(3 of 4)
That evening some 4,000 grimly serious actors, not yet informed of the agreement, swarmed to Hollywood's barnlike American Legion Stadium with minds made up about how to mark the strike ballots they were handed at the door. Loud were the cheers when President Montgomery, dog-tired but icy-cool, announced the settlement. Since formal contracts had yet to be signed, and other producers, notably Warner Brothers, had yet to be brought to terms, a strike vote was taken. Bandy-legged Boris Karloff hustled around with a ballot box which he somehow managed to make suggest an infernal machine. The vote was for a strike against any producer who refused to sign a Guild contract. But no one expected that to happen.
"We've been sold down the river," cried the head of Federated Motion Picture Crafts, his hopes of a sympathetic Guild strike crushed. "The working people of this country made these stars. And we will break them."
¶ Declaring himself tired of C. I. O. attempts to organize his workers, the general manager of Apex Hosiery Co., Philadelphia's biggest non-union hosiery mill, shut down his plant one day at noon, locking out 2,500 employes. Massing outside, they were joined by some 10,000 sympathetic workers from other mills. For a while the ugly-tempered crowd contented itself with milling, muttering, shying an occasional stone through plant windows. Suddenly some 300 men detached themselves from the main body and, while the mob set up a terrifying roar, battered their way through a line of 100 policemen, stormed through doors and windows, beat down the guards inside, commenced a Sit-Down. While 40 battlers licked their wounds, company officials promptly commenced negotiations with C. I. O.'s American Federation of Hosiery Workers.
¶ In Manhattan the rank & file insurgents of A. F. of L.'s International Seamen's Union who staged the "unauthorized" maritime strike in Atlantic and Gulf ports last autumn (TIME, Nov. 9 et seq.) finally made a clean break with their old leaders, set up a new National Maritime Union claiming 28,000 members. Announced were plans to join C. I. O., to demand National Labor Relations Board elections to decide whether the old union or the new should have exclusive bargaining rights.
Also in Manhattan, continuing a national trend, 7,000 members of the Transport Workers' Union voted to desert A. F. of L., join C. I. O.
¶ In Kankakee, Ill., Circuit Judge W. R. Hunter asked six applicants for citizenship if they approved the Sit-Down. Luckily, all said "No," for the Judge announced that he would have denied their applications if they had commended that "form of anarchy."