On the first day of his life as a strikebreaker Jurgis quit work early, and in a spirit of bravado he challenged three men of his acquaintance to go outside and get a drink.
He chose the latter, but to his regret, for all night long gangs of strikebreakers kept arriving.
He sought out the superintendent, who smiled grimly and bade him "wait and see." Durham's strikebreakers were few of them leaving.
A thousand or two of strikebreakers were brought in every night, and distributed among the various plants.
Just at this time the mayor was boasting that he had put an end to gambling and prize fighting in the city; but here a swarm of professional gamblers had leagued themselves with the police to fleece the strikebreakers; and any night, in the big open space in front of Brown's, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories.
He next became a private detective for a street railway corporation, and by successive steps developed into a professional
strikebreaker. Pocock V., the last of the line, was blown up in a pump-house by a bomb during a petty revolt of the miners in the Indian Territory.
Regardless, soon one
strikebreaker and two strikers were dead, with a third seriously wounded.
"The banks are currently on strike, refusing to lend and the government is going to have to play the role of the
strikebreaker. We cannot be held to ransom."
spokesman Notter said the company would continue to challenge the
strikebreaker law but at the state level.
Black Pit (1935) is Maltz's play that deals with a strike in a mining region and the psychology of a
strikebreaker. Maltz's proletarian and propaganda writing is also evident in his short stories, The Way Things Are (1938), and in two novels: The Underground Stream (1940), about attempts to bring unions to the auto industry, and The Cross and the Arrow (1944), about a German's assistance to British bombers.