Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1909 — EMPLOYES QUIT STEEL PLANT [ARTICLE]

EMPLOYES QUIT STEEL PLANT

Because They Can’t Get Beer In Gary Business Men Alarmed. Hammond, Ind., Aug. 14.—Six hundred employes of the Indiana Steel Company, a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation, at Gary, quit work to-day because they could not get beer there, and the merchants of Gary are panic-strick-en since that town went dry. The steel company reports that last pay day $75,000 worth of checks were cashed at South Chicago. To remedy the abolition of saloons a mass meeting, attended by a hundred business men took place last night. The gathering was addressed by Rev. George Matthews, the attorney for the Indiana Anti-Saloon League, who was responsible for the saloon ouster of the Board of Directors of the Steel Corporation last summer, in which the officials said that the only way to dispose of saloons that bred dives and gambling dens was by remonstrance. He denounced illicit liquor dispensaries and said the “blind pigs” were responsible for vice and the consequent crusade which had paralyzed business in Gary by driving thousands of laborers out of town to seek liquor elsewhere. A petition was Introduced at the meeting to be taken before the Board of Commissioners, the signers of the document pledging themselves that if the remonstrance against the saloons was withdrawn all violations of law by saloon keepers would be prosecuted-