Memorial Day Massacre: Remembering the deadly clash with Chicago cops that changed labor conflict

After decades of decline, union organizing is surging again today, mainly in new industries, from coffee empires to online megastores. At the same time, teachers’ and nurses’ unions remain strong and the venerable guild for movie and TV writers went on strike earlier this week. Stephen Colbert, knowing his late-night show would soon go dark, said on Monday, “This nation owes so much to unions.”

Labor protests and strikes, decades ago, often led to violent confrontations between unionists and local or company police. It almost never happens today. This is partly due to lessons learned by both sides 86 years ago this month in Chicago, after police shot (mainly in the back) and killed 10 unionists and wounded 30 others in what has become known as The Memorial Day Massacre.

No labor conflict has come close to this toll since.

There are other echoes today from 1937. Not a single police officer or supervisor was charged or otherwise punished for any part in the Chicago murders. And claims of “media cover-up” could have been applied back then after the only film footage of the confrontation was suppressed by Paramount News, a leading newsreel outlet.

After years of dormancy, and with few signs that the Great Depression was waning, a wave of labor actions gripped America starting in 1935. It spread far and wide, from Woolworth workers to farm workers, but centered on giant industries in the north, with miners, auto workers and steel workers leading the fight. Sit-down strikes became all the rage and even General Motors and Ford caved.

“There were strikes all over the country,” historian Howard Zinn observed. “There were riots. There were people breaking into places where there was food. There were children marching into city halls demanding that they be fed and taken care of. It was a country that was in a state of near-revolution.”

U.S. Steel, the largest steel company, avoided a strike by offering workers – under pressure from fabled CIO chief John L. Lewis – what became industrial benchmarks, such as the eight-hour work day and time and a half for overtime.

But companies known as Little Steel (though hardly small) across the Midwest and Pennsylvania, refused to follow or even recognize the new Steel Workers Organizing Committee. So more than 70,000 at those plants declared a strike in late-May 1937.

Workers who set up picket lines outside Republic Steel in South Chicago were met by police swinging nightsticks and more than two dozen were injured. So they scheduled a picnic to mobilize community and worker support on a broad prairie near the Republic plant on May 30.

As many as 1,500 turned out on this hot, sunny day, including many women and children, dressed in their Sunday best. Encouraged, organizers called for a march to the well-guarded gates of the plant, three blocks away, aiming to conduct mass, legal picketing.

But on the way they were met by hundreds of Chicago police, armed with pistols and some carrying axe handles or tear gas provided by Republic. Five or ten minutes of heated discussion between the two sides ensued, but it appeared it would lead to nothing more. Suddenly police hurled tear gas canisters and then fired dozens of pistol shots.

Some marchers may have tossed stones or a tree branch. In any event, trigger-happy police lost patience with the crowd, which included women and children, when they failed to disperse as ordered. About 40 marchers were shot as they fled across the field, including an 11-year-old boy. The vast majority of those wounded were hit in the back or side, and 10 would die that day or in the days to follow.

Dozens more suffered head wounds after police clubbed the retreating marchers.

To make matters worse, police did not call ambulances or administer first aid but instead arrested the wounded and piled them into paddy wagons for trips to a prison hospital and other distant medical facilities. Only a handful of police officers suffered injuries, all minor.

Studs Terkel, later a legendary radio host and author in Chicago but then a struggling actor, visited the scene of the massacre on the day after and compared the hobbling and bandaged workers at a first aid station there to damaged Civil War soldiers captured by the camera of Matthew Brady. (His story and those of numerous activists and those injured in the massacre are collected in the Memorial Day Massacre book.)

The local press and newspapers across the country (including The New York Times) almost invariably described the unionists as a “mob” of “rioters” who left no choice but for police to fire shots to keep them from attacking the plant. But then it emerged that a leading newsreel company, Paramount News, had a veteran cameraman named Orlando Lippert on the scene who had filmed almost the entire brutal confrontation and ugly aftermath.

Then Paramount failed to release the newsreel it prepared, claiming it feared it might set off riots in movie theaters – but more likely to protect Chicago police and officials.

This sparked a Senate subcommittee, under the crusading progressive, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., to subpoena the footage. A staffer allowed a leading investigative reporter, Paul Y. Anderson, to view it and he wrote a sensational report picked up by many leading newspapers.

Now police were on the defensive and media coverage started to shift a little. At the well-publicized hearings at the end of June and in early July, the star witness was an injured Mexican-American activist, Lupe Gallardo Marshall. There the footage was screened for the first time, including in slow motion.

The great activist Dorothy Day (also featured in the new book) would write in The Catholic Worker, “We are sickened by stories of brutality in Germany and Russia and Italy. And here in America last month there was a public exhibition of such brutality, but the motion picture film, taken by a Paramount photographer in a sound truck, was suppressed by the company for fear that it would cause riots and mass hysteria, it was so unutterably horrible.”

Paramount now had little choice but to release a newsreel devoted to the incident, although screenings would be banned in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis, or by entire theater chains. The Senate report placed full blame on police for the massacre, yet a coroner’s jury in Chicago judged the killings as “justifiable homicide.”

No one was punished for their actions that day, beyond dozens of unionists who had been jailed or fined.

Workers at the steel plant returned without a contract, but they would win recognition and most of their demands a few years later. And there was this positive result: Strike leaders in nearly every field now tried to avoid violent conflicts at all cost and police were determined to control labor actions without the use of firearms.

Today, police shootings of unarmed citizens remain far too common and often go unpunished. But there is this further legacy of 1937 massacre: It provoked the first calls for police to be equipped with cameras to document arrests — anticipating the dashboard-cams and body-cams that reveal so many shootings today.

This evidence, you might say, is now “paramount.”

Greg Mitchell is director of a new film for PBS, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, which premieres over KCET in Los Angeles on May 6 and is available everywhere via PBS.org and PBS apps starting that night. He is also the author of the Memorial Day Massacre companion book, the first oral history on the tragedy, with commentary by everyone from wounded eyewitnesses to Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn and Dorothy Day.