At General Motors in Flint, Michigan, tycoons making half a million dollars a year had paid twenty cents an hour to the men on the line until, last year, sit-down strikes forced GM's surrender. With FDR back in the White House, sympathetic to the union cause, now was the time (some said) for the working man to take a stand. A wave of strikes had followed GM's capitulation, and what was happening at Corrigan-McKinney was part of that.

Not long ago United States Steel, in order to avoid being struck, handed its workers a ten-percent wage in-crease, a forty-hour week, and union recognition. So-called "Little Steel," however, the independent steel mills of which Republic was one, wasn't about to give up so easily.

Curry was pleased with the even-handed manner in which his chief had responded to the strike thus far- frustrating as it might be to the men on the line, Ness's no-firearms decision was, in Curry's opinion, correct.

So why the gun in the shoulder holster?

His mouth dry, Curry clutched the wheel, hoping he could do his job without compromising his sympathies for the strikers. Sympathies he dared not express out loud…

Just after dark, when the crowds had abandoned the City Hall sidewalk for home and/or the plant picket line, Curry had driven Ness over to the Central Police Station at Twenty-first and Payne, where Ness had arranged to have a newsreel sent over by the Hearst people.

Ness used a large conference room on the second floor to screen the newsreel for one hundred uniformed police, most of whom had already worked a shift today, but who at nine o'clock tonight would be replacing the detail that was working the Corrigan-McKinney gate now. Also present, at Ness's pointed request, was Chief Matowitz.

There were stirrings among the men, who were of course less than pleased by the no-firearms directive, and when Ness stood before the assemblage, he said, "I over-heard a man saying that this was one hell of a time to be showing a training film. Well, gentlemen… this is one hell of a training film."