Little Steel strike

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the May 31, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

South Chicago, Memorial Day 1937: Mollie West was there with a group of high school seniors. Curtis Strong was there for the hell of it. Aaron Cohen was there because of the responsibilities assigned him by the Communist Party.

"There" was the field fronting the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, site of the Memorial Day Massacre of May 30, 1937.

It was the first warm day of spring. Hundreds of steelworkers, on strike against the "Little Steel" companies and backed by hundreds of supporters, some dressed in their Sunday best, had come to assert the right of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to establish a picket line at the gate of the Republic Steel plant.

The line was never established. Before day's end they would be attacked by an army of gun-toting, stick-wielding Chicago cops. Ten men would be dead or mortally wounded, countless others severely beaten and many more temporarily blinded by tear gas.

Mollie was walking near the front of the group when Chicago's finest opened fire with tear gas and pistol. "I started to run and fell down. Several others stumbled on top of me. It wasn't very comfortable," Mollie, said in a telephone interview from Chicago. "But it may have saved my life. And it certainly kept me from being beaten with those riot sticks the cops were using."

By the time Mollie came up for air the worst was over. "It was unbelievable, what I saw," she said. "The place looked like a battlefield." And she saw - or felt - something else: "I looked around to see a policeman holding his gun against my back. 'Get off the field,' he ordered, 'or I'll shoot you.'"

Several people came to her rescue and carried her to the first aid station at Sam's Place, the watering hole that SWOC had rented as headquarters during the strike against the nation's second tier steel makers.

Several doctors had responded to the call for public support. "They never imagined that they would need to turn it into a field hospital," Mollie said. "But they did - just like in M*A*S*H."

Curtis hadn't planned on doing anything that day. He was working at the Gary Works of U.S. Steel and was an active SWOC member of what is now Local 1014 of the Steelworkers union. "I thought, why should I go? Shortly after General Motors capitulated to the Auto Workers union, U.S. Steel signed a contract with SWOC."

But ever one to seek adventure, Curtis decided to go. "I thought - what the hell, why not?" he said when reached at his home in Gary. "What started as a lark became one of the most damnable experiences in my life."

Curtis thought the first shots were meant to scare people. "I just knew that no one, not even Chicago's notoriously anti-union police, would open fire on peaceful demonstrators who were demanding the right to put up a picket line at the Republic plant."

But he soon found out how mistaken he was. "A guy about six feet away from me was hit and I started to run - and damn fast. I had set state track records when I was in high school."

Aaron Cohen had been a coal miner in southern Illinois and a leader in the reform movement of the United Mine Workers of America. As such, he earned the wrath of one Van A. Bittner, UMWA district director, whose goons once beat Aaron within an inch of his life.

But the heat of the class struggle can melt old relationships and forge new ones - and such was the case with Aaron Cohen and Van A. Bittner. By the time SWOC launched its drive to organize the steel industry Bittner was running the show in Illinois and Cohen, then 28 years old, was a member of the Communist Party leadership in Chicago.

Shortly after setting up shop, Bittner invited Aaron and Bill Gebert, head of the Illinois CP, to a meeting where he asked Aaron to find SWOC organizers among the various nationality groups and to help get favorable coverage of the campaign in the foreign- language press.

"It was a bit 'frosty' at first," Aaron remembers. "Bittner didn't quite know how to deal with me. But I made the first move. I stuck out my hand and said something like, 'We're in this together, Van,' and that was it."

Aaron, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, described the Memorial Day event - at least in the beginning - as a "jolly kind of affair. There was a holiday spirit. Guys were walking with their girlfriends. Some brought their families and picnic lunches. There was a baseball game and things for the kids to do."

The strike began at 11 p.m. on May 26 and police had prevented the union from establishing a picket line at the Republic plant. "So we decided that the whole bunch would go down and set up a mass picket line. After all, Mayor Kelly said SWOC had the right to picket," Aaron said.

Aaron, too, couldn't believe what was happening. "But when Alfred Causey, who was standing less than an arm's length from me, fell with four bullets in his back, I became a believer." Aaron's voice hardened when he added: "There was Causey laying there dead - and they were still beating him."

When the group - "at least 1,000-strong" according to George Patterson, who led the demonstration - neared Republic property they were met by police lined up for about a quarter of a mile "protecting" the mill.

"For once we had as many pickets as there were police," Patterson said in his oral history of the massacre. "I went up to Police Commander Kilroy who was reading from a document. 'I ask you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to disperse,' he read and dropped the paper to his side with a flourish."

There was no verbal command, Patterson remembered. "When Kilroy lowered the paper, all hell broke loose. Bullets were flying, gas was flying and then the clubbing."

When Patterson stopped running he looked at the carnage - at the young boy limping by, bleeding from a bullet wound in his heel, at men and women lying on the ground, some dead, others mortally wounded.

Patterson said he "learned about death" on the prairie before the Republic plant. "It doesn't take long to know when a man falls forward on his face that he's been killed, he's dead, he doesn't move any more."

Police may have been able to cover up the massacre had it not been for Orlando Lippert, a news cameraman for the Paramount Newsreel division and his motion picture camera.

Within seconds - "fewer than seven," Lippert told a Senate investigating committee - after the assault began, he had his camera grinding away, eventually shooting several magazines of film which he sent to New York.

Paramount executives withheld the film, labeling it "restrictive negatives. Clips and printing of this material absolutely forbidden."

However, the film was subpoenaed by Sen. Robert La Follette's subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee and shown to a closed-door meeting that included Commander Kilroy, Patterson and several reporters, some of whom wrote stories of the events depicted in the film.

Republic Steel's Tom Girdler was the lead dog in the employer's sleigh team that not only provoked the strike but made plans to drown it in blood in a holy war to prevent "the Communists" from taking over. And they meant business:

The La Follette hearings, which began on July 2, did more than expose the Memorial Day events. Committee investigators found that Republic was the largest buyer of tear and sickening gas in the country. Republic's private arsenal was stocked with 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns and 83,000 rounds of ammunition. The other companies had similar arms caches.

In his autobiography, Len DeCaux, first editor of CIO News, described the Little Steel Strike as a "murderous class war." In addition to the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago:

* Strikers were gassed, clubbed, shot in Youngstown, Massillon and Cleveland, bringing the total killed to 18.

* Governors, mayors, sheriffs and police were suborned against SWOC and the CIO, sometimes with hard cash.

* The Mohawk Valley Formula, with its "citizens' committees," back-to-work movements and other strike- breaking techniques was applied with vigor.

* "Friends of labor" in public office betrayed SWOC, as witnessed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's "curse on both your houses" remark at a press conference.

Although the Little Steel Strike ended with only Inland signing an agreement, it has earned a place in the annals of the great battles of the American working class.

In 1937 - as they had been in the Great Steel Strike of 1919 and are at Wheeling-Pittsburgh today - steelworkers were in the vanguard of the class struggle. We salute all of them!

**Little Steel: Gus Hall remembers**

It has been written that there are no great men or women but only great challenges that ordinary men and women rise to meet. That certainly applies to the Little Steel Strike as it unfolded in Warren and Youngstown, Ohio in early summer of 1937.

It was there that Tom Girdler - the arrogant CEO at Republic who boasted he would pick apples before signing a union contract with a bunch of Communists - tested the courage and leadership ability of a young Gus Hall. And it was there that he learned about both.

Hall, then on the staff of the Steel Workers Organizing Committe, says the Republic strike at Warren was unique in ways that hold lessons for today. "It was a strike of the entire community against Girdler - against his thugs, his political hirelings and his provocateurs. Even our picket lines were family affairs," Gus said.

"In a strike it is important to keep people - not just strikers, but all people - informed. So we held public meetings every night. That not only helped build morale but it gave people a way to think how they could help. I think that helps explain the rank- and-file initiative that was a characteristic of our strike."

Throughout our discussion - Gus doesn't give interviews, it becomes a give-and-take discussion - he kept emphasizing grassroots initiative. "There was a landing strip in the Republic property and they used planes to bring in scabs and food. Some of the strikers were hunters and had guns. I don't know anything about it," he said, tongue-in-cheek, "but I'm told that they were pretty good at hitting moving targets - and a plane is bigger than a bird."

Strikers, themselves, found other ways to get things done: Committees of volunteers taking it on themselves to organize the small business community to support the strike with donations and by extending credit; members of the neighborhood working in the strike kitchen.

"The rank and file saw it as their strike - that it not only affected their lives but that they could affect it. It was not a top down operation."

Gus said he "lost count" of how many times he was arrested but the charges ranged from the ridiculous - like being charged with malicious destruction of property because he backed a car into Republic's fence or, in a more serious vein, an attempt to frame him on a dynamite charge. (Suffice it to say that at the hearings before the La Follette Committe of the U.S. Senate, the DA said the charge had been dropped for lack of evidence.)

"Don't get me wrong," Gus continued. "There was dynamite - and lots of it. We found explosives in the union office and in the cars of strikers. There were threats to assassinate strike leaders, including me. Two men were arrested after they were found with bomb-making material but they were released and left town."

During our talk it became clear that Gus enjoys a good fight, as well as the "good fight."

"I wouldn't call the Little Steel Strike 'fun,'" he said, "but it had its humorous moments. Like the time the chief of police in Warren said that it was Gus Hall who was Public Enemy Number One, not John Dillinger. So he sent a whole detail of police to serve an arrest warrant on me - and while they were looking for me I walked into the police station and surrendered. They were so surprised they didn't know what to do."

Nor was that the end of the story. The strike committee had been working with a number of clergy as part of their community outreach. When the men of the cloth found that Gus was in jail and that his bail - as deserving of Public Enemy Number One - had been set sky high, they visited him in jail and then raised the money to get him out and back on the battle line.

Gus said the Little Steel Strike left a "lasting imprint" on the political landscape of North East Ohio. "Before the strike it was solid Republican country. It became Democratic after the strike and is still that way."

The Little Steel Strike also left a lasting imprint on the lives of Tom Girdler and Gus Hall.

While it is not known whether Girdler ever had to pick apples, some things are known: He was forced to resign as head of Republic Steel and Republic eventually signed a union contract.

And we know something else: The young Gus Hall who slugged it out with Girdler in 1937 went on to become an internationally- recognized leader of the Communist movement and is today national chair of the Communist Party, USA.

- Fred Gaboury