In Happy Valley

Happy Valley, Tenn., was full of new trouble last week. Ten thousand idle hands itched with mischief. Strikers from the American Bemberg and Glantzoff artificial silk factories at Elizabethton, Tenn., felt the prick of National Guard bayonets.

These mills had been reopened in the face of the union strike (TIME, April 15 et seg.). Their German managers demanded and received military protection from the State. Machine guns bristled on the plant roofs, manned by young Guardsmen, many of them students from the University of Tennessee. Some 800 militiamen and special deputies enforced what was, in effect, martial law through Happy Valley.

To operate the mills, the managers scoured the East Tennessee mountain country for strikebreakers whom they drove to the plants in busses and trucks under armed guards. The strikers, many of them also back-countrymen, attempted to block the highways, break up the convoys. Trees were felled across the road. In one case a "loyal worker" injured three strikers when ordered by Guardsmen to drive his car full tilt through a blockading group. Adjutant General W. C. Boyd in charge of militia at Elizabethton was arrested on a charge of "aiding and abetting an attempt to commit murder," preferred by a woman striker seriously injured by this motor onslaught.

Riots and bloodshed ensued. Tear bombs were hurled. Several hundred strikers were arrested at once and herded, shouting and cursing, into the Carter County Courthouse auditorium. The tiny jail was full. No sooner did law officers release some of the prisoners, than others were brought in. Elizabethton's 16-inch water conduit was dynamited three miles out of town. Schools closed. Trucks trundled to Johnson City, eleven miles away, for drinking water. Homes of strikers and strikebreakers were dynamited, barns burned.

These disorders drew protests against the use of troops in Happy Valley. Lieut. Gov. Herbert H. Lehman of New York State resigned as a director of the Bemberg and Glantzoff companies after futile attempts to induce their managements to settle the strike, to forego the use of armed forces.

Gov. Henry Hollis Horton had appointed President George L. Berry of the International Pressman's Union as the State's mediator in this Labor dispute. Major Berry was born one county away from Happy Valley. He knows the temper of its people. He was a Vice Presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention last year. Great is his influence among Union Workers. Great is the respect U. S. publishers have for him, for his word keeps their presses turning. His good offices quickly settled the famed New York City Pressmen's strike in 1923, when for several days all New Yorkers were reduced to reading one jointly-issued tabloid for their news.

Last week Major Berry withdrew as mediator because Gov. Horton had sent into Elizabethton additional troops "under whose guise the rayon plants are being operated." Mayor Berry sided with the strikers and, with a voice like an organ, called for a $100,000 relief fund to carry the strike through to success.

Unlike the Communist-instigated textile strikes in North Carolina (TIME, April 15), the Elizabethton walkout had the full and active support of the A. F. of L. President Green of the Federation formally pro tested to Gov. Horton that troops had been sent at the request of the mill owners "to terrorize the strikers."

In Washington, the agitation for a Senate investigation of textile labor troubles began to bear fruit. North Carolina's Senator Simmons withdrew his objections to a resolution by Montana's Senator Wheeler, when the scope of the inquiry was broadened to take in the whole U. S. instead of a few Southern States.

A bedraggled group of Gastonia, N. C., strikers appeared in Washington to tell their grievances. They were snubbed by the National Women's Trade Union League on the ground that they were not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Fourteen-year-old Binnie Green, who weighs 69 pounds, told of getting $4.95 for 60 hours' work a week in the mills. North Carolina's ponderous Senator Overman patted her on the head, and said: "This child ought to be in school." Then he backed away into the Senate, there to renew his warnings of Communistic agitation in his State.