Heartbreak in Tennessee: Poor Whites and the Unions
Rony, Vera
You don't have to come South to see the face of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. You can see it—the concave cheeks, the deep-set pale blue eyes, the blowy, sandy hair—in the meaner streets of Chicago...
...The next day the company, expressing fear for the safety of the non-strikers, dosed the plant—Round One for the union...
...He signed the paper and he never got any money for being off...
...The police called upon the hymn-singing strikers to disperse and fired warning shots over their heads...
...By 5:15 P.M., a whole flock of their relatives were in front of Murray Ohio and they weren't too happy about the pickets...
...But they won't do that, and we won't quit...
...Thereupon the police arrested Craighead, but pickets surrounded the police car, immobilizing it, until Craighead asked them to stand aside and let the law take its course...
...I'll tell you who don't think so—the company," says articulate strike leader Paul Violet...
...Holding the gun with barrel down, Brown made his way through the pickets to the police car and then to the hospital...
...According to Crawford's brother, Nathan, who is quite critical of the strike, "The company was determined to make everybody in town take sides...
...In the steel shed, which employs 17 men, one was killed, two permanently disabled, and many injured, yet no safety system has been installed...
...he died a few months after leaving Lawrenceburg, at the age of 53...
...Hood [Combs's assistant] back in his office before he talked to me or done anything for me...
...this was placed solely and squarely on the shoulders of the workers...
...Clement figured he wasn't going to get anything from labor anyway, so he might as well cash in on all the anti-labor sentiment that's always around in the South...
...But the best laid plans may be shot full of holes in Crockett country, where Davy set the style in marksmanship The productive souls sat idle all day while repairs were made on a section of the power plant knocked out by 13 bullets...
...Clement's announcement that the troops would be withdrawn when enough local citizens were deputized to keep the peace introduced the last and sorriest chapter of the strike...
...If he won't get up, treat him like anybody else," ordered the chief...
...What a ,night...
...And the Red Sea has not parted for them yet...
...In a civic club speech Hannon described Vestal and Craighead as gangsters, the Teamsters threw a picket line around the hostile Columbia Dail...
...It was a needlessly brutal act...
...They beat us by 21 votes —1,115 to 1,094...
...Why should poor white Southerners know when to quit...
...On June 14, Mr...
...But for the powerless, a miss is worse than a mile...
...A week after the state patrol withdrew, they were back at the gates en masse, ambling between the cars as if all the tumult and anger had never happened...
...On April 17, having made no attempts at mediation or conciliation, Clement ordered the state highway patrol to Lawrenceburg: "Our investigation shows that the sale of firearms and ammunition has been abnormally high in the past several days...
...It means a facade of Greek columns and a backyard full of slums...
...Here's a company that's gone against the law time after time...
...Then the supervisors would dare 'em to strike, kid 'em about it," says George O'Rear...
...He became a household word in Tennessee in 1957 when the Senate Labor Rackets (McClellan) Committee accused the local of punching strikebreakers, "syruping" their trucks, breaking windows, etc., and Vestal lieutenant "Hard-hearing Smitty" took the Fifth Amendment 102 times in 20 minutes...
...Now there was no disputing the breakdown in law and order...
...Troopers, covering their hands with sand, grappled with the slithery, shouting pickets...
...Many of the new deputies were strikebreakers paid by the company while on police duty...
...Among them was Bill Thompson, an insurance man whose relative was not an employee but a member of the board of directors...
...An argument developed between him and Craighead, he pulled a knife, and Craighead slugged him...
...The Board then levied the sole penalty provided by law for coercing and intimidating workers—Murray Ohio was ordered to post a notice saying it would cease and desist from such activities in the future...
...Claiming that the resultant delays interfered with production, Hannon closed down again...
...Combs, stayed with me and the doctor talked to Mr...
...Part of it said you are able to return to work...
...This was the account by a reporter for the Florence (Ala...
...A buoyant, handsome man of 50, Vestal came up from a 250-an-hour truck driver in Texas through John L. Lewis's Mine Workers and Harry Bridges's Longshoremen to the presidency of Nashville's 1,000-member Teamster local in 1950...
...We ask that if this Honorable Branch of the U.S...
...But in the rural South, skill and charm alone do not produce union members...
...It means a New South fraud papered over by an Old South myth...
...Ray Blair, for 12 years a member of the Board of Magistrates (city council), says: "When Murray moved here in '55, they invited all the magistrates to supper at the plant, except me...
...We again state that we do not wish to abide by the Agreement that Teamsters Local 327 was forced to sign against their wishes...
...The atmosphere of the community is fraught with danger...
...The aggressive police methods were proving effec tive...
...They still hope that eventually everything will straighten out at Murray Ohio...
...The strikers responded to their eroding situation with a kind of incredulous, strangled outrage...
...In the first attempt to lasso the run-away shop, the election of September, 1957, the UAW polled an impressive 558 votes to the company's 624...
...At that point, the UAW decided that nine dauntless years were enough...
...Three days later, I get a letter from Murray Ohio to be in the office tomorrow...
...Had Sheriff Harold Brown, considered a decent man, been more experienced than his 26 years warranted, he might have sensed that it was a time to walk on cat feet...
...By 8:00 P.M...
...The next morning they woke up to discover that in plain fact nothing had changed...
...Several of these contribute support to those manning the token picket line today, a year later...
...Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to hold Murray Ohio in contempt for violating the court orders of 1960 and '64 to cease interfering with its employees' right to organize...
...By the end of the second day, 30 pickets had been arrested plus a strikebreaker whose car contained a gun and knife like a machete...
...As strikers milled around the courthouse, trading jeers with company personnel, the Chancery Court judge charged the pickets with contempt of injunction and set their trial for April 21...
...After investigation, the Board's regional office issued a complaint against Murray Ohio, charging 16 separate unfair labor practices...
...Hoyt Wright immediately requested the NLRB to void the election, claiming that the company had corrupted the atmosphere of free choice by coercing and intimidating its employees...
...Even the town haberdasher, one of those smiling merchants who pales at the mention of controversy, has a good word for Wright...
...When the man toppled forward, no attempt was made to break his fall, although he was handcuffed and could not aid himself...
...When the company refused, the union appealed to the NLRB, which scheduled April hearings...
...winging industry is seeking not rivers or forests or skilled artisans but a single commodity in short supply up North: non-union labor...
...If Vestal refused to sign, Hoffa could and gleefully would place Local 327 under trusteeship...
...Failing that certainty, neither the UAW nor Hoyt Wright nor the union men of Lawrenceburg were prepared to call it quits...
...If they didn't learn at Antietan and Chancellorsville, nor at Gastonia and Gadsden, where in the Thirties strikers fought state troops until they were clubbed down or killed, nor at Henderson, North Carolina, where strikers held out for 21/2 years—if they didn't learn quitting there, why should they be such expert quitters in Lawrenceburg...
...Craighead, who was on the scene, had made no effort to restrain the pickets...
...Lindsey, whose popularity seemed to make him a favorite police target, had been arrested several times before, but the charges were never sustained in court...
...His head hit the ground with a resounding thud and he scooted about a foot on his forehead .. . That Sunday, the Nashville Tennessean ran a full-page story about the strike, which began: What started out as a simple labor dispute at the Murray Ohio plant here has mushroomed into a social, political, and economic revolution that has shaken the stability of Lawrence County...
...It called the Teamsters outsiders and foreigners and said they were ruining our community and dividing our people with threats, intimidations and coercion...
...The company wouldn't use his seniority—they just cut him back to a $2900-a-year job, and he's in his fifties...
...Is it possible that more than half of these workers genuinely reject organization...
...This will take a lot of doing, for in addition to their other problems, the strikers have now been beset by Jimmy Hoffa...
...For that, yet another legal action was required —a contempt proceeding—which the Board did not initiate until April, 1965...
...O'Rear held on to him for dear life and they made their getaway...
...In that event, an alternative path to recognition was open to the union...
...When the plant manager reported that 50 pickets were delaying incoming cars, Brown rushed over and waded in, selecting "Country Boy" for the first arrest...
...By September, 1964, 600 to 800 employees were coming to union meetings, and two months later the Teamsters called for an election...
...It was the third of December and mighty cold [recalls Teamster organizer James Craighead], but people came from miles around, like it was a football game...
...Combs and Personnel Director Smotherman was there with a statement from the doctor and told me to throw away my crutches and come on back to work...
...These are the yeoman farmers, the backbone of the South, thrown off the Iand by technology...
...There is a widespread feeling that the company is far more interested in minimizing its insurance premiums than in providing fair compensation for such injuries...
...When they took down that tent where there'd been all those chicken suppers and square dancing, the Teamos were lowering their flag...
...Within minutes car windows were smashed, tires punctured, cars overturned...
...After losing so had in the last election, these people were excited...
...Struggling toward the Promised Land, these people have confronted the might of Lawrenceburg, the might of Lawrence County, the might of the governor of Tennessee, and the might of that durable Pharaoh, Jimmy Hoffa...
...The supervisors kept saying there would never be a union at Murray Ohio and the people began to talk strike...
...Says Ray Blair: Country Boy is half man and half polar bear...
...For the law provides that where an election is voided on these grounds and the union then produces valid authorization cards for 51 per cent of the work force, the Board can without further ado recognize the union...
...Since the agreement states that the plant is already fully staffed, this is like saying: Here is nothing, hold it tight...
...The company then undertook its first appeal, to the NLRB Trial Examiner, who upheld the union...
...Times: I was standing about four feet from [Gerald] Heatherly when he was jerked off his feet astraddle a trooper's club hoisted by two officers...
...On the same day, the Chancery Court tightened its injunction: pickets were prohibited from approaching within six feet of strike breakers' cars and from engaging in "carnival type demonstrations with dancing, singing, or gyrations of the body...
...With labor as with civil rights, the stand-pat Southerner contends that but for the "foreigners," there would be no excursions and alarms...
...When he made his comeback in 1963 as the clean, anti-Hoffa candidate pledged to a new day, even the vehemently antiVestal Nashville Tennessean editorialized: "No one will deny his union the right to another chance to make a worthwhile contribution to community progress . . ." A year later, when he accepted the invitation from Lawrenceburg, his membership was up to 5,000 and he had every earmark of the up-and-coming labor crusader...
...This emotion was put to good use by the Teamsters, who correctly predicted that the company's conduct would lead the NLRB to set the election aside...
...They knew I was laborminded and what they were talkin' about was how to keep the unions out...
...That merciless strategist has proposed an agreement which will simultaneously end the strike, extricate the Teamsters from the company's $16 million lawsuit, and smite his enemy, Don Vestal...
...As a first step, job applicants were to be screened by trusted farmers and businessmen who would inquire into their social philosophy...
...To his credit Jim Craighead unburdened himself of the full story of the agreement to NLRB officials...
...And right on his heels came the UAW...
...The state patrol was back in Lawrenceburg the next day and the company's picture of the strikers as a violent, anarchic force was, for the general public, vindicated...
...Frank McCulloch, chairman of NLRB, received a petition from Lawrenceburg: We feel and ask that if after all the Unfair Labor Practices Murray Ohio has committed and been found guilty of we should be certified...
...In addition, company president William A. Hannon recruited his supervisors from the leadership of the UAW local in the Cleveland plant and obtained as a member of his board of directors Mr...
...As legendary Southern organizer Franz Daniel says: "In those little Southern towns, you don't just go after the workers, you go after everybody...
...It is as up to the minute as Chester A. Arthur and Thomas Nelson Page, and by comparison it makes William McKinley and Queen Victoria and Rudyard Kipling seem avant garde...
...Herald, Craighead's car was set on fire, striker David Lindsey was arrested for tossing a smoke bomb into another local plant being struck by the Teamsters, and deputy sheriff W. B. MacDonald announced in front of the courthouse that he intended to kill Jim Craighead...
...It was a crazy atmosphere in the plant," recalls Paul Violet...
...O'Rear's brother George, a strike leader, was among those sitting...
...The company thereupon took the case before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sustained the Board and the UAW in June, 1960...
...Wright had a history of heart trouble," says "Boss" Hollander, the local Tiresias who owns the Colonial Café, "but he died of a broken heart...
...According to a local reporter, the company made skillful use of the sit-down...
...Although he was clearly feeling the heat, the Governor managed to extract three major concessions from a worried Vestal before pulling out his troops: Tent City was to be disbanded and there would be no more mass picketing or delaying of cars...
...Murray Ohio, a Cleveland corporation unionized by the United Automobile Workers in 1936, made no secret of this motivation nor did the Lawrenceburg Chamber of Commerce find it anything but admirable...
...The organizer was not around to collect his last NLRB trophy...
...before Sheriff Brown was satisfied that order was sufficiently restored to permit the first shift to go home...
...The scene now took on the excitement of a public contest...
...Never talked about the union...
...You think they even stopped the damn thing...
...Murray Ohio, which employs about 2,000 people, was attracted to Lawrenceburg by the gift of free land, free construction of utility lines, and the floating of 20-year municipal bonds to finance plant construction...
...But if those people out there ever knew when to quit...
...Vestal, always pro-Hoffa, was defeated for office in 1961 and deserted by his leader...
...By the spring of 1956, Mr...
...Local and county police were strung alongside the road in front of the main gate, locked arm in arm to contain the strikers...
...For the astounded strikers perhaps the unkindest, although the smallest, cut was the stipulation to disband the token picket line...
...That's nothing," he replied to an expression of sympathy...
...A man there fell and broke his back in three places and Combs told him to get back to work...
...A lot of our people are qualifying for the poverty program—what more can I say...
...That ended the sit-down, but it was 8:00 P.M...
...Government does not grant the above, then at least we should be granted back pay and given our jobs back...
...These events, occurring in a Southern border state—one with a "liberal" governor and the most liberal Congressional delegation below the Mason-Dixon line—bring to mind a statement of a distinguished authority on Southern history...
...The company safety director, Mr...
...He would be hard put to explain a little excursion taken by Paul Odom and Jim Schaffer the day after "foreigner" Wright left Lawrenceburg...
...What had, of course, interfered with production was the refusal of the majority of his employees to run the gauntlet of that cat-calling, licensejotting, reprisal-hinting picket line...
...Police chief Scoggins was already sprawled on the ground...
...If they did, they might just once let us alone, just let us campaign and vote in peace, or collect cards without raisin' hell in the plant like they did before we struck...
...When asked by the New York Times in 1962 about the new wave of industrialization sweeping the South, Professor C. Vann Woodward of Yale said: It means caste and segregation and paternalism...
...Hannon was in business in the new location...
...The last major engagement between strikers and police occurred last July 12, when some 300 Teamsters held a rally in a hollow near the plant...
...Checking the information, he was told by local dealers that sales were normal for the season...
...The second appeal was to the full Board, which affirmed the Trial Examiner's decision in February, 1959, almost a year and a half after the union's complaint...
...As soon as one was arrested, another grabbed his sign and took his place...
...The company also filed a $16 million damage suit against the Teamsters—a ploy which would have strategic importance later on...
...Hannon just figured it was a lot more money than these people seen before and he counted on that...
...In the ensuing panic, the police grabbed Edward Henson and clubbed him, while the other strikers covered their scramble uphill by hurling rocks at them...
...The company was not unaware of this development...
...Jim Crawford of the Democrat Union first heard about the rise in the sale of firearms from Mr...
...but not to sign anything giving our jobs and back pay away...
...Old Hannon ran true to form: anti-Vestal signs up all over the polling places and blow-ups of Teamsters throwing bricks at scab trucks side by side with pictures of the happy Hannon way of life...
...With these arrests, the public atmosphere began to darken...
...Frank Costangy, generally considered the most effective union-busting attorney in the South...
...At the end of the first shift, supervisors went around telling people they were trapped and could use the company phones to call home...
...Although the agreement has been filed in the local court, no one has yet told the lonely picket in front of Murray Ohio's main gate that at last he's got to go home...
...Dissatisfaction with the job evaluation system, the key to promotions and discharges, came to a boil in 1959, when the company excused its failure to rehire 22 union sympathizers after a seasonal lay-off by citing their low job ratings...
...About this time [recalls Jim Crawford, co-publisher of the Lawrenceburg Democrat Union], the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Delton Truitt, brought me a full-page ad, signed by the Chamber and other law-abiding citizens of Lawrence County...
...Craighead had made no effort to restrain the pickets or to develop a non-violent response to provocation, and he would make none in the future...
...Lawrence County will never be the same again...
...By the time reporters arrived, the man with the gun was gone, but the battered cars were clearly in evidence...
...The first Murray Ohio employee encountered by this reporter had lost a finger in the factory...
...By that time, seven sets of union complaints had been filed and upheld by the Board, and the situation at Murray Ohio was no longer susceptible to legal solutions...
...We'd go along with the results, like it or not...
...For the next four days, Tennessee headlines were usurped by Frank Clement's Hamlet-like ponderings—to intervene or not to intervene...
...On March 18, Murray Ohio opened its doors, but only 300 workers nosed their cars through the sauntering pickets...
...to its credit, the paper obtained and published the list anyway...
...at this rate the strike could hardly sustain momentum...
...But the company was pulling ahead of him...
...All the company needed to bring was its machinery and managerial personnel...
...But by that time, events had galloped beyond the Board's control...
...V That Monday, all of the 1500 employees who entered Murray Ohio between the cordons of state police planned to put in a good day's work...
...Little Egypt" is what he and several thousand citizens of Lawrenceburg have dubbed the Murray Ohio Company, the largest bicycle-producing factory in the world...
...On March 3, the Teamsters struck Murray Ohio...
...Yet in the view of "Preacher" Townsend, a Missionary Baptist leader in Lawrenceburg, they are not strangers to bondage...
...This decision was, however, overturied by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals...
...but Mrs...
...You don't have to come South to see the face of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee...
...When the Democrat Union requested a list of deputies for publication, the city refused...
...All in all, some 200 patrolmen had enabled 1800 employees, more than twothirds of the work force, to drive through the picket line...
...When he revisited them after the governor's press conference, they refused to talk...
...It means juleps for the few and pellagra for the crew...
...A guy working near me had all his fingers chopped off by a machine...
...Meirowsky's office...
...Yet Wright's latest organizing drive was deflated by the company's sixth set of intimidations in the summer of 1964...
...We heard the Teamsters were tough," says Odom, "By that time, we didn't think no union was tough enough...
...Yet when we try to do something about it after all these years, we get every kind of cop in the state jumpin' on us...
...Giving Wright barely time to file his last NLRB complaint, the UAW folded its tents and quietly stole away...
...When they refused Chief O'Rear's request to leave, a wild struggle broke out...
...The company's dilemma brought into play the second staple of Southern small-town labor relations: by April 1, the local police had arrested 266 strikers, athough both the sheriff and police chief testified in court that, the first day apart, picketing had been entirely peaceful...
...In an NLRB affidavit, Taylor describes his visit to the insurance doctor: They took me to Dr...
...Hannon...
...Hannon, who made no predictions, obtained a Chancery Court injunction limiting the picketing to two people, 3,000 feet from the company gates, 20 feet apart, and moving at all times...
...In the sixth month of their vigil, the cheering, jeering pickets began to melt away...
...He always bought his shirts here, and he was just as nice as he could be...
...They have produced no latterday Tom Watson, no white Martin Luther King, nor have they organized marches or demonstrations...
...It was never just the money," says rank-and-file leader George O'Rear, "but who's gonna be happy with $3300 or $3800...
...What of those farmers who reject the hectic anonymity of Northern cities and the ministrations of their social workers, who fight to stay on the land and retain a meaningful heritage by finding supplementary jobs in the industries now flocking South...
...They also tried to drag George O'Rear out of his car— "Let's git him...
...Instead, those strikers without too many arrests were to be placed on a preferential hiring list for a year...
...It means the Compsons going to work for the Snopeses...
...But remember the Alamo and Davy Crockett...
...It was becoming a hard resolution to follow...
...11 Hoyt Wright, the UAW standard-bearer, was by all accounts an affable personality...
...The strike has grown into a virtual small scale civil war—pitting father against son, splitting and reshaping the county's political factions and setting off a revolt against police powers...
...Less than 24 hours after the strike began, its image was indelibly established—and so was its strategy...
...I don't get it—I must be stupid or somethin'," said Paul Odom...
...Vestal was also to stipulate that neither the company nor the union bore any responsibility for the strike-connected violence...
...In return for the company's withdrawal of the suit, Vestal would have to cancel all union complaints before the NLRB and relinquish the strikers' right to return to their jobs with seniority intact, which was assured by the NLRB's finding of company culpability...
...Despite these skeptics, it is possible that Murray Ohio did at that time command the freely-tendered allegiance of the majority of its employees— but given the pressure of its anti-union activities, who could be certain...
...On February 25, the NLRB regional office found Murray Ohio guilty of 35 unfair labor practices against the Teamsters, including repeated threats that the plant would be closed if it were organized, and recommended that the election be set aside...
...They say the Labor Board is even gettin' ready to take 'em to court for ignoring all their decisions...
...Pickets slow-walked in front of cars entering the plant—taunting, boisterous, but harmless—until a whitecollar worker whose new Mustang was scraped by a picket sign rushed up to the picket line waving a gun and shouting, "Who did it...
...The ad made the strikers so mad they began to boycott the merchants, and from there it went from bad to worse...
...While its Trial Examiner found the company guilty of 33 unfair labor practices and voided the December election, he ruled that the Teamsters failed to present sufficient authorization cards for automatic recognition...
...They stomped his foot so bad he had to get crutches...
...They dropped over to Nashville to find themselves some Teamsters...
...The more scholarly sheets mentioned that the Governor's first election in 1952 owed something to labor's resentment of his opponent, Governor Browning, for dispatching state police to the American Enka strike in Morristown...
...William Taylor, a 29-year-old father of four, fell on spilled grease while cleaning a flue stack and hurt his back so badly that an ambulance was called to take him to the hospital...
...As tension increased, relations between management and workers deteriorated...
...But Lawrenceburg had no such luck...
...Vestal, undeceived about the impact of such an agreement on his conscience and his status as a rising labor leader, and already badly dented by his conduct of the strike, searched avidly for escape—only to come each time to the same dead end: the Teamsters' constitution empowers Hoffa, when backed by the Executive Board, to settle all local strikes and lawsuits...
...As evidence, the Board cited chapter and verse of the company's massive campaign against the Teamsters...
...IV It was a snowy, soggy day...
...a whole bunch of people who'd carried company signs during the voting came and signed up with us—more than 21 votes right there...
...in September, 1960, it won the second election by 1,066 to 640...
...That's all it takes in Davy Crockett country...
...But this reputation was to undergo a metamorphosis...
...The National Labor Relations Board found that "the evaluation system was adopted as a device to eliminate union adherents and is therefore lawless in its inception...
...You can see it—the concave cheeks, the deep-set pale blue eyes, the blowy, sandy hair—in the meaner streets of Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland...
...The repercussions of these events included the condemnation of the Governor by the AFL—CIO, the issuance of a federal show cause order against his intervention, and some fast backtracking by Clement himself, who now denied that the troopers had assumed responsibility for policing Murray Ohio, except to keep open the public streets near the plant...
...That cut it," said a veteran newsman...
...As Brown grabbed him, Lindsey, his dander up at last, smashed his huge fist into the sheriff's eye...
...The sheriff tried to hit back, but seeing himself surrounded by pickets hoisting wooden staves, he reached for his gun...
...The ad appeared on Friday, April 10, and on the following Monday production was resumed at Murray Ohio...
...I wouldn't mind so much it bein' an employer law if they wouldn't call it a labor law," said Paul Odom to Hoyt Wright, who kept on doggedly organizing...
...We asked and voted for Teamsters Local 327 to bargain for us...
...Again, it was a hairsbreadth defeat: the union submitted cards fo 48 per cent instead of the required 51 per cent of the bargaining unit...
...They are the waste products of the relentless process which has wiped out 2,400,000 farms in the last 25 years and, as Secretary of Agriculture Freeman warned in Lawrenceburg, may destroy another million in the next five...
...Thus, in the fourth test of strength in an eight-year period the union again failed to demonstrate the allegiance of the majority of workers at Murray Ohio...
...Everybody hopped into their cars and we had a parade-333 cars riding up and down through town, horns blowing, people shouting...
...In mid-May, 1966, Vestal and Craighead (who was said to have wept) signed the agreement...
...As the strikers' cars pulled out, the cops systematically battered and broke windows and windshields...
...The majority have been separated from their families during this time, having left their small farms in the care of their wives...
...As hundreds of their supporters cheered, the pickets scooted under the human barrier and marched into the stream of on coming cars...
...It took six of those green giants to get him into the police car and they're pushin' and haulin' at him and he's just kind of pullin' against 'em and lookin' puzzled, like a big wooly polar bear that's bein' annoyed but hasn't got his dander up...
...and 1300 employees, more than half the work force, made it to their machines...
...Yet too much of Southward * This article is adapted from Vera Rony's forthcoming book on the labor situation in the South, to be published by Quadrangle Books...
...Jubilantly the strikers erected their "tent city" near Murray Ohio's main gate, held staggering chicken suppers, square danced, and predicted early victory...
...By that time, Hannon, the vice mayor, and the sheriff had all wired Governor Frank G. Clement for assistance, claiming a breakdown of law and order...
...The next afternoon Craighead retaliated: 200 pickets sat down in front of the main gate...
...my foreman said, 'We'll be gettin' together like this often...
...He was making $5500 on polishing when they automated the job...
...There must've been a thousand of 'em milling around watching the voting...
...The Teamsters found jobs for more than a hundred in Nashville, others were hired by local enterprises, still others found work in Alabama, Mississippi, and Detroit...
...No one mentioned that Clement was supported by the Tennessee AFL—CIO council in his two subsequent elections, only to lose the endorsement in his unsuccessful Senate race against Ross Bass, when he retreated ignominiously on the race issue...
...I wouldn't sign this paper [which] was a medical release, to pay the doctor or the hospital...
...III These events seemed to baffle some new members of what is hailed as the world's most pampered proletariat...
...We filed the Unfair Labor Practices through the Teamsters and We Won Them...
...We went and hung a funeral wreath on the company entrance, just like they always hung on the UAW...
...He also counted on their ignorance about how they should be treated, according to Mary "Tiny" McDougal, who while earning $1.50 an hour could not apply for a $2.50 job in the next department...
...The failure to win NLRB recognition and the effectiveness of the reinforced police in restricting picketing (which enabled the company to achieve normal production, quantitatively if not qualitatively) were enough to cut the heart out of any strike...
...Seven pickets were arrested that day, including big, blonde "Country Boy" Lindsay, a local favorite...
...For a moment, as he was being dragged to the police car George, a hefty six-footer, confronted his 6'8 brother: "You've gotten yours," he said "now I'm getting mine...
...VI In the same month, the NLRB shattered the union's last, best hope...
...could the Teamsters beat Bill Hannon...
...Maybe he's given three nickel- or dime-an-hour raises over a period of years...
...Call me Shug.' We ain't got together and I ain't called him Shug, before or since...
...124 pickets were arrested that Monday, some as often as six times...
...The company appealed at once on March 8, the union informed Murray Ohio that it was prepared to submit authorization cards for 51 per cent of the work force and demanded recognition...
...But they had, as a rash of tire slashings and a gun duel attested...
...On the third day, 25 gallons of axle grease were stashed away in the bushes near the picket line and at 4:00 P.M., one hundred strikers sat down in the path of the departing first shift...
...The next morning, Hannon closed the plant for the third time: "Fifteen hundred employees begged us to open this morning, but we could not see anything but bloodshed...
...The people couldn't stop hoping, yet they were kind of desperate...
...Still, no meaningful penalties were imposed...
...My uncle had a better job than most," says Paul Violet...
...And now the NLRB finally petitioned the U.S...
...Before the election we got what we call the UAW raise," says "Preacher" Townsend, "mostly a nickel, but sometimes a dime, and they was just as sweet as pie to us...
...Given that criterion, everybody in mid-Tennessee would agree that Don Vestal's Local 327 was just the place to go...
...These are the means by which the South is transforming itself from a traditional agrarian to a modern industrial society—a domestic Operation Bootstrap of awesome proportions...
...However, the strikers received no reply to their letter, and on June 24, the Board informed Local 327 that the agreement was approved and accepted...
...They just brushed the fingers right off and put somebody else on the machine...
...And you know who they put on—the man's own father-in-law...
...Gerald Heatherly recalls: "They'd have these little meetings with the foremen...
...In the plant, the agitated atmosphere was producing union cards like a dry summer produces cotton...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
