Bloody Friday: The Day the Packers Sent Men With Oak Clubs

In nineteen oh nine, John Morrell and Company bought a failed meatpacking operation north of the Queen Bee Mill ruins and set up a new plant. The city had rail connections, a labor supply, and all the hogs the surrounding farms could produce. By the nineteen thirties, in a city of about thirty-five thousand people, Morrell employed over seventeen hundred. It was by far the largest employer in Sioux Falls, and the only major industrial operation the city had.

The workers who killed and processed the hogs formed a union local in October of nineteen thirty-three, joining the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butchers of North America. Two years later, tensions had reached the point where management fired twenty-nine union leaders. The workers struck.

The company's response was organized. A group of about two hundred non-union employees, known informally as the Company Association, met at the Cataract Hotel on the morning of what would become known as Bloody Friday. Someone had provided oak clubs made from stairway banister rungs. The men were given the clubs at the corner of Sixth Street and Weber Avenue. They marched four abreast up Weber, toward the plant gates where union pickets waited with baseball bats, canes, broom handles, and rocks.

What followed was the most violent labor confrontation in South Dakota history. Brawls broke out at the gates and spread into the surrounding streets. Governor Tom Berry declared martial law and called in the National Guard.

The strikes and boycotts continued from nineteen thirty-five through nineteen thirty-seven. When they finally resolved, labor had established itself as a force in the city. Workers had the right to organize and to speak without fear of immediate termination.

Morell stayed in Sioux Falls for decades. The plant eventually became part of John Morrell and Company's descendants, and the site's labor history remained one of the defining chapters of what it meant to work for wages in this city.