The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy

Michael Dennis, a historian at Acadia University, has produced a useful study of the critical May 1937 “little steel” strike. Dennis utilizes labor and police records to describe the national, local, and neighborhood contexts for the police assault that killed ten workers and injured scores of others in Chicago. The chief of police James Mooney and the skilled worker and labor organizer George Patterson are used as focal points to humanize the events and to elucidate the mind-sets and behaviors of two important players in the drama. The events of the weeks that preceded and followed the massacre are presented in impressive and revealing detail, as is the slaughter itself. The account squares perfectly with the surviving newsreel footage of the police attack. In many ways, South Chicago's “bloody Sunday” (May 30, 1937) was all too typical of the violence directed against labor organization in the United States. The killings went unpunished, and, in fact, key union organizers were arrested in their wake. Despite a substantial public outcry, the violence there and across steel towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania succeeded in curbing mass picketing and led directly to the subsequent defeat in the strike. Only the wartime need for labor peace and the confidence-building low unemployment rate between 1941 and 1945 sparked a resurgence of unionism in the “little steel” plants, consolidating in a 1946 strike wave. In hindsight, it is the ensuing steel industry collective-bargaining era and the general culture of the American workplace over the next forty years that stand out as unique, rather than the triumph of antiunion campaigns which made the free use of violence, firings, red scares, and the repression of civil liberties a staple of U.S. labor history

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