Quiet Week

An enormous silence fell over U.S. industry. Nothing like it had ever happened before; all the walkouts, lockouts, panics and fires of modern times had scarcely muted the clang and throb of the nation's production. Now the fast rising tide of postwar strikes lapped up into the fire rooms of whole industries, sent 1,500,000 U.S. workmen into the midwinter streets, created ghost forests of smokeless stacks from Buffalo, N.Y. to Los Angeles, Calif.

The heartland of the manufacturing East was dead: steel was down in the greatest strike in history. The smoke lifted over Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle. The glow of slag dumps dimmed in Birmingham, Ala. The blast furnaces of South Chicago and Youngstown, from which swaying ladles had drawn the molten seed of national growth, now cooled in unnatural silence. The wonder of the world, a national capacity to produce 95,000,000 tons of steel a year, was wonderfully impotent.

Three quarters of a million steelworkers had hit the bricks. At 1,300 plants nothing moved but the long, slow lines of shivering pickets.

The influence of these placarded, shuffling men spread through the arteries of commerce. Cars lay idle along the coal and ore railroads--the Pennsy, the Bessemer & Lake Erie, the C. & O. Work would soon slacken in limestone quarries, zinc smelters, silica diggings. Barge traffic thinned as the tires were banked along the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the Ohio Rivers. Snow lay undisturbed on the great, vermilion open pits of the Mesabi Range.

Empty Larder. President Lewis Clark of the turbulent young C.I.O. meat packers' union had also called out his men. The cattle-pens of Chicago were nearly empty. The big four's refrigerators were bare of their hams and sides of beef, once the envy of a hungry world. Housewives were stampeding butcher shops.

The General Motors strike was still unsolved. So was the nationwide walkout of 200,000 electrical workers. In Los Angeles, steel-helmeted pickets of the United Electrical Workers ran into old-fashioned strike violence. Los Angeles police, after warning them against mass picketing, charged with tear gas and clubs, cracked heads, bloodied noses, took 25 off to jail. But the United States Motors plant at which the battle raged stayed closed. So did the lion's share of other U.S. factories which manufacture toasters, irons, light plugs, and generators for the world's most electrified country.

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