The Little Steel Strike and the Women's Day Massacre

In the spring of nineteen thirty-seven, Youngstown was a city of one hundred seventy thousand people, and on a single day that May, one in five of them walked off the job. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee, forerunner to the United Steelworkers union, had won a contract with United States Steel. Now it wanted the same recognition from the second tier of producers, including Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Those companies refused. On May twenty-sixth, thirty-three thousand workers struck.

The companies called in armed guards and state troopers. The strike unfolded across multiple cities simultaneously. In Chicago on Memorial Day, police fired on an unarmed crowd of strikers and their families, killing ten and wounding over a hundred. That was the Memorial Day Massacre, and news of it reached Youngstown within hours.

Here, the most violent local episode came on June nineteenth. It is called the Women's Day Massacre, and the name deserves its weight. Women and children had joined the picket lines that day at the Republic Steel plant on the city's east side. The records on who fired first go quiet at the critical moment, as they so often do in labor disputes where the powerful write the first report. What the record shows clearly is the outcome: two strikers killed, twenty-three people wounded.

The strike ultimately failed to win immediate union recognition. Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube held out. But the battle was not finished. Five years later, in nineteen forty-two, with the war economy making uninterrupted steel production a national necessity, the companies finally agreed to recognize the union and bargain collectively. The nineteen thirty-seven strikers did not win on that day. They won eventually.