"Terrible Week"

Organized labor, though it had never been more powerful in its life, last week faced one of the most critical periods in its history. Labor was going to have to clean its big, sprawling, untidy house of Communists, or else--an impatient Government would do it.

Labor's good friend Franklin Roosevelt had already used armed troops against labor (TIME. June 16). For future action, if necessary, he indicated that he wanted a Congress-made club, and Congress was more than ready to oblige him. The Senate passed the Connally amendment to the draft act, which gave the President specific authority to seize defense plants when mediation fails and a labor dispute threatens to tie up the arms program. Already passed by the House was a gigantic Army appropriation bill with a provision that not one nickel of the money should go to companies or workers who defied recommendations of the Mediation Board. And the Department of Justice was reported to be planning to blacklist radicals and advise employers to kick them out.

At week's end. Labor's Non-Partisan League (John L. Lewis, chairman) groaned: "In a virtual tidal wave of reaction the Administration sponsored legislation that advances far along the totalitarian path of forced labor. . . . Unless the events of this terrible week can be reversed, it is clear that American democracy will soon become just another museum piece to be set on a shelf beside the former democracies of the Old World."

Wildcats. Others saw the situation in a somewhat different light. They felt that it was the U.S. that would be put on the shelf, unless labor deloused itself of Communists who were doing their native best to distract and disrupt the nation's defense efforts.

The "wildcat" Communist-run strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, Calif, was scarcely broken when a C.I.O. union (of die casters) walked out of the Cleveland plant of Aluminum Co. of America. The move, following the pattern at Inglewood, was in defiance of a Mediation Board request to withhold strike action until the Board could intervene. Before the Board could even take its coat off, scarcely three hours after it had started to study the dispute, the Cleveland plant was strike-shut. And even after strike leaders reached an agreement with the Board next day (raising wages 1-c- an hour), they deliberately delayed informing strikers. Unnecessarily lost were two full shifts of aluminum production. Washington, hopping mad, put the leaders under scrutiny, discovered that they included a reform-school graduate, an ex-convict and parole violator--and a whole basketful of alleged Communists.

In San Francisco, C.I.O. and A.F. of L. machinists, whose strike leaders had already thumbed their noses at Washington, politely but flatly rejected President Roosevelt's order to get back to work and end the long tie-up of $500.000.000 worth of vital naval building. Harvey Brown. A.F. of L. machinists' chief, left Washington to try once more to get strikers to go back. But there were plenty of indications that radical leadership was not yet squelched.

According to C.I.O leaders themselves, 17 or 18 C.I.O. unions were plagued with radical leadership. Last week the powerful Minneapolis teamsters, who had broken away from A.F. of L.. petitioned for membership in C.I.O.'s Construction Workers Organizing Committee. Head of the teamsters is Miles Dunne, said to be a "Trotskyite," who. with his brothers, dominates Minneapolis labor circles. Head of the construction workers union is Alma Denny Lewis, brother of John L., who received Mr. Dunne & followers with open arms, despite protests from other high C.I.O. officials.

Purge? C.I.O. President Philip Murray was mightily concerned. He wanted to get rid of Reds in his ranks but he believed that a "purge" might destroy his union. He would not make any move that he thought might split C.I.O. His concern was part of the labor philosophy he had learned with John Lewis, who remained, throughout, dour and silent. Although Murray denounced the loggers' strike in the Puget Sound area and sent Richard Frankensteen to denounce the strike leaders at North American, still, as a trade unionist, he deplored the use of troops at Inglewood and attacked the Government order that stripped strikers of draft deferment. He also condemned anti-strike legislation. To Murray, these measures destroyed labor's rights and were not the way to end labor's troubles. What was the way, then? According to Murray, a reasonable man, there was still time for reason.

But other C.I.O. leaders thought the time for drastic action had come. Said OPM's Sidney Hillman: "Labor must clean house. It must get rid of subversive elements." From Hillman's own powerful clothing workers' union and from Emil Rieve's big textile workers' union, representatives hurried to Los Angeles. Their aim: to pull their members out of the leftist Los Angeles central council, possibly set up a council under right-wing control and apply to the parent body for admission. Whether it was called a purge or not, it looked like one in the making, as conservatives in the C.I.O. (who represent the vast majority of its claimed 5,000,000 membership) moved in on the radical cells. The showdown was expected to be on the West Coast, now under the iron domination of tough Radical Harry Bridges, recently re-elected for the third time chief of the longshoremen's union.

In the East, one local in a Brewster Aeronautical Corp. plant took matters into its own hands, charged ten of its members with subversive activities, suspended them, pending a union trial. The U.S. Army also did some disciplining, barred eight of the strike leaders at North American from returning to their jobs.

And, whatever public statements he made, reasonable, cautious Mr. Murray, behind the closed door of his Washington office, was cracking a whip himself. O. M. ("Mickey") Orton, who had headed a six-week-old strike among the loggers of the Puget Sound fir forests, went to Washington at his chief's command, hurried home, apparently chastened, to suggest calling off the strike. Some of the locals had already voted to go back. The rest took the peace proposal out of Mickey Orton's mouth, voted overwhelmingly to return. Meanwhile nearly normal production had been resumed at North American Aviation, with a full personnel quietly back at work. The troops that had been guarding the plant and workers' homes were getting ready to evacuate, their job done, the shotless battle won.

There were fewer stoppages in the defense program this week than there had been for a long time. To the U.S. people, who put national defense ahead of trade unionism, the events of the "terrible week" looked well worth while.

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