to block Franklin Roosevelt's military preparedness policy. Strikes at Harville Die-Casting Company, Alcoa, and North American Aviation were widely seen within the Roosevelt administration as communist-inspired for ideological reasons, rather than for better wages and working conditions. The most important strike seen as communist-inspired was at the Allis-Chalmers aircraft plant in Los Angeles on 5 June 1941. The plant built bombers for the U. S. and British governments, and the strike was seen as a serious threat to American aid to the Allies. The federal government seized the plant and army troops forced open paths through the picket lines to allow workers to enter the plant. World War II and the no-strike pledge The CP's policy toward President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and war changed as soon as Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. At that point, the CP changed into unqualified supporters for the war effort. For their labor allies, that meant not only unconditional support for a wartime no-strike pledge - which the rest of the labor movement had endorsed to some degree - but also opposition to anything that would compromise anti-fascist unity at home. The CP's opponents within the labor movement would also use CP's sudden change against them in the factional battles of the years to come. The change in CP policy led to some startlingly inconsistent positions on its part. When A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the foremost African-American unionist of the time, urged a march on Washington in 1941 to underscore black workers' demands for the elimination of job discrimination in war industries, the CP attacked him relentlessly. This is more than ironic: the CP had championed black workers' rights in the past, even when it complicated their efforts to organize textile workers or miners in the South. The Party had, however, strong political differences with Randolph, even before it became a supporter of the war: he had resigned as head of the National Negro Congress and denounced the CP when the CP broke with the Roosevelt Administration. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union it continued to attack Randolph's proposed March, but now on the ground that it undermined the unity needed to win the war. The CP did not, on the other hand, abandon its support for civil rights, supporting the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and fighting for equal treatment of black workers in