The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America

The Last Great Strike

The Last Great Strike

LITTLE STEEL, THE CIO, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LABOR RIGHTS IN NEW DEAL AMERICA

Ahmed White

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Ahmed, 1970–.

    The last great strike : Little Steel, the CIO, and the struggle for labor rights in New Deal America / Ahmed White.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28560-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-28561-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96101-2 (ebook)

    1. Little Steel Strike, U.S., 1937.    2. Iron and steel workers—Labor unions—United States—History—20th century.    3. United States—History—1933–1945.    4. New Deal, 1933–1939.    I. Title.

    HD5384.I521937 W45    2016

    331.892’8691097309043—dc23

2015018714

Manufactured in the United States of America

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10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents, Marion Overton and Doris Morein White, who taught me so much about the meaning of struggle; and to the steel workers, whose story of struggle I am so honored to tell

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Labor, Little Steel, and the New Deal

PART I: THE OPEN SHOP

1 • Like a Penitentiary: Steel and the Origins of the Open Shop

2 • They Should Honor Us: Work and Conflict in the Open Shop Era

3 • Sure, We Have Guns: The Open Shop in the Depression Era

4 • I Never Gave That Guy Nothin’: The New Deal and the Changing Landscape of Labor Relations

5 • To Banish Fear: The Campaign to Organize Steel

PART II: THE STRIKE

6 • The Spirit of Unrest: From Stalemate to Walkout

7 • In the Name of the People: The Incident on Memorial Day

8 • What Had to Be Done: The Struggle at the Mill Gates

9 • A Change of Heart: Corporate Power and New Deal Strikebreaking

10 • Let’s Bust Them Up: Last Struggles and Defeat

PART III: THE AFTERMATH

11 • A Steel Strike Is Not a Picnic: The Anatomy of Failure

12 • Kind of a Victory: New Deal Labor Law on Trial

13 • Unreconciled: War, Victory, and the Legacies of Defeat

Conclusion: These Things That Mean So Much to Us

Appendix

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliographic Note

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was first enthralled by the story of Little Steel and the CIO seven years ago, while researching other episodes of labor conflict in the New Deal era. Soon convinced that the strike had not received nearly the attention from researchers that it deserved, I set out to write this book. As I suppose is often the case with first-time authors of books like this one, my enthusiasm for the project may have led me to underestimate the challenges that lay ahead. But I was also fortunate, for a number of people and institutions helped me along. It is my pleasure to acknowledge their support in bringing this story to print.

I must stress at the outset how grateful I am to my editor at the University of California Press, Neils Hooper, and his assistant, Bradley Depew, for their faith in this project and their labors in helping to produce a publishable work. I am equally indebted to Kate Hoffman and Julie Van Pelt for their help in editing the manuscript for publication and to the reviewers of this book, most of them still anonymous, who found merit in the manuscript and provided me with useful recommendations and advice. And I am beholden to Cecelia Cancellero for the excellent work she did in preparing the manuscript for review and shepherding it through the process.

Quite a few librarians and archivists aided me in negotiating archival sources and putting together the research on which this book is based. This book would have been impossible without Penn State University’s Historical Collections and Labor Archives, an outstanding institution that houses the records of the United Steelworkers of America and its predecessor, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. My efforts there benefited tremendously from the generosity and expertise of librarians James Quigel Jr. and Barry Kernfeld. Equally important were the collections of government, union, and company records at the Ohio Historical Society, in Columbus, and the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor. There, too, the librarians and archivists were models of professionalism and patience. I am compelled to give special thanks to Martha Bishop at the Youngstown Historical Center, who very generously accommodated my frenzied schedule at the expense of her own time and convenience. I was similarly favored at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, where I was granted access to the records of the Republic Steel Corporation, and at the Chicago Historical Society, home to significant regional union records and important documents pertaining to the strike’s deadliest incident. And I received vital, last-minute assistance from the staff of the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at Catholic University in Washington, DC.

A number of friends and colleagues, including Emily Calhoun, Kenneth Casebeer, David Hill, Alan Hyde, James Pope, and Pierre Schlag, generously read the entire manuscript and provided me with valuable commentary and constructive criticisms. Ellen Dannin closely and critically reviewed an early introductory section of the manuscript, and Michael Goldfield listened patiently and responded incisively to my descriptions of the project. Jane Thompson, librarian at the University of Colorado School of Law, and her assistant, Matt Zafiratos, gave me crucial research support, especially with respect to securing obscure secondary sources. Nefertari Kirkman-Bey, Marissa McGarrah, Liana Orshan, Hunter Swain, and Tarn Udall, all former students of mine, provided valuable research assistance. Along with my faculty assistants, Nicole Drane and Charlie Bowers, whose unfailingly courteous efforts advanced many aspects of this project, Tarn also exceeded all reasonable expectations in working to secure copyright permissions for the images that illustrate the book.

I wrote this book entirely during my service on the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Law, where, I am happy to say, I found the standard resources more than adequate to cover the costs of research and travel, as well as my own upkeep. Among other advantages, this privileged circumstance spared me the trouble—and, dare I say, contradiction—of seeking financial assistance from corporate entities, or from the foundations, fellowships, and prizes they fund, in order to write this book about class struggle and the dangers of corporate power. For this, I am most grateful to the students and the people of the state of Colorado.

I presented aspects of the research that comprises this book on several occasions over the years. The strike was the topic of the 2009 Austin Scott Lecture at my own institution, as well as of presentations at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, the 2010 How Class Works Conference at SUNY–Stony Brook, the 2012 ClassCrits Conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the 2013 Cleveland Laborfest and Forum. At each of these gatherings, I received a host of helpful suggestions, criticisms, and encouragements from scholars, community activists, and, perhaps most notably, former steel workers and their children.

I am bound to give special thanks to other friends, including the late Don Wright. A veteran of more recent struggles in steel and a thoroughly remarkable individual, Don shared stories of that period in his life during a holiday party in Aurora, Colorado, on a frigid night in 2008, which did much to motivate me to write about Little Steel. Unfortunately, Don never realized this. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hayden, a former neighbor of mine and one-time steel worker himself, and Tom Sodders, retired union man and activist in northeast Ohio. Both passionate intellectuals, Jim and Tom gave me numerous insights about this project and showed an enthusiasm for it that helped sustain my own labors. Indeed, it is impossible for me to name all of the friends and colleagues who provided me with advice on some part of this project or another or otherwise inspired me to see it through. But at least a few others warrant special mention, including Aya Gruber, Lakshman Guruswamy, Jane Hill, George Priest, Todd Stafford, Mark Squillace, Niles Utlaut, and Tilman Wuerschmidt.

I would be terribly remiss if I did not also mention the support I received from my family, including my siblings, John White, Lia White-Allen, and Ismail White, and their spouses, Joycelyn Cortez, Troy Allen, and Corrine McConnaughy. Educators and intellectuals all, they helped me think through many aspects of this project while also providing me with more practical forms of assistance, including, in the case of Ismail and Corrine, accommodating me during two lengthy research trips to Ohio. Finally, I must thank my partner, Teresa Bruce, whose many inspired suggestions, steadfast conviction that this project would eventually succeed, and loving support were all, in the end, essential. Of course, any shortcomings in the book are entirely my own.

FIGURE 1. The Memorial Day Massacre: Chicago police assault strikers and supporters attempting to picket Republic Steel’s South Chicago Works, May 30, 1937. © 1937, Associated Press/Carl Linde.

Introduction

LABOR, LITTLE STEEL, AND THE NEW DEAL

I’d never seen police beat women, not white women, Jesse Reese marveled as he crawled through the grass under the afternoon sun on a desolate field in the southernmost reaches of the city of Chicago. It was Memorial Day—Sunday, May 30, 1937. All around Reese, scores of club-wielding police were beating people, men and women, black as well as white, and firing gas weapons and firearms, striking down dozens. Reese, a black man and a fugitive from a Mississippi chain gang years earlier, was no stranger to brutality and injustice. And yet he was stunned as he beheld victims of this onslaught, running and stumbling and crying out in shock and pain.¹

Moments earlier Reese had been firmly on his feet, one of at least fifteen hundred demonstrators who had marched to within a couple hundred yards of the gate of a steel mill owned by the Republic Steel Corporation. The demonstrators’ cause was industrial unionism. Earlier that afternoon they had rallied at an old tavern that served as local headquarters for the union that had called a strike against Republic. Reese himself, a union organizer in a nearby steel plant, had arrived with truckloads of other strikers. From the tavern he and the other demonstrators had walked down the street five or six blocks and then marched across an open field toward the mill’s gate. It was just after 4:00 P.M. Along with strikers from Republic and their families, the demonstrators’ ranks included workers from other steel companies as well as an assortment of sympathizers who supported the union’s cause. Ethnically and racially diverse, the demonstrators were mostly men. But there were many women, too, and also a few children, brought along by some who anticipated a festive outing.

As they made their way across the field, the throng of demonstrators fanned out into a ragged column. Led by two strikers bearing American flags, the crowd chanted slogans, the main refrain an affirmation of the labor federation that sponsored their efforts: CIO! CIO! The demonstrators’ aim that afternoon was certain, at least to themselves. They intended to assert their right under federal law, as they saw it, to establish a large picket line at Republic’s gate. Some held signs denouncing the steel company or proclaiming their right to picket. A handful carried sticks and rocks, and many must have expected some kind of fracas with the police, at least when the crowd closely approached the steel plant. But few could have anticipated what awaited.

Stationed between the approaching throng and the mill gate were about 250 uniformed members of the Chicago Police Department, armed with revolvers, nightsticks, hatchet handles, and various gas weapons. Beyond the police, at the gate and behind the barbwire-topped fence bounding the mill, were dozens of Republic’s own police armed with gas weapons, billy clubs, and firearms. About one thousand workers at the mill had defied the call to strike and remained inside the plant. At least one hundred, and maybe many hundreds, of these men were stationed behind the company police, some wielding clubs and pipes.

When the demonstrators reached the police position, representatives on each side faced off while many others, police and demonstrators, bunched up behind, forming thick, ragged lines. Arguments erupted as the demonstrators demanded their right to picket the gate, and the police refused them passage, insisting that they disperse. After a few minutes, the standoff exploded in the flash of violence that left Reese crawling in the grass. With little provocation, the police fired their revolvers and gas weapons into the gathering of strikers and supporters, mortally wounding ten men and inflicting nonlethal gunshot wounds on some thirty men, women, and children.

The demonstrators fell like wheat before a scythe, one victim recalled. Films and the testimony of numerous witnesses document a horrific scene as the demonstrators’ raucous shouting, smiling faces, and relaxed, upright demeanors were reduced in an instant to overwhelming expressions of shock and fear and contortions of panic and agony. Those who could, ran for their lives. But many were unable because they had been seriously injured or, like Reese, had been knocked to the ground. Others, showing great courage, went to the aid of shocked or wounded comrades. Still others from the broken crowd simply stood in place.

The police rushed forth into this mass of people, firing more shots from their revolvers, beating the demonstrators, men and women, wounded and able-bodied, and manhandling dozens, wounded included, into waiting patrol wagons. Some of the police exulted as they attacked the helpless and compliant unionists, or were consumed by rage. Some went about this business in a workman-like fashion. A small few were themselves shocked by the mayhem. When after several minutes the violence waned, about two hundred gunshots had been fired, all by the police, and approximately one hundred demonstrators had been hurt, including those fatally shot. The police suffered only about thirty injuries, none very serious.

LITTLE STEEL, THE CIO, AND THE NEW DEAL

A signal moment in the history of labor and class conflict in America, the Memorial Day Massacre, as it came to be called, was but one of many violent chapters in a bitter and prolonged strike during the summer of 1937. The Little Steel Strike pitted steel workers aligned with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO; later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations) against a group of powerful steel companies. The companies—Republic Steel Corporation, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, and Inland Steel Company—were dubbed Little Steel only to distinguish them from the enormous U.S. Steel Corporation, or Big Steel, as every one of them ranked among the hundred largest firms in America. Acting in concert, they were also interlinked with other capitalist interests, including powerful trade groups and business organizations. This coalition of capitalists was intent on using the strike to mount what one commentator went so far as to call an armed rebellion against the movements for economic reform and industrial unionism that surged with such strength in that era.²

The SWOC launched the strike against Little Steel on May 26, 1937, after a year’s struggle to organize the companies’ workers. The striking steel workers asserted the right to build an independent union, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to protest by striking and picketing. Although for decades denied most American workers, these rights had been enacted into federal law two years earlier, via the Wagner Act, a legislative centerpiece of the Roosevelt administration’s Second New Deal that was held constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court only weeks before the strike began in the landmark decision NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel.³ But as the men who ran the steel companies saw things, the letter of the law could not trump their prerogatives as industrial capitalists. True to the industry’s tradition of violent and effective opposition to organized labor, Little Steel aggressively resisted the SWOC’s organizing efforts and refused the union’s demands. The companies defied the Wagner Act and the authority of the agency charged with enforcing it, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And they bucked a trend among other large industrial employers during that same period, including U.S. Steel, which had begun to retreat from decades of absolute opposition to basic labor rights.

The Little Steel Strike played out across seven states and involved around thirty mills. At its height in June 1937, over eighty thousand steel workers, along with at least ten thousand CIO miners and other sympathy strikers, were off the job. Although many steel workers were passive participants and thousands opposed the strike, tens of thousands embraced the union’s cause. Aided by sympathizers, these men picketed plant gates for weeks and even months in the face of widespread threats, provocations, and assaults. They tried desperately to inflict economic damage on the companies and to sustain support for their cause among fellow workers, with the broader public, and among politicians and other elites. And they took the offensive against the companies and their allies, organizing sympathy strikes as well as acts of sabotage and violence and intimidating picket lines.

By the end of that summer, at least sixteen people, all unionists, had lost their lives; hundreds of people had been badly injured; and as many as two thousand had been arrested in confrontations between union people, on the one hand, and public and company police, National Guardsmen, and loyal employees, on the other. But the mills reopened and the strike was crushed. Afterward, the companies effectively fired upward of eight thousand strikers, and the SWOC and CIO stood in disarray. It would take years of litigation as well as changes in political economy wrought by the Second World War before the companies acceded to the rights the workers had demanded.

THE STRIKE AND THE MEASURE OF LABOR RIGHTS

The Little Steel Strike has the distinction of being the deadliest strike, not only of the 1930s, but probably of the whole period from the early 1920s through the present time. The strike embodied class conflict on a scale and with a raw intensity seldom surpassed in American history. Nevertheless, the strike has not been well studied, or even much remembered. Although professional historians, labor law scholars, and popular writers mention the conflict in nearly every history of labor relations or the New Deal era, the strike has garnered little focused attention outside of a few accounts of the Memorial Day Massacre, a couple of other localized studies in journals, and brief narratives in broader histories of the New Deal.⁴ The best book about the conflict, a 2010 volume by Michael Dennis, focuses on the Memorial Day Massacre and tends to condense the far-ranging and drawn-out conflict into this one incident.⁵ The closest thing to a comprehensive history of the strike remains an unpublished 1961 doctoral dissertation by Donald Sofchalk.⁶ No one has marshaled the available sources, including scattered archival collections, examined the whole of the strike in its larger historical context, or shown how the strike was affected by and in turn shaped labor law and policy and labor relations. Seventy-eight years later, fundamental questions about this, the last great strike of an era defined by spectacular upheaval, have remained unresolved and the strike’s significance unappreciated.

When the strike is discussed, it is common for its events to be misunderstood and its meaning and legacy miscast. Scholars and other commentators often describe the companies’ eventual concession to union recognition as a symbol of the final victory of the CIO, New Deal labor law, and the NLRB over a deeply entrenched tradition of unqualified employer opposition to labor rights that had long presided in steel and other important industries.⁷ The struggle with Little Steel is thereby folded into a larger, dominant narrative about the triumph of industrial unionism, becoming a dramatic but temporary setback on a march to sweeping victory. In the same vein, some historians have argued that the strike even boomeranged to the overall benefit of labor and the labor law, its specters of open class warfare supposedly warming the public and elites alike to the need for a functional regime of labor rights.⁸

Elsewhere the strike is dismissed, even by those who profess to honor its martyrs, as a poorly timed and badly executed gambit by the SWOC and the CIO that played into the companies’ strengths and revealed more about the need for mature tactics and preparation by industrial unionists than it did anything ominous about the state of labor rights in New Deal America. Reflecting back on the strike from the late 1960s, when both the industry and the SWOC’s successor, the United Steelworkers of America (USW), were at their peak of wealth and stability, David McDonald, secretary-treasurer of the SWOC during the strike and, later, president of the USW, declared the strike a lesson in poor planning that was nonetheless vindicated, along with the labor law, by the companies’ eventual agreement. While Little Steel may have prevailed in the short term, and while the unionists’ defeat hurt like hell when it happened, said McDonald, the processes and those of us who stood by them proved too strong in the end. The victory of Little Steel was short-lived.⁹ McDonald’s emphasis on those who remained committed to the processes—by this he meant the workings of the NLRB and other government-sponsored institutions—is significant, as it reflects another claim often heard from the union’s leadership and their allies: that the union’s defeat could be blamed on irresponsible militants and radical leftists, who played a prominent role in the conflict but were later purged by the union’s leadership. Even today, with its position in steel much weakened, the USW continues to describe the strike as a prelude to organizing success and a validation of the New Deal.¹⁰

There is something to say for this notion that the Little Steel Strike was a tragedy remediated, eventually, by triumph. Little Steel’s belated surrender was an important and hard-won victory for labor rights, one that rested on the sacrifices of many workers and union organizers and the diligent efforts of NLRB staff. The companies’ eventual capitulation rightly symbolizes the last gasp of organized, violent resistance to labor rights and the advent of a new age in labor relations, defined by unprecedented reliance on collective bargaining, relatively peaceful conduct of labor disputes, and greater fidelity to the law. There is also considerable room to criticize the way the strike was conducted by unionists, radicals and moderates alike. Nevertheless, it is a grave mistake to see the strike simply as a delayed victory, as a mere tactical failure, or as evidence of the superiority of responsible unionism and practical industrial relations over opposing concepts of class extremism. For entangled in and often obscured by these conventional accounts of the strike is a complex and sobering story, untold, that speaks important truths about the New Deal and the place of unions and labor rights in modern America.

Above all, the Little Steel Strike was a crucial episode in a larger struggle between industrial workers and industrial capitalists to determine what sort of America would emerge from the political and legal ferment of the New Deal and the unprecedented outbreak of economic crisis, class conflict, and political struggle that characterized that era. In this regard, the Little Steel Strike was, for labor, not merely a brief setback in a journey from defeat to victory or tragedy to triumph, but a clear revelation of the contradictory course that labor rights, class politics, and political economy would take through a key period in American history. As the first major test of the NLRB and the Wagner Act after the Jones & Laughlin decision, the strike revealed both the promises and shortcomings of the agency and the new labor law. The NLRB’s diligent prosecutions of the Little Steel companies for their manifold violations of the Wagner Act in provoking the strike, and for their conduct during and after the strike, helped compel the companies to finally recognize and bargain with the SWOC. The agency’s success made clear that the new legal regime would have real value as an institution of reform. And yet, anticipating problems that endure to this day, this process took years and featured remedies that were generally inadequate, even as the agency pushed the limits of the Wagner Act and the patience of its supporters. In this way, the strike confirmed that the NLRB and the Wagner Act would neither fundamentally alter the overall contours of industrial relations nor uproot capitalist hegemony in the workplace.

On a broader plane, the Little Steel Strike also took the measure of the New Deal. It probably does not go too far to say, as one authority does, that the strike signaled the beginning of the end of the New Deal.¹¹ The strike certainly revealed, and in some ways shaped, the limits of the New Deal and the rightward trajectory of social policy in the late 1930s. Little Steel’s victory over the SWOC confirmed how much power industrial capitalists retained despite the economic crisis, the New Deal’s regulatory undertakings, and the spectacular growth of the CIO. The strike encouraged capitalists to redouble their resistance to reform, even as the violent methods that defined it faded from practice. Moreover, at the same time that it inspired the CIO’s increased dependence on political favors and legal processes, the strike strained the alliance between the CIO and the Roosevelt administration. In all these respects, the strike can be seen as an important moment in the process, maybe best described by historian Alan Brinkley, by which the New Deal of the late 1930s accommodated itself to unbroken corporate power.¹²

The Little Steel Strike also took the measure of the CIO and its radical allies at a critical moment in their epic drive to organize the industrial working class. At the same time that it highlighted some impressive successes in organizing a fractured and much-persecuted workforce, the strike also exposed the weakness of the CIO and the deficiencies of its leadership. In particular, the strike revealed how much CIO leaders had overestimated the strength of their alliance with liberal New Dealers and also showed how unprepared the CIO was for dealing with the kind of resistance that Little Steel offered. Riding a tide of victories anchored on the General Motors sit-down strikes of the previous winter, but now faced with company obstinacy backed by thousands of armed men and massive stores of political and economic power, CIO and SWOC leaders appeared inept and often confused about how to sustain the strike’s effectiveness. Defeat, when it arrived, not only destroyed the drive in steel; it broke the CIO’s momentum, diminished its leaders’ appetite for organizing by means of strikes, and drove the CIO and the SWOC to rely on the problematic workings of the NLRB and other government agencies to achieve what had not been won on the picket lines.

Radical organizers, many of them connected to the Communist Party, joined with rank-and-file workers in spearheading some of the most resolute, courageous, and promising opposition to Little Steel, only to have their efforts disavowed by the SWOC’s leadership. But while the strike did much to confirm the virtues of radicalism and the limitations of the leadership’s program, it also revealed how little these radicals and militants offered in the way of an effective strategy for overcoming Little Steel’s resistance or rolling back the power of industrial capitalists more generally. Indeed, more clearly than in any strike during the 1930s or since, the Little Steel Strike exposed the dilemma inherent in the very concept of labor militancy that they embraced. Tactics like mass picketing and sabotage provided unionists a way of countering the steel companies’ inherent advantages in raw economic power, overcoming the limitations of the Wagner Act, and realizing an effective right to strike. But these very tactics played directly into the companies’ advantages in access to law enforcement and courts and in their capacity to manufacture disapproval of the strike. For militancy begat confrontations like the clash on Memorial Day, which the companies cynically forged into a potent narrative about strike violence that cast unionists as enemies of public order, weakened support for the strike among elites and the public, and justified the wave of intervention by state police and Guardsmen that ultimately finished the strike. In the decade following the strike, this same disingenuous story about violence and labor rights became the centerpiece of a sustained attack on the NLRB and the Wagner Act, led in part by steel companies and culminating in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which cast the agency and the law as too indulgent of unions and in need of dramatic reforms.

In all these ways, the Little Steel Strike was a pivotal moment in American history. The story of the strike is a study in the realities of class struggle and labor conflict that emphasizes the formative role that violence played in shaping the contours of labor rights. Replete with drama and tragedy as well as troubling insights about the true history of the New Deal, it is neither a happy narrative nor an unrelenting dirge so much as a cautionary tale about class conflict and the limits of labor rights and social reform in liberal society.

The chapters that follow unfold in three main parts. Part 1 examines the forces that gave rise to the Little Steel Strike and shaped its course, including the conflict’s roots in a decades-long contest between workers and capitalists over working conditions and labor rights. Part 2 tells the story of the strike itself, from its chaotic beginnings in the late spring of 1937, through the sequence of dramatic clashes and political intrigues that punctuated the grinding struggle on the picket lines, to its eventual collapse later that summer. After considering why the strike failed, part 3 then describes the aftermath of the conflict, including efforts to prosecute the companies under the new labor law; the forces that led to the companies’ eventual capitulation; and the strike’s legacies in law, policy, and labor relations. The book then concludes with a reflection on the strike’s enduring relevance in our world.

PART I

The Open Shop

Steel barb-wire around The Works.

Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.

CARL SANDBURG

Smoke and Steel (1920)

1

Like a Penitentiary

STEEL AND THE ORIGINS OF THE OPEN SHOP

In the course of making steel, companies like Republic also manufactured a potent system of labor repression. This is the essential metaphor in Smoke and Steel, Carl Sandburg’s epic poem about the contradictions and tragedies of steel labor in the early twentieth century: Steel barb-wire around the Works . . . .¹ In the decades preceding the Little Steel Strike, this burgeoning capacity to control labor, which the steel companies embraced as a mandate of industrial production, converged with the increasing obsolescence of traditional patterns of craft unionism to almost eliminate union representation from the entire industry. The industry flaunted this condition, which it described, misleadingly, as if it really meant a benign indifference to unionism, as an open shop program. But the same factors that secured the open shop’s reign in the first decades of the century primed a resurgence of union activism in the mid-1930s and shaped the Little Steel Strike. To understand the strike, one must therefore trace the history of the open shop, beginning with events decades earlier in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

HOMESTEAD AND THE LITTLE STEEL STRIKE

Today a monument to industrial decline, in 1892 Homestead was a bustling company town and the scene of one of the most important labor conflicts in American history. On July 6, 1892, three hundred heavily armed operatives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency set out to prevent union workers there from cordoning a large mill owned by Carnegie Steel. Forewarned of the Pinkertons’ arrival, armed unionists converged on the detectives as they attempted an early morning landing at the plant from two river barges. The confrontation led to a gun battle that trapped the Pinkertons in the immobilized, decked-over barges. A siege ensued, which ended only when union leaders and local officials secured the detectives’ surrender. An ugly scene then unfolded as the captured Pinkertons were repeatedly assaulted by incensed union people, some just apprised of the deaths of friends and loved ones in the day’s fighting, before union leaders and local officials restored the peace.

Even before this clash, officials with Carnegie Steel were working hard to cast the unionists as vile, irresponsible enemies of public order and private property, and local authorities as derelict in their duty to keep the peace and protect the company’s right to operate the plant without interference. When the newspapers got hold of the Pinkertons’ humiliating rout, such charges flowed freely, accompanied by demands that the militia be dispatched. State authorities agreed, and on July 12 the first of some eighty-five hundred troops arrived, guns at the ready. They forced aside the picketers and allowed Carnegie Steel to fully reopen the mill with scabs. When after weeks of further conflict things finally settled down, around a dozen people had been killed, most of them unionists; and dozens of people, all unionists, had been charged with murder and treason.

The dispute at Homestead primarily involved workers aligned with the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AA). Although the unionists routed the Pinkertons that July day at the river, they lost their bid to defend favorable working conditions and effective union representation. In fact, the struggle at Homestead was a crucial battle in a campaign by the steel industry to establish an open shop throughout the industry. Even as the fighting raged on the banks of the Monongahela River, workers, including many far from the scene, understood that defeat at Homestead would undercut any claim that their interests could rival those of property and capital.²

At the time of the Homestead affair, unionism was relatively well established in the iron and steel industry. In 1858, following their defeat in a strike, iron puddlers in the Pittsburgh area founded an organization called the Sons of Vulcan. The puddlers proceeded in great secrecy, as even then unionists risked being tarred as radicals, fired, and blacklisted. Not until 1862 did the Sons of Vulcan make public its existence. Membership gains were slow but methodical. In the mid-1870s the organization entailed over eighty separate lodges, as its locals were called, and was regarded as one of the strongest unions in the United States.³ A craft union, the Sons of Vulcan embodied a model of unionism—by which unions only admitted workers possessed of particular skills and organized them strictly on this basis—that would predominate into the 1930s.

In 1876 the Sons of Vulcan amalgamated with two other craft unions built around skills on the finishing side of the trade to form the AA. The birth of the AA was accompanied by the creation of other, smaller unions at locations and skill levels scattered elsewhere in the industry. In the years leading up to Homestead, these organizations were involved in numerous strikes and lockouts and managed to secure favorable agreements on wages and substantial control over working conditions.⁴ They also built impressive membership rolls. By 1892 perhaps half of the industry’s workers were organized to some extent, either by the AA or one of the independent unions. On the eve of the Homestead dispute, the AA counted nearly twenty-five thousand fully fledged members. It was among the most powerful unions in the country and its health measured that of the entire labor movement. Yet within just over ten years, the AA was in crisis and unionism in the industry had been almost completely destroyed.⁵

The most immediate reason for this dramatic shift in labor’s fortunes was the campaign that began at Homestead. The Homestead dispute was engineered by the company’s director, chairman, and part owner, Henry Clay Frick, to break the AA’s hold within the plant. Frick provoked the unionists by insisting on retrograde contractual terms he knew union workers would not accept without a struggle. Frick then locked out key contingents of workers as his deadline for agreement to the contract expired. Although insidious, this stratagem was hardly a secret, as Frick publicly announced his intention to break the AA. While the company’s founder and principal owner, Andrew Carnegie, cavorted in Scotland and worried over his public image, Frick stockpiled guns and ammunition and had Fort Frick buttressed with barbed wire, searchlights, fencing with loopholes for riflemen, and water cannon.⁶

The hemorrhage of AA members began soon after the union’s defeat at Homestead, as Carnegie Steel, which dominated the industry, systematically withdrew recognition of the union at all of its other plants. Other steel producers followed suit. Mill by mill, they renounced their union contracts or insisted upon unacceptable terms; they refused to negotiate new agreements to replace expired contracts; or they simply opened new mills on a nonunion basis. By 1894 the AA’s membership had already been reduced by more than half, to about ten thousand. And greater losses were to come.⁷

Nine years after Homestead, a merger centered on Carnegie Steel created U.S. Steel. A watershed moment in the evolution of modern capitalism, the birth of this colossal new firm held in store another blow to steel unionism, as the new corporation was founded with an explicit commitment to holding the line against any extension of union representation anywhere in its domain. Later, the Corporation, as it was often known, took an even more aggressive approach, reconstituting nearly all of its many subsidiaries as open shops.⁸ In fact, extending the open shop in steel was part of the reason U.S. Steel was created in the first place, for this aligned with the company’s congenital commitment, inherited from Carnegie himself, to employ rationalized management and production techniques, gigantic scale, and raw power in a relentless drive for efficiency and profits. He always wanted to know the cost, said one of Carnegie’s business partners. The pressure is always on to make all the economies you can.⁹ Achieving these economies required longer hours, faster paces of work, lower wages, and no unions.

In the first two decades of the new century, the open shop emerged as both an ideal or ideology and a concrete set of practices for ridding firms of unions and preventing their resurgence. Ideologically, the open shop appealed to fanciful notions of negotiated individual contracts and the right to work in defiance of union contracts and bargaining demands. Practically, it rested on coercive and sophisticated means of union repression, including blacklists; espionage; yellow-dog contracts, by which workers foreswore union affiliation; dependency-creating company welfare programs; intimidation and outright violence; and schemes for ensuring the companies’ domination of civil life and public authority in the communities surrounding their mills. With these measures, companies decimated union support and crushed the strikes and organizing campaigns that occurred in the early part of the 1900s.

THE ASCENDANCE OF STEEL AND THE CHANGING GROUND OF CLASS CONFLICT

The growth of the open shop was deeply rooted in the industry’s transition from iron to steel production, even though the two metals are really but different categories of alloys of the element iron.¹⁰ For more than two hundred years, ferrous metal production in America focused on making iron, in the conventional sense, in its two most commercially significant forms: wrought iron and cast iron. For the time being, steel was both expensive to produce and needed for few applications, and so remained a specialty product. As rising industrial demand combined with improvements in production techniques to spur increases in production, the industry spread west into regions south and southeast of Lake Erie and into the upper Ohio River valley, where producers had ready access to the necessary raw materials: iron ore, coal, limestone, and water for transportation, power, and processing. Between 1830 and 1860, annual iron production in America tripled; and by 1860, the iron industry was large and well established.¹¹

Steel began to supplant iron in ferrous metal production in the 1860s. By the 1890s, dedicated ironworks were being replaced with steel-making operations. Among the reasons for this shift were technical innovations in the manufacturing process. The most prominent of these was the advent of a remarkably efficient method of producing steel from raw iron: the Bessemer conversion process. Bessemer converters performed the most essential function in rendering steel, which is to adjust (and mainly reduce) the carbon content of the raw, or pig, iron produced in blast furnaces, by driving superheated air through the still-molten iron, producing a flaming reaction that burned carbon and other impurities out of the iron. The result was great quantities of cheap steel. Along with the slower but higher-capacity and easier to control open hearth method, Bessemer conversion rapidly replaced the smaller-scale and much more skill-intensive puddling method of refining pig iron into more useful alloys (including steel), as well as the similarly cumbersome blister and crucible techniques for making steel.¹²

The shift from iron to steel had enormous implications for labor conditions. From the outset, modern steel-producing operations featured lower rates of unionization than ironworks. One reason for this was incumbency. The AA and other craft organizations had come to prominence when iron still predominated and had built their jurisdictions around skills unique to iron production. So rooted in iron were these unions that their members and leaders had difficulty even understanding the nature of their steel-making brothers’ work or their grievances. At the same time, the steel-producing operations that were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s arose in an increasingly open shop environment. Union men were not established in these mills and the companies successfully resisted attempts to organize them.¹³

Steel also changed labor relations by vastly increasing the scale of plant and overall production in comparison with ironworks, which had remained relatively small through the 1800s. Unlike the older methods of refining pig iron, which could only be performed on a small scale, Bessemer production could be steadily scaled up, generating greater efficiencies and lower marginal costs while also bidding up the capital outlay required to run a competitive operation. Open hearth furnaces, too, become progressively bigger and were operated in larger and larger arrays, or batteries. By the mid-1930s, open hearth production, which produced better steel, had largely displaced the Bessemer process, a change that further increased the capital investment required for a competitive operation.¹⁴

A comparable development characterized the most basic stage of production: the smelting of ore to produce pig iron. Fundamentally unchanged for centuries, smelting involves burning iron ore and limestone in a blast furnace. By the mid-1800s, the use of distilled mineral coal, or coke, in lieu of wood charcoal or raw coal, to fire this process was allowing companies to erect much larger furnaces, as the coke would burn properly even when stacked very high inside the furnaces. Also in the mid-1800s, producers began to power the blowers that developed the blast with steam engines, rather than traditional waterwheels. By dispensing with the need for a gradient of falling water, this machinery permitted the plants to install multiple furnaces (and other powerful machinery) nearer to each other and also permitted the works, which still required much water, to feed on lakes and slow-moving rivers. It likewise allowed for even larger furnaces. By the 1890s, gigantic coke-fired blast furnaces, often clustered together and almost always christened with feminine names, were predominant.¹⁵

The mills grew in another dimension as well. Pig iron and steel production were increasingly joined together, and joined to other processing operations, in the same vertically integrated plants. A principal reason for this is that steel, if not made entirely from scrap, has to be refined from molten pig iron. A major advantage of a vertically integrated steel mill is that it allowed the pig iron from the blast furnaces to be refined while still heated, by carrying it in rail cars and ladles over to nearby steel-making furnaces. Otherwise, the raw iron had to be cast in molds, cooled, transported, and remelted, all at great expense, before being made into steel. Integration offered other technical advantages, such as the ease of using the combustible gas generated in the blast furnaces or coke-making ovens to heat the furnaces; as well as the ease of recycling scrap metal cuttings from the finishing mills, where steel was further alloyed and shaped into user-ready forms. These advantages were not all-determinative and not all plants were fully integrated. However by the 1930s, smelting and steel making were only rarely removed from finishing operations, or from each other.

More efficient methods for rolling, drawing, or otherwise rendering steel into useful shapes also proliferated with the turn to steel, as steel production entailed the development of refined alloys that were tailor-made for these milling processes. Often broadly described as either finishing or rolling mills, these actually involved a number of operations for shaping steel into consumer-ready stock besides rolling mills proper. Before it could be processed in these ways, the steel coming out of the furnaces and converters had to undergo a series of semifinishing operations in which it was formed into billets, blooms, or slabs. Though obviously distinct, for convenience of description these primary or preparatory mills were also sometimes lumped into the category of finishing mills.¹⁶ Not only did the finishing mills—to use the term in this broad way—grow in size according to their own economies of scale; but also, as the output of the steel-making furnaces and converters increased, so did the need for larger-capacity machinery at this end of the production process.¹⁷

The trend toward ever-larger steel plants completed the demise of iron production and its accompanying labor relations, as steel became much cheaper than fungible forms of iron.¹⁸ The move toward larger installations also brought with it increasingly anonymous and distant relations between workers and capitalists. Although there had always been bosses of some sort standing between workers and owners, the huge new mills further attenuated these workplace relations with multiple layers of managers and supervisors. These changes eroded traditional, craft-oriented forms of collective bargaining and union-based labor relations, which, though conflict-ridden in their own way, had put a premium on familiar and relatively informal negotiations.

The efficient production of steel mandated unprecedented controls over both machinery and workers. The resulting culture of technical rationalization subsumed larger issues of management, expressing itself in an ethos of relentless cost cutting and profit maximization, realized