Everybody's Doing It

In the land now called Germany there appeared some six centuries ago a curious and fearsome phenomenon. Suddenly and inexplicably large crowds began to dance in the streets with furious abandon, screaming, writhing, foaming at the mouth. The mania spread from city to city, new victims being inspired by sight of wandering sufferers, until most of Central and Northern Europe was a howling, leaping pandemonium. Uncontrollable, the dancers heeded no barriers, dashed out their brains against stone walls, pranced off bridges. Those caught in time were turned over to priests for lifting of curses, casting out of demons.

Appointment of a parson and a rabbi to help Rev. Frederic Siedenberg. executive dean of the Jesuit University of Detroit, mediate Detroit's pandemonium of sit-down strikes was not the only thing which reminded observers of the medieval dance mania last week as they watched the U. S. Sit-Down epidemic of 1937 spread out across the land. From Salem witchcraft persecution to Ku Klux Klan, from Gold Rush of 1849 to Bull Market of 1929, the U. S. has shown itself no less subject than its sister nations to seizures of mass hysteria. The Sit-Down last week remained primarily a new and powerful weapon in the hands of Organized Labor. But the 600 cigar-factory girls who sat down for extra pay in Newark, N. J. had no union, did not want one. The seven Negro wet nurses who sat down for 10-c- per oz. in Chicago (see cut p. 12) had never heard of John L. Lewis, replied to questioners: "Y'all must mean Joe Louis." In Ionia, demanding back pay, members of the Michigan National Guard who had policed Flint during the General Motors Sit-Down, planted themselves on their armory steps, refused to budge until their captain handed them each a $5 bill from the troop's athletic fund. When his 40 employes sat down, President Louis N. Kapp of Chicago's Comet Model Airplane Co. got out his fiddle, made it a party. In many cases the Sit-Down was a craze like marathon dancing or miniature golf. But it was also a grim and growing Problem, which Congress last week found itself unable longer to ignore.

Senators 6 Shadows, Uprising in the Senate for one of the briefest speeches of his loquacious career, California's venerable Hiram Johnson cried: ''The most ominous thing in our national economic life today is the Sit-Down strike. It is bad for the Government and in the long run it is worse for Labor. If the Sit-Down strike is carried on with the connivance or the sympathy of the public authorities, then warning signals are out, and down that road lurks DICTATORSHIP."

Peering down the Johnson road, James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois discerned the same lurking bogey. Solemnly he recalled that seizure of factories and industrial unrest had preceded the rise of Fascist and Nazi dictators. "Hear your humble servant!'' warned courtly Senator "Jim Ham." "In every hour and condition such as now surrounds this our Government there awaits another Hitler and there lurks in the shadows another Mussolini."

Cauldron. Rare news last week was a move toward industrial peace, made when Remington Rand's hard-boiled President James H. Rand Jr., after defying a National Labor Relations Board order to reinstate and bargain with 4,000 of his employes who have been on strike since last May (TIME, March 22), visited Secretary of Labor Perkins in Washington and worked out a settlement with which she announced herself "extremely well pleased." Less pleased with Mr. Rand's terms, the strike leaders pondered, postponed acceptance. Elsewhere in the seething cauldron of U. S. Labor old and new sit-downs and walkouts continued to splash up and vanish in a constant boil.

There were some 60 in Chicago, with the taxicab strike continuing to provide most fireworks. A printers' strike stopped Indianapolis' newspaper presses for over 24 hours. Eleven nearby towns were darkened and service on three interurban lines halted when the Indiana Railroad's shop men and powerhouse walked out. Dead locked with C.I.O. over a demand for more pay, managers of twelve of the big gest downtown department and 5-c- & 10-c- stores in Providence moved to forestall sit-downs by suddenly shutting up shop at the height of Saturday and pre-Easter buying, locking out their 5,000 employes.

A C.I.O. call for a general strike of all ex cept food and drug stores closed a total of 95 of the city's 1,400 stores. A gen eral strike in the hosiery plants in and around Reading pushed the Philadelphia area's sit-down total above 20. Strongly-unionized New York City was lightly touched by the fever. Determined to stamp it out before it could get a start, police arrested 60 sit-downers in Brook lyn's Jewish Hospital for ''endangering the lives of patients," 100 in a Woolworth 5-c- & 10-c- store for "disorderly conduct." Detroit, where the Sit-Down epidemic began, remained its seething centre, and Detroiters last week were getting an idea of what a revolution feels like. Timid housewives laid in siege supplies of food from neighborhood stores, being afraid to venture downtown. Guests at the big Statler Hotel got the shock of their lives when cooks, waitresses, bellboys, chambermaids and elevator operators, conventionally as dumb and docile as the hotel furniture, impertinently sprawled down in lobbies and lounges, left them littered with cigaret butts and wastepaper, refused to serve food, carry bags, make beds, man elevators. Smelling trouble, managers of the Book-Cadillac, Detroit-Leland and Fort Shelby tried to lock out the bulk of their employes, but a flying squad of would-be sit-downers crashed the Book-Cadillac, one pistol shot being fired in the scrimmage.

Governor Murphy soon settled the hotel strikes, persuading both sides to submit to arbitration. But uppity bellboys were the least of the earnest Governor's troubles last week. Nullifying the courts, Governor Murphy had averted bloodshed in the General Motors strike, helped bring a peaceful settlement, made himself a national hero. But he had also taught sit-downers that they could safely defy the law, and last week they were showing that they had learned their lesson well.

That the harassed Governor well realized he was becoming the Kerensky of the Sit-Down appeared when, to a 20-man Committee on Law & Order which he had summoned to consider Michigan's labor troubles, he declared: "When the authority of governmental agencies is continually flouted or defied, confidence in government is impaired, and outraged citizens prepare to take the law into their own hands; democratic rule is endangered, and the way is prepared for the rule of mobs or dictators; worst of all, labor movements and organizations are discredited, faith in liberal democratic government is permanently impaired, and social progress is impeded.

"While I have consistently counseled resort to conference and negotiation, and sought to avoid the use of force, there is obviously a limit to this policy, if orderly government, as we know it here, is to go on." "Insurrection!" Despite this solemn warning, the sit-down of 6,000 Chrysler employes rolled on last week along the trail blazed by the G. M. strike. As the deadline approached which Circuit Judge Allan Campbell had set in his injunction ordering the sit-downers to evacuate, 30,000 to 50,000 roaring sympathizers massed around the eight seized plants in giant picket lines and the defiant sit-downers sat tight behind their barricades. Two days later Chrysler followed General Motors' example by getting the judge to issue warrants for the arrest of the sitters and their leaders. This time it was not necessary for Governor Murphy to command a sheriff to ignore the court order. Cautious Sheriff Thomas J. Wilcox simply refused to budge. To enforce a similar ouster against only 100 sit-downers, armed with meat hooks and cleavers, in the Newton Packing Co. plant, the sheriff figured he would need 600 deputies. In the same ratio, an army of 36,000 would be required to overcome the Chrysler sitters. Harmless were the big manifolds which, mocking the National Guard one-pounders wheeled out for the G. M. strike, they set up to look like cannon (see cut). Far from innocuous were the clubs and blackjacks with which they had armed themselves, the great iron bins lined three deep inside plant gates, filled with such missiles as bolts, pipe joints, grenade-sized automobile parts. "Troops might get through here," a striker confided to Scripps-Howard's Raymond Clapper, "but you ought to see what we've got inside. We have much more material than this piled around each stairway." "It would be folly," roared the New York Herald Tribune, "to call the sit-in strike of Detroit by any but its right name. That name is insurrection."

Professional Sit-Downers. Visiting a sit-down at Frank & Seder's department store one night, Governor Murphy recognized one of the sitters as a "man whom, when the Governor was judge of Detroit's Recorder's Court, he had sentenced to prison for forgery. Investigation disclosed that the ex-convict and ten of his companions were not employes of the store, but union organizers who had seized it in a raid, cowing employes into a strike. Here at last were sit-downers against whom Governor Murphy could proceed with undivided sympathies. He denounced their action as a "form of banditry," and a swarm of 300 policemen raided and routed them. With public opinion swinging behind them at the revelation of these "professional sit-down strikers," the emboldened police moved on seven shoe stores and a food plant, smashed sit-downs in all of them.

Law & Justice-- In the pinko New Republic last week Dean Leon Green of Northwestern University Law School stepped forward as the first impartial and distinguished legalist to champion the Sit-Down's legality.

Essential difference between a walk-out and a sitdown, wrote he, is: "Instead of employes severing their relations and thereby automatically placing themselves outside as dissatisfied former employes, they now insist on maintaining their relations while they negotiate about their complaints."

Showdown? Driving ahead against small sit-downs, Detroit Police next marched up to the Newton Packing Co. plant, called on the sitters to come out. To Sheriff Wilcox chagrin they promptly dropped their weapons, sheepishly filed out to be arrested for contempt of court. Some 100 women sitters in the Bernard Schwartz Cigar Corp. factory gave the officers more trouble, kicked, squealed, squirmed as they were driven out. When watching sympathizers began to pelt the police with rock-cored snowballs, 20 mounted officers charged into the crowd with nightsticks swinging. At that, Detroit's sympathy began swinging back to the strikers, and United Automobile Workers' young President Homer Martin seized the occasion to threaten a city-wide general automobile strike unless the police raids stopped. After a weekend lull, police evicted sit-downers in a printing plant, a W. P. A. station. Labor and the Law moved toward a showdown as Detroit's City Council unanimously refused the automobile union's request for permission to stage a huge mass meeting in Cadillac Square, and Homer Martin blustered that he would hold it anyway.

The case for sit-downers, as opposed to the Sit-Down, was stated most eloquently last week by Senator William E. Borah. Joining those observers who viewed the sit-down epidemic not as a disease but as a symptom, Senator Borah, who blames most economic evils on monopoly, declaimed: "As I look at it, they [the strikers] are fighting for what they deem to be their rights in an economic system which is dominated ... by lawlessness and largely by reason of the fact that the Government does not enforce the law. . . . The power belongs to us to restore economic justice to the economic system of the United States or, take my word for it, we will have something more than sit-down strikes in the United States."

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