The corporation that transformed the Victor works into such an industrial giant, the Radio Corporation of America, began in 1919 as a government-supported monopoly financed by the biggest names in the electrical industry. Before World War I, the wireless communications industry had been foreign-owned and chaotically organized, but when the United States committed itself to the war effort, President Woodrow Wilson placed the industry under the monopoly power of the U.S. Navy. Although the government did not, as some people advocated, establish absolute control over the industry, it did facilitate the creation of the Radio Corporation of America as a patriotic "marriage of convenience" of private electrical corporations as a way to keep wireless communication in American possession and to develop it for the national good.

Under an agreement to pool patents and capital forged by General Electric's Owen D. Young, the ownership of RCA belonged to GE (30.1 %), Westinghouse (20.6%), AT&T (10.3%), and United Fruit (4.1 %), with a variety of other holders accounting for the remaining 34.9 percent. The agreement also stipulated that RCA would sell radio equipment manufactured by its principal owners, which the new corporation could purchase from the parent corporations on a simple formula of cost plus 20 percent. As early as 1926 RCA broadened its original plan from "narrowcast" communications to public "broadcast" by organizing the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The growing network of radio stations formed in the 1920s helped to make RCA one of the key growth stocks during the heady investment years of the Jazz Age, but it was actually manufacturing and licensing of patents that made RCA the instant giant of the communications industry.

Of the 9,800 workers employed at RCA in 1936, approximately 75 percent were women. They did all the wiring, crimping, and soldering on the radio sets. On the main production floor, which stretched the length of two football fields, each female line worker performed the labor-intensive operations on 400 to 800 radio chassis each day. Male inspectors stood at intervals of every ten to fifteen female workers to monitor their performance as the women applied the heavy 200-watt irons to the 300 solder joints necessary to build the average radio in 1935. Women working on an incentive piece-rate system also labored on the feeder lines that built intricate subassemblies and components to be placed on the main assembly lines. In contrast, men's part in the production process was to perform the test and repair procedures, build the large and elaborate wooden radio cabinets, staff the machine shop, and design and build the models and prototypes of products that would soon be rolling off the assembly lines.

[...] In the auto sector, for instance, management based its control over labor on the combination of the moving assembly line, which dramatically reduced labor time, and relatively high wages, which offered little incentive to substitute female labor for more expensive male workers. The manufacture of more labor-intensive and economically competitive consumer electronics equipment, in contrast, relied on "elaborately constructed piecework systems" that left labor content high and depended on the hiring of less costly women and girls. The "cheapness" of female labor, therefore, had only slight utility in the auto industry but formed the core of industrial policy in the electrical industry. Once forged, this gender formulation had its own ideology and institutional logic that persists to the present day-wherever the plants may have been relocated. These formulations even had the power to supersede the drive for profit maximization, which would dictate increased hiring of less expensive female workers in all industries.

The ideology of women's innate characteristics makes little sense except in comparative perspective. The construct of the docile, physically weak, nimble-fingered, and presumably nonunion woman worker simultaneously raised an equally mythological opposite: the clumsy, strong, aggressive, prounion male employee. Rather than reflecting actual biological or social attributes of either sex, these images spoke of the ideal type of workforce that management desired for its assembly lines. The stereotype of the female worker had less to do with any traits inherent in women than with the type of workers the company sought for the manufacture of particularly competitive goods. In a move unpredicted by anybody and unfathomable by most, however, the RCA employees were about to betray their reputation for tranquillity in what one writer called "labor's giant step" into mass-production unionism.

In an effort to check the growth and militancy of these organizing drives, RCA launched, financed, and dominated a company union called the Employees' Committee Union (ECU) in 1933.28 The ECU gained a significant number of members among salaried and clerical employees but only a minority of production workers. RCA was far from unique in sponsoring a company union. By 1935 six to seven hundred such unions had been formed across the country, with an estimated two to three million members. About half of the workers who belonged to labor organizations in the middle of the decade, in fact, could be found in company-sponsored unions. The battle between the powerful company organization and the independent unions shaped the entire conflict over union recognition at the RCA works. Opposition from the corporation, rivalry with the company union, and the hostility of the AFL forged the fragmented organizers into an alliance, and together they formed one of the charter unions, Local 103, in the new United Electrical Workers union during its 1936 inaugural convention in snowy Buffalo, New York.

Five days later the company union gave the RCA workers the chance they had been looking for. Long understood to be the veiled voice of the company, the ECU posted inflammatory notices against the new UE organization, and the union leadership seized the opportunity to put heat on management by calling a sit-down strike, which they claimed shut down 80 percent of production. After only five hours, however, the union called off the strike when RCA agreed to state that it did not endorse the notices put up by the ECU, that all acts of intimidation by foremen (including forcing employees to attend ECU meetings) would end, and that the company would commence negotiations immediately. Union officials later regretted giving up control of the plant, as it soon became clear that the company only wanted to get the workers out of the factory in order to have more time to prepare for the strike. The next morning, as scores of guards took their posts at strategic points to detect and report labor unrest, the plant looked like occupied territory.

Negotiations between the president of RCA's manufacturing wing in Camden and the union local rapidly collapsed, and David Sarnoff, head visionary of RCA, took over the task of dealing with the conflict from the towering new RCA office building in New York City. When the union delegation arrived to discuss matters, Sarnoff attempted to demonstrate his sympathy for the workers by telling Horatio Alger stories to the labor representatives in extended detail. His account began with desperate poverty in a shtetl in tsarist Russia in 1891, progressed to the Jewish ghetto of New York, and ended, as his biographer put it, with Sarnoff as a "corpulent, immaculately dressed, manicured, barbered, massaged, chauffeur-driven, cigar-smoking corporate prince, poised and assured, a dominating presence whose steely blue eyes fixed on subordinates could bead their brows and moisten their palms." Since his tales absorbed a considerable amount of time, the UE delegates amused themselves by smoking all of Sarnoff's cigars, and when the stories ended, Carey wryly suggested that Sarnoff should have RCA-Victor record his moving epic for posterity. Although Sarnoff was one of the most respected figures in twentieth-century business history, he had no skills or experience in labor negotiations and had little to offer the leadership of Local 103 other than his ability to filibuster the unionists. He did, however, have an image to protect as a liberal business leader and an immigrant who had made good.

[...] 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.