Cases

By the spring of 1937, American industry was at the center of a fundamental confrontation over whether industrial workers would have the right to organize. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, known as the CIO, had won a landmark agreement from United States Steel earlier that year, securing union representation and better conditions for thousands of workers. But the smaller steel companies — collectively known as Little Steel — refused to follow suit. Republic Steel, formed in 1935 by a consortium of smaller producers, was among the most resistant. Workers at Republic Steel's mills, frustrated by the company's refusal to match the terms U.S. Steel had accepted, voted to join the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, the CIO's labor arm, and began pressing for recognition. The company responded with layoffs, surveillance of suspected union supporters, and the deployment of private security forces. The strike that followed lasted months. By late May 1937, picketing had become a daily presence at Republic Steel's South Chicago plant. On Memorial Day — May 30 — the union organized a larger demonstration and picnic, drawing workers and their families to the site. Contemporary reports and later La Follette Committee investigations placed the crowd at between 1,500 and 2,500 people. They gathered near the Republic Steel plant and began a procession toward the facility's main gate. The event was peaceful in its early stages; marchers carried American flags and signs supporting union recognition. Approximately 264 Chicago Police officers were already on scene. The officers moved to block the procession, and the confrontation escalated quickly. Police cut through the crowd and opened fire without warning. Ten workers were killed — four died at the scene, and six more died later from their injuries. More than ninety workers were wounded and taken to the hospital; nine were left permanently disabled by beatings. The violence was witnessed and later documented by Dorothy Day, the labor activist and journalist, whose reporting brought additional attention to what had occurred. Newsreel footage of the confrontation was filmed but later suppressed by Paramount, limiting its public distribution. The La Follette Committee — formally the Senate Civil Liberties Committee — conducted an investigation into the incident and the broader climate of employer resistance to union organizing during the New Deal era. Chaired by Senator Robert La Follette Jr., the committee documented the use of excessive force against labor demonstrators and examined the relationships between steel companies, local law enforcement, and private security operations. Its findings, published as part of a broader examination of employer interference with workers' rights, provided one of the most comprehensive official records of the event and its context within the Little Steel strike. A coroner's jury subsequently ruled the killings a "justifiable homicide." No police officers were ever prosecuted for the deaths. The decision drew criticism from labor advocates and civil libertarians who saw it as evidence of judicial deference to law enforcement in labor disputes. The absence of accountability became a recurring theme in discussions about the treatment of labor organizing efforts by municipal authorities across industrial America. The Memorial Day Massacre became one of the most violent confrontations in American labor history. It intensified public debate over labor rights, the role of law enforcement in labor disputes, and the responsibility of the federal government in protecting workers' ability to organize. For many observers, the event underscored the gap between the protections theoretically afforded to workers under the Wagner Act and the reality of enforcement on the ground, particularly in states where local authorities aligned with industrial interests. The Wagner Act — the National Labor Relations Act — had been signed into law in July 1935, two years before the massacre. In theory, it guaranteed workers the right to organize and required employers to bargain in good faith. In practice, Little Steel companies including Republic Steel had simply refused to comply, betting that federal enforcement would not reach them. The Memorial Day Massacre exposed that gap between legal protection and ground-level enforcement in ways that proved difficult to ignore. A memorial plaque dedicated on May 30, 1967 — the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre — was installed near the site of the shooting at 11731 South Avenue O, ensuring the event was not entirely forgotten. The Memorial Day Massacre remains a reference point in discussions of the long struggle for labor rights in the United States, particularly in the context of government and employer resistance to collective bargaining. The incident took place at the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, Illinois, on May 30, 1937.

On the evening of Sunday, June 9, 1912, the Moore family of Villisca, Iowa walked home from a church children's program with eight people in their party and no reason to expect what was coming. Josiah Moore, 43, was a well-regarded businessman and deacon—a man with standing in this quiet Montgomery County town. His wife Sarah, 39, walked beside him. Their four children came along: Herman, 11; Mary Katherine, 10; Arthur, 7; and Paul, just five years old. Joining them for a sleepover were two sisters from the neighborhood: Ina May Stillinger, eight, and her sister Lena Gertrude, eleven, who had been invited by Mary Katherine to spend the night. The program had wrapped up around 9:30. By 9:45 or 10 o'clock that evening, all eight of them were inside the two-story frame house on East Second Street, doors closed against the summer dark. None of them survived until morning. The discovery came at approximately seven o'clock on June 10. Mary Peckham, the family's neighbor, had grown uneasy. The Moores were reliable people—up early, chores done, a household that ran on schedule. But that morning, nobody appeared. No sounds from the yard, no movement in the windows. Peckham alerted the town marshal, Henry Horton, who entered the home and moved from room to room. When Horton emerged, he reportedly told a Moore relative what he had found in plain terms: "Somebody was murdered in every bed." Every victim had been bludgeoned to death while sleeping. All eight showed severe head wounds. The murder weapon was Josiah Moore's own axe—retrieved from somewhere in the house and used on each person in turn, methodically, without waking any of the others. Afterward, the killer left it in the downstairs guest room where the Stillinger girls had been sleeping. The investigation would note other details that compounded the horror: mirrors covered with clothing, curtains drawn, the house locked from within. Someone had moved through the home carefully, perhaps even lingered after the killings. The attack on eight people without a single survivor roused or able to call out suggested either extraordinary luck or deliberate knowledge of the household's layout. The 1912 investigation was shaped and constrained by the tools available to it. There were no reliable forensic techniques, no criminal databases, no way to anchor physical evidence to a suspect with scientific certainty. What arrived in Villisca instead was an overwhelming wave of outside attention: journalists, privately hired detectives working for competing parties, state investigators, and amateur sleuths, all working the case at the same time and often at cross-purposes. Grand juries convened. Accusations circulated. A slander lawsuit grew out of the investigation itself. The case generated more proceedings than it did clarity. Suspicion eventually focused on a traveling minister named Reverend George Kelly. Kelly was tried twice for the murders. The second trial ended in acquittal. The most durable theory among historians centers on a different man: Henry Lee Moore, an itinerant laborer with no relation to the slain family. In the months after Villisca, Moore was convicted of axe-murdering his own mother and grandmother in a separate case—the similarity in method striking enough to keep his name central to discussion of the Villisca case for decades. But no physical evidence has ever placed him at the Moore house on the night of June 9, and he was never charged. Without a conviction, the case eventually receded. Legal proceedings wound down through the 1920s. The story settled into local memory, then into the wider archive of American unsolved crime. The Moore residence still stands. Restored in the 1990s and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it operates today as the Villisca Axe Murder House—open for tours and overnight stays, a destination for true crime researchers and those drawn to the particular gravity of a case with no answer. Modern forensic methods have been discussed as a potential avenue: DNA analysis, investigative genetic genealogy, the same techniques that have cracked other century-old cold cases. No conclusive physical evidence known to originate from the perpetrator has been confirmed to survive. What happened after the Moore family arrived home from church on the night of June 9, 1912, has never been answered in a courtroom. Josiah and Sarah Moore. Herman, Mary Katherine, Arthur, and Paul. Ina May and Lena Gertrude Stillinger. The murders are documented. The person responsible is not.