In an online history of this sad and repellent reflection on the tendency of some large companies to valorize profits over people, Howard Fast provided background on the state of the steel industry after the Great Depression was over:
Let us look at the situation of the steel industry after the worst part of the depression. Taking United States Steel as an example, we find that by 1935 the firm was well on the way over the hump, with a net profit of $6,106,488. Wheels had begun to turn again in America, and the next year’s profit took an enormous jump upwards, a net of $55,501,787 in 1936. Then the graph inclined even more sharply, and in the first three months of 1937 the company recorded a net profit of $28,561,533.
This was big steel. Republic, a light steel industry, was a part of what was known as little steel, and while the profits there were smaller–$4,000,000 in 1935 and $9,500,000 in 1936–they were part of the upward spiral.
It was within this framework of hot furnaces and mounting profits that the C.I.O. began to organize. And as they built their industrial unions, the steel companies built their armed goon squads.”
Greg Mitchell, who has made a film about this massacre, further explains that a wave of labor actions swept through the country beginning in 1935. The largest steel company, U.S. Steel, had been able to avoid a strike, but workers in the “Little Steel” companies – more than 70,000 of them, declared a strike in late May, 1937. One such strike was brought against Republic Steel in South Chicago, which employed 53,000 workers.
Republic Steel circa 1920 (click on image to enlarge it)
Howard Fast wrote in his history of the incident:
Tom Girdler, who ran Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands, and word went around that old Tom could do worse than earn an honest living hoeing potatoes. The strike was less than a week old; the strikers had not yet felt the pinch of hunger, and there was a good sense of solidarity everywhere.”
When police attacked picketers outside Republic Steel in South Chicago, injuring more than two dozen, a family picnic was planned for Memorial Day to help mobilize support for the strikers. On May 30, more than one thousand men, women, and children turned out to picnic on a field several blocks from the Republic Steel plant.
Organizers began to march to the plant, but were halted by a line of roughly 300 Chicago policemen blocking their path; the police were armed with pistols, axe handles, and tear gas, demanding the crowd disperse. When they refused, police hurled tear gas bombs and fired dozens of shots.
Running striker is hit on the back by policeman with a night stick, May 30, 1937 via Encuclopedia of Pullman
Mitchell reports:
About 40 marchers would be shot as they fled across the open prairie, including an 11-year-old boy, the vast majority wounded in the back or side. (Ten would die that day or in days ahead.) Dozens more would suffer head wounds after police clubbed the retreating marchers.
Police did not call ambulances or administer first aid but instead arrested the wounded and shoved them into paddy wagons for trips to a prison hospital and other distant medical facilities. Only a handful of police suffered injuries, all minor.”
(105 marchers were reported as injured.)
Police confronting strikers outside Republic Steel, Chicago, May 30, 1937. DN-C-8769A, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, CHM
The aftermath of the incident was vile as well. Newspapers excoriated the “mob” of “rioters” but it turned out that a leading newsreel company, Paramount News, had filmed the confrontation, which revealed the peaceful nature of the gathering and the egregious response of police. Paramount did not release the newsreel, claiming they feared it would set off riots, but more likely, Mitchell avers, in fear of or deference to Chicago police and officials.
A Senate subcommittee, led by the Wisconsin progressive, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., subpoenaed the footage.
Mitchell notes:
Paramount now had little choice but to release a newsreel devoted to the incident. Screenings, however, would be banned in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis, or by entire theater chains. The Senate report would place full blame on police for the massacre. Yet a coroner’s jury in Chicago would judge the killings “justifiable homicide.” No police would be punished. Dozens of unionists had been wounded, jailed or fined.”
Orlando Lippert, cameraman for Paramount News, testifies about the 1937 Memorial Day massacre before the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee of the U.S. Senate (July 2, 1937), via Library of Congress
Peter Alter, writing for a Chicago history site observed:
Officers claimed they responded to violence with violence to protect the mill and the country from ‘communists.’ A congressional investigation showed the claims of worker violence to be false, and only a small fraction of those there that day held radical left-wing political beliefs.”
Protests in support of Republic Steel strikers continued after the Memorial Day Massacre, such as this group of strikers and sympathizers at a Republic Steel rally, Chicago, June 2, 1937. DN-C-8741, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, CHM
Meanwhile, workers at Republic Steel returned to the plants without a contract, but they did eventually win recognition and most of their demands a few years later. After enduring several bankruptcies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Republic Steel ended all of its operations in the early 2000s.
Legal Legacy 
Leave a comment