Bricks, Bats & Blood

Last week Californians knew from their daily papers that a strike of 25,000 longshoremen was paralyzing Pacific Coast shipping, threatening Alaska and Hawaii with a shortage of supplies. Clevelanders knew there was a newsboys' strike in progress when they failed to receive their copies of the News, the Press, and the Plain Dealer. Citizens of New Orleans knew that a squabble about "company unions" among dockworkers was making rough & tumble news along the waterfront. Citizens of Hartford, of Buffalo, of St. Louis, of Houston, of Baltimore, of Indianapolis, of Pekin, Ill. all knew about strikes in their home cities. But the only strikes of last week which made front page news in every city in the land occurred in Toledo and Minneapolis. They had two things in common: 1) union recognition as the cause of the trouble; 2) violence and bloody death as its result.

Toledo, The Electric Auto-Lite Co. makes electrical equipment for many a big motor manufacturer. Last February the United Automotive Workers Federal

Labor Union demanded a closed shop and a 20% wage increase. Auto-Lite agreed to a 5% wage increase and negotiation of other questions. Six weeks ago, with nothing more settled, the union struck. To outsiders it looked as if the union had picked Auto-Lite to open its drive to capture the whole motor industry. The company continued operating, hired other workmen. Wrathful strikers picketed in vain. Charging many cases of violence, the company got an injunction restraining the union from posting more than 25 pickets at its gates. Even so. workers had to fight their way in and out of the shop, morning and evening. Strikers were arrested for breaking the picketing injunction. Tension grew, then snapped. All one day last week strikers besieged the Auto-Lite plant. By evening the 1,500 workers within, exchanging missiles with the strikers outside, dared not leave. They spent the night barricaded in the plant while windows were smashed, gates broken down. Next day Ohio's Governor White ordered 700 Guardsmen to the plant. Khaki-clad, tin-hatted, armed with gas bombs, rifles, bayonets, machine guns, the young Guardsmen from Ohio's towns and countryside marched in. Not peace but warfare followed. Though the factory ceased operations, rage and resentment seized the strikers who harried the soldiers with insults, jeers, rocks. Every window in the factory was broken. "Now," shouted a striker, "you have your open shop." Wagons and wheelbarrows of bricks and beer bottles were trundled up from the rear to throw at Guardsmen. Unemployed joined the battle. Boys in short trousers popped at the Guardsmen with BB rifles. The battered Guardsmen retaliated with barrages of tear gas, with bayonet charges. The strikers, by now a passion-ridden mob completely out of control, retreated only to come back for more. Once Guardsmen fired over their heads. Then, without orders, a Guard platoon leveled its rifles and fired. Two men dropped dead, a onetime CCC camper and an unemployed battery-shop worker. Otherwise the Guardsmen kept their heads, drove back others without more damage than a dozen bayonet and shot wounds and accidental injuries from bursting gas bombs and arrested the leaders of the mob and suspicious characters (including Columnist Heywood Broun). A howling mob of 250 seized Stephen Kardos, a workman who failed to join the strike, dragged him from a taxi cab, beat him, stripped him naked except for necktie, shoes and socks and marched him through the shopping district. A lone middle-aged policeman won Kardos' release with: "Boys, wouldn't your sister or your mother be shocked by such a spectacle?" After two ugly days for Toledo, the son of a onetime President appeared on the scene--Charles P. Taft II, commissioned by the Department of Labor as mediator in the strike. Minneapolis. Month ago Minnesota's blatant, Radical Governor Olson wrote a letter to Minneapolis' truckmen urging them to unionize to protect their NRA rights. They unionized and struck. Businessmen realized that, if the truckmen won, practically the whole city would go closed shop, because no non-union construction or other business could survive if truckmen refused to make deliveries. Employers were already well organized and had long raised money to fight the strike. Thirty-five thousand construction workers joined the truckmen's strike. The truckmen tied up the whole market district, prevented all deliveries except to hospitals. Eager to break the strike, businessmen persuaded the police chief to commission some thousand of them as special officers to protect the market district, start trucks moving. "Get the 'specials.' Let the blue coats go." yelled 5.000 rioters. From clubs and lengths of pipe the "specials" got a fierce drubbing. Every ambulance in Minneapolis was summoned to carry off the injured. A lusty striker with a baseball bat stepped up behind C. Arthur Lyman, graduate of Hotchkiss and Williams, onetime Guardsman and Wartime artillery officer, now vice president of American Ball Co. The striker swung his bat and Special Officer Lyman went down on the cobblestones with a crushed skull, never to rise again (see cut). Another special policeman died of the beating he received. So cowed were Minneapolis businessmen, that by their request newspapers named none except the parsons who were present at Lyman's well attended funeral at swank St. Mark's Church. Then Minnesota's Farmer-Laborite Governor Olson stepped in again, won both sides to a compromise, the employers agreeing to collective bargaining, the strikers to going without written recognition of their union.

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