LABOR: Trouble at Lowland

The red gumbo soil uttered ugly sucking sounds at the touch of a man's boot. Rain drizzled down over the foothills of the Smokies. The mood carried into a big tent in Morristown, Tenn. (pop. 13,000), where members of the C.I.O. Textile Workers Union, Local 1054, fidgeted.

The men's discontent worried husky Silas Switzer, who had come over from Virginia on orders of the International a year before. Already there had been violence—rock-throwing, punch-throwing, even gunfire and intervention by the National Guard—and now it felt as if more was in the air. "If you're thinking about violence," Si Switzer pleaded,...