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Professional Sit-Downers. Visiting a sit-down at Frank & Seder's department store one night, Governor Murphy recognized one of the sitters as a "man whom, when the Governor was judge of Detroit's Recorder's Court, he had sentenced to prison for forgery. Investigation disclosed that the ex-convict and ten of his companions were not employes of the store, but union organizers who had seized it in a raid, cowing employes into a strike. Here at last were sit-downers against whom Governor Murphy could proceed with undivided sympathies. He denounced their action as a "form of banditry," and a swarm of 300 policemen raided and routed them. With public opinion swinging behind them at the revelation of these "professional sit-down strikers," the emboldened police moved on seven shoe stores and a food plant, smashed sit-downs in all of them.
Law & Justice— In the pinko New Republic last week Dean Leon Green of Northwestern University Law School stepped forward as the first impartial and distinguished legalist to champion the Sit-Down's legality.
Essential difference between a walk-out and a sitdown, wrote he, is: "Instead of employes severing their relations and thereby automatically placing themselves outside as dissatisfied former employes, they now insist on maintaining their relations while they negotiate about their complaints."
Showdown? Driving ahead against small sit-downs, Detroit Police next marched up to the Newton Packing Co. plant, called on the sitters to come out. To Sheriff Wilcox chagrin they promptly dropped their weapons, sheepishly filed out to be arrested for contempt of court. Some 100 women sitters in the Bernard Schwartz Cigar Corp. factory gave the officers more trouble, kicked, squealed, squirmed as they were driven out. When watching sympathizers began to pelt the police with rock-cored snowballs, 20 mounted officers charged into the crowd with nightsticks swinging. At that, Detroit's sympathy began swinging back to the strikers, and United Automobile Workers' young President Homer Martin seized the occasion to threaten a city-wide general automobile strike unless the police raids stopped. After a weekend lull, police evicted sit-downers in a printing plant, a W. P. A. station. Labor and the Law moved toward a showdown as Detroit's City Council unanimously refused the automobile union's request for permission to stage a huge mass meeting in Cadillac Square, and Homer Martin blustered that he would hold it anyway.
The case for sit-downers, as opposed to the Sit-Down, was stated most eloquently last week by Senator William E. Borah. Joining those observers who viewed the sit-down epidemic not as a disease but as a symptom, Senator Borah, who blames most economic evils on monopoly, declaimed: "As I look at it, they [the strikers] are fighting for what they deem to be their rights in an economic system which is dominated ... by lawlessness and largely by reason of the fact that the Government does not enforce the law. . . . The power belongs to us to restore economic justice to the economic system of the United States or, take my word for it, we will have something more than sit-down strikes in the United States."