You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast.

I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world.

These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Vigelin,

Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from

throughout history. Go to Explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's

the Explorers Podcast. Chicago, 1937, a group of men approach the property of a steel mill.

They're not strangers.

This is their place of work.

But they aren't going to work today.

Music They're going to the Republican Mill to pick it, protest, and keep out replacement steelworkers.

These men are members of the new Steelworkers Organizing Committee, a branch of the CIA.

Unlike other scattered radical upstarts of the past, unlike the strikes of 1919 in Chicago where the steel strike was beaten down.

This group is more organized.

The SWAC Steelworkers Organizing Committee was comprised of all skill levels of steelwork, all races, all neighborhoods of Chicago's, Protestant, and Catholic,

immigrant, and native-born. They had newsletters, alert chains, even family picnics, and bowling nights where the members would bond. There was even a CIO radio program weekly. And as they charged forward together, they

knew that they represented a powerful new union, a veritable new model army of labor, forged like

the middle they worked with from the mistakes and successes of America's labor pass. But they had something

else, a friend in the White House, the most pro-labor president ever. And they'd already

wrenched concessions from America's largest steel maker, U.S. Steel. Everything seemed to be right,

yet it would all go wrong. When U.S. Steel. Everything seemed to be right, yet it would all go wrong. When U.S. Steel gave in,

this left Little Steel in Chicago, the smaller companies with lower profit margins. Republic

...