National Affairs: Rip Tide

Labor's sweep toward power continued to surge and boil across the land last week. Keeping in the van. rank & file motor workers set the week's keynote, showing by a fresh wave of sit-downs that they were getting out of their leaders' hands (see p. 20). In Wilmington, Del., a short-lived general strike called in support of striking truck drivers sent flying squads of unionists roving the city's streets, tossing bricks through windows of trolleys, busses, stores. In Albert Lea, Minn., retaliating for the smashing of picket lines and a tear-gas attack on their union headquarters, strikers attacked a gas machine plant where 150 deputy sheriffs were encamped. They overturned automobiles, set fire to one police car and dumped another into the river, did $15,000 damage to the plant. A truck drivers' strike cut off Boston's fuel supply for two days; 1,000 Hershey chocolate workers staged a brief sit-down at Hershey, Pa.; sundry strikes, mostly sit-downs, had 4,500 workers idle in Rhode Island, 4,000 in St. Louis. As the Sit-Down fever flashed like heat lightning over the land, ten farmhands on Charles M. Schwab's estate at Loretto. Pa. supplied themselves with a radio and gas burner, began a sit-down for more pay in the potato cellar.

Sometimes when waves are beating strongly on a beach, an extraordinary outward current of returning water develops, clashes with oncoming breakers, creates a zone of roil and foam called "rip tide." Last week just such a countercurrent of public opinion was beginning to run stronger & stronger against the surging Sit-Down. Governors White of Mississippi, worried about a pajama factory sitdown, and Allred of Texas, worried about the C. I. O. oil drive starting this week, announced that they would oppose Sit-Downs with all the force at their command. With many a State legislature discussing the subject, Vermont's became the first to pass a law specifically outlawing the Sit-Down—which it defined as occupation of property by three or more persons without the owner's consent.

In Congress the two currents met at last in a genuine rip tide of debate.

Byrnes Bomb. Late one afternoon the Senate sat placidly putting the finishing touches on the revised Guffey Coal Bill. Passage within ten minutes seemed assured, and contented Senators' minds were beginning to turn to thoughts of cold drinks and warm supper. In their snug, thick-carpeted little chamber, the storm & strife of tear gas and window-smashings, of roaring, club-waving mass resistance to the Law, seemed pleasantly far away. Day before the Guffey bill windup, New York's New Dealing Robert F. Wagner had presented what was believed to be the Administration viewpoint when he rose in the Senate to blame the Sit-Down on employers' defiance of his National Labor Relations Act, thus implying that it was up to the Supreme Court to resolve the Labor crisis by a decision on the Act. Not one of the Senate's Sit-Down critics had risen to his challenge. So far as the unpleasant prospect of Senate action on that red-hot issue was concerned, the Sit-Down seemed safely pigeonholed when suddenly South Carolina's James F. Byrnes stood up to propose an amendment to the Guffey bill.