• U.S.

LABOR: The Taming of Art Glover

2 minute read
TIME

For nearly two weeks, 4,000 members of the Switchmen’s Union of North America had tied up four major midwestern and western railroads and crippled a fifth. Thousands of cattle ready for the feed lots were stranded in the grasslands. Wheat was waiting to be shipped; in stretches of Kansas, served only by the Rock Island, wheat overflowed elevators and was piled on the ground.

Union Boss Arthur J. Glover and his boys were strictly small fry beside the railroad brotherhoods, but Art’s ambition was to be a bush league John L. Lewis. He figured that he could enhance his power and show up the big boys if he beat the trainmen and conductors to a 40-hour week at full 48-hours’ pay—a demand turned down by a presidential fact-finding board. Even after the Korean invasion, Art kept the strike going. The National Mediation Board asked him to end it for the good of the country, but Art refused: he would let emergency stuff through, but his men would stay on strike.

Last week Harry Truman threw the switch on ambitious Art Glover. The President condemned the strike as unjustified and threatened to step in if the men did not get back to work. Since the U.S. was not at war, the President did not invoke Korea as his justification; the stoppage of food shipments, he said, was reason enough to end the strike.

Art Glover, once a switchman himself, could still read a red signal when he saw it. Within nine hours, he called an end to the strike on the Great Northern, the Chicago Great Western, the Denver & Rio Grande Western and the Western Pacific.

But he stubbornly held out on the Rock Island, announced that the strike would continue there as a test of “whether a legal strike against a railroad is possible in this free country.”

The President’s reaction was quick: he seized the 8,000-mile Rock Island and ordered the Army to run it. Art balked and the U.S. promptly slapped an injunction on the union. That was too much for Art Glover. After grumbling a few hours, he called off the Rock Island strike, too.

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