The CIO was an organization that evolved out of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the dominant labor federation in 1935, with the express purpose of accelerating and intensifying efforts to organize in some key industries and among industrial workers who had been, up until that point, not entirely but significantly excluded from the AFL’s project.

The CIO was the product of some particular ambitions among a set of figures within the AFL who were driven not only by political and ideological ambitions, but also by personal and institutional ambitions and sometimes interpersonal grievances. As it evolved in 1935 into 1936, the CIO ended up spearheading an effort to organize in some key industries, including basic industries like steel and glass, and mass production industries like automobiles and radio equipment, that sort of thing.

Lewis had established himself as the undisputed leader of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which at the time was a very large and relatively healthy organization that had struggled previously with chronic insecurity, to do with in many ways the nature of the mining industry. That insecurity was exacerbated by the significance of the so-called captive mines or captive mining, the control of mines by basic and mass production industry by companies like International Harvester or Ford or US Steel.

These companies controlled mines, sometimes owned them outright, and incorporated them into their vertically integrated production processes. They were a particular thorn in the side of the UMWA and of Lewis himself. Lewis understood that to expand his orbit of control into those mass production and basic industries would have the necessary effect of improving his situation in coal itself. It’s pretty clear that that was part of the impetus behind not only the formation of the CIO, but the zeal with which the CIO undertook to organize industries like steel and, for that matter, automobiles and some of the mass production industries that relied on coal and steel.

In a nutshell, steel was a kind of poster child for what had happened to American organized labor in the preceding half century or so. The industry was home to the formation of some of the first modern unions in the United States that, like most unions that arose in the wake of the Civil War, were organized mainly on a craft basis among skilled workers who, at the time, played an integral role in ferrous metal production, in what was then mainly iron production. Those unions had been steadily eroded in power and influence and some of them completely destroyed in a process that was punctuated by some notable surges in activism and labor conflict, such as what happened in Homestead, Pennsylvania — the Homestead Affair, the lockout and the strike and the violence surrounding that. These craft unions were eroded in power at the same time that there had been, through those decades, no successful effort in steel to establish organizing on an industrial basis.

There had been other very large strikes, most notably in 1919 and into early 1920, the so-called Great Steel Strike, which by some measures was one of the largest strikes in American history up to that date. It was a very tumultuous and violent strike that ended predictably in failure. That wasn’t exactly an effort to organize on an industrial basis, but it was a very good example of the deficiencies of the craft model, since one of the things that crippled the organizing effort was a great host of conflicts among the various craft unions in steel — even during the course of the strike, with many of them refusing to support the walkout.

Now, by the mid-1930s, the steel industry remained largely unorganized. There had been first a further collapse in union representation and the power and influence of the craft unions on the part of something called the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, the AA, which in the early years of the Great Depression and the first years of the New Deal was not much more than a shell organization. But it did provide, in the mid-1930s and in the years just preceding the Little Steel strike, a structure around which there had been a significant upsurge in organizing in steel. A lot of it was spontaneous or relatively spontaneous, a lot of it led by dissidents within the AA structure, and in many cases led by people who were connected with the Communist Party, which had attempted to form its own unions in steel. This upsurge didn’t yield any lasting organizing gains, but it’s pretty clear that it provided a foundation on which the CIO was then able to build its organizing campaign beginning in 1936 and extending into 1937.

The SWOC was formed in the summer of 1936 by the CIO with the idea of constituting a front with which it would organize basic steel and do so on an industrial basis. Now, it’s a little bit complicated because of the relationship between the SWOC, the CIO, and the AA. The AA retained a kind of titular presence in many of the mills. It had members. It had some legitimacy, and it had legitimacy in a context where there was still a lot of residual opposition to the idea of two-card unionism, or dual unionism. So it was important that the SWOC work within or around the structure of the AA in many of the mills.

As the union set about trying to organize basic steel, it also had to wrestle with some basic tactical questions: How would it accomplish this? That inevitably involved it with something else, and that is how to reckon with the great number of company unions that had been established in the industry beginning in the late 1910s, extending into the 1930s, and increasing with the enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, which in many ways seemed to favor the creation of these company unions.

Well, they were there too, and they were not entirely empty shells. They had in some departments and in some plants a fair degree of legitimacy and a fair level of participation. They had to be reckoned with. The CIO organizers looked at them as a convenient way to start organizing in a lot of plants, to build support. So this strategy emerged of potentially capturing the company unions, of building membership within their structure and capturing them.

They were also useful in a context where the organizers were bound to confront considerable repression in the form, first of all, of surveillance and espionage. One way to evade some of that was to work within the structure of these organizations. It might seem a little counterintuitive because, being company unions, they tended to be subject to company controls. Nevertheless, to do the things necessary to organize an independent union, like the SWOC was attempting to do, required that the organizers do things that might more easily go unnoticed if they occurred within the structure of the company unions.

One of the enduring uncertainties about this whole bid to organize basic steel is how much support the SWOC had in, say, the first six to nine months of its effort to organize. The SWOC and the CIO boasted all the time about how successful they were, how many people they were signing up. But there are strong hints that a lot of this was bluster, and a lot of the claims in new membership during this period were artifacts of propaganda, as some of the leadership freely described things later. So there’s some uncertainty about that.

What there’s not uncertainty about is that there were some substantial gains. This all unfolded alongside the chaotic and spectacular developments in automobiles, where, as many people know, on the second-to-last day of the year in 1936 in Flint, Michigan, the great General Motors sit-down strike began. That ended about six weeks later with a significant victory for the United Auto Workers and for the CIO, and there was later a comparable victory at Chrysler.

It was during that period, and during a couple meetings in first early and then in mid-March 1937, that John L. Lewis met with Myron Taylor, president of US Steel, and confected, between the two of them, an agreement that brought most of the workers at US Steel within the CIO’s orbit, and essentially resulted in a kind of recognition of the CIO by US Steel. This was, of course, a startling development and a very significant one. Although its influence as an industry leader in basic steel had diminished some since the early twentieth century, when it completely dominated the industry, US Steel still exerted a great deal of authority in the industry. It was clear to everyone that, while organizing US Steel wouldn’t necessarily bring along the other basic steel producers, organizing the industry without organizing US Steel would be impossible. So this was a watershed moment, and again, for many people at least, a quite startling one.

One reason that people have bandied about is Taylor’s fear of CIO militancy. This was again just a few weeks after the General Motors sit-down strike, and it was basically concurrent with the Chrysler sit-down strike. There’s probably something to that, although it begs some questions about how effective a sit-down strike could be in a basic steel mill, given the very different architecture and geography of production in a steel mill. So that’s certainly a factor worth considering. How much of one is another question.

Something more fundamental, I think, has to do with the changing nature of management at US Steel and how Taylor personified that in many ways. Unlike Girdler, Eugene Grace at Bethlehem, and other dominant figures in steel, Taylor was not, as they said, a steel man. He did not come up through the ranks wielding a shovel from the shop floor. He was a lawyer, a graduate of Cornell Law School. He had a different sensibility about things, and not just in the sense that he wasn’t as tough a guy as Girdler and some of these other people were. There may have been some truth to that, too. But he had a different vision of capitalism and maybe a more forward-looking one. He understood that what was in the offing with the New Deal was not the end of industrial capitalism. Far from it. It was a new phase, a new era in industrial capitalism, one in which it would profit the capitalists to be reasonable about things like organized labor.

“Little Steel” denotes a group of basic steel companies, integrated steel producers that were not actually so little. They were very large corporations in terms of employees, in terms of capital, in terms of production. In the ranks of Little Steel were Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, Inland Steel, and then for most purposes one could also include Jones and Laughlin Steel, ARMCO, or American Rolling Mill Company, and National Steel/Weirton Steel. Every one of them was a large and heavily capitalized producer of basic steel. They’re to be distinguished from Big Steel, which was US Steel, and Small Steel, which denoted a great number of specialty producers, relatively small companies that, for the most part, did not produce basic steel for the open market but rather specialty forms of steel.

Little Steel ended up in the summer of 1937 in a bitter labor dispute with the SWOC, the Little Steel strike, and four of these companies — Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, and Inland — were involved in that strike. In many ways, they probably provoked that strike with the idea that it would advance their interest to do so. Over the course of this dispute, which began on May 26, 1937, and extended into the summer ending at different times in different places and with different companies, about seventy-five thousand or so workers initially went out on strike and soon to be even more than that. Sixteen or eighteen people were killed, somewhere north of one thousand people were arrested. It was one of the last really spectacularly violent strikes in American history, and in many ways, a telling moment in the country’s labor history and legal history.

The usual way to remember Little Steel has been as a kind of footnote. The CIO was, to use a commonly used metaphor, “on the march.” If we remember when this strike occurred, it began just a few weeks after the capitulation of General Motors, of Chrysler, of US Steel. It also is significant because it began just a few weeks after the US Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel. This was the lead case among several in which it upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act and, with that, of essentially the entire New Deal. This set the legal foundations on which have been built the modern administrative state and the modern structures of New Deal liberalism. So all of that happened just weeks before this strike began.

In the wake of the strike, it’s true that eventually the CIO found its footing again and during the war years organized millions more members, setting in place the structure on which was based the tremendous expansion of the power of organized labor through the 1940s and into the 1950s, lasting through the 1960s and into the 1970s. So it’s easy to see why it’s so tempting to dismiss the Little Steel strike as a temporary setback.

Now, it certainly was a setback. Everyone admits that the strike was kind of categorically lost by the SWOC, with the exception of Inland Steel, which entered an agreement to end the dispute at that company. That agreement didn’t give the CIO very much, but it didn’t take anything away at least. With the other companies, the CIO got nothing. In fact, at Republic Steel, thousands of employees were effectively fired by the company, and the CIO’s situation in the company’s mills was much reduced. So there’s no doubt it was a significant setback, but the argument has been that it was a temporary setback.

My argument is that it was more than that. The strike was a test of the power of the CIO and where it stood politically in the New Deal coalition, and a test that it in a sense failed, in that the strike demonstrated how relatively weak the CIO was, how weak a position it occupied within the New Deal and in New Deal politics. It was a test as well of New Deal labor law. It’s very significant in this regard that this was the first major strike to unfold after the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act, which had been tied up in the courts in dozens and dozens of cases, not just the Jones and Laughlin case, but in dozens and dozens of other cases in which, in a concerted campaign, employers had challenged the constitutionality of the act and the authority of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Once the Supreme Court case was decided on April 12, 1937, then the agency could go to work. And it went to work in the Little Steel cases, in the cases that emerged inevitably and very quickly, I might add, out of the dispute that led to and that comprised the strike in the summer of 1937. What the strike revealed was that the National Labor Relations Act and the NLRB, while not insignificant, didn’t fundamentally alter the balance of power between labor and capital. The statute and the agency would work as a means of mitigating, of structuring, of administering the inequality between labor and capital.

But what they did not do was substantially alter that balance of power. That was evident in the inability of the law and the agency to hold these companies to account for what they’d done, let alone to stop them from breaking this strike in the first place. It was 1941 and 1942 before the companies, under pressure from the federal government, recognized the SWOC, which around that time became the United Steelworkers of America. And it was not until then, five years after the strike, that they paid back pay to some of the eight thousand or so workers whom they had, in effect, illegally fired after the strike. Most of these men got nothing, actually, and those who did get back pay got, on average, only a few hundred dollars. That’s it. That’s the price these companies paid, basically in exchange for billions of dollars in wartime government contracts. And that’s the price these workers paid.

That was true even though the companies acted in ways that were, to the minds of anyone who has any sort of meaningful view of labor rights, entirely, entirely unacceptable. Brutal, violent, contemptuous, all of that. They did all of that, and yet neither the statute nor the agency could really hold them to account, not in a significant way. In that regard, the strike really demonstrated something quite significant about New Deal labor law, and frankly about the New Deal, and by anticipation about post-war liberalism, what it would be and most notably what it would not be.

The answer I’m most inclined to give is, no, that things were fated to go the way they did. I do think that there are some interesting questions to ask about the politics within the SWOC, within the CIO, politics that pitted the CIO establishment led by Phil Murray and other lieutenants brought into the CIO structure by Lewis, all of them pretty conservative people, and their interplay with a strong element in the SWOC that was both militant and in many ways radical in its aspirations and in its conduct.

One of the notable features of this whole story, of course, is the role of radicals, most of them associated with the Communist Party, in the organizing effort. Initially there were dozens, eventually scores of organizers in the CIO’s campaign at Little Steel who were closely tied to, and some of them actual members of, the Communist Party. There were thousands and thousands of rank and filers who sympathized with the communists, and there were many, many thousands more who respected them and followed them on the shop floors. So there was this element, and it closely overlapped with a strongly militant element.

This was maybe put best on display in Northeast Ohio, and nowhere more so than in and around Niles and Warren, Ohio, and, to a considerable degree, into the Youngstown area, where there were a great number of large mills and production complexes. In that area, a number of notable communists were central to the organizing effort, none more notable than Gus Hall himself. These people were at the forefront of some of the most militant organizing in the course of the campaign to organize Little Steel and in the course of the strike that followed.

They were, for a time at least, very effective at meeting the company’s organized violence with their own tactics, some of which were themselves violent. In Warren and Niles, these militant activists managed to essentially cordon two plants owned by Republic Steel and prevent anyone from entering them, forcing the company to resupply those mills by airplane. This went on for some weeks before Phil Murray himself stepped in and put a stop to this.

It’s those kinds of incidents and dynamics that raise the question: Would more militancy have better availed the CIO campaign? That’s not a trivial question at all, but it’s not a simple question either because it raises the added question: What would’ve followed from that enhanced militancy? What kind of responses would that have garnered on the part of state and local governments, and on the part of the Roosevelt administration itself, which in all of those cases had a limited tolerance for this kind of militancy? They showed that in the strike as it was. Roosevelt, of course, famously declared the strike “a plague upon both your houses,” angering many people in the CIO, not least John L. Lewis himself. The New Deal governors in Ohio and Pennsylvania quite faithfully ordered their state troops into the strike areas for the purpose of overseeing the reopening of the mills, citing the disorder that had followed from clashes between militant unionists on the one hand and company forces on the other.

So in light of that, one can also ask the question: Had there been more militancy, would there maybe have been an even more certain response from elements of the New Deal to bring the strike to an end and to use, if necessary, active military force to do so?

I think the CIO leadership was shrewd enough to know that sometimes this militancy could be a benefit to its aims and purposes. That was in some ways the story of the sit-down strikes, and it was in some ways the story of the shop-floor militancy, including wildcat strikes, that preceded the actual strike in Little Steel. There were these outbursts of militancy that the CIO leadership was quite content to make use of, to let it flourish in a way that benefited the organization itself. But in many other instances, the leadership was eager to constrain that militancy or to distance itself from it.

One of the more interesting and tragic expressions of this was the single most violent episode in the Little Steel strike itself, the Memorial Day massacre at the South Chicago Works of Republic Steel on Memorial Day, when the Chicago police shot and killed or mortally wounded ten workers who were part of a large group of union people trying to establish a mass picket line at the main gate of Republic’s plant there. They had of course been turned around several times in the preceding days. On that occasion, they were met, as they had been before, by a large contingent of the Chicago police who blocked them and confronted them and inflamed them. Who knows exactly what started the shooting. It doesn’t seem that there was much in the way of provocation on the part of the union people before the Chicago police opened fire. Regardless, they opened fire, and they killed ten people and wounded dozens of others. It was quite a tragic episode.

I mention it in this connection because when it happened, the initial response in much of American society, certainly in the big newspapers and among much of the political elite, was to blame the union. When that happened, the CIO leadership was pretty quick to distance itself from the events there and to play a careful hand in establishing its potential involvement in or culpability in what happened. Now, as the dynamics surrounding that story changed somewhat and the US Senate’s La Follette Committee’s investigations brought to light the culpability of the Chicago police, then the CIO leadership was, I think, equally happy to involve those organizations in a story of martyrdom, of victimization.

But overall, I think what happened that day is a very good example of how shrewd the CIO leadership tried to be when it came to militancy. Could it have managed this differently, or could a different approach to militancy have turned the CIO in a different direction? I think certainly that’s possible, but subject to how much tolerance there was among the political elite in this country for the militancy that was reflected in the Little Steel strike and the sit-down strikes that preceded it.

I think there’s reason to believe that Lewis was right, although I’m quick to qualify that by suggesting that, whatever the public thought about this, its thoughts were framed by the concerted efforts of a number of prominent elites in government, in industry associations, and in the newspapers to depict the sit-down strikes in as negative a light as possible. And I think the same was true with Little Steel. Yes, people like Lewis were right. As far as we can tell, there probably was declining support or tolerance for this kind of militancy after, initially, there had been a surge in tolerance for it, but subject to this process by which this kind of militancy was just packaged and presented to the public. I think that’s critical. And I think that’s what it means to say that you live in a society in which these capitalists wield extraordinary power and considerably more power than workers. That’s how they wield it, in some instances at the point of a gun, but in many instances by their ability to shape perceptions of strikes and strike militancy.

I think the SWOC in organizing did a quite good job, with some qualifications. The industry had long been a kind of bastion of segregation. There were black workers in steel, not least because tens of thousands had been brought into the mill towns for the express purpose of serving as strikebreakers, including in the Great Steel Strike. They stayed around and had become an integral part of those communities and those workforces. So roughly 10 percent or so of workers in the industry were black. It wasn’t just race, though. There also was a great deal of ethnic diversity in the mills at a time when ethnic distinctions meant a lot more than they do today.

Along the lines of both race and ethnicity, there was an extraordinary amount of segregation within the mill. Blacks were of course quite notoriously confined to the worst jobs in the mills, the coking plants, common labor, that sort of thing, and completely shut out of some of the higher paying and more pleasant jobs, and also shut out of the more skilled jobs. That was, to a very considerable degree, true of low-status ethnics who met with a similar kind of segregation in the plants.

The CIO had to overcome that. It had to find a way to appeal to those workers who were at the bottom rungs of this system and who themselves had long perceived of unions, and rightly so, as bound to exclude them, or to use them, I think as one person put it, as cat’s paws in their dealings with employers. At the same time, the CIO had to appeal to old-stock immigrants, Northern European workers who dominated the better jobs in the mills, appeal to them without generating among these workers the fear that they would lose too much of their privileges in an organizing campaign that sought to organize on an industrial basis all the workers within these mills wall to wall.

So the union had a pretty difficult job, and it managed it, I think, reasonably well. It did so by, first of all, making quite certain that its organizing core, both paid organizers and unpaid lay organizers, were all thoroughly representative of the people it was trying to organize. It did quite well at that and, having done that, was able to take the organizing campaign successfully into these still very much segregated communities where these various different workers lived.

So the organizing campaign is a case study, and a very effective one, of the union’s ability to penetrate the ethnic and racial enclaves. The organizers’ notes are a really fascinating record of this, of their successful penetration into the churches, the fraternal organizations, the saloons, and things like that, the bars and clubs where these workers lived and socialized. So it did quite a good job actually of organizing, especially in light of the history that it had to contend with. It did a good job in most places during the course of the strike in bringing out people of every different race and ethnicity and of maintaining solidarity among them on the picket lines.

It’s easy to look at Little Steel as a failure — and indeed it was — but as a failure that somehow points to the inadequacy of organizing efforts in the course of the strike itself, and I think that’s actually unfair. If you look at the strike, what’s remarkable is how long the union managed to keep people out in places where workers had been shot, some of them killed, and beaten, and arrested by the thousands. It did that again in a context where there was a great deal of ethnic and racial diversity and a long tradition of conflict and segregation in the mills.

The real question of the CIO’s shortcomings on race, of course, comes beyond the strike and in the years ahead, when the union finally achieved recognition at these companies and was in the position of participating with employers in managing these plants and allocating jobs and administering seniority programs and training programs and things like that. There the union’s record, I think, is evidently a problematic one, not an overwhelmingly problematic one, but certainly a problematic one.

There are lots of examples that underscore the effectiveness of communist organizing, the bravery and diligence of communist organizing. At the same time, I think there’s some reason to credit Staughton Lynd’s notion here that the communists were too quick maybe for their own interest, if indeed they were communists and going to be true to that, to surrender their independence to the CIO, and I think nowhere more so than in steel. The SWOC leadership was particularly hostile to the communists and particularly quick to persecute the communists and to purge them in the wake of the Little Steel strike, when it was to their benefit to do this.

Now, that raises the question: Did the communists have any chance of establishing their own effective means of organizing in steel? That’s quite debatable. They had, of course, attempted that in previous years, and it had not been entirely unsuccessful, but it was far from achieving the kind of mass organizing gains that the CIO had achieved in basic steel by the time the Little Steel strike began.

On the positive side, what the CIO’s success underscores is the vital importance of organizing, not just as something spontaneous, or semispontaneous, but something that is deeply structured, deeply rooted, and assiduously cultivated. I think that’s an important lesson for people today. I’m not saying that workers now don’t do that kind of work, but I do think there’s a dearth of that, and not just in labor organizing, but in political organizing too.

The CIO’s success was built upon its organizers’ diligence and its leaders’ (whatever our quarrels with them) seriousness about what they were undertaking to do. It’s not easy. That’s clear from the historical record. I don’t mean that simply in the sense that it was dangerous. It was that for some of these workers. They were beaten, threatened, all of that. But it was also difficult in that it was typically tiring, mundane work. I think that’s one of the maybe not so sensational but quite important examples from the CIO’s experience that has relevance today for workers now trying to replicate the CIO’s success.

On the not-so-positive side, the CIO’s experience shows the power of capital in a capitalist society. That’s not something to be taken lightly. That’s not an argument for defeatism. It’s an argument for caution. It’s an argument for a healthy kind of pessimism and a pessimism that I think is nowhere better directed than at the state itself. I think there is and has been for decades in this country among the labor left a kind of residual faith in the state as a source of not just support but salvation, and one that makes frequent use of the story of the CIO. That, of course, not coincidentally requires a certain amount of mythmaking, including mythmaking surrounding things like the Little Steel strike.

We talked earlier about the dominant narratives of Little Steel as a temporary setback. I think one of the functions that served was to absolve the New Deal state of its role in undermining organizing efforts in the mid- and late 1930s. This was the most salient example of, as it were, the treachery of the state, and if not its treachery, then its fundamental allegiances showing themselves in the course of that dispute. If that’s not something you want to reckon with, then you have to tell a kind of false story about the Little Steel strike, or ignore it altogether.

On the other hand, if you look at the Little Steel strike and take it for what it was, then you can’t but come away with a skepticism about the state. That’s not a skepticism that necessarily has to culminate in an absolute rejection of the positive, constructive role of the state in organizing or even in a program of radicalism. It doesn’t necessarily take you to the door of the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World, for instance. It might, but it doesn’t have to take you there. But what it should do is, I think, create a wariness and, again, a skepticism and a kind of cautious attitude about what the state is and what it has to offer in the world of labor organizing.