In the wake of the myriad cases of police brutality that have dominated recent headlines, I expect readers will find much resonance in Michael Dennis's new history of the 1937 Memorial Day massacre. Indeed, Dennis's central argument is that the 1937 massacre of picketing Chicago unionists should be understood not as a mere isolated incident of police violence, but as a flashpoint in a larger social struggle that “challenged the authority of management to dictate the terms and conditions under which average Americans earned a living” (p. vii). The steel strike, Dennis argues, was but part of a broader campaign for union representation, shop floor control, and social democracy. This argument, of course, will not surprise interested scholars. Instead, at 117 pages (a reduction of a previous work), Blood on Steel seems intended as a neat introduction to New Deal–era working-class activism (and business response) through the lens of a very powerful and moving moment in American labor history.

In January 1937, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) won a sweeping victory at the world's largest steel firm, United States Steel, earning workers union recognition, the forty-hour work week, and a ten-cent hourly pay increase. Unfortunately, SWOC encountered much more resistance from the so-called Little Steel firms: Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland Steel, and the other smaller U.S. steel producers. A strike was called on May 26, 1937. Expecting confrontation, Chicago's Republic Steel hired some 370 “police guards” and began stocking weapons at a furious pace, acquiring “4 submachine guns, 525 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns, and enough clubs and ammunition to hold off the Illinois National Guard” (p. 25). Unionists attempted to form a picket line at Republic, but were repeatedly—and forcibly—dispersed by Chicago police. In response, on Memorial Day (May 30), about 1,500 workers and their allies held a rally at the union's headquarters. Resolving to demonstrate for their right to picket, they again marched to Republic Steel, where hundreds of officers stood waiting. As a Paramount news camera rolled on, the police opened fire, sending strikers scrambling. Ten workers were killed—seven shot in the back as they ran from the melee—and 100 to 110 others were injured. The footage captured that day was screened across the nation, catalyzing widespread outrage.

Dennis rightly contextualizes these particulars in a larger narrative of New Deal–era labor activism, but his most controversial argument is revealed only in his concluding chapters: namely, that it was the failure of SWOC and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to capitalize on the public indignation in the massacre's wake that spelled doom for the 1937 strike. Dennis condemns union organizers for their lack of direct action: specifically, for their failure to call a general strike, their unwillingness to endorse a sit-down strike, and their decision to clamp down on wildcat bursts of “grassroots activism” in the name of “union respectability” (pp. 32, 70–71). In short, echoing arguments made by historians like Nelson Lichtenstein, Dennis argues that “conservative” union leaders privileged the possibility of stable contract bargaining over the more expansive dreams of industrial democracy that proliferated at the grassroots, dooming both the 1937 strike and the larger struggle for social and economic change to failure.

Although there are many virtues to this book—indeed, I imagine it will make a very compelling read for undergraduates—there are also a few reasons instructors might want to pause before assigning Blood on Steel. Most obviously, it suffers from a number of editorial flaws. For example, a number of direct quotes are repeated throughout the text (pp. 6 and 82, 47 and 53, 58 and 81); in one particularly egregious instance, a quote is repeated on two consecutive pages (pp. 80 and 81). Moreover, Dennis does not contextualize his own arguments within the larger debate on New Deal labor relations. Blood on Steel would be a better book for students, I think, had the author also highlighted that the argument that SWOC sacrificed the possibilities of direct action at the altar of respectability is not the only available interpretation. Dennis, after all, is staking a claim in one of the most contentious debates in twentieth-century labor history. His dissenters include historians such as Robert Zieger and Kevin Boyle, who have instead underscored the massive political gains that came from CIO pragmatism, pointing out that—especially in regards to issues such as race—it was generally a conservative grassroots battling a much more progressive union leadership. More to the point, Dennis's narrative of union “failure” and “squandering” is hard to square with the CIO's massive wartime and postwar gains, including the eventual organization of Little Steel in 1942.

Most importantly, I wish Dennis had given more time to understanding why exactly Little Steel and the Chicago Police Department were so virulently antilabor. Although one book cannot do everything, his examination of the Chicago police seems a bit flat, simply reducing the department to a xenophobic institution “seasoned by years of internal corruption and Wild West lawlessness” (p. 88). Although there is likely some truth to this characterization, it is nonetheless puzzling. After all, in many other locales, workaday police officers often felt great sympathy for other working-class groups. Dennis offers even less analysis of Chicago's steel firms. This too seems a lost opportunity, as I am sure that the majority of students who encounter this book will be—metaphorically speaking—much more likely to find their own future careers on the side of the steelmakers than the steelworkers. I worry that, by portraying these manufacturers as unimaginably inhuman and unethical, Dennis also unintentionally makes them completely alien caricatures with little to teach today's (future) business leaders and managers. An analysis of some of the possible constraints (or fears) that Chicago steelmakers faced would have made this book that much more relatable, unsettling, and teachable.

Nonetheless, Blood on Steel offers a gripping narrative of one of the most fraught moments of contestation in American labor history. With its accessible length and prose, it is a welcome addition to potential reading lists for courses on labor relations and the New Deal era.