Showdown

Last week Franklin Roosevelt reached a worm-turning point. Having tolerated strikes in defense industry for many months--until the public was fed up and Congress indignant--he either had to put up or curl up. The three strikes which put him in that spot were in the logging camps of the Northwest, in San Francisco shipyards, at North American Aviation, Inc., in Inglewood, Calif. In each case strikers had arrogantly defied the Federal Government. In each case responsible labor leaders repudiated the strike. So finally the President spanked.

Plain to labor leaders, plain to everyone was the noisy nigger in the strike woodpile: Communism in labor's ranks--the old Red policy of fomenting strikes because any kind of labor trouble is good for Communism, the old Red policy which since the beginning of World War II has been reinforced in the U.S. by Nazi cash.

Planes. Weeks of wrangling over demands for higher wages at North American (strikers at Vultee had boosted a 50-c- minimum to 62 1/2-c-) had got nowhere. A strike was brewing when the case was handed to the National Defense Mediation Board, which summoned management and union leaders to Washington. The C.I.O. union agreed not to strike during negotiations. Management promised to make any settlement retroactive to May i. But in the middle of negotiations, William P. Goodman, local union spokesman, bawled that the company was "stalling," and the Inglewood local walked out. Work on some $200,000,000 worth of U.S. and British contracts for bombers, pursuit planes and combat trainers ceased.

Congress grew apoplectic; even labor leaders "condemned and denounced" the walkout. From the White House came an order to reopen North American's plant. If necessary, the plant would be put under Army operation and protection. The Presidential ultimatum gave strikers only a few hours to get back to their tools.

Franklin Roosevelt's choice was easy compared to Philip Murray's. With labor misbehaving, the President's method of slapping it down was to seize the plant of the employer. C.I.O. President Philip Murray could not slap anyone except his own followers. Since he took office he has been harassed by Communists, who became entrenched in C.I.O. ranks under the more tolerant leadership of John L. Lewis. A practical Catholic, Murray has no love for Reds. C.I.O.'s United Automobile Workers, which took over aircraft organizing, has been particularly plagued with them.

Murray sent hefty Richard Frankensteen, national director of U.A.W.'s aviation division, to Inglewood, where Frankensteen broadcast a warning to workers to go back to work or forfeit affiliation with the C.I.O. Said he: "The infamous agitation, the vicious maneuvering of the Communist Party is apparent."

When Frankensteen tried to address a workers' mass meeting, held in a bean field opposite the huge plant, a cell of hecklers milled around the speaker's stand, waved sketches of rats, jackasses and skunks at him, booed him off the platform. Taking to the air again, he suspended his own assistant, Communistic oldtime Labor Leader Wyndham Mortimer, three international organizers and all officers of the brash young local. Strike leaders decided to defy the President, keep the plant strike-shut. They were backed by local and State C.I.O. groups, by Harry Bridges' longshoremen, by their own rank & file (who declared that all they wanted was a decent wage).

To reports that soldiers of the 15th Infantry were converging on Inglewood, stocky, slow-talking Leader Elmer Freitag cried: "Armed forces will not break our strike. Bombers can't be made with bayonets."

Finally the President made good his threat, proclaimed: "Whereas . . . aircraft essential to its [the U.S.'s] armed forces and to the national defense is seriously impaired ... I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pursuant to the powers vested in me . . . direct that the Secretary of War immediately take possession." This week, on the morning set for reopening, as tear-gas bombs began to lob through jampacked streets around the plants and violence began to spurt, soldiers with fixed bayonets marched into Inglewood.

But no shots shattered Inglewood's tense morning. Most serious casualty was one picket, who was reported cut by a bayonet. A few hours after two battalions of troops had taken over, workers were streaming through the gates, and Lieut. Colonel Charles E. Branshaw, in command, announced that the tie-up was over. Some 2,000 workers, about one-quarter normal complement for the shift, were back inside, limited production had been resumed. Unless there was a new outburst, North American would soon be back at top-speed operation.

In Washington, War Secretary Stimson declined to say what effect Army occupation would have on management's status beyond: "We want to get this plant . . . to producing ten planes a day again. . . . All the rest is mere detail." Temporarily, at least, it appeared that the Army had simply assumed North American's personnel problem, would let management continue to boss production.

But there was little doubt that the President had his Dutch up at last when he yanked out one of the biggest clubs in his closet. As 2,000 C.I.O. workers walked out of the Aluminum Co. of America plant in Cleveland, an order came from Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, deputy director of the draft, that henceforth "the citizen who has been deferred because of the job he is performing in the national defense program cannot expect to retain the status of deferment when he ceases to work on the job for which he was deferred." In World War I President Wilson issued a similar order: "Work or fight."

Ships & Timber. North of Inglewood, in San Francisco, striking machinists still sulked. Half a billion dollars worth of naval construction had been tied up for a month. While Franklin Roosevelt smacked down on aircraft strikes with one hand, with the other he summarily beckoned Harvey W. Brown, machinists' chief, to the White House. Results of that conference were awaited this week.

The President's Mediation Board, after long investigation, had stepped in with recommendations for settling the Puget Sound C.I.O. loggers' strike. Similar contract terms had already been accepted by nonstriking C.I.O. loggers in the Columbia River district. But the answer of O. M. ("Mickey") Orton, strike leader, was a violent denunciation of Board Chairman Clarence Dykstra and his terms as an "all-out, labor-busting and strikebreaking device." Philip Murray, in a cold rage, called Orton's statement "a most reprehensible lying defamation."

Surly, sandy-haired Mickey Orton, who has frequently been accused of Communist sympathies, had the support of few labor leaders last week. Best he could produce was a telegram from Harry Bridges, West Coast longshoremen's chief, who was in the midst of a deportation hearing on charges of being a Communist himself. Bridges wired "wholehearted support." The 0PM summoned ranting Mickey Orton to Washington. How much it would take to break the log jam in the Northwest was a matter of speculation, but there were indications that Mr. Roosevelt was ready to use whatever force it took.

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