The St. Louis layoffs campaign sustained the union in time of crisis. By late 1937 District 8 had turned the layoff crisis in St. Louis, which Sentner wrote had "wrecked us morally and financially," into a spirited mobilization of St. Louis union workers in a fight for relief and WPA jobs for union members.

The campaign owed much to the experience of the nut pickers four years earlier. This community activity gave the union strength in the midst of layoffs. Many of the young workers who had engaged in the Emerson sit-down were those laid off, and the union sought to keep those activists in the fold as well as to support all workers and build allegiance to the union.

Women members were prominent among the key activists who organized Wagner Electric's "picket for relief" at the St. Louis County courts, where workers advocated the thirty-hour work week as the solution to the depression.

Clara Ryder of the Wagner Electric plant was a union activist whose efforts at the plant over the relief issue led her to try to connect community relief efforts with union activities for women. Photo courtesy John Logsdon.

District 8 sought to counter the efforts of the NMTA firms to use the layoffs crisis as a way to destroy the union, exposing Century's attempt to organize a community based unemployed group for defeating the union.

Fiering: "I remember it well, the director of relief on one end of this long table, me on the other end, and a large group of workers in between. He looked like he thought we might tear the place apart if we didn't get what we wanted. . . . And we said we don't want any of our people to suffer anything--coal, food or anything. . . . So the upshot of it was that he guaranteed that every worker from Century no matter what would be guaranteed food, coal, shelter for the duration of the recession. And if anything happened, [if] somebody was wronged, he said, "Call me up." . . . Every one of the Century workers who needed anything at all never suffered a thing as they had in prior years. It was a complete reversal of the experience they had seen during . . . [the] Depression.

Henry Fiering and Otto Maschoff, taking a break at a union convention.

Fiering and Maschoff developed the "shock troops" who sustained the union against Century Electric officials efforts to use the layoffs crisis to weaken the UE in the plant.

At the national level, anticommunism was set in motion by anti-labor elements and by the international events that depleted the willingness of many to overlook the CP's association with the Soviet Union .

Anti-labor Congressman Martin Dies established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in late 1938, which aimed its fire at the left in the labor movement and New Deal. The committee was supported by key AFL officials who hoped to exploit charges that the CIO was riddled with Communists.

Then, in August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact provoked bitter condemnations by anticommunists and liberals. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland , Finland , and the Baltic states the fission widened as the CP quickly adhered to the new Soviet line and began to condemn any effort to involve the United States in what they now called an imperialist war.

National CIO leaders sought to avoid weakening the CIO by preventing an internal split over the issue, but were determined to limit the influence of Communists inside the CIO.

The St. Louis CIO, through 1938, defended Communists' right to participate and hold positions.

John Doherty, the Lewis-appointed St. Louis CIO district director, had originally hired Sentner, Shaw, and Fiering for the steel drive.

When questioned about Communists in the movement's ranks during the 1937 strikes, Doherty set the tone by responding, "We are not interested in the private affiliations of men active in our movements."

By 1939, that position had withered away. In the case of St. Louis for example, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee released Ralph Shaw, who had carefully organized metropolitan steel workers since 1936, despite his popularity with workers.

The backlash against the Left in the CIO coincided with the start of Sentner's criminal syndicalism trial in Iowa, for his role in the Maytag strike of 1938.

The trial had been moved to rural, conservative Montezuma, Iowa . "I think we can look for them to throw the book at me up in Iowa," Sentner wrote in September 1939.

Sentner accurately predicted that it would take the Montezuma jury less than twenty minutes to find him guilty of advocating criminal syndicalism, which carried a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a five thousand-dollar fine.

During the trial, the prosecutors used Sentner's Maytag military commission testimony where he acknowledged his CP membership and had argued that ownership of the Maytag plant by the workers "would be a good thing."

Upon Sentner's return to St. Louis from Iowa, he was arrested in an obvious setup between the Red Squad of the St. Louis Police Department and company officials of Baldor Electric, who called him there on the pretense of conducting negotiations. 187 The Red Squad, established in the early 1930s to infiltrate Communist and Socialist organizations, was now targeting Left-led unions in St. Louis as well, providing strategic service to employers in their struggles; it was a significant reversal of the brief entente between unions and police that had developed during the 1937 sit-down.

District 8 initiated a Civil Rights Committee in Iowa and St. Louis , beginning with a pamphlet that set out the facts of the case and its context in the Maytag events. Iowa activists developed a coalition between the AFL and the CIO unions, aided by John Connolly, who helped by "swinging the AFL in line on the question."

Iowa AFL contacts, on Sentner's request, encouraged Missouri affiliates to join in the campaign. The St. Louis CIO also came around, condemning Sentner's prosecution for a "crime [that] . . . consisted of advocating industrial reform" and argued that he was "found guilty because those in control of industry and those in high places in Iowa sought to break the spirit of organized labor."

The St. Louis Union Labor Advocate, an AFL paper, declared that the case was reminiscent of the “mad orgy” of the Palmer raids after WWI, and that labor needed to unite around the case.

The fact that the St. Louis Police Red Squad had conducted raids on the homes of Baldor Electric strikers and UE officials (Sentner and Fiering) in late October fueled support for the committee, as did supportive editorials in the Post-Dispatch and Star-Times. Sentner wrote to Matles in early November: "We have been able to turn the case from one attack against Bill Sentner, the Communist, to the defense of civil rights."

Sentner concluded that rather than fight to dismiss the criminal syndicalism cases, the UE should have used them as a coalition building tool to bring the issues out in the open through "a mass defense campaign . . . which is the only thing. . . that will mean anything whatsoever, especially in view of the changed situation due to the war."

But the UE indicated that the troubles between the CIO and the Left were too severe for this sort of campaign, and urged Sentner instead to drop his membership in the CP. By December, Sentner had dropped his formal membership.