Chicago and the Little Steel strike
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0023656x.2012.679394
ISSN1469-9702
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoAbstract The Little Steel strike of 1937 has taken on iconic significance for historians, in large part because of the anti-labor violence of the Memorial Day Massacre. What has garnered considerably less attention is the community mobilization that accompanied the strike. For a brief moment, steel workers and their allies challenged the anti-democratic tendencies in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. While SWOC leaders focused almost exclusively on the achievement of a signed contract, women of the steel auxiliaries, workers on the picket line, and middle-class liberals from across Chicago sought to transform the strike into something larger than a showdown over union recognition. For this coalition, the Little Steel strike was a flashpoint in a wider struggle social democratic reform. In the mobilization prior to Memorial Day and in the protest movement that followed it, key elements of Chicago's liberal-labor coalition espoused the egalitarian values of the Popular Front. Far from an exercise in bread-and-butter moderation, the strike became the occasion for a larger social uprising. This expression of united front commitment drew on the example of the Unemployed Councils and the front-line militancy that is often only associated with the Flint sit-down strike and the general strikes of 1934. In Chicago, the Little Steel strike raised the possibility that steelworkers might embrace the ‘civic unionism’ that animated the left-led unions of the era. Acknowledgments This article draws from some material published in Michael Dennis. The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), reproduced with kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Notes 1. See Donald Sofchalk, ‘Chicago Memorial Day Incident’; Sofchalk concludes: ‘What had promised to be a successful display of militant solidarity turned out to be a costly mistake’ (36). See also Leotta, ‘Girdler's Republic’, which emphasizes President Tom Girdler's autocratic violation of labor's right to organize; Leab, in ‘Memorial Day Massacre’, stresses the ‘tragic’ dimension of the strike. Criticizing police and company complicity, he ultimately blames the ‘violence, disorder, unrest, loss of life’ on SWOC, which ‘heeded the lessons’ of the massacre and the strike by purging its ranks of militants (14–15). Speer's ‘The Little Steel Strike’ argues that the union emphasized the achievement of a signed contract to the exclusion of a national media campaign, which permitted anti-labor forces to define the struggle as a matter of ‘law and order’ and to link it to their attack on the New Deal. What Speer does not consider is how workers interpreted the ‘law’, nor how unlikely it would have been to launch an effective counter-attack in the business-friendly mainstream press. For works that stress high-level leadership and national politics, see Galenson, CIO Challenge, and Bernstein, The Turbulent Years. 2. As Roger Keeran pointed out in an article on the International Workers Order, ‘the steel campaign had assumed the character of a class struggle to a degree unsurpassed by most earlier labor struggles, including the 1919 strike. The campaign involved not just the recruitment of steel workers but the mobilization of the entire working class in the steel communities – the steel workers’ friends and families, mine workers, and fraternal organizations’. See Keeran, ‘International Workers Order’, 396. It's this often-overlooked dimension of community mobilization and working-class consciousness which the martyrdom motif surrounding the Memorial Day Massacre has obscured. This intense class consciousness and working-class self-determination is also key to understanding how the Little Steel strike approximated a general strike. On the ‘community-based unionism’ which challenged the centralizing tendencies of the CIO, see Lynd, ‘We Are All Leaders’, 2–4. Contra Lynd, who sees the last gasp for alternative steel unionism in 1935, the present article suggests that ‘solidarity unionism’ was strongly evident in 1937. Rank-and-file workers continued to champion organization on a ‘national scale’, which Lynd suggests was only evident until 1935. Moreover, like the rank-and-file insurgents in the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, the striking steelworkers of 1937, broadly defined, also ‘wanted to duplicate Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco on a national scale’. See Lynd, ‘Possibility of Radicalism’, 57–8. Quite simply, striking steelworkers believed the CIO would provide that national structure. 3. Lynd, ‘Response’, 191, 201. 4. Bussel, ‘“Love of Unionism and Democracy”’. 5. McCartin, ‘Reframing US Labor's Crisis’; Lichtenstein and Harris, ‘Introduction’, 5–6; Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 30–2. 6. As Rosemary Feurer points out, the Unemployed Councils also stimulated protest methods such as the sit-down and the mass demonstration that are usually only attributed to the late 1930s. See Feurer, Radical Unionism, 31–4; the importance of the Communist Party's Unemployed Councils in mobilizing Chicago's working class, particularly African Americans, is explored in Storch, Red Chicago, 99–129; rent riots and relief demonstrations were an essential feature of the working-class militancy in Chicago in the 1930s, providing the impetus and example for later union activism. See Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, 53–5, 58–9; the union upsurge was the product of a labor movement that predated the CIO and went beyond the confines of trade unionism. As Michael Goldfield argues, militant and radical social movements had a decisive impact on the framing of New Deal legislation. See Goldfield, ‘Worker Insurgency’. 7. As one journalist explained, the ‘steel industry in general, US Steel in particular, has been the target of more forceful denunciations than have been directed against any other American industrial enterprise’. In addition to the widespread influence of its open-shop policy, wage rates, and working conditions, US Steel was ‘attacked for suppressing any measure of democracy, not only in its plants but in the communities that it dominates … for preventing, in a thousand devious ways, that free expression of political belief that is a fundamental part of the American tradition’. There is no part of that indictment that SWOC activists would not have applied to Bethlehem and Republic Steel. ‘The U.S. Steel Corporation: III’. 8. For all of the historical interest in the Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) as an instrument of working-class advancement, recent research clearly delineates their limits. The ERPs could not substitute for independent unionism. See Patmore, ‘Employee Representation Plans’. 9. ‘Violations of Free Speech’, 4–14. 10. Stolberg, ‘Big Steel, Little Steel’. 11. For evidence of the steel industry's arbitrary practices in South Chicago, see the recollections of pipe fitter Joe Palasik in ‘Best Feature Story’, as well as those of Casimir Klimkowski in ‘Remember Memorial Day’; also see ‘Conditions at Republic Steel in 1937’. 12. Sam Mitrani suggests that the Haymarket incident crystallized the image of the Chicago police as defenders of law and property against the danger of violent labor activism, thus solidifying the emerging alliance between business, municipal government and law enforcement. See ‘Reforming Repression’; Sidney L. Harring provides evidence that the Chicago police department had become a regularized strikebreaking force by the early twentieth century, routinely intervening in labor disputes to disrupt picketing and ensure the safe passage of scabs. See Harring, Policing a Class Society, 106–11, 122–6. 13. Denning, Cultural Front, 4–10. 14. Denning, Cultural Front, 5–6, 11–12; several historians make this case, including Nelson, ‘Unions and the Popular Front’, and Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, 107–35. 15. Following the cultural hegemony framework, it's important to note the prominence of law in maintaining but also facilitating challenges to the status quo. Lears notes that Eugene Genovese and E.P. Thompson have both pointed to the reservoir of ideas which the law inadvertently creates for the powerless. ‘The meaning of the law could be contested by conflicting social groups. Law promised a reign of universal norms with utopian implications.’ That was the case in Chicago with respect not only to the Law and Order consensus upheld by police, but also to the decisions issued by the city's corporate counsel and the interpretation of the Wagner Act. Lears, ‘Concept of Cultural Hegemony’, 590. 16. There is, of course, considerable debate about the intent and long-range impact of the National Labor Relations Act. Suffice to say here that the motives behind the Wagner Act were complex and some of its consequences unintended. Summarizing the viewpoint of New Left historians, Holly McCammon argues that the Wagner Act sought to achieve labor peace and to minimize strikes. Workers thought otherwise, as industrial unionism skyrocketed and a wave of sit-down strikes took off in 1936. ‘A dynamic similar to that following the passage of the NIRA came into play. Workers again viewed the change in law as a clear signal of their right to organize, but their organizational campaigns, led in particular at this time by the CIO, were met by intense, often violent, employer resistance.’ See McCammon, ‘Legal Limits’, 210. McCammon recapitulates the point made by critics of the New Deal regulatory order by arguing that it established a ‘regime of “integrative prevention”’ that protectively incorporated workers and employers while effectively reducing ‘labor insurgency’. See McCammon, ‘From Repressive Intervention’, 571. Christopher Tomlins explains that Robert Wagner envisioned the National Labor Board as a vehicle to promote business recovery, workplace stability, and representation of industrial laborers, a theme that shaped the NLRA as well as the board that administered it. Despite its protective measures, the law brought organized labor under the ‘regulatory ambit of the administrative state’. See The State and the Unions, 109–10, 132–8, and quote on 147. While historians might be exceedingly critical of the ‘corporatist’ tendencies in the New Deal, they have correctly identified the constraining and bureaucratizing impact of national law. They have also understood that law is conditioned by historical circumstances, cultural inheritances, and ideological traditions mediated by classes in conflict. See Swidorski, ‘From the Wagner Act’, 63–4. They have done considerably less to analyze the broadening conception of ‘law’ which oppositional groups fostered in the midst of intense labor struggles. 17. This interpretation also diverges from David Brody's analysis, which sees the CIO of the 1930s as ‘operating within essentially conventional terms of American trade unionism that would have prevailed over contrary tendencies even in the absence of the New Deal’. See Brody's ‘Reinterpreting the Labor History of the 1930s’ in Workers in Industrial America, 141. It also questions Brody's assertion that the ‘mass-production sector was probably the least capable of any part of American industry of generating the demand for workers’ control and the functional shop leadership without which no militant movement could long sustain a rank-and-file character’. See Brody, ‘Reinterpreting the Labor History’, 154. For Brody, the only source of grass-roots militancy had to be found within the confines of the steel mills among predominantly male industrial laborers. While Brody diminishes the significant achievements of the employee representation plans in developing rank-and-file militancy, the point here is that he overlooks the transformative impact of the strike. In the context of that moment, organizations beyond the steel mills, including the Women's Auxiliaries, as well as racial groups within, such as African American and Mexican American steelworkers, demonstrated a measure of class consciousness and social democratic conviction that could not be contained simply in the demand for a signed contract. On importance of the ERPs as the embryo of industrial unionism in steel and as sources of shop-floor militancy, see Cohen, Making a New Deal, 293–6. Acknowledging the persistently northern European and Anglo-American character of the ERPs at the Duquesne US Steel mill, James D. Rose discovered that the ERP representatives championed the workplace rule of democratic law against the arbitrary authority of foreman and superintendants while significantly ameliorating working conditions. See Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism, 111–35. Analyzing the steel organizing drive in the Calumet region, the geographical focus of this discussion, James Kollros argues that Brody ‘underestimates the contributions of both rank and file workers and their leaders’. SWOC success was ‘based on years of organizing and experimenting by rank and file steelworkers’. See Kollros, ‘Creating a Steel Workers Union’, 232. For an analysis that recapitulates the incompatibility between ERPs and authentic labor unionism while suggesting that exceptional circumstances prevailed in steel, see Patmore, ‘Employee Representation Plans’. 18. This is the argument that Lizabeth Cohen advances in Making a New Deal, particularly on pages 147 and 327. Thomas Gobel also emphasizes the ‘long-term process of social and cultural unification within the working class’, a process which he attributes largely to CIO activism. Although he acknowledges the importance of the Depression, the political climate, and the renewed search for ‘workers’ control’, he emphasizes the social and cultural homogenization at the center of class formation in the 1930s. See Gobel, ‘Becoming American’, quotes on 174, 196. The point here is not to suggest that Cohen and Gobel are wrong, but that this emphasis on the unifying capacities of consumer culture, CIO activities, and the democratic rhetoric of the New Deal is insufficient for understanding the working-class formation that the steel upheaval generated. It was in the crucible of the strike that the steelworkers and their supporters forged a movement that challenged the authority structure in Chicago, made the social democratic promises of the CIO a reality, and established the links between the associations that had been so deeply involved in the organizing drive. 19. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 456; Robert R.R. Brooks, As Steel Goes, 86–7; Rose, Duquesne, 101–35. 20. ‘Negroes Back Drive’. 21. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 204–05. 22. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 219; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 335–7; Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 146–8. 23. Patterson, form letter; and ‘Auxiliaries Active in Enlisting Support’. 24. Patterson, form letter. 25. Faue, Community of Suffering, 12–13, 122–5, 190–2. 26. ‘Women Hold Joint Meet’; ‘Women's Support Urged’; ‘An Interview with Dorothy and George Patterson’. 27. ‘The Men's Corner’. 28. Orleck, ‘We Are That Mythical Thing’, 149–50, 167–8; Triece, On the Picket Line, 39–46. 29. E.J., ‘A Unit of Steel Women’, Party Organizer 11 (July 1937): 22, microfiche, Memorial University. 30. Gosse, ‘“To Organize”’, 129–32. 31. Stevens, ‘Building a Women's Steel Unit’. 32. Johnstone, Women in Steel, 21–9, quote on 5. 33. Laskie, ‘“Where I Was a Person”’, 183–4, quote on 184. 34. Quoted in Johnstone, Women in Steel, 13–15. 35. Lewis, ‘Negro Women in Steel’, 54 36. Lewis, ‘Negro Women in Steel’, 5–6. 37. For an extended discussion of how the CIO sought to bind workers together through social activities and union multiracialism, see Cohen, Making a New Deal, 333–49. 38. Johnstone, Women in Steel, 24. 39. Patterson, ‘Women's Auxiliary Corner’. 40. Lizabeth Cohen recapitulates this argument for the unifying power of mass culture in ‘The Class Experience of Mass Consumption’. 41. See in particular Brooks, As Steel Goes, chapters 4 and 6, and Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, chapter 10. 42. Quoted in Sofchalk, ‘Little Steel Strike’, 72–3. 43. Swidorski, ‘The Courts, the Labor Movement’, 74–6; Pope, ‘Worker Lawmaking’, 88–9, 104–5. 44. Swidorski, ‘From the Wagner Act’, 73–5, quote on 69. 45. ‘Bulletin No. 3’, 6752. Hereafter cited as ‘LSC’ (La Follette Senate Committee). 46. Swidorski, ‘The Courts, the Labor Movement’, 77. 47. ‘Exhibit 3421-A, Affidavit – Paul Glaser’, LSC, Part 15D, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 6751, microfilm. 48. ‘Exhibit 3421-A, Affidavit – Paul Glaser’, LSC, Part 15D, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 6751. 49. George Patterson autobiography, Book One, 97, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum; the police harassment continued throughout the SWOC drive. See reference to ‘trouble with city police while passing out papers’ in Indiana Harbor, in Minutes of SWOC Fieldworkers’ Meetings, 17 May 1937, United Steel Workers of America, District 31, Box 124, Folders 124–6, Chicago History Museum. 50. US Committee on Education and Labor, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 4669–70, 4676. La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. 51. Green, World of the Worker, 157. 52. Kollros, ‘Creating a Steel Workers’ Union’. 53. ‘Eight Men Do Work of 14 in Chicago Mill’, Steel Labor, 20 February 1937, microfilm. 54. ‘Testimony of John Riffe’, LSC, Part 14, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, 4865; Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 217. 55. ‘Violence Flares as 25,000 Walk Out; Forty Arrested; Plants Threaten to Close’, Chicago Herald and Examiner, 27 May 1937. 56. George Patterson interview, Book 21, December 1970–January 1971, 80, Roosevelt Oral History Collection, Roosevelt University. 57. Social theorist Charles Tilly has argued that social movements are distinguished from political dissent by their ‘combination of sustained campaigns of claim-making, an exceptional array of claim-making performances, and concerted displays of supporters’ worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment’. This certainly characterized the steelworkers’ protest efforts throughout the course of the Little Steel strike. But so too did their claim to popular sovereignty, ‘the right of ordinary people to hold power and limit the actions of rulers’, as Tilly writes. This ‘sovereignty’ modality embellishes Lipsitz's argument about general strikes as a moment when class activism calls into question the legitimacy claims of a given authority structure, setting in opposition to it the associations that support the popular uprising. See Tilly, Regimes and Repertories, 182–3. 58. ‘Testimony of George Patterson’, LSC, Part 14, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, June 30, July 1 and 2, 1937, 4885–86; Report No.46, Memorial Day Incident, 6; ‘23 Hurt in So. Chicago Steel Strike Riot – Police Clubs and Pistol Fire Turn Back March on Plant; Rout 1,500 C.I.O Paraders’, Chicago Herald and Examiner, 29 May 1937; Frank John Fonsino, ‘An Oral History Version of the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel’, 3, 13–14, Southeast Chicago Historical Project Collection; ‘Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano’, 21 June 1972, 8, Oral History Collection, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University; Patterson, ‘Women's Auxiliary Corner’. 59. Tilly, Social Movements, 140–1. 60. Feurer, Radical Unionism, 236; Bork, ‘Memorial Day “Massacre”’, 63–4. 61. Patterson, Reese, and Sargent, ‘Your Dogs Don’t Bark’, 95, 103. 62. Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 3. 63. Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, 127. 64. ‘Strike Bulletin of Women's Auxiliary of Republic Lodge, A.A. I.S.T.W, May 29, 37’, folder 1, box 411, Governor Henry Horner Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois (hereafter cited as ALPL). 65. ‘An Interview with Dorothy and George Patterson’, 11; ‘Hats Off to the Women in Steel!’; ‘Indiana Harbor, IND’, Reel 5, Chicago labor newspapers and periodicals on microfilm, Chicago Historical Society; Minneola Ingersoll, ‘On the Line …’, Reel 5, Chicago labor newspapers and periodicals on microfilm, Chicago Historical Society, microfilm collection, Chicago History Museum. 66. As Sidney Harring explains, during the garment workers’ strikes of 1910 and 1915, police engaged in ‘wholesale and indiscriminate’ clubbing of striking workers. ‘Large numbers of women were clubbed by the police, with no attempt to hide their actions’ (Harring, Policing a Class Society, 126). 67. The most recent treatment of Marshall and the cultural meaning of the Memorial Day Massacre is Carol Quirke's ‘Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre’, 137–9. 68. Rosales and Simon, ‘Chicano Steel Workers’, 271. 69. Rosales and Simon, ‘Chicano Steel Workers’, 272; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 1–4. The experience of Lupe Marshall and Max Guzman – both of whom were beaten – on Memorial Day was entirely consistent with the anti-Mexican bias of the Chicago police force. See Arredondo, Mexican Chicago, 64–70. The strong presence of Mexican Americans in the SWOC ranks and as strike supporters represented a powerful challenge to the authoritarian consensus in South Chicago, since they were often the target of police harassment and arrest. No less important, Mexican union activism challenged the practice of using Mexican workers as strikebreakers. See Arredondo, Mexican Chicago, 60–1. 70. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 214–15; Nelson, Divided We Stand, 194–5. 71. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 216. 72. ‘Government Acts to Quiet Labor Rift’. 73. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 40. 74. National Lawyers’ Guild, Chicago Chapter, ‘Report of Subcommittee on Activities of Law Enforcement Officers in Labor Disputes; The Chicago Police and the Republic Steel Strike,’ May 29, 1937, Ed Sadlowski Papers, Southeast Chicago Historical Society, Calumet Park Fieldhouse, Chicago. 75. National Lawyers’ Guild, Chicago Chapter, ‘Report of Subcommittee on Activities of Law Enforcement Officers’; also see Steel Workers Organizing Committee, ‘Statement Relative to Activities of Republic Steel Corporation’, Ed Sadlowski Papers, Southeast Chicago Historical Society, Calumet Park Fieldhouse, Chicago. 76. George Patterson autobiography, Book 2, 20–1, Box 9, Folder 6, George Patterson Papers; Howard Fast, ‘An Occurrence at Republic Steel,’ in Leighton, The Aspirin Age, 384; Levin, Citizens, 11–12; Godfried, WCFL, 181–2, Denning, Cultural Front, 287. 77. Quoted in Keeran, ‘Communist Influence’. 78. It's important to note that, according to an intelligence report submitted to Governor Henry Horner, some 2500 people attended the CIO meeting at Sam's Place prior to the march. However many marched to Republic Steel, more than 2000 workers and sympathizers demonstrated their support for the strike on Sunday, 30 May. Considering the location of Republic Steel in a remote corner of Southeast Chicago, that was no mean feat. ‘Observer's Report on Steel Strike Riot, South Chicago District, May 29, 30, 1937’, box 411, folder 1, Governor Henry Horner Papers, ALPL; Keeran, ‘International Workers Order’, 399; ‘Slain Communist’. 79. However skeptical of rank-and-file democracy he may have been, John L. Lewis articulated these ideals more eloquently than any labor leader of the era. See ‘Industrial Democracy in Steel’, radio address, 6 July 1936, in Zinn, New Deal Thought, 210. 80. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 133. 81. Considering the pervasive rhetoric of anti-fascism and the widespread circulation of the Daily Worker, it is hardly a stretch to suggest that Chicago's working class subscribed to its suggestion that a fascist alliance between the Chicago Tribune, the Liberty League, the steel companies and Chicago's political establishment had formed. See ‘Chicago's Bloody Sunday’. Writing about the anti-fascist campaign for the Spanish Republic, Eric Smith postulates that ‘support for organized labor and defense of the New Deal emerged as the ramparts against the supposed impending fascist onslaught’. Furthermore, since ‘corporate capitalism was the central concern in the left's schema of fascism, organized labor was the movement's most valued ally’. See Smith, ‘Anti-Fascism’. 82. ‘Thousands Attend CIO Rally’. 83. Laddie Dvorak, president, Lawndale Taxpayers’ Association to Governor Henry Horner, 2 July 1937; John Hayes, secretary, Farmer-Labor Club, to Governor Henry Horner, 8 June 1937; Sylvia Evans, secretary, National Research League, 2 June 1937. 84. Jacob Dubin et al., Multigraph and mimeograph operators, to Governor Henry Horner, 7 June 1937; Cleora Mullin, secretary, Lehigh County Workers Alliance, to Governor Henry Horner, 6 June 1937; S. Schneider and A. Sottosanti to Governor Henry Horner, 10 July 1937; M.D. Long to Governor Henry Horner, 10 June 1937; William H. Voas to Governor Henry Horner, 11 June 1937, all in folder 1, box 411, Henry Horner Papers, ALPL. 85. John Fisher, president, Progressive Miners Local Union 1, Gillespie, Illinois, to Governor Henry Horner, 13 June 1937; Joe Goin, Rubicon Lodge SWOC 1014, to Governor Henry Horner, 1 June 1937; Resolution, Alice Hinton, secretary, International Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 100, n.d.; Joe Kinby, Furniture Workers Union, Local 148, to Governor Henry Horner, 3 June 1937; John Anderson, Hospital Employees Union Local 20495, to Governor Henry Horner, 9 June 1937; Tessie Gold, United Loose-Leaf and Blank Book Workers of America, to Mayor Kelly and Governor Horner, 11 June 1937; Mario Silver, president, Chicago Fur Workers Union Local No. 45, to Mayor Kelly, Commission of Police Allmam, and Governor Horner, 15 June 1937; Resolution, Ed. Weiner, secretary, Chicago Fur Workers Union, Local No. 45, 15 June 1937; Resolution, George Jamison, secretary, Furniture, Woodworkers, and Finishers Local Union 18-B, n.d.; Gene Baxile, president, United Sheet Workers of America of CIO, to Mayor Kelly, Commissioner of Police Allman, Governor Horner, and Francis Perkins, 8 June 1937; John L. Matuszyk, Farm Equipment Workers Association, to Governor Henry Horner, 3 June 1937; United Packinghouse Workers Ind. Union to Mayor Kelly, Commissioner of Police Allman, 4 June 1937, folder 1, box 411, Henry Horner Papers, ALPL. 86. William Watson, chairman, ‘Resolution Against Chicago's Police Killing Strikers’, 4 June 1937, folder 1, box 411, Henry Horner Papers, ALPL. 87. ‘Horner Intervenes in Chicago Strike’; ‘Steel Pickets Invade Loop’; ‘500 Policemen Called’; ‘Police Fear new Violence’, 2; also see ‘Strike Tussle in Loop – Woman Battles Bystander’, Chicago Herald and Examiner, 2 June 1937. 88. ‘5,000 Strikers Protest’; ‘5,000 Join “Hero” Parade’. 89. ‘Riot Quiz Demanded’; Biles, Crusading Liberal, 24–5. 90. LSC, Part 14, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident, ‘Testimony of John C. Prendergast’, 4672–73. 91. ‘Chicago C.P. Urges City-Wide Protest’; ‘948 Police Mobilized’; on Germano's theory that the Communists engineered the Memorial Day incident in order to produce martyrs, see ‘Oral History Interview #2 with Joe Germano’, 2–5, 21 June 1972, Oral History Projects, Department of Labor Studies, Special Collections, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University. 92. Sofchalk, ‘Little Steel Strike’, 337. 93. Turrini, ‘Newton Steel Strike’, 258–60. 94. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 359. 95. On 24 July, at the crescendo of the Little Steel strike, Philip Murray sent a circular to all SWOC lodges and members reminding them of the primacy of the signed contract. ‘Strikes, walk-outs, and other stoppages of work constitute a violation both of our contracts and the policy of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Under no circumstances should such acts take place’. Murray called on members to exert their ‘good judgment, common sense, and solidarity’ by respecting their contracts. The question for Murray was the ‘integrity of our contracts’, rather than the intuition that an entire industry had been complicit in the deaths of 10 workers. What's important to note here is the timing: clearly, Murray was responding to actual and threatened ‘strikes, walkouts, sit-downs, and other stoppages’, offering evidence that rank-and-file workers were indeed prepared for a more general strike. See ‘Official Circular to all Staff Members, Local Lodge Officers and Members’, 24 July 1937, folder titled ‘Steel Workers Organizing Committee, SWOC Bulletins, 1937–38’, box 5, Howard Curtiss Papers, Penn State Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University. 96. ‘Observers Report to Commanding General District of Northern Illinois’, Henry Horner Papers. 97. ‘Observers Report to Commanding General District of Northern Illinois’, 26 June 1937, box 411, folder 1, Henry Horner Papers. 98. Philip Murray, ‘Official Circular to all Staff Members, Local Lodge Officers and Members’, 24 July 1937, folder titled ‘Steel Workers Organizing Committee, SWOC Bulletins, 1937–38’, box 5, Howard Curtiss Papers, Penn State University. 99. Lynd, ‘Response’, 188. 100. George Patterson autobiography, 107–9, Book 2, box 9, George Patterson Papers, Chicago History Museum. 101. George Patterson autobiography, 112. 102. Baughman, ‘Classes and Company Towns’, 189–90; Sofchalk, ‘Little Steel Strike’, 386–8; on company intransigence and violence, see Cook, ‘Tom M. Girdler’; on lack of organization and appreciation for local conditions, see Turrini, ‘Newton Steel Strike’; for an interpretation that emphasizes the SWOC leadership's failure to prepare strikers for violent resistance and its excessive faith in the Roosevelt administration, see Preis, Labor's Giant Step, 67. 103. Murray would testify before Congress on the iniquities committed against organized labor during the Little Steel strike, but he would not champion mass picketing, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, or a radical interpretation of the Wagner Act. Determined to protect existing contracts, and faced with dwindling SWOC resources, Murray implicitly endorsed a v
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