Sit-Down Spread

Five-score desperate men crouched inside the Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. plant in North Chicago one dawn last week as up to the gates marched a motley army of 125 other desperate men armed with guns, nightsticks, baseball bats, tear gas bombs, battering rams. The besieging army was the Law--Sheriff Lawrence C. Doolittle of Lake County, Ill., with policemen and deputies.

Not gangsters in a hideout, but sit-down strikers were the besieged. Two days prior they had sat down for recognition of their union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers into which John L. Lewis and his C. I. O. are trying to enlist all the steel workers in the land. Circuit Judge Ralph J. Dady had promptly issued a temporary order for them to evacuate. But the example of the automobile sit-downers in Flint (TIME, Feb. 15) had taught the Fansteel men to pay no attention to the court. Just as Flint's Judge Paul V. Gadola had done, Judge Dady issued a writ for the sitters' arrest. This time there was no Governor Murphy to tell the sheriff to ignore it.

"Come on out!" yelled Sheriff Doolittle.

"Come and get us!" bawled the sitters.

"We'll never come out alive." "I've got a court order," cried the sheriff.

"Go to hell!" returned the strikers.

Raising one of their steel rams, the besiegers began to batter at a nailed-shut door. Down on them rained a shower of bolts, nuts, pulleys, bottles filled with nitric acid. Behind a barrage of tear gas, the officers joined battle. Strikers turned on the plant's ventilating system, cleared out the gas almost as fast as it came in. One excited deputy was burned with his own gas bomb. Acid containers hit two policemen, splashed them painfully. One striker quit the plant badly gassed. After two hours the officers ran out of tear gas and Sheriff Doolittle's men withdrew. The strikers declined medical aid, huddled in miserable triumph as cold winds whistled through the broken windows of the heatless, lightless factory. . . . Heat came up after two days, but negotiations to end the strike remained frozen. Like Governor Murphy, sympathetic Governor Homer refused to risk bloodshed by sending militia to evict the sitters. As General Motors' officials had first done, Fansteel's President Robert J. Aitchison stood firm on his property rights, refused to discuss a settlement until his plant was evacuated. Thrice rejecting Governor Horner's pleas for a conference, he said he was perfectly willing to talk to his own employes, but would never treat with their outside C. I. O. leaders. "If they can sit in there," said he, "we can sit up here."

General Motors assembly lines were rolling again last week, but the North Chicago fracas furnished spectacular proof that the greatest issue raised by the Motor War of 1937 was still far from settled. As a disturber of U. S. peace, the Sit-Down Strike had just begun to fight. In Detroit alone, eight small factories were held by a total of 2,600 sit-downers, mostly women. President Walter Fry of Detroit's Fry Products Inc. (automobile seat covers) thought up a new twist when he sat down with his 150 sitting employes, ordered dinner for the crowd, promised to sit it out with the best of them. "If they won't work. I won't, and unless I work and sell, they won't have any work to do," said 56-year-old Mr. Fry, who is his small firm's chief salesman. "If all industry would do something like this," he declared on the third day of his sitdown, "it would solve the epidemic of sit-down strikes. Some of my workers are consulting a union book of strike rules, but there's nothing in the book about Fry or how to make Fry work." On the fifth day the baffled strikers decided to forget about their union, sat down with President Fry and worked out a settlement as a "family affair." Simultaneously this week a new rash of sit-downs erupted throughout the land, victims including Detroit's Briggs Manufacturing Co. (automobile bodies), Santa Monica, Calif.'s Douglas Aircraft Co., Groton, Conn.'s Electric Boat Co. and Crowell Publishing Co.'s printing plant at Springfield, Ohio.

In New Jersey, anticipating trouble, burly Governor Harold G. Hoffman let out a headline-making blast aimed at the C. I. O.: "A labor union has no more right to take possession of a factory than a band of gangsters has to take possession of a bank. ... To the citizens of New Jersey I promise--and to lawless organizations I give warning--that, if necessary, the entire resources of the State will be called into action to preserve the rights, liberties and property of its citizens. . . ."

Turning aside from his organization drives for the moment, the Sit-Down's boldest tactician, C. I. O. Boss Lewis, resumed his role as president of United Mine Workers, settled down in Manhattan for a long haggle with soft-coal operators over a new two-year wage & hour contract to replace the one expiring March 31. Coal trouble still threatened. Automobile trouble was only quiescent.* Steel trouble was almost certain, and last week in Texas it was reported that April 5 the C. I. O. would launch a great drive to organize Oil. In all of those impending struggles, the Sit-Down loomed as the new weapon Labor would most certainly and most provocatively use with what consequence to the U. S. conception of property rights not even John Lewis would venture to say.

Last week in Pittsburgh, banqueting steelmasters were profoundly shocked when a spokesman for University of Pittsburgh's Bureau of Business Research announced that, after a study financed by the rich backers of the Falk Foundation and Brookings Institution, the Bureau believed that steel workers should be organized, preferably in an industrial union such as John Lewis is promoting. Not men to be swayed by such academic advice, steelmasters knew that when their turn came they could put up far stiffer resistance to the Sit-Down than any of its previous victims. Wives and friends of sitters in automobile and other factories situated on city streets can easily reach them with food and supplies. But the great steel plants are often far back in the hills, a mile or so behind high, well-guarded barriers surrounding company property. Militant rank & filers were talking last week of airplanes and parachutes to drop food to Steel's prospective sit-downers.

*Launching its drive for Chrysler recognition this week, U. A. W. planned to tackle Ford next. At his new winter home near Ways Station, Ga. last week the nation's No. 1 anti-unionist spoke out for the first time since the automobile union announced its intentions. Said Henry Ford: "A man loses his independence when he joins a labor group of any kind, and he suffers as a result. Competition in industry will guarantee workers a fair wage, but labor unions destroy this competition. It is organizations of this type that lead up to war."

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