LABOR: Strikebreaker Struck

Around dingy Manhattan street corners, saloons, flophouses, charity employment agencies one September day last year went the word: "Bergoff is hiring." The toughs and bums who heard it promptly made their way to a shabby office on Columbus Circle where they were given jobs at $5 per day, told to "go out in the park until tomorrow morning." Each day the rest of that week the growing army got the same order. Then they were told to report to the Pennsylvania Station.

That night some 1,000 big, shabby, tough-muscled, fearless "gorillas" tramped into the terminal. Bergoff lieutenants sifted out 150 of the toughest, had them sign contracts freeing Bergoff of responsibility if they were injured, packed them into day coaches. At Porterdale, Ga. next day the men raised their right hands, were sworn in en masse as deputy sheriffs. Then they were armed with revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, tear-gas bombs and clubs from Bergoff's private arsenal, marched off to settle the trouble which last autumn's nationwide textile strike had brought to Bibb Manufacturing Co.

Thus in routine fashion did Pearl Louis Bergoff go about the job which Bibb's President William Dickson Anderson had hired him to do. Pearl Bergoff (named by a mother disappointed by his sex) is a stocky, square-faced, violent, profane, efficient man of 50 who makes no bones about the business of which he is undisputed king: professional strikebreaking. In that business, which is permitted to exist nowhere except in the U. S., Bergoff got his start 28 years ago by employing a band of Negroes to break a strike of municipal garbage collectors for New York City. Thereafter his reputation and profits grew as U. S. employers learned to call in his thuggish crews to solve their labor problems. In 1916 he took 4,000 men to Cuba to break streetcar strikes, last winter vainly urged President Mendieta to let him furnish 10,000 men to break Cuba's general strike. His biggest job was for Erie R. R. in 1920, when he supplied between 6,000 and 7,000 men to break a switchmen's strike. Bergoff, a grandiose talker, says Erie paid him $2,000,000 for that job.

Bergoff offers to do a job for a flat daily sum, stands ready to recruit, transport, feed, bed and finance a private army of as many as 10,000 men on a moment's notice. He disciplines his men in military fashion, calls his steady employes "captains" and "lieutenants." Bergoff's brochure offers employers five different but interlocking services. Most in demand is the Open Shop Department, which supplies workmen with at least enough skill to keep wheels turning until strikers grow discouraged. Next most popular is the Protection Department, for bloody, strong-arm work. A Prevention Department offers men & women "of intelligence, courage and great persuasive powers" to thwart incipient strikes by persuasion and intimidation. Finally there are an Investigation Department, practically dormant, and an Undercover Department to spy out strike plans, furnish Bergoff agents with advance sales arguments. Bergoff says plenty of union men are glad to betray their fellows for a price.