LABOR: Onion Trouble

Mayor & Mrs. Godfrey J. Ott of McGuffey, Ohio were tossed out of bed at 3 o’clock one morning last week when a dynamite bomb ripped off the south side of their bungalow. The explosion also broke practically every window in town and rudely awakened most of the 710 other residents of McGuffey.

Located in the central part of the State 35 mi. west of Warren Gamaliel Harding’s Marion, McGuffey lies in the mucklands around the Scioto River where the National Onion Growers Association controls 17,000 acres of onions and peppermint. In June the 700 men, women & children who weed the crop 10 to 12 hours a day for a maximum wage of 12 an hour struck for 35¢ an hour and an 8-hour day. The American Federation of Labor rushed in to organize the strikers who, finding that they got more out of the Relief Administration than they did by working, proceeded to picket while hogweed grew two feet high in the fields. One grower’s home was bombed down, a warehouse burned. The village of McGuffey had to hire 50 deputy sheriffs to keep the peace. The Labor Board sent out a mediator to treat with the growers and the chief agitator for the weeders, a hard-fisted young man named Okey O’Dell, president of the Agricultural Workers

Union. But the mediator gave up, went back to Washington to turn his onion trouble over to the Department of Agriculture.

The first thing the McGuffey deputies did after the Mayor’s house was blasted was to arrest Okey O’Dell. The first thing the aroused citizenry did when it got up that morning was to form a motorcade, storm the jail, seize Mr. O’Dell, transport him none too gently to the county line. “It’s about time,” remarked Mayor Ott’s indignant wife, “something was done.”

But Okey O’Dell hitchhiked back to McGuffey, sought his Brother Elizah and a .38 revolver, barricaded himself and a party of friends into his house. They shouted at a growing mob outside: “The only way we’ll leave is to go as corpses!”

About that time a lieutenant colonel of Ohio militia arrived in town as an “observer.” He showed himself in uniform around the place and by nightfall McGuffey had calmed down. From Washington the Department of Labor dispatched another mediator. Meantime, the weeds were harvesting the onion crop.