The air in Detroit was ominous as last week began. The United Automobile Workers, 6,000 of whose brawniest were sitting down in nine Chrysler plants, asked for a permit to hold a mass meeting of strike sympathizers. The place: Cadillac Square in the heart of Detroit. The hour: 4:30 p. m., as the evening rush hour began.
The City Council voted not to permit the meeting. Strike leaders, bitter at city authorities because police had been used to break up smaller sitdowns, threatened to hold the meeting without a permit. Homer Martin, head of the union, said he would call a general strike. He said the union would secure the recall of Mayor Frank Couzens (son of the late Senator James Couzens). Mayor Couzens yielded, got the union to defer the mass meeting till 5:45, advised firms in the office buildings on Cadillac Square to dismiss their workers early. Save for groups of strikers trooping to their rendezvous, the heart of Detroit was almost deserted at rush hour.
Then on the broad pavement of Cadillac Square, hedged round with modern office buildings and old fashioned three-and-four-story shops, a human mass began to accumulate. It grew slowly at first, but soon swelled bigger than the normal rush hour crowd, bigger than an election crowd, big as a world series crowd. When it was full-grown, newshawks, fond of round numbers, called it 100,000. It was 60,000 at the least. There were some women, a few children, but for the most part only men, able-bodied men in their working years—more than one might find by rounding up the entire adult male population of Bridgeport, Conn., or Nashville, Tenn., or Long Beach. Calif., or the whole State of Nevada. If it was a mob then Detroit was seeing the biggest industrial mob scene* in modern U. S. history. The crowd milled quietly but listened too as, in a hoarse droning roar from the loudspeakers, Homer Martin breathed defiance in all directions:
"You downtown merchants, the working conditions of the automobile workers of this city is a national scandal. . . . Mr. Mayor, you see to it that the law is properly enforced. . . . Give us our rights and we'll quit sitting down. You'll find out we're at least as smart as a jackass. We know even a mule has sense enough to sit down when he's overworked. . . . Henry Ford, you can't stop your workers from joining the union. . . . The best thing for you to do, Henry, is to get ready to do business with your organized workers. . . . We know that nine old men have been on a sit-down for the last six years. . . . I'm squarely behind the President. The Supreme Court of the U. S. is the greatest threat to democracy in America, outside of police fascism. . . . And we say to the police that we're determined to get what is justly ours and we're not going to stop till we get it."