[The first film to fully explore the 1937 tragedy in Chicago, when
police shot and killed ten pro-labor marchers--and the shocking film
cover-up that followed. ]
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BURIED FOOTAGE HELPED CHICAGO POLICE GET AWAY WITH KILLING 10 LABOR
ACTIVISTS IN 1937  
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Greg Mitchell
May 7, 2023
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ The first film to fully explore the 1937 tragedy in Chicago, when
police shot and killed ten pro-labor marchers--and the shocking film
cover-up that followed. _

Chicago Police attack a march of steelworkers and their families, May
30, 1937. , Photo National Archives and Records Administration

 

A major labor strike is back on the front pages this week, as Writers
Guild members—movie and TV writers—have walked out. The most
obvious fallout so far: late night talk shows going dark or struggling
for jokes. Stephen Colbert, before signing off on CBS for who knows
how many weeks, did declare:_ _“This nation owes so much to
unions.”

Labor actions and organizing, in fact, have been surging in recent
years, mainly in new industries, from Starbucks to Amazon and Apple.

Decades in the past, strikes often led to violent conflict between
workers and local police. It virtually never happens today. This is at
least partly due to what happened eighty-six years ago this month in
Chicago, after police shot forty steel strikers and supporters (mainly
in the back) and killed ten of them in what has become known as The
Memorial Day Massacre
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No labor conflict has come close to this toll since.

Nevertheless, Paramount buried the only footage of the incident, until
a famed reporter and crusading U.S. senator brought it to light.

My new film exploring all this premiered over PBS on May 6. It’s
titled _Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried. _It will be
aired over local PBS stations all month but everyone can watch it
starting the same night and for several weeks after via PBS.org and
PBS apps
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or at the site for the hosting station, KCET in Los Angeles.

It’s also explored my companion book
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oral history on the tragedy, with testimony from eyewitnesses as well
as historians and authors such as Howard Zinn, John Hope Franklin,
Gore Vidal, David Kennedy and Studs Terkel, and even Ayn Rand.

The background: A wave of labor actions swept America starting in
1935. Sit-down strikes became all the rage and even General Motors and
Ford caved. The largest steel company, U.S. Steel, avoided a strike by
offering workers--under pressure from new CIO chief John L. Lewis--but
companies known as Little Steel (though hardly small) across the
Midwest and Pennsylvania, refused to even recognize the new Steel
Workers Organizing Committee.

More than 70,000 at those plants declared a strike in late-May, 1937.
When some set up picket lines outside Republic Steel in South Chicago,
police swung nightsticks and more than two dozen were injured. So they
scheduled a family picnic to mobilize support on a broad field several
blocks from the Republic plant on May 30. Well over one thousand
turned out on this hot, sunny day, including many women and children,
dressed in their Sunday best. Organizers called for a ragged march to
the plant for legal, mass, picketing.

When they were halted by hundreds of Chicago police, armed with
pistols and some carrying axe handles or tear gas provided by
Republic, a few minutes of heated discussion ensued. Some marchers
tossed stones or a tree branch, and police lost patience with the
crowd, which included women and children, when they failed to disperse
as ordered. Suddenly police hurled tear gas bombs and then fired
dozens of shots.

About 40 marchers would be shot as they fled across the open prairie,
including an 11-year-old boy, the vast majority wounded in the back or
side. (Ten would die that day or in days ahead.) Dozens more would
suffer head wounds after police clubbed the retreating marchers.

Police did not call ambulances or administer first aid but instead
arrested the wounded and shoved them into paddy wagons for trips to a
prison hospital and other distant medical facilities. Only a handful
of police suffered injuries, all minor.

Newspapers across the country (including _The New York Times_) almost
invariably described the marchers as a “mob” of “rioters” who
left no choice but for police to fire shots to keep them from
attacking the plant. After two weeks of this, it emerged that a
leading newsreel company, Paramount News, had a cameraman on the
scene. He had filmed almost the entire confrontation and ugly
aftermath. But Paramount failed to release the four-minute newsreel it
prepared, claiming they feared it might set off riots in movie
theaters, but more likely to protect Chicago police and officials.

This sparked a Senate subcommittee, under the Wisconsin progressive,
Robert M. La Follette, Jr., to subpoena the footage. A staffer leaked
it to investigative reporter, Paul Y. Anderson, who wrote a
sensational report picked up by many newspapers. At the
well-publicized hearings called by La Follette at the end of June the
footage was screened for the first time.

Paramount now had little choice but to release a newsreel devoted to
the incident. Screenings, however, would be banned in cities such as
Chicago and St. Louis, or by entire theater chains. The Senate report
would place full blame on police for the massacre. Yet a coroner’s
jury in Chicago would judge the killings “justifiable homicide.”
No police would be punished. Dozens of unionists had been wounded,
jailed or fined.

Workers at the steel plant returned to the plants without a contract,
but they would win recognition and most of their demands a few years
later. And there was this positive result: Strike leaders in nearly
every field now tried to avoid violent conflicts at all cost and
police were determined to control labor actions without the use of
firearms.

Today, police shootings of unarmed citizens remain far too common, and
often unpunished. But there is this further legacy of 1937 massacre:
It provoked the first calls for police to be equipped with cameras to
document arrests—anticipating the dashboard-cams and body-cams that
reveal so many of the unjust shootings today.

GREG MITCHELL is the author of a dozen non-fiction books and director
of a new film for PBS, Memorial Day Massacre:  Workers Die, Film
Buried, which premiered on May 6 over KCET in Los Angeles and is now
available everywhere via PBS.org and PBS apps.  He is also the author
of the Memorial Day Massacre companion book, the first oral history on
the tragedy, with commentary by everyone from wounded eyewitnesses to
Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel and John Hope Franklin.  

Our mission at HISTORY NEWS NETWORK is to help put current events
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whipsawed emotionally on talk shows this way and that in response to
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search for profits by media companies and sponsors, historians are
especially needed now. They can help remind us of the superficiality
of what-happens-today-is-all-that-counts journalism. Subscribe HERE
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* Labor History
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* chicago
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* police killings
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* Memorial Day Massacre
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