Page:Jay Lovestone - Blood and Steel (1923)).djvu/28

 The terrible odds overwhelming the workers in their fight against the Two-Shift System is thus brought home forcefully in the following from the answer of the Strike Committee to Wilson’s request for a postponement of the strike.

"As one of many examples: In the city of McKeesport a meeting held by the men within their constitutional rights was broken up and men arrested and thrown into jail charged with riot, and held to the excessive bail of $5,000 each, while one of the hirelings of the steel industry, arrested for the murder of a woman speaker at Brackenridge, Pa., is being held under bail of about $2,500. Another patent example is Hammond, Indiana, were four defenseless union men were charged upon and killed by hired detectives of the steel industry, and witnesses on behalf of their survivors have been so intimidated and maltreated that the truth of the killing was suppressed.

"Guns and cannon have been planted in mills, and highly charged electric wires have been strung around their premises.

"Armed men in large numbers are going about intimidating not only the workers but, in many communities, anyone showing the slightest sympathy with the men."

Typical of the inestimable aid given by the Government to the Steel Trust is the following conditions portrayed by the Senate Committee:

"In the Pittsburgh district, however, meetings have been prohibited from the time the campaign for organization started. In McKeesport and Duquesne, several months before the strike was called, the organizers were forbidden to hold meetings of any sort in halls within the city or on vacant lots anywhere in the vicinity. Appeal was made without avail to the Mayor of the city and the Governor of Pennsylvania. In Clairton meetings were held on Sundays for several weeks prior to the strike, but on September 21 the sheriff proclaimed that 'there should not be any meetings of any kind anywhere.'"

The whole situation on this section of the Strike Army's front is thus summed up by the Interchurch Report:

"Free elections were customarily impossible in steel towns in Western Pennsylvania due to clearly understood manipulations by the steel company officials who were public officials.

"That is, democratic practices as well as constitutional rights are decisively modified by the Steel Companies in Western Pennsylvania, and the 'modifications' are for the purpose of defeating labor organizations … During the strike violations of personal rights and personal liberty were wholesale; men were arrested without warrants, imprisoned without charges, their homes invaded without legal process,