SKETCHES IN LITTLE STEEL
I
CLEVELAND AVENUES. W. in Massillon, Ohio runs directly into the
gates of Republic Steel's Central Alloy plant. The last house on the left
hand side of the street faces the gates diagonally, and commands a
complete view of them. The house is a two-story, drab, unpainted,
wooden structure, indistinguishable in the main from scores of the
neighborhood's dwellings occupied by steel workers and their families.
After the strike in "little steel" began, this last-houses-on-the-street be-
came the center of activity.
It
was converted into a strike headquarters
and strike commissary. Here strikers came for assignment to or release
from picket duty, for their coffee and sandwiches, and to hear latest
developments in the strike situation. The establishment consisted of an
office, a general sit-around room, a kitchen, and pantry. The workers'
wives had charge of the place, and managed to keep it clean and orderly.
Then, suddenly, this headquarters was turned into a mass of ruins the
equal of which II Duce's bombers would find it difficult to duplicate.
The outer front wall was spattered with buck shot and deep gashes
made by tear-gas projectiles. All the windows were broken, and faded
green window shades, with curiously shaped cuts in them, as though
slashed by a maniac, flapped in and out of the window frames like
loosely hanging sleeves of a scarecrow. The interior was aptly described
by the deputy, who escorted newspaper representatives through the
rooms, as a "mess." Without the slightest trace of emotion he kept re-
peating: "It's a mess all right, it sure is a mess." Broken chairs, an over-
turned leather covered sofa, a table with two legs splintered in the
middle, boxes, desk drawers, packages of every size and description were
piled into a fantastically conglomerous heap on one side of the room.
The other side presented an even more grotesque sight. Loaves of bread,
literally hundreds of them, wrapped in their colorful cellophane wrappers,
were scattered over the floor in greater or lesser piles, abandoned to a
kind of merciless uselessness. A small oblong table peered out from under
one of the bread piles and conspicuously displayed a package of ham.
It was impossible to enter the kitchen for the flies which swarmed
in it. One noticed from a cursory glance a refrigerator door torn loose
from one of its hinges, huge pans and kettles in crazy half overturned
position, with their contents spilled over the stove and floor. The room
which served as an office was littered with broken furniture and piles of
torn papers and circulars. Copies of
Steel Labor,
with their red head-
lines, mixed curiously with the bright green circulars and formed a kind
of mad color discord. Several pictures of conventional landscapes and
enlarged photographs hung at odd angles, their glass, and in some
instances their frames, broken. Only one picture escaped this fate. Its
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