Ten Workers on a Prairie: The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937

Four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, the last day of May 1937, and the prairie grass behind Sam's Place was full of families. Sam's Place was a former tavern at Greenbay Avenue and 113th Street on the far South Side of Chicago, rented by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee as a strike hall for the Republic Steel walkout. Somewhere between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred people packed the prairie that afternoon. Strikers in their work clothes. Wives. Children. A seventeen-year-old Western Union messenger boy named Leo Francisco. A thirty-one-year-old Mexican-American social worker from Hull-House named Lupe Gallardo Marshall, who had come down to help.

Joseph Weber chaired the meeting. Leo Krzycki and Nicholas Fontecchi spoke. Van A. Bittner, the SWOC regional director, worked the hall. After the speeches the crowd formed up and began to march across the open prairie toward the gate of Republic Steel's South Chicago mill, about half a mile away. They carried two American flags. They sang. A picketer from the South Chicago Women's Steel Workers' Auxiliary later remembered that they went out carrying those two flags and came back with them, both wet with her own blood.

What Little Steel had already bought

The men walking across that prairie were not walking into an accident.

On March 13, 1937, United States Steel, the largest steel corporation in the country, had signed a collective bargaining agreement with SWOC without a strike. The holdouts called themselves Little Steel: Republic, Bethlehem, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland, and National. The name was marketing. Each of them was among the hundred largest corporations in the country. Their coordination was real.

Tom M. Girdler, the chairman of Republic Steel, wrote in his 1943 autobiography Boot Straps that the companies were "convinced that a surrender to the CIO was a bad thing for our companies, for our employees, indeed for the United States of America." In public he asked, "Must Republic and its men submit to the Communistic dictates and terrorism of the C.I.O.? If America is to remain a free country, the answer is NO!" Girdler told reporters he would dig potatoes on a farm before he signed a contract with the CIO. The version of the quote varies. The position did not.

The Little Steel strike began late on May 26, 1937. Within two days, roughly 80,000 steelworkers were out across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, with around 46,000 of them at Republic. Republic kept its South Chicago mill running with strikebreakers from the first day.

The Senate subcommittee chaired by Robert M. La Follette Jr. spent the next two years documenting what Republic and its peers had been buying. Republic Steel's private arsenal by 1937 included 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns, and roughly 83,000 rounds of ammunition. Republic was the largest single purchaser of tear and nauseating gas in the country. Republic Steel also funneled approximately $40,000 to the Chicago Police Department to support what the company called the strike effort. The police officers drawn up on the prairie on May 30, 1937, were, in the most literal sense the English language allows, on the payroll of the company whose gate they were defending.

None of this was improvised. The National Labor Relations Board already had a name for the playbook. James Rand Jr. of Remington Rand had published it in the National Association of Manufacturers' Labor Relations Bulletin and the NAM had distributed it to its member companies. Citizen committees. Loyal-employee associations. Private munitions. The local police department used as an auxiliary. The NLRB called the document what it was: "a battle plan for industrial war." The bosses called it the Mohawk Valley Formula.

Republic Steel did not write the plan. Republic Steel executed it.

Two or three seconds

Captain James L. Mooney of the Chicago Police Department had arranged roughly 264 officers for the afternoon. About 150 of them stood on the line when the march from Sam's Place reached the police formation near 117th Street.

Captain Thomas Kilroy stepped forward with a paper in his hand and read a dispersal order. "I ask you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to disperse." Ralph Beck, a reporter standing a few feet from Kilroy, would later testify under oath to the La Follette Committee that he had "not heard any of those in the front ranks of the marchers threaten the police." James Stewart, a marcher at the front, would testify that "the first thing I knew I got clubbed, while I was talking." Mollie West, a member of Typographical Union Local 16, would remember a Chicago officer saying to her face: "Get off the field, or I'll put a bullet in your back."

When Kilroy lowered the paper, the police opened fire.

The sustained roar of their pistols lasted, according to the closest contemporaneous accounts, perhaps two or three seconds. Clouds of tear gas rose over the field. Mounted officers rode into the crowd swinging clubs. One striker who had fought in France during the First World War said afterward, "I was in the war and fought in France, but I never heard so many bullets as those coppers fired. Women and children were screaming." The Reverend Fisk saw two officers chase an unarmed worker who was running, and begging for mercy, and they kept swinging. At South Side Hospital, Dr. Nickamin told a reporter that the wounded "looked as if they had come from a virtual massacre."

Four men died on the field that afternoon. Alfred Causey, age 43, of Chicago, a member of Steel Workers Local 1010. Earl Handley, age 37, an East Chicago carpenter working out of the same local, who bled out after police removed his tourniquet. Sam Popovich, age 45, also Local 1010, an immigrant from southeastern Europe. Kenneth Reed, age 23, Local 1010.

Six more died of their wounds over the next three weeks. Joseph Rothmund, age 48, died on May 31. Anthony Tagliori, age 26, Local 1033, died on June 1. Hilding Anderson, age 27, Local 65, died on June 3. Otis Jones, age 33, Local 1033, died on June 8. Leo Francisco, the seventeen-year-old Western Union messenger boy, died on June 15. Lee Tisdale, age 50, Local 1011, an African American steelworker who had marched with his white coworkers, died on June 19.

Ten dead. Roughly 30 shot, the great majority of them shot in the back. Another 38 hospitalized from beatings. By the Senate committee's own later count, nine men were permanently disabled and twenty-eight suffered serious head injuries from police clubbing. Thirty-five officers reported injuries as well. Three stayed in a hospital overnight. Not one of them had been shot.

The man died on my lap

Lupe Marshall did not run.

When the shooting stopped she climbed into a Chicago police patrol wagon with the bleeding wounded. She was five feet tall, she was Mexican American, she was a social worker, and she held a dying striker in her lap inside that wagon while a Chicago officer stood over him and beat him. She later told the La Follette Committee, "Every time he tried to get up the policeman's club came down on him." She said to the officer, "Don't do that. Can't you see he is terribly injured?"

The man in her lap, before he died, looked up at her and told her, "you are a good kid ... Carry on."

Carry on. That is the whole moral spine of the story. Workers in a patrol wagon tending to each other while a cop beats the man who is already dying. At the hospital, a nurse told Marshall, "We haven't nurses. We haven't got doctors on the floor." When she tried to help, a Chicago officer barked at her, "Quit your stalling ... Get going."

Look at who was in that wagon. Lee Tisdale, African American, Local 1011. Sam Popovich, a Slavic immigrant, Local 1010. Alfred Causey and Kenneth Reed, white men from Chicago and East Chicago, same local as Popovich. Leo Francisco, a seventeen-year-old messenger kid. Lupe Marshall, a Mexican-American woman from Hull-House, holding a stranger's head. The Chicago Defender wrote later that Tisdale would "go down [in history] as one who gave his life that all workers may be freed from industrial slavery." Nobody in that patrol wagon needed a lecture on solidarity. They were the lecture. They carried each other out.

The footage they would not let you see

Paramount News sent a cameraman named Orlando Lippert to the Republic Steel gate that afternoon. Lippert filmed the entire confrontation. He got the dispersal order, the volley, the clubs, the bodies. He filmed what happened.

Then Paramount's editors in New York watched the film and decided the country was not fit to see what its own police had done. A Paramount News editor called the footage "not fit to be seen" and said public release could "incite local riot." Another official at the agency said the film was being withheld to prevent "mass hysteria." The reel went into a vault.

Meanwhile, as the labor journalist Greg Mitchell has put it, "The mass media, right up to The New York Times, was supporting the police story, that they had no choice but to open fire on this mob." The Chicago Tribune ran the police account on its front page. The mayor of Chicago, Edward J. Kelley, publicly backed the conduct of his police department.

The footage would have died in that vault if Paul Y. Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had not gotten a copy of it through a staffer on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. Anderson watched the film. He wrote what was in it. From June 30 to July 2, 1937, the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Labor held three days of hearings in Washington on what it called the Chicago Memorial Day Incident. Senator La Follette presided. The Paramount footage was screened in full and in slow motion in the hearing room, reportedly the first time motion picture film was introduced as evidence in a congressional inquiry.

Marshall testified. Stewart testified. Beck testified. The film ran.

The La Follette Subcommittee's written findings, released that summer, put the blame squarely where it belonged. The force the police had used "was far in excess of that which the occasion required." Whatever provocation the marchers had offered "did not go beyond abusive language and the throwing of isolated missiles." The police "treatment of the injured was characterized by the most callous indifference to human life and suffering." And the committee's landing sentence, on the Chicago authorities who had blessed the killings: "The action of the responsible authorities in setting the seal of their approval upon the conduct of the police not only fails to place responsibility where responsibility properly belongs but will invite the repetition of similar incidents in the future."

The Cook County coroner's jury, sitting in Chicago, returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. Not a single Chicago police officer was ever prosecuted for the ten deaths. Public screenings of the Paramount footage were banned in Chicago, in St. Louis, and in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Every institution did its job. The company armed the police. The police shot the workers. The coroner absolved the police. The mayor praised the coroner. The studio buried the evidence. The newspaper of record printed the police story. The one institution that did not behave as the cartel had planned was a Senate subcommittee, and its findings had no prosecutorial power.

That is what state violence at the gate looks like when the state is an extension of the company and the company is part of a cartel. It looks like ten funerals and no indictments.

What the blood bought

Little Steel won the summer of 1937. Across Chicago, Youngstown, Massillon, and Cleveland, eighteen workers were killed before the strike ended that summer in defeat. The mills ran. Girdler did not sign.

Then the machinery the workers had built over the previous four years started to turn.

On April 8, 1938, the National Labor Relations Board ruled against Republic Steel and ordered the company to reinstate all but eleven of its striking workers, citing the company's "brutal acts of violence." Republic Steel fought the ruling through the federal courts for two years. In April 1940, after the Supreme Court refused to hear Republic's final appeal, Tom Girdler agreed to abide by the NLRB order. Roughly 7,000 workers were eventually reinstated. The company paid out approximately $2 million in back pay.

In 1942, with the country at war and the National War Labor Board pressing for labor peace in the steel mills that were forging the tanks and the shells, Republic Steel and the rest of Little Steel finally recognized SWOC and signed collective bargaining agreements. On May 22, 1942, SWOC formally became the United Steelworkers of America, with Philip Murray as its first president. The men and women who had walked toward the Republic Steel gate on Memorial Day 1937 had a union, and a contract, and a name for themselves.

The ten who died did not see any of that. Alfred Causey did not see it. Earl Handley, whose tourniquet a cop removed, did not see it. Sam Popovich did not see it. Kenneth Reed did not see it. Joseph Rothmund did not see it. Anthony Tagliori did not see it. Hilding Anderson did not see it. Otis Jones did not see it. Leo Francisco, seventeen years old, did not live to see his twenty-second birthday, let alone a union contract. Lee Tisdale did not see the United Steelworkers of America put his local's number on a charter.

Their kids saw it. Their coworkers saw it. Their union saw it.

In 1997, sixty years after Paramount put Orlando Lippert's film in a vault, the Library of Congress added the Republic Steel Strike Riot Newsreel Footage to the National Film Registry as "culturally significant." The film that a studio said was not fit to be seen is now part of the federally preserved heritage of the United States. You can watch it. The ten men and the boy are not on the screen long. They are there.

Republic Steel is not. The company was broken up and absorbed into LTV Steel in 1984. LTV itself went under. The name Republic Steel survives today only as a minor brand badge on the side of a few specialty bar mills.

The United Steelworkers still exists. The footage survived. The names survived.

Republic Steel did not.

Sources

The spine of this piece is the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee hearing record of June 30 through July 2, 1937, accessed through the primary transcript of Lupe Marshall's testimony (History Matters, George Mason University) and through the verbatim Subcommittee findings compiled at Encyclopedia.com. The Paramount newsreel story, including Orlando Lippert's cameraman credit and the studio's suppression language, comes through Greg Mitchell's reporting in The Progressive and on Democracy Now! Tom Girdler's quotes come from his 1943 autobiography Boot Straps, verified via the labor historian Erik Loomis. Contemporary worker-press reporting from New Masses (June 15, 1937) supplies the verbatim eyewitness quotes from the Women's Steel Workers' Auxiliary picketer, the World War veteran striker, Reverend Fisk, and Dr. Nickamin. Sam's Place spatial detail, Mollie West's quote, and the Ralph Beck and James Stewart testimony are documented in the Illinois Labor History Society piece and in the Libcom reconstruction of the hearing record. The ten dead, with locals, ages, and dates of death, are reconstructed through the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Defender reporting on Lee Tisdale, and the consolidated Wikipedia victim table cross-checked against those primaries. The resolution timeline, from the 1938 NLRB ruling through the 1942 USWA charter, comes from the Little Steel strike summary corroborated by Ahmed White's The Last Great Strike (University of California Press, 2016), which remains the current authoritative scholarly treatment. Michael Dennis's The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) is the standard monograph on the event itself. The full source list is in the frontmatter above.