THIS MONTH IN HISTORY: APRIL 1937
Companies Use Violence to Undermine Union
By April 1937, most of the workers at Little Steel’s mills in the Calumet region of Indiana and Illinois had joined the union. There were 8000 union members at Bethlehem’s Cambria Works in Johnstown and 32,000 in the mills in and around Chicago. But the companies were doing everything they could to discourage union membership. In Cleveland, Paul Castman, a union organizer, was assaulted while distributing literature and collecting membership cards near a Republic Steel mill. A company policeman beat Castman so severely with a blackjack that he had to be hospitalized for sixteen days.
