Word: flints
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...apparent reasonableness of the General Motors officials at the beginning of the strike won for them sympathy throughout the country. Their subsequent behaviour has done much to dissolve this, Sir Galahad cannot flirt with such a prostitute as the Flint Alliance without losing some of his purity. Mr. Sloan has proven his own worst enemy. If, as now seems probable, he is forced by President Roosevelt or Congress to sit down at the conference table he will find his position badly undermined by an arrogance which has no place in modern industrial relations...
Soon Madam Perkins learned, however, that her anxiety was needless. In the small hours of the morning Governor Frank Murphy had arrived in Flint. "This is not going to be a brawl," he announced, and issued a call to the National Guard. Soon 2,300 Guardsmen were in Flint, most of them camping on the grounds and in the building of Flint's abandoned junior high school. Among the guardsmen called to the colors was one Verl Lahs, a sit-down striker in the Cadillac plant in Detroit. His fellow strikers voted to excuse him from sit-down duty...
Three evenings after the riot in Flint, General Motors' Executive Vice President William S. Knudsen and the Union's President Martin were seated at a table in Lansing with Governor Murphy. Governor Murphy was sitting politically pretty. Not having intervened to oust the sit-downers, he was still considered their friend. Law & order-minded citizens likewise applauded him for his declaration: "Whatever else may happen, there is going to be law and order in Michigan. The public interest and the public safety are paramount. The public authority in Michigan is stronger than either of the parties...
About 3 a. m. he emerged from a 16-hour conference and announced not peace but at least truce. Terms: the union agreed to General Motors' demand for the evacuation of sit-downers from five plants, two in Flint, two in Detroit, one in Anderson, Ind. General Motors agreed to the union's demand that it would not resume operations in these plants nor remove dies, tools, machines or materials (except for the export trade) during peace negotiations, which should meanwhile begin...
That put the fat in the fire. Strike Leader Martin had got the sit-downers to evacuate two General Motors plants in Detroit and one at Anderson, Ind. Before starting to Flint to evacuate the two remaining plants, Mr. Martin became outraged. He made a speech to a union rally in Detroit not only repeating previous charges that Mr. Boysen was a too of General Motors but denouncing the Flint Alliance as a collection of house wives and members of the Black Legion Then he went to Flint, harangued a meeting and it was voted not to evacuate the Flint...