"In Courtroom, Echo of Flint's 1937 Sitdown Strike"
July 20, 1998 By KEITH BRADSHER
FLINT, Mich. - Few cities are as lastingly seared
by a single event as Flint was by the sit-down
strikes in early
1937, a violent showdown between General Motors Corp.
and the United Auto Workers that led to the union's
first contract to represent the workers of a major
automaker.
People still remember whether their parents and
grandparents sided with labor or management when
thousands of auto workers seized G.M. factories here,
sitting on the floors after wielding 20-inch wooden
clubs to drive off the police.
At the company's request, a state judge, Paul Gadola,
ordered the strikers evicted, and the National Guard
was deployed. The occupation of the factories ended
quietly nine days later when the governor, Frank
Murphy, mediated a settlement.
Flint is again the site of a showdown between G.M. and
the U.A.W., as a 45-day strike at two auto-parts
factories has crippled the world's largest automaker.
For the first time since 1937, the company has sued the
union in a bid to end a major strike. And in a
remarkable coincidence that is the talk of the town,
the federal judge assigned to the case is Paul Gadola
Jr., the son of the state judge who ordered the
evictions 61 years ago.
Leafing through yellowed family scrapbooks in his
office, Gadola Jr., who will turn 69 on Tuesday,
recalls the strike vividly. Because of threats against
the family by union sympathizers, he rode in a police
car to and from school, and an officer stood outside
his classroom.
Gadola Jr. said he had spent his life looking up to his
father, who died in 1968. "I believe in the
independence of the judiciary, and that's what my
father upheld," said the judge, who has a foot-high,
framed photograph of his father on the wall near his
desk, and two other photos of his father in the
reception area. "I have so much admiration; he was a
wonderful role model. He was a giant as far as I'm
concerned."
Gadola Sr.'s eviction decision was based on G.M.'s
ownership of the factories. But the U.A.W. for years
criticized the decision and Gadola Sr.'s conduct after
the strike -- as an elected judge and a Republican, he
traveled around the state giving speeches condemning
Murphy, a Democrat, for mediating a settlement instead
of ordering the National Guard to storm the factories
immediately and remove the strikers.
His son's handling of the current litigation has been
gentler. Asked by G.M. in a lawsuit filed last Tuesday
to order the union into immediate arbitration, Gadola
Jr. declined. Instead, he presided over a hearing
Wednesday at which U.A.W. lawyers acknowledged that the
company was entitled to arbitration under its national
agreement with the union.
Gadola Jr. asked both sides to report back to him on
Tuesday on their progress in scheduling arbitration;
the two sides announced late Friday that arbitration
would begin on Wednesday.
U.A.W. officials declined to discuss Gadola Jr., but a
prominent Democratic lawyer who has tried cases before
the father and the son said that the son seemed more
temperate. Gadola Sr. "did what the law made him do,
but he could have showed more compassion" in 1937, said
Jerome O'Rourke, a former county prosecutor whose
father was the union leader served with the judge's
eviction notice that year.
In contrast, Gadola Jr.'s choice of persuasion to start
the arbitration process, rather than an injunction,
"was an objective, fair, understanding ruling," said
O'Rourke, who defeated the younger Gadola in a 1956
race for county prosecutor.
G.M. has also asked for a court order to end the
current strikes and for financial penalties against the
union if the arbitrator finds that the strikes
represent an illegal walkout in violation of the
company's national agreement with the U.A.W. In an
interview on Friday, Gadola Jr. said that he had only
reviewed the legal issues of arbitration.
But the judge also said that he was a strong opponent
of judicial activism, and that he was reluctant to play
a direct role in the collective bargaining between G.M.
and the union. "The merits of this dispute are not for
me to decide," he said. "They're for an arbitrator to
decide."
The coincidence of a father and son handling similar
cases is even more unusual here because the federal
courthouse in Flint shares a docket with federal
district courthouses in three other southeastern
Michigan cities: Detroit, Ann Arbor and Port Huron.
Gadola Jr. said that as with any other case, the GM
lawsuit was assigned when a clerk in Detroit shuffled a
stack of index cards bearing the names of the 12 judges
and five senior judges of the U.S. District Court for
the Eastern District of Michigan. The clerk drew the
card with Gadola Jr.'s name.
"I got this case strictly by happenstance, not because
I'm the federal judge who sits here in Flint," he said.
Gadola Jr. was appointed in 1988 by President Reagan,
whose Michigan campaigns he had led in 1980 and 1984.
But he won confirmation from a Democratic Senate on his
record as a campaigner for civil rights.
Working free of charge for the American Civil Liberties
Union, he represented mostly black protesters here in
the 1960s. They wanted to hold an all-night rally on
the City Hall lawn in support of a local ballot measure
to bar racial discrimination by real-estate brokers and
landlords. He won the case, and the measure passed by
12 votes out of close to 60,000 that were cast, Gadola
Jr. recalled.
The judge's enthusiasm for civil rights grew out of the
persecution that his own family had suffered as Roman
Catholics early in the century, when the Ku Klux Klan
and a similar group known as the Black Legion were
powerful here. Gadola Jr. said his father had been
denied a job in the Flint city attorney's office in the
1920s because of his religion, and his mother had been
turned down for a bank job for the same reason.
His father broke the Black Legion in the county during
the late 1930s. He named himself as a one-person grand
jury, and then investigated and indicted the group's
leaders, many of whom went to prison, The Flint Journal
reported in his obituary.
That case and others made Gadola Sr. a hero in the
city's Italian-American community. Despite opposition
from the U.A.W., he won re-election as a state judge
here every six years until he retired in 1960.
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