The CIO's organizing explosion met the old machinery at full force. On Memorial Day 1937, Chicago police fired into a crowd of Republic Steel strikers and their families, killing ten — shot mostly in the back, as suppressed newsreel footage showed — and wounding a hundred; the only people prosecuted were sixty-five strikers, charged while the La Follette Committee documented the massacre from the police's own films. Across the Little Steel towns, National Guard occupations and mass arrests broke the 1937 strike; in Massillon and Youngstown, strikers were killed and their leaders jailed.

The same years jailed sit-down strikers by the hundreds and sent tenant-farmer and packinghouse organizers to southern chain gangs. The La Follette hearings' four million words on industrial espionage, private arsenals, and strike-breaking remain the fullest official record of what American labor's freedom cost.