No. 3

Up to the gates of Air Associates, Inc., of Bendix, N.J., rolled trucks filled with U.S. troops. Armed with machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, fixed bayonets, 2,100 soldiers clambered down and took possession of the factory. For the third time in five months the Government seized a defense plant to settle a labor trouble.

Seizure of Air Associates was the result of President Roosevelt's conviction that President F. Leroy Hill had flouted the National Mediation Board, OPM AND THE War Department, during months of senseless wrangling and hostilities. Mediation Board Chairman William H. Davis had negotiated a truce whose terms required C.I.O. to disperse several thousand picketers who patrolled the gates, required the company to reinstate immediately C.I.O. union workers (125 of them, said the union; only 51, said the company).

What happened, according to hardworking, pacific Mr. Davis, not only upset his plan but threatened the future course of labor mediation: The picket line dispersed; the company took some strikers back, but failed to give them their old jobs. Upshot: union men walked out again.

Picket lines sprang up once more, and C.I.O. leaders threatened to call a sympathetic strike among aircraft plants in the five eastern States. Out of patience, Washington sent Colonel Roy M. Jones, two other Army officers to Bendix to see that the Board's recommendations were carried out.

Colonel Jones was promptly confronted with another side of the situation. Grimly at work in the plant were some 750 employes, many of whom had been hired in the last few months. They had rejected C.I.O. membership, resented union attempts to intimidate them with a picketing mob of some 3,000 men, most of whom had never worked in the plant. Picketers had stoned their autos; they had clubbed picketers. Like Mr. Hill, they were angry and defiant.

When strikers started coming back to work under the Colonel's eye, a group of nonstriking workers shut off the power, stopped all work. Despite the Colonel, they routed the intruders by cracking a few heads with handy iron bars. On some reinstated women strikers they used less violent but equally effective tactics: they glared at them until the scared women rushed weeping out of the plant.

That was the point at which Mr. Roosevelt made public the proclamation that "the company had failed to carry out the Board's recommendations," and armed troops moved into Bendix.

The cold, wet morning and the sight of cold bayonets chilled the ardor of strikers and nonstrikers alike. Gates were barred to them. Mr. Hill was forced to vacate. After officially firing every man jack in the place, Colonel Jones and officers of the Air Corps began rehiring workers from the sober crowd which stood outside, picking those who were on the payroll before the strike on Sept. 30, whether union or nonunion. By afternoon, half the plant's normal personnel had been restored and work was humming.

Financial control would remain in the hands of company officials, said the Colonel. But the Army would control production, until the Mediation Board, the union and Mr. Hill worked out something. As for the status of Mr. Hill, Colonel Jones cracked: "He is now a former employe."

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