Crash and sit-down: the Depression city

1929 — 1937

The factory city's prosperity had been built on things people could stop buying, and in 1929 they stopped: The consolidation of the age had begun months before the crash: on April 1, 1929, the Oliver Chilled Plow Works merged with the Hart-Parr and Nichols & Shepard companies and the American Seeding Machine Company to form the Oliver Farm Equipment Company, and the works on the river became one plant of a national combine headquartered elsewhere — a quiet rehearsal for everything after. The first emblem of the crash itself fell within weeks of it: the South Bend Watch Company — the Studebaker family's 1903 venture, which had made close to a million watches and sold them largely on installment credit — closed in November 1929 and never reopened, its liquidation finished by 1933; Indiana University South Bend stands on the site today. The census tells the decade's shape: South Bend was the rare Indiana boomtown that shrank in the 1930s, from 104,193 in 1930 to 101,268 in 1940. What crime the decade left in the documented record is told soberly in the Crime section; the Story of South Bend section carries one line of it — on June 30, 1934, the Merchants National Bank in South Bend was the last bank robbed by the Dillinger gang.

Out of the Depression the city's workers built the institution that would defend them for a generation. In November 1936 the United Auto Workers' Local 9 — chartered in 1933 as an AFL federal labor union — struck the Bendix Products Corporation with a weapon new to the auto industry: they stayed inside. The sit-down began on November 17, 1936, with roughly a thousand workers remaining at their machines in the plant. What is not in conflict is the result: the company union was dissolved and the UAW recognized as the workers' sole bargaining agent. It was the autoworkers' first sit-down victory, six weeks before the Kelsey-Hayes sit-down in Detroit and the great Flint sit-down — December 30, 1936 to February 11, 1937 — made the tactic famous: South Bend first, as the union's historians still insist, and on the contemporary evidence they are right to. The Labour section of this record will argue the superlatives out; the Story of South Bend section keeps the sequence.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend reference history — the South Bend Watch Company's 1903 founding by Clement Studebaker Jr. and George M. Studebaker, its closing in November 1929 and completed liquidation, and the Merchants National Bank as the last bank robbed by the Dillinger gang, June 30, 1934.
2. Walter P. Reuther Library, UAW Local 9 records (finding aid) — Local 9's 1933 chartering and the November 1936 sit-down at Bendix Products, given as six days.
3. Labor Notes and UAW Local 9 histories — the sit-down of November 17, 1936, roughly a thousand workers, given as eight days ending November 25, with the Bendix Employees Association dissolved and the UAW recognized.
4. Sit-Down" (1937) — the victory "in a week" and Bendix as the first strike in which automobile workers stayed in the plant overnight.
5. UAW sit-down references — the Kelsey-Hayes strike of December 1936 and the Flint sit-down of December 30, 1936 to February 11, 1937, which followed Bendix.
6. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 104,193 in 1930 and 101,268 in 1940.
7. Oliver Farm Equipment Company references — the merger of April 1, 1929 joining Oliver Chilled Plow Works with Hart-Parr, Nichols & Shepard and American Seeding Machine.