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Abrut three or four months after we got there, we organized the workers and farmers' conference. About a hundred delegates. And they all got up and told what the Depression was doing to them and their families. And we got a volunteer stenotypist, took it all down, bound it up, and made a complete record of it.

After that we began speaking in the neighborhoods, in the school buildings. Of course every time we went to a meeting we were flanked with police or deputies with guns. And when we had a committee go up to see the mayor or the relief head, we had to go through a gauntlet of guns and police. It was like Minneapolis.

And in the spring of the year we educated the unemployed to the unity of the unemployed and employed workers. We engaged in scores of industrial strikes. So participating in an industrial strike picket line was not new to us.

In the spring of 1934 the Auto-Lite and a couple of their subsidiaries went on strike. One of the subsidiaries had heard about us and seen us in action, and they came to our headquarters and asked for help.... Well, Auto-Lite got an injunction, as usual, from a favorable lutionary activity— from the early days as a socialist antiwar agitator in his native Sweden, to his role as a founding member of the Communist Party and later of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.

The strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco, as Art Preis concluded in Labor's Giant Step, "showed how the workers could fight and win. They gave heart and hope to labor everywhere for the climactic struggle that was to build the C.I.O." The experience of these strikes, we might add, are rich in lessons that will give "heart" and "hope" to today's union militants as they confront the tasks of the class struggle. Labor's next giant step will draw on this experience of militant mass struggle and, we are convinced, go even further as the working class, in the big class battles sure to come, strides toward the creation of a mass workers' party.

The heritage of the 1934 strikes is one that Socialist Action claims as its own.

judge. The union leaders of this local at the Auto-Lite plant were inexperienced. So they called off the picketing and were going to fight the injunction in the courts-which many inexperienced leaders do. Well, we knew that would be another lost strike if they pursued that course.

That's when we decided-with the help of Louie Budenz, who was a labor fighter in those days (before he became a Stalinist and an informer)—to keep on picketing. He advised us on how to handle the anti-injunction fight. So we sent a letter to the judge, told him we were going to violate the injunction, and four of us, two unionists and Sam Pollock and I, went on the picket line. Got arrested, taken to court, got convicted with suspended sentence, and went right back to the picket line-but we picked up about 50 pickets on the way back.

So we kept picketing every day and the lines grew longer until May 23, when we were having mass meetings in front of the plant. Then the big blow-out took place. We had 10,000 in front of the plant. The deputies were shooting tear (Continued on page alist ction March 1984