Seventy years ago today, 10 demonstrators were killed and many more wounded by police attempting to break up a steelworkers strike. Workers striking for better pay and working conditions being attacked by the authorities is hardly a unique event in American history, but this may have been the first time such an event was captured on film.
Dick Meister recently wrote an article on the massacre and the newsreel that Paramount Pictures never release to the public. The article tells of the reaction of a US Senate committee that did see the film:
The committee found that strikers and their families, while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as they massed in front of the South Chicago plant operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally peaceful. 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.Its easy to understand why Paramount executives didn't want to incite the public by showing the footage. Years later, news coverage of police brutality against civil rights protesters opened the eyes of Americans to the brutality of segregation and rallied more people in support of Martin Luther King. I wonder if this film would have had a similar affect in 1937. Its an interesting event to read about so follow one of the links above if you're so inclined.
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.