A Memorial Day Massacre 

Monday 30 May 2011 

by, Dick Meister, Truthout

http://www.truthout.org/memorial-day-massacre/1306523906

(Photo: chicago.indymedia.org)

It's a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200
uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers
and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several
hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and
children, who are desperately running away. The police
club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground
and ignoring their pleas as they batter them with
further blows. They stand above the fallen to fire at
the backs of those who've outraced them.

Police drag the injured along the ground and into
patrol wagons, where they are jammed in with dozens of
others who were also arrested. Four are already dead
from police bullets, six others are to die shortly.
Eighty are wounded, two dozen others so badly beaten
that they, too, must be hospitalized.

The close-ups are particularly brutal. As one newspaper
reviewer noted, "In several instances from two to four
policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him
horizontally across the face, using his club as he
would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of
his head and still another is whipping him across the
back."

The film ends with a sweaty, fatigued policeman looking
into the camera, grinning and motioning as if dusting
off his hands.

The film was made in 1937. It was not, however, one of
those popular cops and robbers features of the
thirties. It was not fictional. It was an on-the-scene
report of what historians call "The Memorial Day
Massacre," a newsreel segment filmed by Paramount
Pictures as it was happening on the south side of
Chicago on May 30, 1937.

We're accustomed these days to the use of videotaped
evidence to show wrongdoing by abusive law enforcement
officers. Video technology was unknown in 1937, of
course, and though film was available, it had rarely -
if ever - been used for that purpose. The 1937 film, in
fact, was initially kept from the general public by
Paramount's executives. Fearful of "inciting riots,"
they refused to include it in any of their newsreels
that were shown regularly in movie theaters nationwide.

But the film was shown to a closed session of a Senate
investigating committee chaired by Robert LaFollette
Jr. of Wisconsin. The committee, concerned primarily
with civil liberties, was outraged - particularly since
the Chicago police had acted in violation of the
two-year-old federal law that guaranteed workers the
right to strike and engage in other peaceful union
activities.

The committee found that strikers and their families,
while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as
they massed in front of the South Chicago plant
operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally
peaceful.

But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago
and other cities with plants operated by Republic and
two other members of the "Little Steel" alliance that
also were struck. For, as the committee concluded, the
police had been "loosed to shoot down citizens on the
streets and highways" at the companies' behest. The
companies even supplied them with weapons and
ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than
$40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers,
tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of
ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had
more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the
entire country.

The companies were prepared to go to any extreme to
remain nonunion. Two closed their plants temporarily,
anticipating that most of the 85,000 strikers would
soon be forced to return to work because they had
little - if any - savings. But though Republic Steel
closed most of its plants, it continued to operate the
Chicago plant and a few others.

Republic fired union members at the plants that
remained open and, with police help, cleared out union
sympathizers and brought in strikebreakers to replace
them. The strikebreakers, guarded by police day and
night, ate and slept in the plants to avoid confronting
the pickets outside.

Municipal police, company police and National Guardsmen
harassed and often arrested pickets for doing little
more than lawfully picketing. Six strikers were killed
outside Republic's Ohio plants in Cleveland,
Youngstown, Canton and Massillon.

The killings and other violence, the steadily
increasing financial pressures on strikers, unceasing
anti-union propaganda - all that and more combined to
end the strike in mid-July, two months after it had
begun.

But the steelworkers didn't give up. Determined to not
have made such great sacrifices in vain, they turned to
the labor-friendly administration of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt for help. They got it in 1941, when heavy
pressures from the administration finally forced the
steel companies to recognize their employees' legal
right to unionization and the many benefits, financial
and otherwise, that it brought them and the many other
industrial union members who followed their lead.
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