“A Major Breakdown of Democratic Government”

Abstract

The hunt for those responsible for the Memorial Day Massacre dovetailed with the Chicago Tribune’s longstanding campaign to discredit the labor movement. It reinforced the efforts of the steel industry, American business, southern conservatives, and die-hard anti-Roosevelt Republicans to derail the New Deal and thwart social democratic reform. Although Roosevelt retaliated effectively against the Dupont-funded right-wing Liberty League during the 1936 election, the anti-New Deal forces it represented gained strength. They reveled in the political quandary that the strike wave created for the administration. For the intellectuals, reformers, and frontline steelworkers who held the picket lines, the dispute in Chicago was no longer simply over a signed contract and union recognition. It had become one phase of the larger struggle that defined this era. The drive for a legitimate union in steel had become fused to the wider movement for economic democracy in modern America. “Civil liberties,” the Daily Worker reasoned, if they are to have any meaning in Chicago, must be fought for by a united coalition of progressives and labor groups. At present, the editors added, “civil liberties do not exist in Chicago. The Constitution is a dead letter.”¹