LABOR: Blackout in Kansas City

For four hours one night last week. Kansas City, Mo. was plunged without warning into darkness. Transcontinental planes circled, looking for the unlighted airport. Trolleys stopped dead. Pumps quit pumping the city’s water. A startled community of half a million people groped in candlelit darkness. The striking employes of Kansas City Power & Light Co. had taken over the power plant and pulled the switches.

A dispute between the company and an A.F. of L. electrical workers’ union over recognition, had dragged on for four years. Further proceedings before NLRB and the Circuit Court of Appeals were pending, but local union leaders, impatient at delays, decided to walk out. In defiance of a Defense Mediation Board appeal, they turned out Kansas City’s lights.

Fighting for his infant life in a mechanical respirator, two-year-old Herbert Schneider gasped and almost died. Rushed to the hospital after a traffic accident, Bart Solomon was operated on by candlelight and flashlight. By the same emergency lighting physicians delivered one baby naturally, another by Caesarean section. Storage plants, home electrical appliances, elevators, radio sets all went dead. Set off by the breakage in current, burglar alarms all over the city began to ring. The sirens of police patrol cars added to the weird racket.

Police and city officials charged into the power plant and evicted the strikers. Ten power-company employes were arrested, charged with malicious destruction of property. Albert F. Wright, union organizer, was charged with trespassing. Police Chief Harold Anderson grimly promised that if anyone died, he would try to change the charge to murder.

Next day, officers of A.F. of L. denounced strike and strikers. A chastened local voted to go back to work. No one had died as a result of the blackout, but plenty of Kansas Citizens, hopping mad, had lost all sympathy with the electrical workers’ union.