THE FILM THAT EXPOSED A MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE

THE FILM THAT EXPOSED A MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE
By Dick Meister

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 -- 60 years ago this month. 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 non-union. 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 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.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2184
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Story
Location:	Chicago Ill. USA
Year:	1937