Les Orear has lived through much of the history of organized labor in Chicago. He was working at the meatpacking plant Armour & Company when the National Labor Relations Act gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively in 1935. He helped organize his plant and spent years documenting meatpacking and the labor movement in union publications. Then he watched as the entire local industry crumbled. Since then, as president of the Illinois Labor History Society, he’s been the primary custodian of the stories of all the city’s workers. “He has taught all of us about the 8-hour day, the 40-hour week, Samuel Gompers–people and events in the labor movement that a lot of us in the labor community take for granted,” says Dennis Gannon, executive director of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “His role has been invaluable.”
When Orear came up with the idea in 1999 he picked out a site: a parcel of south-side land formerly occupied by the United States Steel South Works plant.
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In November 1998 Orear read an article in the Tribune by architecture critic Blair Kamin advocating a museum at the United States Steel South Works plant “that would focus on the story of steelworkers . . . while exploring the grander theme of work in America.” Once the largest steel mill in the world, South Works was closed in 1992 and its buildings were demolished, leaving an area bigger than the Loop vacant. Inspired, Orear spent several months developing a nine-page “concept,” which he sent off to city, community, labor, and media representatives in September 1999. He called it the Carl Sandburg Museum of Labor and Industry. “I don’t want to call it just a labor museum, because it’d get nowhere,” says Orear, “but a museum of labor and industry, like ‘science and industry’ . . .”
“Mayor Daley should find this concept very appealing. He needs to receive a message from Chicago’s workers and their unions. . . . Nothing happens without the mayor, of course.”
Orear graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1928, and the following year, around the time the stock market crashed, was accepted into the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which had been founded two years earlier by educator and civil libertarian Alexander Meiklejohn. Its 300 or so students, all male, shared a dormitory and didn’t attend regular classes or lectures. “We were assigned the same subject, and we’d spend the whole year doing nothing but reading, writing, and talking about it,” recalls Orear. One year he studied the history and culture of fifth-century BC Athens; another year the subject was 20th-century American civilization (for which Orear immersed himself in the life of Frankfort, Kentucky).
Orear volunteered to write leaflets and sign-up cards for the Armour drive. He’d stuff dozens of them down his big boots and hand them out during his lunch hour. He says the unionizing drive was haunted by the failed strike of 1921: workers were reluctant to join, fearing they’d be fired. Some of the old racial and ethnic hostilities lingered–no one really knew who could be trusted. But Orear and other organizers persuaded their fellow workers that the drive would strive to unite everyone–Germans, Irish, eastern Europeans, blacks, women–on an equal basis.
The stockyards officially closed in 1971. It was a “very bitter pill,” Orear said during an interview for the WTTW documentary Chicago Stories: The Union Stockyards. “This industry had finally been turned into a real good place to work. We had built a great union, a great democratic institution.” Orear retired from the union in 1977.
