Published by The Evansville Courier

But all this positive news would be marred by labor unrest kindled by demand for higher wages, management's general distaste for organized labor and an obsessive fear of communism.

Evansville was a microcosm of the rest of the nation in the late 1940s, according to Darrel Bigham, professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana.

He said a series of social upheavals occurred in Evansville from September 1945 to spring 1954, generally involving conflicts between management and labor. At center stage were the consumer-durable industries in Evansville - Seeger-Sunbeam, Bucyrus-Erie, Faultless Caster and Servel.

All had been organized or were being organized by unions and were attempting to reach contracts, he said.

At about the same time - the fall of 1946 to the fall of 1948 - rigid lines were taking form nationally and internationally between communist and Western interests, Bigham said. "It was a very anxious time."

"Workers had this pent-up demand for increases in wages that had been capped during the war, and employers were interested in keeping those costs down," he said.

"Owners and mangers of local businesses were generally unsympathetic of organized labor and some labor leaders quite frankly were communists," Bigham said.

Union officials were required to sign affidavits that they were not members of the Communist Party. The United Electrical Workers, which had a strong presence in Evansville, refused to do this, Bigham said.

About this time, the Congress of Industrial Organizations was purging itself of unions it considered to have membership tainted by communism. The United Electrical Workers was one of these, he said.

Also, Louis Ruthenburg, chairman of Servel, commenting on a local labor dispute to a Chicago newspaper, said Evansville was projecting a negative labor image, "an image that stuck, an image he helped create," Bigham said.

In September 1948, U.S. Rep. Ed Mitchell, an incumbent up for re-election and a member of the House Labor Committee, persuaded the committee to conduct a hearing in Evansville on communist influence in the United Electrical Workers.

"For day after day, you had people who claimed to be opposed to the leadership of the United Electrical Workers coming before this committee and saying the darnedest things about their neighbors and their co-workers about their alleged links with the Communist Party with very little opportunity for rebuttal or thorough examination of those charges," he said.

The Courier did a series on communists here titled, "Reds Busy in Evansville."

"Nearly all evidence came anonymously on how the Communist Party became rooted in Evansville," Bigham said of The Courier series. "The Courier was operating, in 1948 particularly, under the notion that a fifth column had gotten into Evansville, that it had taken over some of the unions," Bigham said.