James Payne, 1946

By 1945, the UE's base in some shops in Evansville and its work in the local CIO had produced an unemployment center for returning veterans, a price-rollback campaign, a child care program for women workers, a campaign for better commuter services, and other community projects. Its unemployed service center became a community center . "What we have attempted to do is organize the unemployed workers . . . so they will have an organization to fight for their rights even though unemployed," reported organizer Jim Payne. The movement prevented evictions, kept stores from cutting off credit, and even got local grocers to lobby along with the unemployed for more unemployment compensation. The local gathered signatures on an open letter to Seeger management asking for a wage increase in an effort to "fight the perception issued by management that high wages would keep new industries out of Evansville and thus cause unemployment." Workers paraded in front of the home of a Seeger boss to make their demands--after all, organizer James Payne remarked, the "sidewalks are public thoroughfares."

Charles Wright started work at Seeger as a heat treater in 1936, and stuck with the union through years of defeats under the influence of anti-union corporate power.

By 1944, with the work of Local 813's CIO-PAC (political action committee) he was elected to the Indiana state legislature in 1944.

1954 photo

Wright was just one of a growing number of workers who strongly identified with this vision of unionism. Among others were Sadelle Berger, a skilled and devoted organizer who had come to the UE from the Rural Electrification Administration, where she had become involved in the CIO under the aegis of the United Federal Workers. She signed on as a District 8 organizer during the war, and led the district's political campaign for the 1944 congressional elections in the St. Louis area, an effort that helped unseat Bennett Champ Clark, longtime antilabor congressman. In 1946 Sentner persuaded her and her husband, attorney Sydney Berger, also a former REA staffer, to move to Evansville to help organize the town, joining James Payne who had moved there permanently in 1940. Sydney , drafted in 1942, was outraged as a soldier by segregated eating establishments and developed into a "true idealist."

As the union endured attacks, Sydney earned a reputation as one of the most feisty labor attorneys in the Midwest, pulling old statutes and (according to Logsdon) other "rabbits out of his hat" to defend workers' rights against intensifying political persecution. Sadelle focused on mobilizing women shop workers as well as the wives and children of workers in Evansville.

Sadelle and Sydney saw the workers they helped mobilize as the cardinal instrument for social change in the postwar period. To recognize the kind of personal choices these two made is to realize the great hopes for the postwar era that were embodied in what seemed like a simple union campaign.

Gearing up for another union election in 1946, the local focused on the large number of returning veterans (one-third of the workforce by 1946). It also set up special committees for the 350 women and 150 black workers in the plant. The local sought to undermine fear and influence that had been so effective for Servel in 1939. As testimony to their evangelical spirit and effort to bring a community presence, the UE erected a revival tent across the street from the Servel plant; it remained in place for years.

The union won the election, a major victory that had taken 10 years of community-based organizing.

Albert Eberhard was active in the early 1930s drive for unionism at Servel. He went to work at Servel in 1933, and tried to organize the foundry under the AFL. When the UE began its organizing campaign at Servel, Eberhard joined up and was active in organizing the foundry and then the entrie plant. He was ative in the Evansville Conservation club, a group interested in fishing, hunting and wild life. He was a semi-pro football and baseball player as well.

Eberhard was among those on the Left who were also Catholic, but their experiences with Sentner taught them that Communists were not "bogeymen," as he put it.