''Kickers to the Corral!'3'

Marshaling his parade toward Recovery, by last week President Roosevelt had swung Industry into line with a series of NRA codes. The nation's storekeepers were being regimented under a Retail Code. He was about to turn his attention to the nation's consumers, whose purchasing power was to be set in motion with a "Buy Now" campaign. Special posters, silhouets of the Capitol in blue, were rolling from the presses. Individual manufacturers were ready to launch private advertising campaigns. General Hugh Johnson declared that the "flat wallet era" was about to end.

At this important moment. Marshal Roosevelt was distressed to see that several Labor sections of his Recovery march, those for whom, individually, NRA promised most, were breaking ranks in wild disorder. Strikes, jurisdictional squabbles, bloody labor combats pocked the land. An opportunity to megaphone Labor back into line presented itself when the President went to dedicate a monument to the late great Samuel Gompers on Massachusetts Avenue, a block from the American Federation of Labor Building in Washington.

Accompanied by his wife and Cinemactress Marie Dressier, who was spending the weekend at the White House, the President reached the speakers' platform below which sat delegates to the A. F. of L.'s 53rd convention (see p. 11). He began by recalling that "In the year 1911 --only 22 years ago--Samuel Gompers, Robert F. Wagner, Alfred E. Smith and I were labeled as radicals when we fought for and finally succeeded in passing a bill through the New York State Legislature limiting the work of women in industry to 54 hours a week. . . .

"The keen analysis of President Wilson made this reference to Mr. Gompers in November 1917: 'If I may be permitted to do so, I want to express my admiration of his patriotic courage, his large vision and his statesmanlike sense of what has to be done. I like to lay my mind alongside of a mind that knows how to pull in harness. The horses that kick over the traces will have to be put in a corral.'

". . . Just as in 1917, we are seeking to pull in harness; just as in 1917. horses that kick over the traces will have to be put in a corral. . . . There are hotheads who think that results can be obtained by noise or violence; there are insidious voices seeking to instill methods or principles which are wholly foreign to the American form of Democratic government. . . . The overwhelming majority of the workers understand, as do the overwhelming majority of the employers of the country, that this is no time to seek special privilege, undue advantage, or personal gain because of the fact of a crisis."

In Pennsylvania. While the President thus addressed all U. S. Labor, he was particularly mindful of 55,000 insubordinate Pennsylvania coal miners. These men had originally struck to force recognition of their union. United Mine Workers of America, by non-union operators. In the code and contract that became operative last week, the miners had won this objective. Their union chief had ordered them back to work, when they demanded something more: recognition of U. M. W. by the operators of "captive"' mines-- those owned by the non-union steel industry. The steel men had agreed to give their miners the same treatment provided by commercial mines but without signing any contract. This arrangement the President approved, but still the insurgent miners stayed on strike (TIME, Oct. 9). They now demanded "recognition" of U. M. W. by introducing the "checkoff" system in the captive mines. By the check-off system the employer collects dues for the union by withholding them from the workers' pay envelopes. This the steel-masters declined to do lest it wedge the union idea into their non-union world. Led by red-headed Insurgent Martin Ryan, 30,000 diggers massed outside Uniontown, swore they would not work in any kind of coal mine until the captive owners granted the checkoff.

Although he might license out of existence any mine, shop or factory which violated its industrial code, no law empowered the President to make workers work. Personality and the prestige of his office were all the President could bring to bear. How he had tried these were revealed by Philip Murray, the United Mine Workers' white-haired, black-browed vice president, in a speech at Pittsburgh last week:

"The President of the U. S. has commanded you to go back to work. Any union or union officials who refuse to obey that command will not live long."

And United Miner Murray concluded his appeal even more strongly: "Today you are fighting the coal companies, but tomorrow, if you remain on strike, you will be fighting the Government of the United Slates. Today you are conducting a strike. But tomorrow you would be conducting a rebellion!"

At Washington, But the miners si ill stayed out and the President's next move was to summon a committee of captive mineowners to the White House. To U. S. Steel's Myron C. Taylor, Bethlehem's Eugene G. Grace, National's Ernest T. Weir and Jones & Laughlin's George Laughlin Jr. was presented an eight-point program, written in the President's own hand and scrutinized by General Johnson, which provided for a meeting between captive operators and union representatives. "Failing in agreement on any point . . . the President will pass on the questions involved, and will in making decisions use the principle that captive mines must operate under conditions of work substantially the same in the broadest sense as those which obtain in the commercial mines. ... In the meantime, and with realization that every effort at speedy ending of these matters is being sought, the President requests that work be continued and resumed and that order be maintained."

In Illinois, meantime, coal trouble of another sort had festered in the bituminous fields. For 24 hr., 100 United Mine Workers were besieged in Mine 43 of Peabody Coal Co. near Harrisburg. When the coal company imported rival United Miners from another county, Progressive Miners started a small war. Along a 15-mi. front they laid siege to Mine 43, blew up a railroad bridge, cut power lines, shot away 5,000 rounds of ammunition, wounded twelve men behind the mine enclosure.

Off to the Midwest the shocked President packed eloquent Donald Richberg, onetime Chicago attorney and NRA general counsel. In Springfield, Ill. Counsel Richberg held a long conference with Governor Horner, emerged shaking his head to say: "The problem will take much patience and time."

Sullivan County, Ind. was put under martial law when co-operative miners battled unionists.

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