Trouble in the Citadel

Just before 9 o'clock one morning last week, 600 pickets blocked the doors of the New York Stock and Curb Exchanges. Raucous and cocky, they greeted brokers and clerks with jeers, catcalls and boos. Girls who went into the building entered into a bedlam of epithets such as "stinking tomato" and "scab bitch." Wall Street wondered what had happened: the pickets did not seem to be the white-collar clerks, runners and telephone operators of the A.F.L. United Financial Employes, who had called a strike at the exchanges. Most of them weren't.

They were lean, hard-boiled young sailors from the A.F.L. Seafarers International Union. The Seafarers, following the pattern of C.I.O.'s brawling National Maritime Union in helping striking white-collar workers, had decided to put some noise and muscle into the Financial Employes' walkout. When the cops moved in on them to clear the entrances, the seamen had their own roughhouse counter-move ready. They rushed the cops, blocked the exchange entrance with a carpet of bodies. The surprised policemen started swinging their clubs--and the first labor brawl in Wall Street's history was on.

When it ended 30 minutes later, 45 pickets had been carted off to the police station and a dozen participants hurt. (Among the injured: a plain-clothes man who was mistaken for a picket by the cops and soundly slugged.)

Next day, 500 policemen patrolled the block around the Stock Exchange and there was no more trouble. The American Civil Liberties Union deplored the "lie-down," saying: "By completely denying the right of access to and from the ... Stock Exchange, the pickets abused their lawful right to picket." But it also found "little or no justification for the club-wielding tactics of the police."

One-Man Squad. Many a newly unionized financial worker worriedly wondered what he had got himself into. The union, apparently as untainted by Communist influences as its ally, the Seafarers, was the one-man creation of bespectacled M. David Keefe, onetime Stock Exchange employee. Dave Keefe had started as a $15-a-week page boy; after 13 years he had worked himself up to $37. He organized the union in 1942, saw it almost fall apart after he joined the Seabees. He pulled it together again after war's end and, boasting a membership of 5,000, held contracts with both exchanges.

When the contracts came up for renewal, he demanded a union shop, a $9-a-week raise for employees making less than $40, and $15 for those making more. The exchanges refused the union shop, but offered pay boosts of $3 to $5 from the Stock Exchange and a one-year 10% cost-of-living bonus from the Curb.

With the drop in trading, the exchanges argued that that was all they could afford. To pay even the bonus, said Curb President Francis Adams Truslow, he would probably have to dig into the Curb's cash reserve. Keefe threatened to strike, shrewdly waited till the market was on its way up--and brokers had their hands full with heavy trading--to call his members out. But even with the lusty help of the seamen, he fell far short of crippling the citadel of speculation.

Clean-up Squad. About 800 of the 1,300 Stock Exchange employees walked out. Their places were taken by brokers and exchange members. Robert A. Magowan and Norman Smith, partners in Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, helped run messages on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Vice President John Haskell headed a detail that cleaned up the exchange at night. Curb President Truslow and Chairman Edward C. Werle padded around as night watchmen. In a, day or so, the exchanges were operating almost normally, though the makeshift staffs sweated to keep up with the heavy trading.

Encouraged by the tax cut and passage of ERP (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), trading soared to 1,778,200 shares at midweek, second best day since October. Prices went up also. In four days the Dow-Jones industrial average jumped 3.66 points to 177.61, highest close since mid-January.

Having failed to cripple the exchanges, Keefe threatened a "general strike" of all the brokerage houses in the Street. By week's end he surprised three houses, Shields & Co., E. F. Button & Co. and Bache & Co., by calling strikes and picketing them. Two of them hadn't even suspected that they had any unionists on their staffs. Actually, they had only a few. At Hutton, only 18 of 325 employees walked out. It looked as if Dave Keefe faced a long and probably a losing fight. Said Stock Exchange President Emil Schram: "We are prepared to function indefinitely ... we have lots of help on the floor."

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