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This book explores one of the most dramatic and scandalous events in the movement for American democratic reform. Dubbed the Memorial Day Massacre, it saw Chicago police shoot and kill ten demonstrators and beat more than one hundred others as they tried to form a mass picket line at the Republic Steel Plant in South Chicago.

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Introduction Fire and Steel in South Chicago Crisis Delayed: The 1920s in Chicago and America Out of Despair, Ferment: Upheaval in the 1930s Mailed Fists and Velvet Gloves in the Struggle for Steel Loading the Charge: The Steel Workers Organize Irresistible Forces: The Test of Mettle at Republic Steel ´Trouble is Certain to Follow´: the Coming Conflict A Sunday to Remember in South Chicago Counter-Revolution: The Campaign against Industrial Democracy ´A Major Breakdown of Democratic Government´´Ruthlessness and Disregard for the Law´: After the Massacre ´The Day is Coming...´: Echoes from the Little Steel Struggle

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´Dennis synthesizes primary sources with secondary works in social and labor history and frames the narrative in a radical, timely, and accessible way. This is a good work of scholarship.´ - American Historical Review

´Michael Dennis has produced a useful study of the critical May 1937 ´little steel´ strike. Dennis utilizes labor and police records to describe the national, local, and neighborhood contexts for the police assault that killed ten workers and injured scores of others in Chicago. This is a book that historians of Chicago, civil liberties, the steel industry, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and industrial unionism will consult in the future.´ The Journal of American History

´Excellent a valuable contribution to labor history.´ - American Communist History

"Michael Dennis´s exploration of the events and meaning of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in the Chicago Little Steel strike combines a stirring narrative account of a terrible day in the history of industrial conflict with a compelling argument for the radical potential of the quest for a democratic workplace in New Deal America." - Maurice Isserman, James L. Ferguson Professor of History, Hamilton College, and author of Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War

"Michael Dennis has placed a landmark event in US history into its broader social and political context as a turning point in the long struggle to inject an element of democracy into American industry.In the process, he places in a new light the Memorial Day Massacre, an experience often invoked but just as often misunderstood." - James R. Barrett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"In this rich and highly readableaccount, Michael Dennis casts new light onone of theepicmomentsin U.S. labor history. Dennisbrilliantly retrievesthe struggle for human rights and industrial democracythat guided the hearts and hands of the working class actors in the story. The movement was put down by violence, and the steel mills are long gone, butDennisshows whythese workersleft a legacy that is still very relevant today." - Rosemary Feurer, author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950

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