A STRIKE AT SIXTY

     Since it would be difficult to find someone still living who had an active part I now feel safe in talking about it.  I say "safe" because the big Westinghouse strike of 1955-'56 may have been the most bitterly fought and costly in the history of Mansfield, Ohio.  The Westinghouse Corporation was founded 130 years ago by the inventor of the air brake.  It grew into one of the country's largest manufacturers of home appliances.  The Westinghouse plant in Mansfield, Ohio opened in 1918 and steadily expanded to cover more than two city blocks.  Today all that remains amid the rubble is one building known as the Mansfield Commerce Center.  But how much history shouts to us from that rubble!
     My father dropped out of school during the Great Depression when he was only 14 years old.  I believe he might have found school to be a happier experience if he had some of the good help available today to young people who struggle with school.   About a year after marrying my mother, when they were both 19, my dad took a job with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as the economy began to pick up.  He was working at that job when I was born but as the economy expanded during World War II he found better pay by working at the Mansfield Westinghouse plant in wartime production.  He was exempt from the draft because of an injury from a fall that would eventually almost take his life.  
     When the war ended in 1945 there was a serious housing shortage in the U.S. with millions of young men leaving the military, marrying, and starting families.  All those new homes being built needed things like electric stoves, refrigerators, toasters, irons (to press clothing), washers, and dryers.  Westinghouse in Mansfield expanded to around 8500 employees in those post war years; a number almost too large to comprehend today when one thinks how few manufacturing jobs exist in all of Richland County.  Westinghouse TV ads were filmed in Mansfield and featured the popular TV personality Betty Furness.  As she opened a refrigerator door she would say, "You can be sure . . . if it's Westinghouse".  The Westinghouse "home of tomorrow" was built in the Woodland area.  At Christmas time Westinghouse would rent the entire Madison theater just to show cartoons and give treats to the hundreds of children of employees.   But in retrospect we can see that Westinghouse management lacked foresight in at least two ways.  Their manufacturing plant needed modernization and their relationship with  Electrical Workers Union #711 in Mansfield could have been better.  Other industries proved that both of these were possible; difficult maybe but possible.
     The first major step in the decline of the Mansfield plant came in 1954 when the refrigerator line was moved to another city.  The next year, in the autumn of 1955, the union called a strike.  Thus, the title of this blog:  "A Strike At Sixty" (years after it happened).   Anyone who reads my blogs regularly knows that I don't write history for mere entertainment.  I am heading somewhere with this.  At first the strike was great fun for me as a 13 year old.  On Saturdays that winter my dad would take me to Mansfield with him and I would hang out at the union hall, eat, and watch TV in their upstairs lounge.  I recall a huge poster above the food serving counter with a quotation from Jack London, the early 20th century writer who, among other things, was a socialist.  That long quotation described what terrible people "scabs" were.  One line in particular comes to mind:  "the scab has a corkscrew soul", whatever that meant.  More about "scabs" in a moment.  The union gave each striker vouchers for necessities and we would buy groceries with those vouchers at Mansfield's first supermarket, the A & P on Bowman Street, now long since closed.
     Public school teachers were typically conservative Republicans in those days (believe it or not) and mine was not happy when I handed him a union voucher for my lunches.  One day he heard me repeat something from the Jack London quote about "scabs" and he replied:  "but are they really scabs?"  I told my uncle who also was on strike and he said:  "they are scabs".  In the following years I would discover how wrong the union was in this use of that word.  Those few workers who, for conscience or other reasons, would not go out on strike were dishonestly vilified by the union.  I saw with my own eyes how they were yelled at and threatened as they crossed the picket lines.   A "scab" by definition is actually someone who is hired to take the place of a striking worker, not a worker who refuses to strike.  Refusing to strike may, depending on the situation, be praiseworthy or blameworthy but it hardly fits Jack London's description of a "scab".  One critic said it reads like "barbed wire over sandpaper".  (I can see you rushing to Google when you finish this just to read it for yourself!)
     My dad and his brother were greatly offended at church one Sunday that winter of '55 - '56 when a guest speaker implied that this strike was not something a Christian should do.  My father was man enough in later years to admit "I was wrong".   The ungodliness of that strike was seen on the front page of the Mansfield News Journal in such scenes as overturned cars, not to mention what was yelled at workers crossing the picket lines.  My dad also confessed that union leaders misled the workers and that the strike gained nothing and caused much loss.  There were indeed times in history when working conditions were so cruel and unsafe that strikes were more than justified.  This was not one of them.
     Sixty years ago this spring that terrible episode in Mansfield history came to an end with no winners.  My dad went on working at Westinghouse 22 more years and ten years after he retired Westinghouse in Mansfield, after a slow but steady decline, closed its doors for good.  Compared to the late 1940's Mansfield today is a ghost town.  Westinghouse, General Motors, Tappan, Ohio Brass, Mansfield Tire and others are all gone and manufacturing jobs are scarce.  Other cities, chiefly in the South, have had a far different history.  But Mansfield is a symbol of the U.S. as a whole in its economic and spiritual decline.  In the midst of this it remains as true as ever that for the child of God "the best days are indeed ahead".   When we look at several thriving evangelical churches we can truthfully say that Mansfield has done much better spiritually than economically.  Many are praying that will be true of the entire U.S.  So, here we are, sixty years after the big strike!
     How can something that seems like "just yesterday" to me seem to you like "ancient history"?  Just wait; you'll see.