When the workers got violent, Paulson seized on their mistake. He went to court and filed a motion that would bar the OCAW from picketing in front of the refinery. Paulson’s lawyers argued that the OCAW’s property destruction and violence went far beyond the scope of legal union activity. A local district court judge agreed with the company and handed down a temporary restraining order against the union. The restraining order didn’t bar picketing outright, but it greatly limited what the union could do. The judge said the union must now be limited to having four men stand with picket signs at the refinery, where there had been dozens before. These four men would be prohibited from doing anything intimidating or violent. The unionized police officers at the site couldn’t stand back and remain neutral: they had a judge’s injunction to enforce. The judge’s order smothered the picketing.
As the third week passed and then the fourth week, the reality of the strike began to sink in. The men at the plant still had mortgages to pay and kids to support. They sought out part-time jobs in secret, and many of them found work, but it didn’t pay what the refinery had paid. As the strike dragged on, the OCAW members began to see just how easy it might be for them to fall from the middle class. They saw how easy it might be to lose their home, lose their car, endanger the economic future of their kids. And they knew who was responsible for this danger. They blamed Bernard Paulson. Many of the men began to hate Paulson and his Texas cowboy boots and his superior bearing. The men gathered at the Coates bar and drank and talked about what they might do. And their anger boiled over.
On Friday night, February 23, more than thirty union men gathered outside the refinery. Paulson and his employees had been camped inside the gates for about six weeks, and they couldn’t stay inside forever. The union men knew this, and they were waiting outside when a caravan of Paulson’s employees, packed inside a row of cars, drove out through the refinery gates. The union men pounded on hoods, broke car windows, and screamed at the workers inside. The picketers had been practicing a technique to tip the cars over by gathering in groups and rocking the cars from side to side. They tried this technique on the cars that passed. Someone fired gunshots into the refinery during the melee. No one was hit, and no one was able to determine who fired the gun.
Around this time, Bernard Paulson’s wife was alone at the couple’s home, taking care of their six children. One night a man called her house and asked if Paulson was there. She said he wasn’t and asked if she could take a message. The caller said she could, and he told her the message was that soon Mr. Paulson would not be breathing anymore. Then the caller hung up, leaving Mrs. Paulson alone with her thoughts and six sleeping children.
Bernard Paulson did not bend. He kept working, sleeping on the cot in his office. He was not going to quit; he was not going to back down in the face of threats.
Whenever Paulson needed encouragement, he picked up the phone and called Wichita.
“I worked directly for Charles, and we consulted several times a day. It was with his backing,” Paulson recalled. “He knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.”
On the night of March 15, Paulson went to his office, laid down on his cot, and pulled up the covers before drifting off to sleep. He was exhausted, and he slept soundly. While he slept, someone carried out a plan that might have killed him and every employee to whom he had just said good night.
A set of railroad tracks ran along the west side of the refinery. The tracks carried tanker cars of crude oil and ran right into the middle of the refinery complex where the trains could load and unload fuel. At night, the tanker cars and diesel engines were often parked in a small depot outside the refinery, waiting for the next day’s delivery. It was common practice for railroad companies to leave the diesel engines idling throughout the night because it takes a lot of fuel to start the vehicles. Some of the refinery employees would have known this because a handful of them had once worked for the railroad. These men knew how the trains worked and knew where they were parked.
In the dark hours just after midnight on March 15, someone snuck between the train cars and engines near the refinery. The saboteur jumped up to the doorway of one of the diesel engines and climbed inside. It is unknown whether it was one person or a group of people who did this, but whoever went inside the engine knew how to operate it. They knew where to find the throttle and how to engage it. They pushed the throttle forward and leapt out of the train as it began to chug forward.
The diesel engine picked up momentum as it traveled down the track. The cab was empty, and there were no employees at the depot to spot the engine as it headed over empty cropland and gathered speed. At roughly one in the morning, the train was speeding directly toward the refinery. The tracks it rode led directly to the center of the plant, into a nest of pipes and silos and towers filled with flammable fuel.
Bernard Paulson woke up in his office to the phone ringing. He answered it and heard an employee shouting on the other end. Paulson was half asleep and trying to make sense of what he was hearing. There had been some kind of accident. A train crash. Paulson quickly dressed and ran out of his office. There were men shouting outside, and he ran toward them.
Then he saw a surreal thing. A diesel engine, lying on its side, in the middle of the refinery grounds. The giant train engine was still running.
* * *
When the train engine came hurtling through the refinery, it had been heading straight toward a large refining tower. But there were mechanisms set into the train tracks, called derailers, that acted as a safety stop to prevent damage from runaway trains. The engine hit the derailers at a high speed and the mechanisms did their job, flipping the steel engine onto its side and off the track, sending it skidding over the refinery grounds.
If the derailers had not been in place, if the train had kept going, it would have crashed directly into a series of gasoline lines, pumps and pipes. It is likely that an inferno would have engulfed the refinery and killed many of the men who were working there. Paulson could have been burned alive in his office. The wreck was roughly two hundred feet from where he’d been sleeping.
Paulson tried to absorb what he was seeing as he circled the diesel engine. One of his employees on shift at the time had worked on train lines before, and he climbed into the fallen engine and shut it off. Paulson stared at the wreckage and thought of all the people who had just narrowly avoided death. And he thought to himself: Who could do something like that? The wreck sent a clear message. If Koch aimed to destroy the OCAW, the OCAW would destroy Koch.
* * *
The union’s violence was driven in part by anger. But it was also driven by fear. The union men might have had strength in numbers, but, in many important ways, the union was not as powerful as it once had been.
The strength of modern American unions rested largely on one significant piece of New Deal legislation passed in 1935, called the Wagner Act. The law gave workers the legal right to join a union and legally obligated companies to bargain with them. The act also created a federal agency to oversee union disputes, called the National Labor Relations Board. With these new legal protections, the ranks of union membership swelled. By the 1950s, labor unions were an accepted, almost inevitable part of mainstream American life, with more than one-third of US workers belonging to a union. The impact of the unions was felt even by workers who didn’t belong to them—the very presence of unions affected nonunion companies. These companies knew that their wages and working conditions had to be generous enough to ward off the threat that their employees would defect or start a union of their own. This system started to corrode during the 1960s, however, and it corroded partly from within.