Hopeless Hopewell

In 1622 after the massacre at Jamestown, Va., the good ship Hopewell sailed up the James River to succor those who had settled at a point where the Appomattox flows into the James. For nearly three centuries thereafter the name of Hopewell had no fame. In October 1914 the du Pont company got an order from the French Government to manufacture nitrocellulose for smokeless powder. The No. 1 U. S. munitions concern built a huge nitrocellulose plant and a new town at Hopewell which before the Armistice had become a throbbing city of 40,000 souls. After the Armistice the du Pont plant was dismantled. Hopewell was again about to fade off the map when Tubize Artificial Silk Co. built a new plant on the site of the du Pont factory, began making something new out of nitrocellulose -- rayon.*

For 13 happy years Tubize (now Tubize Chatillon Corp.) made rayon yarn at Hopewell. By last April, when labor troubles first visited Tubize Chatillon, it was third largest manufacturer of this material in the U. S. Then a United Textile Workers' Union was formed at Hopewell, began to solicit members. The company objected to the method of solicitation. Its workers, it claimed, were thrashed if they refused to join up. Some non-union employes were not allowed to enter or leave their homes. Others the company undertook to smuggle out of town for their own safety.

In mid-June President John E. Bassill, ex-top sergeant of Marines, had a questionnaire in the form of a secret ballot mailed to his 1,858 Hopewell employes. Of the 1,074 who returned the blanks only 140 favored a strike and 839 declared they were not union members. Ten days later the "strike" broke, on the ground that 13 union members had been discharged. But it was less a walk-out than a force-out. At 4 a. m. strikers scaled the yard fences, raided the plant, drove the night shift out with hardly a moment's grace to stop the machines.

Making rayon out of nitrocellulose is a delicate chemical process involving the use of ether, alcohol and acids. A sudden shut-down at Hopewell ruined not only the material being processed but collodion solidified in the pipe lines and spinning pumps, and the acids ate into the neglected machinery.

Last week Capital as well as Labor went on strike at Hopewell when President Bassill announced from New York that he would not now re-open his Virginia yarn plant even if his 1,858 employes wanted to go back to work. In a letter to Conciliator Anna Weinstock of the Department of Labor he declared that it would take at least three months to repair and renew the Hopewell machinery wrecked by the night raid of the strikers. Such repairs, he said, would cost thousands of dollars--far more than Tubize Chatillon stockholders would be warranted in investing in a rehabilitation of Hopewell. The company would make no more rayon yarn in Virginia but would import whatever was needed for use on its Hopewell looms from its yarn plant at Rome, Ga. Closing the yarn plant would put 1,500 of the company's 1,858 employes permanently out of jobs.

This stiff edict from a 38-year-old ex-top sergeant of Marines left Hopewell feeling decidedly hopeless. Union leaders sneered "Bluff," accused the company of trying to starve its workers into submission, planned an appeal to the U. S. Labor Relations Board. But nowhere in the New Deal could they find any provision for compelling Capital, once it went on strike, to go back to work against its will.

*Allied Chemical & Dye built its Hopewell nitrate plant in 1927.

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