Abstract
Despite the stunning clashes, industrial unionism did not become an inexorable tide. The failure of the NRA to enforce labor codes, the ambivalence of the Roosevelt administration, and the hostility of business owners to the entire idea of independent unions prevented the movement from congealing in 1934. The inability of the Amalgamated to coordinate a national movement revived the ghosts of 1919, when the steel strike failed to achieve a united front. In 1934 and into 1935, John L. Lewis and Philip Murray of the United Mine Workers (UMW) resisted any steel strike under the guidance of rank-and-file leadership. They wanted a government-sanctioned effort that they could control, not a grassroots insurgency that threatened a more radical form of unionism than they would ever support. Arrayed against businesses that flouted Section 7(a) and hobbled by its inherent weaknesses, the union tide receded.1 Even so the embers of working-class militancy would continue to smolder. Before they caught flame, however, Chicago’s steelworkers would have to rediscover the merits of working-class self-determination.
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Notes
Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 118–19, 133–5;
Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 19–21.
Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People During the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), p. 345.
Tom Girdler in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes, Boot Straps: The Autobiography of Tom Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 214.
LSC, Violations of Free Speech and Labor, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part IV: The “Little Steel” Strike and Citizens’ Committee (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), p. 51.
William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, Volume 3: Parts 4 and 5 (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1971), p. 1227; Girdler, Boot Straps, pp. 211–12, quote on p. 212.
LSC, Labor Policies of Employers’ Associations, Part III: The National Association of Manufacturers (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 89–91.
William Hal Bork, “The Memorial Day ‘Massacre’ of 1937 and its Significance in the Unionization of the Republic Steel Corporation,” MA thesis, University of Illinois, 1975, p. 21.
Ibid., p. 85; Robert R.R. Brooks, As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 80–1; James D. Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 104;
Thomas F. Dorrance, “Remaking on Older New Deal: Chicago Employment Politics, 1932–1936,” Labor 7 (Winter, 2010): 80–81.
Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961), pp. 126–7; ibid., pp. 114–20.
Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 448.
Edward Levinson, “American Labor Leaders, 1936,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 172 (May 1936): 696–7.
David Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism: The SWOC Era,” in Paul F. Clark et al., eds., Forging a Union of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC, and the United Steelworkers (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987), pp. 20–1;
Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 130–2.
Max Gordon, “The Communists and the Drive to Organize Steel, 1936,” Labor History 23 (Spring 1982): 258.
Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 107–27;
Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 150–2.
Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 69–70.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso Press, 1997), pp. 4–7, 125.
James R. Barrett, “The History of American Communism and Our Understanding of Communism,” American Communist History 2 (2003): 181.
Annette T. Rubinstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Historical Overview,” in Michael Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), p. 246.
Mark Naison, “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front,” in Michael Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pp. 45–73; Ralph M. Compere form letter to “Dear Sir and Brother,” December 16, 1936, George Patterson Papers, Box 6, Folder 3. Compere was the group’s Midwest organizer.
Ronald L. Filipelli, “The History Is Missing, Almost: Philip Murray, the Steelworkers, and the Historians,” in Paul F. Clark et al. (eds.), Forging a Union of Steel (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987), pp. 10–11; Melvyn Dubofsky, “Labor’s Odd Couple: Philip Murray and John L. Lewis,” ibid., pp. 32–4.
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© 2010 Michael Dennis
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Dennis, M. (2010). Hammer and Tong: The Struggle for Steel. In: The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114722_4
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