only marginally in the key industries of steel, meatpacking, and agricultural implements. Between 1926 and 1929, the average hourly wage increased 7 percent, from 63.7 cents to 67.4 cents. Even that nominal increase hid the fact that employees were working longer hours, and that fewer of them were employed in 1929 than in 1926. A maze of job classifications and pay rates stymied the efforts of workers to achieve some standardized pay in steel. That had been one of the key demands of the 1919 strike, and it would continue to elude steelworkers throughout the Roaring 20s.33 More troubling was the debilitating job uncertainty in this supposed era of prosperity. Between 1923 and 1927, unemployment in manufacturing exceeded another five-year period since the turn of the century. According to a 1924 survey, over half of the unskilled and semiskilled manufacturing workers interviewed experienced unemployment for at least a month. Conditions were the same for steelworkers throughout the country. The wife of a Pennsylvania steelworker recalled that “You couldn’t save very much because my husband was more out of work than working. . . . The only time that he worked good was during the war. He worked steady for two years without stopping. There were times when he worked just one day a month. It was just awful.” Fully one in four steelworkers was unemployed at any given time between the end of the war and the beginning of the Depression.34 Despite the advertising energy poured into convincing Americans to “buy now and pay later,” very few working people did. While the middle class gave the 1920s its reputation for installment buying, the working class saved. If their middle-class counterparts were exploring the wonders of an automobile bought on credit, Chicago’s workers were scrimping and planning for an uncertain future. And yet South Chicago, like the rest of city and the country, had indeed changed since the era of the great strike. The decade began

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in economic disaster, but it ended in unprecedented economic expansion. Industrial technology, new methods of organizing production, and new advertising techniques increased both supply and demand. Gross national product increased 40 percent, per capita income by 30 percent, and output per factory worker-hour by almost 75 percent. South Chicago’s immigrant and native residents enjoyed some of the benefits of this era of remarkable productivity by purchasing phonographs and listening to records. Later in the decade, they explored the bountiful consumer offerings at national chain stores like A&P and Walgreen’s Drugs. At Saturday matinees and evening shows, immigrant and native-born Americans alike enjoyed the wonders of the silver screen. At neighborhood theaters like Pete’s International, the Pastime, the Gayety, and the Commercial Theater, steelworkers could escape the dreariness of factory and tenement life in worlds created by the alluring Clara Bow, the dashing Rudolph Valentino, and the irrepressible Charlie Chaplin. The advent of talking films like The Jazz Singer and Don Juan only made the experience more captivating, a f leeting escape into a world of glamour and intrigue.35 This was the world that George Patterson inhabited, but it was also a world defined by racial and ethnic boundaries. It provided a source of strength, but also formidable obstacles to change. Even so, those very same ethnic traditions emphasized neighborhood cooperation and community cohesion. When those traditions of community cohesion were extended beyond ethnic boundaries and fused to an American tradition of social protest, they would prove powerful. In the early twentieth century, the labor unions of Packingtown and Southeast Chicago gradually fostered working-class unity across racial lines in the process of “Americanization from below” that defied the company’s campaign of divide and conquer.36 Immigrant workers inhabited a city in which labor activism had become part of the warp and woof of everyday life. Additionally, workers from across the ethnic spectrum embraced a set of values that had little in common with the status-oriented individualism of the middle class. The whole notion of working-class solidarity, the practice of collective resistance, and the exhilaration of participating in a movement were part of the “labor ethos” that suffused early twentieth-century Chicago.37 While craft unionism came to dominate the official labor scene, a counterculture of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) bookstores, left-wing cafes, and radical hangouts proliferated in Chicago. Places like the Dill Pickle Club and “Bughouse Square” across from the Newberry Library became centers of fierce political debate and intellectual ferment. The


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IWW provided kitchens, reading rooms, meeting halls, and employment leads for transient workers in the city. It supported the hobos who became wandering conduits of IWW radicalism. The Radical Book Shop on north Clark Street and the Hobo Bookstore on West Madison attested to the vitality of the city’s progressive subculture. The magnetic convergence of a left-wing intelligentsia suggested that the embers of the Pullman strike of 1894 and the Haymarket incident of 1886 still burned. In the North End and throughout the ethnic packinghouse district on the west side, a community of radicals and reformers coalesced. The leading lights of American dissent converged there, including Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carl Sandburg, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Dennis, and Emma Goldman. In the cafes of the near north side and in the hobo haunts along West Madison Street, an alternative America thrived.38 By the 1920s, though, workers struggled to manage a world in which business ruled. This was not the mail-fisted despotism of the prewar era, though. The steel companies had learned their own lessons from the strike of 1919. The companies had to find ways to bind their employees to the company, wrench additional productivity from them, and root out the virus of unionism. They wanted to persuade employees to look to the company for security and protection. They repealed the odious twelve-hour day, but they also adopted a variety of programs designed to encourage company loyalty. Known as welfare capitalism, the corporate strategy for pacifying labor was designed to dissolve any sense of collective discontent. Industrial relations scholar Sumner Slichter claimed, in 1929, that “Modern personnel methods are one of the most ambitious social experiments of the age,” since they were designed to “counteract the effect of modern [technology] upon the mind of the worker and to prevent him from becoming class conscious and from organizing trade unions.”39 Perhaps that was the greatest lesson of the Steel Strike of 1919: Workers in America, even those who were native born, were not immune to class grievances. By the mid-1920s, some four million workers had been gathered under the umbrella of welfare capitalism. Through profit-sharing arrangements, life insurance, pension plans, company housing, group insurance program, and health benefits, large companies that could easily absorb these costs tried to pacify their workforces. Some companies did more than offer benefits. They set up baseball teams that competed in industrial leagues, provided cafeterias offering affordable meals, and company magazines featuring photos and essays that emphasized worker-management harmony. The themes of employee efficiency, company benevolence, and

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American patriotism permeated the public relations drive. U.S. Steel— formerly Carnegie-Illinois—lavished $22 million on playgrounds, clubs, visiting nurses, a softball league featuring fifty-six teams, a bowling league made up of ninety-eight teams, as well as organized basketball and boxing, a glee club, a band, and a camera club. In addition to benefits and organized sports, the companies also sponsored “employee representation plans” (ERPs), a euphemism for company unions. Employee representation schemes featured elections and grievance systems, but they did not amount to collective bargaining. Managers made sure that wages and benefits were beyond the scope of ERP influence. They made no effort to train organizers in the rubrics of negotiations or inform them about conditions in other plants. What the ERPs provided was the façade of industrial democracy and the reality of managerial control.40 The companies matched internal control with paternalistic meddling in the local community. By infiltrating local institutions, companies sought to prevent union activity and oppositional politics. The apprentice roll turner from Scotland remembered that U.S. Steel exercised “complete control” in Southeast Chicago. From managing the construction of a new YMCA to shaping school board policies to reserving the right to veto a local library, U.S. Steel’s reach extended into the Calumet District. If the region never became a mill town, that was not because U.S. Steel did not try.41 The steel companies and other large interests also offered their employees stock options. George Patterson, who landed a job in the blacksmith shop at South Works and then became a roll turner’s apprentice, remembered this aspect of welfare capitalism. Hired in 1924, he earned twenty-six cents an hour for ten hours a day. As CarnegieIllinois expanded and sought ways to stabilize its workforce, it launched an advertising blitz to convince workers to invest in the company. Earning a meager wage and faced by the constant threat of slowdowns, Patterson took a chance. He purchased one share in 1927 for $144; by October 1929, it was worth $259. Six months after the collapse of the stock market, the share’s value had declined by almost $50. “This kind of tragedy made lots of people sit up and take notice that there was a lack of security,” Patterson remembered, “not only without a union, but also in the economic program of the country.”42 The young roll turner’s apprentice was not the only skeptic. Most workers did not internalize the ethic of welfare capitalism. Yet they did begin to believe that what had been given as privilege had been won as a right. They began to expect pensions, health benefits, decent cafeterias, and company-supported recreational activities. Turning the


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instruments of employee manipulation against the companies, workers began to consider welfare an entitlement.43 What surprised George Patterson most about working in South Chicago was the silence about the strike of 1919. The dapper, mustachioed, almost dandyish Patterson, who bore a closer resemblance to Clark Gable than to the stereotypically calloused steel hand, was surprised to find so little consciousness of that dramatic uprising. As a newcomer to the area, he was “quite unaware that there had been a serious strike. In fact,” he later admitted, “I learned more about the 1919 strike that had been lost, which was led by William Z. Foster, at the time when the CIO was beginning.” By that time, a mythology about the strike had hardened into an effective barrier against prounion sentiment. “Of course, it was the old story,” Patterson recalled. “They tried to say that the organizers of 1919 had run away with the money, they sold the workers out, that the union was something that could not be trusted.”44 The red scare of 1919, which sought to portray every labor activist as a bomb-throwing bolshevik, had gone a long way toward crippling the labor movement. The silence about the steel strike only compounded the inertia of workers in the 1920s. And there was the central problem: This was the era of business individualism and the celebration of competition. Corporate leaders created a favorable business environment not only by adopting welfare capitalism but also by vigorously opposing union organization. Calling it the American Plan, business leaders launched an open shop campaign that thwarted industrial organization.45 At the same time, American manufacturers blacklisted union activists and militants. They adopted “yellow dog” contracts that prohibited employees from joining a union. Under this repressive measure, anyone who signed a union card was subject to dismissal. The state helped business maintain the open shop. Instead of following the provisions of the 1914 Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which seemed to exempt unions from prosecution for “restraining trade,” the courts turned against organized labor. From the Supreme Court on down, the judiciary returned to issuing injunctions against union leaders. Stringent limits were imposed on picketing. The courts gave their assent to the yellow dog contract and prohibited sympathy strikes. They also ruled that unions could be held responsible for damages if they violated these laws.46 Whatever hope that the state would support the movement for industrial democracy faded in the backlash of the 1920s. On the shop f loor, foremen treated their sections like personal fiefdoms. The companies might have wanted them to adopt the modern

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techniques of personnel management, but they gave their subordinates enormous latitude. Steel foremen controlled the hiring process, using it to reward friends and sycophantic employees. George Patterson remembered that employees could expect an extra day of work only if they mowed the foreman’s lawn, procured him a bottle of wine in the era of prohibition, shined his car, or volunteered his wife for windowwashing detail at his house. Lacking a grievance system or seniority, workers had little choice but to follow the dictates of these departmental despots. When the company needed to stretch out the work day, they unilaterally terminated the customary five minutes at the end of the shift that was designated for removing the accumulated grime of steelwork. In measures like these, the company made it clear that what was given could easily be taken away. Any sense of independence that workers enjoyed during the war years when the federal government supported organized labor had been replaced by a grinding feeling of vulnerability to company power.47 The open shop campaign contributed to the general lassitude among workers. But so, too, did the memories of a disastrous steel strike. “I didn’t realize,” Patterson recalled, “that these old timers were staying in line because of the lessons, the bitter lessons, they had learned from experience from the union.” Steelworkers, both skilled and unskilled, suffered the disillusionment of a failed bid for justice, a mood that the open shop drive only encouraged. While the companies used the velvet glove of corporate welfare, they exploited the widespread job insecurity to ensure obedience. “There was too much fear,” Patterson believed, to fashion any kind of opposition to company control. “Management could walk in and fire anybody anytime. They didn’t practice this too much but they did it on occasion.” No doubt, those occasions were riveted in the memories of steel employees and served as a check on actions that might be considered insubordinate. “They would give you a threat that your job would be insecure and this would keep a man in line for quite a period of time,” Patterson observed. “You were dominated but it was done in such a manner, the hidden fear, the hidden persuader . . . it was always there, the hidden persuader with your job.”48 Mailed fist in velvet glove, the steel companies manipulated their workers into submission. Wholesale firings were not necessary; the “hidden fear” was sufficient. Sigmund Freud would have been impressed. While George Patterson was on the road to becoming a labor leader, Tom Girdler was busy refining the labor management techniques that would make Southeast Chicago notorious in the 1930s. Girdler was


29

the product of an Indiana farm upbringing. Financial assistance from an aff luent aunt made it possible for the athletic young Girdler to study mechanical engineering at Lehigh University. In 1908, the ambitious engineer became general superintendent of the Atlanta Steel Company. His meteoric rise up the steelmaking chain brought him to Jones and Laughlin in Aliquippa, where he began work as an assistant to the general superintendent. After guiding the company safely through the upheaval of 1919, Girdler moved into the general superintendent’s chair in 1920. He would build a centralized system of managerial control that rivaled any southern mill village.49 Earlier, however, Girdler worked as a foreman at the Oliver Iron and Steel Company, where he developed the managerial style that governed his conduct until retirement. In an updated version of Machiavelli’s formula for princely authority, he came to believe that workers respected fear more than love. Although he believed an employer should be reasonable, it was the employer’s responsibility to determine what that was. According to historian Donald Sofchalk, he was “inf lexible,” “irascible,” and a practitioner of demeaning profanity, all of which he used to cow opponents and subdue underlings.50 The ruthless tactics were an expression of his belief that he understood the needs of steelworkers better than “outside agitators.” He had worked in steel mills and proven that he was equal to its challenges. Rather than a distant corporate executive, he imagined himself a tough but paternalistic manager who could balance the needs of production against the needs of his workers. “All of the plants of that company were operated on the open-shop basis,” he later recalled. “I previously had experience working in steel plants, and I thought then and I think now, that I know something about how the workers in steel plants feel about these matters.”51 At Jones and Laughlin, he combined his antipathy for workplace resistance and his imperious temperament in a program to make Aliquippa business friendly. He succeeded marvelously, transforming the town and the plant into what critics described as “Little Siberia.” He expanded the company security force, outfitting them in uniforms that made them look like the Pennsylvania State Police. They were issued revolvers to complete the intimidating image. To ensure employee compliance, Girdler investigated anyone suspected of being an agitator or “troublemaker.” He believed that confronting a worker and telling him that he would be “better off ” not joining a union was an exercise of the employer’s civil liberties.52 As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explained, Girdler used an “elaborate system of espionage” that “permeated not only the plants

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but extended into the schools, churches, lodges, and even the homes” of Aliquippa. “He kept Aliquippa a model company town,” the Post Dispatch observed. “He met his employees individually. He barred outsiders. No labor trouble disturbed his routine.” For Girdler, it was simply a matter of utilizing “civil liberties and freedom of speech” to convince the worker that he, rather than an outside agitator, should be in command of his own future. Creating a climate of fear about challenging company prerogatives, Girdler’s company ruled with an iron fist.53 Girdler defined himself as an enemy of organized labor, but part of that animosity f lowed from his love for steel. He understood the industry and relished its monumental forces, the camaraderie of the work crews, and the expertise that went into transforming the earth’s elements into the framework of industrial progress. “The biggest blast furnace in the world is operated in our steel plant there in Warren,” boasted Girdler in his autobiography. “This furnace is a massive wellspring from which f low 1,350 tons of molten pig iron every day.” The former steelworker turned corporate tycoon waxed eloquent at the realization that the furnace depended on the efforts of some 6,500 workers. He marveled at the transformation of molten metal into ingots. Poured into open-hearth furnaces, kneaded with scrap metal, the glistening slabs moved through the mill in a relentless march that showed no consideration for time.54 In reverent detail, Girdler explained how white hot ingots were prepared in the massive soaking pits for refining through the rolling mills. “Blooms become billets. Billets become sheets.” The coating of steel against rust and the ceaseless operation of “two cold strip mills, and three hot strip mills” left him awe-inspired. “Most of this steel production is the work of men, thousands of men, devoted to steel.” The antiunion agenda was never far from Girdler’s mind, however; veneration of “the men” was in part his effort to invest them with a heroic quality that could not be sullied by mere wage carping. Working in teams, they were rewarded for their productivity, Girdler seemed to say, not their demands.55 Yet mixed in with this defense of managerial control was genuine admiration for the alchemists of steel. “This isn’t assembly-line drudgery. Pride comes with skill in steel making. These men aren’t payroll numbers. In the open hearths every third helper, yes, every cinder snapper, prepares to be a melter. Each roller leads a crew; each soaking pit heater and his helpers are proud because of what they can do in this great work and because so much they know isn’t learned


31

from any book. They are steelworkers.” For all of his admiration of the noble steelworker, Girdler failed to understand that these were not the proudly independent iron puddlers of the nineteenth century. Despite their skill and tenacity, the majority of steel laborers worked in perilous conditions for parsimonious wages over which they had little control. If Girdler’s hero was the Anglo-Saxon skilled roller, the industrial reality was quite different. Drawn from immigrant stock, performing largely unskilled and dangerous tasks, twentieth-century industrial workers looked nothing like the iron masters of old. The myth of the noble steelworker might have comforted Girdler in his reverie for the rugged individualism of the nineteenth century, but it obscured his perception of the realities that confronted the “payroll numbers” who worked his mills.56 The tactics of steel leaders like Girdler and the gentle coercion of corporate welfare made the 1920s an inhospitable period for industrial unionism. From the militant heights of 1920, when union membership reached an unprecedented 5 million members, union ranks steadily thinned out, reaching 3.6 million in 1923 and continuing downward for the rest of the decade. Strikes—the ultimate measure of the strength of organized labor—also declined. From 1916 to 1921, the average number of strikes was one hundred; between 1926 and 1930, that figure had dropped to eighteen. More than this, the pure-and-simple unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) dominated the tone of the movement in this era. The postwar red scare launched a crusade against labor radicals that effectively crushed the IWW and drove Socialists and Communists out of union ranks. Their presence in the labor movement would be a constant source of controversy, but their work as vigorous organizers made them vital to its success. Purged of labor militants and the hope of industrial unionism, which aimed to unite all workers regardless of their skills, the movement focused on craft unionism. The AFL adopted a business-friendly outlook that accepted the status quo and the prerogatives of private enterprise. As historian Irving Bernstein described it, the AFL “advertised itself both as a proponent and a bastion of the existing order of society, and enthusiastic admirer of capitalism and a staunch enemy of bolshevism.”57 Pervaded by racial prejudice, the AFL ignored the Mexican, African American, Asian, and women workers who flooded the ranks of American manufacturing. The interests of skilled trade unionists took the place of organizing the mass industries. By 1932, the once-mighty Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers included 4,944 workers. Considering that nearly 90,000 workers walked out in Chicago

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alone during the Steel Strike of 1919, supporters of the labor movement had little reason to cheer the Amalgamated. Considering that by 1933 only one-eighth of the iron and steel industry employed what could be described as skilled workers, the Amalgamated and the AFL could barely even claim to represent the average industrial laborer. If anything, their practices and political perspective had become thoroughly antagonistic to the prewar ideal of industrial democracy.58 *** The Depression ravaged the American countryside, but it struck cities like Chicago with such devastating force that it made the crisis of the 1930s seem an almost entirely urban phenomenon. A full onehalf of the people employed in Chicago’s manufacturing sector in 1927 had lost their jobs by 1933. By 1931, Chicago found itself burdened by 624,000 unemployed persons. That represented 40 percent of the city’s entire workforce. By 1934, less than 10 percent of the Pullman Car Company’s 8,000 employees were still on the job. Of more than 120,000 employees in the building trades before the Crash, only 10,000 still remained, the rest settling for sporadic and poorly-paid work. Few working-class Chicagoans escaped the ravages of the Depression, but African Americans fared the worst. In the early years of the Depression, they constituted only 4 percent of the city’s population. Operating according to the principle that blacks should be hired as a last resort and fired at the first sign of labor surplus, businesses dismissed them in droves. Despite the size of the black community, it suffered 16 percent unemployment. The “forgotten man” of Chicago often inhabited a black skin.59 For all of the hyperbole of the Jazz Age, it was the inequitable distribution of earnings that would stand as the greatest legacy of the 1920s. It divided owners and workers along class lines that would have profound consequences in the next decade. The economists of the Roosevelt administration would describe it as “underconsumption,” a chronic lack of purchasing power among America’s working class. To put it in stark terms, between 1920 and 1929, the per capita disposable income for the average wage earner increased by 9 percent. By contrast, incomes for those in the highest one percent increased by an astonishing 75 percent. Even more than income, the distribution of wealth told the tale of disparity in the 1920s. A full 80 percent of American families held no savings whatsoever. The leading 0.1 percent, a total of 24,000 families, accounted for 34 percent of the nation’s total savings.


33

Although only 2.3 percent of American families earned more than $10,000 annually, they possessed two-thirds of the country’s total savings. Despite rising productivity in the era of Coolidge and Hoover, industrial workers did not see a significant improvement in their livelihoods. As manufacturing became more efficient, prices dropped and profits increased, but wages saw little change. Between 1923 and 1929, productivity increased by nearly 32 percent, but wages increased only by 8 percent. The very people most responsible for and best positioned to enjoy the benefits of industrial productivity could barely afford the refrigerators, stoves, and automobiles rolling off the nation’s assembly lines. Low wages also meant that working-class Americans lacked the savings necessary to endure a major financial catastrophe.60 Chicago’s steelworkers were caught in a national economic hurricane that left behind wreckage unparalleled in the American experience. From an unemployment level of 1.4 million in 1929, the number of idled workers rose to 4.3 million in 1930, then 8 million in 1932, then shockingly higher to 12.8 million, or 24.9 percent, in 1933. Between 1929 and 1933, some five thousand banks collapsed. Panicked depositors only made the consequences of imprudent stock market speculation worse by retrieving every penny they could from the sinking ship of American finance. The failures eliminated more than $7 billion of savings. Unable to pay their mortgages, homeowners stood by as the banks repossessed their homes. In 1930, that added up to 150,000 properties; in 1931, it was 200,000. Municipalities and states across the nation failed to pay creditors. They drastically reduced social services and payrolls while clawing back wages. Even before the stock market collapse, Chicago found itself unable to pay its teachers, firefighters, police, welfare workers, nurses, and civil servants. The depth of the crisis was no more evident than in the fact that the city tried to pay its teachers in tax rebates. In the 1932–33 school year, it simply stopped paying them altogether. By 1932, almost 20 percent of the entire workforce was unemployed. Chicago, Detroit, and other major cities were particularly hard hit. It was there that heavy industry was concentrated, and it was those industries that were so conspicuously idled by the era’s tragedy. In these cities, unemployment reached nearly 50 percent.61 Although the losses to the city’s industry were shocking, the trauma of the Depression appeared most poignantly in the experiences of average people. One visitor to the city in 1932 commented that “I found the suffering among the jobless in Chicago immeasurably worse than in any other section or city.” For social worker Louise Armstrong, the images of suffering made an indelible impression. “We saw the city at

34


its worst,” she recalled. “We saw Want and Despair walking the streets, and our friends, sensible, thrifty families, reduced to poverty. . . . One vivid, gruesome moment of those dark days we shall never forget. We saw a crowd of some fifty men fighting over a barrel of garbage that had been set outside the backdoor of a restaurant. American citizens fighting for scraps of food like animals!” The city’s residents were hungry, largely jobless, and increasingly homeless. In 1932, the city evicted as many as 1,400 families. Municipal court judge Samuel Heller presided over many of the evictions. The courtroom became the scene of dramas that tested the plausibility of the American Dream. Heller remembered that he “had an average of four hundred cases a day. People fainted, people cried: ‘Where am I going?’ ”62 Perhaps the experience of city employee James D. O’Reilly best encapsulated that suffering. Unable to pay his municipal tax bill of $34, he saw his house auctioned off, even while the city still owed him $850 in back pay.63 When the Depression hit, it tore at the fabric of the ethnic communities that bound Chicago’s industrial workers together. South Chicago was not simply a patchwork of ethnic enclaves. Yet the ethnic churches, assembly halls, fraternal lodges, building and loan banks, and insurance associations were the least able to manage the economic disaster of the Depression. They were simply unable to protect working-class Chicagoans at that critical moment. Pressured by declining revenues, companies that had sponsored generous benefits under the rubric of welfare capitalism eliminated them along with the workers they had tried to control. The collapse of the corporate welfare programs and the failure of untrammeled capitalism to provide a measure of security would propel steelworkers down the path travelled by the steelworkers of the great strike of 1919. It would create the conditions in which Chicago’s laborers would once again take up the banner of industrial unionism and social democracy.64 Newly married, with a child on the way, and working only sporadically at U.S. Steel, the roll turner George Patterson would be right in the middle of it.

CH A P T E R

T WO

Out of Despair

Visiting Chicago in 1932, journalist Morris Markey noted that the city seemed “organized for toil, a breathless outpouring of energy with all goals obscured in the clamor of labor for its own sake.” A year earlier, the writer Mary Borden, a native of Chicago but a resident of London, was similarly taken by a return trip to the Windy City. “Go there, as I did. Get out of your train and drive up Michigan Avenue. I defy you not to respond to the excitement in the air, not to feel the drumming pulse of the great dynamo beating in your veins, not to throw your hat to the sky and shout.” The image of a frenetic, pulsating, boundlessly energetic city had struck countless observers since the late nineteenth century. In 1932, though, it was more image than reality. Beneath the scene of city residents rushing up State Street and traffic furiously crossing Wacker Drive was remarkable social distress. By October 1931, 40 percent of workers—some 624,000 people— had been idled by the crisis. Most of the distress was concentrated in areas of the city that few visitors would ever see. Markey observed that “the quarter million of Negroes in South Chicago” had traded in their “Southern carelessness” for the “hurrying stride” of the city of big shoulders. But the Virginian’s regional and racial stereotypes offered little insight into Depression-era Chicago. Borden came closer to the city’s duality. “Chicago is gorgeous and it is awful,” she noted. Beyond the shimmering beauty of Lake Michigan and the breathtaking cityscapes lay “a vast scene of desolate ugliness . . . more dreadful than any others” because they were so “f limsy, so shallow, so open, so bleak.” Beyond the brilliant lights of Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s manufacturing workers were barely hanging on.1

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The cloak of jobless despair seemed to suffocate any hope for recovery. Observing the area around Hull House, writer Edmund Wilson noted that “all around . . . there today stretches a sea of misery more appalling even that that which discouraged Miss Addams in the nineties.”2 Despite the evidence of calamity, President Herbert Hoover assured the American people that the system was fundamentally sound. He took at least some steps toward remedying the blight of unemployment and the collapse of institutions ranging from banks to municipal governments. Yet neither his actions nor the nostrums of business leaders were enough to rally the ailing economy. Even though the majority of Americans continued to work, most either experienced reduced hours, wages, or the consequences of a family member out of work. But while despair seemed to grip most average workers, the possibility of change excited left-leaning political organizations. They, in turn, would inf luence the political environment around them. They would provide an example to labor reformers such as George Patterson and others who would lead the drive for steel unions.3 Events in Chicago were central to the unfolding of the labor movement, but events at the national level and in cities across the country deeply inf luenced the paths that would open to Chicago’s workers in that decade of discontent. Protests in places as far away as Los Angeles and Washington testified to the emergence of a mood of discontent. Strikes and demonstrations in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Flint, Michigan, unleashed forces that would culminate in the steel district of South Chicago. The voluntary approach to the crisis was proving to be chronically insufficient. As for the Cook County Department of Public Aid, it financed a small band of relief agents who proved unequal to the task. Although the county contributed millions in the first two years of the Depression, it generally funneled money into private charities rather than direct relief. By the end of 1931, private agencies were still responsible for the largest expenditures of relief. Republican Mayor William Thompson was preoccupied with job creation, a noble but misguided pursuit since companies lacked the customers that warranted hiring new employees. The governing assumption was that business would recover if only it was provided the right tax and credit incentives. The poor would have to rely on private charities, the unemployed would have to keep their work ethic intact, and a system of government minimalism would endure.4 Into this void moved the Communist Party. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, it emerged in Chicago out of the political turmoil of the

Out of Despair

37

postwar era. The 1920s had not been kind to the party. By 1931, the Chicago branch could count only 2,000 dues-paying members in its ranks. Yet it was able to mobilize some 12,000 votes for William Z. Foster, Communist candidate for the presidency in 1932 and veteran of the Steel Strike of 1919. Determined to foster unity among the dispossessed, the party aggressively recruited African Americans. Half of the one thousand black members of the party in 1931 were from Chicago. The numbers did not tell the entire story, however. By defending the Scottsboro Boys, unjustly accused of raping two white women on a train to Alabama, the party gained credibility among the city’s working class and indeed many of the nation’s blacks. By nominating an African American for the vice presidency, organizing the unemployed, holding massive demonstrations against racial discrimination in the south side’s Washington Park, and advocating for evicted black tenants, the party won considerable support among black Chicagoans.5 Defending evicted tenants was part of a larger national strategy to represent the unemployed. Following a 1929 directive from the Comintern and under the leadership of the party’s Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), Communist districts throughout the country began to organize Unemployed Councils. The idea was to tie the party’s campaign to the workplace and the trade union drive. While state and federal authorities dithered, the party made plans to bring Communist trade union activists and the unemployed together in a common front. Starting in Detroit, the councils spread to Buffalo, where in January 1930, the local council led 3,000 demonstrators in a protest march. Councils were soon active in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The party was able to draw hundreds—or thousands, depending on the source—to an International Unemployment Day in March 1930. In an echo of the antilabor violence of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Chicago police broke up a meeting of Unemployed Council organizers at the Mechanics Hall and arrested thirteen leaders on charges of sedition. They took them to a downtown police station, interrogated them, and beat them mercilessly. Steve Nelson, a Communist Party leader, remembered being strapped to a chair and subjected to a rain of blows from a police blackjack. He was able to def lect the attack by wrenching the chair on its side and pretending to be unconsciousness. A policeman’s kick to his side ultimately did render him unconscious. When he came to, he recalled washing his “bloody face in the washroom. . . . An hour later I found my friends sitting on a cement f loor in front of the elevator. Harold Williams was stretched out, his torn pants revealing an enormous rupture, and

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B. D. Amos had his front teeth knocked out. Joe Dallet was bleeding from the mouth and had a gash on his cheek, and Rodman’s thick black hair was caked with blood.”6 Long before Congress struck committees to investigate subversive activity, the new red scare was emerging. Authorities across the United States scrambled to manage what they considered incipient revolution. Violent confrontations between police and demonstrators took place in Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and New York. It was in New York, though, that this new wave of social activists found out what the authorities had in store for them. Some two thousand demonstrators followed the Communist leader William Z. Foster onto Broadway, directly into the path of a phalanx of police on motorcycles, horses, and foot. In a scene that would become hauntingly familiar to the workers of South Chicago, the New York police dove into the crowd “swinging nightsticks, blackjacks, and bare fists . . . hitting out at all with whom they came in contact, chasing many across the street. . . . A score of men with bloody heads and faces sprawled over the Square with police pummeling them.”7 Even as men and women f led, terrified at the ferocious, lightening-speed attack, police constables and detectives continued the assault. In all, hundreds of thousands of Americans had joined the protest. It was a sign that many were no longer content to accept their abject predicament.8 The strategy may have generated some high-profile confrontations, but it failed to mobilize the unemployed into a sustained movement. The party was disappointed at its own low turnout for the March 6 event, and resolved to find a more effective strategy. That led, in July 1930, to the Unemployed Councils of the United States. With 1,320 delegates attending the Chicago conference, the organization endorsed federal relief, unemployment insurance, control of expenditures by the unemployed, and racial unity on behalf of the Depression’s victims. Absorbing the existing Unemployed Councils, the new organization would focus its work on neighborhoods rather than industries. Communist organizer Steve Nelson understood the transformative significance of the party’s commitment to the unemployed councils. Immediate grievances, rather than class revolution, became the party’s focus. “It was from involvement in the daily struggles that we learned to shift away from a narrow, dogmatic approach. . . . We began to raise demands for immediate relief by the city and state, immediate assistance to the unemployed, and a moratorium on mortgages, and finally we began to talk about the need for national unemployment insurance.”9 This was a grassroots organization adapting to local conditions, not simply following in lock-step the directions of party headquarters.10

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Most importantly, here was direct action at a time when most Americans were simply reeling from the shock of the crisis. Participants cajoled relief station workers in an effort to extract additional assistance. When people were evicted from their homes, the party intervened by moving their furniture back into their apartments and houses. They restored utilities that had been cut off and resisted the efforts of authorities to dislodge tenants. Communist members agitated for better conditions and better social services in the city’s low-income tenements. Activists simultaneously advocated for state and federal assistance to the despondently unemployed. In advancing this argument, the Communist-affiliated Unemployed Councils forged an uneasy coalition with reformers from across the political left. Socialists aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy eventually forged their own council, the Workers’ Committee on Unemployment. Both organizations made the case that unemployment, poverty, and social decay were indeed the responsibilities of government.11 For a while, however, these arch rivals of the Left cooperated. In October 1932, Socialists and Communists sponsored a silent protest march that drew some 25,000 participants. Dr. Lewis Andreas, who would soon find himself entangled in the steel conf lict in South Chicago, remembered the strange event. It was a “very silent, scraggly march of the unemployed. Nobody said anything. Just a mass of people f lowing down that street. In their minds,” Andreas believed, “a point was reached: We’re not gonna take it any more. I remember it particularly because of the silence. No waving of banners, no enthusiasm. An undercurrent of desperation.”12 Marching sullenly in the rain through Chicago’s Loop District to protest a 50 percent reduction in grocery relief, Chicago’s workers proved that they were capable of more than despair. They also demonstrated that they were not immune to the communists’ appeals. Subordinating their dreams of revolution, the party agitated for immediate improvements in the lives of American workers. While most leaders trusted in a spontaneous recovery, Communists and other leftist activists advocated for government intervention. Their demonstrative campaign eventually convinced local governments to pay attention to the human wreckage of the Great Depression. While the councils began to decline in the mid-1930s, the example of streetlevel action remained. The Unemployed Councils provided a training ground for many of the workers who became CIO union organizers. Direct action, the idea of federal responsibility, the belief in the virtue of racial equality for any democratic social movement, and the

40


rejuvenation of the idea of industrial democracy were the legacy of this activism.13 That was not the only legacy of the Unemployed Councils. The evictions and protests at relief stations were often the occasions of violence by Chicago police. In August 1931, a branch of the Unemployed Councils mobilized some five hundred black and white workers to intervene in an eviction on South Dearborn Street. There, they found seventy-two-year-old Diana Gross on the sidewalk tending her furniture. It was a familiar scene that would play out repeatedly across Depression-wracked Chicago. Council activists and supporters swung into action, quickly moving her furniture back into her apartment. It was at this point that police and two municipal court bailiffs arrived. According to party witnesses, the authorities had been dispatched at the joint request of local real estate agents, the district attorney’s office, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The police and the Unemployed Council members had already tangled at relief stations, but this episode was uniquely vicious. The police lit into the crowd, clubbing the activists in a fashion that would become all too familiar in the 1930s. Abe Gray, a black council member, and three other sympathizers tried to disrupt the police assault. The police retaliated, shooting him in the arm and killing two others, John O’Neill and Frank Armstrong. The pattern of antilabor violence inherited from the Gilded Age and revived during the Great Steel Strike had been reawakened in Depression-era Chicago.14 This was not 1919, though, with its undisciplined rank-and-file workers struggling vainly to win the support of native-born craft unionists. In the 1930s, disciplined social activists were emerging from the Communist Party and other leftist organizations to challenge a system that had failed millions of Americans. More than this, they found working-class Americans ready to take action. On South Dearborn Street, neighborhood party members and supporters coordinated a mass protest meeting in Washington Park that drew between 7,000 and 10,000 people. The momentum continued into the next week as activists held large-scale meetings that drew between 5,000 and 7,000 workers each night to Washington Park. Communist activists and supporters then organized the funeral for the murdered black protestors. Guided by the Unemployed Council, it became a mass protest against city government complicity in the police assault. Distributing literally thousands of leaf lets advertising the Unemployed Council, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the Communist Party, activists

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called on the city’s workers to organize rather than mourn. According to party leader Bill Gebert, as many as 100,000 workers took to Chicago’s streets on the day of the funeral to protest the injustice and to collect money for the victims’ families. Transcending the prejudice that infected American society, white and black workers organized in direct protest. The demonstration generated confidence among Chicago’s south side working class, but it also achieved results. The municipal court bailiff terminated the issuing of eviction warrants. For his part, Mayor Anton Cermak, who would soon fall to an assassin’s bullet intended for Franklin D. Roosevelt, imposed a temporary moratorium on rents.15 The evictions did not stop, however. To dislodge tenants, landlords started turning off the water, gas, and electricity in tenant dwellings across the city. The council protests at relief stations and municipal lodging houses only escalated. At a relief station protest in Humboldt Park on the North Side, police attacked the disabled Martina Knutzen, knocking her to the ground. They clubbed her and then dragged her on her knees across the railroad tracks into a waiting patrol wagon. The officers refused to collect a shoe she had lost on the way. When a twelveyear-old boy made the mistake of trying to protect her, the police lashed out at him. They quickly turned and attacked another woman who shouted at them to end the assault, striking her on the head. One witness remembered a police officer hitting a woman who was pushing a baby carriage. As the woman fell, the carriage overturned, spilling the child on the ground. Another constable clubbed a man and dragged him to the paddy wagon. Shouting “You God-damned red, you’re one of the leaders,” a police officer hit the protestor on the leg with a baseball bat before shoving him into the wagon. The police denied any violence, but noncommunist witnesses testified that the vicious attack had indeed taken place.16 The street protests made an indelible impression not only on the unemployed, but also on the officers. On January 25, 1933, unemployed protestors reportedly attacked two police officers and knocked them unconscious in a protest in South Chicago. Two days later, Captain James L. Mooney, who would soon be patrolling striking steelworkers, found himself in the middle of a confrontation with 300 unemployed African Americans. He was allegedly struck by an iron bar and severely injured in an incident that he would recall in testimony before the La Follette Committee. Tensions mounted the following day. The police had been alerted to a protest that would take place close to the Chicago Tribune office on Michigan Avenue. Preparing for a

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confrontation, they arrived outfitted in combat helmets. Ambulances and police cars were dispatched to the scene. As a United Press reporter observed, “Michigan Boulevard from the Drake Hotel to the midLoop was a virtual stage set for battle.” The frequent confrontations and increasing militancy of the unemployed convinced the police to prepare for a showdown. Oddly enough, the expected clash paled in comparison to the raucous uprising of the city’s teachers. Denied pay for most of the previous two years, city teachers were desperate in 1933. They repeatedly invaded the mayor’s office, stormed the Board of Education offices, led 15,000 high school students in a school strike, and launched a 20,000-strong demonstration of teachers and students through the Loop. The mood of anger and rebellion was intensifying in Chicago, and it was expanding beyond unemployed industrial workers.17 At the same time, police officers like Mooney were forming their own opinions about social protest. Yet what was clear was that Chicago’s activists and workers endured the worst of the exchanges. Journalist Mauritz Hallgren noted that “in virtually all of these cases (there were a few notable exceptions) the violence was initiated by the public authorities—rather than by the unemployed or their radical leaders.”18 In 1936, steelworker George Patterson joined the Workers Alliance in a protest at a welfare station. In those “hectic days,” as Patterson described them, police harassment became a common feature of social protest. It was “nothing to be followed by the police of Chicago. . . . They would break up our groups or else they would be stopping our cars. Those of us who could afford a car would be stopped and frisked.”19 The pattern of police coercion cast an ominous shadow over labor organizing in South Chicago. Contrary to the evidence, Chicago police resisted any suggestion that they might be the leading agents of disorder. Despite the police hostility, the Communists had succeeded in focusing national attention on the plight of the unemployed. More than this, they articulated the grievances of millions of workers in a compelling and coherent fashion, outlining the disparity between the promise of American abundance and the reality of working-class despair. They forced the issue of government relief for the unemployed like no other organization. The Communists certainly were not alone, however. In fact, the craft unionists who dominated the Chicago Federation of Labor were vigorous advocates of a system of unemployment relief to be financed by property taxes rather than sales taxes. Craft unionists eventually became inf luential players in Chicago’s political machine during the New Deal years. They helped foster the conviction among working

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people that government had an obligation to support the impoverished in a time of distress.20 Traveling across the country, Journalist C. R. Walker acknowledged the key role that the councils played in stimulating governments to respond to the crisis. He observed that, “In the cities I visited the economic status of the unemployed workers, the amount of relief, etc. was directly proportional to the strength of the Unemployed Councils.” Mauritz Hallgren of The Nation corroborated Walker’s observation. “Social Workers everywhere tell me that without the street demonstrations and the hunger marches of the unemployment councils no relief whatever would have been provided in some communities.”21 Despite the accusations of sedition and violence, the radicals had proven that protest could work. They had also proven their effectiveness in channeling it. Organized labor would learn and utilize both lessons. The steelworkers certainly absorbed the lesson, but they would also pay a very high price for it. First, however, they would place their confidence in Franklin D. Roosevelt. *** Elected in a landslide rejection of Herbert Hoover’s misguided voluntarism, Franklin D. Roosevelt applied his political acuity to the problem of American despair. More than anything else, he brought his infectious sense of optimism to Americans beaten down by circumstances beyond their control. Roosevelt was prepared to reject the shibboleths of a nineteenth-century political economy and find what worked. He was prepared, as he famously announced in a campaign speech, to adopt a program of “bold, persistent experimentation.” Roosevelt wasn’t making a morally neutral statement about his willingness to do anything to achieve recovery. Instead, he was articulating a vision of reform based on the idea of reciprocal social obligations. It was a pragmatism rooted in the ideals of the cooperative commonwealth.22 In a year that saw the unemployment rate climb to over 9 million and federal troops assault protesting veterans in the nation’s capital, working people were resolutely eager for change. Taking forty-two states and besting Hoover by more than 7 million votes, Roosevelt swept into the White House on a landslide triggered in large part by working-class support. Concentrated in major urban centers, workingclass voters swung decisively toward Roosevelt in 1932. In 1928, 46.9 percent of Chicago residents voted Democratic in 1928. In 1932, 57.1 percent cast a ballot for Roosevelt. In New York, the landslide was

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even higher, with 71.4 percent supporting the governor for president that year. The pattern was consistent throughout the major urban centers. Urban, working-class voters had shifted their allegiance to the Democratic Party. The margin of voters favoring the Democrats would widen even further four years later.23 Roosevelt had promised bold action and delivered it, helped along by a Democratic Congress champing at the bit for reform. Although the president endorsed public hydroelectricity and a civilian conservation program, he balked at government works projects. Brain Trust member Rexford G. Tugwell, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and progressive senators such as Robert F. Wagner and Robert La Follette Jr. pushed him further to the left. They convinced him to adopt a program of public works and join it to a plan for industrial recovery. The idea was to set industry-wide prices that would stabilize competition and control overproduction. What emerged was the National Industrial Recovery ACT (NIRA), which authorized $3.3. billion for the new Public Works Administration. Guided by the progressive accomplishments of the First World War, the drafters also provided for a National Recovery Administration (NRA) modeled after the War Industries Board. The NRA would supervise “code authorities” that would act like trade associations in setting prices and production quotas. The bill absolved companies from the requirements of antitrust legislation. In effect, the government would supervise the formation of cartels designed to revitalize American manufacturing. While Hoover had longed for business and government cooperation, the Roosevelt administration seemed ready to deliver it.24 Yet the NIRA carried another provision that would alter the character of labor relations in the 1930s. It would set in motion a series of events that tracked directly back to Chicago’s steelworkers. Reacting to a bill sponsored by Alabama Senator Hugo Black, which planned to create jobs by limiting the work week to thirty hours, the drafters of the NIRA included a section that guaranteed minimum wages and maximum hours for workers. Even more significant, they inserted a clause that organized labor had fought for since the days when the Knights of Labor excited hopes for industrial unionism and an eight-hour day. At the urging of Senator Robert F. Wagner, labor’s most consistent advocate in Congress, the administration included Section 7(a), which allowed industrial employees “to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.”25 Without fanfare, the measure repudiated the Gilded Age idea that the unfettered marketplace could mediate fairly between

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individual owners and workers. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins believed that the NIRA inaugurated the development of “a sound, socially just economic and industrial pattern.” Perkins hoped it would bind business and labor together in the logic of national planning.26 The “sound” economic planning behind collective bargaining was at least as important to Perkins and the New Dealers as the claims of social justice. The idea was to stabilize prices and wages while limiting production. According to the planners, this would root out pernicious competition and foster industrial recovery. If anyone understood the importance of eliminating anarchic competition and rejuvenating collapsed markets, it was organized labor. The unstable business was the business that could not pay decent wages. Unionists understood the vital importance of equilibrium in the area of wages and employment. Many business owners were beginning to grasp this as well.27 The argument on behalf of raising wages also corresponded with the redistributionist theory at the center of New Deal policy. According to the theory, a failure of working-class purchasing power underlay the Depression. Raising wages would help resolve this problem by stimulating purchasing power. Just as important, the architects of the NIRA understood that labor standards were part of the larger question of market regulation. It was the possibility of cartels that convinced some corporate leaders to accept a certain level of unionization though. In 1933 and 1934, many large interests seemed ready to accept increased wages through unionization. After all, those would be accompanied by production limits and minimum prices.28 National Recovery Administration studies confirmed that organized labor functioned as an effective protector of the codes. “Basic labor terms did much to stabilize competition,” one NRA report submitted, and “strong labor organization in an industry was found to assure the most effective codes.”29 Business was not uniformly sold on organized labor, of course. The more vulnerable to competition, the more hostile a company was to unionization. Some executives resented the idea that unions could play a role in governing the company. Others objected that government-protected unions might provide an entering wedge for radicalism. The diversity of opinion about Section 7(a) matched the cacophony of debate over the production quotas and prices. It did not bode well for industrial recovery.30 The NRA experiment in economic planning eventually collapsed under the weight of multiple weaknesses. Not the least of these was the fact that small businesses revolted against the codes while large businesses dominated the system and set prices to their advantage. As prices

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increased, businesses escalated their attack on labor unions or simply ignored the provisions of Section 7(a). By the time the Supreme Court invalidated the NIRA in 1935, the steam had gone out of the drive for a coordinated industrial recovery program.31 Yet the NIRA excited hopes of union recognition and the achievement of a more humane economic order. Despite the persistent trauma of unemployment and poverty, those hopes refused to dissipate. The idea of state-supervised collective bargaining and economic planning had entered into the political imagination of American workers. It awakened dreams of economic reform that would carry Roosevelt’s campaign against Gilded Age individualism into the very center of industrial America. It acknowledged that workers had to negotiate in strength in order to establish decent wage standards and working conditions. It gave industrial workers the legal platform they had lacked in 1919 to launch collective action. More than any appeal from even the most devoted labor militant, the collective bargaining protection in the NIRA regenerated organized labor and stimulated the drive for industrial unionism. Looking back to the measure in her memoirs, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins believed that the “rapid growth of membership when workers were relieved of the fear of being fired if they joined a union was evidence that there was a real trade union movement in the making in the United States.”32 The fear that had gripped the steelworkers in South Chicago—the fear George Patterson had observed at U.S. Steel—was beginning to dissipate. The evidence was in the surge of union activity that immediately followed passage of the NIRA. The stentorian John Lewis of the United Mine Workers and later, the CIO, dispatched organizers to revive the union in the coalfields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Announcing that the president wanted miners to join a union, Lewis and his organizers netted tens of thousands of new members. By the following year, over 500,000 miners had signed union cards. The momentum swept the auto industry, where memories of the consequences of antiunionism remained sharp. Soon, over 100,000 auto workers had f looded into the United Auto Workers (UAW). Organizers found workers eager to join unions in the rubber, electrical goods, textiles, and steel industries. More than one million workers rallied to the union banner. In the fall, workers launched strikes in the coal industry and the steel mills in order to gain union recognition. They were no longer content to rely on corporate charity, which had proven bankrupt. Nor, for that matter, were they content to wait for a spontaneous regeneration of a crippled free market system. Now, they were demanding the recognition of the

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legitimacy of union organization. In that effort, they not only had the support of the NIRA but also the benefit of legislation passed during the Hoover administration. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 prohibited the use of federal injunctions in cases where they would be used to support yellow dog contracts. (The yellow dog contract simply contained a clause that prohibited union membership as a condition of employment.) The NIRA made it the policy of the federal government to support the right of workers to establish independent unions and engage in collective bargaining. There were twice as many strikes in 1933 as in the year before. The strike wave intensified in the summer and fall of Roosevelt’s first year in office. The NIRA had revitalized moribund labor unions and ushered in hundreds more. In the summer of 1933, a new administration had gone on record in support of working-class self-determination. At least that was what workers believed.33 The reality was neither so simple nor so noble. Competitive industries carrying heavy labor costs might have been more willing to tolerate labor unions, particularly when it came in the form of AFL business unionism. The large competitive companies that were heavily capitalized and had little experience of unions, however, resisted the movement vigorously. While the bill was still before the Senate Finance Committee, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) testified strenuously against its labor protections. Foreshadowing the kind of opposition that workers would confront in their bid for steel unions, Robert Lamont of the American Iron and Steel Institute argued that the industry “stood positively for the open shop; it is unalterably opposed to the closed shop.” The steel industry would oppose any negotiations with “outside organizations of labor or with individuals not its employees.” Ominously, Lamont warned that if the steel industry’s position was not ref lected in the bill, “the intent and purpose of the bill cannot be accomplished.”34 The industry association had thrown down the gauntlet to try to extract favorable amendments from Congress. It stood defiantly against any bill that did not respect its interests. Only four days after the NIRA became law, the NAM was scurrying to defend the open shop. Meeting in Chicago, the convention endorsed a resolution that recapitulated the “constitutional rights of the employee and employer to bargain individually or collectively as may be mutually satisfactory to them.” Paying lip service to the administration’s policy of raising purchasing power, the manufacturers reiterated their determination to “prevent the coercion of workers” and assure employers that the bill would “not destroy or affect their mutual right to operate on an open shop basis.” According to the anxious delegates, many of

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whom represented the steel industry, the code did not “impair in any particular the constitutional rights of the employee and employer to bargain individually or collectively . . . nor does it impair the joint right of employer and employee to operate an open shop.” By July 1933, the NAM was circulating a letter among its members that affirmed their support for the open shop and their willingness to “cooperate with them in the maintenance of that right.”35 In the industries where the open shop had become company policy, the resistance would be vigorous. In notoriously antiunion industries such as steel, coal, and automobiles, resistance became positively aggressive. Although the Amalgamated had managed to recruit some 50,000 members by April 1934, it was the Communist-led Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union (SMWIU) that proved the most militant in testing the value of Section 7(a). The SMWIU was a product of the Communist Party’s dual union phase, during which it sought to organize a revolutionary working class through its Trade Union Unity League. With some 14,000 members, the SMWIU had more zeal than organizational stability. When a joint coal and steel strike spread from Pennsylvania to Ohio and West Virginia, affecting some 100,000 workers, the SMWIU swung into action. Its efforts in Warren, Ohio, proved a disastrous failure. At Indiana Harbor next to Southeast Chicago, however, the SMWIU launched a six-week strike at the Standard Forging Plant that generated enthusiasm throughout the steel district. In New York City, Buffalo, and Youngstown, Ohio, the SMWIU’s militancy paid off. There, the union won its main demands. Businesses that had grown used to worker despair now confronted an upsurge of union activism. They would not stand idly by. On October 5 in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, where the SMWIU led a strike, sheriff’s deputies shot and wounded twenty-one people in an assault on union picket lines. Between August and October 1933, fifteen workers were killed trying to organize strikes. The veneer of civility between business and labor had grown dangerously thin.36 The SMWIU established a presence in Southeast Chicago that proved more important than its immediate accomplishments. Although the Communist Party never gained the following it had hoped for in this white, ethnic, industrialized area, it did succeed in establishing a Workers School that recruited some one hundred students, fifty of whom were steelworkers. It soon opened another in Gary, Indiana, where U.S. Steel operated a massive steel mill. Its f ledgling plant units also developed to the point that they produced their own shop papers, including the Illinois Steel Worker at U.S. Steel’s South Works in Southeast Chicago. More than this, the SMWIU assembled an “Anti-Company Union

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Conference” that drew 239 steelworkers together and established links between party members and noncommunists. More than any singular achievement, the party produced leaders and activists who would play a critical role in the union movement. One of these was Joe Weber, who earned his stripes in the Unemployed Council movement. He organized a conference with socialist unemployed activists, worked on behalf of the SMWIU, and became an instructor at the South Chicago Workers School. Union members, police, and residents of South Chicago would soon become quite familiar with Joe Weber.37 By September 1933, the seemingly implacable union drive was coming up against legal barriers that would drastically weaken it in the coming years. In August, NRA administrator Hugh Johnson and his assistant Daniel Richberg drafted a ruling on Section 7(a) that critically undermined the legal grounds for independent, noncoercive unions. Johnson and Richberg announced on August 23 that no single union could claim to be the exclusive representative of a group of employees. That would give business the opening it needed to deal with several different unions at once. It was a time-honored strategy for eroding labor unity.38 Johnson and Richberg also insisted that the open shop was legitimate; so too were “Employee Representation Plans,” a euphemism for company-controlled unions. That device had been a mainstay of the corporate welfare programs of the 1920s.39 Quite simply, business had won a key legal battle against the labor movement. The ruling only intensified the company’s antiunion campaign. Companies discharged union supporters, interfered in union meetings, and recruited local officials to help break up strikes and organizing drives.40 Yet industrial workers received a different message from the Roosevelt administration. Hundreds of thousands of workers now demanded something better than corporate welfare and shop-f loor intimidation. They also had the example of direct action protest provided by the hunger marchers and the Unemployed Councils. The radicals who led those protests articulated the grievances of millions of American workers who wanted something more than company paternalism and government indifference. With employers determined to protect the open shop and workers convinced that their time had come, the powder keg was set. *** It blew the following year. In 1934, the United States witnessed the closest thing to a working-class uprising that it had seen since the Great

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Railroad Strike of 1877. As many as 1.5 million employees joined 1,800 strikes across the nation. In Minneapolis, Trotskyite activists strode to the front of a Teamsters Union strike that took on the coordinated power of a local employers’ association, a strident red-baiting campaign, a vicious police force, and the international leadership of their own union. The workers won. In Toledo, Ohio, unemployed workers joined employees on strike at the Electric Auto-Lite parts plant. They were soon joined by some 10,000 community supporters. When a pitched, seven-hour battle broke out between workers and company security forces, the National Guard was dispatched to repel the crowd. They killed two workers and wounded fifteen others. Faced with the threat of a general strike, the company capitulated. The union won wage increases, jobs for the striking workers, and union recognition.41 A massive longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco and the astonishing uprising of some 400,000 textile workers from New England to the New South confirmed the outbreak of a working-class revolt.42 What happened in 1934 moved well beyond a union drive for improved wages and benefits; it was the spearhead of a thrust against the hopelessness of the Depression itself. Entire working-class communities joined strikers because they believed that they represented a broader attack on the injustice of poverty in a land of plenty. The protests of the Unemployed Councils and violent repression of the veterans’ “Bonus Army” in Washington in 1932 provided the impetus for the uprisings of 1934. They convinced countless working-class Americans that only protest could produce a more humane and equitable society. The NIRA seemed to make those protests legitimate. In the f lush of early New Deal enthusiasm, it appeared as if the federal government had joined working people in challenging irresponsible economic power. How American workers responded to those developments would prove decisive for the nation and for the New Deal. The site of that contest would be the steel industry, and South Chicago its front line.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Hammer and Tong: The Struggle for Steel

Despite the stunning clashes, industrial unionism did not become an inexorable tide. The failure of the NRA to enforce labor codes, the ambivalence of the Roosevelt administration, and the hostility of business owners to the entire idea of independent unions prevented the movement from congealing in 1934. The inability of the Amalgamated to coordinate a national movement revived the ghosts of 1919, when the steel strike failed to achieve a united front. In 1934 and into 1935, John L. Lewis and Philip Murray of the United Mine Workers (UMW) resisted any steel strike under the guidance of rank-and-file leadership. They wanted a government-sanctioned effort that they could control, not a grassroots insurgency that threatened a more radical form of unionism than they would ever support. Arrayed against businesses that f louted Section 7(a) and hobbled by its inherent weaknesses, the union tide receded.1 Even so the embers of working-class militancy would continue to smolder. Before they caught f lame, however, Chicago’s steelworkers would have to rediscover the merits of working-class selfdetermination. Journalist Mauritz A. Hallgren captured the source of worker frustration at the NRA. “Nowhere in the Roosevelt program,” Hallgren observed, “is there any suggestion (apart from the appointment of a few conservative labor leaders to sit on an ‘advisory’ board) that the workers are to have a voice in the affairs of the trade associations or the state.”2 The NIRA had opened the door to collective bargaining, but standing inside were a collection of steel companies defiantly opposed to unionization. Still reeling from the worst of the Depression, the steel companies were determined to restore the old order. That determination would run headlong into an organizing

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drive animated by the cooperative ethos of the New Deal. Fired by new federal legislation, it would powerfully challenge the authoritarian claims of the steel magnates. It would test the democratic possibilities of the era. It would culminate in the streets of South Chicago. The road to that challenge would be a circuitous one, leading through the steel districts of Ohio, the ethnic neighborhoods of Southeast Chicago, and the Senate chamber of the nation’s capital. *** The NAM and the American Iron and Steel Institute had already thrown down the gauntlet during the Senate hearings on the NIRA. It would resist the efforts of the Roosevelt administration to alter the balance of power, even when that effort benefited business recovery. “We had weathered the depression,” Republic president Tom Girdler recalled, “but the great force bent on our destruction thereafter was the government of the United States.”3 Earlier than most, Girdler announced industry’s irreconcilable opposition to the New Deal. Struck to investigate the violation of civil liberties in American industry, Senator Robert La Follette’s Senate Committee on Civil Liberties found the steel industry monolithically hostile to unionization: “From the time the National Industrial Recovery Act became law [the steel industry] adopted a vigorous policy of opposition to any interpretation of Section 7(a) that would encourage the organization of independent trade unions or that would give employees the idea that employers are required to recognize and bargain with trade unions.”4 Determined to contain the union insurgency, the steel industry developed a dual strategy of mailed fist and velvet glove that proved very effective. This resilient antiunionism ref lected the views of independent steelmakers like Tom Girdler. At the same time, it captured the impact of the Depression and expressed the character of American big business itself. Despite the ravages of the Depression, Republic Steel had become the shining example of the up-and-coming steel manufacturer. Committed to growth, technological innovation, and competitiveness, the Republic Steel Corporation developed out of a merger between four steel companies. At the time of the merger, Tom Girdler became chair and president of the new corporation. One of the companies was the Republic Iron and Steel, where the Amalgamated had made inroads as early as 1908. As the La Follette Committee researchers pointed out, though, Republic Steel “was organized at an inauspicious time since the great depression of the early 30s had already started.” From 1930

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to 1934, the company reported mounting deficits. It hit a low point in 1932 when the company registered a $11,261,195 loss.5 Through a series of short-term bank loans, the company tried to keep af loat. The collapse of two of the banks providing massive loans to Republic compounded the distress. By October 1931, the company had stopped paying dividends to its shareholders. By 1932, Girdler’s company was operating on merely 18 percent of its capacity; its sales, which amounted to a respectable $100 million in 1930, had been slashed in half by 1932. In November, Girdler and his associates discovered that the company had little more than $1,000,000 in cash, a figure that they would have to double in order to cover the payroll. The company went into panic mode. “By morning all repair work was stopped,” Girdler recalled. “The purchasing department stopped all shipments of material. We stopped spending, but we also organized a high-pressure force of collection agents. Every man in the collection department, plus all who could be spared from the credit department . . . was given an assignment. Unless they made collections,” Girdler emphatically believed, “the corporation would be in deep trouble!”6 Republic Steel weathered the deluge of the Depression by transforming its inventories of ore, steel, and coke into sales. By 1935 the company began to turn the corner, posting a net income of $4,425,524. The trend continued into 1937, when the company rang up a respectable $9,082,971 profit. But the accumulated debt from the merger of the four companies and the disastrous sales figures for the 1930s weighed heavily on the company. Between 1930 and 1934, it lost $31,326,032. The memory of those tenuous years would haunt Girdler and color his attitude toward the strike of 1937. “Our financial situation became terrifying,” he reminisced. “We exercised almost absurd economies to keep the company solvent, to keep it going. . . . When any of us went on inspection trips we often used our private automobiles to save railroad fare. At hotels we slept two in a room to keep expense bills down.” Girdler recalled a self-sacrificing cadre of executives “fighting for an organization of human beings,” putting the interests of the company before their own. The trials that Republic faced became inextricable from Girdler’s own. “Blast furnaces were cold. Open-hearth furnaces were cold. Rolling mills were silent. Are we to suppose that only politicians’ hearts bled for those who had previously worked with us?” According to Girdler, the federal government failed to realize that “anything that helped make Republic Steel Corporation stronger and more efficient” also helped the national interest.7

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Yet there was more to Republic’s strategy than Girdler’s sense of noblesse oblige. The Depression had forced Republic Steel’s management to improve its aging mills and match the modernizing steel companies. This would augment the company’s strengths, which lay in producing light steel and fabricating it into any number of finished products. While U.S. Steel dallied in adopting new technology like the continuous strip mill and new metals, Republic, Bethlehem, and the smaller independents that made up “Little Steel” ploughed ahead. “Republic is the leader in alloy steels,” announced Fortune in early 1936. While the dominant U.S. Steel saw its market share drop through its reliance on heavy steel products such as rails and ship plates, Republic benefited from the growing demand for light steel in automobile and appliance manufacturing. Capitalizing on its advantages, however, meant upgrading its facilities, and that meant new equipment, new blast furnaces, and access to Lake Erie for its inland mills.8 Purchasing Corrigan, McKinney Steel of Cleveland was a large part of that strategy. Republic was desperately in need of new finishing mills to stay competitive. The Cleveland-based Corrigan, McKinney produced semifinished steel, and that appealed to Republic’s modernization scheme. Republic Steel could also purchase a company valued at $65 million before the Depression at the windfall price of $30 million. Corrigan, McKinney promised to generate the needed cash f low to reduce Republic’s onerous debt and supplement its operating expenses. Republic’s strategy of survival through mergers convinced it to acquire the Truscon Steel Company as well. Truscon had defined itself as a leader in the manufacture of steel products used in constructing buildings and highways. Even more impressive, Truscon had already absorbed a company that specialized in pressed-steel items such as refrigerator cabinets, heavy-duty trucks, washing machines, and automobile frames. Now, Republic owned a company that manufactured a vast assortment of pressed-steel merchandise. That was the kind of steel that was in demand in an economy shifting from heavy manufacturing to consumer goods.9 Yet the very same mergers that promised to put the company on the cutting edge of the steel industry also loaded it with enormous debt. There were shareholders to pay, and there was an increasingly unruly workforce to consider. For union activists, what mattered most was that the company was turning a profit by 1935. The year 1937 would prove to be an exceptionally good year, at least in the beginning.10 When Girdler took over at Republic Steel, he imposed the labor regimen that had served him so well at the “Little Siberia” of Aliquippa.

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He quickly installed several of his Jones and Laughlin cronies in management positions at the new company. He also brought lower-ranking security officials into management and plant security positions. Each had been schooled in the Aliquippa style of labor management. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee described it as a strategy of coercion that included labor espionage, the intimidation of union workers, the suspension of civil liberties, and the control of local authorities. If that was not enough, the company would dismiss those who “deviated from the accepted norm.”11 When the NIRA spurred the dormant Amalgamated union into action, Republic’s management struck back. The rank-and-file workers’ movement seemed to confirm Republic Steel’s worst suspicions. They were convinced that radicals had gained control of organized labor and threatened industrial capitalism, root and branch. Militancy became the equivalent of communist subversion. Executive Vice President Charles M. White was mortified when the Communist Party picketed the company’s Warren facility. “[A]ll of a sudden we find a strike situation where this communistic element and the Amalgamated Association are apparently amalgamating, or at least, the communistic element of their association adopts the Amalgamated Association.” Yet the authors of the La Follette Committee report challenged Republic’s red baiting. “Mr. White’s ‘Communist’ threat was nothing more or less than an organizing drive which the Amalgamated was carrying out under the encouragement of Section 7(a) of the N.I.R.A.” Anticommunism justified harsh measures, but for White and Girdler, it also helped to explain why such apparently satisfied workers had become profoundly discontent.12 Girdler and his counterparts in Little Steel struggled to contain that militancy through the use of company unions.13 Throughout the 1920s, the steel companies from Carnegie-Illinois down to the Little Steel producers such as Youngstown Sheet and Tube had combined coercion and accommodation in the effort to control their workers. Professional strikebreakers and labor spies became a standard feature in the antiunion program. Companies fired union activists, closed union shops, and hired professional thugs to exact violent reprisals when necessary. Yet they combined this brazen force with subtler forms of persuasion. Through the churches, public institutions, and local politicians, they exercised political and economic inf luence in the community.14 Companies used tactics of both heavy-handed intimidation and corporate welfare to win employee loyalty and minimize discontent. One of the key elements of this program was the company union. It offered the appearance of collective bargaining and the reality of

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company domination. As the Depression sliced into corporate revenues, companies eliminated the generous welfare programs but maintained the company unions while others added them for the first time. At least seventeen steel companies employing some 15,000 workers had company unions in place before the NIRA. Once the bill was passed, fifty steel producers adopted “employee representation plans,” the euphemism commonly used for the company union. One of the companies to adopt an ERP plan in 1933 was Republic Steel. Like the others, Republic implemented the ERP to circumvent Section 7(a).15 The idea was to create the image of outward compliance while maintaining management’s traditional prerogatives. What the steel producers could not anticipate was that the ERPs would become the embryo of the most powerful union movement in American history. For the moment, though, the steel industry considered the ERP the perfect antidote to independent unionism. The NAM spearheaded an ERP campaign, contributing money, personnel, and inf luence to the effort. The Iron and Steel Industry gave $3,500 to the campaign, which included favorable reports from the National Industrial Conference Board on the benefits of the ERP and advertising by the Mandeville Press Bureau. The association also conducted a series of meetings across the country, all in an effort to build a united front for ERPs.16 By the summer of 1934, the majority of steel manufacturers had adopted the tactic. In 1936, the American Iron and Steel Institute reported that 92.2 percent of steelworkers were covered by employee representation plans.17 In their minds, they had fulfilled the NIRA’s collective bargaining requirement. According to NAM’s November 1934 report on labor relations, the key issue was the character of that arrangement: “If the employer considers that some form of collective bargaining with company employees is desirable, then he possesses the right to weigh the relative merits of the different kinds of collective bargaining.” Industry leaders blithely rejected the idea that relations between management and labor were adversarial.18 For its part the management of Republic Steel believed that the plan would offer “an orderly and expeditious procedure for the prevention and adjustment of any future differences to insure justice, maintain tranquility and promote the common welfare.”19 To ensure “tranquility,” the company designed a plan that maintained its ultimate control. Unlike a union, the workers did not pay dues—the company paid them

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and all of the related expenses. Employees could vote for their representatives, but only a two-thirds vote by the entire membership could amend the plan. Since company representatives composed 50 percent of that membership, the company could veto any proposed changes. Under the rubric of most steel industry ERPs, workers were not given the chance to meet independently. Nor could they express their collective will to the elected representatives. Company and employee representatives usually met separately. Although the representatives were democratically chosen, they were not, in fact, very representative. For the most part, they tended to be highly paid, skilled workers drawn from the ranks of native-born Americans or northern European immigrants. African Americans found no place on the elected councils. More than this, many of the earliest representatives were drawn from the company’s clerical and white-collar ranks.20 Elected as a shop representative, George Patterson of South Works in Chicago found that most “were not interested in challenging management on their employee representation, but I set myself to the task.” That task was complicated by the fact that the president and the secretary of the plan were office employees, not fellow steelworkers. Most important, of course, the companies maintained the unilateral right to dismiss workers when they chose.21 The Amalgamated Association and the American Federation of Labor saw through the rhetoric of cooperation. William Green of the AFL announced that “The ‘employee representation’ plans are a fraud from start to finish and labor holds they are in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the Recovery Act.”22 Unwilling to intervene, the NIRA permitted the ERPs to f lourish. When the Supreme Court invalidated the NIRA, the company unions gained strength. Yet the ERPs were never simply a matter of managerial manipulation. They already had a foothold not only because the companies wanted them to but because the steelworkers embraced them. The company intention was clear: use them as labor control devices. But just as corporate welfare had unintended consequences, so too did the company unions. The ERPs were designed to make workers docile, but they ended up inspiring something quite different. Power relations were skewed in favor of the company, but the lines of communication had been opened. As one executive commented, the ERPs ended up providing the management with “a real education.” At least the more humane managers began to realize that corporate growth had further alienated the owners from the workers. “We . . . knew nothing of the men’s feelings and grievances.

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The foremen would often be hardboiled with them and pay no attention to their complaints, because the foremen were afraid of being criticized by superintendents and higher executives.”23 The ERPs fulfilled at least some of the functions that the economic planners had hoped the NIRA would achieve. They provided nominally democratic work councils in which management and labor cooperated in operating the plant. They represented the first significant constraint on the arbitrary authority of steel management. They offered workers their first taste of industrial democracy.24 Even so, it was the workers who transformed the ERPs into something more than window dressing. The plans became reverse Trojan horses, engineered by steel management to subdue their employees but containing within them the forces of democratic reform. Voting restrictions were abolished, union members were permitted to stand for election, management representatives were prohibited from counting ballots, and plans were made subject to amendment. The steelworkers democratized the plans, but they also made them deliver concrete results. They agitated for improved working conditions, the amelioration of nagging safety concerns, higher wages, and better pensions. For the first time, workers had a mechanism for addressing the tangled problems of wage and tonnage rates as well as the distribution of work hours. Assertive representatives were able to raise issues that had never been on the agenda before, including seniority and promotions. Anxious to forestall independent unionism and keep the NRA out of labor relations, the companies submitted on a number of issues. As many as 36,709 grievances came before the steel industry’s joint committees, and a whopping 70 percent were resolved in favor of the workers.25 Yet, as effective as they were in securing concessions, it did not amount to collective bargaining. For the most part, the steel companies held the line against wage demands. Individuals and small groups benefited from wage adjustments, but the vast majority of these were skilled laborers. The unskilled wage earners continued to toil at the bottom of the pay scale. It was not simply a matter of insufficient wage increases. Steel management resolutely refused to sign any contract that would make the agreements binding. Instead of bargaining, the steelworkers appealed for improvements, and management either granted or denied them. The pattern of paternalistic control had been modified, not obliterated. The companies were not bound by the protocols of law and public responsibility. The steel employees had not achieved any real independence.26

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The escalating demand for wage increases accompanied a more profound change inside the ERPs. Excited by the prospect of improvement under the NIRA, the steelworkers’ expectations rose dramatically. By 1936 many workers had internalized the cooperative ethos of the New Deal era. In their immediate background was the example of collective action set by the unemployed protests and the failed union drive of 1933. Through the alchemy of political reform and economic crisis, unskilled steelworkers began to throw off the habits of deference they had acquired since the debacle of 1919. In the process, steelworkers became convinced that company paternalism was morally bankrupt. In the wake of that realization, they began to imagine the possibilities before them. They began to forge a union. The transition from ERPs to independent unions materialized first at U.S. Steel’s South Works. Disillusioned by the failure of the plan to achieve significant results, a group of representatives and workers began to lay the groundwork for an independent union. After an unsuccessful effort at revitalizing the Amalgamated Association’s local in the area, Patterson and his ERP associates held a meeting on September 24, 1935, the same night that Joe Louis and Max Baer fought for the title. On that September evening, some eight hundred workers turned out in Bessemer Park to launch the Associated Employees of South Works. The die of independent unionism had been cast. The meeting adjourned in time for everyone to tune in for Joe Louis’s pummeling of Max Baer.27 In June 1936, the Associated Employees gained twenty-two of the thirty-two seats on the South Works ERP council. It was the “Anglo Saxon types,” Patterson recalled, who “started the labor movement at South Works. They backed me up—Danes and Swedes, Norwegians. I hate to say it, very lacking at the beginning was the support of the Polish people who predominated.” Perhaps Patterson should not have been surprised. The ‘Anglo-Saxon types’ had the greatest command of the English language, the greatest percentage of skilled laborers, and the greatest leverage inside the factory. They would spearhead the movement for independent unionism. By June 1936, the organization counted more than three thousand U.S. Steel employees. Through the People’s Press, a left-wing newspaper published in the Midwest, it communicated its message and fostered solidarity. In a column titled “What’s It All About,” steelworkers encountered a democratic justification for union action. Unlike the shriveled Amalgamated or the compromised ERP, the Associated encouraged its members to “take an active part in his organization” rather than leave “the real work to the business agent or other officers.”28 In the pages

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of their own paper, the steelworkers could read of the Association’s petition to the company for action on wages, vacations, “favoritism,” seniority, and safety. “Needless to say,” the paper announced, “thousands of the steelworkers are enthused by the prospects of such mass pressure, as has never been exerted before on our management and corporation.”29 Members and sympathetic unionists could read of the Association’s efforts to achieve a “true means to bargain collectively with the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation” and achieve “Freedom of [sic] company domination.” By organizing an autonomous union, the Associated Employees thwarted management’s interference and gained the “correct angle” for establishing “the steel men’s case.”30 Yet the key to Patterson’s success was his ability to work from within the ERP. Even when the company dismissed him for participating in outside union activities—a dismissal that he successfully appealed through the intervention of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins—he continued to operate as a South Works employee representative and to win concessions for the steelworkers. Acting independently, he maintained the pressure on the company and reminded the workers that there was an alternative to company domination. While Patterson made the case from within the ERP, the independent press reminded workers of the most fundamental of reasons for organizing a union: “3 More Killed at South Works,” announced a People’s Press headline in 1936. In graphic details that would have shaken almost any steelworker, the paper reported on a worker in the blast furnace mechanical department who “was caught on a revolving shaft and torn to pieces,” a man who was “gassed to death in the Engine Room of No. 5 and No. 8 Blast Furnaces,” and a young employee whose head was “crushed in the Open Hearth scrap yard.” Condemning the callous foremen who assigned them these tasks, the paper also identified the underlying causes of the accidents. “After analyzing all these cases, what conclusion can we arrive at? Could it be due to the unceasing speedup to get the work out so the company will get more PROFIT! PROFIT! PROFIT!” The paper also captured the larger economic problems that made labor organization critical. “What about the mental condition of the employees. . . . Are we happy and carefree? Can we possibly be with cost of living mounting as it is, rents, being raised, clothing and food prices soaring and pay checks remaining at such a low ebb?” It was difficult enough, the paper noted, to live on the wages the steel companies paid in the depths of the Depression.31 Security, safety, a decent standard of living, a measure of control over the production process: These were the objectives of the 1919 strike, and they continued to elude workers even in the era of the New Deal.

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All of Patterson’s maneuvering might have come to little had it not been for developments at the national level. In 1935, industrial unionism made a startling comeback. Like so many breakthroughs of that era, it emerged out of a combination of hope and frustration. For industrial unionists such as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, John Lewis of the UMW, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the developments of 1934 represented a lost opportunity. Instead of mobilizing workers under the mantle of Section 7(a), the AFL had settled for government mediation and empty promises.32 Instead of forging industrial workers into a united labor front, they permitted craft, ethnic, and racial divisions to persist. They also ignored the tectonic shifts in industry that had increasingly made organizing along craft lines a quaint relic of the nation’s preindustrial past. Lewis and the others wanted to heat the iron that had burned so intensely in 1934. The October 1935 annual convention of the AFL convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, seemed the right place to do it.33 The AFL had made overtures for industrial organization in auto, rubber, and steel, but the federation had done little to make it a reality. By this time, the grandiloquent, orotund, stockily built and generously browed John L. Lewis had become a major figure, not only in his own UMW but in the larger labor movement. Covering the AFL convention of 1936, labor writer Edward Levinson described him “sitting on a platform, his heavy jaw thrust forward, his stony gray eyes fixed, his hair like horns. When enraged he can roar like a bull. In some respects he is like an old-time actor.” According to Levinson and dozens of other observers, Lewis’s theatrical and egocentric propensities were only too evident: “Nobody relishes a big scene more than he does; to get to the center stage . . . and then set off elaborate oratorical fireworks is his particular pleasure.”34 The ostentatious Lewis made the convention the scene for the birth of a new industrial union. When William L. Hutcheson of the Carpenter’s Union tried to silence a group of rubber workers who were pressing the case for industrial organization, Lewis snapped. He jumped to his feet and began hurling invectives at the sixty-one-year-old, heavy-set carpenter, who returned the verbal assault in kind. Lewis then escalated the attack, bounding over rows of chairs, cocking his fist, and striking Hutcheson with a blow to the jaw. The assembly was stunned, but Lewis quickly regained his composure, lighting his cigar and pacing the f loor. James Cagney could not have done it better. The incident would soon bolster the legend of John Lewis, now the pugilistic champion of the unskilled worker. In the short term, it sparked a revolt that gave rise to a new industrial union,

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the CIO (First the Committee of Industrial Organizations, then the Congress of Industrial Organizations).35 Determined to organize the major industries, the CIO made steel a top priority. It made sense, considering steel’s significance in the American economy, its employment of some 500,000 Americans, and its vigilant antiunionism. Forming the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in June 1936, the CIO declared its independence from the AFL. In the auto and rubber industry, struggling national AFL unions were already active. Although they were still craft oriented, those unions provided the cocoon for militant industrial unionism. In the steel industry, though, top-down control would play a decisive role. Lewis and his UMW were the driving force behind the SWOC. Not only did they provide most of the new union’s leadership, but they also put up the money for the organizing campaign. Since the steel companies largely controlled the mines, Lewis believed that organizing the steelworkers would solidify union gains in that sector. What all of this meant for the steel drive was that the union that led it was the product of complex factors, none of which seemed to be the democratic representation of average steelworkers. SWOC’s autocratic structure may have seemed expedient to its leaders, but it stood in stark contrast to the robust rank-and-file democracy practiced by the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). In that organization, a tradition of shop-f loor militancy, black activism, and more f luid distinctions between skilled and unskilled workers allowed the packinghouse workers to resist the CIO’s centralizing tendencies.36 Recruiting from the ranks of the UMW, the Communist party, and the expired Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, the CIO forged an experienced front rank of union organizers. Highly disciplined and fired by an idealism that fit the mood of the era, the Communists played a critical role in organizing steel. While the party’s national strength never exceeded more than 100,000, its influence in the industrial struggles of the 1930s was immense. According to William Z. Foster, national party chair and leader of the 1919 steel strike, 60 out of 200 full-time SWOC organizers were Communist Party members. One of the key strategies for winning steelworkers was to gain the support of foreign-born and second-generation Eastern European workers. They made up the majority of steel’s unskilled employees, and they would determine the ultimate course of industrial unionism. John L. Lewis had no interest in Marxism and no patience for revolutionary dreams. He did, however, realize that the Communists were a vital asset. Many of their leaders were of Eastern European extraction,

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and much of the party’s activity was tied to ethnic newspapers and fraternal societies. The Communist-directed International Workers Order (IWO) ran fifteen different foreign-language societies and more than twenty foreign-language newspapers. It would be decisive in generating support for the steel movement among ethnic workers. Bill Gebert, the leader of the party’s Polish bureau, took control of SWOC’s campaign to organize the foreign born. In 1936, the union also held a conference in Pittsburgh to solidify support among ethnic workers. Some 500 delegates representing Poles, Croatians, Lithuanians, Serbs, Slovenes, Ukrainians, and Russians attended. Lewis also hired Communist fellow travelers to work as the CIO’s general counsel and publicity director. No Communist Party members ever achieved a key leadership position in the SWOC, and they were never strong enough to take it over. What they did have were commitment and skill, and Lewis was more than willing to exploit those qualities.37 The Communist Party also underwent a critical change in 1935 that transformed it into an effective fighting force in the industrial struggle. In fact, it allowed the party to take the progressive lead on a range of social issues and redefine itself as an organization of social democratic reform. With the rise of the fascist threat in Germany, the Soviet Union changed direction. Now, it expected the international Communist parties to foster a “popular front” of liberal, democratic, antifascist forces. The Communists would downplay their sectarianism, repudiate their belief in an imminent revolution, and support the forces of democratic reform. By adopting the rhetoric of populist egalitarianism and endorsing the New Deal, the party could transform itself into a twentiethcentury vehicle of Jeffersonianism, expanding its membership while building a united front against fascism. It would forge a coalition of progressive intellectuals, trade unionists, and left-wing activists who would champion social democratic reforms at home and antifascism abroad. In the process, the party would shed its image as a conspiratorial, ideologically alien, and hopelessly foreign organization.38 Although the policy came from the top, rank-and-file Communists had been moving in this direction since the beginning of the Depression. The shift toward a progressive-liberal alliance simply ratified what American party activists were already trying to achieve: a closer identification with the surging industrial union movement. It was the central dynamic of the era, the inheritor of the radical energies generated by the unemployed movement and the hunger marches. They had been struggling to address immediate social and economic problems and to Americanize their party since the early years of the collapse. In Chicago, party activists operated a workers’ school and a newspaper

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for the unemployed, both of which addressed immediate shop-f loor issues and challenged the conservative assumptions transmitted by the state school system.39 Even before the party altered its official policy, rank-and-file Communists sought to ameliorate the circumstances that workers confronted rather than exploit them for partisan gain. Now, they would cooperate with liberals in promoting the New Deal. They would expand their efforts to advance black civil rights and champion the idea that the New Deal meant economic democracy for the working class. The Communist Party would play a decisive role in the Popular Front, but they would not dominate it and they could not control it. Out of the crucible of the 1930s, the united front emerged as an alliance of left-wing activists and intellectuals who were neither pawns of the Communist Party nor lackeys of the Roosevelt administration. They defined themselves by their commitment to social democratic reform, anti fascism, and industrial unionism. They fostered an “anti-racist ethnic pluralism” that emphasized international solidarity against nationalistic chauvinism.40 The party generated a multitude of cultural forms that defined the Popular Front era. From movies to jazz music to left-wing literature, proletarian artists and progressive intellectuals celebrated a new ethic of working-class consciousness. Rejecting the individualism and literary modernism of the Lost Generation, they espoused the values of economic decency, racial equality, and antifascist solidarity. Communists and their allies extolled the virtues of working Americans. In absorbing the rhetoric of populism, though, the Popular Front did not capitulate to the classless, antiradical version that found favor in middle-class circles into the 1950s.41 The class character of Popular Front politics would be as evident in the drive for a union in steel as it would be in the defense of the Spanish Republic against a fascist insurgency. This ideological and political amalgam fostered a working-class subculture that fueled social reform for years to come. In periodically challenging the dictatorial hierarchy of its own party, and in thrusting themselves into the struggles that defined the weltanschauung of the 1930s, party activists engaged in the ultimately futile effort to sever the American party from its Leninist and Stalinist roots.42 Most important, they now had a mantle of legitimacy for promoting industrial unionism. Although the party found itself caught in a series of contradictions that undermined its claims to the American democratic tradition, it had found the formula for wider inf luence, if not social revolution. Minimizing sectarian differences, the party became the leading force in a drive for the social democratic transformation

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of America. Communist Party activist Annette Rubinstein noted that it was a “curious, pervasive democracy, emotional democracy” that infused “the party and the organizations it inf luenced, despite the undemocratic hierarchical structure above.” In every American Labor Party club, Parent-Teacher Association chapter, or CIO local, Rubinstein and her counterparts experienced a “much more fundamental sense of equality.”43 The party forged connections with the steel unions, but it also built bridges to the wider movement to democratize the United States and insulate it against fascism. Not only did the SWOC hire Communists, but some of its leading noncommunist members participated in Popular Front causes. Van Bittner, regional director of SWOC for the Chicago area, participated at the Mid-West Conference of the American League Against War and Fascism, an antiwar coalition in the Communist Party’s sphere of inf luence. Despite their troubling, fealty to Stalin the Communists had become the steelworkers’ most vigorous champions.44 Commentators might have condemned the Communists for their hierarchical structure, but party members found the SWOC system strangely familiar. Funded by the UMW and dominated by its leadership, the SWOC quickly acquired a dictatorial style of leadership. Lewis appointed the good-natured, gentle, but quietly resolute Philip Murray to the presidency. Born in Scotland in 1886 in a coal mining district not far from George Patterson’s home, Murray began work in the mines at age ten. He was of Irish descent and Catholic upbringing, and both of these factors would inf luence his perspective on the labor movement. Like Patterson’s father, Murray’s was drawn to the United States by the prospect of higher wages and a better life. The demand for skilled miners in Pennsylvania promised to make the voyage worthwhile. They emigrated in 1902; by the time that Murray was a teenager, he was a union member and a full-time miner. Yet, Murray worked in the nonunion mines of western Pennsylvania. There, he gained profound insight into the vulnerability of the average worker in industrial America. The individual laborer was truly alone, he realized, against managers who exercised almost unfettered power. The unstable wages, appalling working conditions, and constant threat of danger ref lected the power imbalance at the center of the capitalist system. Without organization, the worker had little choice but to accept the petty dictatorship of the mine owners. Fusing those insights to his Irish Catholic heritage, Murray imagined a cooperative alternative to managerial dominance. Instead of class conf lict, he hoped that management and labor could create a harmonious system bound by rules of mutual

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respect. Ref lecting his Catholic milieu, he believed that an authoritarian, hierarchical union could accomplish that goal. First, however, the workers had to organize.45 Murray channeled his convictions into the UMW, becoming president of his union local in Horning, Pennsylvania. In classic Horatio Alger style, he fashioned for himself a program of self-improvement. Taking courses from the Scranton Correspondence School, he gained the rubrics of an education that would permit him to rise within the Union. By the age of thirty-three, he had become the vice president of the UMW. He had been inf luential in the ascent of John Lewis to the presidency of the union, and Lewis rewarded him with the executive position. The tacitum Murray would remain loyal to the burly, loquacious leader until the 1940s, when Lewis turned viciously against him. Before then, however, he functioned as Lewis’s faithful second in command.46 Appointed director of the steel organizing campaign, Murray made SWOC’s autocratic leadership style considerably more palatable. In an industry as daunting as steel, coordination and decisiveness would be critical. What the SWOC lost in democracy it gained in centralized leadership. Even so, those early decisions would have lasting and unanticipated consequences for the union. Promising to pay homage to the Amalgamated Association, the SWOC gained the credibility of its AFL’s charter. It also achieved independence from the AFL and absolute authority in the campaign to organize the steelworkers. For all intents and purposes, the AA had been rendered obsolete. The CIO invested $500,000 in the SWOC campaign. Now it would have to find a way to breach the “Hindenburg Line” of steel, as John L. Lewis called it.47 When the steelworkers began to probe those defenses, the steel companies launched the industrial equivalent of guerilla warfare. The police, state authorities, and the federal government would not protect them. Despite the legal safeguards that would soon provide a platform of legitimacy for independent unionism, the steelworkers were on their own.

CH A P T E R

FOU R

Loading the Charge: The Steelworkers Organize

The SWOC soon realized what George Patterson already knew: The key to organizing steel was the capture of the company unions. Considering the history of antiunionism in steel and the workers’ painful memories of the debacle of 1919, burrowing from within offered the best hope. They would have to overcome the conditioning that workers had received in accepting company autocracy. Faith in corporate welfare had broken down, but thousands of steelworkers looked to the ERPs for relief, believing that they provided a safe alternative to the risky road of independent unionism. Patterson and his supporters would have to convince them that they represented nothing more than the status quo. They would also have to persuade the steelworkers that this was not another quixotic and suicidal venture. Like so many areas of social reform in the 1930s, the Communists blazed the path. Since the advent of Section 7(a), they had been working to infiltrate and absorb the ERPs that soon followed.1 The CIO soon came to the same position. Independent unionism could best be achieved by capturing the ERPs, a January 1936 CIO report confirmed. Surveying the situation in Chicago, trade unionist Hyman Schneid assured Sidney Hillman that the steel region was ready for unionism: “It seems clear that where company unions are established, one of the best ways to fight them is to elect real honest union men as representatives. . . . Electing real union men to the job of representing, agitating and activising [sic] the workers to use the company union rather than ignoring it will bring much better results.”2 Together with the strategy of mobilizing ethnic and black workers and

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gaining political support at the national level, the ERP strategy promised to turn the tide. By the time that Schneid had submitted his report, the momentum of independent unionism was abundantly evident. The company unions were banding together. When U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Pittsburgh rejected a demand by the company union for a 10 percent wage increase and paid vacations, it established ties to the unions at the company’s other plants. Since the company insisted that wage matters could be settled only through corporate headquarters, the ERP would unite with others to present its case. Now, U.S. Steel’s company unions would unite.3 “The ‘hidden fear’ that George Patterson had spoken of was quickly disappearing.” The same unification movement took place elsewhere, but nowhere was it stronger than in Chicago. With the Associated Employees controlling twenty-two of thirty-two seats on Chicago’s Carnegie–Illinois employee council, workers could anticipate the arrival of collective bargaining. In July 1936, the Associated Employes of South Works voted to endorse the SWOC. It was Local 65, Patterson’s outfit, and it was the first major breach in the steel wall of South Chicago. Soon after, the company union at Inland Steel in Chicago Heights followed suit, joining the SWOC as Local 64 and bringing along almost all of the plant’s 325 workers. When a majority of workers at U.S. Steel’s plant in Gary, Indiana, formed a truly independent union under the banner of the Amalgamated Association, the movement in South Chicago took off. It ultimately propelled U.S. Steel’s Chicago-area company unions to form an independent organization, the Calumet Council. Together with the ERPs from Inland Steel and Calumet Steel, they established the Associated Iron and Steel Employee Representatives. When SWOC announced in August 1936 that it would launch an organizing campaign in steel, it seemed that labor was finally on the move.4 Once again, that forward movement ran headlong into the fierce resistance of the steel industry. Harking back to 1919, the leaders of steel asserted that the union drive was the result of radical agitators. According to a full-page American Iron and Steel Institute advertisement, organizations “not connected with the Industry” had captured the campaign and were prepared to use “coercion and intimidation” to control the employees and “foment strikes.” Once again, the steel industry assured the public that it believed in the principles of “collective bargaining.” Workers could share in the benefits of recovery, the advertisement suggested, but they were not entitled to them. Paternalism would continue.5

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More than this, the steel managers challenged the logic of the New Deal. Against the brain trusters’ contention that increasing wages would kick-start the economy, the masters of steel argued that sharing the wealth would “interrupt” recovery and damage the industry. Philip Murray attacked this argument, identifying the benefits that U.S. Steel had derived from federal government purchases and castigating the company’s trickle-down economics. Writing to Benjamin Fairless, president of the Carnegie–Illinois Steel Corporation, Murray contended that “Instead of increasing wages and stimulating buying, so that steel workers could buy automobiles that use the steel they produce, what is the steel industry doing? It is taking all the benefits of recovery into its own coffers, letting little of it drip down to those in need, and stopping industrial progress by not increasing mass purchasing power.” Murray could only conclude that the “profits of United States Steel Corporation justify an increase in wages.”6 The American Iron and Steel Institute was having none of Murray’s reasoning. The organizing drive, as the Institute alarmingly put it, would be accompanied by “agitation for industrial strife.” That was enough to strike fear into the hearts of an American ownership class desperately anxious to restore the old order.7 The rhetoric was inf lammatory, but it expressed more than the steel industry’s customary animosity toward organized labor. The Depression traumatized American business as much as the workers it employed. Considering its massive overhead, its aging factories, and its susceptibility to the f luctuations of a market geared toward automobiles, the steel industry could hardly expect to escape the crash unscathed. Yet the downturn was a shock for steel and not just for Tom Girdler and Republic. The year of the crash, steel mills posted extremely robust profits. Record-breaking steel sales allowed several companies to expand their facilities and hire more workers. The collapse brought an uneven decline in steel orders and a ripple effect throughout the industry. In 1930, it was pumping out 41 million tons of unfinished steel. The following year, that figure had dropped to 26 million tons, or 46 percent of the amount produced in 1929. For steel’s managers, the true story was its profits. That year, the leading twenty steel companies, representing a full 89 percent of the industry’s total production, registered a net loss of $16 million. Republic Steel alone logged a $9 million loss, while Youngstown Sheet and Tube, another of the “Little Steel” companies, reported a $7 million loss.8 As Tom Girdler recalled, “For four solid years we lived in an industrial hell. Day by day we were on the verge of being wiped out. . . . Our financial

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situation became terrifying.”9 Workers may have born the brunt of the economic collapse, but industrial leaders were keenly aware of how close they stood to the brink of disaster. Desperately anxious to restore profitability, they were happy to have government intervention when it helped their interests. When it was accompanied by the threat of unionization, however, they resisted vigorously. When workers began agitating for their rights and threatening independent unionism, that resistance amplified dramatically. The recovery of the industry in 1936 only stiffened the companies’ opposition to the labor movement. The rising tide of union militancy was developing parallel to a monumental resurgence of steel production. Steel production was exceeding the heady heights of 1929. In 1932, the companies produced only 13.7 million tons of ingots. In 1937, steel production skyrocketed to 50.6 million tons. The steel companies were hiring more workers, wages were increasing, and a conf lict was quickly brewing over how that revenue would be distributed. The conf lict that percolated up from the steel districts of Chicago and Ohio, and which eventually would reach the U.S. Senate and the White House, would address the overriding question of the era: whether or not democracy in industry was possible. For the steel companies, the burning question was what it would take to regain control.10 For Tom Girdler and many of the steel industry leaders, the answer was just about anything. The steel industry was no stranger to the tactics of intimidation. Since the days when the Amalgamated battled the Pinkertons at the Homestead Plant in 1892, the steel barons had practiced the dark arts of industrial coercion. Blacklisting, labor espionage, professional strikebreaking, the discharge of suspected union sympathizers, and the hiring of company thugs had been used extensively to ward off union organizers and exact employee compliance. Tom Girdler had perfected those techniques at Jones and Laughlin. Even when workers were relatively compliant, company vigilance continued. Nor did the companies become magically humane. The petty tyranny that factory foremen exercised in the hiring process was enough to remind them that steel feudalism had not disappeared. Steel employees may have embraced company paternalism in the 1920s, but they knew that behind it lurked the threat of reprisal if they stepped out of line. The brutal harassment that characterized the 1919 strike did not disappear in the 1920s. When the strike crumbled, it became part of a comprehensive strategy for maintaining labor tranquility. As the labor movement surged, the steel barons brought it out from behind the curtain of smiling corporate benevolence. The fear that George

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Patterson described may have been dissipating, but company resistance was not. Republic had already made its antilabor vigilance clear when it canceled the Amalgamated Association’s contracts in 1934. In June of that year, while steelworkers struggled to revitalize industrial unionism, the company spent $12,000 on munitions, including small arms and tear gas. The purchases continued, mounting to an amazing $79,712.42 between January 1933 and June 1937. The company spent ten times more than the Chicago Police Department and four times more than the Ohio National Guard on gas guns and gas canisters. By the time that the steelworkers went out on strike, the collection included 4 Thompson machine guns, 525 revolvers, 64 rif les, 254 shotguns, and a wide assortment of clubs, mace, and ammunition. If anyone believed in class war in the 1930s, it was Tom Girdler of Republic Steel.11 When it was not preparing for labor Armageddon, the company was implementing an elaborate system of espionage that collected information on union meetings, membership, and tactics. Disguised as employees, company operatives routinely infiltrated union meetings. They became local union leaders, socialized with union members, acquired informal intelligence inside the plants, and masqueraded as union sympathizers on the picket line. Intelligence was then forwarded to the company’s superintendent of police and made available to other companies for a fee. Although Republic hid its espionage expenses, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee eventually revealed that it spent literally thousands of dollars accumulating antiunion intelligence. Uniformed company police reinforced the system, providing conspicuous reminders that the company meant business. Shotguns, machine guns, rif les, steel bars, sickening gas, tear gas, and armored cars were at their disposal. Wearing steel helmets, carrying sidearms, and wielding blackjacks and brass knuckles, the company police menacingly defended the open shop.12 In addition to spying on their workers, Republic Steel employed a battery of other methods designed to disrupt union organization. Companies used a tactic known as “rough shadowing,” in which company operatives openly tailed a suspected union organizer or sympathizer. In some cases the surveillance was carried out twenty-four hours a day and included physical harassment. In all cases, rough shadowing was designed to intimidate the worker and strike fear into the hearts of his associates. In testimony before the La Follette Committee, a captain of the security force at Republic Steel in Buffalo admitted that anticommunism was behind rough shadowing. He was keenly aware

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of the connection between labor militancy and the social protests of the early decade. According to the Republic police captain, “Charlie Doyle . . . and these fellows, assembled, unemployed, and who have marched on the public squares for demonstrations, and they have taken part in marches on our local government [and] took part in a march on the capitol at Albany and were forcibly ejected off a bridge down there.” Republic’s police captain clearly saw what some contemporary historian have missed: The continuum between the unemployed demonstration and the labor uprising of the 1930s.13 Along with rough shadowing, the company harassed union organizers who tried to distribute literature. Company thugs frequently assaulted union activists as they leaf leted workers going into the mill. In one case, SWOC activist Vincent Favorito remembered a large man wearing workers’ clothes approaching him from the Truscon Plant gate in Cleveland. After trying to hand the man a leaf let, Favorito “heard him mutter something about a son of a b—, and I turned around to see what the man was cussing about, and as I turned around I saw that he was swinging at me, and I distinctly saw brass knucks on his hands, and he struck me above the eye, my left eye.”14 Even more threatening to the company were union organizers. The company targeted them for rough shadowing and more direct reprisals. In his capacity as SWOC organizer, Charles Doyle felt the full brunt of company intimidation. Following a union meeting at a restaurant on South Park Avenue in Buffalo, a company enforcer confronted Doyle and his associate. When he tried to leave the restaurant, Doyle recalled that “Someone hit me in the mouth from behind, right on the ear at the side of the jaw. Mr. Houston was also beat up and kicked around while he was laying on the ground. I was stunned, and the whole thing happened only in a few minutes.”15 At the Republic plant in Cleveland, a volunteer organizer was struck by a company police guard wielding a blackjack. “I stumbled backward and fell in the gutter alongside of the sidewalk,” he reported to the National Labor Relations Board. Then the officer “ jumped on me with his knees in the pit of my stomach, started beating me over the head and the hands with a black jack. He says, ‘God damn you, here is some of Cap’s union.’ ” Repeatedly striking the prostrate organizer, the guard eventually broke his arm, inf licted internal injuries, and sent him to the hospital for sixteen days.16 The attacks were swift, violent, and effective. They traumatized the organizers handing out leaf lets. They also made employees think twice about signing a union card.

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The campaign of intimidation extended into South Chicago, but the steel companies were not its only practitioners. After handing out SWOC leaf lets on a cold November morning at the gate of Carnegie– Illinois Steel, George Patterson and his associate were trying to get warm in his car. A police squad car spotted them, and officers started grilling them about their activities. When Patterson revealed that he was working for SWOC, one officer insisted that he needed a permit to continue. Despite Patterson’s protests that the union lawyer had assured them that they were on solid legal footing, the officer confiscated his remaining literature. He warned Patterson that he would be arrested if he persisted. The group of union leaf let distributors did persist and were arrested, on more than one occasion. It would take a Supreme Court ruling to guarantee Patterson and the other SWOC organizers the right to distribute literature unmolested.17 The police harassment reminded him of how tenuous the rights of organized labor were. Although the majority of prestrike coercion came courtesy of the steel companies, Patterson’s experience confirmed that Chicago’s police were anything but impartial. Their memories of the Unemployed Councils continued to shape their attitude toward the CIO movement. Like their counterparts, at Republic Steel, they operated on the assumption that labor organizers were devious reds. The rules for them were different.18 Those rules were established in the crucible of the Gilded Age, when Chicago elites determined that labor activism was tantamount to sedition. The close alliance between the police force and the political establishment ensured that the city’s uniformed officers would function as the enforcers of working-class subordination. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 presented a critical test of the department’s loyalties and abilities. They were equal to the challenge. Demonstrating a higher threshold for violence than their antebellum predecessors, the police proved to be the critical strikebreaking force in the uprising. They killed as many as thirty-five workers in a series of wild melees that made it the most explosive working-class rebellion of the Gilded Age. Instead of “uniformed idler[s],” Chicago’s propertied elite and respectable middle class now considered the police force a reliable defender of social order.19 Yet in 1886, when Mayor Carter Harrison dispatched 200 officers to rain clubs on the heads of striking workers, the function of the department as a defender of the status quo solidified dramatically. Police shot and killed two workers on strike as part of the national movement for the eight-hour day. When seven police officers were killed by a bomb

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thrown during a protest meeting in Haymarket Square the following night, the police department became the sworn enemy of labor. In the middle-class imagination, it converted the police from petty grafters in uniform into defenders of civilization itself.20 The reciprocal relationship between municipal authorities and industrial leaders also crystallized that night. Even before the decisive events surrounding the eight-hour day uprising of 1886, the police force had been mobilized to crush a streetcar strike in 1885. Literally hundreds of workers suffered blows from police hickory as constables protected scab streetcar operators in downtown Chicago. Despite the insertion of state militia, Pinkertons, and the army into the city during the Pullman Strike of 1894, it was the police who protected the industrialists’ privileged position. Local officials expanded the police force in the 1880s and regularly assigned it antistrike duties. Quasi-military training and organization prepared the police for strike situations. The use of special antistrike task forces also increased the effectiveness of the police in containing labor uprisings. By the early twentieth century, owners were regularly plying officers on strikebreaking detail with accommodations, cigars, and liquor. In some cases, they paid them an additional fee.21 City officials were even willing to withhold police assistance during strikes when industrialists failed to offer sufficient political support. Despite the patina of professionalism, the force continued to be poorly trained well into the twentieth century. By the 1920s, recruits received no more than a month’s training, most of it in parade square drill, before hitting the beat. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century the police force had become an indispensable weapon in fighting the city’s labor movement. In the stockyards and Teamsters’ strikes of 1904 and 1905, squadrons of police officers were dispatched to club the city’s workers into submission and protect nonstriking employees. In the massive garment workers’ strikes of 1910 and 1915, the department relinquished whatever illusion of impartiality they may have entertained in earlier confrontations. Cops inf licted indiscriminate beatings on strikers and bystanders alike. Women were as vulnerable to clubbing as men, a practice proven by a reporter for the Chicago Daily Socialist, who convinced a group of girls to walk past a tailor’s shop and blow a whistle. The police appeared instantly, roughing them up and arresting the offending whistleblower. Arbitrary arrests and beatings became so frequent that police headquarters finally had to intervene. 22

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Constables openly cooperated with professional strikebreakers. In a few cases, police officers detained strikers until company thugs could have at them, beating workers under police supervision. The brutal garment workers’ strikes of 1910 and 1915 even saw some police taking direction from the strikebreakers’ managers on which strikers should be arrested or harassed. Women’s reform organizations were indignant; it had little impact. The police force had become an ally of business in the city’s turbulent class struggle.23 The police force that Chicago’s CIO activists confronted was the product of social and cultural forces that had pulsed through the city since it rose from the ashes of the great fire of 1871. Departmental appointments were thoroughly politicized. Mayors selected police chiefs from the ranks of police captains, and ward politicians inf luenced the appointment of leading officials in their districts. Surveying the political machine that Mayor Edward Kelly inherited after the death of Anton Cermak, Fortune magazine found that at its core were the “50,000 jobholders” who held their positions through patronage. Court bailiffs, Health Department employees, sanitation workers, Board of Education appointees, secretaries, City Hall scrubwomen, fire fighters, and some 7,000 police officers all owed their positions, in one degree or another, to City Hall.24 Advancement up the chain of command required the appeasement of powerful political blocs, and everyone knew it. What consistently frustrated civic reformers was the evidence that police and politicians collaborated in protecting some of the city’s most notorious criminal outfits. The oily entrepreneurs behind the city’s bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, and illicit saloon operations often had connections to local politicians. Criminals further down the food chain, some as lowly as pickpockets and burglars, also had links to the establishment. As the Fortune reporters noted in the 1930s, layer upon layer of Chicago’s lower strata were patrons of the machine. “There are landladies who wish lax inspection from the fire department and health department. There are employees and cousins and uncles and aunts of all these people. There are dope peddlers, beggars, and pickpockets. All of these people need protection.”25 That meant that police chiefs and subordinates had to be careful not to be too vigilant on crime. Utilizing their extensive network in the criminal underworld, they made sure that stolen property was returned when public censure demanded. In general, though, the department acted to control crime rather than to eradicate it. Like other police departments, they operated an elaborate system of protection payoffs and bounties that restricted criminal activity to certain areas.26

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Those same social and cultural forces were evident in the ethnic composition of the police department. Although the force was ethnically diverse, the majority of its officers were Irish American in origin. In 1887, nearly half of the police department was of Irish background, although less than 20 percent of the city could trace its lineage to the Emerald Isle. In 1930, 76 percent of police captains were of Irish descent in a city marked by tremendous ethnic diversity, particularly on the south side. Some contemporary commentators worried about the working-class origins of the police, but rank-and-file officers betrayed little if any sympathy for striking Croatian, Serbian, Italian, and Jewish workers. While immigrant workers tended to be unskilled, particularly those who arrived in the great wave of newcomers after 1890, the police force drew its membership from the ranks of the skilled and semiskilled. Former street car drivers, firemen, clerks, patrol wagon drivers, machinists, construction workers, and skilled craftsmen joined the police force, not unskilled day laborers. Recruits from the ranks of organized labor hailed from conservative trade unions that had little but contempt for ethnic and African American industrial laborers.27 By the 1930s, then, little had changed in the subculture of the Chicago police department since the late nineteenth century. Strikebreaking and antilabor activity ref lected the assumption that the resort to police violence was necessary to maintain order. Yet the order that they maintained included institutionalized criminal behavior, political corruption, and the protection of ruthless vested interests. Beating striking workers was no different from thrashing juvenile delinquents; it was a defense of public order. It was also behavior that won the support of the city’s middle class. Police routinely arrested young, male, homeless drifters, since these outsiders threatened the fabric of a city where who you knew and who could vouch for you meant everything. Even so, police officers were just as likely to provide shelter for the homeless during the winter months as to throw them in jail for vagrancy. In both cases, they acted as defenders of a city that privileged stability over law.28 How little had changed would become apparent in the labor conf lict of the 1930s. If anything, the antiradical, antiforeign component of the police department’s call to arms had intensified. When Chicago police lieutenant Make Mills appeared in 1930 before the Fish Committee, a predecessor to the anticommunist machinery of the 1940s, he left little doubt that the department did not allow constitutional civil liberties to stand in the way of its mission. Operating the “radical squad,” the forerunner to the Red Squad,

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Mills vigilantly kept tabs on demonstrations and public meetings. His squad also regularly disrupted them, regardless of whether they had obtained a permit. Mills revealed to the committee some of the tactics used to disperse Unemployed Council demonstrations. It was not unusual, he smugly submitted, simply to deny permits based on the politics of those involved or to delay issuing them so that protestors made themselves susceptible to arrest. Mills was averse to admitting some of the “radical squad’s” less savory tactics, including the deliberate driving of patrol cars into assembled crowds, the imposition of limits on the time that orators spoke, and the frequent beating of unemployed demonstrators. Mills and his counterparts had ensured that the spirit of the Haymarket hysteria lived on in the 1930s.29 Yet Mills was not a rogue officer. If anything, his management of the antiradical squad demonstrated how rationalized the preservation of “order” had become. Mills jauntily reported to the Fish Committee that he had produced 313 arrests out of thirteen demonstrations in the first six months of 1930. The squad had monitored as many as 132 meetings in a six-month period and had accrued a massive collection of photographs of known radicals. That collection would come in handy when the Chicago police confronted its most serious challenge in the summer of 1937. By that time, Mills, who was eventually tasked to conduct surveillance on SWOC, had made employer payoffs to the police a routine feature of Chicago’s antilabor landscape. Gordon Baxter, a Chicago lawyer, claimed that Mills would arrest the leader of a strike as soon as it broke out. He would then beat and jail him to send a message. In the process, he would make tidy sums for his troubles that ranged from $1,000 to $5,000.30 Although Mills’s payoffs fit a pattern of Chicago racketeering, more than personal advantage was at stake. Mills’s squad cooperated in breaking strikes, not only by attacking picketers and defending scabs, but by providing dossiers of information to the antilabor newspapers. Rendered for a fee, those dossiers were used to attack the credibility of labor union leaders and members. Mills might have thought he was clever, but Communist Party activist Steve Nelson claimed that they could detect squad operatives a mile away. “They infiltrated each of the unemployed councils,” Nelson recalled, but often we could smell them. A guy might come around saying, “ ‘I’m interested in the cause.’ An unemployed worker doesn’t talk like that,” noted the experienced organizer, “and a Communist certainly doesn’t, so we could spot him a mile away.” Despite their acute nose for infiltrators, they could not escape the Red Squad’s attention. “Once you were identified as a

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troublemaker by the Red Squad, it was pretty hard to stay out of their way, unless you just gave up completely.”31 Nelson and his counterparts would not dream of it. Well into the 1940s, Mills’s dossiers would continue to do damage. The Red Squad would submit them to AFL locals trying to squeeze out CIO competition and resist rank-and-file democratic rebellions in their own unions. This pattern of strikebreaking complicity and state-sanctioned antilabor coercion would profoundly inf luence the steel drive in Chicago.32 In 1931, however, only tremors of labor’s coming revolt could be felt. Civic reformers were cheered by the election of Mayor Anton Cermak that year. They approved his choice for police commissioner, a department stalwart who had served his time in the ranks and endured fourteen transfers in thirteen years. He would implement some of the Citizen Police Committee’s most cherished reforms.33 His name was James F. Allman, and workers such as George Patterson would soon come to know him very well. *** Amid intensifying resistance, SWOC organizers became agitators for the kind of social transformation that transcended the demand for a pay increase. Standing outside Carnegie–Illinois on a bitter cold morning distributing literature, George Patterson ref lected on the larger significance of what he was doing. Inside, workers were warm but subservient; outside, Patterson experienced the bracing yet liberating atmosphere of self-determination. It was “the mysterious, mystic thing, known as the call for a democratic, free labor movement.” He looked about him to see organizers from other unions, “other movements, other schools than the school of hard knocks, and they also heard the call. We are never alone.”34 In an era suffused with the values of cooperation and mutualism, it seemed as if workers like Patterson were trying to break free of the straight jacket of competitive individualism. The steelworkers could not depend on federal authorities to intervene in a fight, but they believed they could rely on the law. The New Deal gave their efforts a measure of legitimacy. In February 1935, progressive Senator Robert F. Wagner introduced legislation to strengthen the vacillating labor protections of the First New Deal. The 1934 elections brought a raft of progressive legislators to Congress. They championed a battery of social democratic reforms, but they believed that workers’ rights were paramount in achieving a more equitable society. Although they wanted to safeguard workers’ rights, they also wanted to

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contain labor militancy and restore social stability. The consequences of restraining labor’s freedom of action in a thicket of bureaucratic regulations would be apparent only later. For now, organized labor celebrated what became the National Labor Relations Act.35 The measure did everything that the NIRA had promised. It gave workers the legal right to organize unions and elect representatives of their own choosing. The National Labor Relations Board would supervise elections, extending the guiding hand of federal authority into the nearly ungoverned terrain of labor relations. It would also have the authority to mediate, conciliate, and arbitrate disputes. The legislation did not simply legitimize labor unions, but encouraged collective bargaining. It prohibited the mistreatment of union members, interference in union elections, the refusal to negotiate, and management control of company unions, each an antilabor pillar of industrial America.36 The bill would protect the most basic rights of assembly, majority rule, representative government, and freedom from coercion. Company unions were permissible, but only if the workers chose them. No one would be forced to join a union and the closed shop would not be compulsory. Workers would, however, have the ability to introduce a measure of democracy into a system that all but had resisted accountability. Wagner also argued that the legislation would minimize strikes and lubricate the wheels of commerce. What American workers heard, however, was that the federal government wanted them to organize. “We are free Americans,” the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee announced. “We shall exercise our inalienable rights to organize into a great industrial union.”37 Despite the autocratic leanings of their own union, the steelworkers’ drive would now advance the humane values that Roosevelt had articulated when he first spoke of the “forgotten man.”38 As vital an ally as senator Wagner was to organized labor, none was more important in defending the basic rights of workers than Senator Robert La Follette Jr. The son of a famous orator and progressive politician, La Follette became one of the decade’s most important democratic reformers. Like Wagner, he believed that the labor movement represented more than another interest group in a benevolent broker state. A Republican who had supported the Norris-LaGuardia anti-injunction bill and called for an investigation of police misconduct during the Passaic Textile Strike of 1926, he believed that fundamental civil rights were at the heart of the labor struggle. Collective bargaining was not simply a method for achieving industrial harmony. Instead, it was necessary for restraining the unfettered power of management in the

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lives of people who had almost no control over the conditions in which they worked.39 The NLRB’s investigations produced evidence that companies were f lagrantly violating their workers’ rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Company hostility to union organizing was making a mockery of the Wagner Act. When the NLRB pressed La Follette, a member of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, to take action, he responded.40 La Follette moved to win Senate support for a subcommittee to investigate the violation of free speech and the rights of labor. The committee’s revelations would do more to redress the injustices confronting workers than any comparable effort in American political history. La Follette became the chair of the committee with Utah Democrat Elbert D. Thomas as his key collaborator. Just as the subcommittee was mobilizing for action, the CIO launched their drives in steel, auto, and the mines. The congruence of events could not have been more favorable. Organized labor now had a government agency that was apparently committed to industrial unionism. The Civil Liberties Committee, as it was known, provided an audience of powerbrokers willing to listen to the grievances of working people. The relentless stream of evidence documenting the violation of the rights of labor gave the committee members a compelling reason to sustain it despite mounting opposition from business and its congressional allies.41 Its timing could not have been better. During the critical months of late 1936 and early 1937, while the SWOC intensified its campaign in steel, the La Follette Committee launched its investigation of antilabor espionage, strikebreaking, munitions stockpiling, and private police. Organized labor certainly appreciated the committee’s attention.42 SWOC’s official publication, Steel Labor, reverberated with the crusading energy transmitted by the La Follette Committee. “We are, in this campaign, basing ourselves upon the laws on the statute books and we are consequently utilizing the instrumentalities of the nation’s laws.” The principal architect of justice, according to this article, was not the Wagner Act but the Civil Liberties Committee. “We are preparing material for the announced investigation by this Committee of thugging and other law-breaking activities of the various detective agencies in the employ of labor-baiting steel corporations.” There would be no contracts and no collective bargaining until the rule of law prevailed over the steel towns. “We are determined that coercion, intimidation and violence, open or concealed, shall cease to be the employers’ way of dealing with labor in this industry.”43

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La Follette and his associates forged the link between civil liberties and workers’ rights in the New Deal era. The documented violence against organized labor forced civil libertarians to relinquish their belief that the state was the sole threat to individual liberty. The experience of agricultural workers confronting unimaginable police brutality in the Imperial Valley of California and steelworkers enduring the repressive tactics of companies like Republic Steel convinced groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union that concentrated economic power presented the gravest threat to civil liberties. Those beliefs filtered into the political jet stream that tracked through Washington in those years. The La Follette Committee absorbed those ideas. Its investigations revealed that companies routinely violated their workers’ rights in the drive to thwart unions. To protect those rights, the federal government had to become more active.44 The advent of the La Follette Committee convinced the SWOC that they had reached a historic watershed. When Philip Murray addressed a meeting of 2,000 steelworkers in Farrell, Pennsylvania, they could imagine that they were throwing off the shackles of their own history. SWOC’s Steel Labor noted that, in the 1919 strike, workers were prohibited from holding mass meetings. To “exercise their American freedom under the Bill of Rights, that of free assembly and free speech,” they had to cross over into Ohio. Now, the SWOC was holding union meetings in Farrell, the Shenango Valley, at the site of the vicious Homestead strike, even in Aliquippa.45 As the workers collected in small groups, some women sitting on the grass, all silently transfixed by Murray’s impassioned words, they could sense the gears of the American social order shifting. “What sort of organization do you have to combat that great, powerful organization of wealth known as the American Iron and Steel Institute?” Murray asked. “You have none.” 46 Perhaps recollections of failed strikes and frustrated hopes occupied the thoughts of those quiet workers. Perhaps some of the workers simply remembered years of long hours, dangerous working conditions, poverty wages, and job insecurity, which the Depression only exacerbated. In 1932, the majority of steel companies reduced wages by 15 percent, reducing the f loor of 40 cents an hour to 35 cents. From July 1932 until June 1933, the average steelworker was taking home a meager $13.20 a week, a precipitous drop from the $32.60 he had earned in 1929. The rail mills in South Chicago had been particularly hard hit by reduced production. Coupled with the chronic insecurity and periodic layoffs, the speed-up throughout the steel industry, the promotions based on personal preferment rather than seniority,

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the devaluation of skilled workers, the aggressive dismantling of the welfare programs that had been the promise of labor peace in the 1920s, the replacement of workers by machinery, and the widespread suppression of basic civil liberties within the mills, Farrell’s steelworkers had every reason to listen to Phillip Murray that day.47 More than likely, the workers recalled the indignities suffered at the hands of autocratic foremen. As late as 1936, SWOC field representative Harold J. Ruttenberg could write to CIO director John Brophy that one of the principal grievances of American steelworkers was the persistence of “dictatorial powers” among the lower-ranking bosses. Department superintendents and assistant supervisors exercised “arbitrary control,” while workers at Aliquippa reported to Ruttenberg that “when the boss tells you wood is concrete it is concrete. There is nothing you can do. No use to argue with him. You can’t reason with him.”48 Undoubtedly, Murray’s oratory crystallized the sense that the acquisitive individualism of the postwar years was now bankrupt: “All the powerlessness of unorganized labor was expressed in them,” Steel Labor believed. “All of the power of organized labor was behind Philip Murray.” Murray and “a million and a quarter workers” were “beckoning those men of Farrell and Sharon” to “leave that horrible and defenseless isolation of unorganized labor” and join the steel union drive. Through the union, Steel Labor claimed, workers would have insurance against old age but also “against capricious hiring and firing,” the unilateral power that defined the steel industry. Addressing the workers’ fears, Murray invoked the central ideas of the New Deal. “What is it that brings you to meetings of this kind?” he asked. It had to be “something deep and fundamental,” something that “touches the life of every man, woman, and child in every steel center in the United States.” The answer, Murray offered, was “economic freedom” (italics in original). The labor union would not only deliver economic democracy but give them a “medium of expression,” Murray believed. It would become a vehicle for overcoming their powerlessness and compelling their employers to acknowledge that labor was indeed “sacred.”49 SWOC tapped into the primal fears of steelworkers and tried to root them out. It sought to convince them that they had a tradition of collective protest that could overcome their own troubled history. Steel unions had played a critical role in the American labor movement, Steel Labor argued, but they had confronted again and again the superior coercive power of the steel barons. “They have maintained in their plants the most severe system of labor oppression on record anywhere. . . . Steel labor is non-union through no fault of its own.” It was

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after the remarkable show of force during the Great Strike of 1919 that the industry introduced the “trick of company unionism, to keep their workers from joining real unions.” Steel Labor ignored the tangible benefits that workers derived from the ERPs. Yet they keenly understood the inequities at the center of those unions. Despite the attachment of a great many workers to the company unions, Steel Labor understood that the steel industry was inf lexibly determined to maintain the open shop. “The oppression, the coercion, the spying and other boss-ways against labor were sugar-coated by layers of soft-spoken nice words.” Favors to employee representatives had bought compliance, reasoned the writers of Steel Labor, “But things are rapidly changing.”50 More than in any previous steel drive, SWOC understood the larger political climate. They knew that in the United States, militant demonstrations of solidarity would never be enough. Without political reform, street confrontations would only stigmatize the workers as deluded radicals. To break the “Hindenburg Line” in steel, they would have to overcome the historical detritus of antiunionism. It was not enough to depend on the indulgence of a president during wartime or a generalized mood of progressive reform. Nor could the masses of industrial laborers expect much from the “pure and simple” craft unionists who disparaged political reform. Instead, industrial laborers required the benefit of the law and the activism of at least a few committed legislators. In the 1930s, those forces were aligned. In November 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in a massive landslide, winning 523 to 8 in the Electoral College against his hapless opponent, Alf Landon. At the same time, the National Labor Relations Board announced that it would hold hearings on the Employee Representation Plans, which the independent unionists and SWOC organizers had brought under increasing scrutiny. George Patterson would testify at those hearings, highlighting the company control that prevented the ERP from becoming a genuine voice for the workers. The NLRB had already ruled against the International Harvester Corporation for maintaining what the board considered a company union. The steel companies would soon feel the pressure of the federal government bearing down on their antiunion schemes. In short order, Philip Murray of the CIO reported that 82,315 steelworkers had signed union cards. The following day, U.S. Steel announced a 10-percent wage increase, a hike that soon rippled throughout the entire industry.51 Mass meetings were drawing workers in strength. Through the use of f lying squads of more than 100 organizers, the SWOC distributed leaf lets to advertise the meetings and generate support. In December, a mass meeting at

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Carnegie–Illinois in South Chicago saw regional SWOC director Van Bittner, U.S. Steel’s George Patterson, and local congressional leaders addressing hundreds of steelworkers.52 By early 1937, the SWOC claimed 125,000 members. Steelworkers were beginning to understand the necessity of organizing, but they could also see the strength of the forces aligned against them. Commenting on Republic Steel’s antiunion blitz, steelworker Emil Walters described its pamphlets as nothing more than propaganda. “They do this every time anything good turns up for labor,” Walters observed, “ever since I can remember . . . every time anything had turned up good for labor, it was shouted down as communistic, it was absolutely good for nothing . . . all this and that.” But Walters, and by extension, tens of thousands of steelworkers, were becoming immune to the antiunion diatribe. Responding to the threats of one manager at the Youngstown mill, Walters announced that “Labor has to organize, that is their only salvation. . . . Everybody else is organized. Businessmen are organized, doctors and lawyers, manufacturers, chamber of commerce, they are all organized, have their orders. Labor don’t holler and shout when they organize . . . we don’t see why they should shout when we want to organize.”53 In the idiom of the working class, Walters had captured what was at stake. He also illustrated how far industrial labor had come in recognizing its collective interests. The business and professional groups that Walters identified would shout quite loudly when labor organized, however. That was because what Walters and his counterparts were doing was more than establishing a self-regulating guild; they were challenging a social order predicated on class privilege and capitalist authority. The steelworkers and the companies were set on a collision course. Those forces would converge in the desolate fields of South Chicago.

CH A P T E R

F I V E

Irresistible Forces: Conflict at Republic Steel

In January 1936, rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, went out on strike without even leaving the plant. They had decided to protest a wage reduction and the firing of union members by shutting off the machines and sitting down on the job. They rediscovered one of the most powerful tools of protest available to working Americans in the 1930s. At the same time, they set the tone for the following year. This was not simply an example of heroic defeat, but a breakthrough strategy for workers disappointed by conservative unionism as well as corporate recalcitrance. The sit-down exemplified the spirit of the labor upsurge. More than this, it became the leading edge of the movement for industrial democracy. The rubber workers in Akron had set a fire that would spread all the way to South Chicago. In Flint, Michigan, auto workers deployed the sit-down technique in such dramatic and successful fashion that it destroyed the antiunion barriers at General Motors and initiated a strike wave that would mark 1937 as one of the most rebellious in American history. Electrical employees, furniture workers, leather workers, oil workers, retail clerks, municipal employees, WPA workers, and even steelworkers were soon using the technique in a dramatic rejection of their own powerlessness. They realized that it brief ly gave them control over the production process. It was effective because it minimized violence, usually prevented the deployment of strikebreakers, and often held the companies at their mercy. By carefully protecting the company’s property, the auto workers avoided the accusation of being nihilistic extremists. The sitdown allowed workers to take direct control over their own affairs. It also permitted a small group of militants to take the lead and distract attention from a union’s weak membership.1

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In an exhilarating fashion, the sit-down strategy gave workers the taste of unity that few had ever experienced. “Above all,” observed University of Chicago literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, a leftist academic who would soon play a more immediate role in the labor movement, “it is a forcible reminder to workers, to management, to shareholders, and to the public that legal title is not the final answer to the question of possession.”2 The challenge to the prerogatives of ownership had become a weapon in the drive for industrial democracy. The sit-down wave that dominated the headlines in 1937 was more than a matter of strategy. “It is labor’s reaction to the frustration of the hopes it placed in the New Deal,” observed labor writer Edward Levinson. It expressed the growing dissatisfaction with the legalism of the Wagner Act, which left the grievances of workers tied up in a thicket of bureaucratic wrangling. “Union men cannot be expected to see their leaders picked off, “Levinson observed,” their wages held down, the machines speeded up to inhuman pace, and meanwhile await patiently the outcome of court processes by which a law already enacted and signed is being balked on the advice of conservative lawyers to their ready clients.”3 The aftershocks of the Flint strike were felt strongly in the steel district of South Chicago. “Now the auto workers were in the height of their ‘sit-downs’ and the steel workers were right there with them,” George Patterson remembered. “Small plants on the west side of Chicago began organizing by sitting down on the job, and then calling our office for card applications.”4 Worker sit-downs swept Valley Manufacturing, Wilson & Bennet Company, and Burnside Steel Foundry in Chicago. The most brazen sit-down took place at the Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation in North Chicago. There, workers battled police in the streets, who then constructed a scaffold to assault the sit-down strikers in the plant. Using tear gas, the police routed the workers lodged on the second and third f loor. SWOC district director Nick Fontecchio ordered Patterson, Harold Rasmussen, and other South Chicago steel organizers to assist the Fansteel effort. Meeting in the Clayton Hotel to discuss the situation, the organizers discovered how closely the authorities were now monitoring their efforts. Police burst into the room and arrested several of the key organizers. “Neither search warrants nor declarations of arrest were spoken,” recalled Patterson. It was “just plain seizure.” It vividly demonstrated that the Chicago police had not modified their attitude toward organized labor.5 The defeat of the Fansteel strike came at a tremendous cost. CIO organizer Meyer Adelman and ninety-one other union activists were

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convicted of contempt of court for violating an injunction against picketing the Fansteel Company. Adelman was sentenced to 240 days in jail and fined $1,000. More than this, the destruction of company property in the course of the police assault precipitated a legal challenge to the sit-down that eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. There, the Court came down decisively against the sit-down tactic. The workingclass uprising had been deprived of one of its greatest weapons. Long before that decision, John L. Lewis was capitalizing on the political clout acquired from the Flint strike. While Lewis and the UAW were still engaged in the struggle over General Motors, the CIO leadership once again turned its attention to the steel drive. In an unprecedented development, John L. Lewis negotiated an agreement that would shake the foundations of the steel industry. On January 9, 1937, Myron Taylor, president of U.S. Steel, walked into the restaurant of the Mayf lower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to find none other than John L. Lewis there. The CIO leader was having lunch with Joseph Guffey, senator from Pennsylvania and supporter of organized labor. As a finance expert rather than a hardened steel baron, Taylor did not carry the baggage of the company’s open shop tradition. The U.S. Steel president also seemed considerably less hostile toward the New Deal than Judge Elbert Gary, the company’s former president, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins remembers the change that seemed to come over Taylor in the New Deal years. Meeting in the secretary’s Washington office to discuss the NRA steel codes, Perkins recalled Taylor joining a “huddle” of steel executives that included Tom Girdler and Eugene Grace of Bethlehem. The gaggle of steel leaders deliberately ignored William Green, president of the AFL. The childish snubbing of Green was “the most embarrassing social experience of my life,” Perkins remembered. Yet Taylor eventually “got to the point where he talked easily not only with Green but with Philip Murray and John L. Lewis and took a constructive and active interest in labor relations.” While Lewis’s personality stamped his leadership of the CIO, so too did Taylor’s inf luence his outlook on the contest for steel.6 After Taylor spotted Lewis and introduced himself, the union leader suggested they meet, and a series of discussions followed that would decisively alter the balance of power in the steel industry. Quite simply, Taylor agreed to recognize SWOC as the bargaining agent for its members. While the U.S. Steel president was not prepared to accept a union shop that would give SWOC exclusive bargaining rights, it was nevertheless a dramatic development. For the first time, a major steel manufacturer had accepted the legitimacy of industrial unionism. More

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than this, Taylor agreed to the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week as well as to the principle of time and a half for overtime. The SWOC also won a 10 cent wage increase that brought the hourly rate to 62.5 cents, the equivalent of the $5 day that the union had been pushing for so aggressively. With rudimentary provisions for seniority, and the establishment of a grievance procedure with arbitration, the negotiations produced the first meaningful collective bargaining agreement in steel since the First World War.7 The negotiations functioned like a Geiger counter measuring the tremors in industrial America. While Americans read day-to-day accounts of the sit-down strike at General Motors, Taylor contemplated the costs and consequences of a similar event at Carnegie– Illinois. The developments in Flint certainly had an impact on the steel executive. The UAW had prevailed against General Motors in a strike that cost the company dearly. “The General Motors strike showed United States Steel how tightly an industry can be closed down with this new-fangled industrial unionism,” observed The Nation, “and after it was all over the union won anyway.”8 Labor writer Art Preis observed that Lewis could not be held singularly responsible for the agreement either. Instead, he had “the able aid of a ‘negotiating committee’ of 140,000 GM sit-downers, particularly the brave auto workers of Flint who held the GM plants for 44 days.” 9 In the Calumet area, lodges from Gary and Indiana Harbor to Southeast Chicago and Chicago Heights signed a manifesto that captured the newfound determination of SWOC locals. “Believing in the fundamental principles of our American government,” they announced in the January 17 statement, “and the rights of the citizens to enjoy the blessings of the land, we are determined . . . [to] call HALT to the self constituted masters in the Steel industry. . . . We are going to demand a genuine collective bargaining—Industrial Democracy.” Only by aggressively pursuing this objective could they prevent the recurrence of “the tragic days of the past and make the future, not only of the steel workers but of the entire nation, secure.”10 That aggressive pursuit resounded throughout Chicago. Packinghouse workers who had been doggedly trying to build their own independent unions drew encouragement from the successes in the steel and auto industries. Their relatives and friends in the steel district testified to the power of autonomous unionism and the CIO’s ideology of interracial solidarity. The brazenness and success of the sit-down strike had set in motion the forces that would make 1937 the testing time of industrial unionism.11

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Yet Taylor was responding to more than events in Flint, Michigan. The SWOC campaign was putting pressure on the company at the same time that the ERPs were becoming bolder and more defiant. More important, U.S. Steel was finally turning significant profits after years of contraction. In 1929, the company earned a whopping $220 million in net income. By 1935, profits had dwindled to a paltry $12 million. By 1936, though, the company was turning the corner. Increasing demand and a general economic recovery sent the company’s profits on an upward trend, hitting $67 million in 1936 and $130 million in 1937. The key, for Taylor was to protect the company’s profitability. U.S. Steel might very well have won a strike against the SWOC. Yet rankand-file militancy, the shift of the political climate in favor of workingclass interests, and the financial costs of fighting the union movement were shifting Taylor toward recognition of the CIO.12 Despite the tremendous gains, the SWOC was in no position to win a union election at U.S. Steel. Lee Pressman, general counsel for the union, later admitted that Lewis’s negotiations were indispensable, since the SWOC “could not have won an election for collective bargaining on the basis of our own membership or the results of the organizing campaign to date.” A National Labor Relations Board election probably would have meant defeat for the SWOC at U.S. Steel. Yet Taylor had to think about the financial and political ramifications of a protracted, potentially violent strike. In particular, he had to consider the Walsh-Healey Act, which required that companies receiving government contracts pay a minimum wage of 62.5 cents an hour. Failing to pay that minimum threatened the lucrative government contracts that U.S. Steel was poised to receive in this era of rearmament. Taylor and the executives of U.S. Steel also believed they could win back the price and wage stability they had lost early on in the Depression. U.S. Steel would then try to restore its leadership in setting prices. Since John Lewis’s mineworkers seemed to have abided by the contracts that governed them in the “captive mines,” Taylor believed that the company could gain by dealing with the business-minded CIO leader. He seemed responsible and reasonable, not like the hotheads stirring up the rank and file in Massillon, Ohio, and Southeast Chicago, Illinois.13 The settlement would have a profound effect on the character of the steelworkers’ union. In secret meetings that excluded the roll turners and furnace tenders who organized for SWOC, Lewis negotiated a contract that bore all the markings of the top-down unionism that the CIO was supposed to have overthrown. Although it delivered immediate benefits to the steelworkers, it set the tone for union autocracy that would soon

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plague the movement. The Nation sensed what the Lewis-Taylor deal portended: “The most insidious campaign will consist in the attempt to buy off the leaders of labor with lucrative jobs or political favors.” No less ominous, the magazine reported that Lewis had agreed with Taylor that the company would have to raise its prices to accommodate the wage increase. “In the present instance it may not be a serious factor, but the tendency to raise prices every time labor wins higher pay will increase neither genuine purchasing power nor the prestige of trade unions. We must distribute the wealth, not inflate it.”14 Wage and price spirals and antidemocratic unionism did not seem to matter in March 1937. Steelworkers and reformers across the country celebrated the achievement. Some 35,000 workers signed SWOC cards in the first two weeks following the Lewis-Taylor deal. By the first of April 1937, fifty-nine companies had signed with the SWOC and 429 new union locals had materialized. More than 200,000 steelworkers now belonged to the new steel union.15 Liberal reformers may have celebrated the settlement, but Tom Girdler and the leaders of Little Steel were appalled. Little Steel was composed of the smallest in the steel pantheon, though their size was only in relation to the mammoth U.S. Steel. The executives of Bethlehem, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Jones & Laughlin, Inland, Republic, and American Rolling Mill had already expressed their misgivings about Taylor’s dalliance with Lewis in February. When news of the deal became public, it “came not only as a surprise,” labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse reported, “but as a betrayal to the heads of the big independents in steel, the irreconcilable enemies of union labor.”16 No one felt more betrayed than Tom Girdler. “Unquestionably many thousands of workmen interpreted this event as a wonderful victory for themselves,” he noted acrimoniously in his autobiography. “But I am sure that thousands of workers were shocked, even horrified by the news.” Girdler’s observations said more about his attitude toward the deal than that of the steelworkers. Little Steel would not sign an agreement, Girdler believed, “because we were convinced that a surrender to the C.I.O. was a bad thing for our companies, for our employees; indeed for the United States of America. A majority of our employees did not belong to C.I.O. and we were not going to force them in against their wishes.” Instead, Girdler belligerently remembered, “We were determined to fight.”17 Girdler and Little Steel must have felt as if they were holding a defensive line against an inexorable assault. On April 12, 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act. That would have been particularly galling to Girdler, since the decision involved antilabor charges against

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his old company, Jones & Laughlin. The company was compelled to rehire several employees who had been dismissed for union activity. Now, despite the furious opposition of business, the highest court in the country had prohibited the traditional antilabor practices that had served the steel companies so well.18 Adding insult to injury, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee launched a strike at Aliquippa, the “Little Siberia” that Girdler had so methodically fashioned. “The strike is now a rank-and-file affair,” reported one eyewitness. “SWOC may have called it, but it is now in the hands of anyone who can lead.” When the workers streamed out of the mill on May 12, they signed SWOC cards by the hundreds. In two days, the company was ready to concede. It agreed to permit an NLRB election and abide by the results. That day, SWOC subregional director Joe Timko carried an American f lag in front of a band and a procession of 20,000 workers that marched along the Ohio River. On May 12, the SWOC won the NLRB election and Jones & Laughlin signed a contract. The walls of Little Steel had been breached.19 Yet the Jones & Laughlin decision was a double-edged sword. While the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, it also stated that the law did not require the company to sign a contract that officially recognized the union. The statement simply highlighted the limitations of the Wagner Act itself. The Supreme Court had granted steel a massive antilabor loophole.20 By the time that the decision was handed down, Republic Steel was in a showdown of its own with SWOC. The union was demanding parity with the workers at U.S. Steel, and Girdler would have none of it. On March 31, regional director Clinton Golden wrote to Girdler requesting a conference. He also enclosed a proposal that duplicated the Carnegie–Illinois contract, including the requirement that the SWOC become the primary bargaining agent for its members. Having already decided not to sign a contract, Republic executives refused to respond. On May 3, Golden shot off a telegram that captured the mood in the Republic mills: “Widespread unrest among employees your company various mills prevail over uncertainty your position regarding signed collective bargaining contract.” The layoff of hundreds of workers in Massillon only compounded the uncertainty. “Unless we can have definite assurance from you with date for conference to negotiate written contract,” Golden threatened, “we shall be obliged to disavow all responsibility union members in your mills remaining at work.”21 SWOC was testing the wrong person; Girdler would not be intimidated. “In view of Wagner Act,” Girdler shot back, “see no necessity

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for signed contract.” That would be the company’s line in the sand: It adamantly refused to sign an agreement. In holding this intransigent position, the company had the force of law on its side. Ironically, that law was the Wagner Act. Although Section 8(5) legislated that companies bargain with representatives chosen by the workers, they were not compelled to sign an agreement, as the Supreme Court had only recently explained. Collective “bargaining” could mean meeting, discussing, and dismissing the union’s grievances. Companies determined to circumvent the law might also submit to verbal agreements or vague policy statements but resist anything resembling a contract.22 That would be Republic Steel’s unf linching position throughout the following weeks. Quickly, the conf lict at Little Steel became a contest for union recognition, a struggle for legitimacy. Indignant and resolute, Girdler would only go through the motions of negotiating with SWOC. Both sides agreed to a conference at Republic’s office in Cleveland. In a tense confrontation on May 11, Golden and three SWOC organizers met with company attorneys. Girdler was absent, as was vice president Charles M. White, which spoke volumes about the company’s attitude toward negotiations.23 The friction was intensified by the fact that the union lodges at Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube had just authorized Philip Murray to call a strike on their behalf. The company remained intransigent on wages, but that was no surprise to SWOC. After all, Republic and the Little Steel alliance had already adjusted to the Carnegie–Illinois increase. Instead, what disrupted the meeting was the company’s refusal to consider a written contract. Testifying about the terse exchange before the La Follette committee, Clinton Golden reported that the company attorney had peremptorily announced that “if 95 percent of the employees voted to have the union represent them, it would not change their attitude with respect to signing a contract, and with that, the conference broke up.”24 The announcement landed like a bombshell, but it only reiterated what Republic had been saying to its employees on the shop f loor. At the Republic factory in Youngstown, Ohio, Superintendent John H. Graft warned that “regardless if every man in here joins a union, we are not going to recognize it. We are not going to sign any contract. . . . We are not going to have no closed shop or no collective bargaining.” Graft was not an isolated voice. According to the National Labor Relations Board, the company’s supervisors conducted a “campaign of intimidation and coercion by spreading propaganda in favor of the Plan and against the C.I.O. at meetings of the employees called by them for that

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purpose.” Taylor and U.S. Steel might be willing to give in to the demands of SWOC, but Republic would not. Republic Steel spelled out its position in a letter to its employees the following day. The company claimed that thousands of its workers had expressed their opposition to the CIO. Besides, a signed contract would make no material difference in the lives of Republic workers, since the company had already matched the Carnegie–Illinois improvements. Furthermore, it would not sign a contract with a union that used “coercion” in order to achieve the “closed shop.” Signed contracts offered no guarantee of labor peace, the company argued, since strikes continued to aff lict companies that had them. The company did not want to disrupt the “present harmonious relations” that supposedly prevailed at Republic Steel.26 By May, SWOC had gained the advantage, but it was largely psychological, since the union apparently did not command a majority at Republic in Southeast Chicago. In fact, out of approximately 2,200 workers, the steelworkers had only been able to recruit between 580 and 680 employees. Even so, union support was apparently not limited to those willing to sign a card. Considering the level of company intimidation and the history of steel’s antipathy for labor, it is a wonder that workers signed even 500 cards. Moreover, according to Joe Germano, a key SWOC activist at Republic Steel, “It was a well-organized group of people. . . . When the call came to shut the plant down, they went down. There was no difficulty in shutting the plants down, none whatsoever. . . . There was a few people who stayed in the plant, but as a strike would go, you had an overwhelming majority of the people.”27 George Patterson was equally convinced that Republic Steel was solid. He remembered Local 1033 of Republic Steel “going on record that they were going to have a strike,” and believed that at the time of the strike call, “well over 50%” had signed SWOC cards. The situation at Republic Steel was volatile, as some joined, some resisted, and others waited to find out whether this time the union could gain traction.28 In Republic’s other facilities, SWOC strength was uneven. In places like Youngstown and Canton, SWOC forces had the better of the company. At Newton Steel in Monroe, Michigan, which SWOC had largely ignored until May 1937, the union was negligible. Despite the numerical uncertainties, Local 1033 submitted its strike authorization to SWOC officials on May 14, citing majority support for the union and for the principle of a signed contract. As Joe Germano understood, what mattered was how many workers would walk, not how many

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had signed cards. If they could shut down the plant, they could build momentum for the union and win a majority.29 Concessions would not buy off the SWOC activists. They wanted more than wage parity with U.S. Steel and the forty-hour week. They wanted moral retribution. The company also had no intention of letting the National Labor Relations Board determine the outcome of the struggle. Besides, it could not initiate NLRB proceedings—only the union could. The CIO chose not to request an NLRB election, and that decision would have momentous consequences. Although SWOC had good reason to suspect that Little Steel would ignore union victories, the victories in themselves would have given the union the legitimacy it craved. Yet like Republic Steel, SWOC was anxious about leaving the outcome in the hands of the NLRB. Public defeat would have been devastating. Acutely aware of the gaps in the ranks of steel unionists, Philip Murray and the SWOC leadership did not believe they could risk an NLRB election. They would use the Jones & Laughlin strike and the sheer tenacity of the SWOC militants to bring Little Steel to the table.30 While SWOC officials negotiated, union momentum built. At Republic Steel, the use of new machinery to process steel ingots, as well as the subsequent layoffs of seasoned workers, fostered growing resentment for the company. Through February and March, Republic tried desperately to curb the growing spirit of independence, even raff ling off a radio to shore up company loyalty. It intimidated union supporters and targeted them for dismissal. By late March, the situation was critical. The severe divisions within the employee representation committee were fracturing the organization, rendering it almost entirely ineffective. “Conditions are getting worse everyday,” reported the minutes of SWOC Local 1033, “and company union representatives are getting credit to offset the CIO.” The company dominated the ERP and paralyzed it as a vehicle of genuine representation. “We must complete the job of organizing,” Local 1033 resolved, “and force Republic to agree to recognize us.”31 Under the leadership of disciplined trade unionists, the organizing effort had accelerated tremendously. Van Bittner, the authoritarian, stoic, but determined coal miner led the drive. According to CIO publicist Len De Caux, he was as “dictatorial as Lewis and a stepwatcher like Murray [who] shared neither Lewis’s Olympian detachment nor Murray’s religiosity.”32 Vigorously anticommunist, he was no less expedient than John L. Lewis, indiscriminately hiring party members, socialists, and other radicals to organize the steelworkers. Henry

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Johnson and Jack Rusak were Communist Party members. More than likely, so too were Alfred de Avila, a Mexican employed at South Works, Michael Ostrowski, also from South Works, Melvyn Pitzele of South Chicago, and John Schmies of the International Workers’ Order. The leading Communist in the steel ranks was Joe Weber. After organizing in the Chicago area, he was assigned to work for subregional director John Riffe. In Meyer Levin’s fictional account of the strike, Weber is Frank Sobol, an inscrutable character, one whose “wide lips close[ed] to form an exact plane” and who exuded an “odd, icily courteous calm.” Weber was no open book. In Levin’s mind, he operated according to obscure motives.33 *** Yet Communist organizers found a hospitable home in the SWOC because of their tenacious commitment to industrial unionism. The party recognized the need to cultivate union sentiment where they found it. This meant mobilizing the grassroots leadership in the ERPs. “In order to make a substantial start in organizing the steel workers,” a resolution from a 1936 party convention read, the party would “adopt more f lexible forms of organization.” That meant encouraging the development of locals affiliated to the Amalgamated Association (AA). But it also meant getting behind “independent unions” that showed promise in organizing steelworkers. “At all times we shall try to involve the company union representatives in these partial struggles.” In the interest of burrowing from within, the convention resolved to “canvass the company union representatives with the view of winning over the honest representatives for militant action.” No less important, the party would dedicate itself to recruiting African American workers. More than party recruitment and sectarian purity, what mattered was galvanizing steelworkers.34 Party activists understood that developments at the national and local level fueled the growth of community mobilization. “I suppose you have been following the hearings on the labor spies taking place before the Senate sub-committee,” party leader Morris Childs wrote to Jack Stachel. “The stuff that we spoke about in Cleveland is now coming into the open with Patterson bringing these things out quite clearly.” The La Follette committee was decisively shaping the labor movement. It was vindicating the claims made by union activists about the violation of basic civil liberties by companies that fashioned themselves the guardians of American virtue. Now, local activist George

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Patterson was appearing before the committee, implicitly making the case that federal policies had permitted the rise of industrial dictatorships and that only federal intervention could curb them. It also meant that Patterson was on the Communist Party radar. Yet Childs was equally interested in supporting the left-wing People’s Press, and about doing “something financially in steel.” Childs was convinced that “if there is any place we should put money in it is steel, and in this situation in South Chicago.”35 Local activists were not content to wait for the CIO to lead. They cheered the evidence of working-class revolt in the mills and worked to distribute that energy throughout the steel district. “The strike of the 500 Inland Steel Workers of a few weeks ago and the winning of their demands should not be lost on us,” Childs urged. “The Inland Steel people from the Harbor are already making contact with the [sic] Inland Steel of Chicago Heights in order to learn how their strike was conducted and exactly what they have gained.” Childs was undoubtedly not alone in believing that independent action like the strike at Inland was “just as valuable as dependence on the Lewis Committee. In fact, it is such actions that will stimulate the whole campaign”(emphasis added).36 By cultivating union leadership at the ground level, addressing the immediate economic interests of industrial workers, and exemplifying the racial egalitarianism to which American liberals barely gave lip service, party activists found a welcome reception among Chicago’s steelworkers. The party fostered a form of community organization that would profoundly inf luence the coming strike. Yet for all of its devotion to the CIO, and, despite its own authoritarian structure, the Communists were at odd with the union’s centralizing and hierarchical tendencies. Through its commitment to New Deal reforms, its efforts to alert Americans to the dangers of fascism, its dedication to industrial unionism, and its deliberate decision to downplay revolution, the party advanced a social democratic vision of change that brief ly united liberals and radicals. An essential feature of this united front was the development of ethnic and racial associations. The party mobilized its ethnic associations, legal defense organizations, and African American community groups for the CIO. The International Workers Order (IWO), which organized relief and supplies for the strikers, would prove indispensable. Most IWO members in the Calumet area were steelworkers. It became a linchpin for coordinating its members with the organizing drive and the strike. It rallied members to the assistance of the Women’s Auxiliary.

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Its junior section recruited dozens of children to walk the picket lines in Indiana Harbor. Together with the National Negro Congress and the National Lawyers Guild, both United Front organizations, it contributed immeasurably to the effort to expand the industrial union movement beyond the shop f loor. The days when Communists would be driven from the movement they helped to build were hardly imaginable in 1937.37 The party never achieved the kind of presence in steel that it did in other industries in Chicago. Still, party activists wove their way into the mainstream movement. Ever since the Steel and Metal Workers Industrial League proved such a disappointment, local Communist activists had been moving away from the sectarian approach that had prevented them from winning the favor of the industrial masses. Even before central party headquarters declared the Popular Front, steel activists were trying to find ways to throw off the stigma of sectarianism. By 1935, local activists were abandoning the steel sections of the SMWIU and signing their members into AA lodges. In May 1936, Communist organizer John Steuben of Youngstown, Ohio, wrote elatedly to organizer Jack Stachel of Chicago about the “crystallization of a new and broader progressive block within the AA, the more favorable atmosphere amongst the steel workers toward organization, the possibilities of forcing the CIO to take the next steps in steel,” and the promise inherent in the election year of 1936. They would be front and center in the events that followed.38 The surging Popular Front was manifested in the high number of women who took part in the steel drive. Female party members like Minneola Ingersoll were active in the women’s auxiliaries, which developed in each of the drives to organize heavy industry in the 1930s. Communist Party members played a prominent role in the auxiliaries. Even though many male union leaders saw them as little more than adjuncts to the main event, women activists such as Minneola Ingersoll and Dorothy Patterson used them to break the invidious barrier between the domestic sphere and the world of production. Working-class women of the Great Depression era understood implicitly the relationship between the private and public spheres. They grasped the impact that public policy and social structures had on the home, and intuitively understood how the gendered division of labor supported capitalist production. That women understood how the Great Depression had rendered the whole idea of a placid separate sphere meaningless was evident in Chicago as early as 1931. That year, a group known as the Mothers’ League joined the Communist-led Trade Union Unity

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League to launch a bread strike that reduced prices from ten to six cents. Like the Unemployed Councils, the women’s activism of the early 1930s provided an impetus to later social protest and a training ground for leadership.39 Auxiliary leaders worked to cultivate that awareness into political convictions. By establishing relationships with the wives of steelworkers on the basis of motherhood, domestic responsibilities, and shared grievances, they broke down distrust. Activists also gained insight into the world of women in industrial America. That world was often lonely, marked by both drudgery and uncertainty. The auxiliaries offered the wives and daughters of steelworkers an opportunity to overcome that isolation and join a network of like-minded women. They provided a forum for women to express their grievances, gain confidence as public speakers, and acquire experience as labor activists. In the process, women achieved a greater sense of independence, but also class awareness. No less important, they contributed to the mobilization of a labor movement that went beyond the boundaries of union membership.40 Long before the steelworkers of Chicago hit a strike line, women were mobilizing resources, conducting clerical work, and galvanizing support for the union. It was only shortly after the formation of the Associated Employees that George Patterson’s wife, Dorothy, joined a handful of others to launch the Women’s Auxiliary. The South Works auxiliary joined other women’s groups in a Women’s Steel Conference to push the movement ahead. “The purpose of this committee,” Dorothy Patterson wrote after the first Women’s Steel Conference, “is to further acquaint the community through women’s trade unions, fraternal orders, civic and social clubs” in support of the steel organizing drive. “The steel drive is on in full-swing,” Patterson enthusiastically wrote. Women, she understood, could play the decisive role in the union movement. “Every day brings thousands of workers into the union. You can be instrumental in bringing the message of organization to other thousands, through the women in your own trade union or club.” They could also thrive in the democratic atmosphere of a labor movement that allowed women a greater measure of equality than most had ever experienced.41 The meeting at the Knights of Pythias Hall exemplified the web of association that defined the Popular Front. Eleanor Rye of the Fur Workers Union and a delegate to the Chicago Federation of Labor was in attendance. So, too, was a representative of the Communistinf luenced National Negro Congress, the legendary Agnes Nestor, president of the Women’s Trade Union League of Illinois, and Nicholas

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Fontecchio, district director of the SWOC for the Calumet area. The central auxiliary organization would champion the steel drive by using its connections to the trade unions, fraternal orders, civic groups, and social clubs. It would also knock on every door in Chicago Heights “to show the wives of steel workers the value of unions.”42 The auxiliaries would pressure their male relatives to support the Associated Employees, but they would also function as agencies of working-class formation and political action. As the People’s Press explained, “A Woman’s Auxiliary will not only encourage the steel workers . . . it will in itself help gain the objectives of the men’s union by creating a strongly organized group capable of exerting considerable pressure in times of need.” The auxiliary’s justification for its work conformed to the gender conventions of the period. Nonetheless, these very same women demonstrated their understanding that the home was not some sanctified haven from the ruthless world of commerce. By insisting on the connection between wages and domestic conditions, auxiliary members politicized the home and formulated their own alternatives to the world of individualistic competition.43 “No one knows better than the woman at home just how much the demand of the men in the shops—higher wages, shorter hours, vacations with pay, seniority rights etc.—would mean at home.” In the course of the strike, steelworkers’ wives would demonstrate their newfound conviction that change required collective action.44 Like the women’s auxiliaries that fought for a progressive miners’ union in the 1920s, the women of steel transcended class and gender exclusion by advocating for a progressive transformation of society itself.45 When confronted by a male steelworker who insisted that women’s place was in the home, the Indiana Harbor auxiliary used the separate spheres ideology to justify women’s activism. Yet this domestic feminism resonated with the egalitarian values of the 1930s. “We are fighting mad about our homeless youth and all these miserable, unattached women, some sleeping in hallways, in railroad stations and wandering around in boxcars. We demand a better life, or even, as the Spanish women, the right to defend our homes against these great corporations.”46 Even more than the steelworkers who rallied to the New Deal standard, working-class women embraced the president’s promise of economic reform. Federal works programs, relief initiatives, and tacit support for collective bargaining convinced working-class Americans that the Roosevelt administration sincerely wanted to banish insecurity. Workers, in turn, embraced unions as one of the key instruments

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for achieving those promises. Did the “women of the steel workers” ever wonder, asked one of the anonymous columnists for the People’s Press, what it would be like to be “placed in a position where you and your family could enjoy life more fully. We all know that to enjoy life as we should we have to be free from worry and fear as to what the future will bring. To be free from worry and fear means that we have to have a sense of security; and to have the feeling of security, we have to have an income that is going to meet our needs.” The speedups had to be stopped, one “Interested Wife” warned the readers of the People’s Press, since a slow down would invariably follow. “Of course,” the correspondent noted, “you know what that will mean.”47 Auxiliary members expressed their evolving convictions by sponsoring a form of community organizing that addressed wider social interests. In the weeks leading up to the strike, the women’s auxiliaries collected food and contributions from local merchants and elicited the support of local businesses and at least some local clergy. “In one hour a committee of men and women collected enough donations to feed 400 hungry men coffee and sandwiches,” reported Virginia Mrkonich. “This excellent response from the small business men in our neighborhood indicates that they know who their customers are.”48 In the weeks following the events of Memorial Day, they expanded their activities by taking positions on relief committees and finance committees, organizing women’s and children’s picket days, writing articles for strike bulletins, and pressuring “slackers” to support the strike. Here, Communist Party members again played a decisive role. “In a very short time,” noted Ethel Stevens of Gary, Indiana, “our three Party women became known everywhere in the strike area as active and devoted unionists. They led the women’s picket lines, they organized children’s days for strike duty; our three women made the concrete organizational proposals for most of the women’s undertakings,” and presented “little talks (some of an educational nature) whenever the women gathered.” On the first women’s picket day, police drove 100 marchers away until determined Women’s Auxiliary members compelled them to acquiesce. After Memorial Day, women continued to press for the mass picketing which male leaders of SWOC had all but abandoned.49 Auxiliary members placated the misogyny of their male counterparts, but they advanced a vision of social reformation shaped by labor radicalism, the New Deal, and the Spanish Civil War. In absorbing the Popular Front ethos of the 1930s, these women gained a broader perspective on their world. They fused their international consciousness to

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the struggle in steel. Again, the party played the key role. “Our women have early realized the importance of tying education up with organization,” observed one Communist Party organizer in steel. “When we discussed Spain, for example, we showed that if, while sending aid to democratic Spain, we did not press forward to build our Party right where we were, we would not be putting up a real fight against fascism.”50 They challenged social convention, but they also advanced a vision of women playing an active role in determining political priorities and realizing the labor movement’s democratic ideals.51 The women who joined the auxiliary were critical to the movement for independent unionism. In turn, the Communist Party was indispensable in transforming them into politically conscious activists. “We must state at the outset that the women of this strike region had no previous strike or organizational experience,” observed Ethel Stevens in the Party Organizer. “For most of them it was even a novelty to come to a mass meeting. Until the strike the women of this small company town community were leading a dull and narrow life, confining themselves to kitchen and housework.” The struggle in Little Steel changed that decisively. Although the campaign never became the party recruitment windfall that the steel cadre had hoped for, it generated a level of social conciousness grounded in an understanding of political economy that rivaled any campaign for women’s emancipation, past or future. Activist women now began to see themselves as producers, leaders, and citizens. The women who joined the steel campaign were not motivated by visions of glamorous consumption or abstract rights. They joined a movement that finally drew the connection between economics and power.52 African American organizers played an early and prominent role in the drive for union organizing. Henry Johnson was an invaluable organizer among black steelworkers. A graduate of City College, New York, and the son of a former Wobbly, he went to work for the International Workers Order, a Communist-sponsored insurance operation, which brought him to Chicago. Active in the leftwing National Negro Congress, and an organizer of both black and white steelworkers, Johnson exemplified the radical tendencies of the era.53 Even before the U.S. Steel contract, African Americans in the South Chicago steel district had started mobilizing around SWOC. “Negro people swung their support to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee at a mass meeting in Chicago’s Metropolitan Church,” the People’s Press reported in October 1936. Well before the tumultuous

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strike, a broad array of African American trade union and middleclass organizations seemed to be aligning with SWOC. The South Side Citizens Provisional Committee sponsored the meeting and enjoyed the support of the Cook County Bar Association, the Chicago Urban League, the Dining Car Employees Unions, the Consolidated Trades Council, the National Negro Congress, and the YWCA. Charles Wesley Burton of the National Negro Congress addressed the meeting, as did Van Bittner, regional director of the SWOC.54 The participants championed the idea that industrial unionism offered an avenue of progress for African Americans. A resolution announced that since “trade unions are essential to securing decent living conditions and hours and wages, and the Negro workers of America have the greatest need for protection, being the most exploited group in industry,” the assembled would give its unqualified support to the steel campaign. It also declared that the Committee of Industrial Organization was the “fairest in their dealings with Negro workers.”55 Though the meeting ref lected a tradition of black labor activism in Chicago, it also suggests that black community leaders considered the CIO a viable alternative to the lily-white unionism of the AFL. Community-level support was critical in paving the way for its acceptance among black workers. T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League in Chicago made the connection between national political developments and the political economy of steel. When the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in April 1937, Hill declared that “In light of its declaration that neither race nor color nor creed shall exclude any person from membership in the union and in the light of the tremendous effort that the C.I.O. is making to enroll Negro members, it would seem to be the very apotheosis of stupidity if Negro steel workers deliberately remain outside the ranks of organized labor.”56 Utilizing African American organizers, SWOC broke down years of black antipathy toward labor unions and won black steelworkers to the movement. The populist ethos that defined the CIO appealed to African Americans. By this time, the United Mine Workers, which underwrote the SWOC drive, had earned a reputation for racial decency that black workers respected. By 1944, historian Rayford Logan would observe that the “CIO has been the most aggressive organization in recent years in promoting not only economic equality for the Negro but also political and even social equality.”57 The racial egalitarianism of the CIO allowed SWOC to succeed where the AFL’s Amalgamated Association had failed. Organizers in Chicago noted that, at least in

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some operations, blacks were joining the SWOC in greater proportion than white workers. The leadership of seven black organizers was critical in persuading hundreds of black workers to join before their white counterparts. Several African Americans were elected to offices in local lodges and nominated to SWOC committees. The racial cooperation that the CIO championed in principle was developing in practice, and not only on the part of blacks. White workers began to modify their racist assumptions. As one white worker explained in November 1937, “I learned a lot from that fellow J [Negro organizer]. He woke a lot of us up by showing how the company built up race hatred by playing on our sense of superiority. It’ll be a lot different when steel is organized one hundred per cent.”58 Mexican workers had already been drawn to the CIO by its promises of overcoming their subordinate status in the mills. Through grievance procedures and seniority systems, they would achieve improved pay, security, and a measure of fairness in steel.59 Like African Americans, who had endured the worst that the steel industry could mete out, Mexican steelworkers took a prominent part in launching the union drive. Organizers such as Alfredo Avila, a close associate of George Patterson, and Manuel Garcia had been active in forming Local 65 at Carnegie–Illinois’ South Works in 1935. Avila and Garcia mobilized other Mexican workers to sponsor meetings held in Spanish, to produce literature targeted at Latino workers, and to offer events at which leading Hispanic figures, such as the Mexican consul in Chicago, addressed them. They were soon joined by Juan Davila, Basil Pachecho, Max Luna, and Miguel Arrondondo, all of whom mobilized Chicano support for SWOC in East Chicago, Indiana.60 The steelworkers had become the foundation of a vibrant social democratic rebellion. Stretching back to the unemployed council movement and the relief demonstrations of the early 1930s, it now embraced the larger working-class communities of Southeast Chicago in a drive for industrial democracy. Although better wages, humane working conditions, and a system of industrial jurisprudence stood at the center of that idea, it now expressed larger ambitions. The yearning to rationalize the economic forces that governed their lives, eradicate degrading racial inequalities, bridge the artificial gap between domestic and public spheres, and institutionalize the cooperative values they were already living inextricably bound them to the drive for a contract in steel. It also persuaded many to believe that the CIO’s objectives were fully compatible with their own. Commenting on the steelworkers and electrical workers he was trying to organize in Pittsburgh,

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Communist Party activist Steve Nelson also spoke of the people in Southeast Chicago: The CIO and the New Deal represented a monumental breakthrough for these working men and women. They were part of a social and political process that brought much more than the creation of unions and a change in local government. . . . These victories depended on the close ties of workplace and community activists and the supportive context of working-class mutualism and culture. . . . Radical working-class men and women, in and out of the Communist Party, were at the center of these fights. (emphasis added)61 Yet assumptions about a community of interests would be challenged mightily in the following months. The place of those “radical working-class men and women” in SWOC would become one of the central points of contention in the fight for democracy in steel. *** Dividing his time between organizing steel, packinghouse, and farm equipment workers, Bittner assigned Nicholas Fontecchio to take over as district director for steel. Like other SWOC regional directors, Fontecchio allocated the organizing chores to subdirectors, one of whom was John Riffe. Solidly built and gregariously imposing, Riffe was a gentle giant scoured by the abrasive world of West Virginia mining. Moving throughout the state looking for mine work, Riffe remembered “nothing but poverty wherever we went. Our house was bare. Thee furniture was made from boxes. The f loor gaped with holes between the planks. The only money we ever handled was ‘scrip’ issued by the company to make sure we would go to the company store.” To afford boots for work, his wife Elsie went without, wearing slippers throughout most of the year. Convicted and consigned to a chain gang at the age of sixteen for violating an injunction against even meeting with union organizers, Riffe had no illusions about company benevolence. His relatives had been maimed by mine work, sickened by coal dust, and fired for expressing the mildest of union sympathies.62 Those experiences were enough to convince him to join the labor movement. It was anything but glamorous. Working in the mines, he was assigned to the most unpleasant and dangerous tasks. Organizing in the mining communities, he was often treated like a pariah and betrayed by mineworkers afraid that consorting with troublemakers

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would provoke the company’s wrath. Recovering from surgery at home, Riffe was shocked when two visitors tried to kidnap his wife, Elsie. “They suddenly tried to drag her into the car,” he remembered. “I jumped from bed and rushed into the yard. When I saw what was happening I tore a piece of board from the fence and began to smash their car. Elsie then broke free and the men drove off in a hurry.” He later learned that the mine company had launched the kidnapping plot to exploit Riffe’s weakened state. His experiences had prepared him for the gritty, often violent world of Eastside Chicago.63 By March 1937, SWOC had punched a hole in Republic’s defenses. Workers at the small independent companies of Calumet Steel and Inland Steel in Chicago Heights were exceptionally well organized and eager for action. At Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Indiana Harbor, 3,821 workers out of a total of some 5,500 had signed SWOC cards.64 In April and May, SWOC fieldworkers breathlessly reported building support among the steelworkers. In Chicago Heights, the SWOC members of Inland Steel were “anxious to get [a] contract.” At Calumet Steel, where the workers were already on strike, the spirit was “good” while the “company tricks” were “not going over well.” At Republic Steel, reported Joe Germano, organization was “very good.” By May, a sense of urgency had set in. “Republic Steel ready for the break,” Germano reported on May 13. Four days later, he was reporting “marvelous enthusiasm from the 500 present” at a SWOC meeting of Republic workers. By the 20th of May, John Riffe was announcing that the “meetings are better than they have been.” Yet the challenge was to “hold back” the workers at Youngstown Sheet and Tube and Republic. By May 24, Germano declared that “Republic Steel situation becoming serious due to large number of layoff. Men demanding strike. Everything under control” (emphasis added). Nothing captured the mood of the fieldworkers more than the way in which the secretary concluded the minutes of the May 13 meeting: “Amen in good-faith with the Lord and John L. Lewis.”65 Their faith would soon be tested. While Murray and SWOC leaders desperately sought to batter Little Steel into submission, the rank-and-file membership itched for confrontation. Strikes at Calumet Steel, Fansteel, Jones & Laughlin, and a handful of smaller factories across South Chicago increased the sense that now was the time for a reckoning in steel. “What caused this pent-up rage to explode was not just the wage cuts and unemployment brought about by the Depression,” wrote historian Anthony Badger, “but accumulated old resentments against arbitrary employer power and job insecurity,” both of which Little Steel had used as standard

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labor practices. The coming conf lict was not simply a matter of wages, contracts, pensions, or vacation pay. It was a contest over whether the autocracy of industrial capitalism would continue unimpeded by the cooperative ideals of the Roosevelt era. “Huge corporations, such as United States Steel and General Motors, have a moral and public responsibility,” John Lewis announced to a national radio in the midst of the Flint sit-down strike. “They have neither the moral nor the legal right to rule as autocrats over the hundreds of thousands of employees. They have no right to transgress the law which gives to the worker the right of self-organization and collective bargaining. They have no right in a political democracy to withhold the rights of a free people.” Perhaps better than any labor activist of the moment, John Lewis understood what was transpiring: a contest over industrial democracy. What Lewis did not realize was that this struggle would not only pit SWOC against Little Steel, but set in motion an internal struggle over the character of the labor movement. 67 *** Those forces culminated in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee’s decision to call a strike on May 26, 1937. It was Girdler who forced the issue by locking out the workers at the Massillon mill in Ohio on May 20. On May 25, employees at Republic’s Canton mill walked out, leaving some 9,000 workers effectively on strike but without coordinated leadership. The company, like the rank and file, was spoiling for a confrontation that would settle the score. “When we get through starving you out,” exclaimed a Republic foreman to the president of a local union, “you won’t want to strike.”68 Girdler had preempted the CIO’s carefully laid plans, forcing a strike for which SWOC was barely prepared. Meeting with the representatives of the Ohio and Indiana Harbor locals on May 26, Murray had found the leaders anxious for a strike. “We’ve had a hell of a time holding the men in,” proclaimed a union delegate from Youngstown. “If I go back without word to go out at eleven o’clock tonight, I will get my throat cut.”69 The strike vote carried—some 80,000 steelworkers from Michigan to Illinois would walk on May 26. On the steel front, SWOC quickly adopted a strategy calling for the complete immobilization of Republic and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. The strike paralyzed Youngstown, where some 32,000 steelworkers at Sheet and Tube and Republic rebelliously spilled into the streets. According to Republic, a majority stayed on in its

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Canton mill; those who supported the union had already walked out. Youngstown Sheet and Tube and Inland Steel shut their plants in Youngstown, Ohio and Indiana Harbor, Indiana. Tom Girdler would not comply so easily with SWOC plans. Republic would continue production at its mills in Buffalo, New York, and in Canton, Warren, and Niles, Ohio. Most fatefully, it would continue production in Southeast Chicago.70 While Murray met union representatives in Youngstown, Local 1033 of Republic Steel gathered at Eagles’ Lodge to plan strike strategy. Anywhere between 200 and 700 steelworkers met and voted to join the strike at 11 am. The union-supporting second and third shifts would meet at the gate and initiate a picket line that would intercept the weaker third shift as it arrived for work at 7 pm. In nearby Indiana Harbor, workers were equally excited that the time for action had arrived. “Members of the steel union roared with a happy militancy at a mass meeting last night” when Nick Fontecchio announced the 11 am start for the strike. Almost a thousand “native Americans, Slavs, and Mexicans” wedged their way into the Indiana Harbor auditorium while an additional 2,000 listened to the proceedings through a speaker outside.71 That night, some 25,000 workers at 8 plants across South Chicago and northeast Indiana were on strike. While the locals planned strategy and Fontecchio rallied the troops, the workers took to the streets. At Republic Steel, foremen and supervisors moved through the plant, announcing that the strike would begin at the shift change. While some 50 men and women waited outside the plant for something to happen, another 200 workers moved from the meeting down to the gates of Republic Steel on Burley Avenue.72 Mooney claimed that as many as 1,500 workers were still inside, 200 of whom were not working and “would not go out.” Republic’s management wanted to extricate them before it developed into a full-blown sit-down strike. Captain Prendergast, the chief of uniformed police, had already made it clear that the police would not tolerate sit-downs. That was the unofficial policy the department had vigilantly enforced since the Fansteel strike in February. Soon after he arrived on the scene, Mooney was approached by “a man that represented the CIO” who wanted to address the workers inside. That man was John Riffe. He had arrived at approximately 6:30 and been escorted to the temporary police headquarters inside the plant gates, where Chicago police officers had been housed and fed in the week before the strike. The SWOC subdirector appealed to Mooney for tolerance. “I talked to him and I told him our

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people who are on strike here is [sic] going to conduct this according to the law.” Riffe and SWOC were anxious to avoid “trouble.” Riffe, Fotecchio, and the others understood that violence, sabotage, or f lagrant law-breaking would only rebound against the union.73 But their preoccupation with abiding by a law imposed solely by the police curbed the militant enthusiasm that had precipitated the strike in the first place. Ironically, despite their cautious planning, the steelworkers would soon be tarnished by the accusation of violent extremism. In the earliest hours of the strike, Riffe thwarted one of its most promising developments. Mooney wanted Riffe’s assistance in “cleaning” the workers out of the plant. Remarkably, he agreed. Accompanied by plainclothes police officers, Riffe marched past what he estimated to be 150 to 200 uniformed police officers into the mill. There, he found 200 to 300 employees engaged in what could only be described as a sit-down strike. “I asked them if they knew me and they said ‘yes.’ ” Riffe then explained the deal he had struck with Mooney. “Well, the management and the captain have requested me to ask you men to all leave this plant, they don’t want any sit-down strike and we don’t want any of our men violating the law.” Of course, at the time, there was no law prohibiting the sit-down strike. Riffe appealed to them to leave the plant and join the picketing outside. At that point, Mooney interrupted him, apparently f lummoxed that Riffe had taken the opportunity to elicit support for the picket lines.74 Mooney then ordered him out of the plant and back to the headquarters. “We are going to run this plant whether you like it or not,” warned Mooney, “you and the strikers too.” Riffe left, pleading with Mooney to establish a strike protocol that would prevent violence and minimize police harassment. “As long as you stay across the railroad you can picket, you won’t be bothered.” Mooney could not have been more disingenuous. Returning to the gradually thickening collection of strikers on Burley Avenue, Riffe looked back to see as many as 300 or 400 workers leaving Republic Steel. Whether or not his appeal was the immediate cause of the exodus, he made it clear that SWOC would not support the most effective weapon available to organized labor in the 1930s. An opportunity to tip the balance in favor of the striking workers had been lost; Local 1033 and its supporters would try desperately to restore it in the next few days.75 Despite the controlling hand of SWOC, Republic employees spontaneously expressed the liberating sense that finally the gloves were off. Waves of cheers met the workers as they left the plant in groups of five and six. Workers already on the street rushed to greet them, shaking their hands and welcoming them to the fold.76 The weeks of waiting

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and the years of mounting frustration burst forth into a kind of celebratory eruption that few could have imagined possible in Southeast Chicago. Milling about on Burley Avenue, cheering the workers who defied the company’s appeals for loyalty, Republic’s striking steelworkers experienced a taste of freedom from humiliating subordination. In that moment, they overcame the insecurities that had aff licted the steelworkers since the Great Strike of 1919. Chicago’s striking steelworkers were quickly dealt a blow that def lated the mood of elation. Chicago police had repeatedly demonstrated their barely concealed contempt for public protest. They would do so again with blinding efficiency that evening of May 26. Gus Yuratovac, president of Local 1033, was working that afternoon at Republic Steel. Leaving the plant after his shift at approximately 3:30, he spotted a sound truck and several strikers handing out handbills announcing a meeting later that evening. The union president remembered the workers using the loudspeaker to recruit strikers, but Captain Mooney recalled something quite different. “You scabs in uniform come out there,” Mooney recalled hearing, “get them finks out of the plant.” Mooney considered those words provocative enough to take action.77 Meanwhile, Yuratovac reported to strike headquarters and returned to the plant, determined to use the truck to organize the pickets. A police officer ordered the truck to keep moving. When the driver of the truck objected, the police officer announced that they did not have a permit to use it. Without warning, they arrested the driver and impounded the truck while Yuratovac retreated to join the other strikers. By approximately 6 pm, some 400 to 500 strikers and supporters had assembled across the railroad tracks from the Republic gates. It had been little more than three hours since the strike began, and the police had already disrupted the strike. The friction would only escalate.78 Reporter Ralph Beck had been working part time for the Chicago Daily News when the paper transferred him from the sleepy University of Chicago beat to cover the Republic strike. Arriving at approximately 9 pm, he discovered police inside and outside the plant gates. Sporting leather puttees, gray shirts, and Oxford gray whipcord breeches, the company police maintained a menacing sentry inside the gates. Carrying colt revolvers and clubs, some twenty-one guards reinforced the already massive police presence at Republic Steel. As if company guards and police were not enough to create the image of a military encampment, some 50 to 100 workers, armed with sticks and clubs, patrolled the fence from inside the plant gates. Observing the quickly developing

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scene, Beck also took notice of the police headquarters located inside the company gates. He would observe them having lunch in the company cafeteria—for a week to ten days into the strike. Beck kept up his journalistic vigil throughout the following days. He would soon find himself caught in a series of events that probably made the University of Chicago seem a distant, surreal memory.79 Arriving at the plant at approximately 7 pm, George Patterson was surprised to find almost a thousand demonstrators but no strike organizers. He marveled at the number of police officers arriving at the plant gates in paddy wagons and their own cars. Now a seasoned organizer, Patterson took control. He jumped up onto a car and addressed the enthusiastic crowd. “I told them I thought it was time we should get an established picket line and I asked for volunteers from the strikers, those in Republic Steel who felt that they would like to lead the picket lines.” Patterson then took twenty volunteers to a tavern across the street and held an impromptu meeting. He assigned them to rotating eight-hour shifts and dispatched the leaders to recruit workers from their own departments. He also instructed the first two volunteers to lead an abbreviated shift from 9 until 12 pm. By the time he returned to Burley Avenue across from the plant gates, he found a functioning picket line. Two ranks of workers had formed along the street on the east side of the railroad tracks as the police had ordered. Just as Patterson was congratulating the pickets on their efforts, “the gates of the Republic Steel plant were f lung open and the police marched out.”80 John Riffe’s version of events placed him front and center in the action. He was still meeting with potential strike leaders when he “heard noises outside.” The conf licting recollections suggest more than the subjectivity of historical memory. According to Patterson, Riffe, Germano, and Jim Thimmes had forged an alliance that excluded “leftists” like himself and Joe Weber. Patterson believed that Murray and his assistant, David McDonald, were recruiting organizers who were ideologically compatible with the anticommunist Germano and Riffe. In the coming years, that coalition would turn viciously against any and all organizers who seemed too favorable to the Communists. On May 26, 1937, though, the rumblings of those ruptures were at best faint. Both factions were united by the immediate task of holding together a wavering strike line.81 Drawn by the sound of a disturbance across the street, Riffe quickly returned to the scene. There, he found almost 150 police officers marching out of the plant gates in ranks of three. Descending quickly on the strike line, they swung their clubs at the unarmed marchers

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and ordered them to “get back.” None of the strikers had crossed the railroad tracks, so Riffe urged them to stand their ground. “Don’t break your picket line, hold your picket line. We have a right to picket.” Captain Mooney and another uniformed officer took hold of Riffe. “Captain Mooney called me a Bolshevik and cursed me and said, ‘If you cheep again we’ll bust you in the head,’ ” and then dragged him to a patrol wagon. Powerless to intervene, Riffe watched the police play the role they had rehearsed in countless strikes before. “They kept beating them back, pushing them back, hitting at them with their sticks, breaking the picket line. . . . They was broke [sic].” By that time, there were nearly 300 police officers patrolling at Republic Steel.82 Somehow in the middle of all this, Patterson witnessed the confrontation between Riffe and Mooney. Once the order was given to disperse the strikers, the police “went up on porches, into the taverns, and into people’s gangways between the homes, on to the property, driving everyone away from the Republic gates.” Crowds of worker were driven up 118th Street and back to the streetcar line while others were pushed south on Burley Avenue. The police methodically pushed the workers away from the plant gates, striking any who resisted. From the window of the paddy wagon, Riffe could see the police arrest Frank Englum as he returned to his home on Burley Avenue. They had “cleaned the street and no one was allowed on the porches,” Patterson testified, “no one was allowed anywhere.”83 Driven back by police, a group of strikers staged a spontaneous sitdown. Prevented from using the movement’s most effective method of civil disobedience inside the plant, Republic’s workers now tried to use it outside. They sat down “in several inches of mud in defiance of being moved back from the gates,” the Chicago Herald and Examiner reported.84 Retreating to 117th Street, Patterson recalled finding “a bunch of the men sitting there, so I sat down along with them.” It was probably the shortest sit-down strike of 1937. “I never saw so many people getting picked up and hurled bodily into the patrol car,” recalled George Patterson. One of the more aggressive sergeants began ordering the officers to arrest them. “Suddenly,” Patterson reported, “he saw a young lady in front of me standing just to my right and he said. ‘Let’s take a woman.’ They grabbed her and they run her into the wagon.” Despite all of the spontaneous militancy, the sit-down lacked coordination and strength. The police soon overwhelmed the strikers and hauled them away. Another chance to stop the police assault in its tracks had been lost.85

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Struck by the excitement of the moment, Patterson offered himself up as well. Police hurled him and the woman—probably Marjorie Thompson Miners, featured prominently in the next day’s newspaper coverage—into the paddy wagon. Twelve other protestors were arrested as well. Riffe was in the wagon, as was another organizer whom Patterson recognized. He was “f lung head first,” Patterson testified, “and I looked down and there I found it was one of our organizers. He seemed to be unconscious, laying on the f loor there.” He and the others appealed to the police to open the door and treat the wounded striker. The police ignored them and took them to the South Chicago police headquarters. Apparently, the cells in the East Side police station were already full. By the end of that tumultuous day, as many as 500 uniformed police officers had been mobilized for duty at Republic Steel and 40 strikers and supporters had been arrested. A detail of 96 police would continue to guard the plant and keep it open. The police and the company had formed a united front against SWOC, but the magnitude of the strike presented a formidable challenge. What the police confronted was a massive uprising to break the stranglehold of Little Steel. The Chicago newspapers reported a radically different story; it would set the tone for the coverage of events to follow. “Police acted swiftly to preserve order,” the Chicago Tribune announced. “Police said the strikers refused to obey orders against mass picketing and resisted when the uniformed force ordered a crowd of 300 pickets and sympathizers to a position several hundred feet from the gates.” Riffe was allegedly arrested for “aiming a blow” at Captain Mooney. The Tribune noted that Captain Prendergast, the chief of uniformed police, had warned against sit-down strikes; presumably that was the reason for the massive police presence early on in the strike. “City police have maintained this policy since the epidemic of sit-downs began five months ago.” The paper did not note that the sit-down had yet to be prohibited. Nor did it note that the police had functioned as strikebreakers the night before. The Chicago Daily News reported the company’s claim that as many as 1,000 out of a total of 2,500 workers had remained inside, housed and fed courtesy of Republic Steel. SWOC held that no more than 300 or 400 remained “loyal,” and that a clear majority supported the strike. Conservative estimates would put the number of active strikers at approximately 800. A more generous estimate would permit as many as half of the total number of Republic employees. Historians have offered both versions, but agreement on the numbers has proven elusive. What is clear is that enough workers remained inside the plant to

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maintain the appearance of an operational mill. The fact that the plant continued to operate and that workers were provisioned with cots and sustenance would directly inf luence strike strategy.87 The police on duty at Republic may not have been clear about how many pickets were permissible, but they were certainly determined to make that picketing as ineffective as possible. In doing so, they violated Illinois state law, which the Chicago Department of Law had clarified no more than two months before the strike. In an opinion bulletin dated March 31, 1937, the Corporation Counsel, Barnet Hodes, declared that the police department should not interfere with picketing when it is “conducted in a peaceable manner, for picketing as the term is generally understood is lawful in Illinois when peaceable and without coercion, intimidation, or disorder.” The memo stated that “relief ” should be sought from the courts, not the police, which was a reminder that the police were not the final arbiters of the law. Appealing to the state’s Anti-Injunction Act, the counsel pointed out that “workers should not be interfered with by the government authorities in the conduct of lawful strikes in a lawful manner.” More than this, picketing was a legitimate tactic in a strike. Labor unions were “legal” under Illinois and federal law. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Chicago Department of Law acknowledged that: “The strike is a lawful instrument in a lawful economic struggle or competition between employer and employees.”88 Little more than a week later, the Chicago Police Department responded to Hodes’s opinion and the Anti-Injunction Law. On April 9, some 200 workers at the Walker Vehicle Company on West 87th Street went on strike. It was not long before an overwhelming police presence materialized. None other than Captain James L. Mooney was in charge, and he wasted little time in dispatching 300 police to the vicinity. Police “roughly handled” the strikers, “dispersed, shoved around and struck the pickets and strikers,” harassing them as far as five and six blocks away from the company premises. In an absurd example of police authoritarianism, Mooney limited the strikers to two pickets. No more than a month later, the police broke up a strike at the Crowe Name Plate Company on North Ravenswood Avenue. SWOC lawyer Paul Glaser described the “police terror” that prevented pickets from getting close to the factory: “Strikers were arrested, stopped and shoved and beaten blocks away from the plant,” Glaser noted. Captain Lynch had command of the forces in the area, and when Glaser tried to remind him of the Corporation Counsel’s opinion, Lynch informed him that Barnet Hodes was not in charge of

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the Chicago Police Department. More ominously, Glaser learned from Police Commissioner James P. Allman’s secretary that the commissioner had chosen to take a hands-off approach to labor disputes. According to Glaser, the secretary reported that Allman “would not interfere with the uniform men in the conduct of strike work.” It became very clear to the SWOC attorney that the rule of law would not prevail in the struggle for steel.89 He implied that Commissioner Allman’s instructions to his subordinates were vague, but police would be expected to prevent anything resembling a successful mass protest. He ordered Captain Prendergast to prevent a sit-down strike, but provided no additional instruction beyond the vague injunction to “preserve the peace and protect life and property.” Prendergast, Mooney, and Kilroy knew exactly what the commissioner meant. In fact, Mooney and other ranking officers made that clear in the Walker Vehicle Company Strike and the other labor actions in the preceding months. According to the commissioner, it was not until May 29 that he met with representatives of the strikers and Captain Prendergast to discuss the picketing protocol. At that time, Allman told the SWOC attorneys that they could have as many pickets as they wanted. When the attorneys suggested 50, the commissioner generously doubled it and said they could have 100, provided they were peaceful. What is astonishing is that Allman had given Prendergast no guidance on how many pickets would be permissible prior to May 29. Nor had the commissioner defined the point at which picketing became coercive or intimidating. Instead, he ordered Prendergast to “preserve law and order.”90 Allman was certainly familiar with the Corporation Counsel’s opinion on the legitimacy of picketing and the strike. In fact, he had distributed copies of the opinion to the district captains. Yet almost three days would elapse before Allman would even discuss the question of picketing with Prendergast or anyone else. While Captain Mooney claimed that Prendergast had given him orders to accept anywhere between 50 and 100 pickets, so long as “they behaved themselves,” he also claimed that he did not discuss the issue at all with his superiors. Since neither Allman nor Prendergast seemed to have settled on the fabled “100” striker limit until after the incident of May 26, Mooney’s description of the events is dubious at best. Until that time, the captain of uniformed police and his subordinates f lew under the general orders to “preserve the peace.” 91 What antagonized the police more than anything was the fact that the strikers had turned out in a mood of defiant jubilation. “This was an organized disorderly mob out in front of that gate,” Captain Mooney

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asserted, “and if I had not put them out of there there would have been a riot that night.” Yet the captain also admitted that the worst that the crowd had done was yell “scabs” and “finks” at the strikebreakers and police.92 Here, then, in the excitement sparked by the challenge to Republic Steel, was the evidence of the “lawful economic struggle” that the Corporation Counsel for Chicago had permitted. While Patterson and the other strikers who had been arrested were being released the following day, Mayor Edward S. Kelly produced a statement reaffirming the right to peaceful picketing. Union president Gus Yuratovac was determined to test Kelly’s guarantee. Following the fracas of Wednesday evening, he had tried to extract a promise from Captain Thomas Kilroy to respect a picket line. They were permitted a picket of eight strikers, but that tenuous foothold in front of the gate lasted some fifteen minutes. The police broke up the picket and forced a wholesale retreat back to “the prairie,” an open expanse of land between the railroad tracks that ran alongside the plant and Green Bay Avenue to the east. The prairie had become little more a thoroughfare for workers traveling back and forth from the plant and their homes on the east side. A dirt road transected the field, running from approximately 14th Street down to 117th, where two rows of tidy worker’s houses crowded incongruously between Burley and Buffalo Avenue. Neither they nor Yuratovac could have imagined that the weed-entangled prairie would soon become more significant than the mill itself.93 By the time that Yuratovac returned, the union had rented Sam’s Place, a former tavern, as strike headquarters. Located on Green Bay between 113th and 114th Street, it soon became the center of vibrant activity. The women’s auxiliaries set up and staffed a kitchen that provided meals and coffee to the strikers. It became a staging ground, headquarters, and aid station for SWOC members and supporters. Some 200 to 300 strikers had already converged on Sam’s Place. Thrilled by Kelly’s announcement, which the Chicago Daily Times ran as a frontpage story, Yuratovac formed a line of strikers and set out for the plant. They advanced no further than 117th Street and Green Bay. There, police intercepted them. Told they could not picket the gate, Yuratovac’s contingency produced a copy of the Daily Times with Kelly’s announcement prominently featured. Yuratovac later testified that the ranking officer—presumably Captain Thomas Kilroy—“used profane language toward the paper and he asked if Mayor Kelly was higher that they was.”94 Either too shocked by police misconduct or too disorganized to challenge them after the previous evening’s events, the group retreated to Sam’s Place.

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Released early on the morning of May 27, Patterson went to the former dance hall and tried to salvage the disastrous picket effort. Anxious, angry, and confused, the workers clamored for answers. The former roll turner had few. When he visited the picket lines, he was astonished to find that they were two and three blocks away from the mill. He told the pickets to “be disciplined” and to “obey the rules and regulations.” The pickets were “orderly and obedient,” Patterson remembered, but they were also completely ineffective. Repeated appeals to the police yielded no change; they would be permitted only six pickets, and even these would come nowhere near the front entrance of Republic Steel.95 What tolerance there may have been early in the evening of the 26th had evaporated by the next day. Police were determined to disrupt anything resembling an effective protest. In turn, token picketing would have no impact on the outcome of the strike. Strike leaders realized that they would have to find a way to apply decisive pressure on the company. That was particularly important since some 300 workers remained inside. Apparently, the company was continuing to operate, albeit on a drastically reduced scale. The police finally permitted six pickets in front of the Republic gates. Yet even these were required to maintain a circular pattern on Burley Avenue, ordered not to stop at any point, and prohibited from handing out literature or speaking with any of the nonstriking workers. Confronted with this mute testimony to the f lagrant violation of civil liberties, Fontecchio organized a mass meeting at Eagles Hall.96 The meeting was a standing room–only affair. Too crowded to continue, they adjourned to Sam’s Place. Almost as soon as they arrived, a striking worker moved that they initiate a mass picket line. Two days into the strike, beaten and driven back to their headquarters, the steelworkers would not wait for SWOC directives. The momentum was shifting as rank-and-file workers began to propel the strike forward. A column of some 700 strikers and supporters formed two rows, one on each side of Green Bay Avenue, heading south in the direction of Republic Steel. Carrying a massive American f lag, fifty-two-year-old Dominic Esposito led the parade. Once again, the mood was joyously rebellious. Several women were in the procession, including family supporters, auxiliary members, and activists. It was almost 6:30 on the Friday evening before Memorial Day. At 117th Street, the marchers encountered the routine detachment of Chicago police. Apparently surprised by these developments, the uniformed blues turned around and started leading the procession west

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on 117th Street. As the procession moved “like a glacier,” the Chicago Daily News reported, “silently and without show of violence,” the police scrambled to form a defensive line at the intersection of 117th and Burley. When the marchers had closed to within 100 feet of Burley Avenue, the police contingency nervously threw up their hands to signal the crowd to stop. The marchers continued forward as Esposito tried to push between the police. One of the officers then struck the f lag staff, dropping it to the ground. “The next second,” according to Patterson, “he hit the f lag bearer with the club and he went down.” An instant after the officer dropped Esposito, the police began to waylay the expanding crowd. This was all that Patterson saw of the first moments of the conf lict. One of the squad cars “shot through” and “chased me down the road,” apparently having identified him as one of the key leaders. Patterson jumped into a ditch, then dashed across the road, eventually evading the police.97 Back at 117th and Burley, the march had descended into a bloody brawl. “What are we waiting for?” shouted one of the police officers, according to a “nonparticipant who was at the point of contact between the policemen’s clubs and the striker’s heads.”98 Having eluded the police squad car, George Patterson could see “people being clubbed all around me.” He could smell the acrid odor of gunpowder as police fired two or three shots into the air. Emotions piqued, two police officers almost came to blows when one tried to intervene on behalf of a woman whom the other was beating. Police clubs found their mark and strikers replied. Some pelted the police with rocks, others retaliated with their fists. The swampy area adjacent to the road was quickly “littered with battered people.” Striker Ben Mitckess was knocked unconscious. Lucille Koch, a dedicated member of the Women’s Auxiliary and one of the most militant participants in the demonstration, also fell to police blows. The constables soon had the disoriented marchers in retreat. Pushed back to 117th and Green Bay, the strikers stopped, facing a solid line of bluecoats “swinging their clubs back and forth.” Captain Kilroy arrived at this point. Jumping out of his car, he stepped in front of the police line. He “pleaded with the people to turn back in a peaceful way.” Instead, according to the Captain, they “stood there, and they insulted us with vile language, call[ing] us scabs.”99 Patterson admitted to the invective, but the “rough and brutal” treatment by the police seemed to justify it. Eighteen strikers had just been wounded, three badly enough to send them to the hospital. Angry and confused, the strikers stood confronting the silent wall of police officers. One woman had retrieved the American f lag and advanced

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to the front of the assembly with Patterson and a few others. “This is what you have done to us in the fight we had,” Patterson exclaimed as he pointed to one of the wounded strikers, his head bleeding profusely. Other wounded marchers, “bleeding very badly, their heads . . . split wide open,” one apparently knocked unconscious, were brought to the front of the line. “We only asked for our right to go through and picket peacefully. You should not have done this.” Shocked by the attack, the marchers sullenly returned to Sam’s Place. They vowed to establish a mass picket line, somehow.100 The pathologically anti-New Deal Chicago Tribune condemned the strikers. Allegedly “inf lamed” by the oratory of Joe Germano, they marched toward 117th Street. They were met by the plant’s “defenders” who “stood their ground” while “the mob” surged forward, trying to “get at them” on their way to the plant. Stirring up stereotypes of hysterical female agitators and deluded radicals, the Tribune reported that “Women screamed. Men shouted denunciations at the police.” The paper was conspicuously silent about the clubbings, beatings, and brazen coercion that met the marchers that evening. Instead, it reported that “the strikers’ f lag bearer struck one of the first blows,” a mendacious claim that ignored the initial attack on Esposito. Asserting that the central issue in the strike was a “wage contract,” the paper neglected the fundamental question at stake, the recognition of union legitimacy. It also condoned the police department’s f lagrant violation of the steelworkers’ right to protest and picket.101 Van Bittner and SWOC were unmoved by the news reports. “The strike situation throughout the Calumet Area and the entire United States is in a satisfactory condition,” Bittner reported on May 29. “This corporation is using every un-American means possible to break the backbone of the strike,” Bittner indignantly reported, including “intimidation, coercion, and collusion with the Chicago Police Department.” The regional director also claimed that the company had imported “roving bands of thugs” from other states to work as strikebreakers. If Bittner could not substantiate the roving strikebreaker story, the evidence abounded for his claim that “the Chicago Police Department is being used as a common strike breaking agency by the Republic Steel Corporation.” The Steel Workers Organizing Committee had taken “Mayor Kelley [sic] at his word” when he released the statement reaffirming the right to picket peacefully. “The disgrace of it all,” Bittner observed, “is that Republic Steel Corporation is being aided in their f lagrant and wanton violation of the laws of the United States, by the Chicago Police Department.”102

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The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) conducted an investigation that corroborated Bittner’s report. It presented a vastly different perspective than the one that appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The NLG was a Popular Front organization with close ties to the Communist party and an unf lincing commitment to progressive causes. Far from enforcing the law, the police “are actively cooperating with the Republic Steel Company to break the strike.” The police had established a “forbidden zone” covering a radius of a mile around the mill and had violently driven off pickets who challenged it. They had “arrested innocent bystanders,” “persons in private retail establishments,” and an individual on his own property. The intimidation and prohibition against picketing violated the Corporation Counsel of Chicago as well as the orders of the police commissioner himself. “Without provocation,” the report claimed, “the police have freely used violence against the strikers and sympathizers on every possible occasion.” The lawyers relayed a hair-raising incident in which police pulled a “father of eight” through the window of his car, allegedly ripping the skin off of his hand. The report included Patterson’s story of nearly being run down by a police squad car as well an “unprovoked and apparently premeditated beating” of a union organizer. It was the same organizer who Patterson recalled being tossed unconscious into a police paddy wagon on May 26.103 Perhaps most stunningly, the report directly challenged the newspapers’ claims about the events of May 28. The strikers were met by “a police cordon with drawn clubs three quarters of a mile from the plant” and “brutally beaten and assaulted.” The “first blow” was not delivered by the f lag bearer but against him, as police “knocked the f lag to the ground and clubbed the f lag bearer.” The NLG subcommittee was left to conclude that the “lawlessness of the police in this case seems clearly to constitute not only a gross violation of Illinois constitutional and statutory rights but also a concerted attack upon the rights granted employees by the National Labor Relations Act and the United States Constitution.”104 For progressives who saw the Little Steel Strike as a cataclysmic struggle against the autocracy of steel, it confirmed their worst suspicions. The day the strike began, another labor front grabbed the headlines. The images would be emblazoned on papers across the country and etched in the minds of American labor supporters for years after. That day, UAW organizers Richard Frankensteen, Walter Reuther, and two others traveled to the antiunion bastion of Dearborn, Michigan, home to the Ford Motor Company. Accompanied by press photographers,

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Frankensteen and the others set out to distribute handbills calling on the company’s 90,000 employees to sign a union card. “The Wagner Bill is behind you!” cried the leaf lets. “Now get behind yourselves.” It was only a few moments before company security toughs assaulted the organizers. Pulling Frankensteen’s jacket over his head, they kicked and punched him until his face was bloodied and lacerated. Company thugs hurled Reuther and the others down the stairs of the overpass and ejected them from the property. In graphic detail, the photos captured the uninhibited, casual violence that had become the standard response to union organizing since the era of the Knights of Labor. Now, as the Employee Representation Plans disintegrated and independent unionism revived, company-sponsored aggression returned. The drive for industrial democracy united Frankensteen and people like John Riffe. It brought together labor sympathizers as well as the enigmatic “women in red” who marched that Friday evening in South Chicago. When the photographers followed them in their final effort to establish a mass picket line at Republic Steel, they would soon have something else in common with Frankensteen and Reuther. They, too, would be immortalized in photographs that captured the unbridled hostility of American business and law enforcement toward labor on the March. The key difference was that all of the UAW organizers would live to tell the tale.105

CH A P T E R

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A month before the Little Steel Strike was even on the horizon, the editors of Public Management dedicated an entire volume to the problem of labor unrest in modern America. The International City Managers’ Association of Chicago reprinted the edition as a booklet titled The City’s Role in Strikes. The rising tide of labor militancy prompted the Association to establish some guidelines for managing the issue. One of the writers who contributed an article to the symposium was none other than Philip Murray. “At heart,” Murray observed, “most policemen are for the workers because they are in that class themselves.” It was not the individual patrolman who chose to become a strikebreaker, but the “reactionary administrations” that set the tone for handling strikes. They failed to instruct police officers on the rights of workers to strike and picket. Unenlightened city administrators bore the responsibility for labor violence. According to Donald C. Stone, director of the Public Administration Service, municipal governments played a critical role in the conduct of strikes. Vigilante activity had to be controlled, the use of troops minimized, and “force or the threat of force should not be employed as long as the strike is conducted peacefully and without disorder.” One of the most practical techniques that city management could adopt to prevent civic disorder was to “furnish ample opportunities for freedom of speech as contemplated under our federal constitution. If strikers or any other groups are denied their right of assembly or free speech,” Stone warned, “trouble is certain to follow.” Events would soon test Murray’s assumptions about the benevolence of the police. They would test Stone’s thesis about the consequences of suppressing

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labor’s right to protest. They would also demonstrate just how divisive the “question of industrial war or peace” really was in 1937.1 *** Saturday passed uneventfully as a token contingent of pickets kept up their vigil across from the Republic Steel gates. While the picketers sullenly paced back and forth under the watchful eyes of company police, the strike committee of Local 1033 met. “Important every possible striker be recruited for union membership,” read an urgent telegram from Philip Murray to strike headquarters in Chicago and Indiana Harbor. “Steps should also be taken to form local committees composed of representatives from friendly unions and sympathizers with CIO for purpose of mobilizing assistance.” Considering the critical situation in South Chicago, SWOC assigned Joe Weber to Republic Steel. The reasoning seemed clear enough: The union needed experienced organizers to take the lead. Weber attended the Saturday meeting at which Murray’s telegram was read. He and the other organizers quickly devised a system in which a team of strikers from related departments would picket the plant on one of the three shifts. At the end of the meeting, they addressed another matter: the mass rally scheduled for Sam’s Place at 3 pm. Joe Weber would be the chair.2 It was Memorial Day, Sunday, the traditional inauguration of summer, a day that was turning out to be unusually warm and pleasantly sunny. It was an ideal day for picnics, but not for marching. By 5 pm, the temperature would hit a sweltering 91°F. Still, the heat would not prevent thousands from attending the Memorial Day parade. Sixty thousand in all would crowd along Michigan Avenue to watch bands and drill squads stride past the Congress Street reviewing stand. The highlight would be the forty remaining members of the Union Army who endured the oppressive heat to hear the roar of an appreciative crowd one more time. Governor Henry Horner attended the parade, miles away from the steelworkers in both spirit and geography. Not far from the festivities, at Wrigley Field in the north end of the city, the Chicago Cubs were playing the St. Louis Cardinals. Swimmers eagerly took to the glistening waters of Lake Michigan along the beaches of the Gold Coast. Amid all of the early summer frivolity at the city’s golf courses, parks, and resorts, tragedy would strike some fourteen residents. They were the inevitable casualties of leisurely carelessness on a holiday weekend. In typically sensational fashion, the Chicago American reported that forty-seven-year-old Arthur Maynard of Belvidere was


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“decapitated” and six of his passengers injured in a car crash following a dance at Delavan Lake in Wisconsin. Audrey Lee, a nineteen-year-old “Negro of 4339 South Michigan Av.” was also killed when her vehicle slammed into a tree at Vermont Street and Ashland Avenue in Calumet Park. So did eleven-year-old Benjamin Swan and his brother Leon, both “Negroes,” both drowning victims at the Jackson Park Lagoon. In all, 380 Americans died over the long weekend. Chicago had more than its fair share of tragedy, and the Chicago American had told only half the story.3 *** For Harry Harper, Sunday morning meant visiting with family. Harper worked for Interlake Iron and had been active in the Employee Representation Committee. He enthusiastically welcomed the SWOC drive of 1936. That summer, he attended the Calumet Field Park meeting that galvanized the CIO movement in Southeast Chicago. He then became the president of the SWOC local at Interlake Iron. On Memorial Day morning, unionism seemed to be far from his mind as he, his wife, and his son visited his in-laws, then stopped in to see his parents on the east side. It was a half-mile away from the Republic Steel Company. When he arrived, he found his mother disconsolate. “You know that there is a strike at the Republic Steel Co.,” she reminded him. “Yes, I know that,” he responded. “How are the boys?” he asked. Harper had two brothers, both of whom worked at Republic. Peter, the older brother, still lived with his elderly mother, while Matthew, the younger one, lived with his wife only a half-mile south of his parents. His mother started to cry. Through her tears, she revealed that “Matthew is out on strike, but Peter has stayed in . . . I have heard so many rumors that he may be held against his will.” Trying to relieve his mother’s distress, Harper changed the subject to the weather, but his mind was fixated on the events unfolding at Republic Steel. Harry left for his brother Matthew’s, only to find out from his wife that there was a mass meeting underway at Sam’s Place. He quickly headed for the former watering hole on Green Bay Avenue.4 Driving together from SWOC headquarters at Eagles Hall, Nick Fontecchio and Joe Weber arrived at Sam’s Place shortly before 3 pm. They must have found the scene encouraging. A large, festive crowd had gathered, numbering anywhere between 1,000 and 2,500. Most observers estimated that the crowd ranged from 1,000 to 1,500. According to some participants, nearly 300 women were there along

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with several children. Another observer estimated that as many as one-third of the crowd at Sam’s Place were women. Strikers and supporters congregated on the streets, sidewalks, and the few grassy areas adjacent to the tavern. A few dedicated Communists hawked the Daily Worker. According to the Communist Party Organizer, the paper had become the “semi-official organ of the strike strategy committee.” The committee had prohibited the sale of “antistrike” newspapers on the picket line and had given special privileges to the Daily Worker. On the picket lines, at the steel mills in the Chicago-Calumet district, in the restaurants and taverns of east side Chicago and Indiana Harbor, and now at Sam’s Place on Memorial Day, the Daily Worker had become the voice of striking steelworkers. The mainstream newspapers could howl all they wanted about Communist subversion; for the striking steelworkers, the Daily Worker had become their voice.5 While activists agitated, children threw son-of-a-gun firecrackers at the sidewalk. A group of strikers played a rousing game of baseball. Supporters drove trucks decked out in red, white, and blue bunting, proudly displaying signs that announced their SWOC affiliation. Writer Meyer Levin remembered “an almost holiday atmosphere,” with people “a little dressed up for Memorial Day,” having arrived in family groups to enjoy a sunny afternoon. Ice cream and soda vendors plied their wares, strikers enjoyed the simple fare provided by the Women’s Auxiliary, and young steelworkers lounged under shady trees, girlfriends at their side. Levin also noted that not everyone was so casually turned out. Some were already carrying signs, others sticks, rocks, and baseball bats in preparation for anything resembling Friday evening’s clash. Dressed in her nurse’s uniform, Meyer Levin’s wife assisted Dr. Lawrence Jacques in setting up a makeshift first aid station while a team of strikers affixed improvised Red Cross signs to their vehicles. Some ominous clouds were already gathering on this sunny Memorial Day meeting.6 Still, the mood was convivial. Parents and their children played a desultory game of tag. Organizers enjoyed a brief respite from the tensions of the picket line. Like so many labor gatherings of the 1930s, politics and entertainment mixed easily. By the time Weber arrived, a woman was serenading the appreciative crowd from the back of a f latbed truck. Soon, others joined in the ballad of Joe Hill, a song about the famous union organizer framed and executed for a murder he allegedly did not commit. The enthusiastic entertainer offered up “Solidarity Forever.” She also ran through a selection of labor-inf lected


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songs that Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and the Almanac Singers had made into the anthems of Depression-era protest.7 The Chicago Repertory Group was there as well, singing union songs and bolstering the battered rank-and-file. Before the strike began, they crafted a reputation as left-wing theater rebels. They performed Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty,” Albert Malt’s “Black Pit,” and other works of social criticism that ref lected a commitment to industrial democracy and antifascism. In 1936, they performed for unemployed workers and labor unions, offering affordable tickets and group discounts to ensure a working-class audience. Now, they joined Chicago writers and intellectuals in a moment of protest that would encapsulate the spirit of the Popular Front. Labor writer Studs Terkel—whose accomplishments as a chronicler of the American worker still lay ahead of him—was there as well. So, were an assortment of ministers, seminarians, teachers, social workers, students, journalists, labor activists, and civil libertarians. IWO members, African Americans, Mexicans, middle-class supporters, industrial laborers, as well as striking steelworkers and Women’s Auxiliary members also converged on Sam’s Place that day.8 To one degree or another, each person at Sam’s Place knew that this strike would determine more than union certification at Republic Steel. In this remote part of Chicago, on the periphery of the Little Steel Strike, many of the questions that burned brightly in the days of the second New Deal came into sharp, singular focus. The glaring economic inequalities in American life, the yearning for a measure of dignity in the fiefdoms of American industry, and the gnawing conviction that American Freedom had become little more than an empty slogan brought them to Burley Avenue that afternoon. At the same time, these activists from across the social spectrum expressed the mounting belief that a cooperative ethic just might triumph over the seemingly bankrupt American tradition of reckless competition. Progressives also gathered at Sam’s Place out of a sense that this was a decisive moment in the struggle between fascism and democracy. The fear of fascism was anything but mere rhetoric. The fascist movement then gaining strength in Spain seemed to have found its spiritual ally in the autocratic and violently repressive practices of Little Steel. Perhaps some recalled the words of John L. Lewis less than a year earlier, as the CIO surge accelerated. “It is an issue,” Lewis told a radio audience in July 1936, “whether the working population of this country shall have a voice in determining their destiny or whether they shall serve as indentured servants for a financial and economic dictatorship which would shamelessly exploit our natural resources and debase the soul and

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destroy the pride of a free people.” Perhaps President Roosevelt’s words echoed in the workers’ ears that day—the words he had delivered to an eager Democratic party on the night that he accepted the renomination for a second term. “For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic equality. . . . For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. . . . They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy.” For those assembled at Sam’s Place, the upheaval of the 1930s had irrevocably transformed their understanding of that idea.9 At 3 pm, the meeting came to order with Joe Weber presiding. After instructions on picket duty and the obligatory condemnation of Tom Girdler, organizer Leo Krzycki took to the microphone. A key lieutenant of Sidney Hillman’s in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Krzycki made his reputation as a labor leader in the 1936 Goodyear strike in Akron. Now, the CIO had sent him to assist the steelworkers. He was a powerful orator; one who crafted evocative images that captured the imagination of working people. Warming up the crowd, Krzycki congratulated the workers on getting suntans and looking considerably healthier than they had in the mills. He joked that some of them looked as if they had visited their neighbor’s cellars recently. “The mood of the crowd during the speech was quite friendly,” attorney Frank McCullogh observed; “they were laughing at his jokes.” McCullogh was the industrial relations secretary for the Council for Social Action, a Congregational organization interested in resolving social injustice. An exponent of the Social Gospel, McCullogh’s belief in the impartiality of law had already been tested. Walking the picket line in an earlier strike, he was roughed up and arrested by plainclothes officers who charged him with disorderly conduct.10 After ingratiating himself to the strikers, Krzycki turned to the business at hand. They were engaged in a strike against a company that had openly defied the National Labor Relations Act by refusing even to consider a signed contract. Organization was vital, the CIO was their hope, and both the company and the city stood arrayed against them. The company and its political allies were behaving more like agents of fascist Germany than democratic America. The strikers had a right to picket, Krzycki reminded them, and only by picketing could they bring the company to heel. Recounting the sit-down strikes at GM in Flint, the Bendix strike at South Bend, and the Goodyear sit-downs in Akron,


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Krzycki connected the national labor movement to the events unfolding in South Chicago. Those events were precursors; this strike advanced the cause of industrial justice. He delighted the audience with references to John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his animated style, the socialist and former sheriff of Milwaukee County sketched out for them what the day would look like when they did not have to “kneel down and pick up crumbs from the f loor of the employer’s table.” Under the protection of national law, Krzycki encouraged the assembly to imagine a day when workers might strengthen their purchasing power and enjoy more fully the benefits of American prosperity. Instead of communist agitation, the textile organizer offered the steelworkers an image of an America transformed by New Deal egalitarianism.11 Nick Fontecchio then took to the platform to recount the events of the past few days. He highlighted the police brutality that had marred the strike since the beginning. He pointedly reminded the assembled that Mayor Kelly had reaffirmed their right to picket. “You people elected President Roosevelt and he is in office to serve you,” one reporter remembered Fontecchio announcing. “Here we have the Republic Steel Corporation and Girdler violating the Wagner law and the police protecting law violators,” but that would not “stop us from picketing the plant.” He retraced the events that led to the rise of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and the revitalization of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. Fontecchio contrasted the situation in Indiana Harbor with the one at Republic Steel. At the former, local authorities permitted picketing, but in South Chicago, the determination to crush protest had only led to violence. The strike committee then sponsored resolutions to be sent to the governor of Illinois and the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. Someone in the audience stood to introduce a motion calling for a march to Republic Steel. Strikers and their supporters agreed to form a mass picket line at the plant entrance. There was no discussion of breaching the mill gates. James Stewart, an electrician at U.S. Steel’s South Works and president of Local 65, believed that “it was purely a protest meeting . . . a meeting to establish our right to peaceful picketing.” SWOC organizer John Riffe agreed. The crowd intended to “get down in front of the plant where we had been allowed to have pickets before that, to establish a picket line.” Steelworker Anton Goldasic also believed that the objective was to “establish a peaceful picketing line.” Yet Goldasic himself felt that a massive public demonstration might finally convince the minority of strikebreakers on the inside to join them.12

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Although there were no plans to attack the plant, the strikers intended to assert their right to picket. It was the “typical crowd that I have seen since in various strike mass meetings,” reporter Ralph Beck observed. They listened to “everything the speakers had to say, . . . while others gathered in small groups outside and discussed the issues involved.” Frank McCullogh of the Council for Social Action of the Congregational Churches of America noted that the audience was “rather idly listening. The men were all attentive but not tense. There were women and children in the crowd, and the whole feeling of the people, as I walked among them . . . was not of intense hatred, so far as I could judge by their outward action.” Despite the unwarranted arrests, assaults, and violations of the previous week, the assembly at Sam’s Place never degenerated into an “angry mob.”13 By the time that Weber took the platform again, Harry Harper had arrived at the meeting. He started weaving through the increasingly dense crowd, inquiring after his brother, Matthew. Harper heard the speaker introduce the resolutions and make some other announcements; a letter from Mayor Kelly upholding their right to picket peacefully resonated with him. It probably stiffened the resolve of many strikers. Once again, Kelly had reaffirmed their right to picket. A few of the workers had seen Harper’s brother, but did not know his whereabouts. Scanning the crowd, he found some coworkers who invited him to join the parade. Considering he was a SWOC local president, Harper probably needed little prompting. Now, he joined the throng of workers spilling out from Sam’s Place onto Green Bay Avenue. From there, the march would wind its way south to 114th Street, where the dirt road to Republic Steel began.14 Not all of the observers considered the meeting benign. Nineteenyear-old Clyde James was selling ice cream that day in the area of Sam’s Place. “After the speaking went on for a while,” he recalled, “the people listening begin to get worked up and started to yell for action: shouting among other things, ‘Less words and more action! We want action!’ ” According to James, some of the workers tore down a fence and started fashioning clubs out of the wood. The planks were then used to carry placards. Some of the strikers whittled the ends of their signs into sharp points suitable for close combat. One man apparently handed out twoby-twos to participants on their way to the march. James also claimed to have overheard one striker say to another that “I have my gat loaded,” and saw him patting his back pocket for emphasis. The attentive ice cream vendor also noted the cars in the vicinity featured Indiana license plates. James did not linger very long once the march began.15


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Jean Carleton Carey, a student at the exclusive Francis Parker School on Clark Street North in the Lincoln Park area, was also an observer that day. She had accompanied her history teacher, another teacher, his wife, and four other students to the strike scene on Saturday. Carey had decided to go along out of “curiosity” rather than conviction, she claimed. She went to South Chicago that afternoon with “a lot of faith in policemen.” That faith remained unshaken even after Carey herself donned a picket sign and tried, unsuccessfully, to join the token picket line on Burley Avenue. On Sunday, she returned with her teachers, whose “communistic tendencies” were not enough to keep her away for a second day. One of the teachers’ wives recruited her to distribute water to the strikers. It was there, inside Sam’s Place, that she witnessed people holding “clubs and baseball bats and iron pieces and hose, and I saw three guns.” Carey questioned Emil Koch, a Local 1033 officer, about the apparent contradiction between signs reading “peaceful picketing” and strikers carrying clubs. “If the cops get tough with us,” he allegedly replied, “we will get tough with them.” Intermittently, Carey followed Krzycki’s speech, most of which she “didn’t really understand.” Yet, she recalled him “talking about the bosses down at the steel mill,” about “how the bigger they were the harder they would fall,” and about the injustice of Republic Steel’s refusal to sign a contract.16 More than this, Krzycki claimed that they had a right to picket the mill. He asked the crowd if they were willing to “stand by and let them keep you back?” Serving water inside, Carey saw someone else she recognized. He seemed strangely familiar. Unable to put a name to the face, she and her friends asked one of the union supporters: It was George Patterson. Apparently, her teacher, Mr. Mitchell, had invited Patterson to the school to discuss “steel” and “strikes and things.” To Carey, Mitchell’s communistic leanings were clearly evidenced by the fact that he was always “fighting against Capitalism and things” and always “fighting for the strikers.” To the nineteen-year-old high school student, a friend to one of the police officers on duty that day, the scene at Sam’s was subversive, disturbing, but intriguing.17 No one was more alarmed by the proceedings at Sam’s Place than the reporters who covered the story that afternoon. “While the words of the speakers were phrased so that in cold type they would not seem inf lammatory,” Chicago Tribune cameraman Harold Revoir observed, “the gestures of the speakers and the inf lection of their voices had a tendency to do so.” Revoir believed that the “crowd’s emotions and passions were being stimulated by these speeches,” which “condemned capitalism” and the indolence of the bosses. The photographer was

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surprised when a striker allegedly approached him, club in hand, and announced that “You will get a lot of action pictures today. . . . You will see a lot action today.” Curiously, however, the photographer did not snap any shots of the club-wielding strikers at Sam’s Place. Nor could he explain why strikers carrying pipes would approach a newspaper photographer and make such provocative announcements as “We are really going to town this afternoon.”18 Reporter Edwin Kennedy also detected a malevolent tone under the surface of joyous rebellion. Carrying “clubs, iron bars, bricks and slingshots,” hundreds of steelworkers from Inland and Youngstown Sheet and Tube lined up on Green Bay Avenue following Fontecchio’s speech. He claimed to have overheard the strikers announcing that it “would be too bad for the coppers that got in front of them,” that they were “going through the police lines and going right into the plant,” and that they intended to “run those scabs out of there.” Kennedy must have had remarkable powers of observation, since he was simultaneously able to take notes on the speeches, report on the activities of the strikers, and record in minute detail the characteristics of the slingshots they allegedly carried. He also made these observations in less than an hour, having arrived after the meeting was well underway and leaving before Weber concluded it. Although he did not witness a single striker demonstrating the weapon’s lethal force, it didn’t impede his description of how the attacker could “hurl the missile from the leather portion of the sling through the air with great velocity.” In a crowd that ranged anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 people, Kennedy heard the strikers describing their sinister plan to invade the mill. He also reported that “these people were seen carrying clubs”—not that he himself had seen them. Even before the meeting had ended, he allegedly obseved steelworkers lining up outside in “company formation.” After phoning the preliminary report into his paper, the virulently antilabor Chicago Tribune, Kennedy rushed back to observe the march. For Revoir and Kennedy, the meeting was the staging ground for confrontation.19 Considering the first aid preparations and the painted signs that appeared before the meeting broke up, it is highly unlikely that the march was spontaneous. Some planning, some anticipation of mass action, had to have preceded the meeting. Even so, the group’s intentions were evidently peaceful. Although Weber, Krzycki, and Fontecchio tried to galvanize the crowd by upbraiding Girdler and condemning police brutality, they strictly avoided calling for retribution. Considering the number of journalists and undercover police officers present, any other course of action would have been unwise. And in view of the


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police department’s armed superiority and its demonstrated willingness to suppress even the mildest resistance, openly advocating retaliation would have been foolhardy at best. Any thought of invading the mill and attacking the remaining workers was equally implausible. The strikers lacked the coordination and weaponry to launch such a wild scheme. Dozens of workers had already been wounded on the previous Wednesday and Friday. Every protestor familiar with the events of the past few days knew that it was not just the police who were armed, but also the company’s security forces and several of its “loyal” workers. In a group of supporters that included a considerable number of women and some children, at a time when the strike committee exercised only limited control, anything but a peaceful demonstration would have been impossible, if not unthinkable.20 Kennedy’s suggestion that “two or three hundred” strikers were carrying clubs and iron bars is dubious. Reporter Ralph Beck, probably the most impartial media representative there, “made a point” of examining the demonstrators for weapons. He counted between thirty-five and forty, with only eight strikers carrying lengths of pipe. Also arriving after the meeting was underway, author Meyer Levin observed only fifteen to twenty marchers carrying “sticks or stones” and one carrying a bat. Considering Beck’s evenhanded observations, it is highly unlikely that even as many as 150, let alone “two or three hundred” carried weapons. Contrary to Kennedy’s report, the Strike Strategy committee monitored the marchers for offensive weapons. Louis Selenik, one of the marchers wounded in Friday’s attack, was a member of the committee. Before the march began, he and five other Local 1033 members scoured the crowd, searching for weapons: “I was going through the lines and asking the captains, talking to the men, against any unnecessary battle, particularly if they had any guns to leave them behind. None of them had any guns. The captains were frisking the crowd to see that they had no weapons.” Selenik reported that they did not find any guns.21 Yet the reporters, the ice cream vendor, and the high school student were not simply fabricating stories out of thin air. There was indeed a belligerent undercurrent. Selenik obviously had some reason to be concerned that the crowd might include armed unionists bent on retaliation. Even Meyer Levin, in his semi-fictitious portrait of the events, noted the dissonant tone in the meeting. Levin had his fictional character, Dr. Mitch Wilner—a substitute for the real-life Dr. Lawrence Jacques—note a “foolish, uneasy feeling.” It was a feeling that told him “he ought to back out of the whole thing, leave now.” Opening the

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back door of Sam’s Tavern, Wilner encountered “a group of men in the yard, which was separated from the picnic grounds by a man-high fence.” The strikers there were distributing newly painted signs and engaging in the kind of conversation that only heightened Wilner’s trepidation. Levin had some of the characters in this group proclaim “I just wanna see that sonofabitch that conked me Friday” and “You know who did that? That louse bastard name of Rainey. . . . Well, you just show him to me, that’s all I want is a chance at that sonofabitch.” Levin also added some dialogue that sounded remarkably similar to the comment that Emil Koch made to the wide-eyed student from Lincoln Park, Jean Carleton Carey: “ ‘Nobody’s going to start anything,’ a fellow with inf lamed eyes cried almost exultantly. ‘But if those yellow bastards think they can get away with it this time—.’ ”22 Of course, Levin’s book, published three years after the Little Steel Strike, is a fictional account, but only barely. More than likely, Levin and others overheard at least a few strikers exhibiting the kind of anxious bravado typical of potentially confrontational situations. Some probably did make impetuous statements about invading the plant, pulling out the “finks,” and punishing the “scabs.” Yet, if Levin recounted the confrontational mood of this small minority, he also provided the most compelling account of their motives: “Mitch drew back into the kitchen. If they had been clubbed last Friday, you couldn’t blame the boys for wanting at least a stick in their hands when they went up again to that line of cops. But he felt really uneasy now.” Despite the tough talk, there is no evidence that the few hotheads even made an effort to convince the majority to arm themselves. There was equally no evidence of an attempt to convince the crowd to adopt an aggressive posture. In a group that included unfamiliar unionists, white-collar workers, students, women, and children, not to mention police observers, that would have been imprudent.23 Still, what is remarkable about the protest march to Republic Steel is that it was peaceful at all. What was notable was not the 20, 30, or even 100 marchers carrying sticks and clubs that day. Rather, it was that more did not arrive armed and ready for confrontation. After a week in which dozens had been beaten, arrested, intimidated, and possibly even shot at; after a week in which workers protected by the National Labor Relations Act only recently upheld by the Supreme Court had been prevented from exercising even the most basic of civil liberties, let alone the right to strike and picket, it would not have been surprising had more turned out prepared to defend themselves. After years of public tolerance for the violent suppression of free speech and freedom of assembly,


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demonstrators could not expect that the authorities would handle them gently. By the time that the Little Steel Strike began, Chicago’s finest had already clinched their reputation for strikebreaking efficiency and antiunion ruthlessness.24 When the steelworkers launched their strike, they did so in the belief that they enjoyed the protection of not only federal law but municipal ordinances as well. For those who had been beaten on Friday night, the laws protecting the rights of labor must have seemed like empty promises by Sunday afternoon. With the resolutions passed, the marchers began to form a column. In clutches of friends, family, and comrades forged on the strike lines and in the marches of the previous week, they fell in behind two standard bearers. John Lotito and Max Guzman, both workers at Republic Steel, carried the f lags that had been planted on the makeshift platform. Weber and most of the SWOC leadership would stay behind. Singing “Solidarity” and chanting “CIO,” the column slowly filtered into Green Bay Avenue. It was just after 4 pm. *** A news commentator for WWAE in Hammond, Indiana, Everett Parker must have relished the opportunity to get out of the studio and into the action. Arriving at Sam’s Place at approximately 2:30, Parker darted about the area, interviewing strikers, watching the proceedings at strike headquarters, and interviewing police. At Republic Steel, he found the situation surprisingly placid in comparison to the frenetic energy at Sam’s Place. Eight steelworkers maintained a languorous picket line while police officers lounged at their posts, jackets off in the warm spring sun. From his observation point at the plant, he had a clear view of Sam’s Place. Once the march began, the situation on Burley Avenue quickly changed. Despite the heat, officers donned their coats and began to form up. Police command quickly deployed a platoon of constables in the direction of the advancing march. Patrol wagons were dispatched to intercept the marchers moving slowly down Green Bay Avenue. Setting two cars end to end on 117th, they effectively blocked the route that the marchers had used on Friday evening. Parker followed the police. Standing on a shed, the intrepid radio reporter was able to get “a good idea of the formation of the strikers’ column.” Leaping down from his perch, Parker bolted back along 117th in the direction of the plant. Finding a phone in a nearby tavern, he breathlessly called in his report to the station: The strikers were on the move.

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Returning to 117th, he discovered that the column of marchers had veered away from 118th, onto the dirt road that cut diagonally across the field between Green Bay and Burley. By that time, the police were forming a line in a crescent-shaped cordon at the point where the dirt road intersected with Burley Avenue. Behind the police line ran a row of houses along the desolate Burley Avenue. Eager for a good view of the developing scene, Parker lodged himself on the porch of one of the nearby houses. By the time he arrived, a platoon of reserve police had been scrambled to join the forces now straddling the dirt road. There were at least 200 police waiting for the column of marchers.25 Deployed in four platoons, they marched north on Burley Avenue under the command of Captain Thomas Kilroy. On Saturday, May 29, Captain Mooney had received a tip from a cooperative newspaper reporter alerting him to the plan for a march onto the steel mill. Either prompted by his anonymous informants or convinced of it on his own accord, Mooney now believed that the marchers would try to force their way into the mill. He would create an impregnable barrier and stop them cold. Immediately after receiving the tip from the mysterious informant, Mooney called the lieutenants at the plant and ordered the 4 pm shift to appear for duty at 3 pm. By the time he arrived at the mill, some 300 police officers were on duty at Republic Steel. Calling together the platoon commanders and Captain Kilroy, Mooney gave them their orders. He “expected every man to do his duty and hold that line . . . they were not going into that plant.” The lieutenants were responsible for every officer in their platoon. “We don’t want anybody hurt,” Mooney claimed to have told his officers, “we will try to talk to them; maybe we can turn them around, but . . .” They would only use their .38 Smith and Wesson service revolvers if absolutely necessary. By the time the Captain gave the orders, though, some of the police were already moving into position against the oncoming marchers. Neither Kilroy nor Mooney could be certain that each of the 300-odd patrolmen knew what their responsibilities were that day. In order to prevent a breach at the railroad gate, Mooney sent Sergeant Lyons and his platoon to the left of the police column, which was now spreading out in skirmish formation. With Mooney on his right, Kilroy took up a position astride the dirt road. The police waited as the crowd, which had begun to fan out across the field, once again narrowed, realizing that the dirt road provided the only reliable passage across the swampy terrain.26 While Mooney positioned his troops and Everett Parker angled for a good view, several theology students from the University of Chicago


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followed the enthusiastic marchers. Six students had arrived at about 4:20. Hearing the crowd cheer as it spilled out of the yard at Sam’s Place, they ran to join them at Green Bay and 114th street. Marilee Kone observed several women following considerably behind the group as it moved toward the dirt road. Kone spotted a few workers carrying short sticks and rocks, but nothing more threatening. A few shouted, “Come on workers. We are going to get through this time.” Having fallen in with them, Kone wanted to know exactly what they meant by “getting through.” The strikers answered, “Through to picket.” Satisfied that their intentions were peaceful, she continued along. She noted that as many as 2,000 people had joined the march. Her companion, J. Gordon Bennett, observed that “the strikers were f locking, not determinedly or wildly, just f locking. It appeared more like a demonstration than an attack.” Bennett raced ahead of the women and moved closer to the front of the column. He then noticed a clutch of police officers congregating in strength in the far corner of the field, closest to the plant gate. It was there that the column of marchers, which had fanned out and then contracted to avoid the marshy terrain, was concentrating. The police had stretched out in a 200-yard double file. It began advancing steadily toward the throng of marchers. Kone and the others soon realized that they were no longer observers.27 James C. Row was on the strike committee for the SWOC local at Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Indiana Harbor, but he and two others found themselves drawn away from their quiet picket lines to the excitement at Sam’s Place. Row was in a bit of a predicament: he had promised to take his wife to the theater that evening. Assured that they would not stay at the meeting very long, he decided to drive them both to South Chicago. He and his friends noticed a line forming outside. “It was my understanding that we were just going down to the picket line, singing a few songs, have a little meeting and then come back.” Once again, he reminded his friends of the promise he had made to his wife. Once again, his union friends prevailed upon him, this time to join the parade. “The crowd was very orderly and happy,” Row noted, with the “children of some of the parents . . . running and playing as they went along through the crowd.” He soon discovered the wall of police that stood in the path of the advancing march. Moving to within one hundred feet of the police line, he and others spread out, “talking to the uniformed men.”28 As theology student Marilee Kone noticed several women waiting tentatively on the perimeter of the field, Lupe Marshall joined a group of women moving directly to the head of the column. One

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of the thousands of Mexican immigrants who now called Chicago home, Marshall counted herself a “housewife and a volunteer social worker.” Affiliated with Jane Addams’s pioneering Hull House, which had become a magnet for labor union activists, she was driven to attend the meeting out of her dedication to “studying and doing research among the Mexican people, relative to their attitude within the organized labor movement.” At first, Marshall found herself speaking to a writer—probably Meyer Levin—who was busily taking notes. In order to get the “best account of the thing,” she joined a group of women moving to the front. Like others, Marshall noted the general deportment of the demonstrators. None was carrying sticks, pipes, stones, or other weapons, but she did hear one striker admonishing another to “drop that stone,” claiming that “we don’t want that stuff here.” Instead of menacing hotheads, Marshall observed what she believed to be some 200 women mixed among strikers who were positively “jubilant.” Children accompanied some of the women who had joined the march. Even a police informer noticed that women carried children and that entire families had joined the parade. Moving together in that amorphous group, they sang, joked, and encouraged each other in the belief that they would win the strike. That mood was soon broken. Before them, a solid wall of police advanced in a “running step.” The momentum of the marchers carried the front rank forward to within an arm’s length of the police. Lupe Marshall stood facing Officer Higgins. He introduced himself by calling Marshall and the other women “a vile name” and ordering them to get back. Higgins would soon make a much deeper impression on the day’s events.29

CH A P T E R

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By the time the march got underway, SWOC organizer George Patterson had been at the scene for eight hours. After visiting with his wife, Dorothy, and the other Women’s Auxiliary members working in the soup kitchen, Patterson organized the picket signs and instructed the captains. He, too, noted the “jovial” atmosphere at Sam’s Place and the parents and children playing tag together. He also noted the number of strangers in the crowd. Were they police spies, company operatives, or detectives? Were they planted there as agent provocateurs? Patterson did not dwell on it; it was a “pleasant afternoon” with “little thought of tension among the people and audience.”1 By the day’s end, the workers of South Chicago would demonstrate more decisively than ever before their determination to realize the constellation of values at the center of the labor uprisings of the 1930s. Local authorities would make the case that those values had no place in their city. Once the march began to take shape, however, Patterson quickly discovered that it lacked union leadership. None of the key figures, including Weber, Riffe, or SWOC organizer Hank Johnson, an African American and a devoted member of the Communist Party, planned to join them. Alarmed at the apparent vacuum, Patterson told Johnson that “someone has to go with these people and meet the police.” He soon found himself pressed into that role, alongside Jim Stewart, fellow Scottish native and president of SWOC Local 65. Patterson joined the front of the column, next to the f lag bearers. He began treading the familiar path to Burley and 117th, “the spot [where] we always seemed to meet the police.” The torpid heat and the clouds of dust kicked up from the dirt path took their toll on Patterson. He had seen little relief from the strike since it began the previous Wednesday. The sight of a police cordon was now familiar;

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the sight of several photographers and a Paramount newsreel truck was not. “It struck me as comical,” Patterson recalled, “but I had little time to think. We were face to face with the police.”2 Not far behind Lupe Marshall was Mollie West, the enthusiastic singer who had led the crowd in a litany of union anthems before the meeting. West was no neophyte. In fact, she was a member of the Young Communist League (YCL). She had become “interested and radicalized” by her involvement in a student strike. When high school authorities announced plans to cut extracurricular programs such as swimming, dancing, and music, the students began to organize a walk out. West joined the strike committee. Working at midnight to prepare the picket signs, she and the others were shocked when the police raided the meeting and arrested the committee. Brought to the Fillmore Police Station, West was appalled to find the arresting officer informing the on-duty sergeant that the students had been apprehended for “distributing literature.” She was even more disconcerted to overhear the arresting officer asking the sergeant how to spell “literature.” The experience of being arrested “seared” her and sealed her convictions. She joined the current affairs club of the Jewish People’s Institute and the YCL soon after. When SWOC called on the community to show their support at the Memorial Day picnic, West and carloads of other students from the club showed up. They would soon join the gaggle of demonstrators who streamed into Green Bay Avenue. Without an ounce of military discipline or a weapon that she could observe, they moved toward the plant gate.3 Face to face for the first time since Friday’s altercation, some of the marchers and police exchanged epithets. Lupe Marshall recoiled at the “vile language” that eighteen-year veteran officer George Higgins allegedly hurled at the women demonstrators. Higgins claimed to be equally troubled. According to him, the strikers “used profanity that was disrespectful.” They threatened the police, saying, “You lousy Chicago coppers, you or nobody else is going to stop us. We are going in that mill and drive them out.” Others hurled the familiar epithet of “fink” at the police, while one allegedly directed his remarks at Mooney, stating, “And you, you big [expletive]—I will drive this through your skull,” simultaneously brandishing a menacing hook attached to a pole. Officer Jacob Woods also claimed to have endured verbal assaults. In his account, though, they came from the back ranks of the strikers, a more likely scenario considering the additional cover and courage that a few ranks of strikers would have provided. Woods also mentioned the meat hook-wielding striker. According to


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Lawrence Lyons, most of the officers heard the demonstrators shout, “What are we waiting for, let’s take over the plant.” On the far right of the crescent-shaped line, Captain Mooney was engaged in his own showdown. “I never saw such people in all the years of my experience,” he observed. “They acted out of their heads, completely wild,” using the “most profane words I ever heard. . . . The profanity was terrible.” They were not just swearing, Mooney claimed; they were also threatening to invade the plant: “What is holding us up? Why can’t we kick the finks out? Are we going to let these coppers stop us from getting in there?” According to Lyons, almost every marcher within sight was armed with a club, baseball, or crowbar. The atmosphere was tense, the police maintained, charged by the electricity of a mob whipped into a radical frenzy.4 That account did not even remotely resemble the experience of the frontline marchers who faced Moody and Kilroy. Meyer Levin noted that some twenty-five people were nervously singing “Solidarity,” but that quickly tapered off as they approached the police. Once there, “the line was rather quiet.” Moving to within four feet of the police line, Levin still could not make out the content of the “quiet” discussion going on between strikers and police. Flag-bearer John Lotito was directly involved in one of the exchanges that Meyer was straining to hear. Lotito asked one of the young patrolmen why the police would not simply permit them to picket peacefully. “Buddy,” the officer responded, “I don’t know any more about it than you do. I don’t like to be out here.” Why, then, did they not simply permit the strikers to picket? “We ain’t gonna cause no trouble,” Lotito supposedly said. “We are just going up to the corner there and show them people inside that we are on strike.” Carrying a sign that read “Bullets and batons instead of protection at Republic Steel,” James Stewart—George Patterson’s Scottish compatriot—also stood in the front line of the march. “Why don’t you go back home?” one of the patrolmen apparently asked Stewart. “Why, we are only going to march past the plant and establish our right to peaceful picketing.” The patrolman responded that he was “only trying to do his duty.” “I have no doubt about that,” said Stewart, “but we have our rights under the law.”5 While Stewart and Lotito appealed to junior patrolmen, steel mill chipper Anton Goldasic went to the top. Moving from behind the f lag bearers to the front line, he “walked up and smiled and put my hand on [Mooney’s] shoulder and I says, ‘I can’t understand why you fellows don’t leave us march through and establish a picket line.’ And he says, I can’t let you fellows go through. You men have got rocks and bricks

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and whatnot.” Goldasic reassured Mooney that the marchers would drop the rocks if the police would permit them to picket, but their conversation was over. A plainclothes officer started questioning him; it was not a pleasant exchange. “Get the hell out of here before you know what is good for you,” he announced. This may have been the same plainclothes officer who f lag bearer Max Guzman remembered saying to him, in a subdued voice, “Lucky you are carrying that f lag or you would have been shot.”6 Meanwhile, Mooney stubbornly def lected the marchers’ appeals. Lupe Marshall could hear marchers from behind the f lag bearers simultaneously shouting their demands. Instead of profanity, she heard them assert their right to picket and assemble. Others heard women at the front chanting “CIO, CIO.” Stewart, remembered that the women’s CIO chant sent a “shiver of tension” through the police at that time. They were “highly nervous,” he recalled, and it seemed as if they “were going to take action.” Standing close to Captain Kilroy, reporter Ralph Beck heard the marchers announce over and over that they had their “civil rights, we have our constitutional rights, and Mayor Kelly said we could go through.” Emphatically, the marchers claimed their legal right to picket. “They were excited and hot and kept repeating the same thing over again, as did the police.” 7 The friction simply mounted. Harry Harper was also at the front, appealing to the police to let him look for his brother, Peter. He was the one who had stayed in the plant when the strike began. “I looked at the officers’ faces to my right and to my left. The faces were drawn, the lips quivering, and they seemed to be intoxicated with something that is hard for me to explain.” The analogy that occurred to him was the front line of a football team, tense and primed, waiting for the ball to snap. “I think I displayed some fear,” Harper recalled, “because one of the officers stated, ‘what are you afraid of?’ I was on the verge of saying . . . or I did say, ‘I do not know. It must be in the air.’ ”8 Explosively, without warning, the stalemate ended. In the time it took for photographer Orlando Lippert to change the lens in his Paramount newsreel camera, the tableau shattered. In the brief moment after Mooney and Kilroy had read a formal proclamation stating, “In the name of the people of the State of Illinois, I demand you disperse peacefully and quietly,” the façade of civility vanished. It only took a moment. “As I was addressing one of the officers in front of me,” Marshall remembered, “Mr. Higgins had moved away somewhat. The police were closing in, closing their ranks and crowding us, pushing


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us back all this time,” compressing the marchers and alarming those in the front rank. “There are enough of you men to march alongside of these people, to see that order is kept,” Marshall anxiously announced to one officer. “Like hell!” he returned. “Like hell! Like hell! Like hell there are!” Laughing “real sarcastically” at Marshall, he muttered “something about sending these [blanks] back.” Once Mooney finished reading the order to disperse, the police officer who had been speaking to James Stewart swung his baton at him. It hit the sign, knocking it from his shoulder; another officer swung and hit him in the forearm. “From there on,” Stewart remembered, “it was confusion.”9 Observing the march from behind police lines, Frank McCullogh of the Council for Social Action noticed the scene change at precisely that moment. “It was the beginning of a backward movement,” he observed, “uncertainty, apparently, in the ranks of the marchers.” McCullogh must have seen the pushing incident that Lupe Marshall noted. So, too, did Congregational minister Chester B. Fisk, standing fifty yards behind the front line and carrying a handheld movie camera. Spotting a platoon marching to reinforce the police on the left f lank, Fisk momentarily forgot his camera and watched the scene unfold. “Immediately after that, there was a backward motion at the head of the crowd. I could not tell what caused it at all but could tell immediately that the people were giving way at the very head.” This was the moment when the baton blow struck James Stewart. It was at this point that Harry Harper, who had been looking for his delinquent brother, thought he heard “a blast of a whistle, and then all hell seemed to have let loose.” He was the only marcher who noted it. Observing the standoff from the row of houses behind the police line, Frank McCullogh “saw a rock come from the ranks of the strikers and hit the fence at the end of the alley.” It was at that instant that he noticed the tear gas clouds rising above the prairie. That, McCullogh believed, was when the police launched their attack. Once the rock struck the fence, he saw one of the officers take out his weapon and fire it in the direction of the marchers in full f light. “His gun was pointed directly in the direction of the men and not up in the air.”10 Struck on the left side of his head, Harry Harper went down, “the blood . . . gushing out of my face. It was running in my mouth. I went back and held my hand above my eye. I was in a crouching position so the blood would not strangulate me. . . . I tried to retreat and go back, but . . . I had no vision in my left eye.” Flag-bearer John Lotito had been talking to one of the police officers when the attack began. “I got clubbed and I went down, and my f lag fell down,” but as Lotito tried

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to retrieve it and stand up, the police struck him again. “I was like a top, you know, spinning. I was dizzy. So I put my hand to my head, and there was blood all over. I started to crawl away. . . . I didn’t know what I was doing.”11 In an instant the police had waded into the marchers. The stif ling scent of tear gas quickly filled the humid air above the dusty prairie. It all seemed to happen simultaneously. Lupe Marshall believed she was “still talking to these officers in front of me when I heard a dull thud toward the back of the—of my group.” George Patterson had been one of the strikers appealing to the police to escort the marchers to the plant. After Mooney finished the statement calling on them to disperse, the Scottish organizer once again tried to appeal to the officers to let them establish a peaceful picket line. “He looked through me,” Patterson noted, “down at me. Like he never saw nor heard me.” As police vaulted into the strikers, Patterson turned and ran. Mollie West, who only moments before had been singing “Solidarity Forever,” now noticed an ominous cloud of dust swirling in the grass ahead of her. She suddenly realized what it was: tear gas. “A lot of the people at the front began to wheeze and weren’t able to breathe,” she observed, and they began to move back.12 Tear gas canisters fell rapidly behind the front rank of marchers, but the pops of what many thought were firecrackers or blanks soon riveted the crowd’s attention. “When I was about fifty yards from the front of the crowd,” theology student Marilee Kone recalled, “there was a sudden quick series of explosions, and a great mass of tear gas rose up at the front.” At the same time that the tear gas canisters thudded on the prairie ground, another terrifying sound ripped the air. “Almost instantaneously,” Kone noted, “there was a volley of shots.” One crack followed by a cluster of shots was soon consumed in a torrent of small arms fire that engulfed the marchers in the center of the line. Reverend Chester B. Fisk noted simultaneous “explosions” breaking out at the front of the line, either tear gas or gunfire, he was not sure. At exactly the same time, he noticed “a shower of stones and other missiles” descending out of the air, hurled from the back of the column. Police officers firing into the air were quickly outstripped by those firing directly into the crowd. Some thought it was machine-gun fire; Lupe Marshall believed it sounded “more like thunder.” For several seconds, the barrage continued. Theology student J. Gordon Bennett, who had run ahead of his University of Chicago compatriots to a position approximately seventy yards from the center of the front line, heard a “burst of gunfire,” shots that were fired almost simultaneously as the crowd turned and ran. “A bullet whizzed past. I dropped


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into a depression, then got up and continued running.” Not far behind him, two marchers helped another who had been struck in the leg. He took over from one of them and helped the wounded striker to a car that had raced across the field to pick up the casualties. “A bullet whizzed past” as Bennett and the others helped the wounded striker into the back seat of the car. A woman, shot in the leg, hobbled to the car; others carried a wounded ten-year-old boy to the vehicle. The floodgate of police tension, resentment, and fear had given way to a devastating volley of gunfire that drove the front ranks to the ground.13 As the torrent of gunfire erupted, the wounded Harry Harper saw strikers “going down, as though being mowed down by a scythe.” Looking to his right, he saw officers with drawn revolvers firing directly into the crowd. Harper immediately bolted for a ditch. Overcome by “the instinct of self-preservation,” he ran terrified, convinced that he would get a bullet in the back. As he dove for cover, he heard a plaintive voice calling out “Help me buddy, I’m shot,” but he was in no condition to help. Hugging the ground, Harper was alarmed to see “a green ball of fire” fall to his right, only a few inches from his face, “spitting blue smoke” and irritating his injured eye. He tried to retreat in the direction of Sam’s Place, but as soon as he stood up “a terrible trembling feeling came over me and a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.” Harper might just have been overwhelmed by sickening gas, a chemical agent that acted much like tear gas but incapacitated the victim by inducing vomiting. Either from the gas or the head injury, Harper was helpless, but not alone. Grabbed under the arms by a marcher, he was dragged back to one of the cars that had sped to the chaotic scene.14 Shocked at the cascade of violence, Lupe Marshall could not believe that the officers were firing at the crowd. Turning to look behind her, she saw that “the people that were standing in back of me were all lying on the ground, face down. I saw some splotches of blood on some of the fellows’ shirts.” She tried to run back along the dirt road, but found it blocked by a mass of strikers. They were piled one on top of another, some severely wounded, others toppled over in the desperate retreat from the police. No sooner had the diminutive social worker caught sight of the tangled mass than she herself was struck down, her head lacerated by a patrolman’s club. Dazed, she stood and tried to move around the fallen strikers. She spotted a police officer clubbing another marcher. As the marcher tried vainly to raise himself up, the police officer struck him again and again. According to Marshall, the officer hit the marcher four times, the blows corresponding to his feeble efforts

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to get to his feet. Grabbing one of his feet, the patrolman turned the marcher over and began dragging him on his back.15 It was then that Marshall noticed that the striker’s shirt was conspicuously bloodstained. “Don’t do that!” she screamed at the officer. “Can’t you see he is terribly injured?” As soon as she uttered the feeble plea, another officer struck her in the back and she fell to the ground. Yet another patrolman then delivered a punishing kick to her side. The four-foot eleven-inch, ninety-seven–pound social worker then tried to get to her feet, but one of the officers struck her three times on the back, dropping her to the ground again. The police then hauled her to her feet and took her to a patrol wagon. “As we were walking along,” she recalled, “I noticed men lying all over the field. Some of them were motionless. Some were groaning, but nearly all of those that were lying down had their heads covered with blood and their clothing stained with blood.” Perhaps it was Marshall that he spotted, or another of the many female demonstrators who joined the march that day, but striker Joseph Hickey “saw a woman fall as she was being clubbed by the policeman. She was bleeding and looked like she was dying.” About one hundred yards behind the front line of marchers when the assault began, Hickey ran to help her, leaning down to pick her up. It was the last thing that he recalled of the violent scene on the prairie. About to assist the woman, Hickey was clubbed over the head and knocked unconscious by police officers combing the field for any sign of resistance.16 Steelworker Louis Calvano wasn’t a Republic employee, but he wanted to support the strikers at this pivotal moment. A union member himself, Calvano marched between the f lag bearers and ended up on the front line. Struck on the head, he turned and ran, disoriented from the blow. Lee Tisdale, an African American resident of South Chicago, grabbed Calvano and pulled him along, helping him to avoid the f lailing batons of the oncoming police assault. Traumatized by the initial blow and dizzied by the tear gas, Calvano felt a bullet graze his cheek. He was only vaguely conscious of the fact that a moment before, Lee Tisdale had left his side. “I do not know if he was clubbed then or not.”17 Reverend Chester Fisk realized that the police were firing more than tear gas when one young striker, at once motionless, suddenly dropped. Fisk moved closer to the fallen striker and snapped a picture of him “lying with his face on the ground. I could tell he had been shot by the bloodstains on the back of his shirt.” Looking up, he saw police officers chasing marchers across the field and striking them with their unusually heavy batons. Two officers ran after one striker who pleaded for them to stop the attack. “I’m going, I’m going,” he cried. “I’m doing what you told


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me to do. I’m going as fast as I can.” Running toward a ditch that was close to a nearby vegetable garden, the young worker tried to jump it, but tripped and fell. The two officers approached him at the same time. They “struck him down behind a little clump of bushes and then stood there for a couple of minutes slugging him.” Swinging his camera into action, Fisk took several pictures of the officers hitting the collapsed striker “five or six times after he was down and apparently unconscious.”18 At about the same time that Fisk watched this surreal episode unfold, Mollie West was pulling herself up from a pile of strikers who had tumbled over in the retreat from the police fusillade. “I looked up and I saw a battlefield. There were bodies strewn all over.” Standing up, she sensed someone behind her. It was a police officer pointing a gun at her. “Get off the field or I’ll put a bullet in your back.” Ralph Beck, a close observer of the exchange before the attack and now a direct participant, observed police lunging at the strikers, batons in motion. “In two and threes they pounded backs and cracked down on skulls. . . . Three policemen surrounded one falling man and while two held his hands and legs, the third kicked him in the groin. Two others stopped an old man with his hand held to his bald head trying to stop the blood, only to kick him and beat him across the back and tell him to hurry back to his mob.” The elderly man could take only a few steps before he collapsed.19 The gulf between literary observer and active participant collapsed for writer Meyer Levin that afternoon. Once Mooney had finished his formal statement—which Levin found unusually soft-spoken considering the circumstances—the writer moved twenty feet back in the crowd, fearful that it signaled some impending police action. His fears were confirmed. As tear gas canisters exploded and gunfire crackled around him, Levin turned to see a striker in a blue shirt falling in the grass beside him. Levin ran but glanced back, now convinced that the man whom he thought was only taking cover had in fact been shot. Continuing his retreat to Sam’s Place, he was stunned to hear a child call out, “Pa, I am shot.” Levin took the child from the exhausted father and carried him, running in the direction of Sam’s Place until he spotted a car carrying a Red Cross sign. He wanted to put the boy in the vehicle, but it was already jammed full of injured workers. He carried the boy until he was relieved by two other marchers. Returning to Sam’s Place, he found strikers lying face down on the f loor, bleeding from head wounds, crowded onto the few cots available in the dingy former tavern. “On each cot,” he reported, “there were two or three with bullet wounds; wounded on all the chairs. A tiny yellow kitten stepped carefully around puddles, daintily licking blood.” Nick Leverich’s mother had arrived. Attending to the boy, Levin overheard “cursing

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endlessly in a low tone.” Shocked and excited, a wounded female marcher announced that she was “lucky,” since the “cop chased me, shooting all the time, and he just hit my hand.” Levin then helped to move wounded strikers from the makeshift field hospital into cars for transportation to the hospital. By the time that they had loaded the last seriously wounded marcher, Levin’s hands were sticky with blood. Archibald Paterson, a motor room operator at the Carnegie–Illinois Steel Company, was one of the “ambulance” drivers. Pulling his car up beside the marchers, Paterson was amazed to see police running down the retreating marchers, striking them from behind and indiscriminately firing their weapons. “I saw one man who was coming on his hands and knees,” Paterson reported. “He got up twice, and each time, as he got up, he was clubbed down again. The third time he lay still.” Fired to a white hot anger, Paterson grabbed a stick and ran toward the attacking police, only to realize that his effort was futile. Thinking better of his spontaneous charge across the field, he headed back to his car. He would help the strikers, some of whom were facing a desperate crisis.20 Levin came to believe that the boy he had been carrying had not, in fact, been shot. More than likely, however, the boy he carried was eleven-year-old Nicholas Leverich, who had indeed taken a bullet to the heel. Joe Anomon, a steelworker from Youngstown Sheet and Tube was certain that he did carry the young Leverich, although he too claimed to have passed him off to another marcher. Regardless of who carried him, the boy came to symbolize the indiscriminate brutality unleashed that day in South Chicago. He was there with his father, a striking Youngstown Sheet and Tube worker. He told his son that they were going to attend a parade. “But all of a sudden the police rushed out and there was clubbing and shooting,” young Nicholas recalled. “I felt a pain in my foot. I thought someone hit me with a stone. Then someone picked me up and began running.” The boy was soon in the hospital—and worried that his recuperation would prevent him from graduating to grade six.21 It took George Patterson no time to turn and run once the shooting broke out; he was one of the lucky ones who evaded the mass of falling bodies directly in front of Captain Mooney. Stopping and turning, he noted the deluge of tear gas. He looked at one of the canisters, curious that it did not explode as he might have expected. He picked it up and hurled it back at the police lines, but even his best throw could not match the tear gas guns that the police had at their disposal. “Then I saw the inert bodies of some people lying on the prairie grass. Others [sic] men were being clubbed unmercifully by policemen. A black policeman was down on one knee taking careful aim and


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shooting at us.” Patterson felt a wave of hostility come over him. “I wanted to do something. Entice the police into the alleys. Get clubs, beat their brains out.” Seething with anger, Patterson called on the other strikers to retaliate, but most were in full retreat from police batons. Others lingered on the field, dazed and disoriented, unable to grasp what had happened. “The cruelty I witnessed that day was forever etched in my mind. Wantonless clubbing, shooting of working men who were running away.” Patterson thought he spotted men on top of the mill shooting at the marchers below. “I knew,” he added, “that we had broken no laws.”22 Watching from the window of her Burley Avenue home, Uva Bohrte was gripped by the same sense of despair. “It was horrible. I saw men and women falling everywhere, some of them shot and others clubbed. Many were bleeding terribly.” Overcome by the tragic scene, Bohrte turned away, but her daughter, Melsina, took her place at the window. “It was the most awful thing I ever saw,” she reported to the Chicago HeraldExaminer. “I saw scores of people lying on the ground and being lifted into ambulances, wounded and soaked by their own blood.” She believed the experience would give her nightmares for years. “I never imagined,” she added, “that human beings could fight and kill each other that way.”23 On the field, union supporters struggled to collect the dozens of wounded marchers who could not make it back to Sam’s Place on their own. Overcome by his injuries and the tear gas, Harry Harper found himself lifted into one of the improvised ambulances along with several other wounded strikers. They never made it back to Sam’s place. As soon as the driver kicked the car into gear, several police officers jumped on the running boards and brought the vehicle to a halt. They dragged Harper and the other wounded marchers out of the car and threw them into a patrol wagon. “And then,” he recalled, “that long journey started.” His left eye dislodged from its socket, his head bleeding profusely, he could not be sure if one or two other marchers were lying on the f loor of the patrol wagon, but he knew that someone was. One of the marchers sitting beside him was suffering from a gunshot wound to the thigh. He pleaded with the officers to provide first aid; according to Harper, the officer slammed the door in contempt, saying “Shut up, you son of a bitch, you got what was coming to you.” The driver took a circuitous, seemingly directionless route to the hospital. A wounded marcher, still conscious and sitting beside Harper, called for the driver to stop at a doctor’s office while two of the marchers were still breathing. Harper was not sure whether or not the wounded striker was speaking about him.24

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At the same time that police were herding Harper into a patrol wagon, they were randomly throwing Lupe Marshall into another. The police made no effort to distinguish between the slightly and seriously wounded. All were hurled into the patrol vehicles alongside those who were simply suspected of being ringleaders. Cramming fifteen and sixteen marchers into poorly ventilated, overheated patrol wagons designed to hold only eight, the police further endangered people whose conditions were already precarious at best. “I had one foot on the step when a policeman put his hand on my back, on my buttocks, and shoved me in there,” Marshall recalled. “If I had not put my hands across my face I would have struck the grating of the window in the front of the patrol wagon in there.” Moving next to the door, Marshall observed the police roughly handling the severely wounded strikers. The police “started bringing them in by their feet and their hands, half dragging them and half picking them up.” Turning to a 200-pound, “heavy set” ’ striker—probably Joe Rothmund—the police “grabbed him, and shoved him in the wagon . . . and I noticed that he had two red stains, about the size of a penny, one on the upper side of his abdomen and one lower,” Marshall reported. Sitting on the bench, she had to lift her legs to allow the injured workers to lie on the f loor and on top of each other. None was able to sit up. The police “piled them one on top of the other. There were some men who had their heads underneath others. Some had their arms all twisted up, and their legs twisted up.” By that time, sixteen other marchers, all of them seriously wounded, had been stacked in the patrol wagon.25 After an agonizing delay, the wagons finally pulled away. One patrolman rode on the back to make sure that none of the injured escaped. Marshall and the other strikers who had been corralled into police vans noted that the trip was exceedingly long. It seemed as if “we drove all over the city of Chicago,” she observed. “It was ages before we were able to get there, and every time the patrol wagon jolted, these men would go up about a foot or so, and fall on top of each other, and there was the most terrible screaming, groaning, and going on in that wagon!” Marshall began straightening out the contorted strikers, lifting their arms to allow them to breathe. She spotted one wounded marcher who looked “gaunt and haggard.” He was pinned in an impossibly uncomfortable position. The heavy-set man had landed on top of him; now doubled over, he lay under his weight with his head pressed forward over his knees. Marshall was able to get him straightened out; she then placed his head on her lap. As soon as she did, she realized how dire his condition was. His face was “getting cold and was black, turning black” as he motioned to his shirt


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pocket. She understood that he had a package of cigarettes there; after extracting one, she noticed that it was soaked in blood. The wounded man was gracious. “Never mind, kid,” he said, “You are alright. You are a good kid. . . . Never mind. Carry on.” His condition was quickly deteriorating. He gasped, trying to speak the word “mother,” but was unable to finish. Restrained until that moment, Marshall became visibly upset. “I hope you get the medal for this” she yelled at the patrolman hanging off the back of the wagon. “Your children and your wife must be very proud of you.” In that vexed state, she was astonished to find the police officer contrite, even humane. “I didn’t do that,” he protested. “I wouldn’t do that. I am just doing here what I can for you now. I am trying to help you as much as I can. That is all I have to do, is to see that you get medical care now.” Tears rolling down his face, the officer pleaded, “But I wouldn’t do that.” 26 On the field, Earl Handley was struggling to survive a gunshot wound to the leg that had perforated his femoral artery and vein. Archibald Paterson, the financial secretary of SWOC lodge 65, was now anxiously collecting wounded marchers. Shouting at Paterson, one of the retreating marchers informed him that there was a badly wounded striker behind the advancing police assault. As his assistant, John Jablonski, jumped on the running boards, Paterson hit the gas and drove directly through the police line. When they arrived, they found two demonstrators carrying Handley in a blanket. “At a glance, I saw the man was in a bad way,” Paterson commented. “His right leg was saturated with blood from the hip to the ankle. From the appearance of his face, he was losing blood rapidly.” Paterson took a belt and tried frantically to twist it into a tourniquet around the punctured artery in Handley’s right thigh. Struggling, he asked the police for help; according to Paterson, they laughed and cursed at him. Realizing how little time he had, he and Jablonski moved Handley to his car and threw a blanket over him. He was just about to race back to Sam’s Place when a police officer pulled his weapon and ordered him to stop. Another apparently produced his revolver and announced, “We will get one them sons of bitches anyway.” Paterson tried to convince them that Handley could bleed to death if he did not get attention quickly. Ignoring Paterson’s pleas, they pulled Handley and two other wounded marchers out of the vehicle. One was practically missing an eye and was nearly unconscious. That was Harry Harper. Shocked at the callous behavior, Paterson implored them to at least place Handley in the blanket. “They swore at us again,” Paterson bitterly recalled. “Four constables got hold of the man,” one grasping the tourniquet that Paterson

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had struggled to get into place. It slipped helplessly down to his knee. Paterson then saw the blood f lowing freely from the top rather than from the leg of his pants. They dragged Handley to the patrol wagon where he would join Harry Harper in that “long journey.”27 While marchers f led or fell under the crack of swinging batons, the Paramount newsreel photographer steadily documented the event. After viewing one of the most distressing pieces of film footage ever recorded in the United States, journalist Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the scene. First, “a terrific roar of pistol shots” is heard, followed by people in the front ranking collapsing like “grass before a scythe.” The fusillade of police fire generates a “massive, sustained roar” of some two to three seconds. The camera then captures the police charging at the strikers. While tear gas canisters sail through the air and strikers look wildly for escape routes, the police wield their batons in an “appallingly businesslike” manner. Clutches of police officers “close in on these isolated individuals, and go to work on them with their clubs.” In several instances, from two to four police officers are seen beating one man. “One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back.” The scene then changes, as the camera zeroes in on a striker—probably Otis Jones—“shot through the back” and “paralyzed from the waist. Two policemen try to make him stand up and get him into the patrol wagon,” the reporter continued, “but when they let go of him, his legs crumble, and he falls with his face in the dirt, almost under the rear step of the wagon.” The striker pathetically moves his head and arms, but his legs are completely inert. “He raises his head like a turtle and claws the ground.” The stream of conversation is unintelligible. The film registers only two significant sounds, the first being the thunderous volley of revolver fire. The second is equally prominent, yet no less surprising, since it emerges so distinctly out of the din of voices following the attack that one might imagine the others keeping silent long enough to hear it. Although the speaker is unclear, the words are not: “God Almighty!”28 Congregational minister Charles Fisk soon found himself swept up in the police dragnet that followed the attack. Herded into a patrol wagon, the minister discovered eleven other marchers, four of them seriously wounded. Two demonstrators “had their heads laid open in several places so you could hardly see their hair for the blood on their heads.” The two other wounded strikers had been “beaten so nearly unconscious that they were sitting on the seats of the patrol wagon in a daze, rocking back and forth,” barely able to sit upright. Each wore a


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shirt saturated in the blood that f lowed from their untreated wounds. Fisk was never booked at the South Chicago Police Station. Instead, he was held incommunicado until 10:30 that night, when the police permitted him to contact his wife. In that time, the police confiscated his camera. When they returned the camera, the film was missing.29 Louis Selenik had been clubbed repeatedly by the time he was thrown into a police wagon, the same one that carried the Reverend Fisk. When the police pushed Fisk into the wagon, he recalled that one of them had commented, “Oh, boy, you have got something there.” Selenik surveyed the wounded in the patrol wagon. They included Nick Krugar, struck in the head by a bullet and clubbed as well; Jayson Johnson, an African American; Max Guzman, the f lag bearer; and Ada Leder, member of the Women’s Auxiliary and five-months pregnant at the time. “I was bleeding,” Selenik recalled, “Nick Krugar was bleeding. The girl was bleeding.” One marcher was lying down “with a great big hole in his abdomen that was terrible.” Selenik thought the severely wounded striker was Anthony Tagliori, but could not be sure. What he did know was that scattered shooting persisted while he and the others sat in the wagon. The tear gas continued to blanket the field. “I looked out the window,” Selenik remembered. “It was terrible.”30 The scene that confronted Dr. Lawrence Jacques at Sam’s Place was no less shocking. Sympathetic to labor, the young physician was a typical Popular Front supporter. He was a University of Chicago graduate with a cosmopolitan consciousness formed by study in Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh, Germany, and Switzerland. Jacques had been at strike headquarters on Thursday and Friday. He had treated some of the wounded after the fracas of Friday evening and came prepared on Sunday. Equipped with little more than iodine, cotton, and gauze, Jacques probably expected to see the kind of scalp lacerations that most strikers had sustained on the earlier march to Republic Steel. The young physician watched the strikers assemble and followed them toward the prairie, trailing behind by about hundred feet. There, he observed the marchers move toward the police lines and stop. Just as he turned around to go inside, he heard a “report which sounded to me almost like machinegun fire,” then a quick series of explosions. Blue smoke appeared, then white smoke, and then, almost like the “slats of a Venetian blind,” the crowd reversed course and turned around. They seemed to be rushing off the field, toward Sam’s Place.31 Jacques rushed back to his makeshift field hospital. “Within 4 or 5 minutes, there were approximately 30 or 40 bleeding, groaning,

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screaming, dying, and I thought one dead person.” He had the able assistance of several union supporters, including Women’s Auxiliary leader Virginia Mrkonich. At the beginning of the strike, she had spent most of her time recruiting volunteers and winning the support of local businesses on the east side. When a proprietor failed to support the strikers, she made it clear to him that he could expect a boycott. When the march began, Mrkonich was assigned to keep the SWOC leadership at Eagles Hall informed of any developments. As the gunfire erupted, she placed a panicked call to Weber, asking again and again if he could hear the small arms fire that was so clear to her and the others at Sam’s Place. Now, thrust into the carnage at Sam’s Place, she became a medic. The scene was grotesquely surreal. Mrkonich noted in particular that a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl arrived with a bullet wound in the arm. Along with the other women, she took the white shirts off of the wounded strikers and used them as bandages. She then began darting into the nearby houses to find pillowcases and sheets that could be used as dressings. While Mrkonich attended to the wounded in Sam’s Place, Lucille Koch started driving severely wounded marchers to the South Chicago Hospital. Koch had been a prominent leader in Friday evening’s march on the plant. It was a photo of her defiantly holding the American f lag and supporting a badly injured marcher that became the defining image of the early strike. Now, she was determined to get the wounded strikers medical attention. Koch drove her car straight through the railroad crossing gates at Wisconsin Steel.32 Divinity student Marilee Kone and her friends had returned to Sam’s Place by that time. She saw some fifty wounded brought in while car after car arrived from the field. They left just as quickly, carrying serious cases to the South Chicago Hospital. “During this whole time,” Kone observed, “the crowd was amazingly quiet.” Few spoke, except to order those in the tavern to “clear the way” as another wounded striker arrived. One of these injured was James C. Row, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube worker who had promised his wife that he would return from the mass meeting in time to take her to the theater. Knocked unconscious in the attack, Row was struck again as soon as he stood up; taking flight, he dodged yet another officer who had zeroed in on him. “He just missed hitting me,” Row recalled. “If he had struck me, I think he would have knocked my brains out.” Bleeding profusely and disoriented, Row would have collapsed but for the efforts of two other marchers who grabbed him. “You are alright now,” they told him as they whisked him off to Sam’s Place. Kone and four of the theology students then returned to the scene of the fight. It was easy to find, considering that the “ground was torn


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up,” as Kone noted, “and spotted with blood.” When the students tried to interview the police about the clash, they were told to return to union headquarters and “ask the ‘communists’ who started the trouble.”33 Making a quick examination of the steadily mounting casualties, Jacques discovered between fifteen and twenty gunshot wounds and dozens of lacerations. It was too much to manage at the makeshift triage. Along with two other doctors, Jacques struggled to prepare them for transportation to the hospital. Huddled in a car with two or three other wounded SWOC members, Row noticed his friend, Joe Hickey, whom he had driven to the meeting earlier that day. “His head and shirt was [sic] covered with blood and he was laying to one side.” Shortly thereafter, a call came in for additional medical assistance at the South Chicago Hospital. Jacques obliged. Arriving there, he found the hallways jammed with injured, interns, nurses, and police officers. In the emergency room, two men appeared gravely wounded. One was Hilding Anderson. The other was Tony Tagliori, the severely wounded marcher that Louis Selenik had spotted on the ground outside the patrol wagon.34 Finally arriving at the Bridewell Prison Hospital, Harry Harper was “terribly weak.” He noticed that he was dripping blood on the bodies lying at his feet. The police commanded him to get up, but he was unable. Undeterred, they dragged him out of the wagon feet first, his head hitting the steps on the way down. According to Harper, they chose to take him in for medical attention and deliver the others to the morgue, even though no physician had pronounced them dead. Ben Mitckess was at the Bridewell Hospital when Harper arrived. A steelworker at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Mitckess had been beaten severely in the altercation at Republic Steel on Friday evening. Thrown into a paddy wagon that night and told by one of the police officers that he had a “Communist face,” he knew first hand the kind of treatment the marchers could expect on Sunday. Even he was astonished by what he witnessed that day. Still at the Bridewell Hospital following his own trauma, he watched as the police extracted Harper and the others from the paddy wagon. “I noticed blood f lowing freely from the backs of the wounded,” he observed, as the patrol wagon pulled in. “A number of them cried piteously for aid or a shot that would put them to sleep. All requests were ruthlessly denied.” Mitckess tried to intervene but was told to “shut up.” Spotting Harper, he noticed that “his left eye was hanging by a thread of muscle out of the socket.” They sat him down without any medical attention until some hospital personnel removed his clothes, leaving him “cold, freezing, and shivering.”35

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Physicians finally bandaged his eye and put him in a bed, delirious and without food. Unable to contact his wife, denied a glass of water, and subjected to “abusive language,” Harper felt utterly alone. “They absolutely gave me no attention whatsoever until Wednesday, June 2.” Mitckess’s account was slightly different. On Monday, he seemed to recall that an official—reportedly a “prison doctor”—checked Harper’s eye and reported that it was the result of a bullet wound. He applied some f luid—presumably rubbing alcohol—that burned him and left him “mumbling” in pain. Mitckess tried to get him a glass of water, but was “reprimanded” and ordered to mind his own business. By the time that Harper’s eye received treatment, infection had set in. He was released on Wednesday in the same bloody clothes he had worn into the hospital. In an operation later that week, the eye was removed. Harper had lost thirty pounds in one week.36 Things were little better at the Burnside Hospital, where Lupe Marshall and the sixteen others with her in the patrol wagon arrived that evening. The police unloaded the wounded as carelessly as they had thrown them into the wagon; the officers hauled the injured in by the feet and hands and left them on the concrete f loor. Marshall did everything she could to help the more seriously wounded. As the few nurses on the f loor rushed to accommodate the arrivals, she collected tablecloths, napkins, and a pitcher of water from a nearby dining room. Using these items, she improvised crude wet packs to apply to the wounded. Just as she was offering assistance, a detective burst into the emergency room and made “a terrible noise.” He yelled at the officers standing in the doorway, demanding to know who had ordered the shooting. Some of the police began to respond, but the officer assigned to watch Lupe Marshall intervened. “Shut up your mug!” he growled. “They are not all dead yet.” Marshall continued to try to help the victims. The police repeatedly scolded her and ordered her to sit down. When eleven-year-old Nicholas Leverich was brought in, Marshall once again jumped to assist. While the doctor attended to the boy’s wounded leg, she tried to distract him. An officer spotted her rendering assistance and snapped at her to return to her seat. The physician treating Leverich became incensed. “You have done enough to these people,” he admonished the officer. “Now we are trying to do what we can for them. Now please get out of here and stay out.” The officer finally left Marshall alone—for awhile. 37 The patrol wagon carrying Louis Selenik and the Reverend Fisk took an equally confusing route to the hospital. According to Selenik, the


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police “drove around to Sibley Boulevard, and they drove around to Torrenz [sic] Avenue, turned north on Torrenz [sic] Avenue to 106th Street, then over to Ewing Avenue, then from Ewing Avenue to 92nd and Baltimore, and from there we finally got to South Chicago police station,” not the hospital. The trip to the nearest hospital should have taken ten minutes or less; instead, the route to the station consumed forty-five, an eternity for those bleeding from head wounds and other injuries. Deposited at the South Chicago jail, the marchers were held there for more than an hour before the severely injured were transferred for medical treatment. Selenik was then taken to the South Chicago hospital, given two stitches, and transported back to the Chicago jail along with f lag bearer Max Guzman. Selenik did not realize that his ordeal had only just begun.38 At the Burnside Hospital, Lupe Marshall was finally receiving treatment. Physicians left her to the last after dressing the wounds of a man who had five lacerations and a skull fracture. Bandaged and nauseated from the combined effects of heat exhaustion, shock, and blood loss, Marshall was sent for x-rays. The police followed. Arriving at the x-ray f loor on the elevator, she was surprised to find an officer waiting for her. She was even more surprised when the officer followed her into the bathroom. Scolded by a nurse, the officer defended his actions, Marshall reported, by claiming that “she is dangerous.” The nurse assured the officer that there was no danger of Marshall trying to escape in her weakened condition. The nurse stayed in the washroom with her until called away to attend to another patient. At that moment, the police officer burst in, grabbed Marshall, dragged her into the hallway and then down the stairs. Pulling her out into the hospital driveway, the police officer prodded Marshall to give him her name. Repeatedly, the activist social worker insisted that she had called her lawyer and that he was on the way. According to Marshall, the officer raised his club and threatened her. “No officer,”she timidly responded, “you can’t do that . . . because you officers have to be more within the law than ordinary citizens.” Taken to the Burnside police station, “feeling very ill,” all that she hoped for was to lie down in a cell. Instead, police officials hauled her in four times for questioning and twice for fingerprinting. Badgered and intimidated, Lupe Marshall still refused to give them any information. The police rif led through her purse and pulled out two pieces of literature, one announcing the protest meeting at Sam’s Place, the other, a U.S. Post Office auction. “Communist stuff,” the police matron allegedly announced. It was not until Tuesday night, June 1, that Marshall was finally charged

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with conspiracy to commit an illegal act. She had yet to see her lawyer.39 Relentlessly, the police grilled her, pressuring her to confess her radical ties. The investigating officers tried to entrap her into admitting that she belonged to either the Communist Party or the Young Communist League. When a man turned up identifying himself as a lawyer with the Communist-affiliated International Labor Defense, Marshall became suspicious. She denied being connected to any radical organizations. Her cellmate, Ada Leder, who was five-months pregnant at the time, admitted to being a member of the CIO Women’s Auxiliary, but Marshall did not. She was a social worker and a mother, not a communist agitator. Anxious to contact Hull House, she asked a man to call and ask for “Miss Edwards” at Hull House. She was the drama director at Jane Addams’s famed settlement house, and Lupe Marshall wanted to let her know that she would not be able to manage the rehearsal because she was “indisposed.” Then she added, “Tell her that she should put the thing in somebody else’s charge indefinitely.” Having given her name, Marshall soon discovered that Hull House had indeed been contacted and would post the bond for her. The Hull House secretary was forced to wait from 8 in the morning until 9 at night for Marshall to be released.40 The events of Sunday afternoon had been traumatic enough, but the indecency she endured at the hospital and in police custody was of another order entirely. The treatment at the police station was “absolutely indecorous,” Marshall observed “ungentlemanly” and “vulgar,” and “certainly not what you would expect from an officer, from a representative of the law.” Something else troubled her, however. At the hospital on Sunday, Marshall had been able to steal away for a moment to call her brother to request that he contact a lawyer. She had been unable however, to contact her three children, ages four, eight, and fifteen years. She had simply wanted to “let them hear my voice, to make them feel that everything was alright,” before her brother had to inform them of what had happened to their mother. Marshall would not be released until Wednesday, three days after the incident at Republic Steel.41 Although his wounds were more severe than those of many others, Harry Harper’s perspective on the events of May 30 was representative of most who marched that day. “I was not armed,” he claimed; he even came dressed in his best clothes for a festive protest. He did not see a mob armed with guns and clubs. Had that been the case, he “would not have gone over. I have a wife and child and there was nothing for me to gain by going there if there had been trouble.” Like most, Harper


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saw women and children in the parade, men with wives and girlfriends. Their presence seemed ample testimony to the peaceful character of the parade. “There was no intention of trouble.” Otherwise, why would a person bring his wife, son, daughter, or parent?42 *** Those less sympathetic to the cause of steel labor fashioned an alternative account of Sunday’s march. It would rely on the testimony of antilabor journalists, police officers, and a handful of supposedly neutral observers. Reporting from behind police lines for the Chicago Tribune, Edwin Kennedy saw a different episode unfold than the one journalist Ralph Beck described. Captains Mooney and Kilroy pleaded with the marchers to leave the field peacefully since they were “assembling in violation of law.” While some of the strikers chanted “CIO, let’s go,” a barrage of bricks and other objects descended on police ranks. Instead of the “backward motion” that Chester B. Fisk observed, Kennedy detected the rear ranks of marchers pushing against the forward line. He then heard two shots. According to him, they originated from the ranks of the demonstrators. Only moments later, the police began hurling tear gas. “I then heard about two hundred shots fired,” with some twenty officers firing into the air. The withering fire broke the ranks and sent the marchers fleeing. This would become the standard police version of the events: that a “shower” of missiles precipitated a response by the police, who had little choice but to defend the plant, not to mention themselves. Sergeant Lawrence Lyons claimed that the marchers threw rocks and pieces of concrete while wielding tree limbs, jack handles, and railroad tracks against the police. “I was struck with a rock in the stomach,” he claimed, while the club he was holding split when it was struck by a flying projectile. “The first thought that came to my mind,” he recalled, “when the rocks came through the air was my wife and four children—that is all.”43 Officer William H. Cannon’s description was even more detailed. The “mob” moved toward the police at a steady pace until they were within two or three feet of the police line strung across Burley Avenue. In Cannon’s account, the marchers were armed with meat hooks, stones, iron pipes, jack handles, baseball bats, broken bottles, and other menacing weapons. “They were cursing and yelling at the police and yelling and telling them what they were going to do to them and the men in the Republic Steel Company’s Plant.” After hurling rocks and other projectiles, the marchers attacked, “swinging their clubs and weapons.” Once shots were fired “from the center of the mob,” they

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launched another wave of stones and brickbats at the police defenses. Captain Mooney himself claimed that after having read his announcement, the striker with the meat hook threatened to “put that through your skull” while a marcher who “looked like a Mexican” spat on a Lieutenant Ryan. “Then we got a barrage of bricks, all kinds of missiles, and I told Lieutenant Moran to throw the gas bombs, so he threw them.” Driven by self-defense, the police retaliated.44 George Higgins, the patrolman who faced off against Lupe Marshall, provided an account that corroborated the official story. It simultaneously exposed the brutality of police conduct. According to Higgins, “the mob” was determined to gain entrance to the plant. As they marched across the field, Higgins claimed to have been pelted by bricks and ball bearings. Bullets also were allegedly f lying toward the police lines. Higgins was to the right of Captain Mooney’s position, and it was from there that he heard shots fired and observed “one lousy pup with a sawed-off shotgun,” apparently firing scatter shot and BBs. He then saw Officer George Barber go down, wounded by a slingshot to the jaw. “I seen this lousy pup coming with the gun at me and I had lost my club in this scrap . . . and I waited for him to get set, and then . . . I smacked him.” Higgins was extraordinarily busy during the confrontation. He spotted Officer Walter Oakes pinned to the ground by a striker whom Higgins claimed had ground his knee into the officer’s neck. He then observed a “second mobster with a short club about two foot long, shaped like a wedge, and he’s raising the club. . . . And I wait for my chance and measure him off and sock, I smacked him [shot him].” Having been freed, Oakes was able to bound up and get into the action. He “shot this Rothmund, who we identified at the morgue, and Oakes shot him again and perforated him in the stomach.” According to Higgins, “This was the lousy communist.”45 Rothmund was not the only subversive, according to Higgins. “The Porto Rican woman, she was a Communist.” Higgins admitted that he shoved her and she went down, disclosing a bag of pepper that was never produced for evidence and never appeared in subsequent testimony. Neither did the handguns that Higgins and others claimed the marchers were carrying that day. Not a single firearm was discovered on the field or taken from one of the marchers held in police custody. No one was subsequently charged with carrying concealed firearms. As for cars bearing red cross signs from Sam’s Place, Higgins acknowledged that he turned back two of them, telling the driver of one to “Get out of there, you goddammed rat.” In his estimation, the conf lict on Memorial Day was like no other that he had experienced.


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“I been in that race riot [of 1919], I been in that stockyards strike with all them foreign savages out there, but this beats them all.” One wonders whether or not his experience in suppressing black protestors and “foreign savages” inf luenced his attitude toward the marchers. What he confronted that day was an uprising of people who were expected to know their place. 46 A few of the more independent witnesses did corroborate at least part of the police version of events. One of these was reporter Ralph Beck. He had been present since the strike began, and he saw nothing in the way of provocation on the part of the strikers that would explain the events that followed. Yet, he did see Captain Kilroy apparently convince one striker that the effort to picket was futile, who then turned to make his case to the other marchers. As he did, “someone threw a branch of a tree being carried as a club over the heads of the strikers in the direction of the police.” Eight patrolmen then almost simultaneously yelled “watch out.” At that moment, Beck heard a shot fired from the back ranks of the police, approximately from the place where the branch would have landed. Turning around, he saw an officer pointing a revolver in the air. A shot was fired—perhaps two or three—and then a “rain of rocks and clubs” from the strikers some fifty feet back in the crowd. At that point, several officers drew their weapons, those in the back firing into the air, some in the front directing their fire “point blank into the crowd.”47 Some nearby observers offered a version of the event that differed significantly from the one told by the demonstrators. In the march to Republic Steel, striking Youngstown Sheet and Tube worker, John Sorak, noticed “so many” clubs and stones that he could not count them all. He also witnessed some of the strikers throwing stones and wielding clubs. Jack Sekulich of Inland Steel was there as well. On the march to the mill gate, he noticed “a bunch of kids” join them at 112th and Green Bay Avenue. They “started to throw stones at the police and the fight started after that.” According to Sekulich, the “chief ” appealed to them not to fight, assuring them that “everything would be alright.” Hugh McShane, a platform worker at Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Indiana Harbor, detected “25 or more” strikers at Sam’s Place who were carrying sticks. He also witnessed some of the marchers throwing stones, but could not say when or under what circumstances.48 Watching from the front room of her home, Mrs. Uva Bohrte believed that the conf lict began when a striker threw a brick that hit an officer. Bohrte, however, was not entirely free of bias. Her husband was one of the nonstriking workers still on the inside at Republic Steel.49

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The impartiality of Robert Fleming’s testimony was equally questionable. He was a CIO member, a Republic Steel worker, and a supporter of the Little Steel Strike. He, too, had an ideal vantage point on the events of May 30. At the time of the march, Fleming claimed to have been listening to the baseball game from the second f loor of his house on Burley Avenue. From there, he had a clear view of the prairie all the way to Sam’s Place. Fleming had no recollection of strikers using “vile language,” but he did recall “vulgar language” from the police. He also heard the officers—probably Mooney—repeatedly ordering the crowd to get back. Lupe Marshall heard the same command. Then, “all of a sudden, he [Mooney] said ‘Give it to them, fellows. Let them have it.’ ” Fleming was a union supporter, so his testimony might have been colored by his convictions. Yet his recollection of the police command was corroborated by none other than Chicago Tribune cameraman, Harold Revoir. Like the police and his colleague Edwin Kennedy, Revoir held the strikers responsible for the violence. “The trouble was precipitated by the throwing of rocks,” Revoir bluntly stated in his July 16 statement to the police. Yet his testimony inadvertently supported the claim that the police had indeed been ordered to fire—that it was not simply the result of individual officers acting in their own defense. In his original statement, Revoir claimed that he “spoke to this fellow with the rock right in the front line, that the officers had the words with, and the next thing I heard was, ‘Let them have it.’ ” In his signed statement, everything but the command to “let them have it” was deleted. Even so, Revoir’s account harmonized with Fleming’s.50 Even more intriguing is the testimony of Joe Anomon, the striker who claimed to have carried the wounded eleven-year-old, Nicholas Leverich. Since his ref lections on the event came almost forty years after it took place, there is cause for skepticism about its accuracy. Yet, as Mollie West noted, these traumatic events were indelibly etched in the consciousness of those on the field that day. What is distant to us may very well have seemed like yesterday to Anomon, West, and the others. In an oral history interview in 1975, he provided what might be described as a synthetic account, one that merged the perspectives of both police and strikers. As historian Frank Fonsino of Oakton Community College described it, Anomon “remarked that one person threw a brick that apparently hit a policeman. Within seconds, he heard a sergeant yell, ‘Let ‘em have it.’ ” Like Ralph Beck, Anomon attributed responsibility for the clash to the strikers, but he also suggested that the police had been ordered to retaliate with deadly force.51


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What was clear was that the Memorial Day incident was indeed a “massacre,” not simply an “incident.” By that evening, four of the marchers were dead. Sam Popovich, fifty, had been killed by a gunshot wound to the head, “the bullet entering on the right side of the back,” as Dr. Lawrence Jacques described it, “going right through the right lobe of the brain, coming out on the right side just above the brow.” Shot through the head, Popovich was also beaten, as evidenced by the fact that “the scalp was laid widely open—it was torn widely open.” Kenneth Reed, twenty-three, was shot three times and killed by a bullet to the back. Earl Handley, whom Archibald Paterson and John Jablonski had struggled desperately to help, died that afternoon. “The effective application of a tourniquet,” Dr. Jacques reported, “could certainly have saved his life . . .” precisely what Archibald Paterson had tried to convince the police to permit. Alfred Causey, a forty-three-year-old steelworker originally from Alabama, also died that day, shot four times and beaten so much that Jacques identified “extensive lacerations on the scalp and back of the head.” The Paramount newsreel photographer— the same one that George Patterson had thought so apparently out of place that day—captured Causey in his final moments, dragged along on the side of the dirt road like a sack of potatoes. The photographer also captured the image of at least one police officer trying to alleviate Causey’s suffering by placing a placard under his head for support. All of those killed that day were steelworkers from Indiana Harbor. All had come to support the strikers at Republic Steel.52 The casualties mounted. The next day, Joe Rothmund slipped away after undergoing surgery at the Bridewell Hospital for the bullet wound he sustained on Sunday. On June 1, Anthony Tagliori died as well, pierced in the back by a round that penetrated his bowel and bladder. He ultimately succumbed to peritonitis. On June 3, Hilding Anderson, a steelworker at Carnegie–Illinois, expired from a gunshot wound to the side inf licted on Memorial Day. On June 8, thirty-three-year-old Otis Jones of Hegewisch died from the pneumonia that he contracted while trying to recuperate from a bullet wound to the back. The slug had paralyzed him from the chest down. Seventeen-year-old Leo Francisco had told Emil Badornac, Secretary of Local 1033, that he wanted to help the steelworkers in any way he could. “Just walk with us and don’t start nothin’,” Badornac replied, “and we’ll come back alright.” Francisco lingered for two weeks, finally dying on June 15 from blood poisoning that set in after a gunshot wound to the thigh. Interviewing Francisco before he died and examining the forensic evidence, Jacques concluded that the bullet had entered his back. Lee Tisdale, the African

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American from Chicago’s south side who had helped Louis Calvano escape police clubs, died on June 19 in St. Luke’s Hospital. He was the tenth fatality of the Memorial Day assault.53 The deaths were only the most shocking results of the bloody confrontation. Dr. Jacques, who would soon play such an important role in the aftermath of this event, counted thirty additional victims of gunshot wounds. By his count, twenty-eight others suffered injuries severe enough to require hospitalization, eight of which seemed to threaten permanent disability. Another twenty-five to thirty suffering major injuries were not hospitalized. In all, between 100 and 110 marchers were injured that day, 10 fatally. By contrast, the police injuries were overwhelmingly superficial. Jacques counted nine police officers that required hospital treatment, and only three that required hospitalization. Of the thirty-five police officers injured, none suffered gunshot wounds. All of the injuries were either lacerations or contusions, and only two were injuries to the head. This stood in stark contrast to the kind of injuries that Lupe Marshall saw at the Burnside Hospital, where one marcher arrived with his “head opened in five places” and a dent on his forehead so prominent that the physician could place his finger in it.54 The debate over the march begun. Yet the killings could only be understood in the light of the events of the previous week and in the context of working-class militancy that had been on the rise since the Unemployed Councils’ first protests. In the Gayety Theater on the corner of 92nd and Commercial Avenue, where a working-class audience had been entertained since 1907, people gathered to discuss the day’s terrible events. Learning of the developments over the radio, some three hundred men and women congregated, trying to make sense of what they had heard, eager for company, eager to take some kind of action. “All were in an angry mood,” claimed Mario Manzardo, “cursing Captain Mooney and the police, cursing Tom Girdler and the Republic bosses, cursing Mayor Kelly, cursing the profit system itself!” Like George Patterson, who tried to retaliate by hurling a tear canister back at the police, union members wanted to strike back. Sam Evett, secretary for SWOC regional director Nick Fontecchio, observed that “Many of our people were prepared to go home and get their guns and declare open warfare.”55 The mass picket had been turned back, but at an extremely high cost. On the evening of Sunday, May 30, authorities had good reason to wonder whether or not the incident at Republic Steel would spark a working-class insurrection.

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Hunting for dangerous subversives after the Memorial Day clash, Chicago police gave Harry Harper the shakedown. As hospital personnel stripped him of his clothing, the bloodied and disoriented steelworker heard the officers ordering the attendants to “Look for communistic literature.” Searching his wallet, they would have found nothing more than an identification card with a request to notify a priest in case of an accident.1 That would have done little to impede the pursuit of red agitators. Neither would the fact that Lupe Marshall’s purse contained a notice of the march but not a single treatise on violent revolution. Determined to impugn the motives of the marchers, the authorities and the steel companies launched a red scare that rivaled the Haymarket hysteria of 1886. In this case, however, the reaction was aimed not only at organized labor but at its patrons in Washington. Meanwhile, SWOC waited for the Roosevelt administration to intervene. The steelworkers’ anguish was matched only by their trust in the benevolence of Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Sometime ago I wrote to you about losing our home and you saved it through the HOLC,” wrote Mrs. Ralph Barker of Warren, Ohio. “That was just before the election and to show you that we appreciated it we got out and worked for the President and now we are in more trouble.” With her husband still on strike after eight weeks, Mrs. Barker worried that they would lose their home. “We thought the President would step in and settle it as he has always believed in unions. . . . Isn’t there something that the President can do that they will have to take the old men back[?]”2 The sinking idealism was all too

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evident. Confronted by hostile public officials, subjected to an expanding red scare, and faced with a united front of steel companies unwilling to budge, the steelworkers appealed to the federal government for assistance and justice. Steadily, the union moved from a strategy of mass protests to fawning reliance on the Roosevelt administration. It did not bode well for the achievement of industrial democracy. It was the beginning of a larger test of leadership, and not just that of the president. While the families of the missing marchers “clamored at the doors” of the local hospitals, “some of them hysterical as they tried in vain to push past police guards,” Governor Henry Horner called an emergency meeting at the Southmoor Hotel in South Chicago. Only hours after the disastrous march, CIO Regional Director Van Bittner met with Chicago’s political establishment. SWOC staff worker Sam Evett attended as did Nick Fontecchio. It soon became clear that the meeting was designed to pressure Bittner and the CIO into submission. Republic Steel Plant Manager James L. Hyland, U.S. Attorney Michael Igoe, Assistant U.S. District Attorney Warren Canaday, Captain John Prendergast, Captains Mooney and Kilroy, as well as Federal Labor Conciliator Robert Pilkington and State Director of Labor Martin Durkin also attended the meeting. None of the ground-level SWOC leaders were included, nor were any American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers or representatives of religious organizations that might have been sympathetic to labor. Closely tied to the Chicago Federation of Labor, which represented the interests of the craft union–oriented AFL, State Director of Labor Durkin could hardly be considered sympathetic to the CIO.3 If that were not enough, the governor also permitted three members of the Steel Workers’ Union of America, an organization loyal to Republic Steel, to attend the conference. Claiming that they represented a majority of workers, the union leaders insisted that their position should be represented in any peace settlement. Bittner dismissed the organization as a company union, but their appearance at the conference gave them a degree of legitimacy that only eroded the SWOC position. It was also at this meeting that Chief of Uniformed Police John Prendergast took Van Bittner aside and tried to convince him that the average police officer empathized with industrial workers. “None of us were born with a silver spoon in our mouth,” Prendergast told the CIO director. The captain failed to mention that none of the police were born Croatian, Serbian, Italian, or Mexican, and only a very few were African American. Chicago police officers hailed from the same

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class as the men and women they fired at that day, but the ideological and racial distance between them was vast.4 Outnumbered, stunned by the afternoon’s events, and convinced that another confrontation would derail the steel drive, Bittner conceded. “We do not want any trouble at the Republic Steel Co.,” Prendergast warned. Turning to the police captain, Bittner declared, “There will be no more trouble with the Republic Steel Co. in Chicago.” On Tuesday night, as police mobilized for a rumored attack by Indiana workers allegedly armed with dynamite and shotguns, Van Bittner called the worried captain to reassure him. According to Prendergast, the CIO director reiterated his promise. “You can dismiss your police department. There will be no trouble.” Prendergast complied, and the mysterious insurgents never materialized. More than likely, they were never there in the first place. After visiting the Republic Plant on Tuesday, June 1 to install fifty pickets, Bittner announced that there would be no general strike in Chicago. “A strike by the garment workers won’t help the steel workers,” the regional director claimed. More than this, he reiterated the pledge made to Prendergast. “I have given orders to the strikers that they be orderly, and I have told Capt. Prendergast that if they attempt to provoke any violence he should notify me, and I will put an immediate stop to it.” Bittner assured the media that SWOC would drive the scabs out using peaceful means. “Violence never did anyone any good, and I’m not in favor of it.” It was an opportune time to reiterate that point, since Captain Prendergast had just mobilized 948 patrolmen to thwart any additional “attack.” At the same time, Bittner also drove home the point that there had been no intention on Sunday to invade the plant. “If I intended to send 2000 men through the police lines and into the plant,” the former coal miner wryly commented, “I would have armed them with something more than sticks and a few bolts.”5 In reassuring the police chief that there would “be no trouble” at Republic Steel and announcing that he would “put an immediate stop” to any further violence, however, Bittner inadvertently validated Mooney and Kilroy’s version of events. Engaged in a public relations high-wire act, Bittner ended up conceding that the marchers had been the source of “trouble” at Republic Steel. At a moment when the steelworkers could not depend on the force of law to protect their right to strike, let alone their right to assemble, he deprived them of the tactics that had proven so effective only the previous year in Akron. Like the Teamsters in Minneapolis and striking textile workers throughout the South in 1934, rubber workers used mass community action

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to challenge the united front of local authority and big business. The weapon of collective protest and mass demonstrations did not always work, as the textiles employees found out, but at a time of antilabor lawlessness, direct action was indispensable. Bittner also rejected the idea of a general strike, the very tactic that had made the difference for the longshoremen in San Francisco and the truck drivers in Minneapolis. Instead of mobilizing organized labor across industries and transforming community sympathy into action, Bittner chose to isolate the steelworkers and pacify authorities. Unfortunately, Bittner was also the victim of the SWOC’s own confused position. According to Hearst’s Chicago American, the CIO leader dismissed the idea of an election to resolve the dispute. In its report of the Southmoor Hotel meeting, the paper asserted that when Bittner learned of the National Labor Relations Board’s plan to hold an election to determine the collective bargaining agent for Republic employees, he dismissed the idea, claiming that “We already represent the men. The company knows that. What we want now is a written contract. . . . That is the sole point at issue and an election will not solve that question.” According to the New York Times, whose reporting was consistently less inf lammatory, the CIO had initially shown interest in an election, which Bittner believed would produce “an overwhelming majority.” Bittner and SWOC also proposed that President Roosevelt mediate the dispute and that the parties be “bound by whatever decision he, or his representatives, might render.” Not more than two days later, the New York Times reported that “Neither the union nor the companies are interested in an election.” Journalist Raymond Daniell discovered that SWOC leaders were adamant that “nothing but a signed agreement will satisfy their members.”6 Having proposed “two constructive, peaceful methods of ending the strike,” SWOC was now giving the impression that it respected the apparatus of labor law only when it worked to its own advantage. For their part, Republic would have none of it. The company was “perfectly willing to deal on a collective basis with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee,” western manager James Hyland announced, but Republic would not sign a contract. According to the New York Times, Republic “would not sign a written agreement if the union won a majority. They say that they cannot be made to sign an agreement.” That position rendered the entire idea of collective bargaining meaningless. By contrast, Bittner and SWOC still believed that the union had the momentum. Perhaps the terrible events had galvanized the

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industrial workers of South Chicago. If they could keep Local 1033 and its battered members together, maybe they could win.7 Bittner and SWOC were probably encouraged by what the New York Times discovered in a visit to the plant. In an effort to convince the media that the plant was operational, industrial relations manager Frank Lauerman took several newspaper reporters on a public relations tour. The company had provided ping pong tables, pianos, and checker boards for the amusement of “loyal” workers. It was also housing them in the newly constructed wire plant. Republic arranged interdenominational religious services, softball games, and even a variety show for the nonstriking workers. Yet the New York Times was skeptical. It suggested that there were not nearly as many scabs as the company had claimed. Though the company had arranged some 800 cots for them and asserted that as many as 1,000 had decided not to strike, reporter Raymond Daniell discovered otherwise. “About half the blast furnaces were going,” he noted, “and scattered through the great, sprawling factory some 300-odd men could be seen doing chores.” Contrary to Chicago’s mainstream dailies, the Daily Worker had also reported that no more than 300 workers stayed inside. From the beginning of the strike, the steelworkers had contended that the number of scabs was considerably lower than the company claimed. “It was said that as many more employed on the night shift were sleeping, but these were not visible” (emphasis added). What was clear to SWOC from the beginning was now becoming apparent to the media. The challenge for the steelworkers was to capitalize on that weakness and translate public sympathy into mass support. That would prove difficult when SWOC relinquished the tactic of mass protest to ensure there would be no additional “trouble.” It would prove increasingly difficult as Chicago elites mobilized a counterattack fueled by stories of radical subversion.8 While Governor Horner convinced the parties to meet the next evening, Chicago’s industrial workers rallied. A deluge of letters arrived at the White House, signed by individuals, labor unions, and progressive organizations that identified with the stricken workers. “In a controversy where the workers are on strike solely to force the Republic Steel Co. to conform and act in accordance with Federal Law,” wrote Local 18-B of the Furniture Workers and Finishers Union of Chicago, “it surely seems strange to say the least, to see the public supported upholders of the Law . . . encamped not on Public Property safeguarding equally the lives and property of all citizens alike, but encamped within and upon the private property of a Corporation acting in open defiance of the plain letter and spirit of a Federal Statute.”9

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While some sympathetic workers expressed their indignation in writing, others turned to the example set by the Unemployed Councils. Sixteen University of Chicago students soon joined eight steelworkers in picketing duty at Burley and 118th Street. Fifteen members of the Women’s Auxiliary demonstrated outside City Hall on La Salle Street. Led by Minneola Ingersoll, Local 1033’s invaluable clerical assistant, as well as Regina Mrkonich, who had assisted at Sam’s Place and witnessed the worst of the demonstration’s aftermath, the women established a picket line featuring signs that read “Who Gave the Order to Shoot to Kill?” and “Mayor Kelly, Wipe the Blood Off Your Hands.” When the marchers tried to picket the Clark Street entrance to the county courthouse, bystander W. J. Woods snatched one of the signs from Mrkonich. Unwilling to play the shrinking violet, Mrkonich fought back, handling herself so well that she retrieved the sign and reignited the protest. Police soon broke it up. The Chicago American reported that, instead of participating in a political demonstration, the steel strikers had “invaded” the Loop. Beaten by police, jailed, harassed, and wounded in their effort to exercise basic civil liberties, the Women’s Auxiliary members carried on the fight. Critical to the organizing drive and to the strike itself, they now demanded retribution in the heart of Chicago’s business district. The wives, mothers, and sisters of steelworkers were eager to keep the strike alive, but they also wanted to force middle-class Chicagoans to confront the injustices carried out in the name of law and order.10 Meanwhile, in an East Chicago bank building, SWOC leaders met to organize strategy; most were too shell-shocked to accomplish much of anything. With the police pressure mounting, George Patterson wanted reassurance that he was not the only SWOC organizer on the field the day before. He had little reason for comfort. Nick Fontecchio was absent, as was Joe Weber, Van Bittner, and Leo Kryczki. John Riffe joined the march, but was safely behind the front ranks who would bear the worst of the day’s hostilities. Later that afternoon, Patterson and some of the SWOC staff met at his house. They “needed some reassurance from each other that each of us personally must know what to expect from police action.” Patterson noted, that the United Mine Workers who ran SWOC had changed their position and now expected the organizers to assume responsibility for the day’s events. Already disturbed by the apparent shift in attitude among the SWOC brass, Patterson was further alarmed by a phone call he received during the meeting. Answering the phone, the dashing SWOC organizer was met by a “rough voice” who asked if he was Mr. Patterson. “Well, you dirty son of a bitch, you’ve finally done it.

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Got men killed. You never were in that line of march, you yellow coward, you were miles away.” The mysterious caller hung up. Patterson relayed the story to his friends; the harassment had only just begun, they answered. However misinformed or malicious the caller may have been, he testified to the growing sense that SWOC leadership had failed the rank-and-file that day.11 Mayor Kelly’s tune had also changed since Saturday when he reaffirmed the steelworkers’ right to picket. “The position of the administration and the police department is to protect life and property,” the mayor solemnly declared. “More than 90 percent of the police department members are in sympathy with labor, but they have a sworn duty to perform.” Illinois law permitted peaceful picketing, the mayor contended, but the question was “whether men armed with clubs, bricks and stones are performing peaceful picketing.” Kelly made no reference to the police attacks of Wednesday and Friday or to the systematic harassment of picketing strikers. Nor did he mention the illicit arrests or even the disproportionate police response to “bricks and stones.” His back to the wall, Kelly sided with Republic Steel and the industrial powers of Chicago. Commenting on the mayor’s support for the police, the Daily Tribune noted that the successful suppression of the steel plant “invasion” was the result of the get-tough policy that authorities had observed since the beginning of the CIO insurgency. “Owing to the strong hand the police exercized [sic] during the wave of sitdown strikes,” the paper approvingly observed, “Chicago escaped the disorder and bloodshed that other large cities experienced.” How the paper could exempt Sunday’s assault from “disorder and bloodshed” defied logic. “A tight rein was kept on the strikers and the disputes were settled in comparatively short order.” The Tribune’s position may have been morally reprehensible, but it was historically accurate. The pattern of repression established well before the Little Steel Strike continued into the week of May 25, 1937. By Sunday, it had reached its pinnacle.12 With the police imposing a vicious brand of law and order and the mayor backing them up, the protest in downtown Chicago would not be enough. To keep the badly damaged strike on track, and address the seething anger that rippled throughout the industrial communities of South Chicago, SWOC decided to hold a mass rally in Indiana Harbor, on Monday, May 31. The Herald and Examiner claimed that 5,000 attended the Washington Park rally; the Daily Worker claimed as many as 10,000. What was clear was that the steel communities had turned out in force. They carried signs expressing not only their indignation but also their unwavering commitment to the ideals of the movement.

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Signs reading “We Want Democracy in Steel!,” “No Contract No Work!,” and “We Want Action Now!” bobbed over the heads of sunbaked workers standing in the treeless park, looking to Van Bittner and Nick Fontecchio for direction. Bittner lacked the skillful oratory of John L. Lewis, but in those early days following the Memorial Day incident, he became the steelworkers’ Captain Ahab. “We have gone far with great gains, few losses,” he told the crowd, but we may end the show with some scars—Nothing was ever done in human events without sacrifices.”13 Challenging steel meant challenging the foundations of the social order built on industrial capitalism in the years following the Civil War. At the center of this social order was the conviction that, since private enterprise delivered technological progress, consumer bounty, and prosperity for some, its interests should dominate. The corollary of this belief was that management should have the unconditional power to control its own factories.14 In blunt language, Bittner articulated the idea that this conf lict was a struggle to transform that social order. He articulated the workers’ visceral anger but also their deepest-dwelling hope for a measure of decency in their lives. Memorial Day may have been established to recognize the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, but since then thousands had died for “industrial freedom. Those lives are the price of our freedom.” In his rigid, dour, but sincere manner, he announced that he “would rather be shot by Chicago police tomorrow than give up my rights as a free man. These men fought for the right to live.” Republic Steel was determined to obstruct national law while Chicago’s police upheld the same brand of law and order that permitted Al Capone to murder twenty-five men without the slightest hint of official interference. “I pledge to you, I pledge to my union, I pledge to my country and my God . . . that the men who committed those murders will be treated as murderers should be treated.” Once again, the CIO leader asked rhetorically, if the intention of the strike was violent, “would our men have gone down there armed with nothing more than an American f lag?” Yet his observation about the unarmed, f lag-carrying marchers contradicted his insistence that the authorities should expect “no trouble” from the striking workers. Instead of addressing that inconsistency, he appealed to the wives of the steelworkers to send their men to the picket lines. The assembly enthusiastically passed a motion to carry on. But it also chose to march, to stir up trouble despite the police crackdown and SWOC’s caution. Heading for East Chicago, they carried a banner that read “In Memory of Our Fallen Heroes of the Republic Steel Picket Line.” The drive for democracy in Little Steel would continue.15

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The following day, Bittner reiterated those themes as he encouraged the steelworkers to continue the strike. From Eagles Hall on Houston Avenue, the miner turned steel leader inveighed against the police and Mayor Kelly, declaring that the “shooting of our people at South Chicago has not discouraged the strikers.” In fact, after the meeting at the Southmoor Hotel on Monday evening, Captain Prendergast announced that the police would permit unlimited peaceful picketing. The police, of course, would determine what constituted peaceful demonstrating. No sooner had the captain made the announcement than sixty workers were patrolling in front of the plant gates. “On the other hand, our people have dedicated their lives to the proposition that these men have not died in vain and that the Republic Steel Corporation must sign a wage agreement with the steel workers’ union.” Considering the massive attendance at the rally, Bittner was not embellishing when he observed that “This sad affair in South Chicago Sunday afternoon was the spark that kindled the f lame of unionism from one end of the country to the other. Every trade unionist in America is determined that the Steel Workers Organizing Committee must win this strike.” Concerned with managing the larger strike, Philip Murray offered limited support. In a telegram to SWOC headquarters in Chicago, Murray announced that he was “shocked at the almost indescribable horror” of the incident. “There is a growing feeling that there is definite collusion between Chicago police and Republic Corporation.” To many steelworkers, that was a foregone conclusion.16 Observing the events from Washington, John L. Lewis eloquently articulated the moral indignation of the steelworkers. “The nation knows the Chicago police force is corrupt,” he announced. “It is the same force that for years has protected the hoodlum and the thug. It now aids the Republic Steel Company.” The company and police were complicit in this “planned murder.” Lewis appealed to the conscience of a nation. He hoped that some force could be found strong enough to bring “these uniformed killers to justice,” to restrain the power of the steel companies, and to move indifferent public authorities into action. “Can it be true that striking workmen may be shot at will by the very agents of the law? Is the blood of our American workers less valuable than that in Spain for which we weep?”17 Lewis asked the crucial question: “Is labor to be protected,” “or is it to be butchered? The answer is important—both to labor and America.”18 Republic Steel had an answer. The company would not betray those employees who had chosen to remain inside the plant and work. It would not “let them down,” it said in a statement released to the press, “simply

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because outsiders are seeking by force to close these plants and put these men off the payroll.” The company also claimed that it would continue to operate its plants at Warren, Canton, Buffalo, Niles, and Chicago in order to fill large orders and customer demand. “The extent to which picketing has taken on the form of a military invasion is well illustrated by the fact that practically all the picketers involved in Sunday’s riot at Chicago were not and never had been employed by Republic.” According to Tom Girdler and Republic Steel management, widespread working-class support and community sympathy meant little. It was a matter between the company and their normally loyal workers. The Memorial Day fracas was provoked by “outsiders” who had whipped the workers into a zealous frenzy. Closing the plants now would be equivalent to “turning your house over to robbers because you were afraid if they tried to get in, one of the robbers might get hurt.”19 According to Girdler, it was the radical CIO that had f louted the law, not Republic Steel. The CIO was “irresponsible,” Girdler announced. The “real issues” in the strike were not wages and working conditions, but the “nature and the character of the parties involved.” The union sought a signed contract as the first step toward a closed shop and the union check-off. Despite signing contracts, the CIO had not preserved “industrial peace,” but instead, had launched “scores of strikes” involving hundreds of thousands of workers. Adopting a tactic that business would increasingly employ in the late twentieth century, Girdler accused the CIO of costing billions of dollars in lost wages, endangering “business conditions” on which jobs depended, and preventing “free American citizens from earning a living at jobs they want to pursue.” In Girdler’s account, the CIO’s minions had “defied all law and decency” by mass picketing. They had beaten up innocent workers and thwarted local authorities by “massing troops of armed pickets.”20 Girdler had defined the issues for Little Steel, but he had also outlined the position that would dominate the mainstream media. That position would steadily gain support among conservative opponents of the Roosevelt administration. It was a matter of “law” and “decency” versus “irresponsibility” and industrial rancor. Girdler and the defenders of Little Steel were defining what unions would mean in American society. National labor law would not stand in the way of the privileges of ownership. *** The mass meeting at Indiana Harbor was meant not only to encourage the workers and condemn the complicity of City Hall but also to

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shape public opinion about the events of May 30. The same was true of the picketing by the Women’s Auxiliary in the busy Loop district. It was the leading daily newspapers, however, that would dictate the tenor of the public’s response. Despite countervailing evidence, many Chicagoans would accept their story of radical agitators leading a frenzied mob against the alleged defenders of law and order. “Four Dead, 90 Hurt in Steel Riot,” read the Chicago Tribune’s headline of May 31. According to the consistently antilabor newspaper, the police had repelled a “mob attack” that threatened to invade the Republic plant. Contrary to the reports of dozens of witnesses, the “rioters” carried “bolts, revolvers, cranks and gear shift levers from cars, bricks, and other missills [sic].” In a drastically distorted version of the events, the paper reported that the police “made no effort to harm the attackers until pelted with brickbats and bolts. The police then defended themselves with tear gas.” That would become the standard trope of the mainstream media: A barrage of “missiles” compelled the police to respond with overwhelming force. While none of the marchers were charged with weapons offenses, no demonstrators were found carrying small arms, and no firearms were recovered from the field. The Daily Tribune confidently reported that, “When the rioters resorted to firearms, the police said, they were forced to draw their revolvers to protect themselves.”21 Two key elements of what would become the dominant narrative were firmly in place: that the “mob” had intended to attack the police and invade the plant, and that the police had simply responded to the strikers’ violent provocations. The third element was the insinuation that left-wing subversives had led the crowd to its fate. Since three of the dead marchers remained unidentified throughout the evening of May 30, the paper concluded that “outside agitators played a leading part in the raid on the mill. It was the “agitators” who convinced the crowd at Sam’s Place to “invade” company property, and it was “high government officials” who were on their side.22 The Chicago Tribune followed its coverage with a scathing editorial that defined how business and many middle-class Americans would interpret the Memorial Day Massacre. From the title “Murder in South Chicago,” readers might have been led to expect an indictment of police behavior. But the Chicago Tribune would have no truck and trade with labor unions. It was a “murderous mob” that tried to “storm” the Republic Steel mill on Sunday: “This mob had been inf lamed by the speeches of C.I.O. organizers,” an assertion that simultaneously portrayed union leaders as hot-headed zealots and union members as

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empty-headed lemmings. “There can be no difficulty in fixing the blame,” the Tribune lectured. The police had “behaved on Sunday as they had in the disturbance on the preceding Friday, with scrupulous correctness.” According to the editors, the police were simply protecting the men inside the plant as well as the property of Republic Steel. “All the provocations came from the mob,” it maintained, and the “mob” now had “blood on its hands and should be brought to justice.” Strictly following the police department’s official line, the paper warned that if the “mob, lusting for blood as it was, had succeeded in taking the mill, the roll of the dead and the injured would have been far greater than it was.”23 The police had protected the citizens of Chicago from “anarchy,” from the “incendiary soap-boxer” and “strong-arm squad.” The police gave their answer to that threat on Sunday.24 Now it remained for the rest of the legal apparatus to punish the workers. The Tribune’s campaign against SWOC became an extension of its crusade against the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal. Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse detected the intensifying pattern of redbaiting in the national media. “Throughout the country,” she noted in an article for The New Republic, “there has been a careful portrayal of the CIO as a subversive communistic organization.” More ominously, Vorse observed “a premeditated identification of the President with the CIO. He is openly mentioned on all sides as its partner” and as “the defender of the sit-down strike.” Just as the CIO found itself with its back against the wall, the president found himself portrayed as a partisan of “irresponsible” labor. That accusation would soon compound his growing political troubles.25 George Patterson was on the receiving end of this intensifying anticommunist hysteria, not only from the major media outlets in the city but from readers of South Chicago’s Daily Calumet as well. When he wrote to object to the paper’s biased coverage of the massacre, he elicited a response that ref lected the sentiments of many union opponents. “I think the name C.I.O. fits your outfit. It meaning ‘Communistic International Organization’, and instead of criticizing our police and governments you ought to go back [where] your kind belong that is Russia [sic].” The author, probably a steelworker and more than likely a “loyal” employee of Republic, encapsulated the right-to-work libertarianism that developed alongside the cooperative ethos of the 1930s. Cultivated by corporate interests and sustained by powerful advocates from journalist Westbrook Pegler to former president Herbert Hoover, it provided a formidable challenge to the moral claims of the New Deal. 26 Despite the hysteria, Communists never did dominate the CIO, let alone the steel drive. Nor could Chicago’s business-friendly media point

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to any evidence that Communist labor activists were willing to employ the brutal tactics that Stalin’s henchmen used to root out alleged traitors. Yet supporters of the movement in steel could now point with alarm to what seemed like nothing less than homegrown American fascism. “It looks to me like Mayor Kelly and his boss Nash been readin [sic] too much about those yellow bellies Hitler and Mussolini,” wrote one indignant worker from New York. “Maybe you don’t care but were [sic] union men ourselves and we don’t like this kind of bullying—it just aint [sic] American.”27 To a group of mimeograph operators in Philadelphia, the police assault was a crime “worthy of Hitler.” They resolved that workers like themselves would “see that Chicago does not become another Berlin.”28 Journalists and intellectuals identified the strain of a virus that had gone untreated for too long. To them, it had manifested in the form of a pathological willingness to crush organized labor at any cost. The enormity of the apparent threat to American democracy was equally evident to Rose M. Stein, a journalist for The Nation who had closely observed the strike since the beginning. 29 Girdler and Republic Steel were not simply opposed to union recognition, Stein argued. They were at the center of a conspiracy to evade federal law. In subverting the National Labor Relations Act, they were thwarting the intent of a national statute, the penalty for which, Stein reminded her progressive readers, was a “$10,000 fine, two years’ imprisonment, or both.” Stein contrasted the situation at the Carnegie–Illinois mill in Homestead with the atmosphere in South Chicago and Ohio. In the steel mills where union contracts had been signed, the “men are building their union, improving their bargaining machinery, setting up workers’ education programs, and in some instances are nominating men from their own ranks for municipal office in the coming election.” In Aliquippa, Girdler’s former steel fiefdom, the union at Jones and Laughlin held a parade celebrating its newfound rights. In the steel towns where Republic dominated, company union supporters were being vested with police powers to protect “law and order” while “Whites are being aroused against Negroes, Americans against foreigners.” Throughout the steel districts of the Midwest, the steel companies collaborated with local authorities and subservient workers to circumvent the guiding principles of the New Deal. Through fear, intimidation, and murder, Girdler and his associates defended competitive individualism “by means closely resembling those employed by Adolph Hitler and Francisco Franco.”30 It was the Daily Tribune, however, that most profoundly shaped the way that most middle-class Chicagoans interpreted Sunday’s bloody

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incident. Even so, not all of their readers accepted its version of events. “The brutality of the Chicago police surpasses all bounds,” wrote J. Primack in a letter to the editor: No matter how hard THE TRIBUNE tries to cover up the cold, merciless, murderous activities of the police department in the steel strike, it is clear to every thinking person that the steel companies, in their illegal attempt to evade the Wagner law and to crush unionism, have the use of the police as strikebreakers. THE TRIBUNE has exposed itself as a tool and ally of these powerful forces against the workers. You twist and squirm in your attempt to present these poor men and women who are killed, shot, clubbed and gassed as the offenders. Your news picture captions are belied by the pictures themselves. Thinking people can see that your news columns are not objective but are colored to serve the most brutal employers. Angered by the Tribune’s apparently biased coverage, Primack fumed that “This letter will not appear in print, since you refuse to print the truth.”31 The letter appeared in the paper on June 5. Although Heaton Vorse and Stein explicated the larger forces at work in 1937, it was a steelworker from Buffalo Avenue in South Chicago who best captured the atmosphere following after the Memorial Day incident. Malcolm Benson, on strike at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, had been “walking on Avenue O Sunday morning five blocks away from the Republic Steel property” when and “two or three Irish cops questioned why I should be walking on that street. They told me to go back to So. Chicago and if that’s right I’m crazy,” Benson stated in an interview with The Daily Calumet. Benson was “born in this country and I am an American citizen and no Red.” Most poignantly, Benson added that “everytime a working man asks for something he is called a Red.”32

CH A P T E R

N I N E


The hunt for those responsible for the Memorial Day Massacre dovetailed with the Chicago Tribune’s longstanding campaign to discredit the labor movement. It reinforced the efforts of the steel industry, American business, southern conservatives, and die-hard anti-Roosevelt Republicans to derail the New Deal and thwart social democratic reform. Although Roosevelt retaliated effectively against the Dupont-funded right-wing Liberty League during the 1936 election, the anti–New Deal forces it represented gained strength. They reveled in the political quandary that the strike wave created for the administration. For the intellectuals, reformers, and frontline steelworkers who held the picket lines, the dispute in Chicago was no longer simply over a signed contract and union recognition. It had become one phase of the larger struggle that defined this era. The drive for a legitimate union in steel had become fused to the wider movement for economic democracy in modern America. “Civil liberties,” the Daily Worker reasoned, if they are to have any meaning in Chicago, must be fought for by a united coalition of progressives and labor groups. At present, the editors added, “civil liberties do not exist in Chicago. The Constitution is a dead letter.”1 *** “Riots Blamed on Red Chiefs” screamed the Chicago Tribune headline. In the inf lammatory tone that had come to define its reporting on the labor movement, the Tribune confidently declared that Coroner Frank J. Walsh would take action to “seize mob leaders.” A hastily

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composed coroner’s inquiry was set to begin hearings that day, with Coroner Walsh exercising about as much impartiality as the newspapers. According to the Tribune, the coroner had received information confirming Communist incitement of the “mob.” It was the first step toward punishing the ringleaders who had persuaded the strikers to “assail the police with firearms, clubs, and brickbats in an attempted invasion of the plant.”2 Since the Illinois Communist Party was able to distribute leaf lets on the streets only hours after the confrontation, the Tribune concluded that it had full knowledge of the impending “attack” and had more than likely provoked it. Reinforcing the police position, the Tribune forged the link between Communist activism in SWOC and the Memorial Day “attack.” The paper would not deviate from that position throughout the course of 1937.3 By June 2, city dailies were weaving a full-blown Communist conspiracy. The Chicago Tribune reported that Margaret Rothmund, wife of Joseph Rothmund, one of the marchers killed on the field on Sunday, had admitted that her husband had belonged to the Communist Party and kept “Communist literature” in the house. Rothmund had been photographed distributing The Daily Worker and was arrested for participating in an Unemployed Council’s effort to prevent an eviction in 1934. The paper also gleefully reported that Rothmund “was not a steelworker, lived nowhere near the plant, and was accepting the government’s pay as a Works Progress administration employee.” The implication was that Rothmund was an outside “agitator.” Not only this, but he had worked for the WPA, thus impugning the New Deal agency with the taint of subversion. The Chicago Tribune, which wasted no time in reminding readers that the CIO lawyer who cross-examined Margaret Rothmund had once defended Communist leader Earl Browder, fueled the notion of a radical conspiracy. It moved from identifying Rothmund as a party member to holding him and other “Reds” responsible for the “riot.” Reinforcing an article it ran on the alleged efforts of William Z. Foster and the Communists to take over the CIO, the Tribune printed a piece on the “Trotsky Parallel,” which appeared conspicuously underneath the column shouting “Pin Steel Riot on Red Agents.” According to the paper, the CIO was developing into the kind of “dual power” that Trotsky believed was essential for sparking a revolution and seizing power.4 George Patterson was appalled to find that Chicago’s middle class had apparently swallowed the Chicago Tribune story hook, line, and sinker. Returning to organizing duties only two days after the episode, Patterson traveled downtown for business at the National Labor

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 179 Relations Board office. Searching for a bite to eat after the meeting, he headed into Toffenetti’s restaurant and bought a copy of The Daily Tribune. Like thousands of Chicagoans who took up the city’s leading newspaper that day, Patterson was struck by the hysterical headlines and shocking photographs of Sunday’s incident. “I looked at them, read the captions under them, looked around at the ‘white collar’ folks eating around me, and I, in my emotional state, wanted to scream, that the whole story of the riot was slanted to blame the steelworkers.” He was appalled to discover “that the police were being shown to be blameless” and that “the steelworkers were at fault.” Patterson controlled the urge to shout “lies, all lies” at the Toffenetti patrons. Their “indifference shocked” him and left him “sick at heart.” The coverage of the following days would provide no solace at all. 5 Captain Mooney also jumped into the fray. He announced that he had evidence that Communist agitators were behind the march. The captain also parroted the Chicago Tribune’s point about the Communist Party’s pamphlet’s condemning police actions. Mooney reasoned that this was evidence of communist intrigue, since how else could they have produced the handbills so quickly? Mooney and Walsh soon had additional grist for the red scare mill. On Tuesday, June 2, Make Mills, investigator with the Industrial Detail of the police department’s “Red Squad,” reported that thirteen of the marchers from Sunday’s demonstration belonged to the Communist Party. The Red Squad had been busy throughout the 1930s infiltrating and spying on left-wing organizations. Now it came to the aid of the frontline police in linking the party to the Memorial Day incident. Two weeks later, Mills elaborated on his earlier report. Without a shred of evidence beyond having participated in a “parade demonstration” in 1935, Lupe Marshall was designated a Communist. So too was Ada Leder, the wife of a CIO member, who showed up in a suspicious group photo. Under questioning by police at the 8th District Station only hours after the march, Leder fueled the theory of a planned attack by testifying that “They wanted to walk through the plant and get the boys to come out of the plant.”6 The search for subversives spread like red die in a glass of warm water. Demonstrators Paul Tucker, John Telick, and Joe Starcevuck were labeled Communists for having joined party-sponsored unions, participated in public demonstrations, or been members of Unemployed Councils. Some on the list clearly did belong to the Communist Party, such as WPA worker Joe Rothmund, shot and killed during the Memorial Day march. So, too, did Henry Johnson, an African

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American active on the left-wing National Negro Congress and an SWOC organizer. But the authorities did not limit the red hunt to party members. Max Guzman, a Mexican American steelworker and one of the f lag bearers in Sunday’s march, quickly found himself the subject of intense police scrutiny. After arriving in a police wagon filled with bleeding strikers, the wounded Guzman was confined to a jail cell until Wednesday. In that time, police grilled him about his place of birth, his citizenship, and what his business was at the meeting before the march. They also asked him about his sexual activities prior to marriage, and whether or not he had lied about his age to get a marriage license. “Did you ever have any run with your wife before you got married, and go around with her—do anything?” Guzman was astonished by the line of questioning. “Well, all we wanted to know, if you had run around in any way,” they persisted. “We are not going to tell anybody about it.” Apparently, the police believed that sexual license was a clear indication of Communist sympathies. Guzman was no less shocked when the police accused him of being a Communist. “I told them no, that I don’t even know what the word Communist meant.” Trying to intimidate the Mexican steelworker and extract an admission of guilt, they threatened him with deportation.7 The police were determined to smear the sixty-seven arrested marchers with the brush of Communist sedition. Most had little if any knowledge of the party’s activities. The majority of the group of thirteen demonstrators whom police publicly accused of being Communists were not, in fact, party members. More important, though, there was little that separated party members from the ranks of the steelworkers. No doubt, Lupe Marshall and Ada Leder were sympathetic to the objectives of the Communist Party. That was because by 1937, Communists active in SWOC were more immediately interested in promoting trade unionism, New Deal social reforms, and an antifascist foreign policy than in fomenting revolution. In the New Deal era, grassroots activists focused on the attainable goals of collective bargaining and industrial regulation. Yet the police saw little but a threat to the existing order. According to Captain Thomas Kilroy, it was a matter of protecting private property. “It is our duty to protect life and property and I am sure that those same fellows who are criticizing us today would be the first to call on the police for help if a mob was surrounding their homes and they thought that their lives and the lives of their families would be endangered.” Evidently, it was an edict that did not extend to striking workers. State Attorney Thomas Courtney encapsulated these assumptions when he announced that his office would pursue conspiracy

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 181 charges against the leaders of the march. “The law will be enforced,” he announced. “Property rights will be protected. We will track down those responsible for this riot and punish them to the full extent of the law.” It was not the Wagner Act or the Constitution that Corcoran would defend. Rather, it was the “property rights” of the steel companies and of American industry. Corcoran had inadvertently made it clear that the Little Steel Strike had developed into something more than “a piece of paper.” Instead, it was a contest over the interpretation of law, the protection of civil liberties, and the meaning of democracy in modern America although they had no plans to take over the mills, striking steel workers had indeed challenged the prerogatives of private property, and Corcoran knew it.8 At this critical moment, SWOC’s autocratic character once again became a liability. Bittner and Fontecchio dismissed the idea of a sitdown strike, swore off the notion of a general strike, and conceded that there would be “no more trouble” after the Memorial Day incident. They also had failed to join the workers when the push for the right to picket culminated in the march on Republic Steel. That Leo Krzycki, Nick Fontecchio, Joe Webber, Van Bittner, and other key SWOC personnel were absent would soon came back to haunt them. According to the Chicago Tribune, the sixty-five “rioters” who had been arrested and were now charged with conspiracy to commit an illegal act were growing “desperate” as they faced jail sentences of up to five years. Mooney reported that the strikers “felt more keenly their desertion when they discovered that the very speakers who had aroused them at the mass meeting that preceded the riot had left for safer places while the workers were starting their invasion.” He may have been fabricating the story about the “desperate” workers; if so, it wouldn’t be the last time.9 Yet the fact that leading SWOC officials did not join the rank-andfile in the boldest initiative of the strike could only raise suspicions. Claiming that he and the others had not “expected trouble,” Bittner left immediately after the meeting. Their absence only fueled speculation that the march was orchestrated by communist rabble-rousers who manipulated their followers and then hung them out to dry. As “a disinterested spectator of the recent battle between C.I.O. strikers and law and order” wrote to the Tribune, the absence of the CIO leaders was disturbing. “The racketeers who run the unions employ gifted orators to cause dissatisfaction—then when the fight begins, the union leaders step out and the police step in.” Despite peddling familiar stereotypes about hoodlum unionists, the letter writer zeroed in on the union’s

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weakness. “The leaders and police usually end up with laurels. The poor misguided fools who tried to be loyal end up behind the eight ball.” While few of the steelworkers would have considered themselves “misguided fools,” many recognized the failure of SWOC leadership to abide by the democratic principles they vigorously espoused. Had they done so, they might have joined the picket lines before the backlash from the Memorial Day incident made it necessary.10 More than internal dissent, Bittner was concerned about public relations. He was determined to make the most of the unfortunate fatalities. As forty marchers appeared in court on Wednesday, June 2, on conspiracy charges, still wearing their bloodied clothing, thick bandages wrapped around their heads, Bittner and SWOC planned a mass funeral. SWOC organizers staged the event even as investigators launched a search for six organizers of Sunday’s parade. Held at Eagles Hall, the funeral produced an outpouring of grief, anger, and labor solidarity that illustrated the bond between striking steelworkers and the larger working-class community.11 Festooned with black bunting and American f lags, Eagles Hall overf lowed with strikers and sympathizers. With Alfred Causey, Sam Popovich, and Joseph Rothmund lying in state, and the news circulating that twenty-seven-year-old Hilding Anderson, a rigger at Carnegie–Illinois Steel, had just died that morning, the somber ceremony began. Margaret Rothmund and her children were there; three first cousins turned out to pay their respects to the forty-five-year-old Sam Popovich. “Poorly clad women, sobbing and wringing their hands, and children who didn’t know what it was all about” crowded into the lines that passed by the melancholy display. “These men weren’t my relatives,” observed one visibly traumatized woman, “but I’m crying for the poor downtrodden workers.” Some 10,000 people crowded outside of Eagles Hall on Houston Avenue, listening solemnly to funeral orations carried over loudspeakers into the streets. “Mourners for the most part were a cross section of South Chicago,” noted journalist Edwin Lahey. “They came in dusty overalls from the mills and in clean overalls on their way to the mills, squat Croatians with handle-bar mustaches, sallow-skinned Poles, awed Negroes, bustling Nordics and phlegmatic Mexicans. Spacing them were tradesmen in shirt sleeves and housewives in summer prints.” Despite the stereotyping common to the era, Lahey captured the ethnic and racial vibrancy of the steel movement. This was not an exclusively white, Anglo, skilled workers’ affair. In the front ranks of the protest marchers and the wounded were Mexican Americans like Max Guzman and African Americans like Lee

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 183 Tisdale. For them, the CIO had become the vehicle for achieving the ideals that the Roosevelt administration espoused.12 In an “air of glumness” that aff licted the SWOC leadership as much as the mourners, Van Bittner took to the podium. “These men died that our union may continue to live,” he asserted, draping the victims in the mantle of martyrdom. “All of us might fight and give our lives for those things that are right, those things we believe in. Men and women and children have sacrificed their lives and faced starvation for years for unionism, but somehow they have gone on.” In the city of the Haymarket incident and the miscarriage of justice that followed it, those words rang true. Yet Bittner was not advocating a “fight.” Instead, he and Murray looked to Washington for relief. In the meantime, he tried to rally the workers. “The act of this mob of Chicago police does not discourage me with America. These people exemplify America in the same manner as the gangsters of Chicago typify America.” The police force, Bittner asserted, had acted “in the interest of Republic Steel Corporation.” In the weeks to come, Americans would begin to understand what he meant.13 While Bittner castigated the police, Reverend William Waltmire of the Humboldt Park Community Methodist Church called on the mourners to remember the principles for which they had died. “These men may have been killed by officers of the law who will be upheld . . . but I say to you another government that belongs to the people is not far distant. These men lying here had a dream of brotherhood—they sought to bring a new world, a good world in which men can live and be happy.” Waltmire understood that the Memorial Day incident had become the f lashpoint in a larger struggle for social change. *** If Republic Steel thought that its alliance with the Democratic machine in Chicago gave it the upper hand after the Memorial Day tragedy, it quickly discovered the limits of political expediency. Labor disruptions and angry workers threatened stability, and stability was essential for the Democratic machine in Chicago.14 So, too, was working-class support at the polls. Despite the manufactured red scare, the Memorial Day incident had rocked the political status quo. Even amid the backlash and the concentrated effort to discredit the CIO altogether, the steelworkers believed that unified mass pressure could turn the tide. Meanwhile, SWOC leaders entrusted their future to the benevolence of the Roosevelt administration. Now was the testing time.

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Like the city’s other major manufacturers, the steel industry had benefited from its alliance with the city’s machine. With the city’s police force disrupting CIO organizing and breaking union picket lines, the steel companies could be reasonably pleased that their campaign contributions had paid off. Since 1929, when the Czech-born Anton Cermak became mayor and established the foundations of Chicago’s Democratic machine, the organization depended on the financial contributions of industry. Contributions, graft, and kickbacks lubricated the system. They made it possible to win elections, pay off party loyalty, and keep the machine running smoothly. Like Cermak, who fell to an assassin’s bullet intended for President Roosevelt, Mayor Kelly depended on the support of industry. Yet Kelly was not simply a puppet of capital. He was a shrewd political operator who built alliances with the New Deal through Roosevelt operatives James Farley and Harry Hopkins. Having demonstrated that he could get out the vote for Roosevelt in 1936, Kelly became the central figure in the Illinois Democratic Party. Maintaining power required a delicate balancing act between business, industrial labor, and the craft unions affiliated to the AFL. The party organization had to win the support of key voting blocs to stay in power. Now, the building backlash against the killing of ten workers and the wounding of dozens of others threatened the support of working-class voters and the Kelly-New Deal alliance. The political consequences of the Memorial Day incident were only faintly evident in the first week of June 1937. What was becoming clear to Mayor Kelly was that he could not pander exclusively to the steel companies. Pressured by the steelworkers show of strength, the mayor began to change course.15 The political dispute did not deter the authorities. They were determined to round up the ringleaders who had coerced the “mob” into action; on Saturday, June 5, that campaign intensified dramatically. Quickly returning to union organizing, Patterson was engaged in another steel drive at the Burnside Steel Foundry. On Saturday, he drove to SWOC’s Roseland office to pick up a contract to present to the Burnside workers. Turning off Commercial Avenue onto 95th Street, Patterson observed “four big men” following him closely in a car. Accelerating, he noticed that his intimidating road companions were keeping pace. Turning a corner, they began to trail even closer, leaving a nervous Patterson to wonder if they were “thugs or gunmen.” He soon found out. As the car pulled swiftly up beside Patterson, one of the ominous-looking occupants f lashed a badge at him. As soon as he pulled over, they surrounded the car and ordered him out. They frisked him and began searching his vehicle for weapons. Then the

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 185 police searched his trunk. There, they found something more incriminating than a handgun—a bundle of literature. “What are these?” the officers inquired. “Is this literature ‘red’?” Ordered to surrender the material, Patterson produced a magazine called Fight, a pamphlet titled “A Blueprint of Fascism,” and another named “Fascist Internationale.” While three of the officers interrogated Patterson, another went across the street to a filling station; returning, he announced that the state’s attorney wanted Patterson brought in for questioning. Patterson had quickly become public enemy number one.16 The police refused to book him; if they had, they would have been required to charge him or release him within twenty-four hours. Instead, they confined him to a jail cell. After two hours of unlawful detention, Assistant State Attorney Alexander Napoli arrived to question Patterson. He had a meeting to attend, Patterson complained; there would be no meeting for the CIO organizer, Napoli snapped. According to the pugnacious state attorney, Patterson “was not telling the truth.” They had ways of extracting it. At midnight, they roused him from his cell and dragged him up three f lights of stairs. The police had confiscated his shoelaces and belt, making the journey all that more difficult. Patterson was seated in the middle of a circle composed of eight husky police officers only dimly lit in the darkened interrogation room. Suddenly, a light f licked on, fixed directly on the disoriented suspect. “What’s your name?” a voice asked. Patterson was silent. “I didn’t want to answer because I was shocked, stunned, half scared, wondering what the hell’s going to happen here.” The voice soon identified itself—it was Assistant State Attorney Napoli. Accompanying him was Assistant State Attorney Morris Meyers.17 Since Sunday evening they had been conducting the investigation and taking statements from several marchers. They now believed they had one of the main ringleaders in their grasp. More than this, police had once again searched Patterson’s vehicle. This time, they produced copies of the Communist Daily Worker and a business card of Paul Glaser, attorney for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Written on the back of the card was something particularly incriminating: “C.I.O. Forever. Soviet America.” Underneath the inscription was the image of an American f lag juxtaposed to a hammer and sickle. They also discovered a copy of Literary Digest, but that did little to mitigate the suspicion that Patterson was a Communist operative. While one investigator silently read The Daily Worker in front of an anxious George Patterson, others began peppering him with questions. Had he ever seen the card before? How did it get into his car? Did he know Paul Glaser? Patterson admitted knowing the SWOC

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attorney. In fact, Glaser had bailed him out on more than one occasion. The card, he explained, was probably dropped by one of the hundreds of strikers he had driven to the picket line. That story might have been plausible enough to def lect attention from the attorney. But did he know Joe Weber?18 The questioning about the enigmatic organizer intensified. Weber had been swept up in the same raid that hauled Patterson, John Riffe, and Mirco Pecovich in for questioning. Weber clearly was the Communist big fish that Napoli wanted, and he believed that Patterson might just turn on him. They wanted to know how long Patterson had known the intrepid organizer. More than anything, they wanted to know whether Patterson would identify Weber as a party member. Did he know that he was not born in the United States? “I know very little about the guy,” Patterson answered anxiously, “except that I admire him greatly. He works for the Steel Workers Union and he’s a good organizer and I think a lot of him.” Considering how close Weber and Patterson had worked, it is difficult to imagine that Patterson did not know of Weber’s alliances. Patterson admitted that he and Weber belonged to a left-leaning group of organizers, the radicals whom John Riffe and Van Bittner increasingly shunned. Patterson’s involvement in his church and in the local Boy Scout troop probably meant that he was not a cardcarrying party member, but he was certainly favorable to the radicals and the causes they championed. He supported the League Against War and Fascism, a Popular Front organization committed to fighting the totalitarian threat. He had met Communist Party leaders Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, and Morris Childs. He identified with those who wanted to achieve more than a full lunch pail and vacation pay, yet he had no interest in a Soviet-style revolution. Like countless steelworkers drawn to the CIO banner, he imagined a democratic transformation of America, one that would sweep away the structures of oppression built into the very girders of the American economy. In the parlance of a later day, he was a fellow traveler. What he would not do is sing. He would not be an informer.19 Others apparently had fewer scruples. Released from custody on the Thursday morning following the incident, Louis Selenik was back in custody at the Burnside jail on Monday. The police had swept him up in the dragnet that grabbed Patterson, Weber, and the others. At the Burnside Station, he confronted the implacable Assistant Attorney. Napoli showed Selenik a statement that John Riffe had allegedly made to the state attorney. According to the legal-looking document, Riffe objected to Weber’s alleged tactic of arming the strikers and sending

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 187 them out to deliberately provoke a confrontation with police. To Selenik, it quickly became apparent that the “thing that Napoli wanted to get after more than anything else was Communism.” The assistant state attorney convinced Selenik that Riffe would not be charged and simply wanted to “wash his hands of the whole thing.” Would Selenik be willing to do the same? Anxious to see his wife, convinced that the police were after Patterson and Weber, and aware that Riffe and Merco Pecovich had already been released, he cooperated. Selenik agreed to sign an affidavit that paralleled the statement Riffe had allegedly made. “I thought that if I agreed to the same statement that they said Rife [sic] had made that it wouldn’t hurt me and would not hurt anyone else, and that the thing that they wanted the most—the state’s attorney—was a true statement of everything that happened.” In his statement and in his testimony to the La Follette Committee, Selenik emphasized his altruistic motives. “Someone else might have sold us out,” he insisted. The authorities had the frightened steelworker where they wanted him. Shown a group photo, the thirteen-year Republic employee began to identify alleged Communists.20 The assistant state attorney wasted no time in pointing out Weber and Patterson. Protesting his ignorance of their political affiliations, Selenik nevertheless confirmed the identities of the two key SWOC leaders. “We were not interested in communism,” he assured the persistent Napoli, “we were interested in our union.” Yet his apparent support for Riffe’s statement and his readiness to identify the membership of Local 1033’s strategy committee intrigued Napoli. Accompanied by Captain Mooney, the assistant state attorney asked Selenik if he would voluntarily stay in jail for a few days. Selenik agreed. Napoli and Mooney promised that they would pay him for his time. More important, if anyone got the impression that Selenik had compromised his integrity, the investigators promised to arrange for Selenik and his family to move to a Republic facility “1000 miles away.” Confronting an enormous moral dilemma, the crane operator protested that “he was not selling out,” and that he was “too old for new tricks.” Yet on Monday evening, after he agreed to “go down voluntarily with them for a few days,” Mooney transferred him to a new facility.21 Selenik ended up in the witness room of the courthouse on 26th and California. It was nothing like the one that George Patterson found himself in the previous Saturday evening. In the spacious 100 by 20–foot room, Selenik was astonished to find “nice bedrooms” and a bath, a personal washbowl and soap, a sizable radio, and easy chairs. There was a library, a gymnasium, showers in each room, and decent food.

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The working-class Selenik was overwhelmed by the choices: steak, chicken, and pork-chop sandwiches. Still recovering from his injuries and the traumatic events of Sunday, he ate and slept well. Selenik claimed that he “raised hell” when he found out that he had arrived in “stoolpigeon’s paradise,” the room reserved for those who turn state’s evidence. Yet he continued to answer questions. Those questions revealed just how much the state attorney already knew. By Tuesday, the Tribune was reporting that a “rioter whose confession revealed the military drills in the steel strike” had admitted that he was one of twenty-four “platoon captains” in charge that day. “Spurred by his disclosures,” the Tribune gleefully reported, “police were searching last night for the other 23 captains.” Allegedly, Selenik had claimed that they had been acting on the orders of SWOC and the CIO. The naive steelworker might have been shocked by how the police and the media had used his statement. There was little question, however, about the identity of the informant. As the paper reported, the “captain who confessed” had been moved to the quarters set aside for “important witnesses.”22 Napoli was not interested in what happened on the field; he wanted to know who planned the march and when. “The thing they wanted to find out most was who attended all the meetings—strategy meetings—and what was said—who were members of the strategy committee—who presided over them and who made the motions.” Like the contrived hearing of the later McCarthy era, the investigators already had most of the information they wanted. “They had notes of the meeting,” Selenik observed. “Just from the strike. They had notes on meetings the strategy committee held. They were hollering about communism.” They had the names of the strategy committee, the strike captains, and the officers of Local 1033. Selenik later insisted that he only provided the name of Nick Kruga, a member of the Local 1033 executive. “They were asking who the organizers were,” Selenik recalled. “They had them and I agreed with the paper.” Not surprisingly, Napoli drilled Selenik for information on Joe Weber. He hounded him about Communists in the union. But he also continued to badger him about military dril ling. Selenik believed that these questions emerged from the fact that on Friday, before the mass picket line marched to Republic Steel, union leaders formed up and had the steelworkers march out in an orderly fashion. They called the demonstrators back and asked them to conduct a preliminary march again, “to see if they were disciplined. They did not know about this,” Selenik explained, “until I told them.”23 Exhausted by the ordeal and eager to return home, the crane operator arranged for his release on Friday, two weeks after the first violent

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 189 clash at Republic Steel. Selenik had done little more than confirm the names of key SWOC organizers and union leaders. Yet that information was not public knowledge, and Selenik himself admitted that the union had no interest in divulging it. While police embellished a story of disciplined working-class armies marching in military formation, Selenik provided just enough testimony to corroborate their theory. Distorted beyond recognition, it would fuel the accusation that Communist agitators had indeed led an unsuspecting mob into peril. It would help the authorities fabricate a narrative that exonerated police behavior and condemned the CIO. Additionally, Selenik’s willingness to cooperate with authorities from the comfort of “stoolpigeon heaven” could not have won him favor with the union. What would be the consequences?24 While Selenik was wrestling with his conscience, George Patterson was leaving the Englewood police station. The authorities had held him there, incommunicado, for three days. Unlike Selenik, there were no pork-chop sandwiches for Patterson. When a woman from Joliet arrived to visit her adolescent son who had been thrown in the clink for drunk driving, Patterson appealed to her to call his wife, Dorothy. The next morning, a police officer approached his cell. “Look, you son of a bitch, I don’t know how you did it. . . . Here is a pot of tea and a bunch of sandwiches.” Only Dorothy knew that he drank tea—the message had gotten through. Dorothy Patterson, one of the principal leaders of the Women’s Auxiliary and a constant presence at Sam’s Place during the strike, was an implacable union supporter, and now her husband’s lifeline. She did more than make a few sandwiches. She contacted Ben Myers, another SWOC lawyer, who then insisted on a writ of habeas corpus. The authorities were compelled to release Patterson. They transferred him to the Grand Crossing Station, the same location where Louis Selenik would soon luxuriate in “stoolpigeon heaven.” Handcuffed, he was thrust into a cell with another prisoner. It was Joe Weber. Weber’s treatment at the Stony Island jail had been considerably better than Patterson’s. One of the privileges they allowed him was a newspaper. Having scoured the city’s overheated dailies, Weber ribbed Patterson for allegedly admitting to being an “avowed communist.” At the time, Patterson knew nothing about the reports. He and Weber were handcuffed together and quickly arraigned in felony court on charges of conspiracy to commit an illegal act. When SWOC lawyers convinced the judge to reduce the absurdly high bail, they were released.25 After weeks of relentless stress, Patterson was eager to get home. Taking a bath to delouse himself after the odious conditions in jail,

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he was surprised by a visit from his Presbyterian minister. Patterson dried off and went out to meet him. “Well, longtime no see,” he coyly greeted the Reverend Dr. Warren. “I hear you’ve been in trouble,” the minister sternly said. They sat down to discuss the recent events, but “all he wanted to know,” Patterson remembered, “was whether or not these reds were inf luencing me and had I not really gotten myself in serious trouble and wasn’t I afraid of all these reds that were around.” The minister offered his filial support, but he warned Patterson that he was gravitating toward “too radical a movement.” The exhausted organizer could not believe what he was hearing. Warren probed him about Communist infiltration of the union. Patterson demurred, sensing that the minister was “trying to be nice but advising me against all of my activities, suggesting I give them up.” Patterson, a lifelong Presbyterian and an active church steward, had reached a decisive moment. Local 65, SWOC, and the entire cause to which he had devoted himself for over a year now beckoned, but it lay across the Rubicon. He waded in. “I finally let him know that I was pretty well dedicated to the labor movement, just as I’d been to my church work and I was going to devote myself to the labor movement.” He had given the whole question considerable thought, he told the troubled minister. Despite his attachment to the “spiritual side of life,” he had become, ineluctably, “a little more materialistic.” He believed that his work was helping others and he wanted to continue it. The minister said goodbye, Patterson recalled, “and I never saw him again.” Several years later, Patterson wrote to get a transfer from the South Presbyterian Church. They had no record of him.26 *** The weekend arrests were like accelerants to the f lame of the red scare. On June 6, the Chicago Tribune reported that Weber, who had been arrested in the Fansteel sit-down strike, had been “repeatedly involved in communistic activities,” and that Patterson had carried “a communist membership card.” The editors followed with a scathing indictment of the role of “trained military revolutionaries” in the Memorial Day incident. The “revolutionary military force” could be found “operating wherever the C.I.O. strikes are called and strikers are incited to lawlessness and acts of violence.” On June 7, the Tribune shouted that “Steel Riot Plot is Revealed—Police Hunting Captains Who Led Strike Mob.” The paper pointed the finger at two “widely known strike agitators” who had planned the march and the attack.

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 191 The agitators had allegedly drilled the marchers on Friday and Saturday to launch an “organized assault” that would overwhelm the police. Once armed with police revolvers, the marchers would invade the plant and drive the scabs out. All the evidence the Tribune needed for a Communist plot was found in the fact that Joseph Rothmund, one of the first fatalities of the incident, had been a party member who had “taken part in other radical agitation.”27 Not everyone accepted the Tribune’s attempt to incriminate an entire social movement. Writing to the Chicago Tribune, a W. F. Hewitt criticized the paper for its “venomously unfair reporting,” which he considered abundantly evident in the fact that the paper consistently referred to the unprovoke assault as a “riot” engineered by a mob. Since Mayor Kelly had announced that picketing was permitted, the paper had no case. Hewitt reminded readers that the killings had followed a week of police brutality aimed at preventing strikers from exercising their right to picket. More than this, the moment that public opinion demanded an investigation of the complicity between City Hall and the Chicago police, the Tribune “tries to drum up a red Scare on the basis of the political affiliation of one of the slain men.” Working-class Chicagoans knew the tormented history of labor in that town; it was this history that preoccupied Hewitt as he wrote to the city’s leading daily. “The TRIBUNE’s attitude is strongly reminiscent of that of the Chicago press after the Haymarket affair, back in the 1880s, when the police, whipped to a frenzy by the newspapers, engaged in a city-wide witch hunt, resulting in the conviction and hanging of nine men—not for the bombing, but because they were believed to be anarchists.” Hewitt was wrong about the number of anarchists executed, but poignantly right about the atmosphere that fueled that judicial travesty. Now, in 1937, shades of the Haymarket fiasco returned again. This time, Hewitt contended, it was “murder by the police force, acting as private thugs for Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel.”28 The objections of readers like Hewitt meant little to Chicago’s leading newspaper. By June 7, not more than a week after the killings at Republic Steel, the Tribune had fashioned a conspiracy theory linking the demonstrators to Moscow and international communism. “According to the Chicago authorities, the strikers’ demonstration was led by communists who came from distant points to seize upon the opportunity to foment insurrection.” That was no surprise to the Tribune, since the evidence had steadily mounted that the “C.I.O. is working hand in glove with the communist party in the current warfare on capitalism.” Rothmund’s death had mutated into conclusive evidence that Communists had been in

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the front ranks of the “South Chicago battle.” According to the Tribune’s Manichean worldview, the march was the work of Moscow in its campaign to foment “revolutionary forces in the United States.” For the McCormick owned Tribune, the road from Moscow ran directly through the Roosevelt White House. It was the president who had permitted the sit-down strikes to f lourish and had “forced” General Motors to negotiate. It was the president who had allowed John L. Lewis to “dominate” the Department of Labor, and it was John L. Lewis who now demanded political payback for the CIO’s campaign contributions. It was clear to the Chicago Tribune that the Roosevelt administration would use any weapon in its war on business. It was becoming clear to the steelworkers that the struggle over steel in South Chicago was the eye of a much larger political storm. Before long, that storm would engulf the very people who had fought for Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man.”29 *** The headlines that grabbed attention the next day had nothing to do with steel. Americans awoke to the shocking news that Jean Harlow, the platinum blonde bombshell, had died tragically from liver failure the previous day. The star of gangster films that depicted the gritty realities of urban America and the dreams of a Depression-weary country was struck down at the age of twenty-six. It was an inexplicable loss in a summer marred by them. No doubt many of the steelworkers were Harlow fans, but they had little time to mourn. They were planning a public relations assault to reverse the surging red tide. Perhaps middleclass opinion had not turned entirely against them. Maybe the New Deal coalition of workers, minorities, radicals, and liberal reformers would prevail after all. The Chicago Citizens’ Rights Committee sponsored a meeting at the Chicago Civic Opera House designed to expose police brutality and vindicate the Memorial Day marchers. It formed a who’s who of Chicago’s liberal-labor vanguard. The Reverends Chester Fisk, Raymond Sanford, and Albert Palmer of the Chicago Church Federation were on the committee, as was radical journalist Harvey O’Connor and activist Frank McCulloch. Alfred Kamin of the National Lawyers Guild joined the group, as did intellectuals and reformers Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbot. Attorney Clarence Darrow was on it, as was writer Meyer Levin, University of Chicago professor Robert Morss Lovett, labor activist A. Phillip Randolph, Rabbi Felix Levy, and Van Bittner. Milton Mayer, a professor at the University of Chicago and clearly no fan of Lovett, described him in a Harper’s article as a “dangerous man.”

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 193 The chair of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense League, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the subject of a Communist witch hunt at the University only two years earlier, Lovett turned out “in person or pen” to champion justice. “Whenever or wherever nobody else would write or speak or sign,” Mayer derisively observed, “there was Lovett.”30 A devoted proponent of civil liberties, Lovett was soon reviled as a Communist fellow traveler. Economist and future senator Paul Douglas, also of the University of Chicago, joined the meeting. A prolific scholar and a proponent of national economic planning, Douglas had contributed to the debate that informed the Social Security Act of 1935. When Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security dismissed the government-funded plan that he and a group of economists had designed, Douglas turned to local issues, particularly the elimination of machine politics and municipal corruption. That decision brought Douglas into the vector of the Memorial Day incident.31 The opera house meeting radiated with the energy of the united liberal-labor front. Leading activists turned out, but most significant, according to Albert W. Palmer, was the energetic working-class audience that filled the auditorium built by none other than utilities mogul Samuel Insull. “Many of them obviously had never been in a grand opera house before, and possibly never would be again.” But it was the youthful character of the crowd that struck Palmer most. “It was a great representative mass meeting of the youth, primarily the working-class youth, of Chicago.” It would become a “vast, orderly, serious minded, well planned public demonstration in behalf of justice for the workers,” one which, the Chicago Tribune almost entirely ignored.32 Some 4,600 people filled the auditorium that night, most of them steelworkers and industrial laborers. It made for a curious, exhilarating, but also menacing scene. When it was announced that Otis Jones, one of the strikers wounded on Memorial Day, had died, the audience let out a “frightening roar,” as Meyer Levin described it in his fictional account, “as of some powerful machine jolted into operation.”33 As the auditorium pulsated with indignation, Douglas took to the stage to repudiate the Tribune’s claim of a planned military-style attack. The evidence suggested that police had fired into an “unarmed” crowd and then “brutally beat” wounded marchers on the ground. Douglas made no mention of the strikers who carried clubs or other brickbats. Instead, he demanded “the truth.” At the mention of Mayor Kelly and Captain Mooney, the audience erupted in a chorus of condemnation. “We heard that Paramount News Pictures had a film of the entire record,” Douglas provocatively announced. The Chicago Citizens Rights Committee had wired Paramount for permission to screen the

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film. Douglas read their answer. The company would not permit the viewing “for reasons of public policy. Because the film might cause local riots among crowds subject to mass hysteria in certain localities, the film will stay on our shelves.”34 By the time that the wounded strikers arrived to recount their experiences, the atmosphere was electric. Some hobbled on crutches and favored bandaged legs; another brought one of the torn f lags that John Lotito and Max Guzman had carried. For many strikers, this was their moment of vindication. “I am a striker” announced Emil Riccio. “I try help my brothers. We start parade nice and peaceful. I was back in line. I saw men stopped by police then I heard shots. The shots came more fast than a machine gun. Then I got hit in shoulder and fall down.” The evening built to a crescendo as Raymond Sanford of Common Ground took the stage. He assured the smoldering audience that he had photographic evidence of police brutality. It was in safekeeping at the moment, but he would produce it, he announced, “when the time is ready.”35 The testimony intensified the volatile atmosphere. Robert Morss Lovett condemned Captain Mooney as a murderer; striker Stanley Lasowski recalled the harrowing ride in the police van, during which marchers lay bleeding to death; theology student and eyewitness Clayton Gill reported that “police fired without provocation and continued to shoot while the crowd f led”; Meyer Levin, a former student of Lovett, read a list of the dead strikers while Dr. Lawrence Jacques offered medical commentary on their demise. Van Bittner assailed Republic Steel for its unholy alliance with city police. In his “Apology to the Dead,” Albert Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, eloquently articulated the connection between the New Deal ethos and the events at Republic Steel. On behalf of the churches and the community, Palmer apologized to the victims of May 30. He did so because they had “failed . . . in adjusting the deeper background tensions between labor and management in our industrial life. It is because we are so selfish,” he lamented, “stupid and self-willed that we have not here learned how to give labor a fair, recognized and democratic way in which to voice its grievances.” The community had failed to establish collective bargaining, but it had also failed to generate “a spirit of human brotherhood,” of “Cooperation and genuine goodwill in all social relations,” which alone could prevent such indignities. A “faulty social order” was at the root of the ghastly slayings and beatings. No other speaker so succinctly summarized the alternative values that lay at the foundation of the labor rebellion of the 1930s.36

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 195 Yet it was the stark images f lashed on a barren screen in the darkened, airtight hall that gripped the audience. Photographs captured the marchers streaming across the field, the tense moments before the melee, the tear gas cloud, the f lying branch, and the cowering police; they summoned once again the images of the officers with outstretched arm, frozen in the incriminating act of firing their weapons; of the blue line surging into action, of individual officers clubbing isolated, prostrate strikers; of the pile of bodies formed when panicked marchers stumbled over one another; of the few, superficially wounded constables. As confusing as some of the photos were, this audience considered it compelling evidence that the police bore the responsibility for the tragedy. In his barely fictional account of the events, Meyer Levin described “A strange organic noise . . . forming out of the audience in the vast dark hall . . . as the pictures grew in horror, this sound augmented, became like a cry of an entire city in a rage. . . . You could do anything with these people.”37 The Civic Opera House meeting seemed to signal a turning point. Instead of channeling that energy into a renewed drive for mass picketing or a general strike, however, the liberal activists who had organized the assembly called for investigations. The assault was “a major breakdown of democratic government,” but the resolutions carried that evening called on the La Follette Committee and the federal government to take action. Investigating the connections between Republic Steel and the Chicago police would have little immediate impact on the steel strike. The “demand for an impartial investigation” might have carried more weight if it had enlisted the support of at least some of the city’s opinion-makers. As Professor Lovett noted, however, “no inf luential citizens came to our support, as I am sure would have been the case with the generation I had known in earlier days.”38 Lovett may not have appreciated the powerful impact that the Chicago Tribune had already had on the attitudes of those “inf luential citizens.”39 Still, Republic Steel was feeling the pressure, if not from the protests then from the mayor’s office. On June 7, after a two-hour meeting with city officials, the company announced that it would comply with Kelly’s order to evacuate the plant. “Leaders of the SWOC were openly jubilant over the order,” the Evening American reported; they believed it would finally force the company to shut down the operation. Now, it seemed to the steelworkers, the tables were turning, the tide of public opinion shifting.40 And it was not only the city administration that was exerting pressure. The president had remained conspicuously silent on the strike since

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the beginning. Middle-class and conservative hostility to the sit-down strikes and to the court-packing fiasco had made the president wary of pushing the progressive agenda. Sensing a shift in the political climate, congressional conservatives agitated for a reduction in Roosevelt’s $1.5 billion request for the Works Progress Administration. Besides, since the economy was recovering, Roosevelt and his advisors believed there was little need for massive public spending or aggressive social policy. While 14 percent of the civilian workforce, or approximately 9 million Americans, remained idle, the worst of the crisis was over, they reasoned. Never the thoroughgoing champion of organized labor that his admirers imagined him to be, ever the pragmatist who knew his balance in the bank of political capital, Roosevelt tacked. The Little Steel Strike was a political firestorm waiting to happen. If he threw his support behind organized labor, he would have to give considerably more substance to the rhetoric of class conf lict that had galvanized his working-class support. He would have to defend the “forgotten man” against the “economic royalists.” Roosevelt could not do it. He resisted labor secretary Frances Perkins’s appeals to intervene. At no time did he consider using federal authority to support the right to strike, picket, or bargain collectively, all of which were protected by federal law and the Supreme Court. Yet the 80,000 strikers would not go away. The Memorial Day incident—which the president did not condemn—only sharpened the public focus on this titanic struggle. As picket line violence escalated in Ohio, and as the circumstances surrounding the assault on Memorial Day became clear, the president was forced to act.41 At least that is what the Chicago Evening American claimed. According to the newspaper’s uncorroborated report, the president had asked Mayor Kelly to issue the evacuation order. The president also read a telegraph from steelworkers requesting an immediate and peaceful resolution of the strike. He sent the appeal to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins “as a matter of information,” hardly an encouraging response. Still, the administration had apparently done something. On June 15, it did more. While Chicago responded to the enormity of Memorial Day, the steelworkers of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan fought on. Ohio was at the center of the struggle, where Governor Martin L. Davey had tried desperately to broker a deal. Tom Girdler and Frank Purnell, president of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, refused even to meet with the governor. At a press conference on June 15, Roosevelt broke his silence. In his inimitably dexterous fashion, he admitted that the

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 197 Wagner Act was ambiguous on the issue of signing a contract, the principal point of contention for the steel companies. Even so, the sphinx-like Roosevelt observed, “I think common sense dictates that if a fellow is willing to make an agreement verbally, why shouldn’t he put his name on it?”42 The president might have hoped that his homespun remark would be enough to bring the warring factions to terms, but the stakes were higher than he would admit. The next day, Governor Davey sent a telegram to Roosevelt formally requesting that he intervene. Roosevelt was now compelled to act. He quickly issued an executive order establishing the Federal Steel Mediation Board. The president then telephoned Girdler to inform him about the board and to appeal to him to “really work toward a settlement.” By June 19, the board was in session in Cleveland.43 No sooner had the board convened than Girdler lashed out. It was an investigatory body only, he asserted. Republic Steel would not recognize its authority to compel the company to do anything. He would not enter the same room, let alone negotiate with, John Lewis and Philip Murray. “The basic issue of the present strike is the right of American citizens to work free from molestation or violence and danger, and the right of the company to furnish employment to 58,000 men and women.” Girdler insisted that the administrators not allow the “technical question” of a signed contract to distract them from the “fundamental issue” at stake. Republic Steel would not enter into a contract with an “utterly irresponsible” organization like the CIO. “The company’s plants have been and are surrounded by armed crowds who call themselves pickets and who, by force of violence, keep employees . . . from getting into the plants.”44 Girdler and the leadership of Little Steel had heard enough about the right to bargain collectively. “Is there not an equal right in this country for free, American citizens who want to work, to do so, unmolested?” For Girdler, the company police armed to the teeth, the battalions of strikebreakers, the antiunion harassment, and the heavy-handed complicity of local authorities simply vanished from sight, replaced by the menace of “men armed with clubs and guns, who, by show of force, keep the plants from operating.” Girdler contemptuously dismissed Secretary Perkins’s request to maintain operations at “status quo.” He announced that “the company stands on its right to operate its plants and to offer employment to thousands of willing workers who want to return to their jobs.” The struggle to defend the rights of private enterprise and the right of individuals to work under the conditions of their choosing had reached the critical

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stage. Girdler insisted that it was the government’s responsibility to defend those rights.45 *** In the middle of this political typhoon, Chicago’s steelworkers maintained at least the semblance of a picket line. While the Chicago Citizens’ Rights Committee was content to call for investigations, CIO activists organized demonstrations that kept up the pressure on public authorities. It seemed to be rewarded on June 18, 1937, when between 16,000 and 20,000 unionists and supporters joined the steelworkers in a protest rally that eclipsed anything they had seen before. Here, was the united front that just might bring Republic and the others to heel. The rally was the climax of the day’s protest, which began with an automobile parade through East Chicago, Indiana. The column of steelworkers wound their way through the steel districts, passing by Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland Steel, and Republic Steel. Converging at the Chicago Stadium, the caravan was greeted by the news that John L. Lewis, slated to be the principal speaker, had opted to stay in Washington. With the announcement of a mediation board, he had chosen to focus his energies on manipulating the levers of federal power. It was a strategic mistake. The strike was being fought on the ground, in places like Massillon, Ohio, Monroe, Michigan, and Indiana Harbor, Indiana; the mediation board did not have the authority to compel a settlement. Murray and Lewis managed the strike from afar, choosing to appeal to the president rather than mobilize the frontrank workers. Once again, Van Bittner would have to play the role of dynamic leader. He was ill-suited to the task. Burdened by his own biases about social protest and the reasons for the massacre, he took the stage. This time, however, he would have some assistance: Lieutenant Governor Thomas Kennedy of Pennsylvania, John Lewis’s replacement. Kennedy was not only a ranking public official but the international secretary of the United Mine Workers of America. And for all of his aversion to “trouble,” no one was more indignant at what had happened on May 30 than Van Bittner. Throngs of members from the CIO-affiliated Amalgamated Clothing Workers and International Ladies Garment Workers’ unions turned out. They represented some of the city’s oldest industries and the CIO’s boldest unions. The United Rubber Workers, the United Packing House Workers, and the United Leather Workers joined the mineworkers and clothing workers in a display of working-class unity that would have

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 199 seemed impossible only a few years earlier. John Brophy, national director of the CIO, was also there, as were a handful of other CIO functionaries. An invocation was read, memorializing the nine dead strikers who had already been canonized as martyrs to the cause. Bittner cast the contest in the terms of the day: the struggle between autocracy and democratic freedom. “We serve notice on Tom Girdler and his colleagues that we are going to defeat them on the field of industrial fascism just as we defeated them last November in the field of political fascism.” The rhetoric ref lected what so many of those present sensed was at stake: the promises that President Roosevelt had made to a nation in its darkest days. “The only thing that stands between democracy and Fascism is the organized labor movement,” he announced. Republic, Inland, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube refused to accept mediation for the simple reason that they were afraid they would not win. Once again Bittner denounced the Chicago police and insisted that the perpetrators would be brought to justice. But he also leveled a threat that promised to give the rhetoric substance. Apparently modifying his position on a general strike, Bittner announced that 600,000 coal miners stood ready to shut the steel mills down. If that failed to work, “we’ll shut off all their ore from the iron mines and stop the shipments of what ore they can scrape up by calling out the maritime federation of the Great Lakes.”46 Fontecchio and Bittner had rejected the idea of a mass walkout in Chicago, but perhaps the pressure of more than a half million miners would be enough. Action, it seemed, would replace words. Yet, the words could galvanize action, giving it meaning and direction. That evening, Thomas Kennedy of Pennsylvania understood that better than anyone. Standing below the iconic images of John Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he invoked the egalitarian precepts of the New Deal. “It is vital that labor organize and redistribute the wealth of this nation,” Kennedy argued, reciting the underconsumption theory that was so central to New Deal policy. Unions were critical to this rebalancing act, since higher wages would “enable them to buy the products of American industry.” Labor needed organized clout to engage in the collective bargaining that the Wagner Act protected. “This,” Kennedy argued, “is the fundamental principle of the CIO.” Brief ly turning to the situation in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where the mayor had collaborated in forming vigilante committees to break the strike at Bethlehem Steel, Kennedy spoke in terms that would soon be all but prohibited in public life.47 “Capitalists never learn and never forget,” he exclaimed. “America is thinking differently these days. Those

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steel barons don’t realize it. America is thinking in terms of human values.” Kennedy then challenged Girdler’s claim that the strike was over the “fundamental” question of individual liberty. “The country is thinking in terms of the fundamentals of democracy—‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Faced with the choice between unemployed destitution and a wage in one of Girdler’s tyrannical mills, it was no surprise that many workers chose to cross the picket lines. It took considerable ingenuity, however, to dress that up as an exercise of civil liberties. “These fundamentals will be applied and labor will not cease its struggles until they are.”48 After reading a telegram of support from John Lewis, the meeting dissolved. Yet a key question hung in the air: What would be done? Earlier, Bittner had asked rhetorically, “If we can lick the United States Steel Corporation, why can’t we lick the Chicago police?” With a meeting of working-class Chicagoans from across the racial and ethnic spectrum ending in little more than a f lurry of fiery denunciations, Bittner had at least part of his answer. The hope seemed to lie with the 600,000 mineworkers.49 With the “loyal” workers evacuated from Republic Steel, SWOC had a chance to swing the balance of the strike in its favor. If the coal miners could launch a massive walkout, it might be enough to bring Little Steel to the bargaining table. They would need all the help they could get—SWOC resources were strained to the limit as the union funded some 80,000 striking workers in seven states. On June 17, the Chicago Daily News reported that the La Follette Committee had begun its investigation of the Memorial Day incident. Committee agents subpoenaed the Paramount newsreel that would loom so large in the investigation. They also requested Reverend Chester Fisk’s footage and at least one other amateur film.50 The discovery of the Paramount film signaled a significant shift in the public image of the massacre. It came to light when committee secretary Robert Wohlforth caught wind of it and rushed to New York to persuade Paramount to release it to the committee. Wohlforth, Robert La Follette Jr., and the committee researchers then held a private viewing of the film. Paul Y. Anderson, an intrepid reporter from the St. Louis Dispatch and a close associate of the committee, persuaded the committee to allow him to view the film in exchange for information about a key witness. Anderson had gone on an investigative trip to Chicago directly following the events of May 30. He was one of the first reporters to present a comprehensive picture of the protestors’ experience of Memorial Day. After viewing the film in stunned

“Major Breakdown of Democratic Government” 201 silence with committee members, Anderson penned an article that would decisively inf luence the way Americans viewed the assault in Chicago.51 *** Months after the Memorial Day incident, Harry Harper and George Patterson found themselves attending a funeral, a ritual that had become all too familiar in the days since May 30. It was the funeral of a wellknown SWOC member, Republic Steel employee, and veteran of the Memorial Day incident. His body had been found mysteriously f loating in Lake Michigan, beaten, bruised, and water logged. The Local 1033 member was “an able and fine union man,” Patterson recalled. Local 1033 members would have known the unfortunate victim of an apparent murder quite well: It was Louis Selenik.52


CH A P T E R

T E N


The Memorial Day incident cast the die for the Little Steel Strike. The events in South Chicago would legitimize the f lagrantly illegal actions taken against SWOC in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Collaboration between municipal officials, corporate leaders, and the military in suppressing the strike would go uncontested by federal authorities and cheered by middle-class opinion. Under the mantle of “law and order,” the independent steel companies and their allies would violently suppress the right to assembly, the right to free speech, and the right to organize a union. “None of the citizens committees studied was truly representative of the public,” the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee concluded. “All endeavored to break the strike and to cooperate with company-inspired back-to-work movements. Under the cloak of maintaining law and order, the citizens’ committees deliberately aroused or cooperated with the spirit of vigilantism,” fostering the conditions for what the committee could only describe as “incipient civil war.”1 Stoked by the kindling of antiunionism in the years preceding the Little Steel Strike, the “spirit of vigilantism” f lourished in South Chicago in May 1937. It spread to Youngstown, Warren, Massillon, and beyond. Complicity between local officials and company leaders might very well defuse the movement for democracy in steel. *** Convened on June 30, the La Follette Committee would expose the contradictions inherent in the police version of the Memorial Day

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Massacre. Just how little dissent the Chicago Police Department was willing to tolerate became clear when Captain Prendergast took the stand. According to the chief of uniformed police, the commissioner had indeed given him orders to prevent a sit-down strike. “Is it breaking the law in Chicago to have a sit-down strike?” Senator Thomas asked. “Well, I think it is,” Prendergast suggested. But did the city have an ordinance prohibiting the sit-down strike? Prendergast could not answer. What became clear was that the police force was acting as presumptive lawmakers. Was there any particular reason for prohibiting the sit-down strike, Thomas inquired. “Well, we feel that they are breaking the law when they are doing it. We have never had any trouble with them.” Evidently, Prendergast had forgotten how Chicago police had rousted the Fansteel sit-down strikers using an elevated platform to launch a tear gas assault. When the commissioner directed Prendergast to “preserve law and order,” the captain understood what he meant.2 The hearings tore gaping holes in the official version of events. Captain Prendergast confirmed that Chicago police officers had, in fact, been stationed inside the Republic Steel mill gates. The company had, in truth, provided them meals and temporary headquarters and more than likely had provided the police with tear gas and special, nonregulation clubs. More than this, the police accounts of a striker firing a sawed-off shotgun and of mortally wounded Joseph Rothmund falling to the ground with a nickel-plated revolver clutched in his hand were complete fabrications. 3 Commissioner Allman confessed that his assumption that the May 30 marchers were determined to breach the plant gates and remove all of the “finks” was based on questionable police intelligence. And how, then, did Captain James Mooney determine the marchers’ objectives? A friendly tip from a newspaper reporter, the captain claimed. According to Mooney, that suspicion was confirmed the following day in the standoff with the protestors. It was after issuing his famous order to disperse “in the name of the people of the state of Illinois” that the captain allegedly heard the strikers threatening to storm the plant gates and forcibly eject the scabs. “They acted like wild people. . . . They acted out of their heads, completely wild.” Yet none of the photographic evidence supported Mooney’s version of the event. Not a single independent reporter or observer could corroborate Mooney’s assertion that the marchers were threatening to invade the mill. For that matter, his chilling account of a striker threatening to drive a club with a meat

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hook attached to it through the captain’s head lacked credibility—no witnesses, no meat hook.4 More than this, the image of embattled police officers firing their weapons in self-defense was exposed as pure fantasy. Testifying before the committee, Mooney and Captain Kilroy confessed that they could not be certain that the shots fired had come from the crowd. In neither of his reports of May 30 and 31 to Commissioner Allman did Captain Kilroy even mention that he believed the first shot fired had come from the ranks of the marchers.5 Equally fantastical was Mooney’s assertion that police had been protecting themselves against union attackers. When seven of the marchers were killed by gunshots to the back and three from wounds to the side, how could the captain defend the officer’s conduct? It strained common sense to suggest that a patrolman surrounded by a menacing mob would be able to put a bullet in an attacker’s back. “You can take the poorest marksman in the world,” an exasperated senator La Follette observed, “give him a gun, surround him with a bunch of men who are attacking him with clubs and let him shoot, and if he hits anybody I cannot see how he would hit him anywhere except in the front.” The police officers’ shocking accounts of a fanatical mob launching a frontal assault did not stand up to scrutiny.6 It wasn’t just the inconsistencies of police testimony that undermined their credibility; it was their callous treatment of the wounded strikers.7 Officer George Higgins exemplified the police brutality of that day. He was the very same officer who claimed to have seen Joe Rothmund carrying a nickel-plated revolver, a striker carrying a slingshot, a woman carrying pepper, and a marcher with a sawed-off shotgun. He also claimed to have heard the strikers announce, “We are going in that mill and drive them out.” Under oath, committee investigator Charles Kramer testified that Higgins had recounted coming to the rescue of the allegedly distressed Officer Walter Oakes this way: “A second mobster with a short club about two foot long shaped like a wedge, and he’s raising the club, right there. And I wait for my chance and measure him off, and, sock, I smacked him. . . . Oakes then got up and shot this Rothmund, who we identified at the morgue, and Oakes shot him again and perforated him in the stomach. This was the lousy communist.” It was Higgins who remembered “the [sic] Rican woman” as a “communist.” “I shoved her on her feet and she went down,” Higgins told investigators. “I didn’t hit her, and I picked up a bag of pepper that she had and turned it in.” Higgins, along with other

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officers, had prevented the makeshift ambulances from getting through to the wounded. “We let him come down and he asks, just like that, if anybody is injured,” Higgins recalled in his interview with Kramer, “and I said, ‘Get out of here you goddammed rat.’ ”8 Ref lecting what would become the dominant opinion about police conduct that day, the Washington Post observed that the officers “have said nothing to contradict the general impression, drawn from sworn statements and photographs, that their men went berserk in turning back a platoon of strikers.”9 The truth emerged from the testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques, the young physician who had accompanied the marchers that day and tended to the wounded at Sam’s Place. Using elaborate graphs and stuffed dolls to detail bullet trajectories and wounds, Jacques described in exquisite detail how strikers were killed and wounded that day. He painted a stunning portrait of police aggression on May 30. Struck in the right thigh with a bullet that “perforated the femoral artery and vein,” Earl Handley died from a hemorrhage that could only have been prevented by a tourniquet, Jacques maintained. When officers wrenched Handley out of Paterson’s vehicle and hauled him to the paddy wagon, one grabbed him by the tourniquet that Archibald Paterson had fashioned. It slipped down to his knee, permitting the wound to bleed freely. “In your opinion,” La Follette asked Jacques, “could proper and timely medical treatment have saved this man’s life?” Jacques did not hesitate: “The effective application of a tourniquet could certainly have saved his life . . . the effective and prompt application of a tourniquet.” Would carrying Handley with such disregard for his condition have helped him, the senator asked? “I think it may have contributed to his death.”10 Poised and methodical, Jacques described the grisly wounds. Otis Jones received a bullet that damaged his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed for ten days until he succumbed to pneumonia. Sam Popovich was shot “right in back of the head,” and his skull was “extensively shattered.” As if this wasn’t enough, the “scalp was laid widely open—it was torn widely open—so that the underlying fractures were exposed.” Kenneth Reed, who died on Lupe Marshall’s lap after describing her as a “good kid,” suffered three bullet wounds. The wound that killed him entered his back, passed through the liver and the intestine, and exited from his side. More troubling than any of the stunning details that Jacques enumerated from his postmortems was this one: Seven of the ten men killed that day had been shot in the back. The other three died from gunshot wounds to the side.11


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The marchers themselves offered the most poignant evidence of police aggression. Some appeared before the committee bearing the visible wounds inf licted that day. Through persistent interrogation of witnesses and evidence, La Follette revealed the generally peaceful character of the crowd, the large contingency of women who had participated and sustained injuries, and the astonishing suddenness of the police assault. The recollections of Lupe Marshall, George Patterson, and Harry Harper illustrated the shocking violence of the attack. None was more vivid than those of Reverend Chester Fisk, the liberal cleric whose camera the police had confiscated shortly after the incident. Following a striker desperately trying to evade police batons, he photographed him as he fell, police officers converging on him, striking him until he was unconscious. La Follette asked whether or not Fisk’s film could add anything to the record. It could. Fisk had testified about a man “lying with his face on the ground” as bloodstains formed on the back of his shirt. Officers had fired at him while he stood some hundred yards from the front lines. It exemplified the worst excesses of that day. So, too, did the example of police chasing a marcher into the field “a distance of 50 or 60 yards, possibly 100 yards from the police line and there beating him into unconsciousness.” Fisk captured the disproportionate response that appalled marchers and observers alike: “There was no resistance at all on the part of that man.”12 However gripping their testimony, nothing paralleled the impact of the Paramount newsreel, which the Senate committee screened on July 2. Senator La Follette stage-managed the presentation for maximum effect. He had a row of seats reserved specifically for the police officers. He planned the screening to take place just before noon, maximizing attendance for the film and ensuring its coverage in the evening papers. Throughout the course of the hearings, the screen stood as a celluloid sword of Damocles hanging over the witnesses, reminding them of the graphic spectacle to come. The courtroom was jammed as reporters, congressional representatives, and witnesses crowded in to see the notorious footage. Its suppression and journalist Paul Anderson’s tantalizing previews made it all the more controversial. Orlando Lippert, the Paramount newsreel photographer, told his tale of filming the strikers marching across the dusty plain to the point of contact with the police. Lippert captured it all, with the exception of seven seconds, during which he changed lenses for closer shots. Yet it was during those seven seconds that the assault began. Nothing would prove more intriguing than the possibility that Lippert might have caught the spark that

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started the melee. He claimed to have observed objects being thrown from the ranks of the strikers, but it was hardly a substitute for those seven seconds of missing film.13 The newsreel utterly shredded the police version of Memorial Day. No evidence of military formations, no scenes of armed legions attacking police defenders, no suggestion before the attack that marchers were hostile and potentially violent. It clearly demonstrated workers in f light from a police onslaught of tear gas, batons, and gunfire. Instead of wild-eyed zealots, the film captured the terrified strikers f leeing a torrent of swinging batons. It captured the relentless beating of fallen marchers and the vigorous pursuit of others. It clearly recorded the tangled mass of wounded and fallen marchers directly opposite the center of the police line. It documented the tense but nonviolent exchange that preceded the clash. It showed police carrying white hatchet handles provided courtesy of Republic Steel. The film revealed police officers drawing and firing their weapons. It showed the surprising number of women in attendance, many of whom were in the front ranks. It was not only Lupe Marshall who was wounded that day; Catherine Nelson sustained a bullet wound to the leg. More incriminating than anything else, the film captured the appalling treatment of the wounded and dying after the attack.14 The film’s greatest impact was not in resolving who had started the clash, but in the uncompromising light it shed on police conduct after the fusillade ended. Here was the legendary brutality of a police force seasoned by years of internal corruption and Wild West lawlessness. Lippert’s camera documented police unceremoniously shoving wounded strikers into paddy wagons, some clutching bleeding scalps, others dizzied, disoriented, and in shock. It showed Alfred Causey, writhing and dying helplessly in the hot, dusty clearing; a police officer gently places a piece of cardboard under his head— one of the few gestures of compassion amid the miasma of violence. Earl Handley is seen lying senselessly inert and bleeding from a leg wound that would claim his life; police officers drag him to a paddy wagon. The film propelled a decisive shift in popular opinion. Rather than the defenders of law and order, they now seemed like callous thugs. “Guns fired point blank at f leeing marchers,” the Washington Post indignantly observed, “prone figures clubbed unmercifully as they groaned in death’s agony on the ground, policemen gone berserk in a bloody holocaust of madness”—that was the story that coalesced in the days following the screening.15


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However self-serving, contradictory, and simply dishonest it may have been, though, the police testimony struck a chord. That was because of the incendiary efforts of journalists like Westbrook Pegler, newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, and anti–New Deal organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers to discredit the labor movement. The Communist Daily Worker made the connection between the Memorial Day Massacre and the Dupont-funded Liberty League explicit. The police “corruption and brutality” were simply the most extreme expression of a larger campaign to subvert progressive reform. “They are especially dangerous because they have the support of national political and financial forces headed by the Liberty League that would like, using Chicago as a base, to Hitlerize America.” The rhetoric was typically overheated, but the arrow was not far from the mark. Working through the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Iron and Steel Institute, the steel companies had aggressively opposed labor law reform and the basic objectives of the New Deal. For the management of the Little Steel, the strike was not just about a contract but the entire idea that organized labor had a legitimate place in American society.16 This was precisely the argument the police version of events vindicated. Asked by Senator Elmer Thomas about the activity of “third parties” in the Memorial Day debacle, Captain Mooney had a ready answer. It was the Communists, who had become his mortal enemies in the unemployment demonstrations of the early 1930s. Marching in massive unemployment demonstrations, interfering with the eviction of African American tenants, and taking to the streets to protest any number of fascist coups abroad, Chicago’s leftists were, in Mooney’s view, “absolutely antipolice and antigovernment.” Scarred by memories of militant protests of the early 1930s, Mooney didn’t see jovial protestors that day. He saw marauding radicals who only wanted to breach the plant gates, destroy company property, and attack the scabs. According to Mooney, this was just one front in their larger campaign to destroy American government and promote the interests of Russia. “I will tell you my definition of a ‘Red,’ ” Mooney lectured Senator Thomas. “He is here to undermine this Government and assault police. I don’t know whether this is a good definition or not, but that is what I think. I am an American. My grandparents were born here.” Thomas wanted to get to the core of the issue: Was the “disturbance” a contest between the police and Communist radicals? Mooney had no doubt. “It was brought on over there by ‘Red’ agitators to march down the police and go into the plant and take these men out of there.” The fight was

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between the antiauthoritarian Communists and the police, the defenders of public order. Mooney wanted to make a recommendation to the committee: “Deport every one of those Communists and all of those ‘Reds’ out of the country and then we will get along, they won’t be assaulting policemen and dynamiting buildings, and then we will have a good Nation.”17 Mooney wasn’t alone in this sentiment. Seventeen-year veteran Lawrence Lyons described the marchers as “the army of the ‘Reds.’ ” He believed that the “radical movement” had “brought these poor people to their destruction.” From Lyons’s perspective, the workers “were easily led,” a view that conformed perfectly to the myth of rabid agitators manipulating the susceptible masses. Officer Jacob Woods shared this perspective. “In the district where I worked, Senator, we are bothered with all kinds of people, with ‘Reds.’ ” Recounting how Officer Walter Oakes shot and killed Joseph Rothmund, Officer George Higgins described the slain WPA worker as “the lousy communist.” Following the massacre, police searched Marshall and Harry Harper for “communistic literature,” grilled demonstrator Max Guzman about alleged communist connections, and arrested George Patterson, Louis Selenik, and Joe Weber in their hunt for red subversives. Make Mills, the Red Squad leader in charge of industrial surveillance for the Chicago Police Department, reported to Commissioner Allman of thirteen alleged Communists in the ranks of the Memorial Day marchers.18 Thomas Daly, the city’s legal adviser to the police department, was equally troubled by the supposed Communist inf luence in the march. It was these “agitators—call them Communists, call them Anarchists,” who promoted subversive movements and “attach themselves like a barnacle to a ship [sic] to any semirespectable organization and use that organization for perpetrating an affray like this.” Fixating on “the fact that some of these men are connected with communistic movements, or revolutionary movements,” Daly seemed to imply that it offered a justification for the police killings. “As a matter of fact,” Daly told the La Follette Committee, “the statutes exempt killing during dispersals.”19 Even Commissioner Allman seemed to subscribe to the communist conspiracy theory. According to him, Communists were “always in the unrest movement.” Like Mooney, his views were shaped by the early Depression: “We have had plenty of trouble with Communists who tried to take over the relief stations and who tried to parade without a permit.” Only “on occasions,” according to Allman, did police have to use force against this threat. It was Senator Thomas who outlined the sinister consequences of the growing anticommunist hysteria.


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“This Communist cry is an exceedingly important one,” he asked Allman, “because if communism in America merely means unrest, this is a very, very interesting situation, is it not?”20 Allman had no response. By 1937, few Chicago police officers would have seen any distinction between communism and “unrest.” Police testimony exposed not only the anticommunist preoccupations of the police but their ethnic and racial bigotry. “The class of people that live and work in these mills,” officer Lyons announced, “are of foreign extraction—I mean are foreigners to this country . . . where they have talked the foreign language in their home for years and probably haven’t got as much respect for the American f lag as I have—.”21 Patrolman George Higgins echoed Lyons’s sentiments. He had been “in that race riot”—the 1919 pogrom in which twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites were killed—and he had been in the stockyards strike “with all them foreign savages out there,” but the Memorial Day incident had eclipsed them all.22 When Captain Mooney explained to Senator Thomas that Communists were simply interested in attacking police and subverting the government, he announced that “I am an American. My grandparents were born here.”23 The xenophobic strain blended with the officers’ contempt for “agitators” to reinforce the stereotype of the foreign subversive leading naive Americans down the garden path of destruction. Would overheated anticommunism prove sufficient to exonerate the police? If leading political figures and mainstream media were not willing to challenge the rising tide of anticommunism, congressional representative Maury Maverick of Texas certainly was. Congress had been echoing the tensions generated by the strike for weeks. Media accusations of CIO “irresponsibility” and Communist infiltration gained a hearing in Congress as opponents of a progressive New Deal showed their colors. Now, as the strike escalated in Ohio and as the La Follette hearings came to a conclusion, the friction achieved white-hot intensity. Representative Eugene Cox of Georgia castigated the CIO as “hysterical, highly provocative, and calculated to bring bloodshed and disorder.” Cox and Republican Clare E. Hoffman had volunteered to lead a paramilitary group of “patriotic citizens” to protect Monroe, Michigan, against the alleged attacks of CIO picketers. Cox’s inf lammatory remarks about violent southern resistance to any CIO campaign in the region provoked a response from Maverick that exposed the motives underlying the anticommunist united front. “Who is calling for blood and violence?” Maverick asked in a speech in the House on July 2, the final day of the La Follette Committee hearings. “Why, gentlemen,

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those who prate about the preservation of the Constitution, those who wear patriotism on their sleeves, those who call themselves conservatives and wrap themselves in the f lag.” Yet none of these “conservative gentlemen” had denounced the murder of ten marchers exercising their constitutional rights in South Chicago. “One of the bloodiest, most shameful pages in our history,” Maverick passionately declared, but “no leading conservative denounced it.” He also offered an historical parallel that sounded an ominous warning about moral indifference to the labor movement. The American Revolution, Maverick declared, grew from the intransigence of conservatives “too stupid to see they were forcing the Revolution” on Americans.24 Maverick had no patience for the “patriotic talkers” who refused to acknowledge the wholesale violation of workers’ civil liberties while denouncing communism. “Oh, my colleagues, the old cry of communism is getting very thin. It gets thinner and thinner, answers no arguments, reveals no facts, settles no problems. John L. Lewis! Civil War! Communism! Communism! The Red Flag of Russia!” But the labor movement was not simply a matter of Lewis or the CIO, Maverick argued. “It is a movement of the American people.” Maverick could find no Communists in the CIO, which suggested he wasn’t looking closely enough. Yet he understood that the dominating spirit of the uprising was the drive for basic civil liberties and industrial democracy. “The working man of America is not a Communist, he is not a coward, and he is not a sheep.” Maverick denounced the violence that his congressional colleagues threatened and called on them to respect the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act.25 Cox was unmoved. “I want to think that the gentleman from Texas believes in some form of government and that he has not been wholly Russianized.” Tempers f lared as Speaker of the House William Bankhead admonished Cox and struck the remarks from the record. Maverick made it clear that if civility didn’t return to the debate, “rows and fistfights” might have to settle it. Hostility to social reform was gaining credibility under the mantle of anticommunism. Forming a united front of conservative media, politicians, and industrialists, it would escalate the campaign to undermine New Deal reform. It would simultaneously derail the drive for a progressive form of unionism. Given license by a president who found himself on the political ropes after his court packing fiasco, it would prove a powerful antireform coalition in the near future. Maury Maverick would be one of its first victims. The following year, Maverick went down to defeat as conservatives trumped several of the president’s liberal candidates. In


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the summer of 1937, the conservative coalition that would eventually thwart the social democratic impulse of the era began to crystallize.26 *** The La Follette Committee issued its report on July 22, offering a nearly complete vindication of the demonstrators. Lacking instruction from Commissioner Allman or Captain Prendergast, Captains Mooney and Kilroy had operated at their own discretion. The committee chose not to pursue the implicit antiunion consensus that bound the police together from Allman down to Higgins. Instead, they focused on the utter lack of direction given to the subordinates on the field that day. Some of the marchers probably hurled profanity at the police and waved their arms to make their case. “But there is no evidence of physical threats,” the committee concluded, “or of the frenzied disorder which the police describe.” Carefully weighing the testimony of reporter Ralph Beck, the witness credited with being the most objective observer of the event, as well as that of Captain James Mooney, the committee concluded that both agreed on one, critical detail: The first three shots were fired before the strikers launched any missile barrage. Focusing more on the f lying stick that Ralph Beck saw than the “backward movement” that Frank McCullogh observed, they concluded that “the first shots came from the police; that these were unprovoked, except, perhaps, by a tree branch thrown by the strikers, and that the second volley of police shots was simultaneous with the missiles thrown by the strikers.” Even apart from the incriminating newsreel, the photographic evidence confirmed that the left side of the strikers’ line was in full retreat well before the first devastating volley was fired. 27 Methodically moving through each episode in the Memorial Day incident, the investigators dismantled the image of a fanatical mob attack. Addressing the behavior of the police following the assault, Thomas and La Follette nearly seethed with indignation. The police made no effort to render first aid on the field or distinguish between those seriously and superficially wounded. Captains Mooney and Kilroy did nothing to coordinate treatment for the wounded. Instead, officers were left to hurl wounded and dying strikers indiscriminately into waiting police wagons. Analyzing the photographs, Thomas and La Follette concluded that “the police dragged seriously wounded, unconscious men along the ground with no more care than would be employed on a common drunkard.” Nothing was more egregious than the treatment of Earl Handley, wounded in the leg and dragged out of

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the union vehicle carrying him to safety. Like Kenneth Reed, Handley was tossed indifferently into an overcrowded patrol wagon.28 The committee was no less critical of the police department’s investigation. “The entire effort of the police was directed not toward an impartial investigation of the event,” the committee concluded, “but to an attempt to build up a case against the marchers.” In that effort, the accusation of communist domination proved tremendously effective. By linking Communists to the march, the police could exploit popular stereotypes about radical violence and leave the impression that the marchers had every intention of attacking Republic Steel. Exasperated by the evidence of police misconduct, the committee concluded that the department’s investigation was “entirely inadequate for the occasion.” Instead, police department officials “started with an assumption of guilt on the part of the marchers” and acquitted individual patrolmen of any responsibility.29 The overwhelming evidence pointed to this singular conclusion: The aggressive police response was unwarranted, unnecessary, and inexcusable. The use of excessive force “must be ascribed,” the committee concluded, “either to gross inefficiency in the performance of police duty or a deliberate effort to intimidate the strikers.” Finally, after all of SWOC’s appeals to the federal government, two elected officials finally admitted the following: The police had operated as strikebreakers. After discovering that the company had supplied, fed, and harbored them, it would have required astonishing mendacity to conclude otherwise.30 In Chicago, the citizens’ commission formed at the Civic Opera House protest on June 8 corroborated the conclusions of the La Follette hearings.31 More than this, Paramount’s release of a modified version of the Lippert film after the conclusion of the Memorial Day hearings signaled a significant shift in opinion. On July 3, the film was screened for the first time in New York. At the Paramount Theater in Times Square, the “violence of the action” that transpired on the field that day “seemed to stun the audience.” The sight of police officers charging and firing at retreating strikers produced a “collective gasp” from the audience as it watched in “utter silence.”32 The change in public opinion was echoed in the media. In light of Anderson’s searing report and the testimony in Washington, several mainstream newspapers began to produce more sympathetic treatments of the strikers. With the wide dissemination of the film—the notable exception being in Chicago, where the Police Movie Censor


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Bureau banned it—several newspapers that had jumped to condemn the marchers now rebuked the police for their evident brutality.33 Yet the deluge of righteous outrage that the steelworkers expected never did materialize. Quite simply, the middle and upper class had turned decisively against the CIO. Many were on their way to rejecting the entire idea of a progressive New Deal, one that sought to resolve longstanding labor injustices and economic inequalities. A constellation of factors produced the deepening class divisions. Not least among these was the president’s plan to “pack” the courts in order to push through New Deal legislation. By June 1937, popular opinion had shifted against the president’s court reorganization scheme, which aimed at circumventing judicial opposition to New Deal landmarks such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustments Act. According to a Gallup Poll, 59 percent of the American public opposed the Roosevelt court-packing scheme. Now, the president’s drive to overcome conservative opposition on the courts looked more and more like despotic meddling.34 Coupled with this was the onset of the “Roosevelt recession,” an economic slowdown that was clearly evident by August. Through a combination of Federal Reserve Board policies that increased interest rates, the impact of the first Social Security tax levy, and the president’s decision to balance the budget through massive spending reductions in the WPA and the PWA, the specter of the Depression returned. Unemployment spiked to 11 million as Americans began to question whether all of the New Deal social engineering had achieved any lasting improvements.35 More than anything, the strike wave of 1937 created an atmosphere in which the Memorial Day Massacre would be portrayed as yet another example of misguided militancy. As many as 400,000 workers launched sit-down strikes that year. In Chicago, workers adopted the sit-down strike against sixty businesses in only the first two weeks of March. Inmates held a sit-down strike at the Joliet Prison while housewives in Bloomington threw down their mops in a sit-down against domestic exploitation. Laundry workers, salesclerks, stock boys, sanitation workers, and even WPA employees took to the sit-down tactic in a frenzy of union organizing.36 Yet this drive for legitimacy troubled middle-class Americans and perfectly alienated their upper-class betters. To the conservative media, the CIO appeared to be moving too aggressively, accomplishing too much. Perhaps more to the point, they were winning.37 It also seemed that industrial unrest was increasing despite the advent of the National Labor Relations Act, which had only recently been upheld by the

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Supreme Court. Labor antagonism seemed to be intensifying under the umbrella of government protection. Criticizing the CIO for being “irresponsible,” dozens of mainstream newspapers held the president and the New Deal responsible for the unrest. A Chicago Tribune cartoon published in the June 4 edition captured the conservative perspective. Reminiscent of the Tribune’s version of the Memorial Day incident, it featured brickbats labeled “bigger and better strikes,” “steel strike,” and “riots.” The f lying objects are aimed at an angel of peace dubbed the “Wagner Labor Act” and carrying a scroll titled “Industrial Peace.” Appearing before the Senate Post Office Committee, Girdler tartly made the same point. In a heated exchange with Senators Joseph Guffey and Kenneth McKellar, Girdler exploded: “I’m trying to tell this committee I won’t have a contract with an irresponsible, racketeering, communistic body like the C.I.O.”38 For a growing percentage of property-owning Americans, the CIO had become synonymous with social upheaval, if not communist subversion. The emergence of a southern and conservative Republican anti–New Deal coalition crystallized the opposition movement. While Roosevelt was fighting the Senate Judiciary Committee over his court reorganization plan, he was also confronting massive southern resistance to his plan for a wages and hours bill. Southerners opposed to a minimum wage that would jeopardize the region’s low-wage advantage joined conservative Republicans determined to derail progressive taxation and federal spending on job creation. Conservative newspapers in Chicago virulently opposed the measure. The Chicago Daily News hysterically denounced the bill, calling it a “monstrosity” that would “mark the end of the American form of government as we have hitherto known it.” Mainstream media and congressional conservatives cooperated in fostering a public atmosphere that was antagonistic to progressive reform.39 Just as the Chicago Tribune set the tone in the days after the massacre, it once again helped to establish the popular mood following the La Follette report. “A fake finding has followed a fake inquiry,” the paper squawked. The committee arrived at a predictable conclusion: “the police of Chicago are brutes and that the armed attack on them and the Republic mill was a Sunday school picnic.” According to the Tribune editors, the committee had “repeatedly performed services of the highest value to the cause of insurrection in this country.” It had become an instrument of “C.I.O. propaganda” and a “publicity agent for the party of revolt.” The Paramount newsreel and the testimony of Lupe Marshall, Harry Harper, and Dr. Lawrence Jacques had done nothing to revise the Tribune’s earliest conclusion.40


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If anything, the paper recapitulated its conclusions in light of the findings of the Chicago Coroner’s Office. The bias of the state’s attorney, the coroner, and many of the witnesses themselves did not faze Chicago’s newspapers. What mattered was the jury’s verdict. Released on July 20, just two days before the La Follette Committee’s report, the Chicago coroner concluded that Taglieri and Rothmund were killed “during a riot” that began when a “large body of strikers and strike sympathizers . . . many of whom were carrying clubs or missiles, attempted to force their way through a police line.” The coroner concluded that the officers had acted in self-defense and to protect public order. According to a jury made up of six unemployed members of the American Legion, an organization inveterately hostile to labor unionism, the killing of the marchers was “justifiable homicide.”41 In the estimation of the mainstream newspapers, justice had finally been served. The coroner’s jury “had found that the police were blameless,” editorialized the Tribune, having “done nothing to provoke the fight.” The Chicago Daily News concurred. “It is to be hoped that the verdict of justifiable homicide brought by a coroner’s jury will end the attempt to make Memorial Day martyrs of the rioters killed in a clash with the police at South Chicago.” The Chicago Tribune thundered that the “testimony given at the inquest completely sustains the charges against the rioters and justifies the prosecution of the men arrested as instigators.” The Chicago Daily Times echoed the conclusions of the other mainstream papers. “Community safety and order would rest on shaky ground unless every doubt were decided in behalf of the community’s police force. This the coroner’s jury has done.” Instead of opting for a resolution through the National Labor Relations Board— which Tom Girdler resolutely opposed—workers adopted the “strike strategy,” which led invariably to the “tribunal of violence.”42 Like an amulet waved against a mystical dark force, the police and the Chicago establishment successfully invoked anticommunism to defend their actions. Interviewing business executives on the CIO uprising, Fortune Magazine discovered that most were optimistic that the movement had reached its pinnacle. They agreed that the decisive leadership of Tom Girdler was critical in turning the tide against the CIO. But they also attributed it to the Memorial Day incident. “The excessive brutality of the police was admitted, but the consensus of round-table opinion was favorable to the police,” the magazine reported. One executive seemed to summarize the views of most. He simultaneously encapsulated the conclusion that middle and upper-class Americans would settle on following the hearings. “The strikers went out there for trouble and


CH A P T E R

E L E V E N

“The Day Is Coming . . .”

The labor movement is primarily and fundamentally a moral movement John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty,” 1910. The protest by 600,000 mine workers that Van Bittner had promised would shut the steel mills down never did materialize. Neither did his threat to enlist the support of the Maritime Federation in a boycott of iron ore shipments. There would be no general strike in Chicago; as early as June 2, Bittner had dismissed the idea of a general CIO walkout in support of the steelworkers.1 For all of the efforts of the thousands of steelworkers walking the picket lines from Monroe, Michigan, to Massillon, Ohio, the workers in South Chicago found themselves increasingly isolated. Faced with the deluge of negative opinion from the Chicago Tribune, the indifference of the federal government, and the unwillingness of their own union leadership to take direct action, strikers had every reason to feel desperately alone. And yet they were not. While steelworkers continued to picket throughout the hot summer at Republic Steel and at Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Indiana Harbor, nonstriking unionists tried to extend their support. CIO leaders never considered calling the recently organized steelworkers out in support, a move that might have broken the stalemate at Little Steel. The events at Republic Steel and the La Follette hearings, however, infused the Carnegie–Illinois workers with a sense of urgency. As the strike intensified, Philip Murray cautiously warned them to honor their contracts. “Strikes, walkouts, sit-downs, and other stoppages of work constitute a violation both of our contracts and the

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policy of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee,” Murray announced “While thousands of men are on strike to secure the protection of a signed and written contract, our members who already enjoy that protection are urged to assume responsibility for seeing that its provisions are observed both by their employers and their fellow workers.”2 What Murray did not appreciate was how quickly the strike had developed into something more than a demand for a signed contract. It was now a challenge to the autocracy of steel itself. Despite Murray’s injunctions, militant unionists at Carnegie–Illinois’ South Works did what they could to support the strike and to address their own simmering grievances. Not surprisingly, George Patterson was in the lead. He and James Stewart, president of Local 65 South Works, had joined the Memorial Day parade. That experience radicalized them. They channeled their moral indignation into a resolution that condemned police brutality and defended the ideals of the movement. Patterson, Stewart, and other labor militants had opposed Van Bittner’s decision to divide South Works into four locals. Now, they challenged Bittner and Murray’s compromising legalism. “ECONOMIC ROYALISTS TO BLAME,” the resolution announced. Condemning the “bloody tyrant” Tom Girdler and his “preparation for bloody Sunday,” Patterson and the nine other members of South Works’ union executives made it clear that they would not subordinate the injustices of Memorial Day to the task of winning a contract.3 Patterson’s group reaffirmed its commitment to union democracy and linked it to the Little Steel struggle. “The issues are so much bigger than the strike in steel for a signed agreement, and they are no longer merely the CIO question. It is American Democracy that is being challenged.” The signers pledged to “do everything in our power to assist our striking steel brothers,” since they understood the larger issues at stake. Girdler, Grace, and the municipal officials who collaborated with them “want to bring back the terrorized company steel town on a more definite fascist plan.” In contrast, Patterson and the others were committed to a “democratic union,” one in which none was prohibited from membership on the basis of race, color, nationality, or “political belief.” Though respecting the requirements of their collective agreement, the signers promised to carry on the work of educating steelworkers and the local community about the “real issues of this brutal, unnecessary strike struggle” and the threat of “fascist tendencies” in America. Those same fascist forces had cried “ ‘Communist’ as they pull[ed] the trigger that sent striking steel workers to their deaths on bloody Sunday.” Although Patterson and his

“The Day Is Coming…”

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supporters were never willing to challenge the national leadership, they had outlined precisely what the Little Steel Strike meant to American workers. “We are not going backwards to company controlled towns,” they asserted; “we are going forward with progressive, democratic America.” According to Patterson, Van Bittner did not approve.4 The egalitarian impulse of the CIO drive f lourished despite the terrible setback of Memorial Day. Visiting the strike scene after the incident, Dan Burley of the Chicago Defender was struck by the evidence of racial cooperation. “South Chicago’s melting pot of humanity—as diversified as the elements which go into the making of the steel rail you ride—is fusing into one solid front, black and white, brown and yellow, and every tongue made understandable to all.” At Eagles Hall, the official strike headquarters, Burley was impressed by the “lack of friction present among the various racial identities moving in and out of the busy office.” Some 300 blacks were on strike against Republic Steel while only 20 or so remained inside. The women’s auxiliaries were playing a remarkable role in “breaking down racial discrimination.” At Carnegie–Illinois, for example, Virginia Ray, an African American woman, served as vice president, while Ada Paris, “a prominent social leader,” served on the executive. Noting the history of black strikebreakers and the positive inf luence of the National Negro Congress in “educating the race to unionism,” Burley celebrated the evidence of a multiracial working-class movement. “This is the first time in South Chicago . . . that organizations, trade unions etc. have been able to organize all groups on an equal basis. Mexicans, blacks, Polish, Italians, Germans, and Irish are all being poured into the pot and melted and moulded into American citizens.”5 The strike exposed the weaknesses in SWOC organizing, and illustrated the domineering tendencies of the CIO. But it also provided the furnace that brief ly forged multiethnic steelworkers into a unified force. When the strike broke out, African American and Mexican workers quickly demonstrated their commitment to the union. Mexican strikers marched relentlessly, frequently constituting 75 percent of the picket lines. They were conspicuously evident in the front ranks of the Memorial Day march.6 African Americans were equally active in the strike. As many as 150 out of 250 black workers at Republic Steel joined the union and many picketed alongside white workers. The strike not only challenged the legal status quo but also the social hierarchy. In the tumult of the strike, the union was becoming a laboratory for democracy. One white worker noted that “We were accosted by a Negro who wore an arm band marked ‘Strike Committee’ almost before we set foot upon the

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boundaries of the headquarters. We were asked such questions as, ‘What is your business here? Where are you from, etc. . . .’ This encounter was significant because it is apparent that the role of the Negro has been reversed in strike situations. One white worker remarked later, ‘We are glad to have you here with us.’ ” 7 Racial antagonism did not magically disappear; blacks worked as strikebreakers, and whites were overheard muttering racial epithets about black scabs at strike headquarters. Yet white anxieties about black antiunionism dissipated considerably when so many joined the union cause. African Americans also had reason to revise their attitudes toward white workers, since the racial egalitarianism that the CIO proclaimed seemed to have substance when the rubber hit the road. “Two thousand marching CIO miners will lay down their picks, and Girdler needs coal to blast his furnaces! Thousands of auto workers from the CIO will stop using any steel made in Republic, and Girdler must fill his contracts with the auto companies.” It was an African American strike leader who delivered this hopeful exhortation. The strike certainly did not erase racial friction, but SWOC workers directly challenged the social divisions that had stymied interracial solidarity. The ghosts of 1919 seemed finally to have been put to rest.8 Yet Popular Front egalitarianism could not compensate for a strike that was coming apart at the seams. “I know that unless we get some support,” a striking Republic Steel worker wrote from Buffalo, “there won’t even be a strike here in another two weeks, as the men can’t stand it, and will have to crawl back into that scab hole of a plant.” He and the other strike leaders had little hope of returning to work, since the company had blacklisted them and displayed their photographs as an example to nonstriking workers.9 The complicity of police and local officials, a towering wall of media hostility, the CIO’s financial duress, and SWOC’s excessive reliance on a benevolent Roosevelt administration eroded the movement. What had seemed inexorable only a few months earlier was now disintegrating. Two weeks after the Memorial Day incident, SWOC still seemed to have the advantage in South Chicago. Organizer Joe Germano reported that only a “small number” remained in the plant, perhaps as few as 200. “Conditions in the plant getting to point where men are now becoming demoralized,” he reported at a field workers’ meeting. SWOC organizers took comfort in the belief that Republic Steel was simply unable to produce steel. The picket lines were solid at Youngstown Sheet and Tube and at Inland. A strike strategy committee was now in place at Republic Steel. More than this, organizer Hank Johnson reported that


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an aid committee and citizens’ committee were actively seeking relief for struggling Republic strikers. Frontline solidarity and community support might compensate for the union’s organizational weaknesses.10 Yet the independent steel companies had resources that SWOC did not. By the end of June, fewer than 500 steelworkers remained on strike at Republic Steel. By July, the mounting hospital bills only compounded the problems of lodge finances and groceries that now preoccupied Local 1033.11 Escalating state repression magnified the forces battering the CIO. When a mob of deputized special police and antiunion vigilantes broke the picket line at a Republic Steel plant in Monroe, Michigan, the strike in other steel districts became dangerously tenuous. The decisive moment came when Governor Martin L. Davey ordered the National Guard into Youngstown, Warren, and Massillon, Ohio. Though this move was justified as a measure to protect public safety, Martin had decided that he could win political rewards by using them as strikebreakers in a showdown with the CIO. On June 24, he ordered the Guard to assure safe passage to anyone willing to return to work in the steel mills. The National Guard then disrupted the mass picket lines and protected employees returning to work. By the end of July, all of the plants closed by the Little Steel Strike were once again operating.12 The tone of SWOC’s July 24 press release captured the desperate indignation of Murray and the union leadership. “In each of the steel areas where the strike has been in effect, local authorities acting in complete collusion with the officials of the steel corporations and the National Guard have violated state and national laws and have infringed in the most flagrant manner upon the civil liberties of the steel workers.” Hundreds of striking workers had been unjustifiably arrested and held incommunicado, homes had been broken into, and working people “assaulted, beaten, and shot by local authorities.” Publicity Director Vin Sweeney was unequivocal about Davey’s use of the National Guard. The Guard had supported local authorities in “intimidating and coercing the strikers into returning to work through fear of arrest and being held in jail or being subjected to assaults and beatings.” SWOC also admitted that the federal government had betrayed the steelworkers. It had not “displayed the slightest interest in protecting the rights of the steelworkers on strike which have been so flagrantly disregarded.” Coupled with the president’s public statement condemning both the steel industry and the CIO, the federal government’s deliberate detachment was almost too much for Lewis and Murray to bear.13 Yet even after the use of the National Guard to break the strike

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in Ohio, SWOC leadership was unwilling to do more than appeal to the administration and the courts. While steelworkers fought for recognition and some measure of justice, Murray venerated the contract at all costs. The character of the steelworkers union was becoming very clear in these pivotal moments of 1937.14 By August, arguments over union assistance to workers dominated union meetings. The resentment of striking workers toward union officials who seemed remote and imperious marred these poorly attended meetings. Local 1033’s executive was anything but remote; they were feeling the pressure of a strike that SWOC could no longer afford and was no longer willing to lead. In Indiana Harbor, steelworkers salvaged the strike and turned it into something of a victory. There, Communist organizers and labor radicals had played a critical role in the steel campaign. When Inland Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced they would resume operations, Indiana Governor Clifford Townsend agreed to mediate between the companies and the union to avert picket-line violence. Throughout the course of the strike, the picket lines had been solid and peaceful. In part, that was because local SWOC leaders had agreed to allow Inland Steel to continue using its blast furnaces to supply heating gas to East Chicago. The agreement bought the union greater tolerance from local officials. Now Townsend worried that this harmony would explode in an incendiary exchange between unionists and strikebreakers.15 On June 29, Townsend achieved a breakthrough. Inland and the governor signed a “statement of policy”; the union and the governor then signed a duplicate document. The clever ruse amounted to an unofficial agreement to respect the conditions of the Carnegie–Illinois agreement that John L. Lewis and Myron Taylor had hammered out. It also conceded recognition to SWOC members at Inland Steel. What it did not provide was a signed agreement, the demand at the very center of the SWOC campaign. President Frank Purnell of Youngstown Sheet and Tube was vociferously opposed to any deal. Townsend had had enough. He invited Van Bittner to a meeting, signed an agreement with the regional director, and backed Purnell into a corner by publicly announcing that Sheet and Tube had agreed to the same deal as Inland, short of union recognition. It had not, but Purnell was able to restore production and the union was able to claim a victory. It was certainly not a victory, but confronting unified company hostility and government indifference, SWOC was willing to grasp at straws.16 The increasingly futile strike finally came to an end for Chicago’s steelworkers on November 3, 1937, when Local 1033 voted to dissolve


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the picket line. The union advised workers to seek reinstatement at Republic. Some applied for their positions, most were denied, and many ended up on WPA work crews as the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937 bit deeply. SWOC research discovered that 224,000 steelworkers, or 28 percent of the 800,000 employees in the basic steel industry, had been laid off since the beginning of the downturn. After a survey of eight mills in the Chicago area, the union determined that 10,596 out 23,371 workers had been laid off since the economic slowdown. Only 2,500 employees were working full time when the survey was conducted; as many as 10,475 were working part-time.17 On December 20, 1937, George Patterson, Joe Weber, Lupe Marshall, and Ada Leder learned their fate before Judge Joseph A. Graber. On the charge of unlawful assembly, each followed the advice of the union lawyers and pled guilty, receiving a fine of $10 and $2 for costs.18 After all of the righteous indignation, SWOC opted to lick its wounds, salvage what it could, and fight another day. That didn’t mean that the brutal killings would be forgotten. Only a year later, SWOC would hold a massive commemoration on the site of the massacre. Nick Fontecchio’s animosity for the American Federation of Labor’s opposition to the Little Steel organizing drive still burned bright. Addressing AFL president William Green as “Your Highness—Arch American Labor Traitor,” Fontecchio lacerated him for his attacks on Lewis, the CIO, and the steel drive. According to Fontecchio, Green’s statements won the approval of “Tom Girdler, Charlie Schwab, the Chicago Tribune and others.” Now desperately trying to sustain the organizing drive, Fontecchio demanded that Green give “an account of yourself as to what you did in 1937. You gave a helping hand to Tom Girdler, Charlie Schwab, the Chicago Tribune and others, not only to stop steel workers from organizing but in the actual killing of a number of steel workers who were fighting for industrial freedom.”19 Yet SWOC would forgive, and for the most part, forget. It may have been meager compensation, but Judge Graber became the only Chicago authority figure to identify precisely what was at stake in the Little Steel Strike. Although the judge echoed the now-familiar charge that the defendants had been “mislead [sic] by agitators and people whose program is very, very vicious,” he identified the moral issue that had been at the core of the strike, the CIO movement, and the labor uprisings of the 1930s. “I suppose the day is coming . . . when these men with lots of money will realize that the money that they have is a sacred trust and that that trust should be beneficial to the men whose sweat and whose toil helped them to amass those fortunes.” Graber’s social conscience was

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remarkable. He asserted that they should “pay decent living wages and hours of labor which would enable them to have recreation and decent living conditions.” Invoking the papal encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” Pope Leo XIII’s great reckoning with the conflict between Christian charity and industrial exploitation, Graber looked forward to the day when capital would acknowledge its mutual dependency on working people. “We will then probably get some where along the line of social justice and the laboring man in his relation to capital.”20 It had taken seven months for one of Chicago’s power brokers to acknowledge the “moral issues” that John Lewis had always known were at the center of the struggle. On March 26, 1940, Van Bittner wrote to Nick Fontecchio to notify him of the good news: the request he had made on behalf of a SWOC member had been granted. Fontecchio had written on behalf of Frank Stenken, a member of Local 1011 in East Chicago, had been unable to find work in the mills once the mills started laying off employees in the recession of 1937. He had asked SWOC for $175 to set up a shoe repair business in Lansing, Illinois. Stenken’s request was unusual, and so was Bittner’s decision. Yet Fontecchio had told Bittner everything he needed to know about the budding shoemaker. Frank Stenken had lost a leg from a wound inflicted by police in Chicago on Memorial Day, 193721 *** In 1941, the exigencies of wartime production generated what the Little Steel Strike could not: recognition for SWOC at Republic Steel. Transformed into the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) in 1942, the steelworkers’ union led the way in promoting union cooperation with government. In July 1943, the CIO created its Political Action Committee. Formally nonpartisan, the organization functioned as the union wing of the Democratic Party.21 Led by Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and Roosevelt’s closest union adviser, the PAC board also included none other than Van Bittner. Rejecting third-party politics, the PAC would operate on the assumption that the Democrats offered organized labor its best hope. There was little doubt that Roosevelt had abandoned the steel workers. By the end of June, the president was ready to wash his hands of the whole affair. In a press conference, he announced “a plague on both your houses,” lumping organized labor and the steel companies together as incorrigible trouble makers.22 Still, Phillip Murray, Van Bittner, and the leadership of SWOC would not relinquish their commitment to the Roosevelt administration.


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For all of the gains that unionized steelworkers made during the Second World War, they belonged to a union that steadily eroded the shop-floor democracy that had been so important to the emergence of the unions in the first place. Shortly after the Memorial Day Massacre, while the Little Steel Strike still raged, Patterson noted the change. Frontline aggressiveness had been indispensable to mounting the charge against Steel. Now, Bittner and Murray clamped down. “We were now beginning to receive communications from Phil Murray, telling us that we must uphold our contracts,” Patterson recalled in his autobiography. SWOC leadership imperiously announced that “there should be no wildcat strikes, that we should be patient, while we wait for the international union to go to arbitration on grievances . . . our militancy,” Patterson lamented, “was being subdued by our leadership, and our old type of democratic action (orders from our members) was being taken away.” Instead of mobilizing the grassroots against U.S. Steel and for a broader confrontation with Little Steel, Murray was telling the staff “to keep the members in line.”23 Even as almost 7 million workers engaged in more than 14,000 strikes between 1942 and 1945, Phillip Murray, the USWA, and the CIO defended the No Strike Pledge. That ensured the CIO’s commitment to wartime production, but it also protected businesses’ prerogative to make a profit.24 In the wake of the Memorial Day Massacre, SWOC became even more centralized, dictatorial, and reluctant to challenge political authorities. Almost as soon as the dust settled on the field in front of Republic Steel, SWOC began to purge the radicals from the union. It started when Van Bittner placed the virulently anticommunist Joe Germano in charge of the strike following the massacre. Germano, who was already friendly with the local Democratic Party machine, would eventually become subdistrict director. A year after the massacre, Nick Fontecchio, the new director of the Calumet region, continued the purge. He removed Communist Jack Rusak from the District 31 staff and sent Joe Weber to organize for the Farm Equipment Workers. SWOC was desperately short of money and was eager to trim its staff. When it did, however, it targeted Communist Party members like Weber and Hank Johnson and the labor radicals who supported them. Patterson never belonged to the party, but he was a radical who found common cause with the Communist activists. When he threw his hat in the ring for district director, Van Bittner strong-armed him into withdrawing it. In 1944, Patterson enjoyed considerable support among the South Chicago locals, so he tried again for the district director position. The thirtyseven-year-old former steelworker then found himself drafted into the army when Joe Germano apparently failed to inform the draft board

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that he had qualified for a deferment because of his status as a union organizer. Patterson still ran against Germano, but he did so from his military post in India. He lost the election in a campaign rumored to include massive ballot box stuffing by Germano’s supporters. When Patterson returned to South Chicago, the district director banished him to Texas and Arkansas. He was finally posted to Milwaukee in 1946 where he would remain for twenty-three years. By 1948, District 31 of the steelworkers union belonged to his politically connected rival. Patterson was another victim of the antileft purge.25 Joe Germano saw the purge as a necessary expedient for creating the kind of bread and butter unionism that appealed to many from the old Amalgamated Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, where Germano had cut his teeth as a labor leader. Even more than Van Bittner, Germano believed that SWOC’s leadership was responsible for the Memorial Day Massacre. He had made that clear in the accusations he hurled at Joe Weber during the SWOC strategy meeting the day after the incident. In an interview years after the strike, he reiterated that sentiment. “We were guilty! There was no question about it. We were guilty doing what we did!” Had the marchers who were arrested not pleaded guilty, he believed, “there would have been long trials and God would only know what would have happened in those long, drawn-out trials.” Instead, the union would focus on “trying to do something for our people.”26 Appalled by the involvement of Communists in the strike, Germano believed that protracted trials would only confirm the suspicion that the party had engineered the mass demonstrations. Admitting that radicals were involved in the strike would have required a defense of mass protests, community mobilization, and militant tactics; conservative unionists like Germano were not prepared to do that. In effect, he, Van Bittner, and Phillip Murray had capitulated to the Chicago Tribune by accepting the argument that the union was responsible for the violence of Memorial Day. Lawyers were expensive and “it wasn’t important to prove whether we were right or whether the Police Department was right. The important thing was to see to it that we did try to restore this union.” But the union that Germano restored was one that had little patience for collective, direct action protest and the social democratic movement it championed.27 This was the unexpected outcome of the Memorial Day Massacre. Though it discredited f lagrantly antiunion tactics and police brutality, it galvanized the belief that direct action protest produced violence. It solidified the conviction that only moderate techniques were legitimate in advancing the union cause, and that the confrontational tactics themselves had been the result of Communist intrigue. The USWA certainly was willing to go on strike, launching the longest CIO strike


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in history in 1959. What it would not do was tolerate the wildcat strikes and spontaneous walkouts that expressed deeply rooted working-class grievances. Following the experience of wartime collaboration with the federal government, USWA officials subscribed to this view almost as enthusiastically as their conservative opponents. The roots of this shift were clearly evident in the aftermath of the Memorial Day Massacre. For SWOC leaders like Phillip Murray, achieving a written contract became the leading objective of the labor movement. In this view, wage increases and benefits increasingly displaced the aspiration to achieve social reform and industrial democracy. Companies eager for a restoration of the kind of control they had enjoyed before the labor insurgency of the 1930s were willing to exchange material improvements for authority in the mills. They traded grievance procedures, wage increases, unemployment benefits, and pension plans for compliance on the f loor and control over the direction of the steel industry.28 This didn’t happen overnight. In the early 1940s, Murray and the CIO wanted to make organized labor an equal partner in determining production goals and investment in strategies. Testifying before Congress against the conservative campaign to whittle away at the Wagner Act, Murray cast the struggles of 1937 in terms of an historic movement for industrial democracy. Because of the NLRA, the steelworkers “met less determined and less belligerent opposition than had the 1919 campaigners. In 1936 and 1937 democratic processes were allowed a head start. . . . We were attempting to extend to the steel industry the democratic principles and procedures under which our Government operates.”29 Yet conservative opposition to union influence and the rising tide of anticommunism, which the CIO aided and abetted, wore away at the notion that organized labor had a legitimate claim on determining national economic policy. The experience of wartime cooperation between the state and organized labor, the increasing control of private enterprise over conversion to peacetime production, and the Keynesian emphasis on resolving social problems through increased consumption rather than a redistribution of economic power undermined the CIO’s plans for social democratic reform.30 Although the steelworkers’ union advocated for reform, it established a political alliance that severely circumscribed its influence. In the early stages of the steel organizing drive, SWOC leadership concluded that cooperating with political elites was the key to advancing labor’s fortunes. Even when the Roosevelt administration proved unwilling to intervene in favor of the steelworkers, SWOC continued to trust in the benevolence of the president. Rather than the shop floors and the city streets, the courts and the government regulatory agencies increasingly became the arenas of struggle. Though the Democrats abandoned plans for a “full

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employment” economy that would advance economic democracy in the post war period, the CIO rejected the idea of supporting a third-party challenge that might pressure the Roosevelt (and then Truman) administration into reviving the New Deal. That alliance made it a client of an administration that privileged stability over social democratic reform. In the conservative backlash following the Memorial Day Massacre, and in the drive for wartime preparedness, the vision of working-class emancipation at the core of industrial democracy waned.31 Aligning itself to the Democratic Party, the union tied itself to a political agenda increasingly defined by Cold War militancy and domestic conformity. The amicable relationship between the Democrats and the CIO would have immediate consequences for Chicago. In 1940, the CIO held its convention in the Windy City. None other than Mayor Edward Kelly addressed the assembly. Kelly told the attentive assembly the story of how he was reminded of the Memorial Day Massacre in his campaign for reelection. Walking into a hall, he saw “a man on the platform with one of those things over his eye, and he was talking about the Republic Steel trouble.” Kelly was understandably anxious about how he would be received, since the speaker was haranguing the Chicago police and condemning the violence of Memorial Day. Yet Kelly was soon relieved to hear the speaker announce that “I have lost my eye, but I have confidence in the Mayor of Chicago. I know he will be fair to labor, and for that reason I am supporting Edward J. Kelly for Mayor of the city of Chicago.” Kelly had been endorsed by none other than Harry Harper, the steelworker who had been looking for his brother at Republic Steel and who had lost his eye to the wrath of the Chicago police. Harper had been recruited by Joe Germano.32 Despite the gains made after the SWOC breakthrough in 1941, the turbulent steel industry continued to lay off workers in a cyclical pattern that was only too familiar to the steelworkers of the pre-CIO era. Pay gains aside, the mills continued to be dangerous places to work. In the 1970s, one Wisconsin Steel employee observed that the company “expected you to put yourself at risk.” Only fellow steelworkers could appreciate the constantly threatening environment. “What you don’t want is for a bar to land on you because they go right through you like a knife through butter.”33 Underlying these realities was the persistence of a hierarchical corporate system. Under the pressure of wartime production and the patriotic rhetoric of the struggle against fascist Germany, corporations gained ascendancy while the CIO became more compliant and less democratic. In an environment, of management-union cooperation, workers conceded control over the manufacturing process in exchange for steady wage gains.


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The USWA won tremendous wage, pension, benefit, and grievance system gains for its members. Even so, the Memorial Day Massacre had made organized labor susceptible to state and corporate dominance.34 In the 1960s, Steelworker Ed Sadlowski decided to reverse the decline. Sadlowski, whose grandfather had been burned so badly in a furnace accident that he had to leave the mills, became a grievance officer at South Works’ Local 65 when he was only twenty-two. From that position, the burly, tough-talking steelworker launched a drive to democratize the union. Determined to restore rank-and-file control, he assembled an ethnically diverse group of supporters and won a stunning victory in the presidential election for Local 65. He set out to challenge the cozy relationship between management and union brass. He also zeroed in on the corruption that seemed to fester at the union’ core. To curb these abuses, Sadlowski called for lower union dues, the ratification of contracts by local members, and the use of the strike weapon after years of union submission.35 Appointed to the staff of the international union, Sadlowski shook it to its foundations by introducing resolutions against the Vietnam War. He eventually won a remarkable victory over Sam Evett, Nick Fontecchio’s one-time office assistant, becoming district director in Chicago in 1964. From there, he made a bid for the presidency of the USWA. Ultimately, entrenched opposition from union loyalists stalled the reform drive. Yet Sadlowski had sparked a revolt of disenchanted steelworkers that promised to revive the democratic ethos that had once excited the union rank-and-file. What is remarkable is how Sadlowski galvanized his support. More than anything else, he appealed to the union’s history. He distributed articles that illuminated their militant, egalitarian past, the history of steel mill exploitation, and the SWOC insurgency of 1936. He educated them on the Memorial Day Massacre.36 At Republic Steel, a similar effort was underway to recapture the union’s past and reverse the decline into stagnancy. In 1971, Local 1033 produced a thirty-five-page booklet celebrating the history of “your union.” Borrowing from the recollections of Local 1033 veterans such as Gus Yuratovic, Mike and Virginia Mrkonich, Emil Badornac, and Dr. Lawrence Jacques, it paid tribute to the “terrible and heartbreaking struggles and sacrifices of the brave labor pioneers of 1937 in their efforts to win the freedom and right to belong to a union.” The booklet was more than an exercise in historical propaganda. It offered union members a detailed history of the emergence of the union movement out of the economic and social dislocation of the Depression. Perhaps for the first time, younger union members read about the Unemployed

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Councils, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and the abysmal conditions that Republic Steel’s workers endured in the 1930s.37 For union members witnessing the ongoing struggle of African Americans for full inclusion, the authors of the booklet underlined how “White and Black people joined hands to fight evictions, sheriff sales, and for a better life.” It celebrated the efforts of African American union organizers such as Hank Johnson, Joe Cook, and “Mr. and Mrs. Ben Patterson,” both of whom witnessed the Memorial Day Massacre. Linking the present struggle for racial equality to the union’s multiracial past, the booklet committee emphasized the fact that the “martyrs” of Memorial Day “represented a cross section of Americans.” Recapturing the story of the La Follette hearings and the evidence of police brutality, the authors reminded the members that the union had been forged by working-class activism, not corporate benevolence.38 Themes of conflict resonated in the early 1970s as a labor insurgency broke out across the United States. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans, Latinos, and women sought full equality in unions that had paid lip service to those ideals since the 1940s. Yet the issues of police brutality and government repression of dissent were also reemerging in 1971. Only three years earlier, Chicago police once again gained notoriety when they beat youthful protestors at the 1968 Democratic national convention. Most steelworkers over the age of thirty probably had little sympathy for the long-haired, countercultural dissidents. Many, however, must have been struck by the parallels between the Little Steel Strike and the 1968 melee. “Union steel workers,” commented the authors of This is Your Union, “and the people of Chicago learned a lesson in ‘law and order’ long before George Wallace, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon used this slogan to sow confusion and dissension in our land.”39 The authors of the booklet honored the “martyrs” and praised the “pioneers,” but they also testified to the ongoing need for democratic rejuvenation. They would not whitewash the union’s troubled postwar record. “Following World War II,” they wrote, “Local 1033 experienced a black-out of Union democracy.” Divisions between strikers and those who continued to work plagued the union. Following the 1946 strike, “Union democracy went out the window—the will of the membership was ignored and those who attempted to protest were hit with phony charges or roughed up.” The authoritarianism that had characterized SWOC was institutionalized as dissidents were silenced and allegedly beaten. Election tampering became standard fare.40 Yet signs of “rebirth” were evident in the 1950s. It was in the throes of the 116-day strike of 1959 that President Xavier Smykowski


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“reestablished democracy in the local union.” Through collective efforts on the picket line, the “fear, demoralization, and lack of trust” that had plagued the union began to dissipate. The authors of the booklet were eager to demonstrate that the democratic regeneration had continued in Local 1033. Successful court challenges based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against Republic’s practice of racial discrimination; the election of black and Latino members to the union executive; an integrated Local 1033 basketball team, and the evidence of a thriving, multiracial, union-based social life—all of these seemed to testify to a union that had rediscovered the spirit of 1937.41 However encouraging, the portrait of union regeneration failed to anticipate the crisis that would soon engulf the entire steel industry. It was a crisis precipitated in large part by the abandonment of the kind of national economic planning that the New Deal had once envisioned. Preoccupied by its Cold War alliances, Washington fostered viable foreign steel companies that enjoyed the benefits of open access to the U.S. market. At the same time, aging American firms struggled against intensifying competition. Rather than address the problems of international competition, overproduction, inadequate modernization, and the joblessness that resulted from automation, successive administrations applied temporary macroeconomic solutions that ignored the stagnation at the core of the steel sector itself. Adopting compensatory measures to address the demand for black equality, the federal government failed to resolve the erosion of manufacturing jobs across the industry. The widespread decline gripped black workers as much as whites. In this climate, government measures to resolve racial inequalities only exacerbated tensions between white and black workers, rupturing a working-class alliance that had always been strained by white intolerance.42 Industrial decline advanced unabated. In this crisis environment, the steel companies hammered away at their demand for union concessions. From wages to benefits to pensions, the companies wanted to restore competitiveness at the expense of their allegedly overpaid workers. Media outlets reinforced the argument that the steelworkers had enjoyed an easy ride for too long and that the companies had suffered the consequences. Defeated in an extremely close union election in 1982, Alice Peurala and those who supported the restoration of union militancy could only watch as union executives pursued an agenda of compromise. Those concessions bred the demand for additional sacrifices as U.S. Steel reduced its workforce, dismantled entire departments, and sold off its assets. In 1973, U.S. Steel employed 10, 000 workers at its operation in South Chicago; by

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1983, the worforce had been slashed to a paltry 1,000. By the time the crisis had reached its critical stage, the activist unionism of the 1930s had been decisively discredited. Whether it could have reversed the course of a seemingly inevitable decline is uncertain. What is clear is that the opportunity to revive a vision of industrial democracy in which the rule of law prevailed on the shop f loor had been lost. So too had a vision of unionism in which workers exercised a significant measure of control, shaped production, earned a just compensation, and fused their union to a larger project of social democratic reform.43 Long retired, although anything but dormant, George Patterson observed the collapse in a state of quiet desperation. “These companies will think nothing of us, and that hasn’t changed since I was working in the mill.” In a newspaper interview in 1983, Patterson observed that the USWA executive had adopted the misguided notion that the union and management could cooperate. “Organized labor can never work with management. If you only knew how much blood and sweat we had to give up to get what we have. The time’s now come to give something back, but as little as possible.” While Patterson’s ref lections sounded like an elegy for the steel union, he and the other veterans featured in the Tribune article radiated the same working-class consciousness that had defined them in the Popular Front era. “I’m still 1000 percent union,” the elder Sadlowski claimed. “Back then wages were very low and you were at the mercy of the foreman. Vacations were unheard of, hospitalization was nil and there were almost no pensions. Would you go back there?” The article was framed to contrast the union’s militant origins and the frustrating futility of concessionary bargaining in the 1980s.44 Their lamentations were eloquent, but it was Max Guzman who was the most poignant. He was the Republic Steel ladle operator who had carried the f lag on the Memorial Day march and endured a grueling interrogation by Chicago police. The seventy-two-year-old Guzman brought the strands of historical consciousness and political engagement together. “The companies want too much. . . . They’re trying to break the union again,” he believed. “It’s up to the workers now to stick together and make what we did worthwhile.” Guzman drew on the most vivid memories of his life, those brief, traumatic, and indelible moments in the prairie at Republic Steel. “There were 10 men killed at that massacre. Those people—they gave their lives. . . . Don’t let it go. Don’t let it go back to when you don’t have nothing.” Union leaders had conceded too much, the former steelworkers believed. They had become distant from their membership. In the words of reporter Linnet Myers, the former steelworkers believed that the leadership had failed to sustain the “fighting spirit that brought the organization to life.”45


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In 1993, U.S. Steel shut down its South Works operation. The devastating steel mill closures that began in 1980 when Wisconsin Steel shuttered its operation came to a merciful end in the new century. LTV Corporation, which purchased Republic Steel in 1984, ceased its Southeast Chicago operations in 2001 after declaring bankruptcy. *** The former union hall on Avenue O in South Chicago was teeming with activity on an afternoon in late spring. It was Memorial Day, 2007, the seventieth anniversary of the famous massacre. The crowd that gathered there was not unlike the one that marched to Republic Steel in 1937. Mexican, Latino, African American, and white mixed indiscriminately, a tribute to the union’s egalitarian past. A surprising number of young families attended the event. Even so, it was overwhelmingly an affair for the former steelworkers whose years of punishing mill work were well behind them. Yet what was most remarkable was the number of people who turned out. Perhaps as many as 400 had arrived at this moribund union hall in the desolate lower reaches of the east side. Now more of an underutilized community center than a gathering place for steelworkers, it stands across the street from the former Republic Steel. The once mighty steel mill is abandoned for the most part, except for an incongruous recycling operation corroding in a weed-tangled field. One searches the field in vain for any sign, monument, or testimony to the traumatic events that took place there. Children, local leaders, former union officials, a retired teacher interested in preserving the working-class history of Southeast Chicago, and at least one veteran of the Memorial Day incident—Mollie West, the singer who joined other women in a rousing chorus of “Solidarity Forever” on the march to Republic Steel—were there. Current USWA members sold memorabilia, buttons, booklets, and the kitsch of popular labor history. Photographs blown up to the size of posters, picket signs, and yellowed photocopies of newspaper articles from the summer of 1937 festooned the walls. Friends from the mills long silenced by the tremors of industrial decline met again to exchange stories, old and new. The mood was convivial but also reverent. The Memorial Day Massacre and the legendary strike had become civic ritual for these people. Dramatic readings, poems, songs, invocations, and speeches honored the victims and ref lected on its place in the fabric of the region’s history. Ed Sadlowski was there, cheered once again by the former insurgents, who had seen him as the hope for revitalizing

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the union. Reading the honor roll, he was visibly moved by a story that had galvanized his convictions in the 1970s. More poignant than any speech, however, was the group of gradeschool children who presented a play on the historical significance of the Memorial Day Massacre. One of them had won an award for her writing and performance. She deserved those accolades and more. The children had studied the events carefully. They crafted a dramatic rendering of the strike that explained the origins of SWOC, the conditions at Republic Steel, the transgressions of Chicago police before the Sunday incident, the progress of the ill-fated strike, and the critical intervention of the La Follette Committee. Local media were there to cover the event. It was anything but an empty exercise. In fact, it spoke more directly to the people assembled that day than any critique of corporate globalization. Those forces of relentless market integration were abundantly evident to them, having suffered through the downsizing of steel, meatpacking, and industrial Chicago. USWA representatives attended the event, repeatedly drawing parallels between the predicament that faced workers in the 1930s and the economic miasma that confronts them now. The idiom had changed and so, too, had many of the issues. References to a “race to the bottom,” foreign competition, multilateral trade agreements, the World Trade Organization, and outsourcing dotted the speeches of union leaders grappling with the advent of the Global Era. What had not changed was the sense that workers had to find some vision of unity, some form of cooperation to confront the perils of economic decline. Now they had to organize across borders, relearn the connection between politics and the economy, wrench themselves out of trade union isolation, out of personal anomie, to join the efforts of the unorganized in finding solutions. The language had changed, since 1937, but the overarching predicament was hauntingly familiar. If you closed your eyes in that crowded, boisterous hall, you could almost hear John Lewis or Leo Krzycki or even Joe Weber invoking the ideals of industrial democracy and inveighing against corporate malfeasance. This was not a morbid elegy for something lost and beyond recovery. The former steelworkers, teachers, labor activists, and unionists briefly regenerated the sense of community that had once flourished in this hall. That community was inextricably tied to the union, to work, to the memory of Memorial Day. They nodded and cheered in support of the USWA representatives. In fact, though most were hardly spry any longer, they were apparently following Max Guzman’s injunction. They would not “let it go.”

NOT E S

Introduction: Forgotten Memorials 1. The debate over wages and the plight of workers in the Gilded Age continues to be a heated one, particularly since research conducted under the rubric of the “new economic history” suggests that steadily declining prices meant steadily rising wages for the average worker. According to one preeminent economist, prices fell by 6 percent between 1860 and 1891, while industrial wages increased by as much as 70 percent, from an average of $375 in 1870 to $573 in 1900. Could the predicament of the working class be distilled into wages, particularly average wages, which included workers ranging from highly paid iron puddlers to poorly paid needleworkers? Clearly not, suggests historian Jack Beatty. The problem, according to industrial entrepreneurs, was that labor was getting too large a share of the growing productivity of the era. The answer was to reduce wages but also intensify the workload. “To align their interests with their employers,” Beatty writes, “put wage earners on piecework. Above everything, do something to stop skilled workers from setting the pace of production and spreading to co-workers their spirit of ‘manly’ resistance to speed ups.” That struggle would continue into the era of the New Deal. See Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), pp. 347–8. 2. Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 6–11, 224–5; “What Happened to Industrial Democracy? Thinking Beyond the Current Rights-Based Defense of Organized Labor in the Workplace,” Williamete Journal of the Liberal Arts 14 (Winter 2004): 19–40. 3. Amid the welter of statistical evidence documenting the economic miasma of contemporary America, these statistics are particularly sobering. Manufacturing accounted for a little more than 14 percent of real GDP in 2007, yet between then and October 2009, it registered 29 percent of the nation’s total job loss. Production in several industries is also at historic lows. A Federal Reserve study shows that American production of steel—adjusted for inf lation— has plummeted by 34 percent since the beginning of the recession. It is now at levels set in October 1982, a pinnacle year of decline for the steel industry and also a year of devastating recession. See Alan Tonelson, “Up from Globalism,” Harper’s 320 ( January 2010): 7–9. 4. Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 191–4. 5. Steve Fraser, “The Labor Question,” The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 53–6; Stromquist, “Reinventing The People,” pp. 4–11, 201–4.

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6. Joseph A. McCartin, “Re-Framing US Labour’s Crisis: Reconsidering Structure, Strategy, and Vision,” Labour/Le Travail 59 (Spring 2007): 145. 7. Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–12. 8. Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 69. 9. David Brody, “Reinterpreting the Labor History of the 1930s,” in Workers in Industrial America: Essay on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, reprint 1982), p. 141; Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1970, chapter 10. For a sense of how recent lab historians have expanded the framework for the analysis of steel unionism. Forging a Union of Steel: Phillip Murray, SWOC, and the United Steelworkers (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1987.) For Brody’s analysis of the achievements of SWOC and the limitations imposed by Murray and his conservative subordinates, see “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism: The SWOC Era,” 13–29. 10. Brody, “Reinterpreting the Labor History of the 1930s,” p. 154. 11. Acknowledging the persistently northern European and Anglo-American character of the ERPs at the Duquesne U.S. Steel Mill, James D. Rose discovered that the ERP representatives championed the workplace rule of democratic law against the arbitrary authority of foreman and superintendents. They also significantly ameliorated working conditions. See Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 111–35. Analyzing the steelworkers organizing drive in the Calumet region, the geographical focus of this discussion, James Kollros argues that Brody “underestimates the contributions of both rank and file workers and their leaders.” SWOC success was “based on years of organizing and experimenting by rank and file steelworkers.” See “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, p. 232. For an analysis that recapitulates the incompatibility between ERPs and authentic labor unionism while suggesting that exceptional circumstances prevailed in steel, see Patmore, “Employee Representation Plans in the United States, Canada, and Australia,” Labor 3 (Summer 2006): 41–65. 12. This is a point that Staughton Lynd makes about his edited collection, We Are All Leaders, in a 1997 symposium. See “Response,” Labor History 38 (1997): 183–201. 13. As Feurer has suggested about the UE’s District 8, in St. Louis, an admittedly much more successful experiment in democratic, community-oriented unionism, its members tried to “develop workers’ capacity to continue to develop a style of unionism that could be a force for social transformation, with no prescribed or preordained outcome.” Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, p. 236. 14. See Donald Sofchalk, “the Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass Action,” Labor History 6 (Winter 1965): 3–43; Sofchalk, the preeminent chronicler of the Little Steel Strike, acknowledges the injustices that the Chicago police perpetrated, as well as the complicity of Republic Steel in the massacre, but he ultimately blames the victim by concluding that “What had promised to be a successful display of militant solidarity turned out to be a costly mistake,” p. 36. Sofchalk was the first and the most successful in untangling the complexities of this historic strike. His focus, and the historiographical proclivities of the era in which he was writing, did not afford him the intellectual space to explain how that massive demonstration of violence may have derailed the larger social movement that produced the strike of 1937. This study emphasizes the community mobilization and Popular Front undertones that made it an essential moment in the labor uprising of the 1930s. Subsequent historians have added essential insights on the strike. See Louis Leotta, “Girdler’s Republic: A Study in Industrial Warfare,” Cithara 11 (1971): 41–66, which emphasizes president Tom Girdler’s autocratic violation of labor’s right to organize; Daniel J. Leab’s “The Memorial Day Massacre,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 8 (1967): 3–17, stresses the “tragic” dimension of the strike. Criticizing

Notes

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

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police and company complicity, he ultimately blames the “violence, disorder, unrest, loss of life” on SWOC, which “heeded the lessons” of the massacre and the strike by purging its ranks of militants, pp. 14–15. Michael Speer’s “The Little Steel Strike: Conf lict for Control,” Ohio History 78 (1969): 273–87, argues that the union emphasized the achievement of a signed contract to the exclusion of a national media campaign, which permitted anti-labor forces to define the struggle as a matter of “law and order” and to link it to their attack on the New Deal. What Speer does not consider is how workers interpreted the “law,” nor how difficult it would have been to launch an effective counterattack in the business-friendly mainstream press. For works that stress CIO leadership and national politics, see Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), and Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 30–1; United Steel Workers of America, District 31, Local 1033, “Remember Memorial Day, May 30, 1937,” 11, pamphlet, Chicago History Museum. Quoted in Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995; reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 143. Mary Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), p. 291; Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers, 2nd ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 23. Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, pp. 291–2. Ibid., p. 291; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, pp. 144–7. Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950, pp. xvi–xix, quote on xvii. On the “community-based unionism” that challenged the centralizing tendencies of the CIO, see Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Union Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 2–4, and Staughton Lynd, “Response,” in “We Are All Leaders: A Symposium on a Collection of Essays Dealing with Alternative Unionism in the Early 1930s,” Labor History 38 (1997): 191–201. Mary Triece makes a similar argument about women’s activism in an era that is almost invariably and unfortunately associated with male historical actors. In the midst of the Great Depression, “women forged a communitybased activism that linked domestic concerns with the sphere of production, breathing new life into the 1930s labor movement.” See On the Picket Line: Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 1. Ibid., p. xvii. McElvaine, The Great Depression America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1984 [reprint 1993], chapter 9; Alan Lawson, A Common Wealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). The majority of workers certainly did not endorse a program of socialist expropriation, but I’m suggesting here that a critical mass did go beyond the “moral capitalism” that Lizabeth Cohen identifies in her study of Chicago. Cohen writes that workers “did not demand a fundamental redistribution of power,” and that the “American workers’ idealistic but nonetheless conservative economic loyalty to a ‘moral capitalism’ circumscribed the political alternatives they could imagine supporting.” Again, one should be cautious not to be carried away by the notion that Chicago’s laborers endorsed a radical agenda for change. Nevertheless, not only did they contemplate, but in the midst of the organizing drive, began to live alternatives to the existing order, challenging some of the defining features of capitalist production in early twentieth-century America. What might seem like a working-class consensus in favor of “moral capitalism” was the product of forces set in motion by the aftermath of the Memorial Day Massacre. If most did not espouse a coherent vision of socialist transformation, they expressed a wider range of political possibilities than “moral capitalism.” See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 315, 366. Ibid., p. 286.

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25. Mary Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, pp. 286–90. 26. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, 3rd ed. (New York: United Electrical and Machine Workers, 1955; reprinted 2005), p. 262. 27. Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, p. 291. 28. Howard Fast, “An Occurrence at Republic Steel,” in Isabel Leigton, ed., The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), p. 399. 29. Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, p. 292. 30. Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950, pp. xvii, 73. 31. In an ambitious attempt to overhaul the interpretation of the New Deal, historians Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have recently argued that American political culture has been def ined by a “deep and abiding individualism” that the New Deal’s Keynesian economics could not overcome. Compounded by the contradictions of race and religion, the New Deal could not “liberate Americans from the historic constraints of their political culture.” See “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 6, 14. 32. Historian Nancy MacLean makes this argument in response to Cowie and Salvatore. In addition to questioning the pervasiveness of individualism in the Gilded Age, which saw the emergence of powerful protest movements determined to restrain the power of monopoly, MacLean argues that their analysis fails to address the “ill-gotten and enormous power of southern white conservatives in Congress, whose veritable chokehold over legislation better explains, say, why the United States has no universal healthcare than does enduring individualism.” See “Getting New Deal History Wrong,” International Labor and WorkingClass History 74 (Fall 2008): 49–55, quote on p. 51. This study ref lects that sentiment, and suggests that the Memorial Day Massacre was a turning point in the movement to stop the advance of a more progressive New Deal. 33. Staughton Lynd makes this distinction between democracy, which many alternative unions championed, and organization, which leaders John L. Lewis and Phillip Murray privileged above all. See “Response,” 201.

One Fire, Steel, and the Coming Crisis: The 1920s in Chicago and America 1. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14. 2. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 25–6. 3. Ibid., p. 24. 4. Ernest W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), pp. 59–63, cited in Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 18–19; David Brody, In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 105. 5. John Ashenhurst and Ruth L. Ashenhurst, All About Chicago (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1933), pp. 169–71. 6. Len DeCaux, Labor Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 52. 7. Ibid., p. 90. 8. William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 10–15, 22–3, 96–7.

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9. James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 273. 10. Edith Abbot, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936; Arno Press, reprinted 1970), pp. 139–51, quote on p. 150. 11. Ibid., pp. 144–51, 120–2. 12. Ibid., p. 118. 13. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, p. 218. 14. Ibid. 15. Eric Arnesen, “The Quicksands of Economic Insecurity: African Americans, Strikebreaking, and Labor Activism in the Industrial Era,” in The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 41–5, quote on 44; Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 60–1. 16. William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), chs. 1 and 2; Kornblum, Blue Collar Community, pp. 13–14. 17. John Conroy, “Milltown,” Chicago 25 (December, 1976): 210. 18. Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel (New York: International, 1933), pp. 35–45. 19. Ibid. 20. Quoted in Davis, Labor and Steel, p. 53. 21. Ibid., pp. 51–9. 22. Phillip and Phyllis Janik, “Looking Backward: From ‘The Bush’ to the Open Hearth,” Chicago History 10 (Spring 1981): 53–5. 23. David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 15. 24. James Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, 49–50. 25. John B. Appleton, “The Iron and Steel Industry of the Calumet District,” University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 13 (March 1925): 93, quoted in Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union,” pp. 41–2; Arredondo, Mexican Chicago, pp. 62–3. 26. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers’ Union,” p. 42. 27. Ibid., p. 44. 28. Ibid., pp. 42–7. 29. Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003), pp. 38–40. 30. Ibid., pp. 70–2. 31. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 165–7, including quote. 32. Interview with George Patterson, conducted by Ed Sadlowski, December 1970 to January 1971, Roosevelt Oral History Collection, hereafter referred to as ROHC. 33. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 101–3; Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers’ Union,” pp. 59–60. 34. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 102–4, 184; Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), p. 80; Davis, Labor and Steel, p. 92. 35. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 65–66; Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 105–29; Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 66–70. 36. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, pp. 142–3. 37. Ibid., p. 143. 38. On the connection between the bohemian hobo subculture and the Industrial Workers of the World, see Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 97–111.

242

Notes

39. Quoted in Raymond L. Hogler, “Worker Participation, Employer Anti-Unionism, and Labor Law: The Case of the Steel Industry, 1918–1937,” Hofstra Labor Law Journal 7 (Fall 1989): 14. 40. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 67–9; David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 71–2; Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union,” pp. 64–6. 41. Patterson interview, ROHC. 42. Ibid. 43. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 70–1. 44. Patterson interview, ROHC. 45. Goldberg, Discontented America, pp. 72–3. 46. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 66–7. 47. Patterson interview, ROHC. 48. Ibid. 49. Donald Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike of 1937,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1961, pp. 20–1. 50. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 51. Quoted in Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 4, “Little Steel Strike and Citizens” Committee, March 31, 1941, p. 71. (Hereinafter abbreviated as “LSC” for La Follette Senate Committee.) 52. LSC, Part 4, “Little Steel Strike and Citizens” Committee, p. 72. 53. Quoted in ibid., pp. 72–3. 54. Tom Girdler in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes, Bootstraps: The Autobiography of Tom Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 288. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., p. 289. 57. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1960), p. 97. 58. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 64–5; Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s. (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961,) pp. 116, 122; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 453–4. 59. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, p. 87; Cohen, Making a New Deal, p. 217; John F. Bauman and Thomas H. Coode, In the Eye of the Great Depression: New Deal Reporters and the Agony of the American People (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 40–1; T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 45. 60. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), pp. 38–9. 61. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, p. 163; Watkins, The Hungry Years, pp. 43–4. 62. Quoted in Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 57. 63. Ibid.; Perrett, America in the Twenties, p. 454. 64. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 238–49.

Two

Out of Despair

1. T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 45; Morris Markey, “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride, The Urgent City,” reprinted in Bessie Louise Pierce, ed., As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors,

Notes 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

243

1673–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), p. 511; Mary Borden, “Chicago Revisited,” reprinted in ibid., pp. 489–90. Quoted in Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1970), p. 14. Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 99. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 222–4; Randi Jill Storch, “Shades of Red; The Communist Party and Chicago’s Workers, 1928–1939,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1998; Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 250–6. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 261–2; Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, p. 108; Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 111–15. Quoted in Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 119. The discussion of the development of the Unemployed Councils and the events in Chicago is also drawn from Watkins, pp. 116–20. Ibid., pp. 120–1. Ronald Edsforth, The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), p. 105. Steve Nelson, James Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson, American Radical (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 76. Storch, “Shades of Red,” pp. 85–8. Storch, Red Chicago, pp. 111–13; “Shades of Red,” pp. 84–9. Quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 146. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 261–6. Storch, “Shades of Red,” p. 99. Ibid., p. 100. Storch, Red Chicago, p. 118. Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People During the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), pp. 132–3. Ibid., p. 165. Patterson interview, December 1970–January 1971, ROHC. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton-Miff lin, 1960), p. 427; Storch, Red Chicago, p. 115. Both quotes in Edsforth, The New Deal, p. 107. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), p. 117. McElvaine suggests that Roosevelt’s pragmatism was predicated on compassion, not simply political expediency. Bernstein, The Lean Years, pp. 508–9. William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 55–8; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 38–9; Leuchtenberg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 56–7; Edsforth, The New Deal, pp. 180–3. Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, p. 151. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Harper & Row, 1946), pp. 210, 212. Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 195. Daniel Nelson, “The Other New Deal and Labor: The Regulatory State and the Unions, 1933–1940,” Journal of Policy History 13 (2001): 373.

244

Notes

29. Quoted in Gordon, New Deals, p. 194. 30. Ibid., pp. 194–9. 31. Brinkley, The End of Reform, p. 39; George McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 67–9. 32. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, p. 212. 33. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 112–16; Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pp. 106–7; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 16–17; James D. Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 66–8. 34. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part Three: The National Association of Manufacturers (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 77–8. 35. Ibid., p. 79. 36. Edsforth, The New Deal, pp. 184–5; Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 273; Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel (New York: International, 1933), pp. 265–6; William Hal Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and Its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” MA thesis, University of Illinois, 1975, p. 15; James Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, p.137. 37. Ibid., p. 138. 38. Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 88. 39. Ibid., p. 117. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 396–7; Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1997), pp. 174–6. 40. Zieger, The CIO, p. 17. 41. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 218–29. 42. Brecher, Strike!, pp. 170–5; McElvaine, The Great Depression, pp. 226–8; Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: the General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 152–60.

Three Hammer and Tong: The Struggle for Steel 1. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 118–19, 133–5; Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 19–21. 2. Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People During the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), p. 345. 3. Tom Girdler in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes, Boot Straps: The Autobiography of Tom Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 214. 4. LSC, Violations of Free Speech and Labor, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV: The “Little Steel” Strike and Citizens’ Committee (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), p. 51. 5. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, p. 16. 6. William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, Volume 3: Parts 4 and 5 (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1971), p. 1227; Girdler, Boot Straps, pp. 211–12, quote on p. 212. 7. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, p. 1227; LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, p. 17; Girdler, Boot Straps, pp. 208–12, 214.

Notes

245

8. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, p. 1227; “The Corporation,” Fortune 13 (March 1936): 166, 173, quote on 173. 9. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, pp. 1228–37. 10. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, p. 17. 11. Ibid., p. 72. 12. Ibid., p. 79. 13. Ibid., p. 81. 14. Ibid., pp. 45–8. 15. Ibid., p. 53; Barry Kritzberg interview with Harry Harper, February 12, 1971, Roosevelt Oral History Collection, Book 37, p. 46. 16. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, pp. 51–3; LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part III: The National Association of Manufacturers (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 89–91. 17. William Hal Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” MA thesis, University of Illinois, 1975, p. 21. 18. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, p. 96. 19. Ibid., pp. 84–5. 20. Ibid., p. 85; Robert R.R. Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 80–1; James D. Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 104; Thomas F. Dorrance, “ Remaking on Older New Deal: Chicago Employment Politics, 1932–1936,” Labor 7 (Winter, 2010): 80–81. 21. Patterson Interview, December–January 1970, Book 21, ROHC; Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism, p. 104. 22. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, p. 85. 23. Quoted in Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry, p. 79. 24. Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism, p. 103. 25. Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961), pp. 126–7; ibid., pp. 114–20. 26. Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry, pp. 82–5; Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism, pp. 120–1; Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1970), p. 448. 27. Patterson Interview, 1970, ROHC, Book 21; Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, p. 456; “Two New Lodges in Chicago District: The Leaders are ‘Graduates’ of ‘Representation Plans—Thriving Unions in South Works and Inland Steel, Calumet,” Steel Labor, September 5, 1936. 28. “What It’s All About: It Is Not Enough to Join a Union. It is Necessary to Know WHY You Joined,” People’s Press, September 19, 1936, reel four, Chicago Labor Papers microfilm, Chicago History Museum. 29. “Petitions Flood Mill with Thousands Signing,” People’s Press, May 2, 1936. 30. “U.S. Guarantees Right to Organize,” People’s Press, March 14, 1936. 31. “3 More Killed At South Works,” People’s Press, May 2, 1936. 32. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, p. 20. 33. On the sensitivity of AFL insurgents to the need for organizing on a national level, appealing to ethnic workers, invigorating the Amalgamated Association with decisive leadership, and hiring a team of researchers who could analyze wage and steel market data, see “Organizing the Steel Industry: The Present Problem,” February 1936; “The CIO Files of John L. Lewis, Part I: Correspondence with CIO Unions, 1929–1962,” microfilm, Patee Library, Penn State University, hereafter cited as John L. Lewis Papers. 34. Edward Levinson, “American Labor Leaders, 1936,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 172 (May 1936): 696–7.

246

Notes

35. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, pp. 22–4. 36. David Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism: The SWOC Era,” in Paul F. Clark et al., eds., Forging a Union of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC, and the United Steelworkers (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987), pp. 20–1; Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 130–2. 37. Max Gordon, “The Communists and the Drive to Organize Steel, 1936,” Labor History 23 (Spring 1982): 258. 38. Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 107–27; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 150–2. 39. Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 69–70. 40. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso Press, 1997), pp. 4–7, 125. 41. Ibid., pp. 124–5. 42. James R. Barrett, “The History of American Communism and Our Understanding of Communism,” American Communist History 2 (2003): 181. 43. Annette T. Rubinstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Historical Overview,” in Michael Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), p. 246. 44. Mark Naison, “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front,” in Michael Brown. ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pp. 45–73; Ralph M. Compere form letter to “Dear Sir and Brother,” December 16, 1936, George Patterson Papers, Box 6, Folder 3. Compere was the group’s Midwest organizer. 45. Ronald L. Filipelli, “The History Is Missing, Almost: Philip Murray, the Steelworkers, and the Historians,” in Paul F. Clark et al. (eds.), Forging a Union of Steel (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987), pp. 10–11; Melvyn Dubofsky, “Labor’s Odd Couple: Philip Murray and John L. Lewis,” ibid., pp. 32–4. 46. Dubofsky, “Labor’s Odd Couple,” pp. 32–4. 47. Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, pp. 440–1, 448–9; Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, pp. 34–8.

Four Loading the Charge: The Steelworkers Organize 1. Max Gordon, “The Communists and the Drive to Organize Steel, 1936,” Labor History 23 (Spring 1982): 255–6. 2. Quoted in Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1970), p. 456. 3. Ibid., pp. 456–7. 4. Ibid.; Steel Labor, September 5, 1936. 5. Quoted in Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 85. 6. Philip Murray to Benjamin F. Fairless, September 16, 1936, Box 5, Folder 17, “Steel Workers Organizing Committee,” Howard Curtiss Papers, Penn State Historical Collections and Labor Archives. 7. Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL, p. 85. 8. James Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” PhD dissertation (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998), pp. 87–8.

Notes

247

9. Girdler, in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes. Boot Straps: The Autobiography of Tom M. Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), pp. 207–8. 10. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region,” p. 88; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 448. 11. Philip Cook, “Tom M. Girdler and the Labor Policies of Republic Steel Corporation,” Social Science 42 ( January 1967): 22; Leotta, “Girdler’s Republic,” p. 50. 12. Cook, “Tom M. Girdler,” p. 22; Leotta, “Girdler’s Republic,” pp. 48–50. 13. LSC, Private Police Systems, pp. 183–4. 14. Ibid., p. 188. 15. Ibid., pp. 190–1. 16. Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike of 1937,” p. 45. 17. George Patterson Autobiography, Book One, 97, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago the police harassment continued throughout the SWOC drive and pervaded the Calumet Region. See reference to “trouble with city police while passing out papers” in Indiana Harbor, found in minutes of SWOC Fieldworkers’ meetings, May 17, 1937, United Steel Workers of America, District 31, Box 124, Folders 124–6, Chicago History Museum. 18. George Patterson statement, November 28, 1936, Box 6, Folder 3, George Patterson Papers. Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 19. Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983) pp. 106–11. 20. Ibid., pp. 111–14. 21. Mark Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890–1925,” Law and Society Review 10 (Winter 1976): 306; Sam Mitrani, “Reforming Repression: Labor, Anarchy, and Reform in the Shaping of the Chicago Police Department, 1879–1888,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 6 (Summer 2009): 92–6. 22. Harring, Policing a Class Society, pp. 122–6. 23. Ibid., pp. 113–15, 126–7; Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 61. 24. Mark Haller, “Police Reform in Chicago, 1905–1935,” American Behavioral Scientist 13 (1970): 650; “The Kelly-Nash Political Machine,” Fortune Magazine, 14 (August 1936): 120. 25. “The Kelly-Nash Political Machine,” Fortune Magazine 14 (August 1936): 120. 26. Haller, pp. 650–1; “The Kelly-Nash Political Machine,” Fortune Magazine, 14 (August 1936): p. 120. 27. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior,” p. 305; “Police Reform in Chicago,” p. 650. 28. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior,” pp. 319–22. 29. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 49–50. 30. Ibid., p. 50. 31. Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 80. 32. Donner, Protectors of Privilege, pp. 50–1. 33. Haller, “Police Reform in Chicago,” p. 662. 34. George Patterson Autobiography, Book One, 98, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Collection. 35. Ronald Edsforth . The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 242–3; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 150–1; Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 24. 36. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 289–90; Edsforth, The New Deal, pp. 242–3.

248

Notes

37. Quoted in Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 199. 38. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 126–7. 39. Jerold S. Auerbach, “The La Follette Committee and the C.I.O.,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48 (Autumn 1964): 3–4. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.; Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis and New York: Boss-Merrill, 1966), pp. 1–7. 42. Ibid., including quote on p. 4. 43. “We Turn to La Follette Committee,” Steel Labor, August 20, 1936. 44. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, pp. 8–11, 208–12; Geoffrey D. Berman, “A New Deal for Free Speech: Free Speech and the Labor Movement in the 1930s,” Virginia Law Review 80 (February 1994): 291–322; Auerbach, “The La Follette Committee: Labor and Civil Liberties in the New Deal,” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 435–59. 45. “Farrell—1936: A New Page in Labor History,” Steel Labor, August 20, 1936. 46. Ibid. 47. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” 90–4; Harold J. Ruttenberg to John Brophy, July 15, 1936, Ruttenberg Papers, Box 1, Folder 6, Penn State Historical Collections and Labor Archives. 48. Ruttenberg to Brophy, July 15, 1936, Ruttenberg Collection, Penn State. 49. Ibid. 50. “The Steel Union Tradition,” Steel Labor, August 20, 1936. 51. Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: University Books, 1956), pp. 194–5. 52. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” p. 202; Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961), p. 133. 53. Testimony of Emil Walters, Youngstown Hearings, Case 184, National Labor Relations Board, “Transcripts and Exhibits,” 1385, File 272, Box 382, Record Group 25, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

Five Irresistible Forces: Conf lict at Republic Steel 1. Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 50. 2. Robert Morss Lovett, “A G.M. Stockholder Visits Flint,” The Nation 144 ( January 30, 1937): 124. 3. Edward Levinson, “Labor on the March,” Harper’s Magazine 174 (May 1937): 646. 4. George Patterson Autobiography, 138, Book One, 138, Box 9, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 5. Ibid., 161. 6. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, p. 58; Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 95; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Harper & Row, 1946), pp. 221–3. 7. Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1970), pp. 467–71. 8. “Steel Victory—and After,” The Nation 144 (March 6, 1937): 286. 9. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1964), p. 65.

Notes

249

10. Letter of Chicago-area SWOC lodges to “the honorable President of the United States, Members of the Senate of the United States, Members of the House of Representatives of the United States, Members of the Supreme Court, Members of the United States Labor Relations Board,” January 17, 1937, in “The CIO Files of John L. Lewis, Part I: Correspondence with CIO Unions, 1929–1962,” microfilm, Patee Library, Penn State University, hereafter cited as John L. Lewis Papers (microfilm). 11. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, pp. 58–9; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 52; Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL, p. 95; Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 126–7. 12. Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL, p. 93; Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, p. 468; David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 [reprint 1982]), pp. 103–6. 13. Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL, pp. 94–6; Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism,” in Forging a Union of Steel, pp. 22–3; Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961), p. 143. 14. “Steel Victory—and After,” 286. 15. Mary Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), p. 113; Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: University Books, 1956), p. 200. 16. Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, p. 111. 17. Tom M. Girdler, in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes. Boot Straps: The Autobiography of Tom M. Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 226. 18. Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism,” in Forging a Union of Steel, p. 24. 19. Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, pp. 477–8. 20. Donald S. McPherson, “ ‘The Little Steel’ Strike of 1937 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 39 (1972): 220. 21. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, The “Little Steel” Strike and Citizens Committee, p. 118. 22. Brody, Workers in Industrial America, p. 109. 23. Donald Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike of 1937,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1961 p. 71. 24. Ibid., 120. 25. National Labor Relations Board, “In the Matter of Republic Steel Corporation and Steel Workers Organizing Committee, Case No. C-184,” October 18, 1938, 84. 26. LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV, The “Little Steel” Strike and Citizens Committee, p. 120. 27. Oral History Interview 1 with Joe Germano, June 21, 1972, pp. 169–70. Oral History Projects, Department of Labor Studies, Special Collections, Penn State University. 28. Alice Hoffman Second Interview with George Patterson, February 2, 1969, pp. 32–3. Oral History Projects, Department of Labor Studies, Special Collections, Penn State University. 29. James Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” Ph.D diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, p. 217; William Hal Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and Its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” MA thesis (University of Illinois, 1975), p. 73; Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike of 1937,” p. 78; Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 134; Joseph M. Turrini, “The Newton Steel Strike: A Watershed in the CIO’s Failure to Organize ‘Little Steel,’ ” Labor History 38 (Spring/ Summer 1997): 237–9. 30. Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike,” 75–86.

250

Notes

31. Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of Republic Steel Corporation,” 60. 32. De Caux, Labor Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970) p. 282. 33. Meyer Levin, Citizens (New York: Viking Press, 1940), p. 22. 34. Draft Resolution, Section Convention, Youngstown, February 23, 1936, CPUSA Files, Microfilm reel #304, Fond 515, Yale University Library. 35. Morris Childs to Jack Stachel, April 11, 1936, CPUSA Files, Microfilm reel # 304, Fond 515, Yale University Library. 36. Ibid. 37. Mark Naison, “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front,” in Michael E. Brown (ed.), New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pp. 44, 55–61; Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and Its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” pp. 56–8; Roger Keeran, “The International Workers Order and the Origins of the CIO,” Labor History 30 (1989): 396–9. 38. John Steuben to Jack Stachel, May 14, 1936, Files of the Communist Party of the USA in the Comintern Archives (New York: IDC Publishers, 1999), Microfilm reel #304, Fond 515, Yale University Library (hereafter cited as “CPUSA Files”); Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,”pp. 192–5; Storch, Red Chicago, pp. 174, 182. 39. Mary E. Triece, On the Picket Line: Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 58–65. 40. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 41. Dorothy Patterson form letter to “Dear Friend,” November 23, 1936, Box 9, Folder titled “Women’s Auxiliary,” George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 42. Ibid.; “Auxiliaries Active in Enlisting Support for Organizing Drive,” Steel Labor November 20, 1936. 43. Annelise Orleck, “We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public”: Militant Housewives During the Great Depression,” Feminist Studies 19 (Spring 1993): 149–50, 167–8; Triece, On the PicketLine, pp. 39–46. 44. “Women Hold Joint Meet with Steel Men’s Union,” People’s Press, April 4, 1936; “Women’s Support Urged for Steel Men’s Union,” People’s Press, March 14, 1936. 45. Caroline Waldron Merrithew, “ ‘We Were Not Ladies’: Gender, Class, and a Woman’s Auxiliary Battle for Mining Unionism,” Journal of Women’s History 18 (2006): 65–7. 46. “The Men’s Corner,” Women in Steel 1 ( January 1937): 1, Samuel Evett Papers, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest. 47. “Women’s Support Urged for Steel Men’s Union.” 48. “Strike Bulletin of Women’s Auxiliary of Republic Lodge, A.A. I.S.T.W, May 29, 37,” Folder 1, Box 411, Governor Henry Horner Papers, ALPL. 49. “An Interview with Dorothy and George Patterson,” 11; “Hats Off to the Women in Steel!” Women in Steel 2 (August 1937), n.p; “Indiana Harbor, IND.,” Minneola Ingersoll, “On the Line . . . ,” ibid., Microfilm collection, Chicago History Museum; Ethel Stevens, “Building a Women’s Steel Unit in the Strike Area,” Party Organizer 12 (September 1937): 14. 50. E.J., “A Unit of Steel Women,” Party Organizer 11 ( July 1937): 22, Microfiche, Memorial University. 51. Merrithew, “ ‘We Were Not Ladies,’ ”pp. 65–7. 52. Ibid. 53. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” pp. 192–5; Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2003), p. 28. 54. Negroes Back Drive,” People’s Press, October 3, 1936.

Notes

251

55. Ibid. 56. Horace Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing Company, 1939), pp. 204–5. 57. Quoted in Eric Arnesen, “The Quicksand of Economic Insecurity: African Americans, Strikebreaking, and Labor Activism in the Industrial Era,” in The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 64. 58. Ibid., 219; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 335–7; James Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), pp. 161–2. 59. Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 337–8. 60. Francisco Rosales and Daniel T. Simon, “Chicano Steel Workers and Unionism in the Midwest, 1919–1945,” Aztlan 6 (Summer 1975): 270–1. 61. Steve Nelson, James Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson, American Radical (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 309. 62. William Grogan, John Riffe of the Steelworkers: American Labor Statesman (New York: CowardMcCann, 1959), p. 18–21. 63. Ibid. 64. Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” 213–15. 65. Minutes of SWOC Fieldworkers’ Meetings, April 26, May 13, 20, 24, 1937, United Steel Workers of America, District 31, Box 124, Folders 124–6, Chicago History Museum. The mood of militancy as well as the enthusiastic support of the Chicago-area steelworkers for CIO and SWOC leadership is equally evident in a resolution that Calumet district lodges of the Amalgamated Association signed in April 1937. See “Resolution,” April 14, 1937, John L. Lewis Papers, Part I (microfilm), Pattee Library, Penn State. 66. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002, First published 1989): p. 131. 67. John L. Lewis, “Industrial Democracy,” NBC radio broadcast, December 31, 1936, CIO Publication #9, January 1937, in Harold J. Ruttenberg Papers, Box 4, Folder 9, “CIO, 1937–1958,” Penn State Historical Collections and Labor Archives. 68. Quoted in Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, p. 483. 69. Quoted in Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry, p. 139. 70. Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, p. 483; Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike,” pp. 139–41. 71. “Workers Leave Jobs at 8 Mills in Chicago Area,” Chicago Daily News, May 27, 1937. 72. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937 [Arno Press Reprint, 1971]), “Testimony of John Riffe,” pp. 4864–5. 73. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4684; “Testimony of John Riffe,” p. 4865. 74. Ibid., “Testimony of John Riffe,” p. 4865. 75. Ibid. 76. “Testimony of Gus Yuratovac,” pp. 4874–5. 77. Ibid., pp. 4874–5; “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4685. 78. Ibid., “Testimony of Gus Yuratovac,” pp. 4874–5; “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4685. 79. Ibid., “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” pp. 4850–1. 80. Ibid., “Testimony of George A. Patterson,” pp. 4879–80; George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 16, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers. Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 81. Ibid., “Testimony of John Riffe,” p. 4865. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., “Testimony of George Patterson,” p. 4881.

252

Notes

84. “Violence Flares as 25,000 Walk Out; Forty Arrested; Plants Threaten to Close,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 27, 1937. 85. George Patterson Interview, December 1970–January 1971, 80, ROHC. 86. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of George A. Patterson,” pp. 4880–1; George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 16–17; “85, 000 Strike, Police Act—Lewis Organizers Are Arrested in Picket Row,” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1937; Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement, p. 139; “Violence Flares as 25,000 Walk Out; Forty Arrested; Plants Threaten to Close,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 27, 1937. 87. “85,000 Strike, Police Act—Lewis Organizers Are Arrested in Picket Row,” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1937; “Workers Leave Jobs at 8 Mills in Chicago Area—Union Forms Picket Lines at South Chicago and Calumet Factories,” Chicago Daily News, May 27, 1937; William Hal Bork suggested that “out of Republic’s 2,200 man work force, at least onethird struck, with up to one-half a possibility.” See “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” 83. In his interview with Ed Sadlowski, George Patterson claimed that “seventy percent were organized and we were in a healthy position” at Republic Steel. He also claimed that “less than ten percent stayed in the plant.” Even if that were the case, there is little evidence to suggest that 90 percent of Republic’s employees supported the strike. See George Patterson Interview, 1970, ROHC, Book 21, 78. 88. “Bulletin No.3 Chicago Department of Law Opinion Bulletin, Picketing,” LSC, Violations of Free Speech and Labor, Part 15D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident: Industrial Munitioning, November 18, 1937 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), p. 6752. 89. “Exhibit 3421-A, Affidavit—Paul Glaser,” LSC, Part 15D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, p. 6751. 90. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937, “Testimony of James P. Allman,” pp. 4640–5; “Testimony of John C. Prendergast,” pp. 4668–70; “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” pp. 4685–6. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4686. 93. Ibid., p. 4875. 94. Ibid., p. 4876. 95. Ibid., “Testimony of George Patterson,” p. 4882. 96. Ibid., “Testimony of George Patterson,” p. 4883; “Testimony of Gus Yuratovac,” p. 4876; “Testimony of John Riffe,” p. 4867; “Report of the Committee on Education and Labor: the Chicago Memorial Day Incident,” Report No. 46, Part 2, 5–6, in the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, Hearings, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937. La Follette Committee (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1971) (hereafter referred to as “Report No.46, Memorial Day Incident”). 97. “Steel Strikers Battle Guards at Indiana Mill—News of Strife Fans the Temper of Workers at South Chicago,” Chicago Daily News, May 29, 1937; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937, “Testimony of George Patterson,” pp. 4884–5. 98. “Steel Strikers Battle Guards at Indiana Mill.” 99. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937, “Testimony of Thomas Kilroy,” p. 4727. 100. Ibid., “Testimony of George Patterson,” pp. 4885–6; “Report No.46, Memorial Day Incident,” 6; “23 Hurt in So. Chicago Steel Strike Riot—Police Clubs and Pistol Fire Turn Back March on Plant; Rout 1,500 C.I.O Paraders,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 29, 1937. 101. “Rout Strikers at Steel Mill—South Chicago Mob Battles Police; 24 Hurt, Clubs Halt Attackers at Plant Gates,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1937; “26 Hurt in Chicago Riot as

Notes 102.

103.

104. 105.

253

Police Fight Strikers Marching on Steel Plant—Mob is Beaten Back,” New York Times, May 29, 1937. Statement, Van A. Bittner, Regional Director of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee,” May 29, 1937, Edward Sadlowski Collection, 81-77-2, Box 19, Southeast Chicago Historical, Calumet Park, Chicago (hereafter referred to as SECHS). National Lawyers Guild, Chicago Chapter, “Report of Subcommittee on Activities of Law Enforcement Officers in Labor Disputes; The Chicago Police and the Republic Steel Strike,” May 29, 1937, SECHS. Ibid.; also see Steel Workers Organizing Committee, “Statement Relative to Activities of Republic Steel Corporation.” “Recent Riot is Viewed as Evidence that the Unionization Battle is to be Spectacular,” New York Times, May 30, 1937; “21 Hurt in Ford C.I.O Rioting—Organizers Beaten at Plant; Protest to U.S. Labor Board,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 27, 1937.

Six


1. Philip Murray, “Labor Asks Protection of Picket Lines,” in The City’s Role in Strikes: A New Outlook and Suggested Techniques for Municipal Officials (Chicago: International City Managers’ Association, 1937), pp. 3–4, Chicago Historical Society; Donald C. Stone, “The Public Interest in Labor Disputes,” ibid., pp. 8–9; Editors, “Preface,” p. 2. 2. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Joe R. Weber,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937; Arno Press Reprint, 1971), pp. 4917–18. 3. “Holiday Death Toll 14 in Chicago Area,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937. 4. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4959; Harry Harper Interview, February 12, 1971, pp. 5–9, Roosevelt Oral History Collection Interviews, Roosevelt University, Chicago. 5. Ibid., “Testimony of Joe R. Weber,” p. 4919; “Testimony of Meyer Levin,” pp. 4892–3; “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” pp. 4851–3; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident: Industrial Munitioning, Exhibit 3536, “Testimony Before Cook County Coroner Re the Memorial Day Incident,” Everett C. Parker Deposition, Cook County, July 13, 1937, p. 6913; George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, pp. 20–1, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers; Howard Fast, “An Occurrence at Republic Steel,” in Isabel Leighton ed., The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1949), p. 384; Levin, Citizens, pp. 11–12; Morris Childs, “The Party and the Daily Worker in Strike Struggles,” Party Organizer 11 (August 1937): 23, microfiche, Memorial University Library. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid; Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926–1978 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 181–2. 9. John L. Lewis, “Industrial Democracy in Steel,” radio address, July 6, 1936, in Howard Zinn (ed.), New Deal Thought (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 210; “Acceptance of the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa., June 27, 1936,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Five, The People Approve, 1936 (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 233–6. 10. Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 33; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Frank McCullogh,” pp. 4903, 4906. 11. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Meyer Levin,” p. 4893; “Testimony of Joe R. Weber,” p. 4920; “Testimony of Frank McCullogh,” p. 4903; George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 22, Box 9, George Patterson Papers.

254

Notes

12. Fast, “An Occurrence at Republic Steel,” pp. 384–5; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, Exhibit 3548, Edwin J. Kennedy Deposition, July 17, 1937, p. 6917; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Frank W. McCullogh,” p. 4903; “Testimony of James Stewart,” p. 4910; “Testimony of John Riffe,” p. 4871; “Testimony of Anton Goldasic,” p. 4934; “Report of Citizens Joint Commission of Inquiry on South Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 1937,” p. 7; Donald G. Sofchalk, “the Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass Action,” Labor History 6 (Winter 1965): 14. 13. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” p. 4852; “Testimony of Frank W. McCullogh,” p. 4906. 14. Ibid., “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4960; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1426,” Harry Harper Statement, June 1937, pp. 5060–1. 15. LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, Exhibit 3549, “Testimony Before Cook County Coroner,” Clyde James Deposition, July 15, 1937, pp. 6918–19. 16. Ibid., Jean Carleton Carey Deposition, July 23, pp. 6893–8. 17. Ibid., pp. 6893–8. 18. Ibid., Harold A. Revoir Deposition, pp. 6915–16. 19. Ibid., Edwin J. Kennedy Deposition, pp. 6917–18. 20. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Joe R. Weber,” p. 4921; “Report of the Committee on Education and Labor: the Chicago Memorial Day Incident,” Report No. 46, Part 2, pp. 9–10; Daniel J. Leab, “The Memorial Day Massacre,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 8 (1967): 7. 21. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” p. 4853; “Testimony of Meyer Levin,” p. 4893; “Report of the Committee on Education and Labor: the Chicago Memorial Day Incident,” Report No. 46, Part 2, pp. 12–13; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Appendix, 1439,” Louis Selenik Statement, June 24, 1937, p. 5069. 22. Meyer Levin, Citizens (New York: Viking Press, 1940), pp. 18–19. 23. Ibid. 24. Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 61. 25. LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 3546,” Everett C. Parker Statement, July 13, 1937, pp. 6913–14. 26. Ibid., “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4700. 27. Ibid., “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3409,” Marilee Kone Statement, pp. 6738–9; “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3408,” J. Gordon Bennett Statement, pp. 6737–8. 28. Ibid., “Exhibit 3413,” James C. Row Statement, pp. 6744–5. 29. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Mrs. Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4945–7; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 3513, Steel Strike, May–June 1937, South Chicago, Illinois—Confidential Military Report,” p. 6854.

Seven


1. George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 20–5, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 2. Ibid. 3. Araceli Ramirez and Sherry Oliphant interview of Mollie West for George Washington High School, February 1995, in author’s possession. 4. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of George R. Higgins,” p. 4813; “Testimony of Jacob C. Woods,” pp. 4791–2; “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” pp. 4707–8; “Testimony of Lawrence J. Lyons,” pp. 4771–3.

Notes

255

5. Ibid., “Testimony of Meyer Levin,” p. 4894; “Testimony of John Lotito,” p. 4938; “Testimony of James Stewart,” p. 4910; “Testimony of Anton Goldasic,” p. 4935; “Testimony of Max Guzman,” p. 4942. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4947–8; “Testimony of James Stewart,” p. 4913; Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 3412, Paul Tucker Statement,” p. 6742; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” p. 4856. 8. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4961. 9. Ibid., “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4947–8; “Testimony of James Stewart,” p. 4912. 10. Ibid., “Testimony of Frank W. McCullogh,” p. 4904; “Testimony of Chester B. Fisk,” p. 4898. 11. Ibid., “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4961; “Testimony of John Lotito,” p. 4939. 12. Mollie West interview, February 1995. 13. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” p. 4948; George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 24, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3409, Marilee Kone Statement,” p. 6739; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Chester B. Fisk,” p. 4898; “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” p. 4948; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3408, J. Gordon Bennett Statement,” p. 6738. 14. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4962. 15. Ibid; “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4950–1. 16. Ibid., pp. 4950–1; “500 Policemen Called to Halt Strike March—Reinforcements Ready as Pickets Near S. Chicago Plant,” Chicago Daily News, June 1, 1937. 17. LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3416, Louis Calvano Statement,” July 1, 1937, 6747. 18. Ibid., “Testimony of Chester B. Fisk,” p. 4899. 19. Sean Callahan, “Out of the Past: A Striking Picture from Chicago’s History is Preserved on Film,” Daily Southdown, December 19, 1997, in Southeast Chicago Historical Project Collection, Calumet Park Field House, Chicago [hereafter abbreviated as SCHPC]; “Riot Eyewitness Describes Fight in Which 9 Were Killed,” Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1937. 20. Meyer Levin, “Slaughter in Chicago,” The Nation 144 ( June 12, 1937): 671; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Meyer Levin,” pp. 4894–5; “Testimony of Archibald G. Paterson,” p. 4966. 21. “Boy Strike Riot Victim Worries Over School,” Chicago American, June 10, 1937. 22. George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, 25, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 23. “Eyewitness Tells Horrors of Fighting—Housewife Averts Eyes from Sight, Bystander Rescues Boy of 9, Wounded in Foot,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 31, 1937. 24. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Appendix, 1439, Harry Harper Statement, June, 1937,” p. 5061. 25. Ibid., “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” p. 4951. 26. Ibid., p. 4952. 27. Ibid., “Testimony of Archibald G. Paterson,” pp. 4967–8; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3414, John Jablonski Statement, June 29, 1937,” p. 6746. 28. Quoted in Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 320. 29. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Chester B. Fisk,” p. 4900. 30. Ibid., “Appendix, 1439, Louis Selenik Statement, June 24, 1937,” p. 5070. 31. Ibid., “Testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques,” pp. 4984–6.

256

Notes

32. Ibid., p. 4986; Frank John Fonsino, “An Oral History Version of the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel,” p. 3, 13–14, SCHPC. 33. Ibid.; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3409, Marilee Kone Statement,” pp. 6739–40; “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3413, James C. Row Statement,” p. 6745. 34. LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3413, James C. Row Statement,” p. 6745; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques,” pp. 4986–7. 35. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1426—Harry Harper Statement,” pp. 5061–2; “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4964. 36. Ibid.; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 33410, Benjamin Mitckess Statement,” p. 6741. 37. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4952–3. 38. Ibid., “Appendix, 1439, Louis Selenik Statement, June 24, 1937,” p. 5070. 39. Ibid., “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” pp. 4954–6. 40. Ibid., pp. 4956–7. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., “Appendix, 1439, Harry Harper Statement, June, 1937,” p. 5063. 43. Ibid., “Testimony of Lawrence J. Lyons,” p. 4757. 44. Ibid., “Exhibit 1380, Testimony of William H. Cannon, June 29, 1937,” p. 5039 45. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1361, Officer George Higgins Statement, June 28, 1937,” pp. 5028–9. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., “Testimony of Ralph Beck,” p. 4858. 48. LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witneses—Exhibit 3523, John Sorak Statement, May 30, 1937,” p. 6866; “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3518, Jack Sekulich Statement, May 30, 1937,” p. 6862; “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3516, Hugh McShane Statement, May 30, 1937,” p. 6861. 49. “Eyewitness Tells Horrors of Fighting,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 31, 1937. 50. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Robert Fleming,” p. 4969. 51. Frank John Fonsino, “An Oral History Version of the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel,” 12–13, SCHPC. 52. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques,” pp. 4992–3. 53. Ibid., pp. 4990–4; Fonsino, “An Oral History Version of the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel,” p. 12; Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” pp. 110–17. 54. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques,” pp. 4994–8; “Testimony of Lupe Marshall,” p. 4954. 55. William J. Adelman, The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1973), n.p; Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” p. 107.

Eight


1. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Harry N. Harper,” p. 4964.

Notes

257

2. “Mrs. Ralph L. Barker to Eleanor Roosevelt, July 22, 1937,” 8-C-101, Box 1027, “Fair and Unfair Labor Practice Files, 1938–9,” National Labor Relations Board, Record Group 25, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. 3. “Bedlam Rules as Wounded Jam Hospitals—Relatives Clamor at Doors as Small Staffs Treat Victims; ‘Like Massacre,’ Says Doctor,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 31, 1937; “500 Policemen Called to Halt Strike March—Reinforcements Ready as Pickets Near S. Chicago Plant,” Chicago Daily News, June 1, 1937. 4. Ibid.; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of John C. Prendergast,” pp. 4672–3. 5. Ibid., pp. 4672–3; “948 Police Mobilized at Mills; Riot Victim a Red, Quiz Told; 25,000 to Attend Mass Burial,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 2, 1937. 6. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of John C. Prendergast,” pp. 4672–3; “500 Policemen Called to Halt Strike March”; “C.I.O. Lawyers Begin Steel Riot Inquiry—Mine Workers’ Staff Hears Chicago Strikers as Union Demands Ouster of Police,” New York Times, June 3, 1937. 7. “Mass Police in New Riot Threat—Police Out Again in Riot Fear—Prendergast Calls out South Side Reserves to Be on Duty,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937. 8. “900 Police Guard Strike Area as Riots are Hinted—Reports of New Attack Plans Spread While Union Prepares Mass Burial for Six,” New York Times, June 2, 1937; “12 Strikers Hurt as 100 Police Attack—Only 1 Plant in Area Attempts to Operate With Skeleton Scab Force or [sic] Less Than 300—1,500 March in Demonstration,” The Daily Worker, May 29, 1937. 9. “Resolution of Local Union 18-B, Furniture Woodworkers and Finishers, to President Roosevelt,” n.d., 1937, 8 C-101, Box 1027, “Fair and Unfair Labor Practice Case Files, 1938–39,” Records of the National Labor Relations Board Files. Record Group 25, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. For another example of Popular Front protests against the Memorial Day police assault, see “M. Silber, American League Against War and Fascism, to National Labor Relations Board, June 14, 1937.” 10. “Horner Intervenes in Chicago Strike; Fifth Death in Riot—Governor Confers with Union, Steel and City Officials and Police in Peace Move,” New York Times, June 1, 1937; “Steel Pickets Invade Loop,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937; “500 Policemen Called to Halt Strike March—Reinforcements Ready as Pickets Near S. Chicago Plant,” Chicago Daily News, June 1, 1937; “Police Fear New Violence in Mills Area; 948 Massed,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 2, 1937, 2; also see “Strike Tussle in Loop—Woman Battles Bystander.” 11. “George Patterson Autobiography,” Book Two, Box 9, 29–30, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 12. “Kelly Defends Police Action in Strike—Mayor Says Officers Favor Labor, but Must do Duty,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937; “Mayor Upholds Police 100% on Handling of Riot—Can and Will Maintain Order, Says Allman,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1937. 13. “5,000 Strikers Protest Police Action,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 1, 1937; “Fifth Chicago Steel Picket Dies in Hospital—Union Asks Chicago Cops Indicted for Murder— 6,000 March in Memorial Day Parade—10,000 Hear Van Bittner,” The Daily Worker, June 1, 1937; “Horner Intervenes in Chicago Strike; Fifth Death in Riot—Governor Confers with Union, Steel and City Officials and Police Move; 5,000 Join ‘Hero’ Parade; Bittner at Mass Meeting Demands Indictment of Police on Murder Charges,” New York Times, June 1, 1937. 14. “Bittner at Mass Meeting Demands Indictment of Police on Murder Charges,” New York Times, June 1, 1937. 15. Ibid. 16. “900 Police Guard Strike Area as Riots are Hinted—Reports of New Attack Plans Spread While Union Prepares Mass Burial for Six,” New York Times, June 2, 1937.

258

Notes

17. “Steel Deaths Murder, Cry of Lewis—CIO Leader Claims Six Lost Lives in Republic Riot,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937; “Statement of Mr. John L. Lewis,” June 1, 1937,in “The CIO Files of John L. Lewis, Part I: Correspondence with CIO Unions, 1929–1962,” microfilm, Patee Library, Penn State University, hereafter cited as CIO Papers of John L. Lewis. 18. George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, Box 9, 141, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 19. “Republic Steel Tells Stand,” Chicago American, June 1, 1937. 20. “ ‘Law vs. Terrorism’ is Issue in the Strike, Girdler Insists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 16, 1937. 21. “Four Dead, 90 Hurt in Steel Riot—Police Repulse Mob Attack on S. Chicago Mill,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1937. 22. Ibid. 23. “Murder in South Chicago,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 1, 1937 24. Ibid. 25. Mary Heaton Vorse, “The Tories Attack Through Steel: Girdlerism in Action in Youngstown,” The New Republic, July 7, 1937, 246. 26. “George Patterson to Mr. Worden, July 22, 1937”; “W. Johnson to George Patterson, July 23, 1937,” SWOC, January–July 1937, Box 6, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 27. “A. Schneider and A. Sottosanti to Governor Horner, July 10, 1937,” Box 411, Folder 1, Henry Horner Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. 28. Ibid., “Jacob Dubin et al. to Governor Henry Horner, June 7, 1937.” 29. Rose M. Stein, “Republic Sticks to its Guns,” The Nation 144 ( June 12, 1937): 668. 30. Ibid., pp. 668–9. 31. “A Letter Written in Anger,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1937. 32. “Mass Funeral Tomorrow for Those Killed—Services at Eagles Hall Tomorrow Afternoon,” Daily Calumet, June 2, 1937.

Nine


1. Milton Howard, “Chicago: Testing Ground for American Fascism,” Daily Worker, June 1, 1937; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), pp. 13–24. 2. “Riots Blamed on Red Chiefs: Coroner Moves Today to Seize Mob’s Leaders,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 1, 1937. 3. Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” p. 112. 4. “Pin Steel Riot on Red Agents: 6th Victim Dies, 65 Prisoners Face Court Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1937; “How Trotzky’s Revolt Won; A Warning to U.S.—Analyze Red Minority’s Subtle Weapons,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1937. 5. George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, Box 9, 30, Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 6. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1332, Make Mills Report on ‘Steel strike riot,’ June 2, 1937,” p. 5009; “Exhibit 1333, Make Mills Report on ‘Steel Strike riot,’ June 16, 1937,” p. 5010; LSC, Part 15-D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Affidavits of Witnesses—Exhibit 3525, Ada Leder Statement,” p. 6869. 7. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Max Guzman,” pp. 4943–4.

Notes

259

8. “Steel Strike Peace Conference Fails—5 Dead, 4 More Dying After Riot,” Daily Calumet, June 1, 1937; “Pin Steel Riot on Red Agents; 6th Victim Dies—65 Prisoners Face Court Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1937. 9. “Pin Steel Riot on Red Agents; 6th Victim Dies—65 Prisoners Face Court Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1937. 10. Dorothy King, “The Recent Riot,” Chicago Daily News, June 3, 1937. 11. “Rioters Freed on Bail as Police Hunt Inciters,” Chicago Daily News, June 2, 1937. 12. “Bury Riot Victim as 7th Dies—Strike Dead Honored by Comrades—Women Sob at Rites as Huge Throng Passes Bier,” Chicago American, June 3, 1937; “Seventh Riot Victim Dies as C.I.O. Holds Rites for 5,” June 3, 1937. 13. “Hold Funerals for 3 Riot Dead; 7th Victim Dies—Crowd Orderly; Bittner Assails Police,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 4, 1937. 14. Robert Slayton, “Labor and Urban Politics: District 31, Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and the Chicago Machine,” Journal of Urban History 23 (November 1996): 30–2. 15. Ibid; Thomas F. Dorrance, “Remarking on Older Deal: Chicago Employment Politics, 1932–1936,” Labor: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas 7 (Winter 2010): 78–79. 16. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of George A. Patterson,” pp. 4927–8; George Patterson Interview, December 1970–January 1971, 109–11, Roosevelt Oral History Collection. 17. George Patterson Interview, 111–12, ROHC. 18. Ibid; LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of George A. Patterson,” pp. 4928–9. 19. Ibid., pp. 4928–9; “George Patterson Interview,” pp. 111–13, ROHC. 20. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1439, Louis Selenik Statement,” pp. 5071–2; “Testimony of Louis Selenik,” p. 4980. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., “Exhibit 1439,” p. 5073; “5 Tell of Seeing Steel Rioters’ Military Drill—Pullmans to House Plant Crews; Cleaners Strike,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 8, 1937. 23. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 1439,” pp. 5073–5; “Testimony of Louis Selenik,” pp. 4982–3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., “Testimony of George A. Patterson,” p. 4930; George Patterson Interview, 115–17, ROHC. 26. George Patterson Interview, 56–7, 117, ROHC. 27. “Mayor Orders Steel Workers to Leave Plant—Owners Determined to Operate Mill,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1937; Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance,” p. 116; “Steel Riot Plot is Revealed: Police Hunting Captains Who Led Strike Mob,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 7, 1937. 28. “The Memorial Day Riot,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 14, 1937. 29. “Roosevelt Uses Any Weapon to Fight Business—Aids Say ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 7, 1937. 30. Milton Mayer, “Portrait of a Dangerous Man,” Harper’s Magazine 193 ( July 1946): 64. 31. Chicago Citizens Rights Committee, “To the People of Chicago,” Folder titled “Citizens’ Joint Commission of Inquiry on South Chicago Memorial Day Incident (Republic Steel Riots),” Box 37, Graham Taylor Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 32. Albert W. Palmer, “A Report of the Citizens Mass Meeting, Tuesday Evening, June 8, 1937, Chicago Civic Opera House,” Folder titled “Citizens’ Joint Commission of Inquiry,” Box 37, Graham Taylor Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 33. Roger Biles, Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 24–5; Levin, Citizens, p. 254; “Citizens Right Group to Probe Strike Rioting,” Chicago Evening American, June 7, 1937.

260

Notes

34. “Riot Quiz Demanded as 4,600 Boo Police,” Chicago Evening American, June 9, 1937; Biles, Crusading Liberal, p. 27. 35. “Riot Quiz Demanded as 4,600 Boo Police.” 36. Ibid.; Albert W. Palmer, “An Apology to the Dead: Talk at Citizens Mass Meeting, Tuesday Evening, June 8, 1937,” Folder titled “Citizens’ Joint Commission of Inquiry,” Box 37, Graham Taylor Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 37. “Riot Quiz Demanded as 4,600 Boo Police”; Levin, Citizens, p. 262. 38. “Riot Quiz Demanded as 4,600 Boo Police”; Lovett, All Our Years, p. 263. 39. “Report of Citizens Joint Commission of Inquiry on South Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 1937,” p. 13. 40. “Republic to Evacuate Plant—Steel Heads to Obey Mayor,” Chicago Evening American, June 7, 1937. 41. McElvaine, The Great Depression, pp. 297–8; Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope, pp. 218–19; Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, pp. 494–5. 42. Quoted in Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, p. 494. 43. Ibid. 44. “ ‘Right to Work’ Demanded in Girdler’s Statement,” Chicago Daily News, June 21, 1937. 45. Ibid. 46. “16,000 Attend Steel Union’s Mass Meeting—Speakers Declare C.I.O. Will Not Rest Until Companies Sign,” Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1937; “Thousands Attend CIO Rally—20,000 Hear CIO Pledge Finish Fight,” Chicago Evening American, June 18, 1937. 47. “Thousands Attend CIO Rally—20,000 Hear CIO Pledge Finish Fight.” 48. Ibid. 49. “16,000 Attend Steel Union’s Mass Meeting—Speakers Declare C.I.O. Will Not Rest Until Companies Sign.” 50. “Steel Workers Meet Tonight Without Lewis,” Chicago Daily News, June 17, 1937. 51. Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 122; Carol Quirke, “Reframing Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937,” American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 145. 52. “George Patterson Autobiography,” Book Two, 68, Box 9, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago.

Ten


1. LSC, Violations of Free Speech and Labor, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV: The “Little Steel” Strike and Citizens’ Committees, p. 293. 2. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of John C. Prendergast,” pp. 4669–70, 4676. 3. Ibid., “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” pp. 4701–2; “Testimony of John C. Prendergast,” pp. 4676–7; Testimony of Thomas Kilroy,” pp. 4746–7. 4. Ibid., “Testimony of James P. Allman,” p. 4664; “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” pp. 4689–90, 4707. 5. Ibid., “Testimony of Thomas Kilroy,” pp. 4734–5, 4737. 6. Donald G. Sofchalk, “the Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass Action.” Labor History 6 (Winter 1965): 36–7; ibid., pp. 4738–9; quote from “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4719. 7. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of Philip Igoe,” p. 4821; “Testimony of Lawrence J. Lyons,” p. 4760; “Testimony of George R. Higgins,” pp. 4813–14.

Notes

261

8. Ibid., “Exhibit 1361, Memo of Interview June 26—Chicago Shootings,” p. 5029. 9. “Police Faced with Photos of Beatings: Chicago Official Admits Scene in Picture is ‘Brutal,’ ” Washington Post, July 1, 1937; “Chicago’s Brutal Police,” Washington Post, July 2, 1937. 10. Ibid., “Testimony of Dr. Lawrence Jacques,” pp. 4991–2. 11. Ibid., p. 4992. 12. Ibid., “Testimony of Chester B. Fisk,” pp. 4897–902. 13. Quirke, “Reframing Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937,” p. 149. 14. “Chicago Police Slugged, Kicked, Cursed Her, Trampled Wounded Strikers, Woman Charges,” Washington Post, June 29, 1937; “Labor’s Gethsemane,” Washington Post, July 4, 1937; “Riot Film Backed by New Witnesses: Pictures from Suppressed Film Introduced at Strike Investigation,” New York Times, July 3, 1937; Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal, pp. 127–8. 15. “Labor’s Gethsemane.” 16. Milton Howard, “Chicago: Testing Ground for American Fascism—Slaying of Five Steel Workers Another Act of Labor Suppression in Record of Kelly-Courtney-Nash Reign,” The Daily Worker, June 1, 1937; on the origins in the 1930s of the assault on the New Deal that would eventually see the business ideology vindicated, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), pp. 3–25. 17. LSC, Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” pp. 4692–4. 18. Ibid., “Exhibit 1627-C, Make Mills, Industrial Detail to Commissioner of Police, June 14, 1937,” pp. 5160–2. 19. Ibid., “Testimony of William V. Daly,” p. 4832. 20. Ibid., “Testimony of James P. Allman,” pp. 4661, 4662–3. 21. Ibid., “Testimony of Lawrence J. Lyons,” p. 4769. 22. Ibid., “Exhibit 1361, Memo of interview June 26—Chicago Shootings,” p. 5029. 23. Ibid., “Testimony of James L. Mooney,” p. 4692. 24. “Rep. Maverick Defends C.I.O. in Fiery Debate: Texan Hits Union Critics; Bitter Speeches Force Adjournment,” Washington Post, July 3, 1937. 25. Ibid. 26. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, p. 349. 27. LSC Part 14, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Report on the Memorial Day Incident,” Report No. 46, Part 2, pp. 4–21. 28. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 29. Ibid., p. 37. 30. Ibid., pp. 38–40. 31. “Report of the Citizens Joint Commission of Inquiry on South Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 1937,” pp. 3–8. 32. “Chicago Riot Films Stun Audience Here: Paramount Releases Pictures Taken During Memorial Day Steel Trouble,” New York Times, July 3, 1937. 33. Sofchalk, “the Chicago Memorial Day Incident,” pp. 37–8. 34. “Sentiment for President’s Court Plan Drops to 41% in Latest Poll,” Washington Post, June 20, 1937. 35. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 350–5; James Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), p. 165. 36. Green, The World of the Worker, p. 157. 37. Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike,” pp. 121–3. 38. “Troops Guard Ohio Workers Johnstown Martial Law Lifted; Girdler Calls Murray a ‘Liar,’ ” Washington Post, June 25, 1937.

262

Notes

39. “The Angel of Peace,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1937; on question of CIO “irresponsibility,” which became the rallying cry of media and business opponents of labor, see, for example, Westbrook Pegler, “Mr. Lewis is Sensitive—Tells Pegler to Trust C.I.O,” Chicago Daily News, June 26, 1937; on Roosevelt’s struggle for what would become the Fair Labor Standards Act and resistance to it in Chicago, see “Pay and Hours Bill is Ready for Congress,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 23, 1937; “Roosevelt Urges U.S. Labor Control: Message to Congress Asks ‘Decency’ Basis for Workers; Social Security Act Upheld,” ibid., May 25, 1937, and “Recovery and Relief,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 29, 1937; quote from “A Wages-Hours Monstrosity,” Chicago Daily News, June 26, 1937. 40. “Propaganda for Insurrection,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1937. 41. Ibid., pp. 6869, 6878; On composition of the coroner’s jury, see “Police Fear New Violence in Mills Area; 948 Massed,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 2, 1937. 42. “Propaganda for Insurrection,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1937; “The Riot Verdict,” Chicago Daily News, July 21, 1937; “Verdict on the Riot,” Chicago Daily Times, July 22, 1937, all in LSC, Part 15D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, pp. 6932–5. 43. “The Industrial War,” Fortune 16 (November 1937): 184. 44. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 64–85, quote on p. 69. 45. “Amelia Earhart Feared Forced Down Into Pacific Near Tiny Island Goal,” Washington Post, July 3, 1937.

Eleven “The Day Is Coming . . .” 1. “948 Mobilized at Mills; Riot Victim a Red, Quiz Told; 25,000 to Attend Mass Burial,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 2, 1937. 2. Philip Murray, “Memo to All Officers and Members of S.W.O.C. Lodges, July 24, 1937,” Howard T. Curtiss Papers, Box 5, Folder titled “SWOC Bulletins 1937–38”; Phillip Murray, “Report of Chairman of Steel Workers Organizing Committee,” First Wage and Policy Convention of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, December 14, 15, 16, 1937, 34, Harold J. Ruttenberg Papers, Box 12, Folder 1, “SWOC Convention Proceedings, 1937–1940,” Special Collections Library, Penn State University. 3. George Patterson Autobiography, 107–9, Book Two, Box 9, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 4. Ibid., p. 112. 5. “Government Acts to Quiet Labor Rift—All Races on Equal Footing Make Up Strong Working Units,” Chicago Defender, June 5, 1937. 6. National Lawyers Guild, Chicago Chapter, “Report of Subcommittee on Activities of Law Enforcement Officers in Labor Disputes; The Chicago Police and the Republic Steel Strike,” May 29, 1937, SECHS. 7. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions, pp. 214–15. 8. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 [originally published 1945]), pp. 313–19, quote on p. 319. 9. “Edward M. Murray to Phillip Murray, July 4, 1937,” Box 1, Folder titled “Republic Steel—Miscellaneous Correspondence,” USWA Legal Department, Special Collections Library, Penn State. 10. Minutes, Staff Meeting, June 14, Box 124, Folders 124–6, USWA District 31 Papers, Chicago History Museum. 11. William Hal Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of Republic Steel Corporation,” pp. 120–2.

Notes

263

12. Joseph M. Turrini, “The Newton Steel Strike: A Watershed in the CIO’s Failure to Organize ‘Little Steel,’ ” Labor History 38 (Spring/Summer 1997): 261–2; James Baugham, “Classes and Company Towns: Legends of the 1937 Little Steel Strike,” Ohio History 87 (1978): 190. 13. United Mine Workers of America Press Release, Saturday, July 24, 1937, “The CIO Files of John L. Lewis, Part I: Correspondence with CIO Unions, 1929–1962,” microfilm, Patee Library, Penn State University, hereafter cited as John L. Lewis Papers. 14. Philip Murray, “Official Circular to All Staff Members, Local Lodge Officers and Members,” July 24, 1937, Box 5, Folder titled “SWOC Bulletins, 1937–38,” Howard Truman Curtiss Papers, Special Collections Library, Penn State University. 15. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 496–7; Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” p. 229. 16. Ibid.; Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 106. 17. Vin Sweeney, Steel Workers Organizing Committee, “SWOC Release,” n.d., John L. Lewis Papers, Part II. 18. LSC, Part 15D, the Chicago Memorial Day Incident, “Exhibit 3570A, Transcript of Trial in Chicago Municipal Court Growing Out of the Memorial Day Incident,” pp. 6940–5. 19. “Nicholas Fontecchio to William Green, April 5, 1938,” Box 1, File 4, CRA 137, Sam Evett Papers, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest. 20. “Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano, June 21, 1972,” pp. 9–10, 19–20, Oral History Projects, Department of Labor Studies, Special Collections, Penn State University. 21. Van Bittner to Nick Fontechio, march 26, 1940, C2A 137, box 1, file 6, Sam Evett Papers. 22. Ibid. 23. McElvaine, The Greatest Depression, p. 296. 24. “Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano, June 21, 1972,” p. 6946. 25. Ibid., pp. 177–82. 26. George Patterson Autobiography, Book Two, Box 9, Folder 6, 112, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. 27. Ibid., p. 174. 28. “Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano, June 21, 1972,” 5, 12, 18, Oral History Projects, Special Collections Library, Penn State University; “Ed Sadlowski interview with George Patterson, December 1970 to January 1971,” pp. 168–72, Roosevelt Oral History Collection; David Bensman and Roberta Lynch, Rusted Dreams: Hard Times in a Steel Community (New York: McGraw Hill Book, 1987), pp. 131–2. 29. Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’ ” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 76. 30. “Statement of Philip Murray, Chairman, Steel Workers Organizing Committee on the Proposed Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act,” CRA 137, Box 1, File 5, Samuel Evett Papers, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest. 31. Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” ibid., pp. 123–7. 32. Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 202; Mark McColloch, “Consolidating Industrial Citizenship: The USWA at War and Peace, 1939–46,” in Clark et al., Forging a Union of Steel, p. 86. 33. Proceedings of the Second International Wage and Policy Convention of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, held in the City of Chicago, Illinois, May 14, 15, 16, 17, 1940, p. 109, Harold J. Ruttenberg Papers, Box 12, Folder 1, titled “Convention Proceedings,”

264 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Notes

Special Collections Library, Penn State University; “Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano,” 43, Penn State University. Bensman and Lynch, Rusted Dreams, pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 19; the impact of the Second World War on the democratic potential of the CIO movement is given extensive and convincing treatment in Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003; originally published by Cambridge, 1982), pp. 1–35. John Conroy, “Mill Town” (first in series), Chicago Magazine (November 1976): 178–80. Bensman and Lynch, Rusted Dreams, p. 133. This is Your Union, 1933–1971: History of Local 1033, May 1971, Box 179, Folder 2, titled “Local History,” 1–7, USWA District 31 Papers, Chicago History Museum. Ibid., pp. 7, 19–21. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., pp. 24–32. Ibid. Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 309–23. Bensman and Lynch, Rusted Dreams, pp. 71–91. “Union at Mills no Longer Strong as Steel,” Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1983. Ibid.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

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I N DE X

1919, labor struggles of, 3, 25, 27, 34, 60, 68, 70, 222 Abbot, Edith, 16–17, 192 Addams, Jane, 2, 156 Adelman, Meyer, 86–7 African Americans, 32 as workers, 37, 221 as labor organizers, 101–3, 232 Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, see Jones & Laughlin Allman, James F., 78, 114, 204, 210–11, 213 Amalgamated Association (AA), 55, 57, 59, 66, 68, 71, 95, 97 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 61, 126, 198 American Civil Liberties Union, 81, 164 American Dream, 1, 34 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 31–2, 47, 57, 61–2, 66, 78, 102, 164, 225 American Iron and Steel Institute, 47, 52, 68–9, 81, 209 Anderson, Hilding, 153, 161, 182 Anderson, Paul Y., (media), 150, 200 Andreas, Dr. Lewis, 39, 63, 87–90, 94 Anomon, Joe, 146, 160 Anticommunism, 27, 31, 67, 97, 229 in company, 55, 71, 73, 84 to justify police action, 41, 76–8, 153, 158, 205, 217, 218 to undermine Memorial Day marchers, 163, 174–5, 178–80, 181, 186–90, 190–2, 209–12, 214 in unions, 110, 227 Anti-Injunction Act, 113 antiunionism, 3, 27, 30, 46, 48, 49, 52, 76, 77–8, 79, 157, 166, 228

of company, 49, 55, 71, 84, 133 in steel industry, 62, 67, 83 tactics, 27, 55, 80, 91, 228 Armstrong, Louise, 33–4 Avila, Alfredo, 103 Badger, Anthony, 105 Badornac, Emil, 161, 231 Barber, George, 158 Barker, Mrs. Ralph, 163 Beck, Ralph, 109–10, 128, 131, 145, 159, 213 Bendix Strike at South Bend, 126–7 Bennett, J. Gordon, 135, 142–3 Benson, Malcolm, 176 Bethlehem Steel Corporation, 19, 54, 87, 90, 199 Bittner, Van, 94, 102, 104, 118–19, 164–7, 168, 170–1, 181–3, 186, 192, 194, 198–201, 219, 220, 226–7, 228 Black, Hugo, 44 blacklisting, company use of, 23, 27, 70, 222 Bohrte, Melsina, 147 Bohrte, Uva, 147, 159 Borden, Mary, 35 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 192 Bridewell Prison Hospital, 153 Brody, David, 5 Browder, Earl, 178, 186 Burley, Dan, (media), 221 Burton, Charles Wesley, 102 Business-friendly unionism, 31, 47 see also American Federation of Labor (AFL), company unions Cagney, James, 61 Calumet Steel, 68, 105

274

Index

Calvano, Louis, 144 Canaday, Warren, 164 Cannon, William H., 157 Carey, Jean Carleton, 129 Carnegie-Illinois, 14, 26, 60, 68, 69, 73, 78, 84, 88, 92, 146, 161, 175, 219–20, 221, 224 see also U.S. Steel casualties, 153, 161–2 Causey, Alfred, 161, 182, 208 Cermak, Anton, 41, 78, 184 Chicago Federation of Labor, 42, 98, 164 Chicago Police Department, 37, 42, 76, 107, 171, 204 and anticommunism, 73, 214 and antiunionism, 73, 86, 109, 113, 118, 171 race and ethnicity, 164–5 use of violence, 40, 76–7, 113, 176 see also cooperation, of company, police and local authorities Childs, Morris, 95–6, 186 Citizen Police Committee, 78 Civil Liberties Committee, see La Follette Committee class divisions, 1, 2, 3, 32, 71, 75, 84, 125, 215 closed shop, 47, 79, 92, 93, 172 Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 5, 6, 7, 27, 46, 62–3, 80, 89–90, 104, 126, 133, 183, 189, 199, 217, 219, 221, 222, 227, 229, 230 leadership style, 8, 62, 89, 94, 96, 181, 221 opposition to, 78, 164, 172, 174, 183, 211, 215, 216, 223 race, 102–3, 222 Communist Party, 8, 36 and labor organizing, 48, 55, 62–3, 95, 96, 224 in the media, 124 and the popular front, 63–5, 67, 97, 104 and unemployed councils, 37, 39, 40–1, 42 and women’s auxiliaries, 100–1 company unions, 26, 48–9, 55–9, 67–8, 79, 83, 89, 94, 95, 120, 164, 175 competitive ideal, 1, 15, 27, 52, 78, 99, 125, 175 cooperation, of company, police and local authorities, 40, 73–4, 75, 107, 109–10, 112, 119, 126–7, 169, 171, 174–6, 179, 183, 191, 194, 195, 204, 208, 214 cooperative ideal, 3, 8, 11, 24, 43, 52, 59, 78, 103, 106, 125, 174, 194

corporate welfare, see welfare capitalism Corporation Counsel, 113–15, 119 Courtney, Thomas, 180–1 court-packing fiasco, 196, 212, 215 Cox, Eugene, 211–12 craft unionists, 4, 24, 31, 42, 83, 184 see also American Federation of Labor (AFL) Daly, Thomas, 210 Daniell, Raymond, (media), 166–7 Darrow, Clarence, 192 Davey, Martin L., 196–7, 223 Davis, Horace B., 18–19 De Caux, Len, 14–15, 94 Depression, 4, 32, 33, 34, 45 and company policy, 51–6, 69 and growing social movement, 39–40, 50, 63–4, 105, 231 and women, 97 Dewey, John and progressive reform, 2 direct action, 39, 49, 64, 166, 219, 228 Douglas, Paul, 193 Doyle, Charles, 72 Dubinsky, David, 61 Durkin, Martin, 164 elections, federal, 43, 78, 83, 97, 177 employee representation plans (ERPs), see company unions Englum, Frank, 111 espionage, company use of, 29, 55, 70, 71, 80, 83 Esposito, Dominic, 116–18 Evett, Sam, 162, 164, 231 eviction, 34, 37, 39–41, 178, 209, 232 Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, 86–7, 105, 107, 190, 204 Farley, James, 184 Fascism, 8, 63, 96, 101, 125, 126 Feurer, Rosemary, 4, 8 Fish Committee, 76–7 Fisk, Charles B. (Chester), 142, 144–5, 150–1, 157, 192, 207 Fleming, Robert, 160 Flint, Michigan, see General Motors strike in Flint Fonsino, Frank, 160

Index Fontecchio, Nick, 86, 98–9, 104, 107, 116, 123, 127, 162, 164, 168, 170, 181, 199, 225, 231 Foster, William Z., 38, 62, 178, 186 Francisco, Leo, 161 Frankensteen, Richard, 119, 120 Garcia, Manuel, 103 Gebert, Bill, 41, 63 General Motors strike in Flint, 36, 85–6, 87, 88, 106, 126–7, 192 Germano, Joe, 93, 105, 110, 118, 222, 227–9 Gilded Age, 1, 4, 9, 13, 15, 20, 44, 46, 73 Gill, Clayton, 194 Girdler, Tom, 28–31, 52–5, 70, 90, 91–2, 106, 172, 175–6, 191, 196–7, 199, 200, 216, 217, 220 Glaser, Paul, 113–14, 185 Goldasic, Anton, 127, 139, 140 Golden, Clinton, 91, 92 Goodyear strike (Akron), 85, 126–7 Government, role of, 2–3, 8–9, 27, 36, 39, 42–3, 45, 47, 50, 61, 66, 70, 81, 164, 197–8, 216, 223 Graber, Joseph A., 225 Grace, Eugene, 87 Graft, John H., 92 Great Depression, see Depression Green, William, 57, 87, 225 Gross, Diana, 40 Guffey, Joseph, 87, 216 Guzman, Max, 133, 140, 151, 155, 180, 182, 210, 234, 236 Hallgren, Mauritz, 42, 43, 51 Handley, Earl, 149–50, 161, 206, 208, 214 Harper, Harry, 123, 128, 140, 141, 143, 147–9, 153–4, 156, 163, 210, 230 Harper, Peter, 140 Heller, Samuel, 34 Hewitt, W.F., 191 Hickey, Joseph, 144, 153 Higgins, George, 138, 158, 205–6, 210, 211, 213 Hill, T. Arnold, 102 Hillman, Sidney, 61, 67, 126, 226 Hindenburg Line, 66, 83 Hodes, Barnet, 113 Hoffman, Clare E., 211 Hoover, Herbert, 36, 43 Hopkins, Harry, 184

275

Horner, Henry, 122, 164, 167 Howard, John, 22 Hutcheson, William L., 61 Hyland, James, 164, 166 Igoe, Michael, 164 independent unionism, 47, 51, 56, 58, 59–60, 66, 67–8, 70, 83, 88, 95, 101, 120 individualism, 2–3, 9, 11, 24, 27, 31, 46, 64, 78, 82, 175 industrial democracy, 1–3, 4, 7–8, 9, 10, 26, 27, 32, 40, 58, 85–6, 88, 103, 106, 120, 125, 164, 212, 229, 230, 234, 236 industrial unionism, 4, 34, 44, 46, 51, 61–4, 79, 80 and African Americans, 102 and Communist Party, 88, 95, 96–7 opposition to, 10, 31, 71, 213 see also Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 24–5, 31 Ingersoll, Minneola, 97, 168 Inland Steel, 14, 21, 68, 96, 105, 107, 198, 224 Insull, Samuel, 193 International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 61, 198 International Workers Order (IWO), 63, 96, 101, 125 Jablonski, John, 149 Jacques, Dr. Lawrence, 124, 131, 151–3, 161–2, 194, 206, 231 James, Clyde, 128 Janik, Phillip, 20 Johnson, Henry (Hank), 101, 137, 179, 222, 227 Johnson, Hugh, 49 Jones, Otis, 150, 161, 193, 206 Jones & Laughlin, 29–30, 54–5, 70, 81, 82, 175 Kamin, Alfred, 192 Kelly, Edward S., 115, 127, 128, 140, 168, 169, 171, 175, 184, 191, 193, 195, 196, 230 Kennedy, Edwin, 130–1, 157 Kennedy, Thomas, 198–9 Kilroy, Captain Thomas, 114–15, 117, 134, 139–40, 157, 159, 164–5, 180, 205, 209, 213

276

Index

Knutzen, Martina, 41 Koch, Emil, 129, 132 Koch, Lucille, 117, 152 Kone, Marilee, 135, 142, 152–3 Kraus, Henry, 7 Krugar, Nick, 151 Krzycki, Leo, 126–7, 129, 130, 181 La Follette, Robert, 44, 79–80, 205, 207, 213 La Follette Committee, 52, 55, 71–2, 80–1, 195, 200, 203, 213, 214, 232 Lamont, Robert, 47 Lasowski, Stanley, 194 League for Industrial Democracy, 39 League of Struggle for Negro Rights, 40 Leder, Ada, 151, 156, 179, 225 Leverich, Nicolas, 145–6, 154, 160 Levin, Meyer, 95, 124, 131–2, 139, 145–6, 192–5 Levinson, Edward, 61, 86 Levy, Felix, 192 Lewis, John, 46, 51, 61–3, 65, 96, 105, 106, 125, 171, 192, 198, 212, 223, 224, 226 Lippert, Orlando, 140, 207–8 Little Steel, 3, 54, 55, 69, 87, 90–1, 92, 94, 101, 105, 112, 125, 170, 172, 197, 209 Lost Generation, 64 Lotito, John, 133, 139, 141–2 Lovett, Robert Morss, 86, 192–3, 194, 195 Lynch, Captain, 113 Lyons, Lawrence, 139, 157, 210–11 Mcdonald, David, 110 Manzardo, Mario, 162 Markey, Morris, 35 Marshall, Lupe, 135–6, 138, 140–2, 143–144, 148–9, 154–6, 179, 206, 207, 210, 216, 225 Maverick, Maury, 211–12 Mayer, Milton, 192–3 McCullogh, Frank, 126, 128, 141, 213 McKellar, Kenneth, 216 McShane, Hugh, 159 Meyers, Morris, 185 Miners, Marjorie Thompson, 111 Mitckess, Ben, 117, 153–4 Mooney, Captain James L., 41–2, 107–14, 134, 138–42, 145, 157, 158, 160, 164, 165, 179, 181, 187, 193, 194, 204–5, 209–11, 213 Moran, Lieutenant, 158

Mothers’ League, 97 Mrkonich, Mike, 231 Mrkonich, Virginia, 100, 152, 168, 231 munitions stockpiling, company use of, 9, 71, 80 Murray, Philip, 51, 65–6, 69, 81–3, 94, 105–7, 110, 121–2, 171, 183, 198, 219–20, 223, 226–9 music, 64, 124–5, 133, 138 Myers, Ben, 189 Myers, Linnet, 234 Napoli, Alexander, 185–8 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 47–8, 52, 56, 58, 209 National Guard, 18, 50, 223 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), 44–7, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56–9, 78, 215 National Labor Relations Act, 79, 119, 212, 215 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 79–80, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 166, 217 National Lawyers Guild, 97, 119 National Negro Congress, 97, 98, 101, 102, 180, 221 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 44, 45–6, 51 National Urban League, 102 Nelson, Catherine, 208 Nelson, Steve, 37, 38, 77, 104 Nestor, Agnes, 98 New Deal, 3–4, 45, 78, 82, 86, 104, 127, 194, 199, 230, 231 coalition, 50, 184, 192 and Communist Party, 96 oppposition to, 52, 69, 174, 175, 177, 209, 212, 215, 216, 218 and women, 99–100 No Strike Pledge, 227 Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, 47, 79 Oakes, Walter, 158, 205 O’Connor, Harvey, 192 open shop, 10, 27–9, 47–9, 71, 83, 87 O’Reilly, James D., 34 Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, 62 Palmer, Albert, 192, 193, 194 Paris, Ada, 221 Parker, Everett, 133–4

Index paternalism, company, 49, 59, 68, 70 see also welfare capitalism Paterson, Archibald, 146, 149–50, 206 Patterson, Ben, 232 Patterson, Dorothy, 97, 98, 137, 189 Patterson, George, 22–4, 26–8, 34, 36, 42, 46, 57, 59–61, 67–8, 71, 73, 78, 83–4, 86, 93, 95–6, 110–12, 115–17, 119, 129, 137–8, 142, 146–7, 162, 168–9, 174, 178–9, 184–5, 186–7, 189–90, 200, 220, 225, 226–7, 234 Pecovich, Mirco, 186–7 Pegler, Westbrook, 167, 175, 209 Perkins, Frances, 44, 45, 46, 87, 196–7 Peurala, Alice, 233 Pilkington, Robert, 164 Popular Front, 5, 8, 63–5, 96–7, 98, 100, 119, 125, 151, 180, 186, 222, 234 Prendergast, Captain, 107, 112, 114, 164–5, 204, 213 Primack, J., 176 Progressive Era, 2–3 Public Administration Service, 121 Public Works Administration (PWA), 44 Purnell, Frank, 196, 224 race and ethnicity in Chicago, 13–18, 21–5, 34 and Communist Party, 37, 62–4, 67, 96 and company policy, 20, 231 and government, 233 immigrants, 13–18 and labor organizing, 5, 6, 7, 8, 31, 57, 61, 88, 102–3, 182, 221–2, 231–32 Mexicans, 103, 221 and police, 76, 164–5, 211 see also African Americans Randolph, A. Phillip, 192 Rasmussen, Harold, 86 Ray, Virginia, 221 Reed, Kenneth, 161, 206 relief stations, 39–41, 208 Republic Steel, 6, 14, 69, 171, 183, 195, 197, 231, 235 anticommunism, 71–2 antiunionism, 52–6, 71–2, 81, 84, 175 dealings with unions, 91–4, 105, 107, 166–7 racial discrimination, 233 see also cooperation, of company, police and local authorities

277

Reuther, Walter, 7, 119–20 Revoir, 129–30, 160 revolution, 4, 8, 38 and Communist Party policy, 36, 38, 39, 63, 65, 96, 180 Riccio, Emil, 194 Richberg, Daniel, 49 Riffe, John, 95, 104–5, 107–12, 127, 137, 168, 186–7 rights, 26, 133, 139–40, 175 Civil Rights, 64, 79, 232–3 company rights, 57, 106, 197 human rights, 10 labor rights, 47, 70, 73, 78–9, 80, 115, 118, 121, 127, 133, 139, 165, 169, 181, 191, 196, 198, 201, 223, 231 property rights, 169, 173, 181 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 10, 41, 43–4, 48–9, 79, 83, 126, 166, 192, 195–6, 198, 216, 218, 229 Roosevelt administration, 3, 32, 44, 51–2, 99, 163, 182, 183, 222, 229 “Roosevelt recession,” 215, 225 Rothmund, Joe, 148, 158, 161, 178, 182, 191, 204, 205, 210, 217 Rothmund, Margaret, 178, 182 rough shadowing, 71–2 Row, James C., 125, 152–3 Rubinstein, Annette, 65 Rusak, Jack, 95, 227 Ruttenberg, Harold J., 82 Ryan, Lieutenant, 158 Rye, Eleanor, 98 Sadlowski, Ed, 231, 234, 235 Sam’s Place, 115, 122–5 Sanford, Raymond, 192, 194 Schneid, Hyman, 67–8 Scottsboro Boys, 37 Section 7(a) of NIRA, 44–6, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 61, 67 Sekulich, Jack, 159 Selenik, Louis, 131, 151, 154–5, 186–9, 201, 210 sit-down strike, 85–8, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 126, 174, 195, 204, 215, 219 social democracy, 4, 5, 34, 63–5, 78, 96, 103, 177, 228–9, 234 socialists, 31, 39, 49, 94, 127 Sorak, John, 159 Spanish Civil War, 100

278

Index

spheres, public vs private, 17, 99, 103 Stachel, Jack, 95, 97 Starcevuck, Joe, 179 Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union (SMWIU), 48–9, 62, 97 Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), 62, 66, 67, 68, 81, 82–3, 84, 87, 89–90, 91, 93, 105, 106, 116, 118, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168–9, 203, 223–5, 227–9 leadership style, 65, 89, 116, 133, 168, 181–2, 221, 226–7, 232 and race, 102, 222 Stein, Rose M., 175 Steuben, John, 97 Stevens, Ethel, 100, 101 Stewart, James ( Jim), 127, 137, 141, 220 Stone, Donald C., 121 Strike of 1919, see 1919, labor struggles of strikebreaking, 9, 17–18, 55, 56, 70, 74–5, 76, 78, 85, 112, 121, 118, 121, 133, 176, 214, 221–2 students, see youth Supreme Court, 27, 46, 57, 73, 87, 90, 91–2, 102, 132, 196, 216 Sweeney, Vin, 223 Tagliori, Anthony, 151, 161 Taylor, Myron, 87–90, 224 Telick, John, 179 Thimmes, Jim, 110 Thomas, Elbert D., 80, 204, 209, 210, 211, 213 Tisdale, Lee, 144, 161 Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), 37, 48, 97 Tucker, Paul, 179 Tugwell, 44 unemployed councils, 37–40, 43, 49, 50, 73, 98, 168, 179, 231 unemployment, 23, 32–3, 39, 41, 43, 46, 105, 209, 215, 229

United Auto Workers (UAW), 46, 87, 88, 119–20 United Mine Workers (UMW), 46, 51, 61, 62, 65, 66, 102, 168, 198 U.S. Steel 14, 18, 21, 26, 54, 59, 68, 87, 89, 91, 233, 234 See also Carnegie-Illinois Vorse, Mary Heaton, 9–10, 90, 174 Wagner, Robert F., 44, 78–80 Wagner Act, 80, 86, 90–2, 102, 120, 181, 196, 199, 229 Walker, C.R., 43 Walsh, Frank J., 177–9 Walsh-Healey Act, 89 Walters, Emil, 84 Waltmire, William, 183 Warren, Reverend Dr., 190 Weber, Joe, 49, 110, 122, 123, 126, 137, 186–8, 189, 190, 210, 225, 227 welfare capitalism, 25–7, 28, 31, 34, 49, 55, 56, 59, 67, 68, 70 West, Mollie, 138, 142, 145, 160, 225 White, Charles, M., 55, 92 Wilson, Edmund, 36 Wohlforth, Robert, 200 women, 97–101, 124, 136, 140, 152, 168, 207, 208, 235 Women’s Auxiliary, 96, 98–101, 116, 124, 125, 137, 151, 152, 168, 173, 189 Women’s Steel Conference, 98 Woods, Jacob, 138, 210 Woods, W.J., 168 Workers Committee on Unemployment, 39 yellow dog contracts, 9, 27, 47 Young, William, 22 Youngstown Sheet and Tube, 14, 21, 69, 84, 90, 92, 93, 105, 106–7, 130, 135, 146, 152, 176, 198, 199, 219, 222, 224 youth, 129, 132, 134, 138, 168, 193 Yuratovac, Gus, 109, 115, 231

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