OP-ED: Changing the direction of U.S. labor
Memorial Day, a day set aside to honor fallen veterans, is a red letter day for American labor – literally. On Memorial Day 1937, union blood was spilled in Chicago, when 10 were killed and nearly a hundred protesters were injured during a steelworkers’ strike rally.
It was a tragic, splintering event involving the Chicago police and local and national politicians.
Here’s some background: Before there was the United Steelworkers (USW) union, there was the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC).
After Samuel Gompers, the incomparable craft union leader of the early 20th century, there was the combative, innovative unionist John L. Lewis.
Lewis was the person chiefly responsible for a whole new approach to organized labor in the United States: unions for the masses, unions for the millions and millions of unskilled men and women busting their butts just to get ahead in life.
At the time of the “Chicago massacre,” Lewis was president of the United Mine Workers, the country’s largest and strongest labor union. For SWOC chief, Lewis selected western Pennsylvania transplant and UMW vice president Philip Murray.
From its inception, the SWOC had its eye on the cluster of steel manufacturers in and around Pittsburgh. Murray operated out of the same Golden Triangle office building as the United States Steel Corporation. In 1937, U.S. Steel manufactured more product than any other steelmaker in the world.
The SWOC and U.S. Steel composed their differences in March 1937. Other, smaller steelmakers refused to fall in line, however. “Little Steel” was composed of the likes of Republic Steel. Republic was led by the rabid anti-union businessman Thomas Girdler.
Girdler vowed to never grant union recognition. Lewis and Murray were his sworn enemies. In turn, Lewis called Girdler “a heavily armed monomaniac with murderous tendencies.”
The Memorial Day disturbance took place during a march on Republic Steel’s Chicago factory. Thousands gathered on the flat prairie land just east of the factory gate.
The crowd sang “Solidarity Forever” as it surged forward. Some 500 Chicago police officers stood in their way. Police charged. The protesters retreated. Police opened fire with their revolvers. Seven of the 10 men killed were shot in the back. A woman and her three children were among the wounded.
Girdler remarked, “There can be no pity for a mob.”
A U.S. Senate panel accused Chicago police of “gross misconduct.” Asked Lewis, “Can it be true that striking workers may be shot at will by the very agents of the law? Is labor to be protected or is it to butchered?”
Lewis’ ire was especially directed at Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Ed Kelly. The Memorial Day violence foreshadowed Lewis’ consequential break with President Franklin Roosevelt prior to World War II. A year earlier, in 1936, Lewis and the UMW had aided Roosevelt’s spectacularly successful re-election campaign.
During a Labor Day speech in September 1937, Lewis remarked that the “murders of these unarmed men has never been publicly rebuked by an … officer of the state or federal government … by those who profess to be the keepers of the public conscience.”
Noting that the Roosevelt administration continued to shower Chicago with federal benefits, Lewis said, “Kelly must believe that the killing of the strikers is no liability in partisan politics.”
When President Roosevelt condemned both labor and management over the “Little Steel” strike, Lewis responded, “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”
It took the Second World War and Roosevelt administration pressure to finally smash the resistance of “Little Steel” to a union workforce.
John L. Lewis had many detractors. He was a polarizing figure. But by insisting on organizing the unorganized, he rendered an inestimable public service. Lewis helped pave the way for the great American middle class of the 1950s and ’60s.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.