On May 30, 1937, the temperature in Chicago reached a balmy 88 degrees: a “perfect day for a picnic,” as some would later describe it. But 1,500 steel workers hadn’t gathered with their wives and children inside a dilapidated dance hall called Sam’s Place to enjoy a relaxing Memorial Day celebration. Sam’s was the headquarters of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, an arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the workers were organizing a peaceful strike.
They were striking because Republic Steel, the plant where they worked, had declared it would not recognize their new union. Unlike his counterparts at U.S. Steel, Republic’s president, Tom Girdler, felt no obligation to mollify the outrageous and insulting demands of his workers. A 40-hour work week? An eight-hour day? Time-and-a-half wages for overtime? That was preposterous. It was communism, and there was no way he’d stand for it. The country was still in the midst of an economic catastrophe, after all. Those people were lucky to have jobs in the first place.
Instead, Girdler called on his friends in the Chicago police force, arming them with submachine guns, wooden ax handles, and tear gas, and let them set up a command post inside the gates of his massive steel plant on Chicago’s southeast side. If the workers tried to picket his plant, they’d be stopped before they even started. What happened next is now regarded as one of the ugliest episodes of anti-worker violence in American history. One lone cameraman, an employee of Paramount News, filmed what actually occurred that day, and the footage he took is the only reason that any national memory of the actual event still survives.
The space between Sam’s Place and the Republic Steel plant, where the steel workers intended to picket, was a wide, grassy prairie. As they marched across this field, those in front suddenly encountered a line of police officers, forbidding them from approaching the plant any further. All of the police were armed with revolvers. When the workers protested that they had every legal right to picket, the police opened fire. Accounts dispute whether someone may have thrown a ”branch” or another object which may have angered the police, or whether some of the workers were pushed into the police by the crowd. Other accounts suggest the police intentionally provoked the incident by prodding and then hammering the workers with their nightsticks when they refused to turn back.
“An estimated 40 marchers were shot within seconds,” recounted filmmaker Greg Williams, writing for the Los Angeles Times. “Doctors later determined that the majority were wounded in the back or in the side. Dozens more were sent to hospitals with severe head wounds after police chased, caught and clubbed retreating marchers.”
Ten unarmed steel workers were killed that day, most of them shot in the back while attempting to flee the phalanx of 300 Chicago police officers that had been fingering their weapons, preparing for violence from the outset. About 90 more people were wounded. Of those, many were roughly stuffed into police paddy wagons and taken to a distant hospital to treat their wounds.
The police later tried to justify their actions by claiming the marchers were “communists.” Nearly all of the national media fell in line, referring to the march as a “riot” and the strikers as “agitators.” As Mitchell notes, “For three weeks, newspapers across the country almost invariably described the unionists as ‘rioters’ who left the police no choice but to use deadly force to keep them from attacking the plant.” But then the Paramount film footage was discovered, which, as Mitchell observes, depicted “almost the entire confrontation and aftermath.” Paramount inexplicably refused to release a newsreel about the incident to theaters. But as detailed in Williams’ PBS documentary, “Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried,” the entire film was then privately screened for Paul Anderson, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Anderson also interviewed survivors of the police massacre, who in turn provided testimony to a Senate subcommittee.
Senators were able to create a slow-motion version of the footage that enabled them to track the movements of certain individuals within the film. One of the striking workers, a woman who was five months pregnant, was observed being “brutally clubbed” by police before being “pushed into a police van” along with other victims. Another man was identified as being bludgeoned by two police officers who wielded ax handles supplied by Republic Steel. Another, later identified as Alfred Causey, 43, of Chicago, was carried away after receiving four bullet wounds, then left to lay on the ground without treatment before being pronounced dead “a few hours later.”
And then there was Earl Handley. Initial newspaper reports claimed he was assisted by police after being shot and apparently placed in a private car to be taken to the hospital. But the Senate testimony revealed what the footage did not: After the camera was turned off, police pulled Handley out of the car and dragged him to a paddy wagon. A tourniquet that had been applied to stop his bleeding from a bullet wound was allowed to fall off, and, as the PBS documentary notes, he then bled to death.
After the hearings concluded, Paramount finally released the film footage to news organizations. But the first 15 seconds, which clearly showed the police were culpable in starting the violence, were conveniently omitted. Nevertheless, police departments in several states succeeded in persuading theater chains not to run the footage at all. Meanwhile, as the PBS report observes, workers who had participated in the strike were “fired or blacklisted” and media reports continued to blame workers for incidents of labor-related violence.
No one was ever prosecuted for this violence. Four years later, after pressure from the National Labor Relations Board and a White House suddenly concerned about worker productivity for the war effort, the unionization effort succeeded at Republic Steel, and Steel Workers Organizing Committee changed its name to the United Steel Workers of America. Blacklisting and firing of striking workers was made illegal, and unions began to flourish.
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