Remembering the Memorial Day Massacre while it's still in history books
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT and KEA retiree
Most Americans, including most union members, probably have never heard of the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. If Donald Trump has his way, tragedies like this one will vanish from history books. More on that in a minute.
On May 30, the date the holiday was observed 88 years ago, Chicago police fired into a crowd of fleeing strikers, their families and supporters outside the Republic Steel mill in south Chicago.
The officers fatally shot or beat to death 10 people. Sixty-four others were wounded by gunfire or seriously injured by police wielding night sticks.
The atrocity is a stark reminder of corporate America’s often violent resistance to organized labor and of police and a legal system that historically have been allied with American capital against unions.
The crowd was peaceful and unarmed; no police were killed or injured. Even so, the officers pleaded self-defense, claiming members of the crowd were high on marijuana or were violent communist agitators. The cops swore they feared for their lives.
A coroner's jury sided with the police and ruled the slayings "justifiable homicide."
Unbeknownst to the cops, a newsreel camera operator recorded the slaughter on film. His images proved the officers lied. "The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor," author Howard Fast wrote.
The committee ruled that the police used force "far in excess of that which the occasion required." The panel also reported that "treatment of the injured was characterized by the most callous indifference to human life and suffering. Wounded prisoners of war might have expected and received greater solicitude."
Two years before the massacre, New Deal Democratic-majority Congress passed the Wagner Act. Signed by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the landmark legislation led to an historic wave of union organizing, especially in mining and industry.
The act gave workers the right to unionize and required employers to recognize the union when a majority of workers voted for the union. As a result, millions of working men and women flocked to unions.
Despite the Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relation Act, many companies, including Republic Steel, refused to accept unions. Thomas
Girdler, president of Republic Steel, was more than notoriously anti-labor.
He was, according to the May 30, 1938, Chicago Daily Worker, a "typical Liberty Leaguer, admirer of the Silver Shirt fascist gangs, and President of the Steel Institute of America, the spokesman for his class to the New Deal and the demands of labor for trade union rights.”
The paper added that while the rubber and automobile industries “feel their way cautiously to renew provocations and violence, it is well for America to recall the simple facts of Girdler’s masterpiece of murder, unexcelled since the Rockefeller perpetrated the Ludlow massacre of Colorado."
Republic Steel workers struck after Girdler refused to recognize their right to unionize under the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (a predecessor of the United Steelworkers of America.) The workers began picketing and after a Memorial Day meeting with several wives and children present, “about 200 men and women, with some kids straggling along, singing songs, carrying the American flag, begin a peaceful march toward the plant to establish a picket line for the day.”
Police, led by a Capt. Mooney, stopped the procession. Union leaders pleaded for the right to remain peacefully, according to the paper. But “suddenly, without warning, shots rang out, and tear gas bombs began to fall, and the police charged forward into a stumbling, dismayed mass of men and women trying to evade the sudden appearance of murder.”
What followed, the paper reported, was “sheer horror. Men lying on the ground, were clubbed and stamped to Fleeing backs were targets for bullets. Screams and blood everywhere, as the cold-blooded massacre went on. Prisoners hauled into the waiting police wagons bled to death as callous curses met their demands for medical aid. The toll was 10 dead, 64 weight. Of the wounded, some have been permanently crippled.
The country’s conservative, anti-union newspapers “might've succeeded in deceiving the American people as to the truth of the massacre. It happened that a movie man was taking pictures. These pictures shocked America. But it was a hard fight to get them released so that America could see the truth.
After a Senate subcommittee headed by Wisconsin Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Jr., a Progressive, showed the film, the images were shown in several cities, but not in Chicago, the paper said. The motion pictures were shown in many cities, but in Chicago, where the far-right-wing, hysterically anti-union Chicago Tribune ruled the media roost. The paper “could not scream obscenely about "red plot "and “CIO invasion” if the people Chicago could see the truth shown by the camera,” the Daily Worker charged.
Nonetheless, Girdler steel company executives—and much of corporate America—lionized Girdler ‘“His ‘fellow Tories’…elected [him] president of the Steel Institute,” the paper said. Right-wing New York Herald-Tribune “prostitute” George Sokolsky lauded Girdler “as a ‘true American fighting for liberty,’ said the Daily Worker. (In addition to writing a right-wing, anti-labor column for the Herald-Tribune, Sokolsky was a radio broadcaster for the vehemently anti-labor National Association of Manufacturers.
The paper concluded “Thus, American Hitlerism advance his mouthing phrases of liberty as it rains death upon workers who dare to ask for a living wage and for the enforcement of the law.”
Two months before this Memorial Day, Trump signed an executive order with the phony title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“The order essentially declared that Trump is the ultimate arbiter of US history and had the right to police thought,” David Corn wrote in Mother Jones last month. The article was headlined: "Donald Trump’s War on History" with the subhead "Like other autocrats, he wants to control the nation’s story and police thought."
Added Corn, MJ’s Washington, DC, bureau chief “….Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.”
In Trumpian history, like all else Trumpian, only Rich White Lives Matter.