Country Road Riding in West Dayton

Guess the location:

60 Years Ago: The Great Univis Strike of 1948

Another installment in “A People’s History of Dayton” (apologies to Howard Zinn).: This time we’ll look at a long forgotten strike that involved a remarkable degree of labor solidarity.

As we’ve seen, by the end of WWII the radical CIO union UE had successfully organized a number of the larger and mid-sized factories in Dayton, and did so without violent strikes or lockouts.

This was to change in the early postwar era. Sixty years ago this year Dayton was to experience perhaps it’s most violent and intense strike of the 20th century, the Univis Strike, marking the high water mark of union militancy in Dayton.

Forgotten today, this labor battle pitted UE local 768, with support from Frigidaire, Delco and GHR Foundry workers, against the Univis Lens company, Dayton police, the Ohio National Guard, the courts, and the local media.

Run-up to the Strike

Univis started in the 1920s, but had built a new plant in north Dayton in the 1940s, employing at its peak 800, a mix of male and female workers. The company made various kinds of lenses, for the military and civilians

In the 1940s the company moved into this new plant on the former site of McCook Field, which was being developed in part as an early industrial park, perhaps the first one in Dayton without rail access
UE organized the plant in 1946, with the first contract signed that year. The organizing drive was a tough one, where the company apparently tried to stymie the union by laying off a bunch of the union members just prior to the certification election.

In 1948 the contract came up for renewal, but the union and company could not reach agreement during negotiations. Union leadership recommended an extension to the contract and to continue negotiation, but the rank and file disagreed and voted down the proposal on 30 April . There were two strike votes, one deadlocked, but a second one a four days later passed (against recommendations from union leadership), and the strike was on:

Chronology:

May

14 May: Shop steward urges greater turnout on the picket line, and members agree to let salaried workers pass the pickets.

Negotiations remained deadlocked


June

2 June: Company seeks injunction to limit pickets, union leadership threatens to mobilize Delco, Frigidaire, Master, and Airtemp workers to join the pickets if Univis succeeds.

14 June: Court of Common Pleas grants injunction imposing a 6 man limit on pickets.

15 June: Univis VP attempts to lead a some returning workers across the picket line, confronts 400 UE members, a scuffle breaks out, back-to-work attempt is thwarted.

17 June: Dayton mayor offers to arbitrate dispute. Union accepts offer, Univis rejects.

17-22 June: Police begin clearing a path through the pickets, union leaders file a complaint about excessive force, and other UE locals throughout the city volunteer to help, including GHR foundry workers, who took a half-day off to walk the picket line. Financial assistance is also provided to the strike fund by other Dayton locals.

July

Early July: Univis circulates petition saying strikers wanting to return to work should sign, 30% do sign. Univis then uses this petition to request a union decertification election (workers later say, via affidavit, that the petition was circulated under false pretenses)

July 23: NLRB decertification election. Management offers raises, bribes, and promotions as well as threats to secure a decertification vote. Union protests election & vows to remain on strike.

July 26-29: Violence on the ;picket line increases: 3 day running battle between pickets and the police.

July 30 (Friday): 10,000 workers mostly from the 3rd shift at Frigidaire and Delco join the pickets, and prevent the police from opening a path to the plant.

August

1 August: Emergency meeting with the union & management with the Governor to try to settle, with an agreement to rehire most workers, and submit 11 workers (strike leaders) to arbitration. Agreement was rejected by both the shop steward and the rank and file.

2 August: Thousands on the picket line and police unable to cope. Governor mobilizes the National Guard.

2 August (evening): 1,200 guardsmen armed with tear gas, machine guns, armored cars, and three Sherman tanks patrol the streets of North Dayton (cantonment area on the grounds of McGuffy School) and disperse the strikers (presumably martial law was declared). This was the first time in Dayton history that troops were used to put down a strike.


Strike sites.

Note that it was a walk up Webster and Keowee for the workers at GHR, Frigidaire and Delco to help out on the picket line, unless they drove or took a bus..
The union had picket line headquarters in this nearby bowling alley (probably in the restaurant or bar)

National Guard used the school grounds here as their base and camp.


The Univis plant today


After the Strike

Though Univis won the strike in 1948 apparently management had soured on Dayton. In 1951 a letter was sent to stockholders briefly discussing a plant being built in Puerto Rico, but implying that the work would not be phased out at the Dayton plant, Yet by 1953 the workforce had dropped to 150. In 1954 news reports indicated the Dayton plant was being considered for sale, presumably due to operations having been relocated to Puerto Rico.

So perhaps a very early example of off-shoring production to get away from labor issues, even if those problems seemed solved by the union being defeated.

One should note that this was during the early Cold War (Berlin Airlift the same year). The media at the time spun the Communist angle, as in this Time magazine article (which gets the facts wrong):

Brass Knuckles: Not since the 1913 flood had Dayton been so excited. One day last week, word spread that big trouble was brewing on the picket lines at the Univis Lens Co. Some 7,500 Daytonians turned out to watch. They saw 160 policemen move in, pour tear gas into a yelling union mob. A savage, three-month-old strike in which heads had been bloodied, stink bombs tossed at non-strikers, ribs prodded by police billies, had reached its climax.

The Dayton Daily News also used the strike as an excuse to red-bait local UE leadership. Interestingly, though UE organizers were prominent on the picket line and during the violence (beaten by the police, one while in custody), it seems the CPUSA members in union leadership actually counseled against the strike, and recommended accepting the offer brokered by the governor, but were rebuffed by the Univis rank and file and their shop steward, who, though an ardent unionist, was equally anti-communist.

So it seems that the Communists did try to influence matters, but not in the way the press was reporting.

And rank-and-file union members in Dayton were pretty militant whatever their political affiliation, not to mention showing remarkable solidarity: Delco, Frigidaire, and GHR Foundry workers not only raising funds but also volunteering for picket duty in huge numbers, something that would be unheard of today.

Reality Check on the Arcade

The Arcade was in the news last week, as part of a report on Bob Shifflers presentation to the Chamber of Commerce. Shiffer was telling it like it is.

Developer: Arcade development will take collaboration

Shiffler, who has been negotiating to buy the five-building complex, said redevelopment funding would need to include up to $8 million in equity that would provide investors a return. The rest of the costs would need to come from tax credits, loans, tax-increment financing or other tools, he said.

And the community needs to act sooner rather than later to undertake this effort since tight government budgets could eliminate tax credits applicable to the project, he said.

This is a great wake-up call to those that think this project is going to happen via 100% private financing.

And given the problems making Ballpark Village work how likely is a public private partnership? And it seems even small re-use projects like The Merc are beyond local capacity.
The reality is the money just isn’t there for a public-private partnership, which means any re-use of the Arcade is going to be doomed from day one.

I have posted on how Louisville is finding ways around the economic impasse of center city re-use. However this is not a fair comparison as Louisville has these things Dayton lacks:

• A growing economy (Dayton will be getting that when BRAC effects kick-in)

• Financial and managerial capacity in local government

• Leadership in the business and government that prioritizes downtown revival.

The Economist reports on Louisville as one city that is taking the big picture look that is so lacking with local leadership, and this is recieving national attention as a model:

In a forthcoming report for the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC, think-tank, Carolyn Gatz and Edward Bennett commend it as a model for other recovering cities.

So there are lessons learned, but they are politically unpalatable ones for this community

The DDN Aracde article continues:

Such a redevelopment also would need a reliable, long-term tenant such as a government agency or a law firm to help anchor the project, he said

The public use makes sense, perhaps more for an expansion of Sinclair (WSU already has a downtown facility) than for some local govt. office (government is already in the Riebold Building and other office spaces). The law firm concept does, too, except the city already has a commitment to move a large downtown firm to Ballpark Village. But finding a large office tenant is very unlikely given the trend away from the center city.

City Film Cultures: Amber Films

As a testament to the power of the internet to link up folks and share ideas, I only found out about this group via my participation in an online fan site for English folk-punk singer Billy Bragg. Two or three of the participants were from the Newcastle/Sunderland area in Northeast England, and turned me on to this cultural project (it extends beyond films).

Amber Films started out in 1969, coming out of what might have been a sort of independent guerilla filmmaking scene in Britain at that time, where collectives would form and make indy films. Very non-commercial. Amber survived for nearly 40 years, so impressive longevity for a nonprofit volunteer project.


What makes Amber interesting is their political commitment, and especially their local focus.

Here is an excerpt their “about us” statement on their website:

“The work is rooted in social documentary, built around long term engagements with working class and marginalized communities in the North of England. …

"The approach is celebratory, even when the marginalization of lives and landscapes makes this more difficult. Production grows out of the relationships with these communities, and our creativity is inseparable from that of the people with whom Amber works. In any project, the first commitments are to individual lives, a particular landscape, or a set of concerns…”

Recent examples of their work is this documentary about a person in the local music scene working percussion (that he does “sound sculptures” makes me think of Michael Bashaw)….

…And a drama with a local theme
Amber does go beyond documentary films, working on drama and experimental, and also combining a bit of all three. Their long-term committeemen to basing film on everyday life and work in a certain location is maybe not unique, but rare enough (in the US) to seem so.

Amber also runs a café, gallery, ant theatre, and does film education, like this 2 day film school:

…so one can see there is outreach and education going on as well as cultural production.

For some outside opinion on Amber click here and here (both UK film websites)


One calls the body of work “…one of the great unsung achievements of British cinema.”

Would This Work in Dayton?


I think in the US, there isn’t anything equivalent to Amber, though some commercial US filmmakers do occasionally have a localist theme in their work. Good examples in recent cinema would be Baltimore, in some of the films of Barry Levinson and John Waters.

One can almost imagine what an Amber Films for Dayton would be like, as a force for development & celebration of city culture and as a way of building community. Locally the closest we have are the occasional projects of Cityfolk, who has sponsored a film festival dealing with Appalachian culture. Yet Cityfolk (as far as I know) has not commissioned film or tried to generate local filmmaking activity around Dayton-specific themes and subjects, since they are a presenter, not a producer.

The issue, as with all things in Dayton, is funding. As non profit Amber recieves support from local government, foundations, and "Arts Council England", and has recieved support in the past from the BBC. It would be unlikley such funding could be secured in the Dayton region for something like this.

City Film Cultures: The Kino Movement

Since one of the Creative Region Initiatives is called Film Dayton I’d thought I’d post on two film concepts that have a localist focus. The first is the Kino movement.

Kino is the German and Russian word for “the movies”, but apparently was adopted by a bunch of Montrealers (people working in advertising) for the name of their amateur film group


This has turned into an international movement, with Kino cells forming on 4 continents, but mostly in the Francophone world (Quebec, France, etc) based on this list.

Some of these groups have web-pages so you can see what they are up to. I like Fimonik, from Manchester, England…they seem to have a lot going on.


Two examples from the German speaking parts of Europe are Kino M and Kinoberlino. Both sites mostly auf Deutsch (with some English on the Berlin page), but you can get the idea that each local cell has its own identity (Kinoberlino even makes its own DVDs)

For the USA there is Wis-Kino, up in Madison, Wisconsin (the other US cell is in Louisville, which is how I found out Kino). Wis-Kino seems pretty active:

What’s cool about Kino is that it’s participatory and open to amateurs. This is particularly the case with their 48 hour filmmaking marathons called Kabarets.

A Kabaret starts out with a ‘secret ingredient’ that has to be incorporated into the film, then groups of filmmaking teams form up and shoot their films, with the films shown at the end of the 48 hours as a small film fest, open to spectators as well as the participants.

If one is familiar with the traditions associated with architectural education at the Ecole de Beaux Arts this is akin to being on charette, but with film.

Of course, being that this is amateur one can assume the quality is uneven, but one has to applaud this as a way to jump-start some creativity, possibly spinning off a local film scene beyond just watching movies.

Heres an interesting article on it from UKULA:

On The Road With Kino

"Forget what you know about movies…the bloated budgets, the popcorn programming, even that castrated gold statuette. Now let me introduce you to Kino—a stripped-down film collective, equal parts Stella Artois and Stanley Kubrick. Since its basement apartment inception, Kino has set out to create films in an environment of community and collaboration.

"Founded in 1999 by two Montreal filmmakers, Kino consists of independent artists who create shorts that are then distributed around the world on the festival circuit. Kino has since evolved into an international movement with cells in over 50 cultural hubs from Vienna to Adelaide to Reunion Island. Hell…even Wisconsin is represented

So, an interesting way of getting film afcionados involved with actually making films.

Toward an Oregon Mural Project

The North American mural movement is one of the great populist art forms of the 20th century, and its still going strong. This public art form is at once accessible, colorful, and can have a didactic and community building role.

Starting in Mexico, the movement expressed the cultural side of the Mexican Revolution, emphasizing the mestizo character of the new Mexican state as well as representing the populist and Marxist leanings of its three great painters, Rivera, Orozco, and Siqieros.




Around the same time in Anglo-America, the WPA arts projects gave the interior of public buildings as a canvas for similarly motivated painters of the American Scene genre.

Muralism saw a rebirth in the 1960s & 1970s with the advent of populist identity politics, often fusing the stylistic and aesthetic agendas of the American Scene and the Mexican Muralist movements, and eventually transcending them.

Famous murals from this era are Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles and Chicago’s Wall of Respect.

The movement has moved beyond a certain explicit didactic purpose to celebrate community and history.

Good examples of this are the work of Jeff Zimmerman, who involves community members as subjects in his murals, which usually are fairly open-ended in interpretation, and the Portsmouth Floodwall Murals, which are both historical and celebrate aspects of modern Portsmouth…

…and some of the murals coming out of the California Chicano community, like the one from the Estrada Courts housing complex.

There is always a bit of a populist back-story to murals, as in how the Portsmouth murals celebrate that city’s industrial past, but feature the workers in these plants, not just the industrialists).

Oregon Murals?

As a way of dealing with the blank facades of the porn shops, and instead of tearing them down for what would probably be more parking, how about keeping the buildings but using them as a public mural project on the theme of Oregon history?

Four murals

1. Theme of First Settlement: Development of a German working class community & the industral city, featuring lost buildings and local industry as well as images of the former residents.

2. Theme of Appalachian Migration: From the mountains and coalfields, down the hillbilly highways to Oho. Work in modern factories, and also indtroducing a cultural theme of honky tonks and the start of bluegrass music in Dayton, including portraits of performers or groups that played here.

3. Theme of the Urban Pioneers: Urban renewal threat and restoring the neighborhood after near abandonment, including working in some portraits of locals still living in the area.

4. Theme of Oregon as Center of Cultural Production: the live music scene (bands and singers and so forth) and the new arts scene, and maybe master chefs and sous chefs in a restaurant: a different type of creativity.



Using a bit of a Jeff Zimmerman mural to show what it might look like?

Greenmont's Neighborhood Tavern

Consdering the political history of the place, what else but...


You just got to love the ironical coincidence of that name....of course it has to be Lefty's!