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A deadline was set. A curly-headed girl stepped defiantly over it and jeered. Thwack went a police club. Roaring like a monster in pain the crowd surged forward. Mounted police charged. Women and children were trampled. Rocks, bricks and bottles flew. Above panicky cries a whistle shrilled a signal for police to release a tear gas attack. The crowd wavered and broke but a few forehanded strikers snapped on gas masks and tossed the smoking bombs back among the police.
The crowd came on a second time, this time in angry earnest. "Let 'em have it!" somebody called. Firing opened from the roof of the Dexdale mill where a local chief of police pumped away with a rifle. Two young men dropped to the pavement. Both were wounded in the leg. Neither was a striker. Union leaders called off the attack after scores had been hurt, scores arrested.
That night Governor Gifford Pinchot in his blue Rolls-Royce sped from his Milford home to Harrisburg. There he called a midnight conference with labor leaders and patched up a truce for Lansdale. The strikers were to limit their picket lines at the mills. Local police were to be replaced by a detachment of grey-clad State troopers to maintain order.
Also at that midnight conference beside her husband was Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, Pennsylvania's energetic, good-looking First Lady whom all strikers in the State have come to look upon as their friend at court. Last May Mrs. Pinchot conspicuously joined a strikers' picket line in the Allentown garment district, explained that she was there as a matter of noblesse oblige (TIME, May 15). Her critics flayed her as a Red. accused her of fomenting fresh labor disturbances. Nevertheless she was out on a picket line again last week at Lebanon. The spectacle of a liberal Governor's liberal wife openly encouraging strikes created a public impression that Mrs. Pinchot was on Labor's side heart & soul.
Mrs. Pinchot and Labor had another good friend at the Harrisburg conference that night in the person of Miss Charlotte Carr, 43 and sensitive about her heft. Miss Carr had been an assistant in the State Department of Labor & Industry. The male head of that department accused her of stirring up industrial strife, of trying to rivet a minimum wage law upon Pennsylvania. Fortnight ago Governor Pinchot ousted him and appointed Miss Carr as his Secretary of Labor & Industry. A Vassar graduate (1915). Secretary Carr began her social work in an Ohio orphan asylum where she spent her $18 per month pay to buy toothbrushes for the children. During the War she was a night policewoman (No. 720) in the tough vicinity of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her job was to steer home "good" girls looking for sailors, before they got into trouble. Later she worked as an industrial employment manager before taking a job under Miss Frances Perkins in the New York State Department of Labor. She and Mrs. Pinchot were largely responsible for pending Federal charges under the Mann Act against a Northampton shirt factory owner who allegedly made his prettier girl workers go with him on parties in New Jersey.