“Ruthlessness and Disregard for the Law”: After the Massacre

Abstract

The Memorial Day incident cast the die for the Little Steel Strike. The events in South Chicago would legitimize the flagrantly illegal actions taken against SWOC in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Collaboration between municipal officials, corporate leaders, and the military in suppressing the strike would go uncontested by federal authorities and cheered by middle-class opinion. Under the mantle of “law and order,” the independent steel companies and their allies would violently suppress the right to assembly, the right to free speech, and the right to organize a union. “None of the citizens committees studied was truly representative of the public,” the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee concluded. “All endeavored to break the strike and to cooperate with company-inspired back-to-work movements. Under the cloak of maintaining law and order, the citizens’ committees deliberately aroused or cooperated with the spirit of vigilantism,” fostering the conditions for what the committee could only describe as “incipient civil war.”1