LABOR: Bloodless Interlude

Seven men (included wounded who died) last week went to their graves as the result of the battle between pickets and police before Republic Steel Corp.’s South Chicago plant (TIME, June 7). In Chicago a “mass funeral” was staged for three of them by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Meanwhile the violence of the S. W. O. C. strike against three big independent steel com-panies—Republic, Youngstown and Inland —subsided. In Detroit, where fortnight ago United Automobile Workers organizers were beaten at the entrance to Ford’s River Rouge plant, the fighting shifted to court. On both fronts the combatants took advantage of the lull to maneuver for position. On both sides the sense of injury grew deeper and darker.

Steel Front. Inside the Republic plant near which the bloodshed had taken place, newshawks found that some 1,000 non-strikers were not having a bad time, playing baseball and ping-pong in off hours. But Chicago’s Mayor Edward J. Kelly acted to end their cloistered life. He wrote Republic Steel a polite letter declaring that the men were living in quarters (a wire mill) not designed for residence, an infraction of the city’s health and housing ordinances. They would have to be evacuated within 48 hours. When the time expired, the company shunted 21 Pullman cars inside its gates, installed about 600 workers in them, said the rest would go home at night.

In Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, site of several Republic and Youngstown plants, other maneuvers were afoot. Basic strategy of all three steel companies was to sit tight, wait for back-to-work movements to start among such of their workers as were not actively allied with the S. W. 0. C. strike. They counted on aroused public feeling to assure protection for men going back to work. The Youngstown plants were entirely shut down, in charge of company maintenance men. Republic plants were in partial operation. All were in a state of close siege by strikers. Around the Republic plant at Warren, Ohio, the roads for miles were taken over by strikers who stopped traffic of every description. They called it “Strike Law.” Airplanes, making regular flights to deliver food to the plants at Warren and Niles, were sniped at and repeatedly hit by rifle bullets. The company offered $1,000 reward (unclaimed) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of snipers.

To prevent supplies entering the plants by rail, strikers put ties on the tracks, threatened the train crews until they retired “in fear of bodily injury.” This brought the railroads into the picture: Pennsylvania, B & O and Erie. They appealed to the courts for an injunction to prevent strikers from blocking their tracks. S.W.O.C. counsel replied that the railroads were not acting on their own behalf but merely as a catspaw for the steel companies.

Attempts were made to mail food and clothing into the plants. Local postmasters refused to accept such parcels on the ground that they were “unusual” shipments and the Post Office had for “30 years” had a rule against making unusual shipments in troubled areas. Steel company officials then charged that a parcel of medicine for a man in one of the besieged plants was opened and sent on its way only after two union leaders had passed upon its contents. To Postmaster General Farley, Republic sent a vigorous protest.

The union next made a broader, bolder move to close the plants still operating. It set out to organize the ore mines in upper Michigan and Minnesota, to shut off Republic’s ore supply. Representative John T. Bernard of Eveleth, Minn., one-time miner, fireman and labor leader—who signalized his appearance in Congress last January by delaying passage of the Neutrality Act until the Mar Cantabrico had sailed with a cargo of arms for Spanish Loyalists (TIME, Jan. 18)—hastened home from the Capital to help C.I.O. organize the iron-miners.

High Words. Chairman Tom Girdler of Republic recently obtained a vote of confidence from his industry when he was elected head of the Iron & Steel Institute instead of William A. Irvin of U. S. Steel (which signed a contract with S.W.O.C. without a fight). Ever an outspoken man, Tom Girdler expressed himself freely on the situation last week. He insisted that 21,000 of his 50,000 workers were still on the job, that his mills were shipping 8,000 tons of steel daily. Reporters asked about a suit started by Stockholder Robert W. Northrup of Toledo, who complained that Republic’s officers had spent $1,000,000 on arms & ammunition not required in the steel business. “He’s crazy,” laughed Tom Girdler. But hadn’t the company laid in arms in anticipation of a strike? “I wouldn’t say in anticipation of a strike and I would say it was some years ago. I never knew a steel plant that didn’t have guns and ammunition to protect its property.”

Had he conferred with John L. Lewis? “I’ve never seen John L. Lewis, except at a distance, and I hope to God I never do.”

Wasn’t it just supposition that the strikers whom the police fought in Chicago had actually been going to attack the Republic plant? “I don’t know. Most of them had clubs and weapons. One man even had an old-fashioned razor. Maybe they were out to catch butterflies.”

Equally rough were the words of Philip Murray, chairman of S.W.O.C., addressing a strike meeting in Warren: “I’m here to tell Tom tonight that he’s not going to get much more ore. Girdler is not a steel man. He was chief of the Jones & Laughlin police force before he was dragged by the bootstraps to be president of the Republic. He’s a company cop, nothing more and nothing less, and there’s no company policeman big enough to whip us.”

Ford Front. In Detroit, on the call of the county prosecutor, Judge Ralph W. Liddy of the Common Pleas Court constituted himself a one-man grand jury to investigate the beating-up of Organizer Richard Frankensteen & friends by Henry Ford’s men. Several of the Ford men were brought in. One of them, Oscar Jones, 23, a Negro who used to be a lightweight boxer, admitted he took part in the brawl and was taken into custody. He and a Ford foreman, Wilfred J. Comment, were promptly subpoenaed by Senator La Follette’s Civil Liberties Committee. Meanwhile officials of the town of Dearborn joined Ford attorneys in denying the right of Judge Liddy to investigate an event which took place outside Detroit’s city limits.

Regardless of jurisdiction, the higher-ups of the Ford Co. were hard for Judge Liddy’s process-servers to find. Edsel Ford was reported somewhere in the East. Harry H. Bennett, head of the Ford “service men” accused of the assault, sent word that he was recovering from a severe sunburn at his home in Ypsilanti. When he appeared he spent only a short time in the grand jury room but it was long enough for him to be served with a subpoena to supply the names of all “service men” on the Ford payroll on the date of the riot. Mr. Bennett, once a lightweight boxer in the Navy, sailed into Henry Ford’s employ aboard some ships Mr. Ford bought from the Government after the War and became master of the Ford plant militia and all problems of personnel. He denied knowledge of the formation of a Ford Brotherhood of America, decried by U.A.W. as a “company” union but did say that 80,698 of the plant’s 82,064 men had signed “loyalty pledges” voicing “complete confidence and agreement with the policies of Mr. Henry Ford.”

Elsewhere three incidents, minor in themselves, last week suggested the trend of Labor’s thinking about itself and its power.

¶ A “rent strike” was launched by the United Automobile Workers in Pontiac, Mich. Accusing landlords of raising rents so fast that motor workers were worse off after recent wage increases than before, the union announced that none of its members would pay any rent considered unfair. The union’s idea of fair rent: 1% a month on assessed valuations. On its list of fair landlords the union placed General Motors which built houses for its workers during a housing shortage. How many of the union’s 15,000 members failed to pay rent June 1 was not known, but in the first case (originating before the rent strike) to reach court, a jury voted for the worker-tenant’s eviction.

¶ In New York City 800 drivers, supervisors and guards of armored cars used for transferring millions of dollars in cash & securities daily between banks and businesses, went on strike. In a few hours the constipation of the city’s financial system grew serious and the strike was settled, the strikers winning a closed shop and wage increases of more than 30% ($45 a week for drivers and supervisors).

¶ A “labor holiday,” incomplete version of a General Strike, was engineered in Lansing, Mich. Spark for this was the arrest of six men and two women for picketing the Capitol City Wrecking Co. Industrial plants shut down as 12,000 workers marched out. Chain and department stores were closed. Taxi drivers and city bus employes walked out. In front of the State Capitol and elsewhere automobiles were parked side by side blocking all traffic. Mobs paraded through the streets, directed only by union organizers. Banks refused to do business because they had no police protection. Governor Murphy who had been out of town came back to his Capital and chaos. He promised to investigate whether the pickets had been unjustly arrested. On the outskirts of Lansing, a group of State College students found union organizers trying to close business houses, promptly set upon them, threw eight into the Red Cedar River.