Sit-Down at Emerson Electric, 1937
Workers and community supporters march in front of the occupied Emerson plant, March 1937. Photo courtesy WHMC-UMSL.
 
At noon on March 8, Emerson's workers launched a sit-down strike at the main plant, surprising the UE national office as well as NMTA spies and the managers that hired them.
  
 
Above: Sit-downers receive supplies through rope system.

Right: a kiss for an Emerson worker occupying the plant.
Two hundred of the youngest workers (many of them with relatively short records of employment, and all but fifty of them without family obligations) occupied Building H. They went floor-by-floor escorting foremen out the door.

Most workplace sit-downs in the 1930s were orchestrated by strategic groups of workers in key departments. Emerson's workers were so well organized they took over the plant simultaneously at every level.

Teams of workers solicited food from bakers and merchants in the strikers' neighborhoods. Six food squad leaders collected the supplies. sitdown food squad “food is obtained by asking grocers, merchants, restaurants and wholesale houses for donations.” George F. Schmidt, chair of strikers commissary “We get the names of prospective donors from the strikers. We feel that if the family of a striker has been dealing with one merchant for years there is nothing shameful about asking that merchant to help us now.” Two squads of 4 women strikers work in two shifts, from about 6 a.m. until noon meal. then the second dquad comes on just before noon and stays until after supper is served.
 

Sentner announced to the press that workers had vowed "no violence" during the sit-down. Sentner and other CIO officials made an arrangement with the police chief that allowed workers themselves to patrol the plant area on the promise that the union would ensure order, thus "giving us control of the strike in and about the plant." This would of course also ensure that the company would be unable to marshal a back-to-work movement by the NMTA. This arrangement was aided by sympathetic contacts between local United Automobile Workers leaders and the police that had developed when a hired GM "thug" brutalized the son of a police sergeant in the aftermath of that strike. It marked a significant departure in relations between St. Louis workers and the police.

Left: Picketing Emerson, with police in a passive role. Photo courtesy WHMC-UMSL

Above: Occupation of St. Louis relief offices on behalf of Emerson strikers, with supporters massed on the outside of the building. Photo courtesy of WHMC-UMSL.

The strikers sought to get local relief officials to rescind their practice of refusing relief to strikers. A "strikers' welfare committee" led by George Kimmel protested to the mayor, who agreed that "the best policy is to give relief to strikers" but noted that only the state administration could force a change in the local policy. Kimmel led groups of strikers to the governor's office and to the state administrator of relief, who informed the St. Louis office that there was no state prohibition of relief to strikers.

When the St. Louis relief administrator refused to budge on the issue, a racially mixed group, including Emerson strikers and supporters, strikers from other plants, and unemployed activists from the Workers' Alliance (which had merged with the AWU to become the new umbrella group of the unemployed), staged a two-day sit-down in the St. Louis relief offices. (above)

The St. Louis relief board finally reversed its policy. In reaction, four relief board members associated with the St. Louis financial and social elite resigned in protest. An Urban League observer claimed the feeling that the CIO movement was “more than just an organizational campaign” when workers “lock arm with their fellow white workers in the picket line; sit down with them; and comb the community to-gether soliciting food and funds.”

Left: Hilda Marasche, at far left, Frank Abfall, Troy Lee, and a group of unidentied supporters of the union cause, mass in front of the Emerson plant, as the sit-down developed into a long siege.
 
. A newsletter, Emerson Equalizer, was produced by a team of workers.
 
Norman Thomas, prominent socialist, joins St. Louis CIO workers on the picket line. Sentner, with pipe, on left. Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Josephine Johnson, as well as less-well known ministers and liberals joined workers on the line to show support.
 
Left: James Carey, President of the UE, joins Century workers and community supporters on the line. Already, workers were critical of the poor negotiation style of Carey, while managers were impressed at his moderate approach, and sought to deal with him instead of local workers.

More than 1,500 workers from other shops, especially Emerson, as well as other supporters massed on the Century entrances to close its doors to spread the strike.

Works manager Robert Hill, (center, looking at camera) frantically pointing to hundreds of workers who moved back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the building, announced to the press and to police, "I never saw most of those people before!" To Century managers, according to Fiering, it was clear who was responsible: "I remember this Bob Hill telling the police, 'Get that redheaded red son of a bitch, that's the guy!'"

 

Fiering attested that a "veritable war" was fought to keep the plant shut down.

At Century's foundry, leaflets called for interracial unity and promised that the mistakes of the 1934 strike would not be repeated . Century management, fearing an interracial occupation of the plant, welded shut the steel doors to the foundry.

Soon Wagner workers would also shut down the old bastion of NMTA, despite the fact that in Wellston police still worked on behalf of the company and arrested workers for picketing.

Century workers had the good fortune to strike the company on the day before the Supreme Court declared the Wagner Act constitutional. Across the country, managers woke up to the news and bemoaned the political tide that was moving toward them, now even in their cherished preserve, the courts. Legal scholar Jim Pope has shown that the determination of workers like those in Local 1102 to occupy plants in defiance of employers property rights claims influenced the court's Wagner Act decision.

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