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NEWSLETTER |
Past Newsletters |
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 Sinclair Rhoda was presented with his Journeyman’s certificate |
By Bruce Dennis
President
We had a busy meeting on April 9. Eighty-nine people were in attendance, which included several guests. Jessica Wellner, from the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital presented a plaque of recognition to Local 247 for our contributions to their Holiday Card program. She thanked us for our donations over the last several years. We had two political speakers also: Appointed State Rep. Jackie Dingfelder and State Rep. Kathy Lowe were on hand to explain their candidacies for Oregon House of Representatives and Oregon Senate, respectively.
We had reports from Apprenticeship & Training, Retirees, business representatives and organizers. Under new business, we had a motion to send four members to Labor Education and Research Center seminars, have a silent auction for old office equipment and furniture, endorse Portland’s library levy, endorse Diane Linn for re-election as Multnomah County Chair, pending Executive Board approval, and to invite the negotiations team to our next regular meeting.
There was a discussion about the recent survey that was sent out by the Regional Council.
Vice President Willie Gore is organizing a golf tournament for this summer. Notification will follow as soon as a date and location are established.
The meeting lasted longer than usual and there were several other topics discussed. Sinclair Rhoda was presented with his Journeyman’s certificate and we adjourned at 10:04 p.m.
General membership
Meets the second Tuesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. at the Carpenters Hall, 2205 N. Lombard, Portland. State Represen-tative Randy Leonard, candidate for Portland City Council, will speak at the meeting.
Retirees
Retirees meet for lunch the second Monday, May 13, at 11 a.m. at JJ North’s, 10520 NE Halsey, Portland.
Executive Board
Executive Board meets the fourth Tuesday, May 28, at 7 p.m. at the Carpenters Hall, 2205 N. Lombard, Portland.
Nominations and election:
The May meeting will be a Special Call meeting for nominations of officers and delegates, and the June meeting will be a Special Call meeting for the election of officers and delegates.
Silent auction on furniture, supplies
We are finally moving ahead with the remodel of the storefront! We need to get rid of some furniture and miscellaneous office equipment. We are going to have a silent auction. You may come down to the hall and view the items that are available. If you are interested in any of the items, please write down your name, the number(s) of the item(s) and the bid that you would like to make for those item(s). Put your bid in a sealed envelope and leave it in the office with one of the secretaries.
All bids will be reviewed on May 6, and buyers will be contacted by May 10. Items need to be removed from the storefront by Tuesday, May 14. Any remaining items will be donated to charity on Wednesday, May 15. Items may be viewed Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This auction is only available for Members & Staff of Local 247.
Items available: Safe, six desks, miscellaneous office chairs, leather couch, old computers and miscellaneous office equipment.
Congratulations to our apprentices!
Carpenters Local 247 would like to congratulate our apprentices who became journeymen between April 1, 2001 and April 1, 2002. These members will be recognized at the Carpenters’ Honors Banquet on May 4, 2002: Gary Backman Jr., Ryan Bates, Jason Beck, Dale Blancas, Axel Bledsoe, Joseph Bowles, Thomas (Chris) Clavey, Shawn Dishman, Edward Doty, Darell Duffy, Troy Dulay, Guy D. Elliott, Jaime Galman, Oscar Garcia, Bradley A. Grier, Troy E. Hamlin, Jeromy Hettinga, Daniel Hill, Erik Holte, John Hosty, Stanley Joseph, Jeremy W. Mallatt, Kris Meining, Ryan Middleton, Paul Miller, Carl Moaning, Tom P. Panich, Dustin D. Pierce, Patrick Price, George L. Reinhart, Sinclair Rhoda, Kalin Rudolph, Matthew Schindler, Clark Scholl, Steve Sharman, Gabe Sherburne, Randy A. Simonatti, David W. Sprenger, Mike E. Tremmel, Bret Wilson, Valeriy Zagumennyy.
Carpenters Local 247 is sponsoring our first annual golf tournament. It will be held on June 22, 2002 at Colwood National Golf Club, 7313 NE Columbia Blvd., Portland. Tee off is at 5:30 a.m. The tournament will consist of 64 players. We will have a “blind draw” one week prior to the tournament to determine the pairs. The cost is $52 per person, which includes a golf cart and a ham and egg sandwich. Prizes will be awarded for First, Second and Third place, in addition to the longest drive and 3 KP holes. Please call the hall to reserve your spot. Payment must be in the office by Tuesday, June 11. Please make checks payable to Carpenters Local 247. For further info, contact Carpenters 247 Vice President Willie Gore at 503-284-9337 or by e-mail at iwillgo@earthlink.net
Nature Cures Clinic is proud to be a union supporter. Nature Cures is a downtown naturopathic and Chinese medicine clinic offering alternative health care services. Health care benefits for members of Carpenter Local 247 include coverage for acupuncture and naturopathic medicine, and the practitioners at Nature Cures Clinic want to make it easy for UBC members to use their services.
When you visit the clinic, simply show your union card and they will waive the co-pay ($25). Nature Cures Clinic is home to four physicians, each with unique areas of interest.
As primary care physicians, the practitioners at Nature Cures can address a wide range of health care concerns, including repetitive motion injuries, back pain and sciatica, and all types of acute and chronic conditions. Call for more information or to schedule an appointment, 503-287-4970, or stop by the clinic at 1020 SW Taylor, Suite 330, Portland. That’s one block south of the Multnomah County Central Library, on the MAX and streetcar, and just one block from the Smart Park at SW 10th and Morrison.
The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937
By GENE LAWHORN
“Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot, humid, and sunny; it was the right kind of day for the parade and the holiday, the kind of day that takes the soreness out of a Civil War veteran’s back, makes him feel like stepping out with youngsters a quarter his age. It was a day for picnics, for boating, for the beach or a long ride into the country. It was a day when patriotic sentiments could be washed down comfortably with Coca-Cola or a Tom Collins, as you preferred. And there’s no doubt but a good deal of that holiday feeling was present in the strikers who gathered on the prairie outside and around Republic Steel’s Chicago plant.”
— Howard Fast
The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), later to become the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was formed Nov. 9, 1935 in a split with the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). Labor reporter and author Art Pries would call it “Labor’s Giant Step” in a book by the same name. Within a year of its formation, hundreds of thousands of workers would join the CIO, winning victory after victory. From the Midwest teamsters, the West Coast longshoremen to the GM sitdown strikes, American workers were racking up a great deal of very successful victories against corporate America.
In the midst of these great victories came also one of the greatest defeats the CIO was to suffer. That is what is known as the “The Little Steel Strike of 1937.”
Little Steel was composed of an “unholy alliance” of Republic Steel, Youngstown Steel & Tube, Bethlehem Steel, Inland Steel and Weirton Steel. Together, these combined steel corporations provided 25 percent of the steel produced in the United States. The Little Steel strike followed one of the CIO’s greatest victories. Following the impressive sitdown strikes of General Motors, the chairman of the giant U.S. Steel Corporation signed a contract with the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee granting union recognition and a 10 percent wage increase.
The Little Steel Alliance felt betrayed by U.S. Steel’s action. Tom Girdler, the chairman of the Republic Steel, declared he’d resign and grow apples before he’d negotiate with a union. In preparation for the strike, the Alliance spent over $43,000 on night sticks, guns, shotguns, machine guns, tear gas and explosives. It is interesting to also take note that during this era of great labor conflict there were traveling arms salesmen who went from one strike zone to another peddling arms, tear gas, and explosives, complete with free samples, and sometimes they actually held demonstrations on pickets. It was truly a big business venture and corporations such as General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, as well as the steel corporations, spent tens of millions of dollars on arms.
On May 26, 1937, the SWOC issued a call to strike because of Little Steels’ refusal to negotiate. Over 75,000 workers walked off the job. On the fourth day of the strike, the SWOC leaders organized a Memorial Day march of over 1,000 steelworkers, their wives, and children, from Sam’s place, the SWOC strike headquarters, to the Chicago Republic Steel Plant. As they approached the plant gate the first ranks of the crowd came upon a contingent of Chicago police numbering from 300 to 500. Without any warning, the police opened fire on the peaceful crowd who, en masse, turned to run from the bullets and tear gas. The police ran after the fleeing crowd, shooting, clubbing, kicking, and beating. Ten strikers were killed, 40 more shot and over 60 severely beaten.
Standing by to capture and record the carnage for the first time in the history of American labor was Orlando Lippert, a Paramount Newsreel cameraman. He was parked less than 50 feet from the center of the police line. The film was so explosive that Paramount refused to show it, “On the grounds that such a unrelieved record of blood and brutality was liable to touch off more riots.” It is interesting to note that while the film was being censored in a nation that guarantees freedom of speech and press, it was being viewed in British cinemas.
Reporter Paul Anderson wrote the following description of the Paramount film for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in June 1937:
“Those of us who saw it were shocked and amazed by the scenes showing scores of uniformed police firing their revolvers pointblank into a dense crowd of men, women, and children, and then pursuing and clubbing the survivors unmercifully as they made frantic efforts to escape.
The impression produced by the fearful scenes was heightened by the sound record which accompanies the picture, reproducing the roar of the police fire and the screams of the victims
A vivid closeup shows the head of the parade being halted at the police line. The flag bearers are in front. Behind them the placards are massed. They bear such devices as “Come on out, Help win the strike, Republic vs. the People, and CIO …
Then suddenly, without warning, there is a terrific roar of pistol shots, and the men in the front ranks of the marchers go down like grass before the scythe. The camera catches approximately a dozen falling simultaneously in a heap. The massive sustained roar of the pistol shots last perhaps two to three seconds.
In a manner which is appallingly business-like, groups of policemen close in on isolated individuals. They go to work on them with their clubs. In several instances two to four policemen were seen beating on one man.”
Describing the importance of the Paramount film in their book, Labor’s Untold Story, Herbert M. Morais and Richard O. Boyer write, “The Paramount film of the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago might well stand for every such assault on labor from New York’s Thompkins Square in 1874 to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 to the most recent strike. After such affairs the press badly states that a number were killed and injured but in this film the statistics come to life, change into human beings fighting for their lives against murderous police breaking the Bill of Rights and the nation’s most fundamental laws…”
The Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago was just one chapter in the unfolding drama of the Little Steel Strike in which strikers were beaten, killed, or arrested throughout the steel-producing towns of the Midwest. Throughout the strike the Steel Workers put up a great struggle against overwhelming odds. The steel companies and their big business supporters on the local and state level, the Citizens Alliances, the back-to-work groups, the police, sheriff’s department, state police, and the National Guard all used their power to break the strike.
During the strike, besides the 10 massacred in Chicago, eight more strikers were killed, and over 200 wounded or severely beaten. In Monroe, Michigan, the steel workers organizing headquarters was burned down, and hundreds of strikers arrested.
In June 1937, U.S. Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin held an open hearing before his “Civil Liberties Committee” on the Memorial Day Massacre. He and the committee viewed the Paramount film several times, and took testimony from the Chicago Police, the mayor, and victims. The committee concluded the following:
Time magazine of Aug. 2, 1937 reported that Chicago officialdom was “hopping mad “when the LaFollette finding was released. At that time Chicago was preparing to prosecute 65 strikers and sympathizers for conspiracy to riot. Prior to the Lafollette committee’s conclusion, a coroner’s jury composed of six unemployed American Legionnaires concluded that the massacre at Republic’s Chicago steel plant was “justifiable homicide.” Take note that throughout this nation in the early 1900s the American Legion served foremost in breaking strikes, organizing back-to-work movements, vigilante attacks on strikers, and the lynching of union organizers.
So amid the all-important Memorial Day sales specials, and the rhetoric about honoring the fallen soldiers of America’s foreign wars, let us not forget the fallen heroes and heroines of America’s labor wars, who paid the price with their life’s blood that we may have shorter work day, safer work conditions, and family wages, and the right to organize.
List of workers killed during the Memorial Day Massacre:
Earl Handley
Otis jones
Kenneth Reed
Joe Rothmund
Lee Tisdale
The source material for this story came from the following Books and articles:
Labor’s Untold Story by Herbet M. Morias and Richard O. Boyer
Labor’s Giant Step by Art Peris
Time Magazine, May to August 1937
Life Magazine, June 14, 1937
Memorial Day Massacre by Howard Fast
The Labor Spy Racket By Leo Huberman
For pictures taken from the Paramount film, check out this Web site:
http://uswa1011.org/history/republicmassacre/republic-massacre.htm
or look up “Memorial Day Massacre” on the Google search engine.
Doernbecher thanks Carpenters Local 247
At the April general membership meeting, Jessica Wellner from the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital presented Carpenters Local 247 a plaque of recognition for our contributions to their Holiday Card program.
