First Indictments

For the first time the big, jagged teeth of the Smith-Connally-Harness Act bit down. They caught not their intended prey, mastodon John L. Lewis, but 30 small-fry officers and members of United Mine Workers locals.

John Lewis ordered his miners back to work as Congress prepared to make the bill law over Franklin Roosevelt's veto. They went back for the third time in two months, still without a contract. But back they went, more than 500,000 of them.

In the captive mine region around Uniontown, Pa., where coking coal is dug for nearby mills that own the mines, Lewis' order did not stick. First at Brownsville, then at Uniontown, groups of miners worked against union officials who were trying to get them back into the pits. When local election on the question brought a mixed result, self-appointed pickets roved from shaft to shaft, arguing, pleading, jeering at the returning workers, Thus, at the height of the outlaw strike, 24,000 miners were idle, cutting production a daily average of 200,000 tons for 18 days. Since this type of coking coal cannot be bought on the commercial market, furnaces stood idle at five big steel companies.

Pressure to crack down came not from Washington but, apparently, from the steel companies owning the captive mines, and from commercial coal operators who feared the strike would spread. Last week a Federal grand jury brought in the first indictments under the Smith-Connally-Harness Act, which makes it a criminal offense to attempt to strike a Government-operated industry.

The indicted U.M.W. members have received no support from U.M.W. Local, district, and international treasuries are flush, but the miners have had to find their $1,000 bond money elsewhere (some from professional bondsmen, some from community storekeepers). John L. Lewis knows that aid for the indicted miners would infuriate a sizable percentage of U.M.W. members who resented the outlaw strikes and an even larger percentage of U.S. citizens who consider such strikes near treason. Local leaders believe that the sly Old Man of the Mines, considers these cases poor grounds for a Supreme Court fight. But with or without U.M.W., the indictments will almost certainly lead to legal actions which will test how enforceable, how constitutional the Smith-Connally-Harness Act is. The U.S. got one indication of this last week.

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