Abstract
The hunt for those responsible for the Memorial Day Massacre dovetailed with the Chicago Tribune’s longstanding campaign to discredit the labor movement. It reinforced the efforts of the steel industry, American business, southern conservatives, and die-hard anti-Roosevelt Republicans to derail the New Deal and thwart social democratic reform. Although Roosevelt retaliated effectively against the Dupont-funded right-wing Liberty League during the 1936 election, the anti-New Deal forces it represented gained strength. They reveled in the political quandary that the strike wave created for the administration. For the intellectuals, reformers, and frontline steelworkers who held the picket lines, the dispute in Chicago was no longer simply over a signed contract and union recognition. It had become one phase of the larger struggle that defined this era. The drive for a legitimate union in steel had become fused to the wider movement for economic democracy in modern America. “Civil liberties,” the Daily Worker reasoned, if they are to have any meaning in Chicago, must be fought for by a united coalition of progressives and labor groups. At present, the editors added, “civil liberties do not exist in Chicago. The Constitution is a dead letter.”1
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Notes
Milton Howard, “Chicago: Testing Ground for American Fascism,” Daily Worker, June 1, 1937; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: WW. Norton, 2009), pp. 13–24.
Robert Slayton, “Labor and Urban Politics: District 31, Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and the Chicago Machine,” Journal of Urban History 23 (November 1996): 30–2.
Ibid; Thomas F. Dorrance, “Remarking on Older Deal: Chicago Employment Politics, 1932–1936,” Labor: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas 7(Winter 2010): 78–79.
Milton Mayer, “Portrait of a Dangerous Man,” Harper’s Magazine 193 (July 1946): 64.
Roger Biles, Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 24–5; Levin, Citizens, p. 254; “Citizens Right Group to Probe Strike Rioting,” Chicago Evening American, June 7, 1937.
Jer old S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 122;
Carol Quirke, “Reframing Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937,” American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 145.
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© 2010 Michael Dennis
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Dennis, M. (2010). “A Major Breakdown of Democratic Government”. In: The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114722_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114722_10
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