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That the harassed Governor well realized he was becoming the Kerensky of the Sit-Down appeared when, to a 20-man Committee on Law & Order which he had summoned to consider Michigan's labor troubles, he declared: "When the authority of governmental agencies is continually flouted or defied, confidence in government is impaired, and outraged citizens prepare to take the law into their own hands; democratic rule is endangered, and the way is prepared for the rule of mobs or dictators; worst of all, labor movements and organizations are discredited, faith in liberal democratic government is permanently impaired, and social progress is impeded.
"While I have consistently counseled resort to conference and negotiation, and sought to avoid the use of force, there is obviously a limit to this policy, if orderly government, as we know it here, is to go on." "Insurrection!" Despite this solemn warning, the sit-down of 6,000 Chrysler employes rolled on last week along the trail blazed by the G. M. strike. As the deadline approached which Circuit Judge Allan Campbell had set in his injunction ordering the sit-downers to evacuate, 30,000 to 50,000 roaring sympathizers massed around the eight seized plants in giant picket lines and the defiant sit-downers sat tight behind their barricades. Two days later Chrysler followed General Motors' example by getting the judge to issue warrants for the arrest of the sitters and their leaders. This time it was not necessary for Governor Murphy to command a sheriff to ignore the court order. Cautious Sheriff Thomas J. Wilcox simply refused to budge. To enforce a similar ouster against only 100 sit-downers, armed with meat hooks and cleavers, in the Newton Packing Co. plant, the sheriff figured he would need 600 deputies. In the same ratio, an army of 36,000 would be required to overcome the Chrysler sitters. Harmless were the big manifolds which, mocking the National Guard one-pounders wheeled out for the G. M. strike, they set up to look like cannon (see cut). Far from innocuous were the clubs and blackjacks with which they had armed themselves, the great iron bins lined three deep inside plant gates, filled with such missiles as bolts, pipe joints, grenade-sized automobile parts. "Troops might get through here," a striker confided to Scripps-Howard's Raymond Clapper, "but you ought to see what we've got inside. We have much more material than this piled around each stairway." "It would be folly," roared the New York Herald Tribune, "to call the sit-in strike of Detroit by any but its right name. That name is insurrection."