A Memorial Day Massacre

[Hissyspit]

http://www.truthout.org/memorial-day-massacre/1306523906

A Memorial Day Massacre
Monday 30 May 2011
by: Dick Meister, Truthout



It's a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children, who are desperately running away. The police club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground and ignoring their pleas as they batter them with further blows. They stand above the fallen to fire at the backs of those who've outraced them.

- snip -

But the film was shown to a closed session of a Senate investigating committee chaired by Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin. The committee, concerned primarily with civil liberties, was outraged - particularly since the Chicago police had acted in violation of the two-year-old federal law that guaranteed workers the right to strike and engage in other peaceful union activities.

- snip -

But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago and other cities with plants operated by Republic and two other members of the "Little Steel" alliance that also were struck.  For, as the committee concluded, the police had been "loosed to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways" at the companies' behest.  The companies even supplied them with weapons and ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than $40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the entire country.

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[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. I don't even know what to say about this horror.

We don't see scenes like these now...

The companies have gotten a lot more cagey about union-busting activities. They know we're watching, and they have adapted.

The citizens who suffered, fought and died in those battles fought as though they were in a war. And they were.

It was a war that they had not asked for, but one that they fought in anyway, because the stakes were so high for them.

I wonder if we have that sort of courage today.

Recommended.

[former9thward]

2. Thank you for posting this.

At the risk of outing myself I worked for many years at that mill and was an union officer at the steelworkers local. Our union hall was directly across the street from where the massacre took place and there is a plaque with the names of those who were killed. I have always thought there should be more done to remember this part of our labor history.