In Passaic

Through the dusk, down a soiled street, beside a factory wall, a file of men were marching. Their clothes were the color of the wall. Their faces were the color of the dusk. They walked without animation, each to his own tune as if they were following a drum that had been silenced. Where the wall ended, a row of policemen made a stiff blue dam across the street, leaving a gap just wide enough for the passage of these twilight marchers, right foot, left foot, shoulder to shoulder.

They were strikers. Until a few weeks before they had got their living in the Botany Worsted Mills over behind the wall. When they quit work the usual endless controversy had begun about better living conditions, about more pay. It was not very lucrative to work in the Botany Worsted Mills of Passaic, N. J. Some workers got $9 a week. More experienced ones got $15. The strike had been coming for a long time, and when it came they were quite ready to listen to the taut harangs of Strike Leader Albert Weisbord (a graduate of the Harvard Law School) and to the words of Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, a wild Irishwoman who could fire a meeting like a cigaret in shavings. They had been listening to her that afternoon. She had sent them out to march past the mill. . . .

But now they were not marching any longer. Something had happened; a police sergeant had given an order, and the gap in the blue dam had been closed. The shufflers in the rear did not understand. They kept coming on. The front line stopped. The ranks behind rippled and deepened. Soon the street was filled with a discolored tide that washed up over the gutters, into doorways and alleys, lapping uneasily and stirring with a vague noise like the rumor of surf. What were the cops trying to pull off? What was the big idea?

"Stand back! Watch it up, buddy! Stand back there!"

A rattle of hoofs. Fifteen mounted policemen had come up. They made brief sorties into the surf. Haggard men and women scrambled away from the iron shoes. No, someone was stepped on that time. A girl. The iron shoes stamped by. The sea, pushed from behind, pressed closer than ever.

A brass bell yapped; a siren hooted like a gull. Police-chief Richard 0. Zober of Passaic in a red flivver. "Disperse that crowd!" He took a metal-covered sphere from his pocket; threw it; threw two more; gray gas sidled into the dusk. Tear bombs! . . . More bells, more hooting. A fire engine. Another. Enormous silver rods of water battered the hatless women, the men who had no overcoats. The crowd eddied, broke, swirled down the street. Policemen dashed after, clubbing backs, heads, shoulders. ...

So ended the extraordinary scene on the first day of the war in Passaic. Nobody knew what had occasioned it. The strikers had not been disorderly. They had sound legal right to march down Dayton Street, provided they broke no windows, gave vent to no loud jeering at Bomber Zober. But although the sound of that human surf, following the chief's experiments with tear gas, had begun to be ominous, the crowd of some 3,000 persons that milled around at Highland and Dayton Avenues on the following afternoon paid very little attention to the 35 patrolmen who were watching from the sidewalk. There was snow in the gutters. Small boys had a fine time pelting motorcycle policeman. Much merry horseplay, too, of holding back light cars that were trying to get up the grade to the Botany plant. Officers tried to clear the traffic. They drove their sputtering motorcycles round and round. Women jeered, dingy men guffawed. ... It was a signal the patrolmen had been waiting for. They charged the crowd with their clubs. . . .

An explosion. A great glare of light. A series of glares, booms. Cameramen were setting off flashlights. The clubbers hesitated, swerved. "Get them," yelled a voice, "get the cameras! . . ." And then the patrolmen charged the newspaper photographers. . . .

A man struggling between two officers who held his arms while a third beat him over the head. His moving picture camera lay broken in the gutter at his feet. . . .

Kicked and beaten, another, down on all fours, reaching out his hand to pick up the valuable lens of his shattered machine. A policeman smashed the reaching hand with a neat blow . . . kicked the lens far away. . .

A young woman had a bundle of notes in her hand. A swipe of a nightstick loosened her hold. The papers fluttered into the mud.

One photographer escaped by climbing over a roof. Another crawled through a window, hid in the kitchen of a startled housewife.

Next day an airplane whirled and swooped over Passaic. It contained a cinema cameraman. Two armored cars lumbered through the streets. They shielded reporters. In steel helmets, with gas-masks strapped to their shoulders, strikers paraded past the mill, two by two. The Passaic Chamber of Commerce asked Governor Harry A. Moore of New Jersey to "mediate" the strike. An inventor, one Edward Moore, offered Mayor McGuire of Passaic his "centrifugal riot gun, which shoots 4,000 shots a minute and is effective at a mile and a half." The offer was not accepted. The police did not try to stop the grey-faced marchers on Dayton Street. No women were clubbed.

On the fourth day of the riot (the end of the sixth week of the strike) warrants were sworn out for Chief Zober and for two patrolmen. The warrants had nothing directly to do with the riot. A War veteran charged that Zober had struck him repeatedly with a club when the police raided a strike meeting three weeks ago. The two patrolmen were charged with beating, kicking, prostrating a storekeeper and his wife in their store two weeks ago. A justice of the peace issued warrants of arrest. The police refused to serve them and a constable from a neighboring town had to be procured to do it. But the visiting constable backed down at the last moment, said he was afraid of "publicity."

The Passaic Director of Safety, Abram Preiskel, summed up the incident:

"Chief Zober will not hide or run away. He has been working 20 hours a day and is all in. When he is well he will face the charges and so will the patrolmen, who have been working 14 to 16 hours a day under trying conditions."

But the strikers got county authorities to effect the arrest of Chief Zober and his two patrolmen. All were released pending action by a grand jury, Chief Zober nursing grippe in bed.

* 1. Karl W. Fasold (Pathe News).

2. Harry Wurnecke (Daily News).

3. Dorothy Dayton (The Sun).

4. Arthur G. Miller (N. Y. American).

5. Frederick Must (Daily Mirror).