Cemetery Strike

Cemetery Strike From Mexico to Manhattan last week went Poet Witter Bynner for the funeral of his mother, Mrs. Annie Brewer Bynner Wellington. Through Brooklyn's streets her funeral procession soberly rolled to Greenwood Cemetery, one of the world's largest burial grounds. When the hearse stopped at the general receiving vault, no cemetery employes appeared to take the casket. Poet Bynner's fellow-mourners carried it in themselves. There they discovered the 350 gravediggers, grass- cutters, gatekeepers, chauffeurs and other laborers, members of the C. I. O. United Cemetery Workers, had gone on strike in protest against layoffs.

Vainly Witter Bynner pleaded with the gravediggers to bury his mother's body. At length, he and his friends deposited the casket on a shelf and Poet Bynner rushed to a telegraph office to appeal to President Roosevelt to do something about ''this affront to fundamental human rights." To the President and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins he wired that "there should be equitable Federal or State supervision over the status of cemetery employes, protecting them against injustice and also protecting the bereaved and unoffending citizen against a recurrence of such grievous indignity."

Meanwhile at the cemetery, where a hard rain was falling, laborers abandoned a plan to stage a sit-down and took themselves off. Soon another body arrived. It lay in an open grave all night. Next day came six more. As more funeral processions, unaware of the strike, continued to arrive at the cemetery. New York City's Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia saw an emergency.

New York's sanitary code requires that all bodies be buried within four days after death. To Mayor LaGuardia, the Greenwood Cemetery crisis had ceased to be a labor dispute and become a problem in public health. So it was--not because of a strike in one cemetery but because it posed the possibility of some great future strike that might spread pestilence as did exposed, decaying bodies in the Middle Ages--that the Mayor directed his labor adviser, Nathan Frankel, to notify the cemetery management and the strikers that unless they promptly settled the dispute, he would act. Then he instructed Health Commissioner John L. Rice to be prepared to draft laborers from the Department of Water Supply, Gas & Electricity as gravediggers.

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