Chicago and the Little Steel strike

Abstract

The Little Steel strike of 1937 has taken on iconic significance for historians, in large part because of the anti-labor violence of the Memorial Day Massacre. What has garnered considerably less attention is the community mobilization that accompanied the strike. For a brief moment, steel workers and their allies challenged the anti-democratic tendencies in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. While SWOC leaders focused almost exclusively on the achievement of a signed contract, women of the steel auxiliaries, workers on the picket line, and middle-class liberals from across Chicago sought to transform the strike into something larger than a showdown over union recognition. For this coalition, the Little Steel strike was a flashpoint in a wider struggle social democratic reform. In the mobilization prior to Memorial Day and in the protest movement that followed it, key elements of Chicago's liberal-labor coalition espoused the egalitarian values of the Popular Front. Far from an exercise in bread-and-butter moderation, the strike became the occasion for a larger social uprising. This expression of united front commitment drew on the example of the Unemployed Councils and the front-line militancy that is often only associated with the Flint sit-down strike and the general strikes of 1934. In Chicago, the Little Steel strike raised the possibility that steelworkers might embrace the ‘civic unionism’ that animated the left-led unions of the era.