Toledo workers blaze way
1984Ted Selander 1984-03Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 7 →
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In 1932 I met Art Preis by accident in a rooming house. We met at the time of the Bonus March when MacArthur and Eisenhower and George Patton were burning and tear-gassing the veterans of the First World War out of Washington, D.C. We read about Toledo there, how badly it was hit by the Depression, and Art and I figured it was a good place to go to organize the unemployed.
So we did. We went to Toledo. And Toledo, I tell you, looked like a disaster. One-third of the workers were unemployed. Half of the stores were closed and vacant. The people were walking around with a solemn, bewildered look. The Willys-Overland plant, the largest plant in town, declared bankruptcy, as you know auto plants are doing today. And they threw 28,000 workers out on the street. There wasn't a union contract in town, except with the building trades, and they were down to a skeleton. We went up to the Central Labor Union to a few meetings. They didn't have enough people for a quorum.
The only relief that people could get was what we called "nosebag relief." You went down to the warehouse, stood in line for hours, and you got a bag of potatoes, beans, and prunes, whether you liked them or not. And you had to work one day for that bag. It was degrading.
Mass action
So we rolled up our sleeves and started to organize the unemployed. Well, we were green, inexperienced. We had done a little reading, studying, but we knew that what we had to do was build a combat pressure organization that relied on mass action militancy. That was our premise. And before long we would organize the unemployed not only in Toledo but throughout Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
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police and the deputizing of every reac-