LABOR: In Passaic

The twelfth week of the strike of the mill workers in Passaic, N. J., ended, and the thirteenth began. Time, whether the duration of a strike or of a man’s life, does not seem long when it is measured in weeks, but three months is a long time for a strike to last—so long that newspaper readers who know how the Passaic strike began with the walk-out of a handful of workers from the Botany Worsted Mills, how it spread until it included some 10,000 employes of other Jersey mills, how the grey-faced men and girls, exhorted by Strike-leader Albert Weisbord, by Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, picketed and paraded, were jailed, clubbed and watered with fire-hose (TIME, March 15), forget that these grim maneuvers still continue intermittently from day to day, and exclaim, when despatches from Passaic thrust themselves once more into the headlines, “What? That strike again?” Last week the strike flamed back into print with a vengeance.

The premonitory rumble of trouble issued from the throat of Sheriff George P. Nimmo, summoned from a neighboring county to direct activities in Passaic, when he stood on the mudguard of a red police-car reading a paper to a group of picketers. That paper was a copy of the Riot Act, which provides that any assemblage that hears this act read to them must disperse within an hour or be liable to arrest. Sheriff Nimmo, a fox-faced man in spectacles, read in a loud voice. The crowd began to move away; some did not move fast enough, were stimulated with prodding clubs. Men began to hurry, fell over one another; women screamed; a squad of motorcycle police cleared the way.

That night some of the strikers’ directorate, the United Front Committee, talked over the telephone to Norman Thomas, onetime Socialist candidate for governor and mayor of New York. Would Mr. Thomas care to test the legality of the Riot Act? Mr. Thomas knew that the U.S. Government has on file other documents besides those that provide for the suppression of disorder. There is for instance the Constitution, which guarantees to freemen the right to meet and voice their opinions. Next day, in Garfield, N. J., Mr. Thomas climbed into the crotch of an appletree stump and put the Riot Act to the test.

The apple tree was important in his adventure, because it was his own apple tree. He had rented it for $10 from a friendly landowner. While he stood in its fork he was abiding in it—hence it was his house and, by the tradition of freehold, his fortress. Some newspapermen, a few strikers, the members of the United Front Committee and a dozen policemen stood around the gnarled bole and listened to him. He asked them to keep the law. He asked them not to commit any disorderly acts. He said that in his opinion the bail of $30,000 fixed for Strike leader Weisbord (whom Sheriff Nimmo had just arrested) was excessive. A police whistle cawed. “Clean ’em up, boys,” a voice directed, and the policemen, armed with clubs and shotguns, dissolved the group, hustled Mr. Thomas away to jail. After spending the night there, he was held on $10,000 bail for the grand jury. His lawyers made efforts to discover the offense with which he was charged.

Events, meanwhile, on other fronts did little to quiet the strikers:

Albert Weisbord, jailed on four counts, three of them headed “Hostility to Government” and the fourth “Inciting to Riot,” was released on $25,000 bail by the Paterson police, rearrested on the same charges by the Garfield deputies. He could not get another $25,000; so he was taken to a cell— a thin, frail young man but recently graduated from the Harvard Law School. Bainbridge Colby, onetime Secretary of State, spoke vainly on behalf of him and U.S. justice. Later Prosecutor A.C. Hart was persuaded to reduce his bail to $5,000, which was found for him. As Weisbord left the jail, Mr. Hart was heard to say: “Instead of throwing these men into jail we ought to give them a good dousing in the river.”

Arthur Garfield Hays, lawyer, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote asking Governor Harry A. Moore of New Jersey to intervene, appended a catalogue of acts committed by the police which he declared to be “mockeries of justice. . . .”

Wives and children of strikers went to Washington, marched to the White House with banners (See THE PRESIDENCY).

Children in Passaic picketed the schools to prevent their classmates from going to class. “No school today,” said their banners. From their guarded offices, mill-owners announced that the mills would reopen immediately, that strikers who wanted to go back to work would be given police-protection day and night. Droves of police stood ready.

From their jails, strike-leaders begged their followers to “stand firm.”