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there was “no place for pikers in this election.” 19
    Mollman announced that he considered his reelection “an endorsement of my policy of law enforcement,” and he pledged that saloons would never again be open on Sunday as long as he was mayor. He threw a postelection banquet for his black supporters at a Masonic hall in a predominantly black area in the South End near Thirteenth Street and Bond Avenue. Four or five hundred blacks came by for food and drink and political speeches. Although Mollman was nominally a Democrat, one of the sponsors was the St. Clair County Republican League. The banquet stuck in the craw of many white East St. Louisans, who saw it as Mollman fawning over the very people who were destroying the city. 20
    Shortly after the election, one of Mollman’s reluctant reform supporters, William Miller, head of the downtown YMCA, became alarmed at the armed gangsters—they were white—swaggering in and out of the building across the street and roughing up passersby. The building, owned by Tarlton andCanavan, housed the Commercial Hotel, a notorious saloon, gambling hall, brothel, and den of thieves a couple of blocks from city hall. The saloon had been one of the places Mollman had closed down in the cleanup campaign earlier in the year, but now that he had been reelected it was already open again. Miller warned that there was bound to be trouble coming when there were so many young men with guns downtown, “men who never worked at all but found some way to make a living.” He told Mollman, “Conditions have grown rank by degrees and they are rotten clear to the core and you sit here and can’t see it, can’t understand it. Your moral vision is gone … If you live down in this end of town, where the sentiment is rotten to the core, you think it is the sentiment of the whole world, but it certainly is not. The end of this thing is coming soon.” 21

    On the evening of April 17, several hundred members of the aluminum workers union met at the Labor Temple, a downtown auditorium that was privately owned but used for meetings by workers’ groups. They voted to strike the Aluminum Ore Company over a myriad of unresolved issues, including the mass firings of men friendly to the union. A large and rowdy picket line went up at the plant early the following morning.
    Federalized national guardsmen were already camped nearby to help keep the plant open, and management supplemented them with professional strikebreakers from Chicago. They wielded pickaxes and shovels to protect replacement workers, black and white, as they were led through lines of union men screaming “Scab!” The company announced that the strikers were German sympathizers disrupting essential work on war materiel. The
Journal
seemed to agree, remarking on its editorial page, “When strikes are called now, there is good reason to suspect something other than the interests of workers is at the bottom of them.” 22
    Other industries were in turmoil, too. The streetcar workers were also going through bitter negotiations, and they were told by management to go ahead and strike if they wanted to. The streetcars would be driven by soldiers, who wouldn’t have to be paid by the company at all. And the meatpackers, who could look through the fences around their plants and see soldiers dawdling in front of their tents, simply gave up trying to organize and hoped they could hang on to their jobs. The aluminum workers’ strike lasted twomonths, but for all practical purposes it was over a week or two after it began. Superintendent C. B. Fox refused to meet with the union’s executive committee, and announced before the end of April that all strikers who didn’t immediately leave the Employees Protective Association would be barred from the plant for life. He took out a full-page ad in the
Journal
, stating that the company had hundreds of openings. Strikers who quit the