The Sit-Down Strike, suddenly boomed by the General Motors trouble last December as a new phenomenon in U. S. labor warfare, seemed last week to descend from its peak of the week before (TIME, March 1) almost as rapidly as it had risen. The Sit-Down Strike, as an instrument of Labor policy, was impressively sat upon in many places. It had lost its surprise value as police and employers learned more about combatting it. It was being tried on hard-boiled firms which were not so utterly dependent on public sympathy as General Motors and which could afford to take a sterner course with workers who seized company property.
¶ At Groton, Conn., 107 of 1,900 workmen in the plant of Electric Boat Co., manufacturers of submarines for the U. S. Navy, sat down. They passed one day in pleasant converse, whiled away the evening listening to the music of banjo and guitar. Shortly after midnight the plant superintendent appeared at the door and announced: ''All you fellows are fired!" He was followed by 50 State police who arrested all the strikers under warrants for trespassing. The strikers got up with good humor, took their banjo and guitar and marched through the deserted streets to police court. There at 2 a. m. a sleepy police judge released them without bail for appearance later in town court. Next day the strikers picketed, the plant operated peacefully.
¶ At Santa Monica, Calif. 345 of 5,600 employes of Douglas Aircraft Co. on the third day of a sit-down were indicted for "forcible entry and occupancy" but refused to retreat. Police and sheriff's deputies, 350 strong, surrounded the plant, brought up machine guns, ominously set up a dressing station for expected casualties with a Red Cross flag prominently displayed. The sit-downers retaliated by arming themselves with wrenches, rolling airplanes to the windows so that their propellers could be used to blow tear gas out of the plant. They distributed drums of paint with which they threatened to fire the building. Undeterred, police called for the fire department and prepared to storm the plant if the sit-downers would not surrender. At that tense moment Dr. Towne Nylander, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, went in and announced that the Labor Board would hold hearings on charges that Douglas Aircraft had discriminated against union employes and refused to bargain collectively, urged the strikers to give up. Believing that they would be licked in a fight, the 345 sit-downers marched out, were carted off to Los Angeles County jail in police wagons and busses, all but three score of them later released without bail. At Northrop Corp., subsidiary of Douglas, 200 sit-downers then walked out rather than risk indictment.