LABOR: Showdown

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"Just between us," President Homer Martin of the United Automobile Workers of America asked reporters confidentially last week, "what does the public think?" One of those present answered, in a note to his editor: "Where there is public opinion, it is for Martin. He has a better pressagent, a pretty fair radio technique, and pearly teeth."

Homer Martin had just bared his pearls in one of the most fantastic episodes in U. S. Labor history. In 1934-35 the onetime Baptist minister in Kansas City helped organize U. A. W. as an A. F. of L. union. In 1936 he took it into C. I. O. In 1937 he fought and won a bitter strike with General Motors, signed up that giant, and all motormakers except Henry Ford. In 1938, he quarreled with his co-founders and lieutenants, and his union of 375,000 men (third largest in C. I. O.) was saved from falling apart only when John L. Lewis practically took control of it. Last week Homer Martin upset this much-joggled applecart.

A crisis was precipitated when in a bitter session U. A. W.'s international executive board (18 of whose 24 members led by Vice President Richard Frankensteen and Wyndham Mortimer opposed Martin) ousted President Martin as editor of the union paper, and canceled some of his administrative orders. He moaned to the press:

"They want [an editor] who cannot read or write, make a speech, a broadcast, or walk. What they want is a mummy, a dummy and a 'flummy.'"

In distress Mr. Martin telephoned C. I. O. Vice Presidents Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray, the overseers installed by John Lewis to suppress factionalism in U. A. W. They went to Detroit, last week got the board to call a special convention for March 20 in Cleveland. Object: to let the rank & file end the row by throwing out one faction or the other.

Then events followed fast. Homer Martin had requested such a convention, but he denounced it, charging that the terms of the call gerrymandered it against him. So he issued his own call for a convention and suspended 15 board members including Messrs. Frankensteen. Mortimer and potent little Walter Reuther of Detroit. They retaliated by impeaching him. He caught them napping. Early one morning he and a dozen huskies marched into U. A. W. headquarters, seized the union records and bank books, locked the offices, transferred everything to Mr. Martin's suite in the Eddystone Hotel.

Thus by the week end the Labor scene was in turmoil. Homer Martin, who seemed on his way to fame & power in 1937, was on the outside looking in at C. I. O. Two leaderships laid claim to U. A. W.'s contracts, bank accounts, membership. John L. Lewis' receivership for the union was itself in temporary bankruptcy. It appeared that only the rank & file could save U. A. W. from permanent disruption. And the shadow of a new figure appeared on the U. A. W. stage.