Vol. 72/No. 33      August 25, 2008

Phelps Dodge, one of the nation’s biggest copper producers, is out to bust the copper workers’ union. From the day the strike began, July 1, the company has used every means at its disposal to break it.

Phelps Dodge has tried to work the mine with a relative handful of scabs and has openly appealed to hire more. The company got court injunctions limiting the number of strikers picketing any gate to five.

As we go to press, Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt has activated seven units of the Arizona National Guard. Several hundred guardsmen and 400 state troopers equipped with armored personnel carriers, four Huey helicopters, automatic weapons and hundreds of tear gas canisters, are on hand within miles of Morenci.  
 
August 18, 1958
AUG. 12—President Eisenhower, once more, has used his high office to pressure American workers to forego wage increases. The President warned labor that the American consumer “is going to rebel in a big way, and there will be real trouble” if labor is not “very, very careful about this whole problem of pushing wages each year above those rates that imply or show the increases in productivity.”

Eisenhower hit at the working class as a major factor in the inflation the same day that the U.S. government broke two old records in inflationary spending. The House of Representatives voted to raise the national debt ceiling to its highest point in peacetime history, to $288 billion. This sum is second only to the high of World War II. And a House-Senate conference committee voted the biggest peacetime war budget in history.

To blame labor for inflation is monstrous in view of these government moves.  
 
August 26, 1933
In the dark hours of August 13, Sheriff Shamblin and some deputies decided that for “safety’s sake” they were going to transport the three young Negroes, Dan Pippen, A.T. Harden and Elmore Clark, charged with a typically southern felony—murder of a white woman—from Tuscaloosa to the larger city of Birmingham, Alabama.

They had not gone far when a mob waylaid the car, and ordered the sheriff to hand over the Negroes to them. The sheriff did exactly as ordered. He did not lift his little finger in protest—not to mention his gun. Dan Pippen, 18, and A.T. Harden, 16, were slain outright. Elmore Clark, 28, played dead and after the lynch mob left crawled to the house of a Negro family.

A committee has been formed to demand from Roosevelt immediate action in Tuscaloosa and to force the arrest of Judge Henry B. Foster and Sheriff R. L. Shamblin in connection with the murder of the two young Negroes.  
 
 
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