Mark and Lena had been in Washington for the past week, trying to find and buy a building to house the headquarters of the International Miners Union. Failing in that, Mark made arrangements to rent a building as our temporary headquarters. A year later, plans were drawn for a new building, the one which today houses the union. Kollman and Watts were the real-estate brokers through whom Mark had been working. We met there because I had been sent on an errand to Washington to buy Dorothy Holt a house. This was almost, but not entirely, as bald as it sounds. Nineteen thirty-seven had been a tumultuous year. The country was still in the grasp of the great depression, and from coast to coast there had been an endless series of violent strikes against falling wages and bad working conditions. Almost all of these strikes had been wildcat affairs in nonunion industries, and now they had culminated in an enormous sit-down movement in the auto industry in Detroit. Thousands of workers in the biggest plant in the industry had laid down their tools, stopped the assembly line, declared a strike, and refused to leave the plant.
