May 25, 2026

Little Steel Was Not a Size. It Was a Cartel.

On March 2, 1937, US Steel signed with the union. Five other steelmakers closed ranks and decided to fight instead. They had a name for themselves. They had an arsenal. They had Tom Girdler. The massacre came eight weeks later.

On March 2, 1937, the largest corporation in America signed a union contract without a strike. John L. Lewis and Myron Taylor, chairman of US Steel, met quietly at Taylor's New York townhouse and came out with a deal: five dollars a day, an eight-hour shift, a forty-hour week, and recognition of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee as bargaining agent for its members.

That signature isolated everyone else in steel.

The cartel

"Little Steel" was not a size category. It was a bloc of five integrated steelmakers who accepted the label and used it to coordinate a private war on the CIO after US Steel walked away from their side of the line: Republic Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Inland Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and National Steel. The smallest of them was still among the hundred largest corporations in the country. The "little" was marketing. The coordination was real.

On March 30, 1937, SWOC brought the same contract to these five. They refused.

Girdler

The public face of the refusal was Tom Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel, headquartered in Cleveland. On June 24, 1937, Girdler was sworn in before the US Senate Post Office Committee and put his position on the record:

I won't have a contract, verbal or written, with an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic body like the C.I.O., and until they pass a law making me do it, I am not going to do it.

Same hearing, same day: the CIO's "apparent policy," Girdler told the senators, was "to rule or ruin American industry."

A man who says that out loud under oath is a man who has already built what he needs to back it up.

The arsenal

The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee spent the next two years documenting what Republic and its peers had been building. The findings were not ambiguous.

Republic Steel's private arsenal by 1937: 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns, and more than 75,000 rounds of ammunition, plus gas guns of every type. Republic was the largest single buyer of tear and sickening gas in the country. Between 1933 and 1937, the Little Steel firms as a bloc purchased more nauseating gas than the entire US military possessed during the same period. The La Follette Committee also found that Little Steel companies had spent roughly $40,000 arming local police departments in the towns around their mills.

They ran labor spy networks. They kept lists. They paid private cops. The word for a company that does this is not "employer." The word is "combatant."

The field

SWOC called the strike on May 26, 1937. On that day, 25,000 workers walked out across Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. By May 28, the count was 80,000, with 46,000 at Republic alone.

Republic kept its South Chicago mill running on strikebreaker labor from the first day and was busing more men in by the end of the month. The company had the guns. It had the gas. It had the local police on a retainer it had helped pay for. When a picket-line march formed on the afternoon of Sunday, May 30, 1937, and started walking toward the Republic gate, it was walking into a field the cartel had spent years preparing.

Next week's long-form covers what happened at that gate.

Sources

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