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By Root 185 0

the working class,” he tells me. “They don’t even understand that there is such a thing.” (He also was appointed to the Illinois Labor Relations Board, which helps resolve labor disputes involving public employees.) One Saturday morning, Sadlowski invites me to join him and his students, thirty-six men and one woman, for a field trip. All of them are in their twenties and early thirties, dressed in hooded sweatshirts and Carhartt jackets. Each has a cell phone on his (or her) belt. They wear baseball caps announcing their allegiances: Chicago Cubs, Bud King of Beers, Killian’s, Rapala, and Rail Cats (a semipro baseball team that plays in a stadium called the Steel Yard). They look as if they’d rather be elsewhere, and early on, when Sadlowski, sitting in the front of the bus, starts rambling on about his days in the mills, a voice from the back hollers out, “Come on, Ed.”

“What do you think their attention span is?” he mumbles. “Half a commercial?” But Sadlowski loves these guys. Their lives are constrained by what they know and by where they live, but they know enough to recognize that getting by with what skills they have may not cut it as the world turns, and so have elected to come back to school, to figure out what’s next. (One tells me he wants to become a nurse.) They’ve also had the good fortune to run across Sadlowski, and Sadlowski the good fortune to run across them; they’re cut from the same cloth, and Sadlowski can tell them whence that cloth came.

At Sadlowski’s direction, the bus driver turns off Burnham Avenue, over the curb, and along a stretch of cracked cement that wends its way through a large field of tall weeds and prairie grass. A quarter of a mile in, Sadlowski tells everyone to get off the bus. According to Sadlowski, the nearby Calumet River was at one time the most industrialized waterway in the world. Now, as the carpenters and millwrights stand there, chilled by the early fall wind, he gestures toward the river and rattles off the names of the companies that once lined its banks: “Interlake Steel. Valley Mold and Iron. South Works. American Shipyard. Calumet Shipyard. Wisconsin Steel. Republic. Acme.” It’s to make a point. A few days earlier in class, one of his students had ripped into people living off the dole, people taking welfare handouts. “Too often, we point fingers,” Sadlowski tells his students. “How can people live like that? I’ll show you how it can be. Forty, fifty years working in a steelmill, doing what society expects of you, and then . . .” He claps his hands together. He has their attention.

“So where do the guys go?” a young carpenter by the name of Joe Gilmak asks.

“That’s my point,” Sadlowski says.

Sadlowski has taken his blue-collar protégés to this field because it’s the site of the Memorial Day Massacre (not to be confused with the Valentine’s Day Massacre, an Al Capone–ordered killing on the city’s North Side); it’s in places like this, Sadlowski tells them, that their lives and livelihoods are rooted. In 1937, the nascent steelworkers’ union was attempting to win recognition at the smaller steel companies, and Republic Steel resisted, locking out its workers. The men and their families had gathered at a nearby tavern, Sam’s Place, and decided to march on the company. As they approached the gates of the plant, Chicago policemen shot into the crowd, and then went after the strikers and their families with pickaxes supplied by the company. Ten men were killed, another eighty-four injured. It would be another five years before Republic recognized the union. Sadlowski takes his students across the street, to a former union hall (now a church-run community center), which still bears a plaque listing the victims and declaring them “Martyrs—Heroes—Unionists.”

This is a city of plaques and monuments, a city with a long memory, for the famous and not-so-famous, for the virtuous and nonvirtuous. Sadlowski has also led a contingent of steelworkers to the burial grounds (in the suburb Forest Park) of the anarchists hanged because of their alleged role in the Haymarket Affair;