Little Chance Governor Will Call Up State Militia for Railroad Strike, July 12, 1922

Little Chance for Calling Out North Carolina Militia. . . Strike Situation Farm From Threatening in This State—Governor Pays No Attention to It—Strikers Are Level-Headed

By Oscar J. Coffin, Special Capital Correspondent

Raleigh, July 10—It can’t be called a burning question as yet, but there is some conjecture hereabouts as to whether the National Guard will be called upon to assemble for possible duty in connection with the railroad strike. The stories of elsewhere and reports from at least half a dozen states which have mobilized their troops have given rise to this inquire.

Then, too, four of five special policemen of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad at Rocky Mount got into an affray with a striker, who insisted that he was not on Coast Line property. The special policemen drew fines in the municipal court, too. But the Coast Line has been first of all the North Carolina carriers to attempt coercion of the strikers, having threatened them with loss of their seniority rights if they are not back on the job today.

Governor Morrison has a record for promptness in attending to disturbances calculated to overthrow law and order, but he is also known as one who expects local governments to attend to their own affairs. While he has called out the troops on occasion, it must be remembered that he denied them to the sheriff of his home county of Mecklenburg to serve as special policemen during the most recent unpleasantness growing out of an industrial dispute there.

And the governor has started a-fishing this week. After that he is billed to address the State Press Association. It is doubtful if he has had the matter of what to do in case something should be done called to his attention.

If the strike situation is as peaceful as at Raleigh where shopmen of the Seaboard constitute the preponderant majority of the men out, there is no indication whatever of disorder. Practically all of the strikers are old-timers, who could fight the thing out on the present line all summer without one requiring even an indignation meeting.

Raleigh remembers a printers’ strike last summer involving almost as many unionists which brought on no more disorder than would have been caused by a dozen or so high school boys playing hooky. Somebody somewhere may be sitting over a lighted mine, but the state capital isn’t uneasy. There is as yet more talk of the primary of some eight or nine days since than of the strike.

From the front page of The Kinston Free Press, Wednesday, July 12, 1922