Most Americans, including most union members, probably have never heard of the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. If Donald Trump has his way, tragedies like this one likely could be erased from history books. More on that in a minute.
On May 30, the date on which the holiday was observed 88 years ago, Chicago city and company police fired on, tear gassed, and savagely beat a crowd of unarmed and unresisting steel workers peacefully striking for union recognition at the Republic Steel mill in South Chicago. The strikers were accompanied by family members and other supporters marching under an American flag.
Ten people were killed or fatally wounded, and 100 were injured by gunfire or blows from clubs.
“Autopsies showed that the bullets had hit the strikers in the back as they were running away,” historian Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States.
Few industrialists of the day were more viciously anti-union that Republic President Thomas Girdler. He vowed never to accept the workers’ union, the Steelworkers Organizing Committee.
No police were killed. Even so, the officers pleaded self-defense, claiming they feared for their lives. None were prosecuted.
The atrocity is a stark reminder of corporate America’s often violent resistance to organized labor, and of a legal system that historically has almost always allied itself with capital over labor.
At a 2022 event commemorating the 85th anniversary of the Memorial Day Massacre, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmon recalled that the right-wing press and politicians criminalized the strikers “for having the audacity to stand together and stand up to some of the most powerful companies in America and call for better working conditions.”
Redmond, a Steelworker, said the event was more than a gathering to honor the lives, work, and sacrifice of the strikers. “We’re here to reflect on this tragic event in labor history, in our nation’s history. But we have to do more than reflect on the past or we risk the past repeating itself.”
The CIO News editorialized on the first anniversary of the massacre:
“Ten dead men will picket here forever,” said a banner carried by demonstrators before the South Chicago plant of Republic Steel. ...
Living pickets are human beings of flesh and blood. They may be beaten down with clubs or pierced with bullets. Ambulances and police wagons may carry away their bodies. Brute force may triumph for a day over the living. But it has no power over the dead.
Just as the soul of John Brown went marching on, until slavery was abolished, so the protest of the picket line cannot be destroyed by violence.
Chicago police drove the picketing steel workers from the Republic Steel plant in one of the most fiendish massacres of modern times. But for every man they killed, ten thousand have arisen who are sworn to keep the soul of the 1937 picket line marching on, until its purpose has been achieved.
Republic Steel is more effectively picketed today by the determination of hundreds of thousands of union steel workers than ever before the massacre.
The memory of the ten dead men will continue this picket line until collective bargaining is accepted by every steel company in the land – and until the political hirelings who order working people murdered are removed from every public office.
Not until 1942, the year after the U.S. entered World War II, did Republic recognize the United Steelworkers of America, the successor to the SWOC.
“Which Side Are You On?” is a famous old union song. Donald Trump, one of the most anti-union presidents ever, is on the side of the Thomas Girdlers of today. In his speech at last year’s Democratic National Convention, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called Trump a “scab.”
Two months before this Memorial Day, the president signed an executive order with a typically disingenuous Trumpian title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“The order essentially declared that Trump is the ultimate arbiter of US history and had the right to police thought,” David Corn wrote in Mother Jones last month. The article was headlined: “Donald Trump’s War on History” and was accompanied by the subhead, “Like other autocrats, he wants to control the nation’s story and police thought.”
Added Corn, MJ’s Washington, DC, bureau chief “… Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.”
Union history also has no place in Trumpian history in which, like in all else Trumpian, only Rich White Lives Matter.
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