Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937

This essay re-examines one of the twentieth century's most well-known instances of violence against labor. It focuses on the incident's iconic imagery, which showed Chicago police beating and shooting at protesters in the midst of the 1937 "Little Steel" strike. As this essay reveals, newsreel footage and news photographs long held to demonstrate police responsibility for the violence first appeared in metropolitan dailies and nationally circulating magazines in stories representing strikers as a mob that sought to storm the Republic Steel plant, leaving police no option but to shoot.

This essay emphasizes the political influence of an increasingly national and photographic mass media. Sustaining earlier scholarship, this study identifies the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Paul Anderson, and the La Follette committee as central players in a campaign to reverse public understanding of events in Chicago. In its attention to the conflict over the use and meaning of newsreel footage and photographs, the essay documents how labor and its allies engineered a re-reading of news imagery first employed by Chicago officials and Republic Steel executives to condemn workers' activism. This re-reading took place at Chicago rallies, in Washington congressional rooms, and ultimately, within the newly nationalized, photographic media itself. Understanding how labor reversed the interpretation of these images before the American public suggests that labor's newfound political might included a sophisticated ability to renegotiate its visual representation, and to capitalize on the growing salience of news photography to restrict corporate and state violence against unions. The essay's experimental form stresses cultural history's power to re-animate the past, specifically in its meditation on the nature and limits of photographic evidence. Archival evidence for this essay comes from the Grinberg Film Libraries, the Congressional records at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the United Steel Workers of America Papers, the George Patterson Papers, and the Lawrence Jacques Papers at the Chicago Historical Society.