On May 30, 1937, workers on strike at the massive Republic Steel plant in South Chicago called for a Memorial Day picnic on a nearby prairie to build support for their struggle. About 1,500 workers and their families turned out on the hot, sunny afternoon. After the picnic, organizers called on the crowd to march toward the plant gates where they hoped to establish a mass, legal picket.
Halfway to their destination, several hundred workers were halted by a large contingent of Chicago police officers and ordered to disperse. A heated discussion ensued. A few rocks were thrown in the direction of the police. Suddenly, some of the police drew their pistols and opened fire on the protesters at point blank range. Then, as the marchers fled, they chased after the survivors, clubbing many of them.
By the end of the conflict, forty people had been shot—including a woman and a young boy—most of them in the back. Ten demonstrators would die by mid-June, and another fifty were injured. Most of the wounded survivors were arrested and shoved into paddy wagons without the benefit of medical attention. Only a handful of police officers required treatment for minor injuries.
Despite the one-sided results of this confrontation, local and national newspapers—including The New York Times and The Washington Post—almost uniformly portrayed the marchers as the guilty parties in this tragedy. One story after another called them a “mob” who had set off a “riot,” giving police no option but to use force to prevent them from invading the plant. Some articles falsely suggested that the unionists fired first.
The strongest evidence of what happened that day was captured in four minutes of footage shot by a Paramount News cameraman. But Paramount, after creating a newsreel based on that film, refused to release it, so the pro-police narrative remained untested for two full weeks after the incident.
That might have been the last word, had it not been for one prominent progressive U.S. Senator and a single investigative reporter, essentially working together. This is the story that unfolds in a new PBS film about the massacre.
When news emerged that Paramount had buried the footage, a citizens group in Chicago led by economist Paul Douglas asked Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. to look into it. La Follette, the son of the late Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Sr., (founder of The Progressive), was a famous progressive in the U.S. Senate in his own right. As co-chair of a Senate subcommittee, he had been probing civil rights violations against workers for many months. La Follette staffers promptly subpoenaed a copy of the raw Paramount footage.
Then they leaked it—or screened it (accounts differ)—for Paul Y. Anderson, an award-winning investigative reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was shocked by what he saw. The footage showed police firing at the already-retreating crowd, then wielding nightsticks, even hitting unarmed women and clubbing men who were already on the ground. Bodies were left bleeding or carried roughly to police vehicles—with sixteen people crammed into one wagon—for a trip to a distant prison hospital or other facility.
Anderson quickly located and interviewed a few of those caught on camera, notably a Mexican-American social worker named Lupe Gallardo Marshall, who was clubbed and bloodied that day. His two-part article, published in the Post-Dispatch, was then picked up by The New York Times, Time magazine, and dozens of other papers.
Still, the pro-police narrative held sway at many media outlets. La Follette, with his Republican colleague, Senator Elbert D. Thomas, arranged three days of Senate hearings on the incident to be held from June 30 to July 2, 1937.
This attracted wide media coverage, as La Follette staffers arranged for testimony from about a dozen of the Memorial Day protesters (some of whom had been injured at the event), as well as many Chicago police officials and rank-and-file officers. The victims at last had a chance to tell their full stories.
Lupe Marshall, wearing the same suit that was bloodied on Memorial Day, proved to be the star witness. Police defended their actions, but these claims often fell apart under persistent questioning from La Follette himself. Some implausible claims by police drew laughter in the crowded committee room.
Then, after LaFollette asked top Chicago police officials to move close to a giant projection screen for a better look, the Paramount footage was shown in its entirety—and then replayed in slow motion. There were gasps, and even a few tears, among members of the audience in the large Senate committee room.
Press coverage now turned more (though not entirely) against the police. Paramount was forced to release a newsreel with part of the footage, although its screening was banned in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis, and in the entire state of Massachusetts. Three weeks later, the La Follette committee released its report (most of it has been reprinted, along with witness testimony, for the first time in my new book on the massacre), which harshly criticized the police:
“We conclude that the consequences of the Memorial Day encounter were clearly avoidable by the police. The action of the responsible authorities in setting the seal of their approval upon the conduct of the police not only fails to place responsibility where responsibility properly belongs but will invite the repetition of similar incidents in the future.”
The Paramount footage is now a part of the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
There was one final tragic coincidence. Paul Anderson, a heavy drinker, would lose his position at the Post-Dispatch, and died by suicide in 1938, a little more than a year after his groundbreaking stories on the massacre. Senator La Follette would lose his Senate seat to Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1946 Wisconsin primary, and he, too, would take his own life seven years later in 1953.