Jurisdictional disputes in the motion-picture Industry : hearings before a special subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first-session, pursuant to H. Res. 111 (1948)

MOTION-PICTURE JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES 2331 NO TEi\.K GAS USED Backstopping some 150 oflicers— battling at odds of more than 13 to 1 — were 8 policemen with steady tear gas guns, but it was not found necessary to use them. The spearheading police quickly herded the mob's ringleaders into patrol wagons before the angry crowd could agree on concerted action. The arrests were for disturbing the peace and illegal parading. At 4 : 30 a. m., about 20 pickets appeared at the corporation's Cahuenga Boulevard plant. Fifteen minutes later, live motorcycle otticers arrived. It was only a few minutes thereafter that crowds of strikers began pouring into the streets around the plant. Peace officers then began arriving in numbers. The strikers began blocking the main employee entrance with densely packed pickets. Police Capt. Clyde H. Tucker told Picket Leader Andy Lawless : '•This is illegal, you're jostling and threatening those people who want to go to work." Tucker asked Lawless to break it up but Lawless said he had no power to do so. Four abreast, two lines of pickets blocked the entrance and police had difficulty in keeping a lane open for workers to go into the plant. Defiant, the pickets marched in close formation and a small line of women pickets suddenly was formed. Officers began pushing them out of the area where tension was rising. FIGHTING BEEAKS OUT Strikers rushed the officers and 2 or 3 minutes of quick fighting raged while a large crowd yelled, cheered, jeered, and booed according to the way the battle went at the moment. One woman threw a cup of coffee into the face of an officer, another smacked an officer on the head with her handbag, and a third did yeoman service with a heavy newspaper twisted into a club. You might just look at that photograph. Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1946, the headline reads : "219 Arrested in Columbia Studio Strike." [Reading :] In the first mass arrests of this year's film strike, 219 persons were taken into custody yesterday at Columbia Studio. Most of them were charged with disobedience of a superior court order against massed picketing, a few with disturbing the peace. Then it goes on to describe some of the details. Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1946. The head of the article reads : "Police Jail 126 in Studio Strike Demonstration." Then briefly from the article : Some 2,000 film strikers and sympathizei-s carrying American flags, union banners, and scathing placards early yesterday paraded through Hollywood, disbanding only when 126 of their number had been arrested. Now as I said, I could go on with hundreds of those newspaper items but I thought I would simply give this committee a sampling of the incidents. In the same way there were a great many injunctions obtained by the various companies against mass picketing and violence both in the 1945 and the 1946 strike. 1 have — not with me — but I have at least 20 such injunctions, the full set of the papers, the complaints, the affidavits, the orders and so on. I think it will be sufficient simply to put into the record here some extracts from the sworn affidavits on which these injunctions were obtained and then have the balance of these treated as a reference exhibit because some of them specifically refer to some of the statements made by Mr. Sorrell.