The Last Great Strike, page 24
If the SWOC was not certain of the strength of its position, neither was Bethlehem. By May, a company-wide strike seemed increasingly unlikely, but a strike at the Cambria Works was very plausible, and the company began to prepare. Intending to run the mill during a strike, the company brought in food and bedding. It increased the size of its force of company police in Johnstown and augmented its supplies of gas munitions. It also began to confer in earnest with local officials and business leaders on how to meet to the strike.4
When the May 26 strike call omitted Bethlehem’s mills, it was left to the local SWOC leaders in Johnstown to decide the next move. The earlier strike vote notwithstanding, for two weeks they seemed content to do nothing, even as rank and filers fretted about organizing efforts and the need for solidarity. But then Bethlehem’s conflict with workers at its captive Conemaugh & Black Lick Railroad intervened. The company had unilaterally imposed schedules on these workers and refused to recognize and bargain with the brotherhoods representing them or to sign written contracts, even after federal railway labor administrators ruled in the workers’ favor. In frustration, the railroad men walked out on May 10.5 Faced with a tide of sympathy among steel workers, the local SWOC leadership called a meeting the next day and conducted a vote, which authorized a strike to begin almost immediately.6 Production workers began walking out at around the 11:00 P.M. shift change, many bearing tools and clothing as they streamed past curious sightseers at the gates. By morning, picketers were patrolling along the plant’s extensive perimeter. Hundreds of workers, arriving for the start of the 7:00 A.M. shift, either joined the picket lines or turned for home. Although some workers continued to enter the plant and the mill continued with some processes, production was largely shut down.7
Bethlehem’s response to the strike was much aided by the mayor of Johnstown, a megalomaniacal bootlegger named Daniel Shields who loathed the CIO. During the drive, Shields presided over a hearing concerning an organizer arrested for distributing the SWOC’s newspaper, Steel Labor. Shields instructed the man that distributing literature was prohibited in Johnstown and apparently did so with sufficient force that local unionists largely abandoned this tactic in favor of more covert methods of recruitment.8 Later, the mayor, again acting as jurist, sentenced a picketer to ninety days in jail and a $100 fine for “picking up a rag” with intent to throw it at a policeman.9
Shields told union people that he planned to prevent Bethlehem from importing strikebreakers, provoking the strikers, or even running the mill during the strike, as long as the picketers remained peaceful. He lied. On June 13, Shields ordered the arrest of a young man not directly connected to the SWOC because he had yelled the word scab. Over the next several days, the strikers perceived that officials and police, both local and company, were taking an increasingly menacing approach. More ominously, picketers confronted threatening gangs of vigilantes, many of them deputized American Legionnaires.10 In fact, Shields had equipped these men with “nightsticks, helmets, and shields and ordered [them] to patrol residential districts in taxicabs and private cars.”11
These forces were organized around a “Citizens’ Committee,” founded on June 14 by town officials and civic leaders with the support of Bethlehem. Although ostensibly neutral, the group clothed itself in the rhetoric of law and order, the right to work, and “Americanism” and did little to hide its real agenda. On June 15, the committee convened a meeting with SWOC field director David Watkins at which members warned that any strike violence would be charged against the CIO and the SWOC and that the committee was already helping recruit deputies to respond to this eventuality. It was at this point that Shields deputized dozens of men to serve with the city police and began working with Bethlehem on obtaining munitions. How many men were recruited and how much weaponry was acquired is unclear, not least because Shields courted contempt of Congress by failing to produce records subpoenaed by the La Follette Committee. Shields claimed that the deputized vigilantes numbered 600 or 700 men. However, 200 to 300, the number offered by police officials, is a more likely estimate. Bethlehem provided this force with at least $5,000 worth of gas.12
FIGURE 20. Blows are struck as strikers prevent loyal employee, in black suit, from entering Bethlehem Steel’s Cambria Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, June 14, 1937. © 1937, Bettmann/Corbis/Associated Press.
There was a fair amount of unrest on June 13 and again the night of June 14, when a fight between picketers and loyal employees at one of the gates resulted in local police using gas and gunfire against unionists. At least ten people were hurt and seven arrested before the state police restored calm. There were other episodes of unrest around this time, too, including a handful of assaults and outbreaks of stone throwing and damage to property. However, serious episodes of violence remained relatively uncommon, given the size of the walkout and the tension in the town. And the situation seemed within the ability of the regular police to control, had local officials been committed to doing so.13
Instead, the mayor, the Citizens’ Committee, and agents of the company proceeded with their buildup of armed forces and other inflammatory actions. On June 14, Shields issued a proclamation purporting to guarantee the rights of strikers, while condemning “men not residents of our community” who were behind “certain disturbances.”14 On June 16, the Johnstown Democrat published the opinion of a local attorney, whom Shield had commissioned to define the boundaries of the right to picket, which concluded that picketing was lawful only if the underlying strike was lawful and the picketing itself completely uncoercive and limited to “reasonable” numbers.15 That same day, Shields took to the local radio to fulminate about “bullies, hoodlums, yes, cowards” who, he said, were already in Johnstown threatening “defenseless women and children,” beating up workers, and otherwise imposing on the rights of “red-blooded Americans.” Of course, Shields meant unionists—“Greeks bearing gifts.”16 On June 16, too, the Citizens’ Committee ran an advertisement in the Democrat touting the “Constitutional Right of every man to work” and indicting strikers for acts of intimidation and disorder and for threatening the “home life” of workers.17 The next few days brought more of this, including an advertisement on June 17 in which the mayor offered $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of six CIO men who had supposedly kidnapped a loyal employee, “stripped him and turned him out, naked,” on the street.18
Much of this offensive against the SWOC was directly sponsored by Bethlehem, which had established a secret account, ostensibly for the purpose of “maintaining law and order,” through the offices of the Citizens’ Committee and the mayor. From mid-June through late July, more than $25,000—probably much more—was drawn from the account and placed at the disposal of the committee and the mayor. Some of this money went toward anti-SWOC publicity and paid for gas weapons for the city police. But more than $23,000 went straight into the personal accounts of Shields and his wife, which when revealed prompted a half-hearted grand-jury investigation.19
The near-continuous ranting about union violence made good use of news that the UMW was organizing sympathy strikes at captive mines and planning a massive march by forty thousand miners on Johnstown, to be held June 20. While the sympathy strikes were real enough, the march was miscast as an “invasion” that promised to sow mayhem and disorder. What the CIO actually intended was a peaceful rally, half as large, which had been conceived before the strike began in Johnstown. Moreover, its true purpose was to bolster the morale of SWOC supporters. Nevertheless, company operatives and Johnstown officials used the invasion threat, as well as other, specious claims of imminent violence and exaggerated depictions of actual disorder, to back a petition to Governor George H. Earle III to impose martial law, with the hope that this would end picketing and allow the plant to reopen.20
Initially, Earle took no action on the request—not least because the situation remained relatively peaceful. Although there was a stabbing at one of the plant’s gates on the night of June 16, the Johnstown Democrat reported that this “lone disturbance” had been “quelled almost as quickly as it started” and that loyal employees engaged in maintenance work and keeping a few departments running were entering unmolested.21 On June 18, the Democrat reported that police had the situation in hand and that “peace reigned along the miles of Bethlehem mills.”22 But that very day the mayor and his forces escalated their anti-CIO rhetoric and announced their plan to conduct a “back to work” march that would breach the picket lines.23
Finally convinced that mass violence loomed, the next day, June 19, the governor declared martial law in Cambria County and dispatched several hundred state police to the area, many on horses and motorcycles, with National Guard units held ready to back them up.24 Earle’s order required that the union dismantle the pickets and requested that the planned rally be canceled, but it also ordered the Cambria mill to keep most of its departments closed.25 CIO unionists, including many in UMW locals in Pennsylvania, perceived this as a victory and deluged the governor with appreciative letters and telegrams.26 For the moment, it seemed, Shields and other procompany forces had miscalculated. Just before the order was issued, they joined with Eugene Grace and other company officials in questioning the need for it. To no avail—at 12:30 A.M., June 20, state police “padlocked” the plant.27
COMPANY-SPONSORED VIGILANTISM
With events suddenly turned against them, Bethlehem and its allies refocused their efforts on organizing a back-to-work movement. The “Steel Workers Committee,” around which this campaign was structured, initially enjoyed little support from the workers themselves. It was funded and organized almost entirely by the Citizens’ Committee and thus, in turn, by Bethlehem.28 Together with the Citizens’ Committee, the back-to-work movement quickly accomplished several functions for Bethlehem. These community groups, as they were sometimes generically described, operated as instruments of intimidation and coercion. But they were also used in more subtle ways to legitimate other means of strikebreaking, to lobby and organize more aggressive government intervention, and to purvey propaganda.
Republic and Sheet & Tube sponsored their own community groups. In Canton, Republic attempted to stage a back-to-work meeting on the morning of the first full day of the strike. The company abandoned the venture, which was supposed to feature some sort of poll on whether to continue the strike, only when pressured by the mayor, who feared that it would incite trouble.29 A few days later, the local chamber of commerce bowed to its “civic duty” and the urgings of a “committee of workers” and commenced its own poll. The organization mailed out ballots to determine whether Republic’s workers in Canton desired to return to the plants. The ballots touted the chamber’s supposed neutrality but went on about how “it cannot shrink from its duty to preserve the good name of the city of Canton and to use its influence on the side of law and order in the community and the protection of life and property.” How this “neutral” body got hold of all the workers’ home addresses can be imagined.30 A week later, the ballot count revealed that a large majority wanted to go back to work. For the chamber, this mandated an end to the strike, even though unionists boycotted the poll and more than twenty-five hundred ballots were declared uncountable by local clergymen who conducted the vote.31
With the assistance of the NAM, Republic also organized a Law and Order League in Canton. Working with Republic officials, its public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, a local Citizens’ Committee, and the chamber, the back-to-work movement and the Law and Order League demanded that picketers be disarmed, company men be hired on as deputies, and public officials give “protection” to loyal employees. The back-to-work movement even mounted armed patrols, becoming so threatening that its actions began to worry leaders of the Law and Order League. On June 18, the back-to-work movement set out to smash the picket lines, but the plan unraveled when the few men who showed up were preemptively assaulted by union men.32
Groups like these were active elsewhere, including Youngstown, where a company-sponsored back-to-work movement, backed by the Mahoning Valley Citizens’ Committee, played an important role in stoking the tensions that led to the Stop 5 Riot.33 In Cumberland, Maryland, home to Republic’s N&G Taylor mill, a back-to-work march organized in part by a company union had to be postponed when several hundred CIO men preemptively seized the meeting site.34 In Warren and Niles, Republic sponsored a back-to-work movement, a Citizens’ Committee, as well as a “John Q. Public League,” which performed the familiar functions of pressuring the strikers while demanding that police and National Guard dismantle the pickets and oversee the full reopening of the mills.35 For a time, before such schemes were overtaken by other developments, these groups conspired to have as many as five hundred men deputized as special police and to set up patrols of men armed with firearms.36 In Massillon, Republic helped organize an entity variously known as the Citizens’ Committee, the Labor Relations Committee, and the Law and Order League, which worked with a back-to-work group and a revitalized company union to oppose the strike. These groups, which Republic pressed workers to join, propagated fears of a violent CIO invasion, broadcast the company’s threat to permanently close the mills, and pushed city officials to deputize company men. As we shall see, these efforts led to considerable bloodshed.37
Almost all these community groups represented themselves as independent actors with no particular position on the underlying dispute and few ties to the steel companies. But as the La Follette Committee concluded, the organizations were actually creatures of the steel companies, without much public support and poorly subscribed by the men they claimed to represent.38 Instead, these groups were disproportionately composed of and led by owners and managers of local businesses, representatives of commercial groups, professionals, and government officials.39 Often, their leaders were directly bound to the companies by overlapping economic interests, which were inevitable in small- and medium-size mill towns like Monroe, Johnstown, or Massillon—a small city of only twenty-six thousand, where Republic employed the vast majority of wage earners and claimed to pay a $40,000 daily payroll.40 Just as often, the people who predominated in the community groups embraced a common class identity with the companies and their mangers, reinforced by membership in commercial organizations, churches, social clubs, and the like.
PAID PROPAGANDA AND BIASED MEDIA COVERAGE
During the strike, the companies continued to assail workers and the public alike with propaganda invoking the right to work; the SWOC’s supposed domination by radicals, immigrants, and blacks; its alleged penchant for violence; its alleged desire to exploit the steel workers economically; the threat that a long strike or the advent of CIO unions might pose to the viability of particular plants; and a congenial vision of American life and industrial capitalism, which married antiunion views to attractive tropes about traditional patterns of authority and entitlement in the home, the community, and the workplace. As we have seen, much of this program was developed for the companies by the NAM. But key aspects were also devised by professional public-relations firms, in particular Hill & Knowlton, which was on retainer to Republic and Sheet & Tube; and John Price Jones (and its advertising component, Thornley & Jones) and Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, which were employed by Bethlehem.41
Although national in scope, this campaign was also focused locally.42 Such was evident in Johnstown, as we have just seen. In northeast Ohio, too, both Republic and Sheet & Tube ran full-page newspaper advertisements promising substantial rewards to anyone whose information might lead to prosecution of strikers for acts of violence.43 Sheet & Tube said that reopening its mills was contingent on whether the workers desired to return to work. As soon as the company could point to the back-to-work movement as evidence of such sentiments, it ran advertisements in which Frank Purnell himself declared union violence the only impediment to a resumption of operations.44 Another advertisement by Sheet & Tube interwove a critique of SWOC demands with a broader assault, roughly shaped around federalist principles, on the premises of New Deal liberalism.45 Similarly, the Mahoning Valley Citizens’ Committee ran a lengthy piece in the leading Youngstown paper that paired a reminder about the area’s economic dependence on the steel industry with a call to settle the strike on the basis of “American principles”—which meant enforcing the law against “rich and poor alike, even though to do so may be politically inexpedient.”46
Another medium for company propaganda involved the use of letters, written by company officials and ostensibly addressed to loyal employees but intended for wider publication. On June 15, Tom Girdler mailed a rambling, slightly incoherent epistle to all Republic employees in which he railed against CIO duplicity and radicalism, accused the picketers of violence and lawlessness, and touted the local Law and Order Leagues and back-to-work movements. A representative passage asked, “Must Republic and its men submit to the communistic dictates and terrorism of the C.I.O.?” And: “Is America to remain a free country[—]the answer is NO.”47
By their very existence, the back-to-work movements and citizens’ groups suggested that only through violence could unionists prevent the lawful reopening of the mills. This assertion conveniently took as given, and thereby preempted any real investigation of, the underlying premise that so many workers were clamoring to return in the first place. The awkward position that this stratagem put the union in was illustrated later in the strike, when the SWOC itself was reduced to arguing that the plants should not reopen because this would certainly result in widespread fighting and bloodshed.48
