Stormy Weather

The nation's pulse rose feverishly last week as riot ran loose in three industrial cities of the U. S. Public patience, strained by disputes that have been impeding the defense effort, cracked. But it was the din of disorder, not of disaster, that raised the national pulse.

In Bethlehem, Pa.,police charged picket lines around the Bethlehem Steel plant. In Chicago, strikers milled and jeered around the gates of International Harvester's McCormick plant, while people who recalled the bloody Haymarket riot of 1886, which was fought on the same spot, held their breaths. Men battled before the Harvester plant in Richmond, Ind. Strikers and police split each other's heads, fought with clubs, tear gas, pitchforks, baseball bats, brickbats. In riot's wake was a debris of hospitalized citizens, overturned autos, damaged property and partially shut defense plants.

U. S. indignation was reflected in a Gallup poll, which indicated that 72% of the public was sure that strikes in defense industries should be forbidden. Bills to curb strikes, unions, union activity were considered in Congress, in many a State legislature. The Oklahoma Senate, the Texas House, the Georgia Legislature had already voted such measures. New York's Senate passed one last week. Everywhere the conviction--sometimes the almost hysterical conviction--grew that something must be done. But what?

In the House of Representatives Hatton Sumners, chairman of the potent Judiciary Committee, made the jhigh-pitched suggestion that "enemies of this nation, in the factory or elsewhere," be sent to the electric chair. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, with hoarse urgency, spoke of organizing home guards (now that the National Guard was in the Army) to suppress "any labor disorders."

The most novel idea came from the Air Corps's Major General George Brett, who announced that Army planes would swoop in mass formation over struck plants, to show strikers "what they are working for." Congressman Dies, who has cried "Wolf!" so long & loud that he has almost turned public sympathy against Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, croaked incessantly of Communists, demanded the purging from labor of all Reds. In Washington, an Army officer wagered even money that the first target of U. S. armed forces would not be enemy troops but U. S. citizens.

Behind all this ferment were some un-fevered facts. Whenever industry skyrockets, labor troubles follow inevitably in a smoky trail. At last midweek the number of strikes in defense industries had actually dropped from twoscore a few weeks ago, with 47,000 workers out, to 27, with an estimated 40,000 out. There were still some 36,000,000 people in the U. S. (not counting agricultural workers) at work.

Cause for Confusion. No one denied that any industrial stoppage was bad, in the critical spring of 1941, and especially bad when it occurred in a vital centre. Looking for a cure, men looked for causes, tried to sort them out and define them.*

Profits were being made, and labor wanted a piece. If that attitude was less than sacrificial, so was the attitude of at least some industrialists. The secretary of the Machinery and Allied Products Institute wrote to a Washington newsman: "Anyway, many of our members have come to the conclusion that Government orders aren't worth bothering with." In the majority of strikes, new wage demands were involved. Proof of the reasonableness of its demands, labor felt, was the record of the last six months of 1940, when practically every strike for increased wages had been wholly or partly successful. Labor saw no good reason for slackening its efforts now. It foresaw a higher cost of living (not yet generally apparent), and was determined to get contracts for wages that would meet those future costs. Labor did not believe economists' warning that higher wages now would inflate prices, lower real wages.

As important a cause for the turbulent racket was the fight for union recognition.Labor felt that if it did not strengthen its position during the war it would be badly set back on the coming of peace. Unionizing drives ran smack into ancient prejudices. The battle at Bethlehem was only a skirmish in C. I. O.'s long effort to organize that company. Trouble started last week when an election of officers to the Employes' Representation Plan (which NLRB declared to be a company-dominated union) was flaunted in the faces of C. I. O. steelworkers. The Washington News commented: "Both sides ... are to blame, the union chiefly for its violent tactics. But this is a defense strike in which we feel that a major portion of the blame rests on the company. Labor policies of the Bethlehem Company have been notoriously archaic and often brutal."

Confounding confusion (and losing labor many a last friend) were two other causes: the rivalry in labor's divided house, resulting in jurisdictional fights between C. I. O. and A. F. of L.; and Communism in C. I. 0.--a vexatious matter, because C. I. O., with its membership chiefly in the key defense industries, was involved in the great majority of strikes. C. I. 0. President Philip Murray has declared : "Labor is ... just as loyal to the cause of America ... as any group in the country." Murray hates Communism with a deep hate. Nevertheless, as nobody can deny, a thin Red thread runs through C. I. 0. It is thin but tough, and Murray has been unable to get rid of it. It has tangled in many a situation, confused many an issue.

Disorder in Washington. The outbreak caught the Administration unawares, there by adding unnecessarily to the apparent confusion. Earlier in the week, the new Dykstra Mediation Board (TIME, March 31) had held a brief preliminary meeting, had heard hopeful words from its chair man ("We shall ... try to appeal to the sound sense and the good will of all true Americans") and -- adjourned. The Mediation Board could not deal with any strike until Madam Secretary Perkins gave the word ; and there was no word from Madam Perkins. Labor's man on OPM, Sidney Hillman, was Florida-bound, sick after a winter of worry and work. President Roosevelt was somewhere off the Florida coast. Labor's Perkins was junketing.

But there were two men left in the capital who deemed that the time had come for action. OPM's William Knudsen and Secretary of the Navy Knox bared their teeth and drove straight into the thick of things. They charged at neither Harvester nor Bethlehem, but at the tougher, two-month-old Allis-Chalmers strike. A peremptory request to reopen went to Company President Max Babb, who hastened to comply and sent invitations to his employes to come back.

C. I. O. workers refused. Although some employes returned, the Allis-Chalmers dispute stayed snarled over an interpretation of settlement terms. But the Knudsen-Knox attack had one effect. Before they could get set for another charge, Madam Perkins, from New Mexico, certified not one but four strikes to the Mediation Board. Chairman Dykstra summoned his colleagues to a hurried meeting.

One strike -- Universal-Cyclops -- resolved itself before they even met. The Mediation Board thereupon knuckled down to the 48-day-old Vanadium Corp. tie-up, the disputes at Cornell-Dubilier Electric Corp. and Harvester. Within the space of three days the board announced that every one of the plants but Cornell-Dubilier would reopen immediately, negotiate afterwards. It was a triumph.

The steel strike at Bethlehem dissolved in a truce engineered by hard-working Labor Department conciliators, State mediators. The terms, hailed by the union as a victory, pooh-poohed by the company as a return to the status quo, obligated management to meet and deal with S.W.O.C. representatives, put off final selection of an exclusive bargaining agent until the NLRB charge that E. R. P. was a company union was decided by the courts. A strike that had closed Bethlehem's Johnstown plant was settled by the same device. By early this week, the number of workers on strike in defense industries had dropped to 15,000.

Break in the Clouds. Tension relaxed, although there was still plenty to worry the ebullient Mr. Roosevelt when he got back from his fishing trip. The brash act of Knudsen and Knox had exposed some sharp cleavages within the Administration itself. C. I. O.'s Murray, serving on the Mediation Board, was hopping mad over what he considered Knudsen's and Knox's assumption of authority. Possibilities of new strikes hung in the sky. Management and workers at Ford eyed each other warily. Skirmishes kept nerves on edge. A strike of machinists threatened on the West Coast. A showdown between S.W.O.C. and Big Steel neared an extended deadline, when contracts expired.

Still, there were patches of blue in the overcast. Ford had made some gingerly concessions, and the C. I. O. United Auto Workers' strike deadline passed without any concerted overt act. Steelworkers' leaders promised: "There need be no public apprehension about a possible suspension of steel production in any of the mills . . . of U. S. Steel." In New York City, coal negotiations moved out of the critical stage when U. S. Conciliator John R. Steelman declared: "Whatever optimism I have expressed is based on the fact that both sides will remain in conference." Douglas Aircraft Co., Inc., without being forced, announced a 2 1/2-c--to 5 1/2-c--an-hour increase in wages to "balance the increased cost of living resulting from defense 'boom' activities" in California. March had been a stormy month; what would April show? No one had yet devised any workable panacea for the manifold problems of labor. Whether labor smoothly meshed in with the gears of the defense machinery probably depended on "sound sense and good will."

*The Mayo Clinic's Dr. Russell Morse Wilder had an answer: "I suspect that many industrial workers are led to make unreasonable demands because of the inadequacy of vitamin BI (thiamine) in their diet." "Paunchy industrialists" trying to diet were, he guessed, also low in vitamin BI, and irritable as a consequence.

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