[...] Before and after work hours, roving bands of workers and thugs attacked each other with razor blades, stones, milk bottles, heavy nuts and bolts, and cans of paint that burst open on target; workers wielded lead pipes, swung their fists, and returned the next morning to hurl eggs and pour pepper on men who dared to cross the picket line. In order to tell friends from enemies, UE members marked their foreheads with black smudges and formed their own 150-member "police" force to defend themselves against the guards hired by the company and to restrain their own members from violent reprisals against workers who crossed the picket lines. As strikers and sympathizers "brought their women folk and children" to the picket lines, the press reported, the police "tore lanes in crowds at each entrance for strikebreakers to pass." Even the audio space around the factory became a war zone as RCA executives blasted recordings over loudspeakers in efforts to drown out the speeches, catcalls, taunts, and Bronx cheers of strikers. The union countered the amplified music with a sound truck that circled the buildings, calling the strikebreakers out into the street. While many peacefully waved signs calling for a "100 percent union town, Americanism, and Unionism," the protest frequently descended into what the press called free-for-all violence, in which the "wildest disorder prevailed, with missiles flying, men shouting and women screaming."

[...] the company hired men to provoke pickets at one door so nonunion workers could be ushered in through another. The union accused RCA of importing 700 strikebreakers, hundreds of whom were in violation of the new interstate antistrike breaking law recently signed by President Roosevelt. On many days the police hauled away hundreds of workers-both men and women- "clubbing and jailing the pickets as if they were handling so many cattle." The behavior of the police, according to the union, made it appear "as if the RCA company had purchased the City of Camden outright, and was trying to develop cowboys from the city police." As RCA's own former chief investigator later explained, authorities "would grab people out of the picket line at different times, just for no good reason at all." An emergency telegram from the strike committee to John L. Lewis captured the urgency: "siTUATION SERIOUS ... WHOLESALE ARRESTS STRIKERS DENIED ELEMENTARY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS LOCAL AUTHORITIES UNITED WITH COMPANY IN SYSTEM OF TERROR AND BRUTALITY .... WE URGE YOUR IMMEDIATE HELP."

Violence and physical intimidation were not the only weapons in RCA's arsenal-the company's threat to move its investment elsewhere hung over the entire episode. Although at the time it could easily be dismissed as mere posturing, the threat was a constant element in RCA's strategy to break Local1 03. The warnings emerged as early as the second day of the strike when Elmer T. Cunningham, president of RCA's manufacturing division, proclaimed in a full-page advertisement in the Philadelphia Record, "We want to keep our plants open-we want to continue to provide gainful employment for thousands of families in this area ... we want the citizens and merchants of the Camden-Philadelphia area to continue to benefit from our industrial activity." Compliance with the union's demands, however, would "result in serious loss to employees, their community and company," as it would lead to "the closing of the Company's plant within a few months ... the responsibility for which we decline to assume." Despite RCA's posting of over $6.1 million in net profits in 1936, the company appeared to be willing to go to extreme measures to prevent the unionization of the Camden works.

After four weeks of false arrests, violence, intimidation, brutality, and threats of relocation, the stalemate finally broke when the company and the union settled on an election sponsored by theN ational Labor Relations Board (NLRB). John L. Lewis, who had been negotiating with Johnson throughout the conflict, reached an agreement with RCA just as both the company and the union appeared to be weakening. Four thousand of the 9,700 employees had crossed the picket line when the strike finally ended, and the UE had dropped all its original demands except for exclusive representation of the workers at RCA. As for the company, its name and reputation had been dragged through the mud as the national press made it clear it was sponsoring a company union and engaging in a variety of violent strikebreaking activities. Moreover, RCA's main competitor, Philco, continued to produce and sell radios under a union contract while RCA battled with its workers. The two parties compromised on two particularly sticky issues: Local 103 won the rehiring of strikers without discrimination as to union affiliation and RCA was allowed to keep the company union on the NLRB ballot.

The company's campaign to keep workers from the polls worked almost flawlessly: only the UE faithful dared to turn out for the certification election. Of the 9,752 workers eligible, only 3,163 cast ballots-95 percent of them for UE Local 103. Despite the overwhelming majority of votes for Local 103, the clever words of RCA's agreement with the UE denied the union its victory: the sole bargaining agent would be the candidate that received the majority of the votes "of all those eligible to vote in such election." 52 RCA's strategy of keeping the majority of workers from the polls therefore succeeded in denying the UE what it needed to win: a majority of all those qualified to vote.

Bob Doty looked as though he had just fallen in a flour bin. Stationed above the pulverizing jaws on the big crusher, he picked out the mud, lost drill heads, and other articles that would destroy the machine if they got caught in the mechanical jaws that converted rock into marketable lime dust. Like many workers in southern Indiana's stone belt, he carried a collapsible aluminum cup into which the water boy could pour relief from the hot and dirty work. On one of the boy's passages, Doty accepted his water ration and began to roll a cigarette for himself. As he put tobacco to paper, however, the overseer barked, "You ain't got time to be rolling cigarettes. Buy hard rolls."

The limited industrial culture, low levels of unionization, and, most important, the destruction of the local economy made Bloomington a dream town for a capitalist in search of workers for labor-intensive electronics production. The local population's desperation for work and deference to anyone who could provide it allowed RCA to establish very strict guidelines for employment. "The people that we hired when we started RCA was this nice person's son and daughter," the employment director recalled. "You know, a rather high level of clientele." Without the constraints of federal- or statemandated hiring rules, "you could refuse to hire a person if you didn't like the way they parted their hair. So you had full rein of being very selective." Applicants "were just wild to get a job, and particularly something in industry .... Jobs had not been available. They needed them." When workers lined up at the Graham Hotel for an interview, a position "would be so important to them, they would be so nervous, they would shake like a leaf in the wind." Workers were not concerned about how much a job paid, what they had to do, or what their hours would be; "they just wanted that job and wanted to hold that job." Boys applying for stock-handling work typically arrived in their Sunday suits, and even prospective employees who were "very minimal in social and education standards" would show up impeccably dressed and groomed when they submitted their applications. "It sounds like a fairy tale," she recalled about the applicants' desperation, "but it was that important to them."

Management's only reservation about the formula they had found in Bloomington was the possible influence of the coal miners in the region and their deep commitment to unionization. "Well, for years," reported the personnel manager, "we did not hire in that area where you would have the coal miner's daughter."

In Bloomington, where work for anybody was scarce, underpaid women workers were in abundance. The top of the pay scale for women in Monroe County was $7 .SO a week. When RCA opened, it paid 17.5 cents to 19.5 cents an hour, or $7.00 to $7.80 for a forty-hour week. This scale placed entry-level pay in competition with some of the very best wages available to women in the area. Moreover, rates of pay quickly rose to 23 cents and 25 cents an hour, a rate that made factory work much more financially appealing than any other job for working-class women. This tactic RCA called paying a "community wage"-a system of offering marginally better pay than other blue-collar jobs in the area in order to attract the finest workers. The "community wage" concept also cut the other way. When the Bloomington workers sought raises to bring their rate of pay up to those of other RCA workers in the country after World War II, the company rejected their request because their pay was deemed "appropriate in terms of community and industry." In sum, while offering very valuable and much-needed work to Bloomington women, RCA reaped the real financial bonanza, as the female operators in Camden started at between 40 and 50 cents an hour-up to double what Bloomington women could expect.

Several other electrical industries followed RCA to Bloomington. A former engineer for RCA, Sarkes Tarzian, went into business for himself after the war, manufacturing television tuners to supply to the large receiver producers, and eventually he moved into a variety of consumer electronics products and other components. As his shop grew from 900 employees in 1948 to more than 3,000 workers by the 1960s, again most of them women, organizing Tarzian's operation became a perennial goal for Local 1424 and the IBEW International office. Although they got close on several occasions, the union never won a certification election. Mrs. Tarzian was notorious for her extraordinary efforts at keeping the union out of the factory. She promised to build a swimming pool for the employees if they agreed not to vote for the union, and she was known to sit outside of union organizing meetings in an ineffective disguise to take note of the workers who attended.