Hard Times (23 page)

In ‘34 I got discharged over a hassle we had with the mine company. I was on the union’s grievance committee. They had me blacklisted in the fields there. I never got a job until I went to work in the steel mills in ’36. I bummed around a little in some temporary jobs, anything I could get. Had
a big family, seven children, they were all small. So you just had to hustle for whatever you could get.

I went to work in a car shop. That’s when the CIO started organizing steel. Half the organizers we had there came from coal. Among ‘em were some good organizers. But among ’em was also pie cards,
⁵⁰
they didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise. You see it crop up today.

It was rough going. You’d get a little relief. There was some surplus commodities, flour and stuff like that. You’d get a day’s work now and then on the farm. You might run into a week’s work, a road job or something like that. That’s the way people got along.

MY FATHER lived on a farm. When the Depression came around, the first thing he did was go to New York City to look for a job. He took a job as a strikebreaker, because he really didn’t know what it would mean. He didn’t realize how bad this would be, or how dangerous. Or what striking people would think of this. He remembers being shadowed by people with guns and all sorts of things like that. He really got out of that job quickly. He didn’t know what he was doing, he was that naive… .

“It was really in my last year at law school that I noticed something was
going on. At the New Haven football games, I met Yale graduates, who a couple of years before were claiming it was easy on Wall Street. Now the market crashed, and they were back at school, out of jobs. The world rushed in on us suddenly… .
”

 

THERE WAS a wave of sit-down strikes. Newspapers and respectable people said it was bad enough to have strikes, but it was clearly immoral as well as unlawful to seize property. In those days, strikes were broken by the importation of strikebreakers. Sitting down in a factory kept strikebreakers from getting in. It was a new technique. When suddenly the rules of the game, which the unions had always lost, were altered by the sit-downs, there was an outcry.

You hear the same kind of talk about student demonstrators today. It’s all right for them to protest peacefully, but they must do it in accordance to the rules

There was a sit-down strike at one of our plants. We had a plant manager who dealt with these labor troubles. In his way, he was a nice guy, but his appearance was that of a cartoon factory boss: cigar in the corner of his mouth, a big square face and a big square frame. He had ways of beating the strikers that were not generally published, but known to manufacturers.

There was a police detail in Chicago known as the Industrial Squad,
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in charge of a lieutenant, Make Mills. When a strike occurred, Mills would arrange to arrest the leaders. They’d beat them up, put them in jail, make it pretty clear to them to get the hell out of town. Mills got tips, $1,000, or if it was a was a serious thing, $5,000. He made a hell of a lot of dough to get the agitators, as they were called.

These were organizers, some of whom didn’t work in the factory. With his plainclothesmen, Mills would get them in a saloon. They’d have free drinks, then a fight would break out.

His uniformed men would come in and arrest the organizer, beat hell out of him, put him in jail. They got a lot of people out of town. There was an awful lot of rough stuff going on.

The factory was shut down. I was drawn into it. The union had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board,
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The issue was union recognition. The complaint: blacklisting.

The company sent letters out in very fancy language: we will pay the
best wages, we will always discuss grievances with employees, but will allow no outside intervention. Newspaper editorials were urging employees to return to work. Each day of the strike was costing them money they’d never recover.

I was handed a stack of cards to take downtown to our attorneys. Some of those I examined had notations: “Union agitator, do not rehire.” Others were marked with little round dots. The employment manager told me they indicated a union sympathizer. Many of them had been or were to be fired. If any prospective employer were to ask about them, he’d be told: “Don’t hire him—troublemaker, agitator.” The word “Communist” wasn’t used much at the time. “Red,” though, was a common term.

I took the cards to Twynan, Hill and Blair. The operating head of the thing, Blair, came out of the Northwest as a successful railroad attorney. He represented many big companies and was a member of our board. A tremendous bore, a funny little guy, about five feet four, small mustache. All his clients were saints, under attack. He was about seventy at the time.

When he’d get agitated, it would upset his stomach, he’d bounce up and down in his leather chair and reach for mineral water. Then he’d run out in the hall, holler for his secretary and relieve himself by dictating letters.

He had a special phrase he liked: “This presents a situation pregnant with danger.” Of course, it’s a great sustenance for a lawyer. If a danger is pregnant, he’s got to come to the rescue. The annual retainer doesn’t quite cover this. He got a hell of a lot of fees out of this operation.

Blair told me the cards were harmless. It dawned on me that he didn’t know of the existence of the Wagner Act. When I told him, he said, “There cannot be any such law. And if there were, I would not hesitate to advise you it would be unconstitutional because it would be an impingement upon the freedom of contract.” I said, “There is such a law. It’s sometimes called the Wagner Act.” He said, “I never heard of it.” And I said, “It was adjudicated in the Supreme Court and its validity was upheld.” He howled, “That is impossible!” He swiveled around and grabbed for his mineral water.

He called in an associate. “This young man tells me there is a law by the name of the Watson Act.” “The Wagner Act.” The other nodded. “There is? This young man goes further and claims the United States Supreme Court declared it constitutional.” The other nodded. “That, sir, is impossible!” His associate said it was so. “It’s a fine thing!” With that, Blair slapped the stack of cards on his desk, bang. “Well that’s one more of these left-wing New Deal activities. Respectable citizens who built up this country can come in and testify, and their testimony won’t be believed.” The other said, “That’s the way it would go.” Blair said, “We sent the president of the company to deny these charges, and he wouldn’t
be believed?” I said, “Mr. Blair, one of the reasons he wouldn’t be believed is because it would be a lie.”

“What do you mean a lie?”

“Look at these cards. It identifies union men.”

“Is something wrong with that?”

“Yes, it’s prohibited.”

“That has to be adjudicated.”

“It was adjudicated. And all these people who were fired. It says on the face of it: Don’t rehire.”

“But they are
former
employees.”

Well, this is the way it went. He called in a detective, who was on the company payroll and said, “Take these cards. I don’t ever want to see them again. I don’t want to know what happened to them, and I don’t want you to ever know anything about them.”

The National Labor Relations Board did find the company engaged in unfair labor practices. The union was recognized. A large sum of money was awarded in back wages to employees who were fired. There were tremendous legal fees, of course.

There was a curious aftermath. The people went back to work. But there persisted an attitude of bitterness and resentment. A continuing hostility. Each side wished the worst of the other.

During the ten years I stayed on, this feeling existed. Finally, the company sold its die-casting plant. They couldn’t make any money out of it. It’s a difficult business, but there are companies that do make it. I’ve often wondered whether the failure here wasn’t due to this long, sustained bitterness. Every negotiation became a war, bitterness begetting bitterness, violence begetting violence.

Most people don’t become vice presidents until their late fifties. I was one of the few college-educated men in the company. There was a lot of suspicion of me: I had to be watched. But a great many of the older men would take me out to lunch and ask me to tell them something.

This was at a time when people who went to Yale or Harvard went into brokerage, not into manufacturing. In contrast to now, the industrialists were basically men who came up from the bench. The hard way, they called it.

That had a lot to do with their tone and attitude. If anybody has the impression that a man who had come up the hard way had an easy way of looking at the working man, he’s completely mistaken. His view was: I got ahead. Why can’t you?

There’s a parallel in this race business today. Look, my family came from the Old Country, and my grandfather sold pots and pans off his back, and I’ve moved out to the suburbs, and if my grandfather could do it, what the hell’s the matter with these niggers?

The people who made it were very impatient with the agitators. Agitators
were parasites, trying to tear down the structure. There was no law of agreed principles. It was nothing but a contest of staying power. It was a jungle.

People would regard a depression today as man-made. In the past, depressions fell in the same category as earthquakes and bad weather. An act of Providence or God. I don’t think there’d be the acquiescence of the Thirties. I think there’d be a rebellion. I think even in these suburbs out here you’d get a rebellion. Exactly what they’d do about it, I don’t know. I think there’d be a vigorous and, ultimately violent, insistence: if not my measure, then some other measure. Something and soon.

There was some of this in the Thirties, the left wing. Some were called Communists; some were Communists. They pointed up, as they called it, the contradictions: people starving, with farmers being told to kill off their pigs. There was anger and frustration with the inability to put the productive capacity to work to meet the needs of the people. There wasn’t much of this talk in the Thirties—these were the nuts, the fringe. They wouldn’t be the fringe today… .

THE SIT-DOWN