Lost Cause

By last week everybody in the C.I.O.'s United Packinghouse Workers union knew that its two-month strike against the Big Four packers (Swift, Armour, Cudahy and Wilson) was a lost cause. Almost everybody knew that the union's leaders were ready to admit defeat. From Chicago a call went out for local leaders to come and discuss surrender terms.

Then violence broke out. In South St. Paul there were bloody clashes as non-strikers ran the gauntlet of massed pickets. About 300 pickets had formed a wall, eight deep, near the Swift & Co. plant's main gate. Sheriff Norman Dieter and a force of 21 cops moved up to read the law: a court order had set a limit of 18 pickets. When no one moved, the sheriff rammed his force against the wall. A few minutes later the bloody, battered cops retreated.

Shirts On. That night, across the Mississippi river in Newport, Minn., about 200 raiders armed with clubs broke into the Cudahy Packing Co. plant, smashed equipment, turned loose more than 100 squealing pigs, then beat up company guards and maintenance men.

This was too much for Minnesota's Governor Luther Youngdahl. Next day, on his orders, about 2,500 National Guardsmen, swiftly mobilized in rural areas, moved into South St. Paul, Newport and Albert Lea, where there had been some slugging. It was the first time in 14 years that Minnesota's militia had been called to keep strike order.

Crowds along South St. Paul's Concord Street jeered as the helmeted guardsmen seized several pickets who tried to block workers' cars. Then, with bayonets prodding those who did not step lively, the militiamen cleared more than a mile of Concord Street of all bystanders. The guardsmen swarmed around Minnesota's marble-domed Capitol as strikers went to protest to Governor Youngdahl. Said the governor: "You can't win a strike by anarchy . . . Have a little faith that I am working for you . . . Keep your shirts on."

Shirts Off. But the strikers knew that they had already lost their shirts. This week, in Chicago, union leaders went in to surrender to Armour and Co. officials. They were ready to accept the 9-c--an-hour increase the companies had originally offered (the union at first demanded 29-c-, later was willing to take 12-c-). There was a snag to final agreement: the company now demanded the right to fire strikers who had taken part in the violence. Until that was settled, the strike would drag on.

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