Nearly 90 years after Memorial Day 1937, Chicago is being reminded of the Republic Steel massacre—when police shot dead 10 unarmed strikers and injured 90—through newly resurfaced footage and a painting that still feels like a warning.
On Memorial Day in 1937—May 30. 1937. the traditional date—Chicago police shot dead 10 unarmed strikers outside the main gate of Republic Steel on the city’s Southeast Side. The killings came as the men were protesting the lack of a union contract for the steelworkers. They were among several hundred marching from a nearby rallying point with picket signs and chanted union slogans.
They weren’t violent. A newsreel crew from Paramount was there to film the strikers as they crossed a field of prairie grasses and wildflowers toward the main gate. In the record of the day. the images are black and white—but the footage. long associated with the event. is described as “stained in red.”.
The police opened fire “without provocation,” using pistols and tear gas. As the strikers tried to flee, the police moved in with billy clubs, beating the wounded and the dying. Later, police claimed the strikers had been “on dope,” and that one had thrown a stick at them.
A year earlier, the U.S. Senate had authorized Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin to form a committee to investigate violations of constitutional rights of workers. The committee’s investigation into the Republic Steel massacre depended on subpoenaing the newsreel footage. Chicago police had suppressed it. Paramount. for its part. withheld the footage from public viewing. believing it to be incendiary—an action that raised the question. in those records and retellings. of whether the company feared a workers’ revolt.
Nearly two decades later, the memory of that day arrived in a very different format. A copy of the footage was acquired on VHS tape from the Illinois Labor History Society. The tape was described as “eerily silent. ” but it was narrated by Les Orear and Sam Evett of the United Steelworkers of America. As of the writing associated with the resurfacing of the film, it could be found on YouTube in two parts. The Illinois Labor History Society planned to offer it on DVD at illinoislaborhistory.org.
What happened at Republic Steel has also been preserved in art. Philip Evergood. a social realist painter. depicted the massacre in a then-contemporary work titled “American Tragedy (1937).” The painting shows both police and strikers in nightmarishly cartoonish form. with the dead and dying portrayed like marionettes whose strings have been severed. In the center. a white man in short sleeves is shown with his protective right arm around a young Hispanic woman who appears in distress; she defiantly holds out her left arm in a futile attempt to stop the police.
The police uniforms—bright blue—dominate the center of the painting, surging right to left as officers overpower strikers. The fleeing and the fallen are portrayed with colors “drained of life.” Above the figures. the steel mill’s squat. lifeless buildings and black smokestacks are rendered blood red. At the bottom, blood pools are shown beneath the bodies of the strikers. The painting is described as capturing violent energy and tragic chaos.
For one Chicago-area writer and book reviewer, bringing that image back to the city is personal. John Vukmirovich says he was born. raised. and lived for close to six decades a few blocks from where the real-life tragedy occurred. as well as from both the union hall and its memorial built to honor the murdered strikers. He passed those landmarks on a near-daily basis. His father worked at Republic Steel and also served the union as a grievance committeeman; during Vukmirovich’s grammar school years. his father taught him about the importance of the day in 1937—lessons about workers’ rights. but also about the abusive nature of power.
Vukmirovich’s account extends beyond the historical record. In early spring. he says he queried the Art Institute about locating and acquiring Evergood’s “American Tragedy” for public display in Chicago. While waiting for a reply. an internet search suggested the painting had been on display in 2020 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He contacted the Whitney and learned it does not own “American Tragedy. ” but had it on loan from a private collection.
Unlike the Whitney, the Art Institute did not respond to his query. Vukmirovich describes his response to that silence as an “extended shout” to consult the Whitney, contact the private collection, and “get it done.”
In the background of that push is a figure tied to the 1937 killings: funeral services for Joseph Rothmund. slain by police at the Republic Steel plant on Memorial Day 1937. And more than images. more than paint. what remains is the scale of the violence—10 killed. 90 injured on Memorial Day in 1937—and the insistence. carried forward through footage and artwork. that the confrontation should not be reduced to a single. buried chapter.
For Vukmirovich, “American Tragedy” is not just a portrait of 1937. It is a picture “for our time.”
Chicago Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre 1937 union strikers Paramount newsreel Robert M. La Follette Les Orear Sam Evett United Steelworkers of America Philip Evergood American Tragedy Joseph Rothmund