Word: sit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When debate resumed this week, Sena tor Byrnes changed his amendment to apply to all Sit-Downs affecting interstate commerce, but many a colleague still objected to having it tacked to the Guffey Bill. Denying assertions that a vote against the amendment would be a tacit endorsement of the Sit-Down. Senator Minton cried: "I'm willing to meet this issue but I am unwilling to have the textile industry compel me to cast a vote that might be construed as the Senators suggest...
Having salved their consciences by such objections, virtually the entire contingent of Administration Senators joined in killing the Byrnes' Rider by 48-10-36 - but only after Leader Robinson had promised that a separate Sit-Down resolution would get early consideration...
Blood or Sanctity. Conscientious citizens could sympathize with President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors, who wrote to his stockholders last week: "The Sit-Down strike should be dealt with by those responsible for law and order just as aggressively as all other offenses in which the safety and welfare of the community are involved...
...impartial observers could also sympathize with harassed Governor Murphy of Michigan, who pleaded by radio last week: "I have been urged to 'shoot the workers out of the factories and thus end sit-down strikes once and for all.' Put yourself in my place. If you were Governor of Michigan, would you authorize a plan which might very easily and almost certainly result in bloodshed, bitter and lasting animosities and a deplorable situation which it might very easily take years to correct...
Reviewing his own strike, whose cost to the national economy he estimated at "many hundreds of millions of dollars," President Sloan asserted that it had represented not workers struggling toward better lives, but Labor bosses grasping for power. Yet the "unauthorized" General Motors sit-downs which were embarrassing union leaders last week showed that plain workers, awakened to a sense of their own power, were taking the new weapon in their own hands. Aghast at wholesale seizure of private property, some jittery souls were calling the Sit-Down a step upward communism. To calmer observers, the sit-downer...