Montana labor news., 1937-09-02
0 LITTLE TOWN OF
BETHLEHEM
By L GROBIN
Reprinted from The Nation

1 nave watched d DdcK-lO-WOrk
movement" in the steel strike sector.
1 never saw anything more phony.
When l returned from J%ohnstown,
Pennsylvania, l was surprised to find
how inaccurate a picture even we'll
informed New Workers had of what
was going on in the steel-mill towns,
despite the thousands of words print
ed about the strike. Most of the
people l talked with appeared to
think that (a) Tom Girdler was the
so-and-so back of it all; but none the
less that (b) the steel workers them
selves, many of them, wanted to go
back to work rather than continue
the strike. There are two things
wrong with this picture (a) and (b).
On the other hand l should not
have been surprised, for Edward
Levinson of the New York Post was
one of the few newspapermen l met
in the strike zone who knew what
the score was and who told it with
clarity-and he got thrown out of
the Johnstown City Hall for being
so smart. There may have been one
or two others who were doing a good
job; but those l met were covering
the story as though it were ordinary
police-court routine or a baseball
game.
They were telling who, what,
where, and when-day by day, as
things occurred or when somebody
issued a statement. But they were
not telling Cor, at least, their papers
were not printing! the way and how;
and here, as every intelligent re-
porter on the job knew, lay the meat
of the story.
New York, however, knew more
about the situation than Johnstown
did. The farther n got from the
strike zone the more fairly was the
story presented. In the strike zone
the local newspapers made no pre-
tense of fairness. Typical examples
were the two Johnstown papers, the
morning Democrat and the evening
Tribune. They fairly frothed at the
mouth editorially and in their news
columns. Both pictured the strike
as revolution and the strikers as
aliens and Communists.
Since the strikers had been re-
duced to primitive word-of-mouth
as a mean of communication, their
side of the story was smothered
under a thick blanket of distortion in
the local press. As a result, the local
strike-bound communities themselves
had but the vaguest idea of what
was going on. This, as it developed,
was an important lement in the set
up for the spurious "back-to-work
movement and for the dynamitings
which loosed against the strikers a
fury already carefully built up.
Neither of these events would have
occurred in Johntsown had its TO-
900 inhabitants been told the truth.
The anti-strike campaign has been
waged along two general lines. One
objective was to break the morale
of the steel workers; the other to
turn the general public against the
strike. The attempt to demoralize
the strikers took two forms: propa-
ganda to the effect that the strike
was lost, that men were going back
to work, and that the strikers had
better come back too while they
were still acceptable to the manage
ment; terrorization of pickets and
the intimidation of their families.
Public opinion was "coordinated'
also in two ways: through propa-
ganda by means of press, pulpit,
general talk, and gossip; and through
economic pressure. The economic
pressure was terrific.
On June is, five days after the
strike broke out, five leaders of the
~vigilantes met with the two strike
leaders, David Watkins and John w,
Stephenson, at the Lutheran Church
on Vine Street. S. H. Hickman, head
of the Penn-Traffic Store, Johns
towns only department store, who
was n of the organizers of the
vigilante Citizens Commute, told
Watkins and Stephenson that 'the
business men of the Greater Johns
town area will absolutely refuse to
permit the employees of the Bethle-
hem Steel Company to organize and
bargain collectively with their en-
ployer, as such procedure would be
harmful to our business" I have
in my possession a st%enographic re-
port of that conference.
Another item is the pencil
scrawled note to Mrs. Pedro Sanchez
wife of a striker, from Vince Far
anda, who run a general merchan-
disc store where he sells everything
from groceries to dry goods. I have
it before me as l write. 1t says:
Mrs. Sanchez: I guess you have
heard about it. We are very sorry
because we have to stop all accounts
Because the wholesaler they have
stopped all of our accounts and put
us on cash basis.
So since we have to pay cash fol
everything, we must get cash fol
everything too. So please don't fee.
offend (sic), because we can't helr