Second Week

Last week President George A. Sloan of the Cotton-Textile Institute swept aside Labor's proposal that the President's Board of Inquiry for the Textile Industry arbitrate the two-week-old national textile strike. The United Textile Workers' demand that all mills be closed by their owners before arbitration commences, Mr. Sloan found "utterly impossible from every standpoint."

Replied Strike Leader Francis J. Gorman: "The battle goes on!"

In the South the strike for a 30-hour work-week at 40-hour pay, elimination of the stretch-out and union recognition, seemed to have reached its peak, settled down into an endurance contest. South Carolina strike leaders called off their "flying squadrons" of picketers, and most strikers stayed home. Important mills in the Carolinas bristled with bayonets. In Georgia, Governor Eugene Talmadge declared martial law, whipped up a "flying squadron" of his own--National Guardsmen who arrested and interned some 200 pickets, took control of troubled districts. The strike in the South remained roughly 40% effective.

Shortly after the strike began last fortnight one South Carolina mill-owner flashed the following bulletin to the Cotton-Textile Institute's New York headquarters : "Our mills will continue to operate indefinitely. They are now barricaded and ready for a state of siege." That mill-owner was a thickset, thick-spectacled young man worth about $20,000,000, who habitually wears straw-woven slippers and a beltless Norfolk jacket of 1917 vintage. His name is Elliott White Springs.

Elliott White Springs' Grandfather White was a Confederate general who won Southern hearts in Reconstruction days by accepting Confederate greenbacks in payment of a big debt. Elliott White Springs' stepmother is handsome, energetic Lena Jones Springs, whose name was formally proposed and seconded for the vice-presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 1924. Elliott White Springs' father was Col. Leroy Springs who, upon his death three years ago, left his son control of seven of South Carolina's biggest and best textile mills at Fort Mill, Lancaster and Chester. But Elliott White Springs' public remembered him not as an able mill-owning son of an able mill-owning father but as a Wartime flyer and writer.

After he left Princeton in 1917 he became a captain in the U. S. Air Force. In France he was the Army's No. 3 ace, with twelve German planes to his credit. In 1926 he started a great cycle of War-time aviation literature with War Birds, which ran serially for three months in Liberty and later became a best-selling book. War Birds was supposedly the diary of an unknown U. S. aviator, but few literary wiseacres believed that Mr. Springs did nothing more than edit the manuscript. Mr. Springs has a private airport on his estate at Fort Mill, plays a crack game of tennis, lists on his letterhead some 25 goods & services--including cotton sheets, airplane transportation, short stories--which he will supply for a fee.

Last week all of Elliott White Springs' seven mills with their 400,000 spindles were running full blast, as if their 7,000 non-union workers had never heard of the strike call.

The North last week got a bitter taste of the same sort of strike violence which had plagued the South week before. National Guardsmen were called out in Maine, Connecticut and in Rhode Island, where trouble hit hardest.

First Northern shooting came at small Saylesville, R. I. (pop. 1,416) when deputy sheriffs pumped buckshot into a crowd besieging the local textile plant. On the second day Rhode Island's Governor Theodore Francis Green clamped martial law on the Saylesville district, mobilized his State's entire National Guard (2,083).

In midweek the twister of trouble moved a few miles north to Woonsocket, R. I. (pop. 50,000). Behind a barrage of bricks which left the main street in darkness, some 500 picketers charged the Woonsocket Rayon Co.'s mill just before midnight. Militia advanced on the shadowy mob with fixed bayonets, fired two volleys. Four figures went down in the dark, one to rise no more.

Then began the ugliest rioting of the strike. Down on the "Social" district, a mile from Woonsocket's business centre, bore a howling mob of hoodlums, some 1,000 strong. For three hours the town was theirs. Roaring up & down streets, they smashed, splintered, looted.

Five truckloads of fresh troops brought peace to Woonsocket at 3 a. m. Thoroughly alarmed, Governor Green sent a call for the State Assembly to meet in extraordinary session that afternoon. "This is not a textile strike," cried he. "It is a Communist insurrection."

Jitters, Lawyer, banker, scholar, Fellow of Brown University, 66-year-old Governor Green belongs by birth to Rhode Island's Republican mill-owning class but has cast his lot with plebeian Democrats. Last week he was an old man badly frightened when he asked his State Assembly for: 1) $100,000 to up the State police force from 51 to 1,000 during the emergency; 2) $100,000 more to put 1,000 War veterans under arms; 3) power to close any or all textile mills in the State; 4) power to call in Federal troops, which he said President Roosevelt had promised him.

Republicans lined up behind the Governor, his own partymen against him. The Republican leader of the Senate said he had received the following message from Brig.-General Herbert R. Dean, commander of the State's National Guard: "I think I can control the situation but for God's sake tell the Legislature to do something. We need Federal troops!"

Answered the Democratic leader of the Senate: "Don't call in the regular army! Don't militarize Rhode Island for the sake of the selfish interests of a small group of mill-owners! If you want to stop the trouble, stop it at its source, the mills, which are a cancer in this body politic."

When the shouting died that night the Assembly had granted none of the Governor's requests. Voluntarily mills at Woonsocket, Saylesville and four other trouble spots closed and the Governor started a Communist round-up on his own authority. Though Federal troops were reported mobilizing in New York and New England, President Roosevelt at Hyde Park appeared to be in no rush to send them to Rhode Island.

Next day Rhode Island was quiet and the worst of its jitters had passed. The Assembly adjourned sine die. Governor Green still was without the power to call Federal troops.

Month More. In Washington peace moves were at a standstill. With Labor's arbitration offer withdrawn, Governor John G. Winant of New Hampshire and his colleagues of the Textile Inquiry Board went into a 48-hour huddle with employers to find on what terms they would submit to arbitration. Governor Winant emerged to announce curtly that the employers would arbitrate on no terms whatsoever. Their position was that Labor was attempting to alter the textile code by force and should be resisted to the bitter end as a matter of principle.

Unexpectedly to the mill-owner's side after two weeks of silence charged NRAdministrator Johnson. At an NRA Code Authority meeting in Manhattan he accused U. T. W.'s President Thomas F. MacMahon of bad faith, denounced the strike as an "absolute violation" of the agreement reached by U. T. W. and NRA when a strike threatened last June (TIME, June 11). Roared the redoubtable General : "If such agreements of organized labor are worth no more than this one, then that institution is not such a responsible instrumentality. . . ."

Grateful for such moral support from NRA, President Sloan promptly thanked the General for thus "definitely spiking propaganda [that NRA and the Government are behind the strike] effectively used in many mill centers." Strike Generalissimo Gorman quietly pointed out that the agreement at issue had begun with the following words: "This agreement does not prejudice the right to strike."

Strikers who expected the Government to feed them were disappointed everywhere except in Lowell, Mass. Said Leader Gorman: "We are now preparing for at least a month of struggle to win the strike."

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