The story of the union striking against Northwest Airlines is very big, because buried in it there is something that looks like a change in the intellectual soul of the nation. For generations it has been widely accepted that when one union goes on strike, members of other unions should express their corporate sympathy by refusing to cross the picket line.

Restraints on collegial striking as highest priority were here and there imposed by Congress and the courts. And it was the chief executive – President Ronald Reagan – who in 1981 fired the air-traffic controllers who struck illegally, barring them from reemployment. But mostly the attitude has been that if a picket line is set up, all conscientious people are supposed to observe it, never mind any examination of the issues being fought over.

Three examples come to mind. The first involved Eleanor Roosevelt, who one evening stopped short of entering a theater that was being picketed, announcing that she would not cross a picket line “under any circumstance.” That statement gave rise to the nearest thing to the inescapably rationalist reply in modern polemics, which was a call for volunteers to picket round-the-clock all the exits from Hyde Park.

Next most arresting was the event featuring professor John Kenneth Galbraith. It was in 1967, and Mr. Galbraith, freshly anointed as chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, was bound for a studio for an interview on “Meet the Press.” But AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, had called a strike, and professor Galbraith refused to cross the picket line into the studio. Here was a champion of independent thought submitting to indiscriminate instructions with a kind of docility unknown outside of Carthusian life.

My favorite recollection features David Susskind, the great organizer of television forums. He was premiering a stunt. Gathered about a table at the center of which was a little Sony television set sitting on a lazy Susan were a half-dozen men of illustrious public station. They included Billy Rose, John Kenneth Galbraith, the comedian Dick Gregory, and the journalist, me, set to answer questions posed from Grand Central Station.

Mr. Susskind announced with a little trace of embarrassment that when he called out the name of any one of us, the guest addressed had to rise quickly from his seat and occupy the seat of the guest seated opposite the Sony. You see, said Mr. Susskind, the union hadn’t decided who had the authority to twiddle the Sony set to face the guest called upon. This meant that six public figures had to dance about the table at high speed playing musical chairs to oblige the union bureaucracy. Billy Rose could have put us on as an exhibit at the World’s Fair.

What has happened in Minnesota is that other unions are simply not observing this picket line. There are pilots and flight attendants and baggage handlers and contractors who are quietly expressing themselves by declining to strike.

The management of Northwest is defending itself by taking on some of the jobs performed by the striking union. That kind of thing was attempted by AFTRA during its strike, to the huge amusement of large audiences who found themselves listening to broadcast news on strike night not as told by Dan Rather and Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters, but as told by vice presidents yanked from their offices. In the sprightly observation of an editor of Time magazine, that evening we were regaled with news of “Vest Nom,” “Cheeze Juftif Warren,” “cloddy skies” and “mosterly easterly winds.”

Well, Northwest executives can’t fly their airplanes, but they can reach out to unemployed mechanics, as they have done, finding hundreds who are willing and able to do the work necessary to keep Northwest flying. There was no alternative except to plead for bankruptcy. It is a growing sense of the need to cope with economic realities that we see here, displacing altar-boy deference to union strikes, merely because they are strikes by unions.

If Northwest prevails, it will have accomplished more merely than the continued flight of its airplanes.