Steel Front

Rounding out its first full month last week, the Steel Strike of 1937, biggest and bloodiest since 1919, entered upon a fresh, perhaps final, phase. From mill gate and picket line the major action shifted rearward to civil courts, State capitals, Congressional committee rooms and the editorial and advertising columns of the nation's press. Temporarily stalemated by martial law in two steel States, both Labor and Capital grasped desperately for the support of Public Opinion. And Public Opinion, without the support of which no major strike is ever won, seemed to be swinging slowly, imponderably to the side of the embattled steelmasters.

At wreck's start Republic's Tom Mercer Girdler and Youngstown Sheet & Tube's Frank Purnell had announced the reopening of their plants in the Youngstown district. Picket lines were hastily strengthened, C.I.O. reinforcements summoned from nearby industrial centres. A pitched battle seemed inevitable. To Secretary of Labor Perkins went a plea from John L. Lewis to "prevent this contemplated butchery." Said Mr. Lewis: "I told her that sornewhere there should be a power that could be exercised tonight to restrain this madman Girdler."

Upshot was that President Roosevelt personally requested the steelmasters to keep their plants closed until his Steel Mediation Board had done its work. And Ohio's Governor Davey dispatched 4,800 militiamen into the Mahoning & Trumbull Counties with orders to preserve the status quo. The plants stayed closed and, rare in U. S. history, the strikers greeted the arrival of troopers with loud cheers.

Exploded Steelman Purnell: "What right has the Governor to send troops in to prevent men from working? The Governor's job is to protect men who wish to work. . . . It's gotten so now that a man can't work in this country when he wants to."

Both steelmaster and striker soon changed their tune. Methodically the troopers stopped invading C.I.O. sympathizers at the city line, disarmed the picket lines, confiscated weapons which included hatchets, axes, clubs, baseball bats, slingshots, blackjacks, brassknuckles, 15 sticks of dynamite, several buckets of pepper, a machete, a stone tomahawk and a bolo.

Since the Ohio constitution makes no provision for martial law the militiamen were nominally at the command of the local sheriffs. Sheriff Elser of Mahoning County, mortally feared & hated by Youngstown strikers, promptly clapped nearly 200 unionists in jail for carrying concealed weapons and on "suspicion." What was worse, he left them there without arraigning them until a judge, outraged by such "willful failure" to grant the prisoners their constitutional right to a hearing, gave the sheriff a thoroughgoing public reprimand.

Meantime in their dove-papered suite in Cleveland's Hotel Hollenden (just a short way from where Murderer Robert Irwin was working as a bar boy--see p. 11), the members of the Federal Steel Mediation Board did their best to arrange a permanent peace. A compromise proposal-- that the steel companies make agreements subject to Labor Board elections--was turned down flat by the steelmasters, though Mediator Charles Phelps Taft II was sure that the union would have accepted it or some variant of that proposal. The steel companies now maintained that the question was not. and never had been, simply one of signing a C.I.O. contract. Though nearly everyone in the U. S. from President Roosevelt down was under that impression, the steelmasters informed the mediators:

"The statement has been made that our companies have arrived at an oral agreement with the C.I.O. regarding wages, hours and other conditions of employment, but decline to put that agreement in writing. That is not true. No such agreement, oral or otherwise, has been reached. That does not mean, however, that the terms of employment now in effect with our employes are indefinite or uncertain or subject to unreasonable or arbitrary changes. They have been reduced to writing in form of notices which have been posted in all plants to which they apply or otherwise announced in writing to all our employes. . . ."

It was true that the terms of the notices were virtually identical with conditions in plants with C.I.O. contracts and hence acceptable to C.I.O. But as the striking steelworkers promptly pointed out there was nothing except a steel-master's conscience and the fear of John L. Lewis to prevent him from posting new notices any day with new and lower wage scales.

The Mediation Board made one last effort--an appeal to the steelmen to talk to John L. Lewis face to face--but was rebuffed. Then, citing pressing personal duties, the members of the board prepared to disperse. S.W.O.C.'s Philip Murray now suggested that the dispute be turned over to President Roosevelt for personal arbitration. The incongruity of this was that the President of the U. S. had disqualified himself as an impartial judge by declaring for the C.I.O. position last fortnight.

"I knew you were a gentleman." Just before the Steel Mediation Board adjourned Tom Girdler hurried off to Washington to testify before the Senate Post Offices Committee on C.I.O. interference with the mails, a subject which the committee later voted to drop. In fighting fettle, the tightlipped, hooknosed, bespectacled steelman put on an exciting show. Having read a spiced-up version of the statement given to the Mediation Board, Mr. Girdler immediately opened up on Pennsylvania's Senator Guffey, no member of the Post Offices Committee but on hand for a morning of Girdler-baiting. The Committee had understood from Philip Murray and Senator Guffey that the steelmen did have an oral agreement with C.I.O.

"Mr. Murray is a liar to the best of my knowledge and belief and always has been," cracked Steelman Girdler. "Senator Guffey doesn't know what he's talking about."

Chairman McKellar admonished Mr. Girdler that Mr. Guffey as a Senator was entitled to respect. Mr. Girdler: "I don't call it disrespectful to say that a Senator does not know what he's talking about."

Could the Senator from Pennsylvania ask the witness a question? It was "common talk" in Pittsburgh clubs, said the Senator, that Mr. Girdler had been asked to resign from the presidency of Jones & Laughlin Steel. "Because you gave confidential information of your company to the company you are now with."

"If that's a rumor, that's a lie and whoever told you that is a liar!" shouted Mr. Girdler.

"You were talking about irresponsible union officials," continued Senator Guffey. "Maybe that's one reason your employes don't want a verbal agreement with you, feeling that if you would give confidential information you aren't responsible either."

Fumed Mr. Girdler: "If the Chairman will remove the ban, I'd like to answer that one as it ought to be answered!"

Would Mr. Girdler sign a contract if an election were held and the majority of his employes voted C.I.O.? "We still wouldn't sign a contract."

Would he sign if the Labor Board ruled that he must? "I would not care what they ruled because that is not the law."

Would he sign if the Supreme Court upheld the ruling? "Whenever the law says I have to sign a contract and the law is properly upheld, then I'll have to sign a contract. . . . I am trying to tell the distinguished committee I won't sign a contract with an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic organization like the C.I.O. and until the law requires me to do so, I am not going to do it."

Stage-managed by his Washington press-agent was a luncheon the following day at which Mr. Girdler carried on for the benefit of a few handpicked newshawks. Earlier efforts by reporters to arrange an open press conference collapsed when Mr. Girdler is said to have learned that Columnist Heywood Broun planned to attend. Even at his private conference Mr. Girdler got into hot water. Calling the Mediation Board "incompetent and unfair," he asked: "Who is Taft? He is a man who likes to talk about the things his father did. Who is Ed McGrady? He is Fannie Perkins' and John Lewis' office boy." After this appeared in print Mr. Girdler hastily telephoned Mr. Taft, explained that he had only quoted a New Dealer. Apparently what roiled the steelmaster most was the way President Roosevelt had thanked him a fortnight ago after Mr. Girdler agreed to cooperate with the Mediation Board. According to Mr. Girdler, the President said to him: "I knew you were a gentleman."

"C.LO. She Blow Up." Returning to Cleveland by plane, Steelman Girdler found good news awaiting him. With back-to-work sentiment hardening into effective political pressure, Governor Davey announced that the Right to Work was as "sacred" as the Right to Strike. To his troops flashed orders to protect all workers who wanted to return to their jobs. The same militiamen who had received such a warm welcome when they marched into the Mahoning Valley early in the week were now roundly damned by the union as public strikebreakers.

A hint that the troops might not prove an unmixed blessing to C. I. O. came early in the week when Governor Davey ordered his National Guardsmen to enforce a stiff injunction limiting picketing in the steel town of Warren. Labor's reply was a sympathetic strike in Warren but after one day C. I. O. called it off. The Governor's decision to allow the reopening of plants brought the C. I. O.'s full wrath upon his head. When demands that the troops be withdrawn were ignored, C. I. O. lawyers marched into Federal Courts seeking injunctions. From the Mahoning Valley Citizens Committee the Governor received a message: "Your stand is commensurate with the acts of a true statesman and patriot." But in his own capital 700 C. I. O. delegates assembled to "pledge the forces of organized labor to drive Governor Davey from the political life of the State and the nation." Said the Governor: "I probably am committing political suicide."

By this time the luckless Governor found himself embroiled in a front-page argument with Madam Secretary Frances Perkins. He claimed that the Secretary of Labor had urged him to "kidnap" the recalcitrant steelmasters, sit them down with John Lewis, "keep them there until they signed an agreement."

"I never made any such unwarranted and high-handed proposal," cried Miss Perkins, maintaining that she merely urged the Government to use the power of subpoena to bring about a face-to-face conference.

Meantime Pennsylvania's Governor Earle was discontinuing the martial law by which he had closed Bethlehem's great Cambria plant in Johnstown. When it became apparent that the strike would not be settled by mediation. Governor Earle decided his enforced shut-down was no longer warranted. Having decided to permit the Bethlehem plant to reopen, having determined to prevent bloodshed by keeping State troopers on the scene, the Governor had only one course open: protect non-strikers from violence. Since law & order is seldom compatible with an effective strike, this "Labor Governor" too found himself in Labor's eyes a strikebreaker.

Just before Governor Earle withdrew martial law, a Johnstown "Citizens' Committee" & a "Steel Workers Committee" inserted in some 40 newspapers a full-page advertisement captioned WE PROTEST. Relating that the closing of the Bethlehem plant was costing the community $500,000 in weekly payrolls, the advertisement thundered: "It is no part of the functions of American Government to force--or to permit anyone else to force--the individual worker into surrendering his Constitutional rights. . . . If this can happen in Johnstown it can happen anywhere else.

As the big Bethlehem plant slowly picked up momentum Governor Earle's troopers reported a "more or less tense feeling" at the gates but in spite of sporadic scuffles and 24-hour picketing the men continued to straggle back to work. Justification for the presence of the troopers came suddenly this week when the two huge water conduits supplying the Cambria plant were dynamited back in the hills, crippling the plant and again throwing those willing to work out of work. In Youngstown under the guns of Governor Davey's troopers some 15,000 men returned to Republic and Sheet & Tube plants, the normal figure being about 20,000. Though strike leaders strove to bolster morale, accusing the companies of burning tar in their furnaces to create an illusion of smoky activity, the back-to-work movement rolled on to the accompaniment of stones, clubs and tear gas. Remarked a gloomy Hungarian steel-worker "C.I.O., she blow up."

But C.I.O. had by no means blown up, even on the Steel Front. Mass picketing threatened fresh rioting as the companies prepared to resume or increase operations in other districts. The four embattled independents still had to deal with the Labor Board, test case being Inland Steel. And even if he lost his first major battle, John L. Lewis could claim that he had not lost the campaign. His drive in the steel industry to date had netted contracts with 258 companies employing 440,000 workers. If he was as sensible as he seemed to be trying to be, John L. Lewis welcomed the week's one tangible legislative development: Michigan's new act restricting picketing from interference on highways, expressing Governor Murphy's conviction that "the State must retain its police power."

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