Evansville, Indiana, a city of around 125,000 people located less than 150 miles east of St. Louis on the Ohio River, shared with St. Louis a low-wage structure for the metal trades industries.

Appliance, furniture, machinery, farm implements, and auto industry companies dominated the city's industrial landscape, some migrating there to take advantage of the city's low wages.

By 1938, major employers included Servel, Sunbeam, Hoosier Lamp, Bucyrus-Erie, Briggs Automotive, and Chrysler. Though Chrysler was the best-known company, it was clearly Servel that dominated the city's labor policy.

Servel's roots were in the Hercules Company, a gas engine manufacturer that moved from Cincinnati to Evansville in 1902. Hercules remained a small company until it merged with several others, including Servel, in 1925. Servel, a small Virginia-based company, became a vehicle of the Chase Manhattan Bank, acting on behalf of European capitalist interests, to become the exclusive U.S. manufacturer of Electrolux, gas- and kerosene-operated refrigerators, whose patent was held by a Swedish company.

Electrolux manufacturing was moved to Evansville , bringing great growth in employment. By the late 1920s, Servel employed five thousand workers in Evansville , making it the largest employer in the city. The company's board of directors was more nationally and internationally based than was, for example, Emerson's or Maytag's, and it had better-established markets in South America . In addition to a Chase Manhattan director, the company's board included a Sears-Roebuck representative. Its major stockholders were in Europe and New York.

Servel's president, Louis Ruthenberg, emerged as antiunion spearhead, in Evansville as well as regionally, seeking to contain the New Deal's nod toward workers.

Ruthenberg came to Evansville in 1934 to head Servel. He was born in Louisville KY, the son of a lawyer who studied at Purdue University and in Europe. He was considered the "father of foreman training."

He had contacts across the Midwest and was chair of the refrigeration division of the National Electric Manufacturers Association, which is considered by many historians to have been a "progressive" organization in respect to labor issues.

Louis Ruthenberg and other Servel officials organized the Evansville Cooperative League, an organization that was similar to the earlier Citizens' Industrial Alliance. Hailed as a “new type of community organization to fight the New Deal, the Wagner Act and the CIO,” Servel, Sunbeam, and Hoosier Lamp were especially prominent in the organization. The league sought to influence public opinion against unions with radio broadcasts and advertisements that suggested the CIO was controlled by Communists.

Given that the management of these companies were also active in the NMTA, (Ruthenberg was a leading national official and Sunbeam and Hoosier Lamp officials ran the Evansville branch) it is likely that the league was the brainchild of that group.

Right: Ruthenberg revived the CIA arguments about unions as the scourge of communities, and sought to create alliances in the community by painting unions as subversive threats that were dangerous to community betterment. But the challenge from unionization grew. Withing business sectors, and in his writings, he posed as a progressive employer, whose revamping of foreman training was touted as modern and efficient. Behind the scenes, he employed detective agents in conjunction with the midwestern offices of the NMTA.

These managers used industrial espionage, employing a series of operatives from St. Louis and elsewhere, to spy on workers. Evansville had "a very efficient blacklist across industries."

Still, a core group of workers continued to agitate for a union, and organized in the UE. Servel assembly line workers were especially active in self-organization, and in shop floor actions, responding to a series of wage cuts and charges of unfairness in shop floor changes. In early 1937, metal finishers on the assembly line launched a sit-down strike.

These workers were immediately fired, and Ruthenberg proposed that each agitator "should be photographed and have his picture posted on every billboard and bulletin board in Evansville in order that the community might know who he was." Meanwhile, Servel raised wages 10 percent, recognizing the threat of agitation.

In October 1937, Art Meloan, originally a UE activists from the Emerson plant, began an organizing campaign centered on establishing a community-based strategy, a campaign deterred by the severe recession. In late 1938 he and District 8's Bob Logsdon resumed the campaign. Sentner joined them in Evansville on a regular basis. This is when the St. Louis organizers started to win the deep respect of the Evansville union stalwarts who were risking everything to be openly associated with the union drive.

Logsdon's analysis of the issues in Evansville showed a keen understanding of the need to use community-based organizing to take on Servel. Servel wielded intimidation through private and community forces. For example. when the union sought to marshal supporters to hold a union "card drive" outside the plant in October 1938, fifty Evansville policemen cordoned the plant. Servel employed a private police force of thirty-five armed men who intimidated union supporters. Two of the armed men "constantly watched" the chief steward and followed him out of and back in the gate.

The union needed to build a community base to counter this power. It established contacts with church groups. It tried to counter the Cooperative League's massive antiunion propaganda with its own radio broadcasts and open public meetings. Logsdon sought a means to get women's involvement in the drive, something that had not been done in earlier CIO drives.

Workers were still considering a plant occupation when, in late February 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Fansteel decision, which declared sit-downs illegal.

Fansteel workers had occupied the plant in response to the Chicago company's violations of their rights under the Wagner Act, including the use of spies whose aim was to provoke a traditional strike and replace them.

The details of this Supreme Court decision made clear, legal scholar Jim Pope has argued, that “the employer could violate the workers' statutory rights [illegal spying in violation of the Wagner Act] without sacrificing its property rights, while the workers could not violate the employers property rights [through plant occupations] without sacrificing their statutory rights—a return to the hierarchy of values that predated the Wagner Act.”

The decision certainly affected possibilities for District 8. Circuit Judge John W. Spencer of Evansville warned that he would immediately grant an injunction against the strikers at any time there was a sit-down, but pledged to be fair to the union if there was no violence. The organizers sought to use their shop floor actions and the growing community base of support in a traditional strike walkout.

As soon as the strike was called on the morning of March 14, 1939 , however, it was clear that Servel too had prepared well.

The local radio station rejected the union broadcasts under influence from the company.

Servel erected watchmen's shanties and installed spotlights (loaned from public parks) on building tops that followed cars as they approached the factory. Police were "thick as lice around the plant” wrote Logsdon. Logsdon quipped that Louis L. Roberts, who was city attorney, Colonel of the National Guard, Corporation attorney and Director of Public Safety, directed his forces against the union, was the "handy man" for the company.

That evening almost the entire Evansville police force was at the plant gates.

Facing this intimidation, community supporters failed to show.

Then the Democratic governor balked at his promised intervention.

The worker who was shot by a plant guard was held, while the guard was not.

Evansville Courier headline, March 17, 1939

As if on cue, violence occurred on the picket line, something Judge Spencer informed the union officials would happen, but which they attested they would prevent at all costs. The union reported that it was the work of NMTA operatives, designed to tarnish the unions image in the community.

Evansville's Judge Spencer ordered the police to jail Sentner, Logsdon, and Meloan, without filing charges.

The courts, police, media local American Legion, even the Fire Department were brought into a campaign that resulted in destroying the momentum of the strike, with Bender directing the operations. The city even ordered the end to leaflet distribution by the union.

Most unionists refused to picket "because of the terrific amount of terror and intimidation." According to Logsdon, even some of the most militant shop floor activists "lit out like scared rabbits," and many could not be persuaded to picket.

Logsdon believed that that Servel hired an agency to conduct a campaign of window breaking in order to further discredit the union.