Greg Mitchell

In July 1943, former Hollywood screenwriter Ayn Rand was still tracking responses, critical and commercial, to her first major novel, The Fountainhead. It had been published two months earlier by Bobbs-Merrill after being rejected by a dozen other companies. Rand had written two previous novels, along with two stage plays, none of which proved successful. Now The Fountainhead was off to a slow start with audiences and reviewers.

While this was transpiring, Rand received in the mail a set of galleys for the memoir (eventually titled Boot Straps) by Tom M. Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel, which operated several massive plants in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. Many Americans had probably already forgotten the most tragic incident that Girdler was associated with, almost exactly six years earlier. If Rand was among them, her memory (and high estimate of Girdler) was surely revived in reading those galleys. Soon she would model a key character in her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, partly on Girdler.

Near the end of May 1937, workers who had been on strike for several days at Republic Steel in Southeast Chicago had called for a Memorial Day picnic on the wide open field several blocks from the plant entrance to build support. Tom Girdler wouldn’t even recognize the union, famously vowing that he would retire and go back to growing apples before he’d do that. At least 1500 workers and family members, including many women and children, turned out for the picnic. After the festivities, organizers called on the crowd to march to the gates of the plant where they might establish a mass, legal, picket.

Halfway there, the marchers, at least 500 strong, were halted by a large contingent of Chicago police and ordered to disperse. A heated discussion ensued. A few rocks were thrown in the direction of the police. Suddenly, some of the police drew their pistols and opened fire on the protesters at point blank range, and then as the marchers fled. They chased after the survivors, clubbing many of them.

Forty in the crowd were shot, with ten dead within two weeks. Dozens of the survivors were arrested and lifted into paddy wagons without medical attention. Only a handful of police required treatment for minor injuries.

Despite these one-sided results, local and national newspapers, right up to The New York Times and Washington Post, almost uniformly portrayed the marchers as a “mob” intent on rioting—that is, as the perpetrators of this tragedy. Some falsely suggested that the unionists fired first.

The only footage of the incident is quite graphic, showing the police shooting and then clubbing marchers; it was suppressed by Paramount News, a leading newsreel company.

Then the Progressive Party senator from Wisconsin, Robert LaFollette, Jr. convened a sensational three-day hearing into the tragedy. The Paramount footage was screened in its entirety—and then in slow motion (you can watch it here)--providing more proof of police malfeasance. It emerged that Republic Steel had collaborated with police on this day, allowing them to set up headquarters inside their plant and supplying them with tear gas and axe handles to supplement their billy clubs.

When the LaFollette committee released its report (most of it, along with witness testimony, printed for the first time in my new book on the Massacre), it harshly criticized the police: “We conclude that the consequences of the Memorial Day encounter were clearly avoidable by the police. The action of the responsible authorities in setting the seal of their approval upon the conduct of the police not only fails to place responsibility where responsibility properly belongs but will invite the repetition of similar incidents in the future.”

Ayn Rand clearly did not agree. On July 12, 1943, she typed a five-page letter to Republic boss Girdler after reading his galleys. “Allow me to express my deepest admiration for the way in which you have lived your life,” Rand wrote from New York City, “for your gallant fight of 1937, for the courage you displayed then and are displaying again now when you attempt a truly heroic deed—a defense of the industrialist….” Then she offered to send him a copy of her novel.

“The basic falsehood which the world has accepted is the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal,” she related. “That is, service to others as a justification and the placing of others above self as a virtue. Such an ideal is not merely impossible, it is immoral and vicious. And there is no hope for the world until enough of us come to realize this. Man’s first duty is not to others, but to himself…

“I have presented my whole thesis against altruism in The Fountainhead….Its hero is the kind of man you appear to be, if I can judge by your book, the kind of man who built America, the creator and uncompromising individualist.”

But Rand also admitted that “it shocked me to read you, a great industrialist, saying in self-justification that you are just as good as a social worker. You are not. You are much better. But you will never prove it until we have a new code of values.

“You had the courage to stand on your rights and your convictions in 1937, while others crawled, compromised, and submitted. You were one of the few who made a stand. You are doing it again now when you come out openly in defense of the industrialist. So I think you are one of few men who will have the courage to understand and propagate the kind of moral code we need if the industrialists, and the rest of us, are to be saved. A new and consistent code of individualism.”

She concluded the letter “with deep appreciation for your achievement and that which you represent.”

Girdler replied on July 27, 1937, that he had just purchased The Fountainhead. A few months later, he met Rand in New York and told her that he had read and enjoyed novel, which pleased her immensely, and he suggested they meet for lunch.

This apparently did not take place, but she would, a short time later, create one of the key characters in Atlas Shrugged, troubled steel industrialist Hank Rearden, based partly on Girdler.

Greg Mitchell’s new film Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, premiered over PBS stations in May and can now be watched by everyone via PBS.org and PBS apps. He has also written a companion book with the same title. He is the author of a dozen previous books.

Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago radio host, raconteur and author of dozens of books, will probably now become best known to some because one of those books, Working, inspired the new Netflix series of that name from Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama.

But I met Studs back in the early 1980s after he wrote a blurb for my first book and then invited me on his radio show in Chicago. We then conversed over the following decades, before his passing in 2008.

Still, I did not know of his intimate connection to one of the most shocking historical incidents in his Chicago until I began research for my new PBS film and companion book, both titled Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried. They explore the 1937 tragedy in South Chicago near the old Republic Steel plant when police shot forty strikers and their supporters (hitting most of them in the back or side) and killed ten. The only footage of the incident was suppressed until a famed investigative reporter and a crusading U.S. Senator brought it to light.

Now, nearly 86 years later, Studs provides one of the most significant voices in my film and book, the first oral history on the subject. I’d like to think that Studs — the master of the oral history — would love that.

In 1937, however, he was still a struggling part-time actor. Of course, he was already a political activist. He would reflect on that period: “There were labor battles, historic ones, where the fight for the eight-hour day had begun. It brought the song: ‘Eight hours we’d have for working, eight hours we’d have for play, eight hours for sleeping, in free Ameri-kay.’”

For whatever reason, Studs did not attend the Memorial Day picnic, called by strikers to build support, on the wide Southeast Chicago prairie that led to the massive Republic plant. Organizers suggested that the crowd of 1,500 (including many women and children) march toward the distant plant and attempt a mass, legal, picket outside. The ones who tried were stopped halfway there by a contingent of a couple of hundred police. Within minutes, some of the police opened fire with pistols at point blank range and then shot at retreating protesters.

Accounts differ on what set it off. Some of the marchers may have thrown stones and other objects at the police, though hardly at the level that warranted the shootings (and then police waded through the crowd, clubbing many at will). A Paramount News cameraman captured most of this on film.

Studs did make it to the site the following day, to meet strikers and the wounded still being treated at the union’s headquarters nearby, as he recalled: “The day after the massacre, I took a streetcar to the workingman’s bar, Sam’s Place. On this spring afternoon the place is crowded. The men are on strike. Some of them have their arms in slings. Others have bandaged heads. A couple are on crutches. This was a scene out of Matthew Brady’s photos right after Gettysburg. All are in shock. They are among the survivors of a Memorial Day picnic.

“Three of us, members of the Chicago Repertory Group, were called upon…Could we perform at Sam’s Place? Songs, sketches. It would help the morale of the strikers. A guy read a poem. I was an actor in one of the sketches, from Waiting for Lefty.”

Media coverage, both local and nationally (right up to The New York Times), overwhelmingly accepted police accounts of the confrontation—they had to shoot to halt the “mob” who were about to “riot” and invade the plant. Studs would observe: “The Chicago Tribune in those days was headed by sui generis publisher Colonel McCormick, sort of a Colonel Bull Moose figure. He was flailing away at the New Deal daily. One of his former employees called him ‘the finest mind of the 12th century.’ And Colonel McCormick was anti-union, of course. Next to a picture in his paper from Memorial Day of a cop with a club over a fallen worker, was the heading: Worker Attacks Police.”

Paramount, meanwhile, created but then failed to release a newsreel with the footage, claiming they feared it would set off riots in theaters.

A few days after the incident, protesters gathered at the Opera House for a rally. One of the organizers was economist (and later U.S. Senator from Illinois) Paul Douglas. Another was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. Among the speakers were poet Carl Sandburg and union leader A. Philip Randolph. The police captain who led his forces on the prairie on the day of the massacre, Capt. James Mooney, came in for particular criticism. Studs attended, and recalls in my book:

“It was the most highly-charged event I’d ever attended. I was sitting in the back of the balcony, next to a steel worker. You couldn’t squeeze anyone else in. You could taste the wrath of the audience. Carl Sandburg, who was a great ham, was up there swaying, taking a year-and-a-half to get a sentence out. The steel worker next to me says, Come on.

“The emcee was a gentle old professor named Robert Morss Lovett, who taught literature at the University of Chicago, and he was beloved. ‘Mooney is a killer, Mooney is a killer,’ he said, ‘and we’ve got to stop these killers!’ It was taken up by the whole audience. It had become a roar for justice. I haven’t the foggiest notion what happened to Capt. Mooney. Was he punished? Rewarded? Instantaneously retired?”

In fact, no patrolman or police officials was punished for what happened that day, even after a U.S. Senate probe found them responsible for the massacre. A coroner’s jury judged all of the murders “justifiable homicide.” But Senate staffers had finally brought the Paramount footage to light (you can watch it here).

Studs, of course, went on to great fame as radio host, author and man about town. One of those featured in his bestselling oral history on the Great Depression, Hard Times, would be the doctor who treated the wounded at the site of the 1937 massacre--and provided the crucial testimony to the Senate about the majority having been shot in the back.

Greg Mitchell’s film Memorial Day Massacre , co-produced by Lyn Goldfarb, can now be watched for free everywhere online or streaming via PBS.org and all PBS apps. He has written a dozen books, including the companion book for the new film.

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.