Seizure!

Serene and calm, Sewell Lee Avery sat down in the green leather chair in his paneled office, and waited. Day before, he had sent a telegram challenging the authority of the President of the U.S. to seize the Chicago plant of Montgomery Ward & Co., the $295,000,000 mail-order house of which Mr. Avery is the absolute, unchallenged boss. Mr. Avery had not long to wait.

The U.S. Government arrived, in the person of an old-family Chicagoan, Under Secretary of Commerce Wayne Chatfield Taylor -- a rich man's son, product of St. Mark's and Yale, onetime investment banker, and by no means a wild-eyed New Dealer. Sewell Avery rose from his chair, his thin lips parting in an amiable smile, and courteously, gravely asked the U.S. Government to step in. The door closed.

With Wayne Taylor came short, balding Ugo Carusi, executive assistant to the U.S. Attorney General; with Sewell Avery were two top company executives. Out of his briefcase Wayne Taylor drew a certified copy of the Presidential order directing the Secretary of Commerce to take over operation of Montgomery Ward & Co. "for the successful prosecution of the war."

An hour later Wayne Taylor emerged, informed newsmen that Sewell Avery had bluntly refused to turn over his plant. Messrs. Taylor and Carusi seemed nonplussed. They telephoned Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones in Washington, huddled with U.S. District Attorney J. Albert Woll in Chicago's old Post Office. Presently they returned, accompanied by U.S. Deputy Marshal William H. McDonnell and eight gun-toting deputies. Facing the armed squadron, Sewell Avery politely told Marshal McDonnell that he would not surrender. Then a call went out to Camp Skokie Valley, just north of Chicago.

Time to Go Home. Shortly after 6 p.m., three olive-drab Army trucks rolled up to Montgomery Ward's main entrance. Out jumped a 44-man unit of battle-helmeted Military Police under command of Lieut. Ludwig Pincura. Bayonets glinted in the afternoon sun. Followed by four enlisted men, Lieut. Pincura began his bloodless invasion. On the eighth floor the five pairs of Army brogans clattered across the green-and-white-squared linoleum, then moved noiselessly through the deep-carpeted executive offices.

Sewell Avery was not surprised to see them. He smiled. After a moment's embarrassed silence, Lieut. Pincura said: "Under authority vested in me by the President of the United States I am taking over this plant."

Asked Sewell Avery: "Does that mean I have to leave?"

"Yes," said the commander of the Army of Occupation.

"No," said Sewell Avery, answering his own question.

Sewell Avery, a tall, thin man with long thin hands, glanced calmly at his watch. "Well," he said, "time to go home anyway." He left by a rear door, ducking reporters, jumped into his waiting black

Cadillac and drove to his Lake Shore Drive apartment. Lieut. Pincura's men posted the President's seizure order on company bulletin boards, began alternating on four-hour shifts in front of the eight-story brick office building. For the 16th time in World War II the U.S. Army had seized private property, at the direction of the President, as the result of a labor dispute. But this time there was a difference. That night on the radio, in the early editions of morning newspapers, in news offices and corner drugstores, the questions were asked: Is Ward's a war plant? Do the President's wartime powers cover seizure of a mail-order house?

"You New Dealer!" Next morning 30 newsmen and photographers milled around Montgomery Ward's main entrance, their way barred by soldiers. A lieutenant came out, told the newsmen a press room had been set up on the seventh floor. Virtually imprisoned in this room for 20 minutes (a bayonet-wielding soldier barred the door), the newsmen were finally ushered into Sewell Avery's office.

Sewell Avery was not there. At his desk sat Wayne Taylor; at Wayne Taylor's right sat lank, birdlike Attorney General Francis Biddle, who had flown in from Washington at 4 a.m., rushed to Ward's after an hour's sleep at the Drake Hotel. His eyes were red-rimmed; his jaw set.

Said the Attorney General, in his best Philadelphia Main Line accent: "When Mr. Avery came in this morning I asked him if he would cooperate and turn over books to our bookkeepers. He refused to do this. ... I asked him to call a staff meeting and explain what our purpose was. Mr. Avery said he would not cooperate in any way. We told Mr. Avery he would have to leave. Mr. Avery refused."

Francis Biddle looked nervously about the room, then quietly dropped his bombshell: "Mr. Taylor therefore directed Major Weber to conduct Mr. Avery out of the plant. Mr. Avery refused and had to be carried out."

Newsmen nearest the door scurried out of the room to telephones. Those who stayed badgered the Attorney General with questions:

"Did they actually carry him out?"

Replied Mr. Biddle: "He was actually picked up and carried out of this chair occupied by Mr. Taylor."

"How did he react?"

Francis Biddle seemed to welcome this question. He smiled: "Well, I'll tell you something. He got pretty mad when I said he had to go. Then the blood came to his face and he said to me, 'You New Dealer!'

" A newsman asked: Would Sewell Avery be barred from holding a stockholders' meeting in the building? Francis 'Biddle saw no reason why he should; then he blandly added: "We're not interfering with anybody. We were in charge here and were being interfered with." That afternoon, Chicago papers carried quarter-page Montgomery Ward advertisements stating that "because of the presence of trespassers," the stockholders' meeting would be held at the Blackstone Hotel.

Feet First. The actual ejection of the $100,000-a-year board chairman of Montgomery Ward was carried out by Sergeant Jacob L. Lepak of Milwaukee and Private Cecil A. Dies of Memphis. The two soldiers picked 170-lb. Sewell Avery up by his arms and thighs, carried him to the elevator. Mr. Avery refused to walk in; the soldiers picked him up again. In the elevator Sewell Avery said: "I'll be glad when this is over." On the main floor he again refused to budge. The soldiers hoisted him up, carried him past a handful of startled clerks in the lobby, and down the main steps. His grey hair unruffled, his blue suit coat buttoned, his hands folded benignly across his stomach, his eyes half-closed, Avery looked every inch an Oriental potentate being borne by slaves.

Photographers who had waited outside jammed plates into their cameras, snapped the most startling U.S. newspicture (see cut) since a press agent set a midget on J. P. Morgan's lap in 1933. One Ward executive suggested putting the picture on the cover of Ward's next catalogue, with a caption "We take orders from everybody." Put down on the sidewalk, Sewell Avery bowed slightly to his carriers, walked across the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad tracks to a waiting limousine.

Told that newsmen had snapped the picture, Attorney General Biddle replied: "That's too bad. I felt sorry for the old boy."

"The Old Man." The events of the two days had projected into the news and given at least a footnote in history to a man hardly known to the U.S. public. Son of a wealthy Michigan lumberman (six generations of Averys have been lumber men), Sewell Avery was born in Saginaw in 1874. After graduation from Michigan University Law School (1894), he started at the bottom in a small gypsum plant owned by his father. At 22 he was manager. In 1901 the company was absorbed by the U.S. Gypsum Co.; four years later, Sewell Avery was president of U.S. Gypsum. A suave and brilliant supersalesman, he built the company into an $81,000,000 concern, made it one of the largest purveyors of building materials in the U.S. He is still the company's board chairman.

In deep-depression 1931, when Montgomery Ward was losing money, harried directors called in Salesman Avery as doctor. In twelve years he had changed a $5,700,000 loss (1932) into a $20,438,000 profit (1943). His formula, soon discovered by avid readers of Montgomery Ward catalogues: adding new luxury lines to Ward's stock in trade. Said he: "We no longer depend on hicks and yokels. We sell more than overalls and manure-proof shoes." Meanwhile the number of employes has jumped from 35,000 to 78,000.

Sewell Avery has run Ward's not only well but with an iron hand. In the late '30s, Ward's became famous in the business world for the number of top executives who left because of violent disagreement with "the Old Man." (Some of them: Walter Hoving, now president of Manhattan's swank Lord & Taylor; Brigadier General Albert J. Browning, now a top man in Lieut. General Somervell's A.S.F. ; Raymond H. Fogler, now president of W. T. Grant Co.) By turns a kindly and domineering man, Sewell Avery once said: "If anybody ventures to differ with me, of course, I throw them out of the window."

In time, Sewell Avery also earned a quiet reputation as one of the nation's foremost Roosevelt-haters and labor-baiters. He has fought the New Deal since 1935 when Ward's lost its blue eagle for refusing to pay NRA assessments. No rough& -tumble labor fighter, his union opponents say that he has learned that "a 300-page legal brief can be as deadly as a machine gun."

Union Security. The long battle which flared last week began in 1939 when C.I.O.'s United Mail Order, Warehouse & Retail Employes' Union laid siege to Ward's Chicago plant. By February 1942, the union had won an NLRB election (by 3-to-1 majority), was duly certified as bargaining agent for the plant's 7,000 employes. But it did not get a contract with Ward's until Franklin Roosevelt had twice commanded Sewell Avery to sign. The bone of contention: a maintenance-of-membership clause, which WLB insisted on ramming down Sewell Avery's throat. To Mr. Avery, maintenance of membership was the wartime equivalent of the closed shop, to which he is bitterly, irreconcilably opposed.

The contract came up for renewal last December. This time Sewell Avery flatly informed the union that he would not sign, come hell or high water. His reason: with a year's staggering 200% labor turnover, he doubted that the union still represented a majority of employes. WLB promptly asked NLRB to hold another election. The union screamed, while other Chicago employers rushed NLRB with requests for elections in their plants. But WLB had also ordered Sewell Avery to renew the contract, pending the election.

When the union finally struck (TIME. April 24), the contract had not been signed, nor the election called. To end the strike, and to force Sewell Avery to terms, WLB turned the case over to the President. No one knew for sure whether the union had a majority. WLB and NLRB were playing the New Deal's favorite game of labor coddling; bureaucratic red tape delayed the election. Sewell Avery, at the very least, was guilty of intransigence in not continuing the old contract until the election should be held.

Presidential Power. But the over whelming issue at stake was whether or not the President had authority to take over an industry that seemed to the U.S. public patently civilian. How far does Federal power extend? Attorney General Biddle tried manfully to class Montgomery Ward as a war industry, pointing out that one of its subsidiaries manufactures airplane parts. But he hastily sought refuge under the Constitution's broad mandate to the President "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

Swift public clamor almost drowned out the Attorney General's tortuous reasoning. Cried Illinois' Republican Congressman Charles S. Dewey: "Gestapo methods!" Tart Senator Harry S. Byrd asked: "Does Francis Biddle cherish the ambition to be an American Himmler?" Echoing the fears of many a businessman, Mississippi's Senator James Eastland declared: "If the President has power to take over Montgomery Ward, he has the power to take over a grocery store or butcher shop in any hamlet in the U.S."

The House Rules Committee, over throwing the leadership of Illinois' New Dealing Adolph Sabath, whipped through a resolution for a Congressional inquiry. But Nevada's maverick Senator Pat McCarran beat the House to the draw. Acting under a month-old resolution empowering the Judiciary Committee to investigate all executive orders, he dispatched an investigator to Chicago, subpoenaed all WLB files in the case. He promised a full-dress, "nonpolitical" investigation.

The President seemed to be on shaky, if not altogether nonexistent, legal ground in seizing the plant. But he had a case: the office of President could not accept a peremptory rebuff from one citizen. (During all the pulling & hauling, Franklin Roosevelt was still at his Southland vacation spot.)

By week's end the case was headed firmly for the courts. In Chicago, Attorney General Biddle summoned U.S. District Judge William H. Holly, a longtime liberal, out of a meeting of the National Lawyers' Guild, asked for an injunction to bar Sewell Avery and other company officers from the plant. The judge granted a temporary injunction, ordered a further hearing for this week. Said Sewell Avery: "Fine. It shows the Government recognizes the Constitution. Now we can take our time." After four days of occupation, the Army withdrew.

One fact was certain: legal technicalities and delays could by no means make the U.S. forget the case. What happened in Chicago last week was sure to echo and re-echo again & again through this year's Presidential campaign.

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