BOOK MARK : Labor Peace Was Never Easy, Especially When a World War Loomed

A wildcat strike of United Auto Workers at the North American Aviation Co. in Inglewood, Calif., in June, 1941, proved severely damaging. The California aircraft industry, part of the massive reconfiguration of the national economy, with defense and defense-related production at its core, compacted together a set of bedeviling problems.

The rush to turn out fighting planes upset the labor market, generating acute shortages, the pirating of skilled cadre by rival manufacturers, black-market wages and a chaotic shattering of customary job hierarchies. Young workers, often unfamiliar with cities, factories and trade unions, but made militant by the deranged circumstances of the job market, streamed into the centers of aircraft production and further unsettled a sensitive situation that the government was determined to stabilize.

The half-year preceding the explosion at Inglewood was filled with threats of strikes and “quickie” strikes up and down the West Coast--at Vultee in Los Angeles, Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego and elsewhere--as old-timers and new recruits protested pay rates, exhausting overtime and punishing shift schedules. Manufacturers squabbled among themselves, defeating Sidney Hillman’s diligent efforts to get them to cooperate and standardize their labor policies.

On top of that, the UAW local at North American was unstable. Wyndham Mortimer, a veteran of Flint and the Communist Party, ran the UAW’s organizing drive on the West Coast at a time when the party was least inclined to defer to the “national interest.” Thus, no one was surprised when an outlaw strike shut down North American Aviation.

Hillman found himself in a no-win predicament. Constrained by his social responsibilities, he reluctantly sided with a decision by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and William Knudsen of General Motors, the director of the Office of Production Management, to send in troops to break the strike.

For this, he was roundly condemned by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, despite the fact that he had struggled for weeks to avoid precisely this military solution--and despite the fact that the strike itself was disavowed by the national leadership of the UAW and the CIO. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers used the occasion to convene a session of 250 CIO leaders in Washington to condemn Hillman and the President for their resort to force.

An atmosphere of hysterical overreaction enveloped the strike. Everyone was irate about the Communist Party and radicals generally. Hillman had received intelligence about an alleged National Maritime Union-Communist Party undercover movement to foment a seaman’s strike on all coasts, especially in New York, Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans. Navy Undersecretary James V. Forrestal informed Knudsen about an alleged Socialist Workers’ Party plan to strike several sensitive Minneapolis manufacturers, including Honeywell, and Knudsen, in turn, asked Hillman to investigate. The investigation revealed, as in so many of these cases, the hollowness of the rumor.

The air was thick with outlandish accusations. Hillman received wild communications pretending to uncover covert Communist Party plans to take over key industries should the Congress pass anti-subversive legislation. From the other shore, Gerald L.K. Smith, the right-wing rabble-rouser, circulated a petition at Ford’s River Rouge plant, stigmatizing Hillman as an ally of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union and as a fast friend of Vladimir I. Lenin, demanding the President fire him.

For all these reasons, by the time Mortimer marshaled his troops, Hillman had run out of patience. Not only did he accuse North American Local 683 of doing “immediate and irreparable damage,” but he used the occasion to curse others guilty of criminal disloyalty--including the International Woodworkers of America, whose leadership persisted in striking “unjustifiably” and issuing “violently false and inflammatory attacks upon the national government.”

Once the decision was taken to send in the Army, unanimity evaporated within the ranks of the CIO. Philip Murray, a key figure, joined Lewis in condemning the decision, along with Hillman’s complicity.

In a vitriolic exchange at a high-level CIO get-together in July, Lewis damned Hillman for his perfidy at North American Aviation: “Sidney Hillman stood at the elbow of the President of the United States when he signed the executive order that sent troops into the Inglewood plant.”

The deployment of armed men traumatized the labor leadership and inflamed the aircraft workers. For weeks, it was hard to restore order. Welders went back to work reluctantly as they “were greatly incensed at the actions of the Army and also because of the throwing of tear gas.” They might be working, but in their eyes the stature of the “Defense Administration” had dropped drastically while that of the Communist Party was enhanced.

Even “Dutch” Kindelberger, president of North American, while boasting, “Things are pretty damn quiet now,” had to acknowledge the welders remained obstreperous.

The Army colonel who, together with Hillman’s man on the scene, was charged with getting the plant back in operation commented that “until we catch these radicals and absolutely stamp these insidious, undermining elements preying on the minds of the men in these plants,” turmoil would continue.

Even after the left was beheaded and subdued, when inflammatory radio broadcasts ceased and the Communist Party groups were driven underground, the colonel noted to Hillman the knotty problem of restoring social relations between radical and conservative workers. And this state of incipient rebellion persisted, despite the fact that Hillman, together with the military brass and the National Defense Mediation Board, were more than ready to accept the basic wage improvements and job classifications demanded by the union and to impose them uniformly on the rest of the industry to eliminate one major cause of chronic labor upheaval.

1991, by Steven Fraser. Reprinted with permission from The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: “Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor,” by Steven Fraser, is reviewed on Page 1 of today’s Book Review section.