The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Some small firms capitulated to the early sit-ins, but the bigger plants, notably those of General Motors, didn’t budge. Machine guns were being brought into Flint. In Dearborn, Harry Bennett, the former Navy boxer who had won the affection of Henry Ford, was recruiting a private army of three thousand, and blackjacks were stockpiled in the union camp. Inside each factory a cadre of tough young workers converted shops into fortresses. Armed with clubs and brake parts, they took turns guarding barricaded gates while those off duty played cards or made beds on the floor beside incomplete car chassis. Company property was carefully protected, but company men weren’t allowed inside. When Fisher Body executives turned off the heat, the men roller-skated, sang, and danced. Periodically UAW men ran food in past the police.

  To the management mentality of 1937, the sit-down was the ultimate outrage. Private property was held to be as sacred as human life, perhaps more so. White-collar executives had always suspected that the union leaders were Communists. Now they knew it. If subversives could prevent an owner from using his shop by draping their bodies across its doors, erecting flesh and blood blockades to keep him out, General Motors might as well turn the country back to the Indians. Their lawyers counseled patience. Obviously this tactic was unlawful. Why not turn it over to the forces of law and order? General Motors did, and instantly acquired an injunction ordering evacuation of the plants. Front offices were elated. But the moral force of the injunction collapsed when reporters discovered that the judge was a major GM stockholder.

  Enter John L. Lewis. By now he had realized that if he didn’t lead the auto workers he would lose them; therefore he went on the air to declare, “The CIO stands squarely behind these sit-downs.” Father Coughlin called Lewis “a Communist stooge.” Hermann Schwinn, Nazi leader on the West Coast, and General Nicholas Rodríguez, head of the Mexican Gold Shirts, offered their services to GM management. The NAM erected antilabor billboards all over the country. William Green, speaking for the AFL, denounced the strikers, and in the President’s oval office Roosevelt, Garner, and Secretary Perkins debated the wisdom of issuing a statement.

  Garner left the meeting under the impression that Roosevelt would take a stand. He didn’t, and his silence meant that the man under the gun was Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan. GM lawyers had appealed to another judge, not a stockholder, and this time the evacuation order threatened the strikers with prison sentences and a fine of fifteen million dollars if they didn’t quit the shops by 3 P.M. on February 3. By this time the workers were vowing that they were ready to die on their barricades. GM had selected the battleground: its Chevrolet plant in Flint. Murphy had called out the National Guard, and the plant was surrounded by soldiers, the Flint police force, and strikebreakers armed with pokers, clubs, and crowbars. Milling around in between were UAW sympathizers from Detroit, Akron, and Toledo. Over the mail gate hung a strikers’ placard: THEY SHALL NOT PASS.

  Murphy was ready to send Guard bayonets against the workers. Then, at the last moment, he called John L. Lewis and uneasily asked him what he would do. “You want my answer, sir?” roared Lewis. “I shall personally enter General Motors Chevrolet Plant Number Four. I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast. I shall walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike. And as my body falls from the window to the ground, you will listen to the voice of your grandfather as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?’”

  Murphy hesitated; his grandfather had been hanged after an Irish uprising. And the threat of blood was no Lewisian metaphor. Already it had begun to flow in Flint. During night skirmishes fourteen strikers had been wounded. The police had retreated, and the strikers were derisively describing the “Battle of the Running Bulls” to newspapers, a taunt which was almost certain to trigger police brutality. Wearily the governor tore up his orders. Then he forbade General Motors to impede delivery of food to the sit-downers. Embittered conservatives afterward claimed that Murphy had broken GM’s morale. He had helped. So had Lewis. So, by remaining silent, had the President. The crushing blow, however, had been the UAW’s technique. Under it the union had immobilized General Motors while making only token demonstrations at Chrysler, Ford, Nash and Packard. In theory—Liberty League theory—the others should have stood with GM in antilabor solidarity. In practice they had been carving up the GM market for their own cars. On February 7 GM directors had to cut its dividend in half. This cost Pierre Du Pont an estimated $2,500,000. From Wilmington came word that principles were all right, in their place, but management should not lose its head, not to mention Du Pont cash. At that General Motors capitulated. After forty-four days of crisis, Knudsen agreed to a conference. When the sit-downers heard about it they square-danced wildly in the frozen yards outside the plants.

  Chrysler fell in line, and by summer every firm except Ford—who held out until 1941—had signed a contract recognizing the UAW, seniority, grievance committees, surveys of speedup evils, the forty-hour week, and time and a half for overtime. It was nothing less than total victory. For a while perching on the job, any job, was the rage. New Jersey barbers sat in a nonunion shop, chefs in Washington’s Willard Hotel sat on cold stoves, striking seamen sat in deck chairs, Woolworth clerks sat on their counters, striking waitresses persuaded their friends to occupy all seats and then order coffee, Chicago wet nurses sat until they were paid a higher rate per ounce, and a New York motion picture projection operator stopped the show to tell the infuriated audience that he was underpaid.

  ***

  Now John L. Lewis’s CIO had eclipsed the AFL. Industrial labor had put a very large foot in Detroit’s very large door. The fact that Lewis had contributed a quarter-million dollars to Roosevelt’s reelection campaign came to light, and a chill fell over the Union League Club. The New York Sun warned of THE CALLOUS SELFISHNESS OF JOHN L. LEWIS. The man’s agents seemed to be everywhere. He learned that the Vice President had opposed him and thundered, “All labor asks is twenty-five lousy cents an hour. The genesis of the campaign against labor is a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man whose name is Garner. Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor. I am against him officially, individually and personally, concretely and in the abstract.” It was suggested that the CIO “explore” the possibility of a reunion with the AFL. Lewis snorted, “Explore the mind of Bill Green? I give you my word there is nothing there.”

  Everyone in industry knew his next target was U.S. Steel. He admitted it. “If we can organize here,” he said, “the rest will follow. If the crouching lion can be routed, it’s a safe bet that the hyenas in the adjacent bush may be scattered along the plain.” The prospect of a conflict between the CIO and Big Steel was appalling. Huge as General Motors was, it was dwarfed by U.S. Steel, or “the Corporation,” as it was more simply known to its officers. In 1934, despite the Depression, the Corporation earned $35,218,359. Its by-products alone—from ammonia to cement—came to more than a quarter-million tons a year. It owned mills and mines from Canada to Brazil, a fleet of ships rivaling the U.S. Navy, and thousands of miles of railroad track. It was the largest thing in American industry. Yet the average steelworker, working in constant danger, earned $369 a year and had to support six people with it. If anyone in America was ready for revolution, he was. By comparison, the auto worker was affluent, and now, with the heavily publicized settlements in Detroit, the steelworker knew it. It was noted that when Modern Times was shown in Pittsburgh, blue-collar audiences did not laugh at Charlie Chaplin’s parody of a workman’s five-minute break, in which his hands continued to mime the machine at first and then slowed down just long enough to allow him to grab a glass of water. The pantomime was too close to their real routines, the lockstep lives they meant to change.

  But how? The right to organize, it seeme
d, could only be bought with blood. And then came a surprise. There would be more bloodshed in 1937, but none of it at Big Steel. On the lazy Saturday of January 9, when the GM sit-downs were entering the third week, Lewis had been in Washington, lunching at the Hotel Mayflower with Senator Guffey. There was a stirring around the maître d’hôtel’s post and in walked bespectacled Myron Charles Taylor, the patrician chairman of U.S. Steel’s board of directors and chief executive of the Corporation. Taylor bowed to the two men; then, after escorting Mrs. Taylor to another table, he strolled across the room to chat with Guffey and Lewis. The senator left, and the president of the CIO joined the Taylors for a pleasant twenty-minute talk. It was one of the more sensational moments in the history of the Mayflower, but no reporter was there to record it, and the lobby was empty next day when Lewis, at Taylor’s invitation, arrived at the industrialist’s hotel suite for another conversation.

  At first they discussed Gothic tapestries, medieval manuscripts, and Elizabethan drama. Taylor, finding his guest captivating, suggested the two of them begin conferring at his New York home, in secret, to resolve differences between Big Steel management and the CIO Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC). Lewis brought more than charm to these meetings. He had figures showing that SWOC had signed up enough U.S. Steel workers to cripple it just as orders were piling up. For fifty years the Corporation had fought its own employees with guns and strikebreakers; surely, he suggested, it was time for a truce, formal talks, and a contract. Taylor reflected awhile and consented. Eight weeks later he initialed a pact agreeing to an eight-hour five-dollar day and a forty-hour week for steelworkers, and to paid vacations and seniority rights. Then they called in the press. When an organizer stumbled into Philip Murray’s SWOC office and said he had just heard on the radio that U.S. Steel had been meeting with the CIO, Murray told him he was crazy and threw him out. Taylor’s subordinates were equally shocked, though when the contract was signed March 7 Benjamin Fairless, president of U.S. Steel, came over to Murray and told him that he was the son of a miner. “Call me Ben,” he asked. Murray answered, “Yes, Mr. Fairless.”

  Lewis had reached the peak of his glory. In the afterglow of the GM and Big Steel triumphs, firm after firm came round until the CIO had 30,000 contracts and three million members. Organized labor had become a significant American constituency, with partisans far beyond working-class wards. Thirty New York clergymen qualified for AFL admission as Ministers Union of America, Local 1; college students began singing labor’s new anthems, and altered meanings of liberal (pro-union) and conservative (anti-union) came into general use. The CIO had won two famous victories. However, the routing of the crouching lion did not mean the scattering of the hyenas, by which Lewis had meant Little Steel—Republic, National, Inland, Bethlehem, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. None of them would speak to CIO organizers. Tom M. Girdler of Republic, the tycoon who became the leader of Little Steel’s intransigents, said he would quit his $130,000-a-year presidency and go back to hoeing potatoes before he would meet workers’ demands.

  On May 26 Lewis took the men out—70,000 workers in 27 plants. Little Steel company police, and hired guns wearing local police uniforms but paid by management, expanded by 7,000 men. A Senate investigation subsequently reported, “Over $4,000,000 was expended directly attributable to the strike. A total of $141,000 worth of industrial munitions was assembled for use.” Strikebreakers inside the mills were fed by parcel post and parachute drops, and local newspapers cooperated in back-to-work campaigns. Girdler paid strikers who played informer $25 a week while accusing union leaders of “interference in a man’s private affairs.” He added, “An ominous fact was repeated in the sketchy facts we had about some of these fellows: they were Communists.” He refused to permit “intimidation” of “loyal workers” by “outside agitators.” And he pledged: “I won’t have a contract, verbal or written, with an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic body like the CIO, and until they pass a law making me, I am not going to do it.” The fact that the Wagner Act was such a law, and that it had been signed by the President and upheld a few days earlier by the Supreme Court, was unmentioned.

  Violence came on Memorial Day, outside Republic Steel’s South Chicago plant. Several thousand strikers and their families had gathered on a stretch of flat, sparsely inhabited prairie east of the factory. They were planning a protest parade. From the beginning of the strike, the police had interfered with token picketing; this time, however, Mayor Edward Kelly had announced that a peaceful demonstration would be permitted. It was hot and humid. Vendors with refrigerated pushcarts bearing nickel-a-cake brick ice cream were mobbed. On a signal the marchers formed ranks quickly, displaying their hand-lettered signs: REPUBLIC STEEL VIOLATES LABOR DISPUTES ACT, REPUBLIC STEEL SHALL SIGN A UNION CONTRACT, and WIN WITH THE CIO. Two men carrying American flags led the procession. Reporters and photographers swarmed around, and there was a camera crew from Paramount News. Like a long crocodile, the marchers crossed the fields singing “Solidarity Forever.”

  Just ahead, between them and the mill, the singers saw a line of five hundred heavily armed Chicago policemen. They hadn’t expected this. It was, in fact, in direct contravention of the mayor’s orders. The cops were there, it later developed, because an “anonymous source” had informed them that the pickets planned to march into the mill and seize it—that defenseless families, in other words, would try to overpower the professional strikebreakers manning Browning 30-caliber heavy machine guns at the gate. Anyhow, the bluecoats believed it, or said they did. To the approaching pickets a police captain shouted, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go.”

  The parade slowed, but doggedly it edged toward the factory. There was no further warning. About 250 yards from the mill a wedge of bluecoats attacked a band of workers’ wives, nightsticks thrusting into breasts. Other cops were aiming gas guns or yanking revolvers free. The men with flags shouted, “Stand fast! Stand fast! We got our rights! We got our legal rights to picket!” But police shouted back, “You got no legal rights!” and “You Red bastards, you got no rights!” In that instant the provocations later cited by Chicago police spokesmen took place; a few empty soda pop bottles were thrown, and workers called out taunts. At that, police grenades began to fly, a pall of nauseous tear gas settled over the procession, children screamed in terror, and the line buckled and broke. Then the murdering began.

  At first the shots were scattered. As the general flight began, however, the bluecoats fired volleys. Some policemen pursued individuals. A woman tripped and fell; four cops held her down, smashing in her face with the butts of their pistols. Pickets lay on the grass or crawled about aimlessly on all fours, vomiting blood, and officers stood over them and fired into their backs. It was all there on the Paramount newsreels. Ten were dead, over ninety were wounded. The reporters called it the Memorial Day Massacre, but Tom Girdler said, “There can be no pity for a mob. As that artistic brawler, Benvenuto Cellini said, ‘Blows are not dealt by measure.’ Some of the mob were clubbed after they had started to run from the wrath they had aroused. Some women were knocked down. The policemen were there performing a hazardous and harsh duty. What were women doing there?”

  The Paramount newsreel was suppressed on the fatuous ground that movie audiences—though conditioned by years of gangster films—might be incited to riot. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch exposed the suppression, but the Chicago Tribune described members of the unarmed procession as “lusting for blood.” Both the McCormick and the Hearst press branded the CIO (and, by implication, the wives and children of CIO men) as communistic. No one was ever prosecuted, though eight more workers were killed, one of them a crippled veteran who was selling tickets to a CIO dance, before the strike was over. It ended when the men returned to work without a contract. Girdler’s tactics had been too much for them.

  They were not, however, too much for Robert M. La Follette Jr. The Wisconsin senator launched one of the most exhaustive and memorable investig
ations of the decade. His committee found that:

  …provocation for the police assault did not go beyond abusing language and the throwing of isolated missiles from the rear ranks of the marchers…. From all the evidence we think it plain that the force employed by the police was far in excess of that which the occasion required. Its use must be ascribed either to gross inefficiency in the performance of the police duty, or a deliberate attempt to intimidate the strikers.

  Photographs had been enlarged and distributed, testimony from participants and witnesses published, and the story unfolded bit by bit for a public which, until then, had assumed that all strikers were suspect. When the casualty list first appeared, President Roosevelt had probably spoken for the middle class when he quoted Shakespeare: “A plague on both your houses.” Lewis had replied, “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.” Roosevelt explained that he meant the extremists on both sides. It was not often that the President felt it necessary to explain anything, and when it developed that all the extremists in South Chicago that day had been antiunion, he moved to labor’s side. Public opinion moved with him, and the National Labor Relations Board brought Girdler to his knees. Thus the Little Steel strike was won after all, with union shops in all its plants except Bethlehem Steel.