The Last Great Strike, page 1
The Last Great Strike
The Last Great Strike
LITTLE STEEL, THE CIO, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LABOR RIGHTS IN NEW DEAL AMERICA
Ahmed White
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Ahmed, 1970–.
The last great strike : Little Steel, the CIO, and the struggle for labor rights in New Deal America / Ahmed White.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-28560-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-28561-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-96101-2 (ebook)
1. Little Steel Strike, U.S., 1937. 2. Iron and steel workers—Labor unions—United States—History—20th century. 3. United States—History—1933–1945. 4. New Deal, 1933–1939. I. Title.
HD5384.I521937 W45 2016
331.892’8691097309043—dc23
2015018714
Manufactured in the United States of America
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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
To my parents, Marion Overton and Doris Morein White, who taught me so much about the meaning of struggle; and to the steel workers, whose story of struggle I am so honored to tell
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Labor, Little Steel, and the New Deal
PART I: THE OPEN SHOP
1 • Like a Penitentiary: Steel and the Origins of the Open Shop
2 • They Should Honor Us: Work and Conflict in the Open Shop Era
3 • Sure, We Have Guns: The Open Shop in the Depression Era
4 • I Never Gave That Guy Nothin’: The New Deal and the Changing Landscape of Labor Relations
5 • To Banish Fear: The Campaign to Organize Steel
PART II: THE STRIKE
6 • The Spirit of Unrest: From Stalemate to Walkout
7 • In the Name of the People: The Incident on Memorial Day
8 • What Had to Be Done: The Struggle at the Mill Gates
9 • A Change of Heart: Corporate Power and New Deal Strikebreaking
10 • Let’s Bust Them Up: Last Struggles and Defeat
PART III: THE AFTERMATH
11 • A Steel Strike Is Not a Picnic: The Anatomy of Failure
12 • Kind of a Victory: New Deal Labor Law on Trial
13 • Unreconciled: War, Victory, and the Legacies of Defeat
Conclusion: These Things That Mean So Much to Us
Appendix
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was first enthralled by the story of Little Steel and the CIO seven years ago, while researching other episodes of labor conflict in the New Deal era. Soon convinced that the strike had not received nearly the attention from researchers that it deserved, I set out to write this book. As I suppose is often the case with first-time authors of books like this one, my enthusiasm for the project may have led me to underestimate the challenges that lay ahead. But I was also fortunate, for a number of people and institutions helped me along. It is my pleasure to acknowledge their support in bringing this story to print.
I must stress at the outset how grateful I am to my editor at the University of California Press, Neils Hooper, and his assistant, Bradley Depew, for their faith in this project and their labors in helping to produce a publishable work. I am equally indebted to Kate Hoffman and Julie Van Pelt for their help in editing the manuscript for publication and to the reviewers of this book, most of them still anonymous, who found merit in the manuscript and provided me with useful recommendations and advice. And I am beholden to Cecelia Cancellero for the excellent work she did in preparing the manuscript for review and shepherding it through the process.
Quite a few librarians and archivists aided me in negotiating archival sources and putting together the research on which this book is based. This book would have been impossible without Penn State University’s Historical Collections and Labor Archives, an outstanding institution that houses the records of the United Steelworkers of America and its predecessor, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. My efforts there benefited tremendously from the generosity and expertise of librarians James Quigel Jr. and Barry Kernfeld. Equally important were the collections of government, union, and company records at the Ohio Historical Society, in Columbus, and the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor. There, too, the librarians and archivists were models of professionalism and patience. I am compelled to give special thanks to Martha Bishop at the Youngstown Historical Center, who very generously accommodated my frenzied schedule at the expense of her own time and convenience. I was similarly favored at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, where I was granted access to the records of the Republic Steel Corporation, and at the Chicago Historical Society, home to significant regional union records and important documents pertaining to the strike’s deadliest incident. And I received vital, last-minute assistance from the staff of the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at Catholic University in Washington, DC.
A number of friends and colleagues, including Emily Calhoun, Kenneth Casebeer, David Hill, Alan Hyde, James Pope, and Pierre Schlag, generously read the entire manuscript and provided me with valuable commentary and constructive criticisms. Ellen Dannin closely and critically reviewed an early introductory section of the manuscript, and Michael Goldfield listened patiently and responded incisively to my descriptions of the project. Jane Thompson, librarian at the University of Colorado School of Law, and her assistant, Matt Zafiratos, gave me crucial research support, especially with respect to securing obscure secondary sources. Nefertari Kirkman-Bey, Marissa McGarrah, Liana Orshan, Hunter Swain, and Tarn Udall, all former students of mine, provided valuable research assistance. Along with my faculty assistants, Nicole Drane and Charlie Bowers, whose unfailingly courteous efforts advanced many aspects of this project, Tarn also exceeded all reasonable expectations in working to secure copyright permissions for the images that illustrate the book.
I wrote this book entirely during my service on the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Law, where, I am happy to say, I found the standard resources more than adequate to cover the costs of research and travel, as well as my own upkeep. Among other advantages, this privileged circumstance spared me the trouble—and, dare I say, contradiction—of seeking financial assistance from corporate entities, or from the foundations, fellowships, and prizes they fund, in order to write this book about class struggle and the dangers of corporate power. For this, I am most grateful to the students and the people of the state of Colorado.
I presented aspects of the research that comprises this book on several occasions over the years. The strike was the topic of the 2009 Austin Scott Lecture at my own institution, as well as of presentations at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, the 2010 How Class Works Conference at SUNY–Stony Brook, the 2012 ClassCrits Conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the 2013 Cleveland Laborfest and Forum. At each of these gatherings, I received a host of helpful suggestions, criticisms, and encouragements from scholars, community activists, and, perhaps most notably, former steel workers and their children.
I am bound to give special thanks to other friends, including the late Don Wright. A veteran of more recent struggles in steel and a thoroughly remarkable individual, Don shared stories of that period in his life during a holiday party in Aurora, Colorado, on a frigid night in 2008, which did much to motivate me to write about Little Steel. Unfortunately, Don never realized this. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hayden, a former neighbor of mine and one-time steel worker himself, and Tom Sodders, retired union man and activist in northeast Ohio. Both passionate intellectuals, Jim and Tom gave me numerous insights about this project and showed an enthusiasm for it that helped sustain my own labors. Indeed, it is impossible for me to name all of the friends and colleagues who provided me with advice on some part of this project or another or otherwise inspired me to see it through. But at least a few others warrant special mention, including Aya Gruber, Lakshman Guruswamy, Jane Hill, George Priest, Todd Stafford, Mark Squillace, Niles Utlaut, and Tilman Wuerschmidt.
I would be terribly remiss if I did not also mention the support I received from my family, including my siblings, John White, Lia White-Allen, and Ismail White, and their spouses, Joycelyn Cortez, Troy Allen, and Corrine McConnaughy. Educators and intellectuals all, they helped me think through many aspects of this project while also providing me with more practical forms of assistance, including, in the case of Ismail and Corrine, accommodating me during two lengthy research trips to Ohio. Finally, I must thank my partner, Teresa Bruce, whose many inspired suggestions, steadfast conviction that this project would eventually succeed, and loving support were all, in the end, essential. Of course, any shortcomings in the book are entirely my own.
FIGURE 1. The Memorial Day Massacre: Chicago police assault strikers and supporters attempting to picket Republic Steel’s South Chicago Works, May 30, 1937. © 1937, Associated Press/Carl Linde.
Introduction
LABOR, LITTLE STEEL, AND THE NEW DEAL
“I’d never seen police beat women, not white women,” Jesse Reese marveled as he crawled through the grass under the afternoon sun on a desolate field in the southernmost reaches of the city of Chicago. It was Memorial Day—Sunday, May 30, 1937. All around Reese, scores of club-wielding police were beating people, men and women, black as well as white, and firing gas weapons and firearms, striking down dozens. Reese, a black man and a fugitive from a Mississippi chain gang years earlier, was no stranger to brutality and injustice. And yet he was stunned as he beheld victims of this onslaught, running and stumbling and crying out in shock and pain.1
Moments earlier Reese had been firmly on his feet, one of at least fifteen hundred demonstrators who had marched to within a couple hundred yards of the gate of a steel mill owned by the Republic Steel Corporation. The demonstrators’ cause was industrial unionism. Earlier that afternoon they had rallied at an old tavern that served as local headquarters for the union that had called a strike against Republic. Reese himself, a union organizer in a nearby steel plant, had arrived with truckloads of other strikers. From the tavern he and the other demonstrators had walked down the street five or six blocks and then marched across an open field toward the mill’s gate. It was just after 4:00 P.M. Along with strikers from Republic and their families, the demonstrators’ ranks included workers from other steel companies as well as an assortment of sympathizers who supported the union’s cause. Ethnically and racially diverse, the demonstrators were mostly men. But there were many women, too, and also a few children, brought along by some who anticipated a festive outing.
As they made their way across the field, the throng of demonstrators fanned out into a ragged column. Led by two strikers bearing American flags, the crowd chanted slogans, the main refrain an affirmation of the labor federation that sponsored their efforts: “CIO! CIO!” The demonstrators’ aim that afternoon was certain, at least to themselves. They intended to assert their right under federal law, as they saw it, to establish a large picket line at Republic’s gate. Some held signs denouncing the steel company or proclaiming their right to picket. A handful carried sticks and rocks, and many must have expected some kind of fracas with the police, at least when the crowd closely approached the steel plant. But few could have anticipated what awaited.
Stationed between the approaching throng and the mill gate were about 250 uniformed members of the Chicago Police Department, armed with revolvers, nightsticks, hatchet handles, and various gas weapons. Beyond the police, at the gate and behind the barbwire-topped fence bounding the mill, were dozens of Republic’s own police armed with gas weapons, billy clubs, and firearms. About one thousand workers at the mill had defied the call to strike and remained inside the plant. At least one hundred, and maybe many hundreds, of these men were stationed behind the company police, some wielding clubs and pipes.
When the demonstrators reached the police position, representatives on each side faced off while many others, police and demonstrators, bunched up behind, forming thick, ragged lines. Arguments erupted as the demonstrators demanded their right to picket the gate, and the police refused them passage, insisting that they disperse. After a few minutes, the standoff exploded in the flash of violence that left Reese crawling in the grass. With little provocation, the police fired their revolvers and gas weapons into the gathering of strikers and supporters, mortally wounding ten men and inflicting nonlethal gunshot wounds on some thirty men, women, and children.
The demonstrators fell like wheat before a scythe, one victim recalled. Films and the testimony of numerous witnesses document a horrific scene as the demonstrators’ raucous shouting, smiling faces, and relaxed, upright demeanors were reduced in an instant to overwhelming expressions of shock and fear and contortions of panic and agony. Those who could, ran for their lives. But many were unable because they had been seriously injured or, like Reese, had been knocked to the ground. Others, showing great courage, went to the aid of shocked or wounded comrades. Still others from the broken crowd simply stood in place.
The police rushed forth into this mass of people, firing more shots from their revolvers, beating the demonstrators, men and women, wounded and able-bodied, and manhandling dozens, wounded included, into waiting patrol wagons. Some of the police exulted as they attacked the helpless and compliant unionists, or were consumed by rage. Some went about this business in a workman-like fashion. A small few were themselves shocked by the mayhem. When after several minutes the violence waned, about two hundred gunshots had been fired, all by the police, and approximately one hundred demonstrators had been hurt, including those fatally shot. The police suffered only about thirty injuries, none very serious.
LITTLE STEEL, THE CIO, AND THE NEW DEAL
A signal moment in the history of labor and class conflict in America, the “Memorial Day Massacre,” as it came to be called, was but one of many violent chapters in a bitter and prolonged strike during the summer of 1937. The “Little Steel” Strike pitted steel workers aligned with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO; later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations) against a group of powerful steel companies. The companies—Republic Steel Corporation, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, and Inland Steel Company—were dubbed “Little Steel” only to distinguish them from the enormous U.S. Steel Corporation, or “Big Steel,” as every one of them ranked among the hundred largest firms in America. Acting in concert, they were also interlinked with other capitalist interests, including powerful trade groups and business organizations. This coalition of capitalists was intent on using the strike to mount what one commentator went so far as to call an “armed rebellion” against the movements for economic reform and industrial unionism that surged with such strength in that era.2
The SWOC launched the strike against Little Steel on May 26, 1937, after a year’s struggle to organize the companies’ workers. The striking steel workers asserted the right to build an independent union, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to protest by striking and picketing. Although for decades denied most American workers, these rights had been enacted into federal law two years earlier, via the Wagner Act, a legislative centerpiece of the Roosevelt administration’s “Second” New Deal that was held constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court only weeks before the strike began in the landmark decision NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel.3 But as the men who ran the steel companies saw things, the letter of the law could not trump their prerogatives as industrial capitalists. True to the industry’s tradition of violent and effective opposition to organized labor, Little Steel aggressively resisted the SWOC’s organizing efforts and refused the union’s demands. The companies defied the Wagner Act and the authority of the agency charged with enforcing it, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And they bucked a trend among other large industrial employers during that same period, including U.S. Steel, which had begun to retreat from decades of absolute opposition to basic labor rights.
The Little Steel Strike played out across seven states and involved around thirty mills. At its height in June 1937, over eighty thousand steel workers, along with at least ten thousand CIO miners and other sympathy strikers, were off the job. Although many steel workers were passive participants and thousands opposed the strike, tens of thousands embraced the union’s cause. Aided by sympathizers, these men picketed plant gates for weeks and even months in the face of widespread threats, provocations, and assaults. They tried desperately to inflict economic damage on the companies and to sustain support for their cause among fellow workers, with the broader public, and among politicians and other elites. And they took the offensive against the companies and their allies, organizing sympathy strikes as well as acts of sabotage and violence and intimidating picket lines.
