National Labor Relations Act

bondholders or an insurance company and they want to know what goes on in there.

"You probably tell him, 'I want to know more of what these foremen and superintendents do than your fellow workmen.'

"Well, if he goes along and plays ball, and I think maybe 70 percent, or next to it, from the start know, but in no time at all, say, 90 percent, say, in 2 or 3 months, know what they are really doing, because you have got to go back to this fellow and school him and train him to bring in facts that this particular client wants to know. And today it is all as regards unions and the activities of unions."

994

Such a hooked man described his work in a report to his employer "I have known Ferguson for 20 years and Kepler for 10 years (both union officers) and now I am selling them out as they tell me most anything."

995

Stoolpigeons are practiced not only in feeding names to the employers' blacklists, or acting as union officers in betrayal or embezzlement, but they are adept in provoking ill-times strikes or, with greater skill, they preserve a demoralized union in being, as a stall against real union organization. A stoolpigeon in cahoots with a patient foreman can get almost any upstanding worker fired from his job, too plausibly for a Labor Board to put him back.

Violence and corruption, then, are essential tactics in the war against labor organization. They are sufficiently widespread that sociologists have asked whether there is any cradle of crime, aside from poverty itself, to compare with industry's paid rogues.

So much for the bottom: What of the top? This war has long enlisted our best people. Respectability, and scope, were indicated in the lists of purchasers of spies, strikebreakers and munitions. An old employers' body, National Metal Trades Association, with a quarter of a million dollars war chest, showed the Senators a membership of 950 manufacturers, no business too extensive or too simple or too respectable to be served. A single espionage concern, Corporations Auxiliary Company, displayed 499 clients in 18 industries in 19 states, including Chrysler Motors, 23 plants; General Motors, 13 plants; Electric Auto-Lite; Midland Steel Products; Quaker Oats; American Medicinal Spirits; International Shoe; Mergenthaler Linotype; Firestone Rubber; New York Edison; Postal Telegraph; Radio Corporation of America. These are eminent names; they paid $1,750,000 in 1933-6 for Corporations Auxiliary spies.

Worthy to stand alongside was the Pinkerton Detective Agency clientele which, beside some of the above, listed Bethlehem Steel, Baldwin Locomotive, Colts Firearms, Continental Can, Curtis Publishing, Delaware & Hudson Railway, Endicott Johnson Shoes, General Electric, Grace Lines, Montgomery Ward, Pennsylvania Railroad, Realsilk, Shell Oil, United Shoe Machinery, Warner Bros. Another, the veteran Railway Audit and Inspection Company, whose officers defied the Senate, serviced a list headed by subsidiaries of the United States Steel Corporation. The latter two agencies had a gross income of $6,500,000 in 1933-6, principally from industry.

A single great enterprise, General Motors Corporation, had put itself in a state of preparedness for almost any emergency. Its books revealed 15 spy and strikebreaking concerns, including Pinkertons, Railway Audit, Burns, Corporations Auxiliary, O'Neil Industrial, Cal Crim, Watkins, Industrial Standards Corp., Pattie, International Auxiliary, Standard Services, McGrath Detective Agency, Pennsylvania Industrial Service, Washington Detective Bureau, Sherman Service, Inc. To these General Motors paid $839,764 in 1934-6. Through these General Motors spied on union workers, stole union books, eavesdropped on government mediators such as Assistant Secretary McGrady and accomplished "shadowing" in John Lewis's home town in Virginia. The office files of the best people in General Motors were stripped in anticipation of the Senate investigation.

Legal sanctification of this war has not been lacking or humble. The law firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood, which persuaded the Supreme Court to outlaw NRA, endeavored to persuade Senator La Follette to spare Pinkerton, and one of its partners was a director on the board of Pinkertons. The "National Lawyers Committee of the American Liberty League" which for a year advised employers that the Wagner Act was unconstitutional, professed to be more than respectable. Of that committee, a dozen were counsel in labor

4 Hearings, Senate Subcommittee on S. R. 266, Part 1, Labor Espionage and Strikebreaking, p. 201.

Hearings, Senate Subcommittee on S. R. 266, Part 1, Labor Espionage and Strikebreaking, p. 105.

matters to great corporations, listed as hiring spies; one publicly defended a detective agency's defiance of the Labor Board; another declared formally "We see no reflection in any way in the employment of detectives." Others, on retainer, did their best to block the Senate investigation. The practical integration of law and war appeared closest in the case of the chairman of the Liberty League's subcommittee on the Wagner Act. His law partner sat on the board of directors of a chemical company supplying gases and machine guns, side by side with the president of a spying agency. In that instance, as the La Follette Committee learned, the employer "can go into a single office and put it down on a bit of paper like a grocery order, as, Item 1, tear gas and guns; Item 2, one squad of strikebreakers, some to be deputy sheriffs; Item 3, one score of stool pigeons; and Item 4, one Liberty League lawyer."

You hesitate to criticise a war that is associated with names of a class so distinguished; and if the blackjacks fall, if the vomit gas turns men and women inside out, if workers get killed,-well, you can't ask a war to be too respectable.

Too one-sided, the Senators feared. They had the thousands of entries on the books of detective companies and munitions concerns carefully combed for any orders placed by labor unions. They found three. It is a conflict where one side puts up the millions of dollars; the other side puts up the target.

Relationships between labor disputes and civil liberties were detailed in two of the Senate committee hearings, one concerning the largest rubber company in the world (Goodyear), the other the largest concern of its kind in the world (United States Steel Corporation).

The first exemplified phenomena manifesting themselves with frequency of late. From various industrial centers it is represented that mobs arise, composed of workers, who spontaneously assault union men; also that citizens disinterestedly form law and order leagues to subdue union organizers. In Gadsden, Alabama, last summer a meeting for the president of the rubber workers union was broken up, he was beaten and deported; later the union headquarters were wrecked by "spontaneous" fellow workers, the organizers beaten; still later union men in the Goodyear plant were driven out, again by fellow workers. The Senate Committee learned from the lips of a company guard how Goodyear officials organized that mob and gave workers time off for the wrecking. The Goodyear vice president admitted he had told Akron organizers going to Gadsden "they might get their head knocked off." Records showed the Akron management in close contact with Gadsden happenings, and reporting these to an employers' central intelligence in New York. Likewise in Akron, where the Bergoff strikebreaking agency had once secretly organized a "Law and Order League," a citizens' vigilante association was set up in offices next to the Goodyear president. An ex-mayor of Akron called for ex-service men "to gang up for law and order in this wonderful city" and to tell "radicals" to "get to hell out." Goodyear's president, P. W. Litchfield, trailing his reputation as a liberal employer, questioned by the Senators, had no criticism of that riotous speech. In contrast to Akron, where they had been forced to deal with the union, the Goodyear management in office records termed Gadsden "glorious."

Another Alabama city, Birmingham, is headquarters of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company, subsidiary of United States Steel. Thence came a young communist, who told the Senate how he had spent eight months in prison for having in his possession two pieces of reputedly red literature. For trying to get this youth out of jail, Prof. Gelders told how he was kidnapped and flogged so savagely that a country doctor was afraid to do anything "for such a mess as you." He identified the floggers and the Senators heard the evidence connecting the ringleader with the offices of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company. Why were the floggers not indicted? Because as a state officer put it, the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company "owns about 15/16's of everything down there." The ruse of the cry of "communist," the strategy of privately paid for “law and order" and the tactic of "spontaneous" vigilantism have every appearance of the coming technique in industrial disputes.

"What about sit-downs?" Most discussions of labor, religion or the weather have had to meet that interruption. Well, violated civil rights may be related to sit-downs at least as closely as are sit-downs to property rights. The Senate suspected that when it could not resolve to condemn sit-downs without condemning espionage and frustrated collective bargaining. The evolution of labor unionism is a history of laggard adaptations to the habits of capital. Craft unions copied one phase of capital. A later phase, trustified control and the mass production of machine tenders, made inevitable such a movement as that which John Lewis has come to head. Twenty-four years ago an American

labor leader, whose thought was an indigenous as his bones, wondered why strikers didn't put their picket lines inside the plants and he detailed to me a bit idealistically, its advantages, "You wouldn't be caught on the sidewalk between a cross fire of police in the street and deputies behind a company fence, you would avoid 'violence,' besides you wouldn't have to 'keep moving,' you could just sit down." Old ideas of greater safety may recur to many minds when spurred with recently increased knowledge of factories as arsenals, of employers as ungetatable as knights in armor. Resentment may lead such strikers to exploit ruthlessly other advantages besides safety. Are a few dates pertinent? In the autumn of 1935, the new rubber workers union in Akron exposed half a dozen important spies among their membership. A month later began the sit-downs and other great strikes in rubber. Then in steel, partly with the help of the National Labor Relations Board, spies were found and munitions exposed; almost at once you had the bloodily fought Portsmouth strike, which coincided, to its embarrassment, with the inauguration of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Then later, mostly with the help of the Senate Committee, the newly forming auto workers unions were exposing spies by the dozen. Indeed, in the La Follette Committee hearings the head of the Chrysler locals turned on the Chrysler officials and publicly warned that his men would not work alongside spies. That was January 27. On March 8, began the Chrysler sit-down. Not sole causes, of course, but not insignificant symptoms. Citizens startled by sit-downs cannot say they were caught unawares. The man they hold most responsible, John Lewis, on New Years' eve, the eve of the motor strikes, urged over a radio net-work that the Senate make an end of industrial espionage and that "the Federal Government enter these plants and gut them of their deadly weapons, * * lest labor men on their march

to industrial democracy should have to take by storm the barbed wire barricades and machine gun emplacements." Government agencies concerned with restoring civil liberties may in the end be doing more to solve sit-down problems than too many lawyers.

Sit-downs, walkouts and what threatened to be a titantic and violent conflict this spring were avoided in the steel industry. All were averted by an agreement which the union's leader termed an act of "industrial statesmanship" on the part of the head of United States Steel Corporation. Four or five factors discernibly induced the steel masters' agreement: One, I venture, was an aggressive public concern for civil liberties. The fact that Senator La Follette had announced further investigation of the Steel Corporation for March 3, and the agreement was signed March 2, (a mere coincidence) was at least emblematic of benefits that might flow from an aggressive watchfulness over civil rights. Instead of a strike we had the better state, whereby steel production and profits go on uninterrupted, the companies' stocks of tear gas have suffered no depletion and depreciation of the companies' machine guns does not mar the ledgers. Even espionage lies low, awaiting the demise of governmental interference. In general, an informed public opinion appears so aroused over our violated liberties that you hear frequent demands for new laws to curb labor.

The judgment quoted at the beginning might better read "The right of workmen to organize themselves into unions has become the most important civil liberty." To defeat this one, the others have been denied,-the liberties of assembly, free speech and political suffrage. Possibly, the firm establishment of this one would enhance all democratic rights. Possibly, if war customarily enhances civil liberty.

STANFOR

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