The 1937 Chicago Steel Strike: Blood on the Prairie

PREFACE

Although I come from a police family and worked a summer break from college on the open-hearth furnaces at Republic Steel’s South Chicago plant, I don’t remember anyone in either setting mentioning the tragic 1937 Memorial Day encounter. I became only vaguely aware of the fatal episode sometime later, probably from reading cryptic flashbacks in the newspapers. Even today, when I mention the event to informed longtime Chicagoans, I often find that I’m telling them something they’re hearing for the first time. Chicago Fire Department historian John Rice has suggested that tragic events such as the Iroquois Theater fire or the capsizing of the SS Eastland become part of a collective amnesia because people don’t want to remember something so horrible.

The Memorial Day incident—or massacre, as many call it—was horrible; it never should have happened. The eight minutes of newsreel footage recorded that day depict a police riot, to borrow a term from the presidential commission that investigated the disturbances at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. What happened on May 30, 1937, far exceeded anything that transpired thirty-one years later. The police shot forty people, ten fatally. All but four were hit from the back or side. Dozens were clubbed as they fled a tear gas barrage, some as they lay defenseless.

Steelworkers Local 1033 has conducted periodic memorial gatherings to keep the memory fresh. A sculpture dedicated to those killed stands a half block north of the union hall on the city’s Southeast Side, the building itself dedicated to the dead of 1937. Like the Iroquois, the Eastland or the Stock Yards Fire of 1910, this is a chapter of Chicago history that deserves to be preserved. This account is not intended to be pro or anti union, industry, police or government—local, state or federal. What follows, I hope, is a straightforward presentation of the facts in an attempt to capture a seminal period of labor history and, more specifically, the tragic event that marked its nadir. The heroes, rogues and those between, on all sides, identify themselves through their own words and actions.

Like most everything I’ve attempted to write, this project would not have reached final form without the invaluable help of my editor-in-chief—and spouse—Judy Ellen Brady, who took time away from writing her own book to keep me on course.

Friend, neighbor and professional editor Andrea Swank, who is always there when my work requires doctoring, acquitted herself with distinction once again.

Alex Burkholder, my collaborator on Fire Strikes the Chicago Stock Yards, shared his extensive knowledge of Chicago history while also providing encouragement and a big assist with the graphics.

The last president of Local 1033, United Steelworkers of America (USWA), Victor Storino, was most generous with his time and access to the union’s files. Victor and his brothers and sisters in the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), as feisty and likable a bunch of seniors as anyone would care to meet, made me feel welcome from the outset.

The research staffs at three of my offices, the Chicago History Museum (CHM), Newberry Library and the Municipal Reference division of the Chicago Public Library (CPL), were unfailingly helpful and friendly, as always, even when confronted with dumb questions. A fourth office, the John Merlo Branch of the CPL, offered a quiet retreat for writing, particularly on winter days with snow covering the front lawn of the church rectory next door, seen through the Merlo’s west windows.

Elizabeth Murray Clemens of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit and Emily K. Harris of the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) in Washington, D.C., graciously responded to requests for photographic material. The Illinois Labor History Society in Chicago also provided help with visuals.

When I called Adriana Schroeder, the historian of the Illinois National Guard in Springfield, she found herself inundated with requests for information regarding the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Nonetheless, she allotted all the time I needed for background on the National Guard’s part in the Republic strike. Doing so, she handed this old reporter a small scoop—the long-confidential identity of the undercover National Guard officer who provided the governor with intelligence before, during and after the Memorial Day encounter.

Family friend and research librarian Carla Owens answered an urgent eleventh-hour call to help finish the project. Judy and I still owe you and Matthew that dinner, Carla.

CHAPTER 1

GODFATHERS

The rural Midwest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century hardly could have produced two more philosophically dissimilar national figures. Born three years apart, Tom (Tom, not Thomas) Mercer Girdler and John Lewellen Lewis now seem as though they were preordained to follow a collision course as the interaction of labor and capital became revolutionized, often with tragic results. Girdler and Lewis personified the immovable object and the irresistible force. They bestrode the American stage, alternately cajoling and defying federal and state bureaucrats, Congress and even presidents in pursuit of their diametrically opposed visions.

By the late 1930s, the pipe-smoking Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel Corporation and president of the American Iron and Steel Institute, and United Mine Workers chief and CIO founder Lewis, who favored cigars, together commanded hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers with a stake on both sides of the divide. Lewis, with his massive head, leonine mane, perpetually glowering visage and, above all, eyebrows sufficiently overgrown to accommodate three faces, was by far the most visible and well known. (The Chicago Tribune, no fan of organized labor or its leaders, delighted in describing Lewis as beetle-browed. He was a cartoonist’s godsend.) In the ’30s and ’40s, his image loomed almost as prominently in newspapers and movie newsreels as that of President Roosevelt, whose jutting chin and jaunty cigarette holder also were no strangers to caricature. Tom Girdler, on the other hand, would fail to stand out in any CEO group portrait, a very ordinary-looking man who wore round, dark-rimmed glasses perched below an expanse of full-frontal baldness. Yet the bland exterior masked an extraordinary individual, just as hard-nosed as Lewis, though unlike his adversary, Tough Tom, as he was called, was known to smile occasionally.

Community organizer and Lewis biographer Saul Alinsky sneered that Girdler was tough—if profanity and table-pounding constituted attributes of toughness. If Alinsky had read Girdler’s autobiography, he came across an episode the steel man related about his time as a young foreman at the Oliver Iron & Steel Company of Pittsburgh. When he challenged a subordinate three inches (taller) and forty pounds heavier for leaving early, Girdler wrote, the man not only refused to return to his machine but cursed him as well. There was never a day in my life when I wouldn’t fight when anyone called me that. Tough Tom said he punched the worker in the mouth, and the ensuing fight continued until he wrestled the bigger man down, hammered his head on the brick floor and didn’t stop until his opponent lay unconscious. The subordinate didn’t suffer any lasting injuries but never returned to the plant. Girdler said his own supervisor shrugged off the incident.

Girdler was born on a farm near Sellersburg, Indiana, about eight miles due north of Louisville, Kentucky, the third of five children. He and all his siblings were delivered by their maternal grandfather, a familiar and well-regarded doctor who traveled the territory by horse and buggy. In addition to the family farm, the Girdlers owned and operated a nearby cement factory, the brainchild of a wealthy uncle who brought his brother-in-law, Tom’s father, on board. By Girdler’s account, the farm and cement factory did well enough for the family to retain a hired girl and enable them to send their two daughters to private school in Louisville. Nevertheless, he suggested that his father may have lacked the funds to send him to college, and that was the primary reason he ended up teaching after graduation from high school. At nineteen, when others his age had at least one year of college behind them, circumstances changed. Aunt Jenny, wife of the cement factory founder, decided it was time for her nephew to begin his higher education. She dipped into the childless couple’s fortune and told Tom he was going to Harvard. Girdler balked. He’d been hoping for such an offer from dictatorial Aunt Jenny but was determined to pursue a mechanical engineering degree. Tough Tom hung tough; he enrolled at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with Aunt Jenny’s blessing (and cash).

The story of the Girdlers is not one of a family who disembarked at Ellis Island. Nor is it one of the countless families of tenant farmers who populated the nineteenth-century countryside. Yet the title of Tom Girdler’s autobiography, published in 1943, more than twenty years before his death, suggests otherwise. A browser, plucking a copy of Boot Straps off a bookshelf, might expect to read about a Horatio Alger–type character who sheds his rags for riches, not about the grandson of a doctor, the son and nephew of factory owners who turned down an opportunity to attend Harvard in favor of another university. Girdler spent years crafting the image of the self-made man and succeeded, if a 1937 newspaper profile is any indicator. Tom Girdler is no golden spoon aristocrat. His father was a farmer and his grandfather a country doctor…He earned his first money—fifty cents a day—by pulling weeds.

Young Tom did indeed work on the family farm, long and hard, according to his telling, just as he worked at the cement factory during summers off from Lehigh. The family may not have been aristocrats in the strictest sense, but in Boot Straps, Girdler described a lineage that he seemed to believe was first among equals. The Girdlers helped build the United States of America, he boasted, and by implication he wasn’t about to watch John L. Lewis, the CIO and their Communist pals tear it down. The nation-building process, he explained, was typified by his resolute, God-fearing [paternal] grandfather [and] his sea voyages…All the Girdlers had been seafaring men, ship captains, including his great-grandfather, who went to sea against the British in 1780 when he was fourteen. A great-uncle also fought in the American Revolution, while the great-grandfather returned to duty as a navy captain during the War of 1812. All the Girdler men fought in the Civil War. While he made no mention of his mother’s family’s military service, he stated that the earliest of them to come to America landed in Massachusetts in 1635, only fifteen years after the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. So, good or bad, Tough Tom concluded, every fiber of me is American.

Girdler had always wanted to work in the steel industry. After graduation from Lehigh in 1901, he began to fulfill his dream, dashing the family’s expectations that he would return to the cement company and eventually take over the business. Off to London he went, to work in the recently opened office of the Buffalo Forge Company as a salesman of heating and ventilating equipment. He remained there less than a year, living in a shabby, one-bedroom boarding house. In another deviation from the bootstrap image, he came back to the United States at the behest of a classmate and fraternity brother, the scion of a wealthy, socially prominent Pittsburgh family who owned Oliver Iron & Steel. The friend arranged for Girdler to join the ranks of three thousand employees at the oldest establishment of its kind in the Pittsburgh area. One of the classmate’s uncles could claim an estate valued at $16 million; another was a United States senator.

The new arrival began his career as foreman of the bolt shop where he was to have the knockdown fight with the subordinate. He saw himself as an anomaly because of his college education. Some bosses in the plant, he said, preferred to believe that the only way to make yourself useful in the steel business was to start with a wheelbarrow or shovel. (Bootstraps, anyone?) Been there, done that, he seemed to believe, while realizing that he was bucking a real prejudice…against education. The following year found him moving up to superintendent of the nut factory, which employed 150 men and 75 girls, the latter giving him 75 times as much trouble as all the men.

Girdler left the Oliver Company in 1905 and rose through the ranks at several steel companies, including Jones & Laughlin, which he joined in 1914. He became that company’s president in 1928, and the following year, he combined with Cleveland industrialist Cyrus Eaton and other steel executives to forge Republic Steel Corporation from a cross section of smaller operations, among them a pipe manufacturer, a nut and bolt business and a blast furnace concern. Some of what we had was good. A little was excellent. But most was junk, he said. Creation of the new corporation virtually coincided with the start of the Great Depression. Girdler compared himself to Robinson Crusoe, that castaway [who] took out of a wrecked ship the stores and tools with which to attempt survival on an island amid fierce conditions. Becoming chairman of Republic in 1930, he launched it on a path to become the nation’s number three steel producer.

Long before Girdler took over the helm at Republic, the principle of collective bargaining had been making significant progress in the steel industry. I am not against unions, Tough Tom asserted in his autobiography. I have never been against unions, only some union leaders. Others would vehemently disagree. Where Girdler saw himself as fair but firm, unionists saw a slave driver, a fighter with no regard for