Sacred Mails

A Greek historian who died some 400 years before Christ, Little Boy Blue blowing his horn, and a couple of cans of sardines, all entered the steel strike situation in Ohio last week. Also a bottle of mineral oil.

Greek Herodotus wrote the slogan which expresses for U. S. citizens the sanctity of the U. S. Mail: "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

"Little Boy Blue" was what sarcastic former Senator George Higgins Moses, 68, called New Hampshire's Governor Henry Styles Bridges, 40, last year in the Senatorial primary. The epithet was a boomerang which helped elect Mr. Bridges to the U. S. Senate.

Little Boy Blue Bridges, remembering how a bold sound in a Boston police strike made Calvin Coolidge a national hero, last week blew the horn of Herodotus to demand that the Senate investigate obstruction of the U. S. mails by steel strikers. Aroused by this blowing, Private Citizen Dwight Scovel of Hopewell, N. J. mailed some sardines to the beleaguered steel workers to test the maintenance of U. S. mail deliveries.

Postmaster General Farley, who knew little of what had gone on, took no part in the affair. Called before the Senate Post Offices & Post Roads Committee was the Deputy First Assistant Postmaster General, hard bitten Jesse M. Donaldson, a Post Office employe for 33 of his 51 years. He said that postmasters were simply following the department's standard policy of avoiding taking sides in a strike. The First Assistant Postmaster General, rotund William Washington

Howes, was more explicit: by law the Post Office may discontinue service where-ever it cannot safely be continued; carriers are not required to deliver mail to a house where an ugly dog threatens. "We are not the police power of the Government. . . . Our employes didn't join the service with the idea that it would be their duty to handle such abnormal functions." Mr. Howes averred that the only overt interference had been the temporary halting of one mail truck by the strikers. This the Post Office was investigating. There had been no "deal" with any striker. "We . . . refuse to risk the lives of our employes by asking them to carry food into those plants."

Senator Bridges, who rates even among Senate Democrats as no lightweight Republican heckler, went into his act. "Did the pony express riders ask the permission of the Indians to carry the mail?" he cried. "Did President Cleveland ask the permission of the Pullman strikers in 1894? ... I have always been taught that the mail was inviolate." Slapping down a telegram from two Steel Workers Organizing Committeemen at Niles. Ohio, Senator Bridges quoted: '"We simply had an understanding with the postmaster, the assistant postmaster and the postal inspector of Youngstown, Ohio as to what kind of packages would pass through the picket line and what kind would not pass.'"

Senator Bridges produced a package which had been mailed to a strike-bound steelworker at Warren, Ohio by his wife, one Hazel E. Finch. It had been returned marked "undeliverable." The committeemen guessed maybe there was a bottle of liquor hidden inside and that that was why it had been returned. Senator Bridges opened it, unfolded a pair of darned socks, shirts, underwear, handkerchiefs, a necktie and a bottle marked Petrolagar. "What's that?" snorted the Committee's chairman, huff-puffing Senator McKellar of Tennessee.

"A medicine for constipation," replied Senator Bridges.

At week's end Steelworker Finch was without his physic, Senator Bridges was without his special investigation, but Citizen Scovel's sardines had gone through, one package containing two cans by first-class mail, a similar one by parcel post. Blocker of the Bridges investigation was sly old Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania. He urged the Senate to investigate not only the stoppage of U. S. mails but also the conduct of the steel companies. This week's hearings promised to be an investigation to investigate whether there should be an investigation.

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