Redcio revision 2012

The CIO and It’s Left Wing:

Their Rise and Fall

By Mike Olszanski April, 1997
(Revised 11/2011)

All that harms labor is treason to America. No line
can be drawn between these two. If any man tells you
he loves America, yet he hates labor, he is a liar.
If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor,
he is a fool.

I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails
under which laborers can strike when they want to....
I like the system which lets a man quit when he
wants to and wish it might prevail everywhere.

The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of
the family relation, should be one uniting all
working people of all nations, tongues and kindreds.

-From the speeches of Abraham Lincoln

If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I
would do would be to join a union.

-Franklin D. Roosevelt

We were nervous and we didn't know we could do it.
Those machines had kept going as long as we could
remember. When we finally pulled the switch and
there was some quiet, I finally remembered something:
That I was a human being, that I could stop those
machines, that I was better than those machines
anytime.

-Sit-down striker, 1936

Mike Olszanski 1 April, 1997

Long before Marx' exhortation: "Workers of all countries, unite!" workers

were organizing in the United States of America. The first U.S. unions were more

like guilds and, organized along craft lines, had limited goals and limited success.

Not until the CIO did mass unionization begin. As with all social movements,

various theories have been advanced in an attempt to explain the successes and

failures, the rise and decline of the U.S. trade union movement, but traditional

theories of sociology and social psychology, while offering some insight into the

reasons the labor movement gained ground in the 1930's, seem inadequate to

thoroughly explain the complex dynamics at work in the movement at various

periods in its development.

The breakdown theory of Durkheim, et al., fails to differentiate between

mob action and the organized, planned collective activities of unions, e.g., strikes,

demonstrations, slowdowns etc.—clearly rational activities which have achieved

significant long term gains in the areas of wages, hours and working conditions,

not to mention simple respect.1 Indeed, the U.S. Labor movement seems to refute

a great deal of what Durkheim had to say.


The charismatic leadership theory of Max Weber emphasizes the

importance of leaders with strong personalities. Applied to the likes of John L.

Lewis, it seems to have been a factor in labor's success2.

Piven and Cloward's caveat concerning the counter-productive effects of the

tendency toward bureaucratization in organizations like unions and the coopting of

leaders casts some light on the conservative trend in the unions, though I do not

agree that this was inevitable, by any means.3

Solidarity theory, ala Marx, furnishes perhaps the most rational

understanding of the labor movement. The movement according to Marx stems

from the adversarial relationship between capital and labor inherent in the capitalist

system, the recognition of that relationship by a class-conscious working class, and

the empowerment of the class through its mass organizations which act in the

interest of the workers vis-a-vis management. By itself however, it fails to explain

organized labor's loss of power and influence in recent years.4

The CIO organizing days of the 1930's and 1940's saw some of the most

rapid, dramatic and profound advances for the American labor movement in

history; the 1980's perhaps the most precipitous decline. I will argue that perhaps

the single most important factor in that advance and subsequent decline was the

influence and activities of the left within organized labor in the thirties, and the

virtual elimination of the left in the purges of the 1940's and 1950's. 5


My broad definition of the left includes socialists, communists and

anarchists whether organized or independent, i.e., those who believe basic systemic

change to be desirable, whether or not it is inevitable. Indeed, many labor activists

joined and left organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),

Socialist Party (SP), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Socialist Workers Party

(SWP) and others at various times during their careers. Salient examples include

William Z. Foster, organizer of the national 1919 Steel Strike who left the IWW to

become a major leader of the CPUSA. The six Dunne brothers, who led the 1934

Minneapolis Teamsters strike, likewise started with the CP at its founding in 1919

(Bill Dunne edited the Daily Worker at one point) then changed to the Trotskyists

during the CP split in the 1920’s.6

While most histories of the 1930's credit Roosevelt's New Deal with the

legalization and encouragement of union organizing e.g., the Norris-LaGuardia Act

of 1932, Section 7a of the NIRA and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935

("Wagner Act") it must be emphasized that, as Gore Vidal and others have put it,

"Roosevelt's aim was to save capitalism."7

The left, including the Communist Party (CPUSA) and socialists and

anarchists of all denominations were unfettered by any such allegiance to a

capitalist system which had caused the worst depression in history and whose


worst faults and contradictions had become manifest in that depression. Class

consciousness among the poor and workers was high. While they were not joining

radical organizations in droves, they joined unions by the millions, unions led

and/or clearly influenced by reds, and in many cases calling for basic systemic

change. "Class consciousness in action," Cohen calls it.8

Roosevelt, Wagner and other New Deal liberals were, at least in part,

responding to the perceived threat to the very survival of the political economic

system of capitalism posed by the specter of revolutionary change. In providing a

safety net (social programs) and safety valve (legal unions) FDR liberalism (social

reforms) sought to blunt Durkheimian discontent, anomie, revolt. The Keynsian

Welfare State (KWS) was the response to the depression based on the economic

theories of John Maynard Keynes, adopted by the New Deal. However sincere

FDR's sympathies for the working class, he was not of it.

He could, however, read the writing on the wall. In 1934 the

Milwaukee streetcar strike, nation-wide textile strike, Minneapolis "riot", and the

general strike in San Francisco, were an indication of how far workers could and

would take things. That year leftist west coast Long Shoreman Union president

Harry Bridges, with the help of the Communist Party, had built a power base

which enabled him to shut down west coast ports. From Seattle to L.A., 50,000

dockworkers walked out, precipitating the San Francisco General Strike, which


brought out National Guard troops with machine guns and tanks.9 Hugh Johnson,

Roosevelt's head of NRA, called the strike "a menace to government" and "bloody

insurrection."10 This was a kind of re-run of the Seattle General Strike of 1919,

over the longshoremen's refusal to load military supplies for the U.S. intervention

in Russia.11 The Toledo Auto-Lite Strike and Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of

1934 also saw armed conflict, and many strikers throughout the country including

textile strikers throughout the south ran up against “prison graduates” employed

by “strike breaker number one” Pearl L. Berghoff.and his cronies.12

The million and a half workers who struck 1800 times that year were

sending a message, clearly articulated by Upton Sinclair in his campaign for

Governor of California as a Socialist and to a lesser extent by groups like the

Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, led by Governor Floyd B. Olson and Huey P.

Long's "Share the Wealth" campaign. The message: the system is not working for

the working class, and the working class can change the system. While the right

wing was making their voice heard by spending millions, it must have been clear to

Roosevelt that if push came to shove, millions of workers could exercise more

power than millions of dollars. The Bonus Army march on Washington of 1932

might be the precursor of a not so peaceful "invasion" of jobless workers the next

time.


Why were American workers willing to join a labor movement clearly led

(on the local and shop-floor level) and influenced by the left in the 1930's? Why

did some fraction of the same workers actually join Socialist and Communist

organizations during the same period? William Z Foster, first a member of the

Socialist Party, later the International Workers of the World (IWW) later leader of

the Communist Party (CPUSA) who was active in organizing unions from around

the turn of the century through the Great Steel Strike of 1919 offered this

explanation, supported, I believe, by a preponderance of the evidence:

The workers progress best, intellectually and in point of organization, under
two general conditions, the antipodes of each other: (1) during periods of
devastating hardship, (2) in eras of so-called prosperity.
When suffering extreme privation they are literally compelled to think
and act, and when the pressure of the exploiter is relatively light,
during good times, they take courage and move forward of their own
volition. The static periods...are when times are neither very bad nor
very good. The workers...learn by action. It is just when they
enjoy greatest power and well-being...that they are most stimulated to desire
and demand more.13

During these exciting times in the thirties, people like John Sargent, Nick

Migas, and Joe Gyurko at Inland Steel joined the Steelworkers Organizing

Committee (SWOC) organized the giant Local 1010, negotiated our first contracts,

got beaten up on the picket lines, collected dues at the plant gates (before the

check-off) and were later hounded by the FBI, dragged before the House

UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) red-baited in union elections and in


the case of Migas, Local 1010 president in 1945, beaten by reactionary USWA

goons for his exercise of the constitutional right to free speech at the United

Steelworkers of America (USWA) convention.

Leaders like John L. Lewis of course still garner the credit of historians,

lending some credence to charismatic authority theories. Punching out "Big Bill"

Hutcheson of the Carpenters union at the 1935 AFL Convention in Atlantic City,

then walking out to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) assured

Lewis a legendary place in the history of the labor movement. Denouncing the

conservative AFL leadership's refusal to support the "industrial organization of

mass production workers" in auto and steel, Lewis invoked (for him) typical high-

flown bombastic prose: "I was seduced, I am enraged, and I am ready to rend my

seducers limb from limb." 14 His answer to Michigan Governor Frank Murphy

when machine guns were placed at the gates of the GM's Flint auto plant during the

sitdown strikes still sends chills down my spine:

Tomorrow morning I shall personally enter GeneralMotors Plant
Chevrolet #4. I shall order the men to disregard your order,
to stand fast. I shall then walk to the largest window in the plant,
open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt
and bare my bosom. Then when you order your troops to fire,
mine will be the first breast those bullets will strike."

Inspirational, charismatic, indeed. Smart and effective, sure.

Also flamboyant and self-aggrandizing.


Contrast those words with those of USWA's John Sargent, several times elected

President of Local 1010 at Inland, who considered himself,

…fortunate to be caught up in a great movement of the people in
this country. And that doesn't happen very often in one's lifetime
...a movement that moved millions of people, literally, and
changed not only the course of the working man, but...the relation-
ship between the working man and the government ...and the boss,
for all time in this country." Workers who were "gonna have
a union, come hell or high water. nothin' was gonna stop em.15

Sargent, a leader of the CP's Young Communist League (YCL) in the

early thirties, who apparently left the party before the fifties, credits

the left, and especially the masses, with building SWOC, the CIO and the

USWA:

A young fella who becomes active in the union, who hasn't got
a broader perspective than just the union, sees the union as
a stepping stone to security for himself, either to get a job in the
union...or to use the union to get a job with the company, as a foreman,
for instance...

It was that way once you got the check-off. Unless
the guy has a socialist viewpoint, or some kind of broader view-
point of what this whole thing means, you're not
gonna get good leadership. That's an important part
of it.

The other side of the coin: these guys then become purists, and
like any religion, ya know, you can't dissent any more.
That's the problem in the labor movement, or you haven't got
any movement.


History's important. But if anybody tells you you gotta believe
a guy like me because he's been through this stuff, don't listen
to him. It's not 1936 now. Use your own initiative...These
old guys are alright. They did what they had to do.16

My own union experience supports Sargent's view of the importance of

a leftist perspective. It was once again the leftists who were most often correct on

the issues, who did the most and best union work. Their reward: redbaiting. When

I started at Inland's Indiana Harbor Works late in 1963, John was again running for

president of the 18,000 member Local 1010. My introduction to union politics was

an introduction to red-baiting, as all through the mill I saw posted Xerox copies of

excerpts from Sargent's testimony before The House Un-American Activities

Committee (HUAC), with "commie" scrawled across them in red marker. Despite

being cleared by HUAC's 1958 Gary inquisition, as reported on the front page of

the Gary Post Tribune, John Sargent was viciously red-baited until his retirement

from union activities due to a heart condition around 1967. His Rank & File

Caucus overcame it, and he won his last term as Local 1010 president in 1964.17

President Sargent's 1943 letter to the War Labor Board, threatening to strike

Inland in defiance of the CIO (and CP) supported war time no-strike pledge, brings

into question Sargent's adherence to any "party line" during the war years, but adds

weight to his image as a militant, rank & file oriented leader.18


Peter Calacci, Trotskyist in the forties--when it was popular—was president

of 1010 from 1956-1962. Sectarian anti-communist and opponent (with Manuel

Turbovich and Max Luna) of Sargent's Rank & File group, he supported the

USWA's anti- communist line, and was appointed sub-district Director by

Germano.19

Supporters of Sargent and members of the center-left Rank & File Caucus at 1010

included accused Communists Jim Balanoff (elected president of 1010 in 1976 and

Director of 120,000 member District 31 in 1977) and Joe Gyurko, long-time

Griever and later Grievance Chair. Joe Gyurko started at Inland in 1939 and paid

his first union dues before his probationary period ended. He was a "Dues

Steward" in the days before the check-off, and on the first negotiating committee at

1010. When SWOC became the USWA in 1942, Gyurko helped build its first

grievance committee. In the mill during the war years, he packed tin-plate in

crates destined for the Soviet Union, and complained of co-workers who "nailed

the crates just any-old way...They didn't care 'cause it was for the Russians." Now

in his seventies and long-since retired, Joe still finds it difficult to talk about the

McCarthy era, but told me in a taped interview in May of 1983 about how FBI

agents sat in a car parked in front of his house day and night, watching every move

he and his family made.20


Like John Sargent, Jim Balanoff and countless others across the country

Gyurko had to overcome vicious red-baiting and Government intimidation to get

elected to any union office from 1947 or 1948 on. Passed over by many careerists

and right-opportunists, it would be 1980 before Joe was elected to full-time union

office. Needless to say, Rank & Filers, accused reds and militants, never got

offered jobs on the USWA staff anymore until left-leaning Ed Sadlowski of Local

65 (U.S. Steel South Chicago Works) was elected District 31 Director in 1973.

An especially poignant example of guilt by association is the case of a co-

worker of mine, Stanley Rygas. A member of the Rank & File Caucus in the early

1950's. Rygas, an elected Assistant Grievance Committeeman, was removed from

office by 1010 President Don Lutes in June, 1953 for allegedly rubber-stamping

his name to Communist literature and mailing it to other union members. While he

"emphatically denied this forgery" and subsequent charges of violating the

USWA's anti-Communist clause, Rygas received notice from Secretary-Treasurer

I.W. Abel in April 1955, that the Inter-national Union had upheld Lutes motion to

terminate his union membership (tantamount to having him fired by Inland) subject

to appeal in Pittsburgh. In charges filed against him, his association with John

Sargent, Jim Balanoff and other "known or suspected Communists" was used as

evidence against him.21 When Sargent's eligibility to run for office was challenged

in 1954 and when he was called before HUAC in 1958, his association with Rygas


was in turn used as evidence against him!22 Stanley subsequently kept his union

membership, and therefore his job in the mill, but never again ran for union office,

and never discussed union politics.

Some historians see the 80,000 members of the CPUSA at its peak

(one ex-Communist leader estimated closer to 100,000)23 and the 100,000 votes

received by William Z. Foster in 1932 as insignificant. But who has estimated the

number of workers who, not willing to join a party or vote for Foster or Norman

Thomas, would fight side by side with reds for union rights and perhaps even

fundamental systemic change? In the thirties --a rare period of American history--

radicalism, including socialism and even Communism, were recognized, as they

had traditionally been in Europe, as legitimate alternatives to capitalism. 24

The work of leftists in organizing, building and leading unions was

respected and admired by workers, and when John L. Lewis began the CIO

organizing drive, he used every red he could find to get the union built,

recognizing their ability, dedication, discipline and experience--in the labor and

unemployed movements. No friend of revolution, Lewis, when asked whether he

didn't fear losing control to the left, is rumored to have remarked, "Who gets the

bird, the hunter or the dog?"25 His cynical strategy of exploiting the talents and

energies of leftists, with the aim of purging them later, was to prove a paradigm

for the unscrupulous opportunists who later used the House Un-American


Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism to expel, not just Communists,

but thousands of dedicated, decent, hard-working union leaders whose only crime

was to stand up for constitutional rights against the ruthless, cold-war-inspired

reactionary tide of the late forties and fifties.

But if the late forties was a period of reaction, one might have sensed

revolution in the air in the 1930's. During the United Auto Workers (UAW) sit-

down strikes of 1936-37, radical Socialists and American Trotskyists publicly

denounced "capitalist politicians" and the "illusions" some workers might have

about Franklin D. Roosevelt, "class representative of the capitalist state."

Communists--supporters of FDR and concerned with bad publicity from red-

baiting of the union--used more subtle tactics, (e.g., distributing the Daily Worker

inside the plants). Despite their differences though, the various factions worked

together in the UAW and the CIO.

Walter Reuther, a member of the Socialist Party, spent two years in the

USSR, where he and brother Victor worked in a Gorky auto plant. Back in the

USA, he worked with Party members including William Weinstone, and by one

account "paid dues for a time to the CP." For its part, the CP, with more members

in the auto plants than the Socialists and Trotskyists, backed Reuther and the

Socialist leadership, and worked for unity in the UAW promoting a world wide

"United Front."26


The forty-four day sit-down of General Motors plants #1 and #2 in Flint,

Michigan was organized and led primarily by local Communists Wyndem

Mortimer, Bud Simons ("Mayor" of Plant #1) and Henry Kraus, with the full

cooperation and support of the Socialist Workers Party's Genora and Kermit

Dollinger (Genora was a leader of the Women's Emergency Brigade, so vital in the

winning of the strike). As with other leftists, these leaders had won the respect and

following of those with whom they worked by their deeds more than by their

words. While the men occupied the plant, the women manned picket lines which

successfully held off gangs of armed police trying to storm the plants. As Nellie,

one of the Women's Emergency Brigade's members put it, "We couldn't have done

it without the Communists and Socialists," whose intelligence, leadership and

organizing ability were critical.27

The February 11, 1937 agreement, negotiated by John L. Lewis, which

settled the Flint strike was a "giant step toward the goal of bringing industrial

unionism to the auto industry..." and "...powerful vindication of the CIO [and

Lewis'] course."28

It was also a powerful illustration of the importance of left leadership and

left-center unity among rank and file autoworkers, who, to a much greater extent

than in steel, exercised considerable local autonomy and control of their own


union.

Early advocates of industrial union organizing, the CP's Trade Union

Educational League (TUEL) organized miners and textile workers in the twenties,

according to Eleanor Binkley representing 70,000 workers by 1929, when it

became the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL).

Urging political action and opposition to racism and sexism, TUUL

organizers brought their principles to CIO organizing after TUUL dissolved itself

in 1935 in favor of the CP's popular front policy of center-left unity supporting

Lewis and the CIO.29

A factor in the unity on the left in the mid thirties, according to Hal Draper,

organizer for the Independent Socialist League in 1937, was that the Norman

Thomas Socialists and the CP "crossed each other, going in opposite directions,"

around 1935 or 1936, the Communists going right, the Socialists to the left.30

Beyond ideology though, leftists were practical enough to understand the need for

unity.

With the entrance of the United States into World War II, the CIO's wartime

no-strike pledge--supported by the CP to avoid disruption of war materials

production as well as to avoid provoking repression by the Government of the

union--was loudly denounced by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and Max

Schatman's Workers party (WP) who opposed the war.


Especially in the UAW, the split caused problems, but a membership

referendum on the issue, held by the UAW in 1944, in which but 320,000 of the

1,250,000 auto workers voted, reaffirmed the union's commitment to the no-strike

pledge two-to-one. Walter Reuther avoided taking a firm position on the issue, but

later used it in his campaign to oust the Communists. The controversy continues to

this day over the wisdom of the Party's enthusiastic support of the pledge, resented

by many rank and file CIO members. In retrospect, CP leader William Z. Foster,

allowed that Communists had perhaps erred in enforcing the pledge "too rigidly."31

John Williamson, Ohio CP District Organizer in the thirties, was convinced that

the Party's wartime policies under Browder had "forfeited leadership to the

Reuthers and other radical phrasemongers."32

Researcher Roger Keeran, while recognizing a decline of the left (at least in

the UAW) as a result of Word War II "Browderism", concludes that this decline

was marginal:

...because in spite of their mistakes the Communists did much that
won rank and file respect. The Communists' enthusiasm for the
war effort certainly appealed to workers who were for the most part
patriotic. Moreover, in spite of the wartime restraint, the Communists
vigorously pursued the union's objectives in organizing, educational
and political work.

The Communists also engaged in important struggles on behalf
of black and women workers. All of this contributed to...
maintaining an important influence in the union after the war.
Consequently, the Cold War, rather than the Second World War,
would provide the setting for the decisive defeat of the Communists..."33


Trotskyists, perhaps the most radical of the left-wing sects in the thirties in

the sense that they eschewed electoral politics in favor of revolutionary

movement, were bitter foes, politically, of the Communist Party "Stalinists".

Splitting off from the CP in 1928, in response to Stalin's announced policy of

"socialism in one country," the at first "tiny" group of expelled party members

formed their own Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In a notable success,

experienced organizers--known Trotskyists--inherited from the CP, organized and

built a powerful Local of the Teamsters in Minneapolis (Local 544). In 1934 they

conducted a strike, led by Vincent, Grant and Miles Dunne and (later president)

Carl Skogland, which caused Minnesota Governor Olson to declare martial law

and call out the National Guard. They introduced "flying squadrons" later used

throughout the CIO. The strike was supported by the entire labor movement of

the area, as well as the farmers of Minnesota. While a purely local phenomenon,

the Minneapolis Teamsters strike of 1934 impressed labor activists far and wide,

who acknowledged that it was well and effectively run, and won respect and a

reputation for the Trotskyists. Unsuccessful in building an anti-Stalinist party of

great size or influences in the U.S., Trotskyists played a role in the building of a

militant labor movement in the thirties and afterward, and aided in the raising of its

class-consciousness.34


Trotskyists worked in the Socialist Unemployed Leagues in the early

thirties, which eventually merged with the CP's Unemployed Councils in 1936,

forming a national Workers Alliance which claimed a membership of 800,000.

Many CIO organizers would benefit from experience with the unemployed

movement led by the left.35 While the SWP only claimed 3,000 members nation-

wide by 1941, the Department of justice claimed to have proof that the number

exceeded 5,000.36

The Trotskyist leaders of CIO Local 544, including the SWP's Dunne

brothers, were indicted under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Alien and

Sedition Act) in 1941, victims --along with Harry Bridges--of Martin Dies

infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and Hoover's FBI a decade

before Senator Joe McCarthy's inquisition of the early 1950's. Noting the years it

took the Justice department to indict these union leaders, independent journalist of

the day I. F. Stone wondered in print in the July 26, 1941 issue of The Nation

whether it was really their move to leave the AFL and Dan Tobin's International

Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) for the CIO which brought down the

Government's wrath on Local 544. 37

Unfortunately, while the CIO leadership defended the 17 Local 544 leaders,

the CP's Daily Worker of August 16, 1941 dubbed them a "fifth column" and

"agents of fascism" for their refusal to support FDR and the Allies against Hitler.


This sectarianism, excused by some based on the need to promote the war against

Fascism in Europe, would be used against the CP leaders when their turn came.38

Farrell Dobbs, leader of the Teamsters and the SWP, was the mentor of

Jimmy Hoffa, who later disavowed Dobbs' Trotskyism, but never his skills as an

organizer.39

At Local 1010, Manuel Trbovich "and other Trotskyists led a mid-war

departmental strike over a discharge to a successful re-hiring," according to

Staughton Lynd.40

Race and ethnicity were major factors in the American labor movement from

its inception. These divisive factors were overcome by class-consciousness

fostered by a leftist perspective, with he help of left-wing leadership. The resulting

unity played a major role in the success of the CIO, as well as in progress for

minorities. Subsequently, the purge of leftists resulted in the erosion of many of

the gains made by minorities through the CIO. The earliest trade unions were craft

unions, operating much like guilds. Exclusive clubs, they exercised not just ethnic

and racial discrimination in admitting members, but also a good deal of nepotism, a

tradition which survives to this day in AFL building trades unions.

Social historian Lizabeth Cohen among others argues quite convincingly

that the success of the CIO in the mid thirties was as much the result of changes in

the workers' own self-image in terms of race, ethnicity and class during the 1920's


and 1930's as on external influences like the charismatic leadership of John L.

Lewis or the anti-union militancy of corporate America.41

In 1919, Cohen reminds us, workers "launched the greatest strike wave in

American history."42 It failed, she says, less because of the government's Red

Scare, the AFL's conservatism and the strength of the employers' resolve than

because of the workers' own isolation in local neighborhoods and fragmentation by

ethnicity and race. Divided--by location, language, culture, loyalty, color--the

workers were more easily conquered.43

Having only recently come together in huge industrial workplaces--most of

which were still segregated along ethnic and racial lines by plant and department--

workers in 1919 went home to ethnic neighborhoods and racial ghettos which were

cut off from each other and still insulated from the larger mass culture just then

beginning to emerge. African Americans, of course, were relegated to even more

circumscribed sections of the city, denied even the advantage of living close to the

mills and factories where they worked.44 Working -class ethnics identified with,

relied on, were loyal to their neighbors, who spoke the same language, ate the same

food, enjoyed the same dances and music went to he same church and most

important of all, were the same color. They patronized local ethnic businesses

and established their own charities and banks. In short, they "took care of their

own," resisting attempts, even by religious leaders such as Catholic Archbishop


(later Cardinal) Mundelein, at “Americanizing" them. By 1919 they had not yet

encountered, much less embraced the mass culture most of us take for granted

today, which would tend to homogenize society across ethnic, if not racial

boundaries, classes and even regions in the twenties, spurred by advertisers seeking

mass markets who would exploit mass media like radio and the movies.45

Ms. Cohen's analysis squares pretty well with that of William Z. Foster, a

leader of the 1919 Steel Strike, and offers valuable insight into the sociology of the

early labor movement. Sociologist Steven Steinberg agrees with Cohen's view on

the importance of ethnic and racial divisions in the early twentieth century, and

their exploitation by capitalists.

Even earlier, after the collapse of the militant, racially inclusive and

avowedly radical Knights of Labor, skilled workers were split from less skilled

immigrants and blacks by cunning employers who, in the absence of class-

conscious organization, exploited "status anxieties and simple fear combined to

heighten craft exclusiveness among (the remaining) skilled workers."46

Ethnic pluralism--"diversity", to use the latest popular term--survived in first

and second generation immigrants, in part paradoxically, Steinberg says, due to

the segregation of groups like African Americans, Jews and--at least initially--

other ethnics by the WASP power structure, and the consequent necessity for

ethnics and minorities to stick together in the face of the prejudice and


discrimination which they faced. Eventually the "melting pot" of American mass

culture largely subsumed ethnic, but not racial identities. Immigrants and

especially their children changed, adapted, assimilated in response to the need "to

feel a part of their adopted society."47

They were able to do so and also, eventually to achieve relative economic

success, according to Steinberg because they were the same color as the WASP

elites. Other racial minorities, especially blacks, had no such ability to assimilate.

Hence, it was not a lack of cultural "family" values (as today's "culture of poverty"

theorists and right-wing politicians would have us believe) but the brand of racism

which relegated a large section of AfricanAmericans and other non-whites to a

continuing underclass status.

Exploitation by the bosses of ethnic and racial divisions had helped defeat

the steel strike of 1919 and other strikes and organizing efforts of that period. As

has been widely reported, African Americans were imported as scabs to break the

steel strike:

Black sharecroppers were brought up from the South.
They were promised good jobs at high wages with good
conditions. They knew nothing about making steel, nor
did they know that they were being used as strikebreakers."48


Perhaps less well known, but well-remembered by veterans of the early days

of Local 1010 is the fact that Inland Steel, in Indiana Harbor, preferred to import

its scabs from Mexico, housing many of them in a company-owned flea bag hotel

in the shadow of the mill, later known as the Baltimore. Many of these immigrants

descendants helped build the USWA and the CIO in the 1930's.49

The break with the AFL in 1935 was, to a great extent, a break with

racism and ethnocentrism, both implicit features of the old craft unions, which

disdained lower skilled industrial workers almost as a lower class. The right wing

AFL leaders contempt for blacks and unskilled immigrants was matched by their

contempt for communists, socialists and the syndicalists of their early rivals, the

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), many of whose leaders, like William Z.

Foster, would later lead the CPUSA. Cohen credits Communists with "constantly

agitating against white racism and for black equailty,"50 and organizing, along with

socialists, unemployed councils that paved the way for union organization by the

CIO, which inherited many of its organizers from the unemployed movement.51

CIO leaders of the thirties, especially leftists, conscious that solidarity of the

entire working class was essential, strove to foster class unity, to make sure that

this time would be different. Organizing along industrial lines meant organizing

across craft lines, which meant organizing across ethnic and racial lines.


Black and ethnic organizers were hired, staffs deliberately inclusive of

the different groups. Indeed, the CIO's "celebration of diversity", encouraged by

the left, anticipated recent efforts.52

According to labor historian Robert Zeiger,

It was the Communists and their allies, after all, who created
and sustained the most principled biracial unions of the CIO era,
unions that in some cases pioneered in promoting egalitarian
workplace practices and in energizing somnolent civil rights
organizations.53

Blacks, "..a population that had catalyzed unionization."54 were actively

recruited by UAW and CIO organizers, joining in large numbers. Some, like Local

1010 (USWA) officer (and Socialist, according to Sam Evett) Bill Young, whose

father was beaten on the streets of East Chicago during the 1919 steel strike, were

elected by their fellow workers because of their radicalism and heroic behavior

during strikes. In 1978, Young told CBS TV's George Herman about being clubbed

on the head at the 1937 "Memorial Day Massacre" at Republic Steel in South

Chicago, where ten union men (three from Local 1010) were killed--gunned down

by Chicago's finest. "They beat me pretty good, but I was on the picket line the

next morning," the eighty-something retiree told CBS. Why did he join the

union? "You had no rights the boss was bound to respect," Young declared.55


Most oppressed, many Blacks accepted radical ideas, and recruitment by radical

groups, as freely as immigrants familiar with leftist ideas from their European

backgrounds.

According to Jimmie Carter's Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall,

Communists...were unquestionably a force for equalitarianism
in the CIO. By raising the race issue to gain Negro support,
the Communists forced white leaders to pay more attention to
racial problems.56

In the UAW,

Communists led in recruiting black leaders into its local
organizations, which in turn functioned as civil rights
ginger groups.57

In 1941 a left-led alliance of the NAACP and the UAW helped the Detroit

Rouge Local 600 organizing drive, then provided a vehicle for blacks to gain

power in the UAW and launch local civil rights drives all during World War II.

The NAACP in Michigan gained so many working class members as a result of the

alliance that it was transformed from the elite-dominated organization of pre-war

years.58

Years later actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson would praise Local 600 as a

paradigm of black-white and left-center unity in the CIO. At a picnic in 1951

organized by the black foundry workers and attended by a racially mixed audience

of nearly 7,000 Robeson,


..was moved to pay tribute to the foundry workers who..
have developed a unity which is the core of the progressive
militancy of the entire local.59

This in the face of vicious attacks by the right wing Reutherites and cold-warriors

in the Truman administration on the CIO's left wing.

Another union in which militant blacks played a leading role also

exemplified the CIO's role in civil rights struggles. The United Federal

Workers (UFW) chartered by the CIO in June, 1937 launched an all-out

drive to organize Government employees in Washington, D.C. in 1942, led

by four organizers, two of which were women. A Black machinist and

Howard University graduate, Marie Richardson was one. Another was

Coleman Young, later elected mayor of Detroit.

The UFW elected Thomas Richardson, a former organizer with the Southern

Negro Youth Congress, one of the first Black Vice Presidents of a CIO union in

1944. And the first woman seated on the CIO's national executive board was

Eleanor Nelson, President of the UFW. Attempting to deal with Federal job cutting

after World War II, and its devastating effect on black government workers, the

UFW proposed a Mandatory Transfer Plan, the main points of which were adopted

by the U. S. Civil Service Commission in 1945, giving veterans and laid-off

Federal workers preference for reconversion jobs. UFW President Tommy

Richardson stressed the importance of fighting for full-employment policies after


the war to protect war-time gains of blacks and maintain black-white unity in the

labor movement.

The questions of seniority and lay-offs as they affect Negro
job gains can only be resolved in a framework of strong
national unity, forged by the fight of the common people
for permanent peace and full employment.60

In 1943, a militant strike led by the African American majority of

workers at R. J. Reynolds in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, won recognition for

the left-wing United Cannery,Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of

America (UCAPAWA) and a measure of work-place democracy and black

power.61

Also in the forties, the CIO's Political Action Committee (PAC) helped elect

Benjamin J. Davis, a black Communist, to the New York City Council.62

West Coast CIO Chief Harry Bridges, President of the International

Longshoremen and Warehousemens' Union (ILWU) for nearly fifty years, was an

accused Communist with strong ties to the CP. He never denied his socialist

convictions, and in keeping with them, fought for racial equality in his union, the

CIO and the nation. As black ILWU activist Cleophas Williams told Studs Terkel

in a 1992 documentary, Bridges was,


Honestly committed to making the world a better place for
people to live in...One night at union meeting, one of the
old timers asked Harry, 'When the war is over,what are you
gonna do with these black guys who've come here to take our
jobs away from us?' Harry said he wished we had a system
where we could have full employment... But if things
ever reached the point where only two workers were left on the
waterfront...if he was the one to make the decision, one would
be a black man.

"Discrimination against Negroes is anti-labor, anti-American and anti-

white," Bridges wrote in his monthly column for the union newspaper. He might

have added, anti-working class. "The ILWU had a reputation for racial equality

which gave them a strong base of support in Hawaii," Terkel says in the Public

Television film, and Harry Bridges was the first to organize the various ethnic

groups there into a union.63

African American Jesse Reese worked at Youngstown Sheet & Tube's

Indiana Harbor Works, during the CIO days in the 1930's. Reese joined the

Communist Party, and helped organize the Steelworkers Organizing Committee

(SWOC) later the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). He saw the party as

the major force behind building the CIO, and the union as the vehicle for black

advancement as part of the advancement of the entire working class. Interviewed in

1973, Reese complained that after the reds were purged, the union became a "dog

with no teeth."64


Another Black Communist, Joe Henderson, participated in a number of

strikes to integrate the locker rooms and eliminate other racist practices at

Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant starting in 1949. He is credited with

signing up 1,300 Black and white steelworkers for union dues checkoff to block a

Bethlehem effort to decertify the USWA in the early fifties. Refusing to testify at

a HUAC hearing in 1951, Henderson was again summoned by HUAC in 1957,

and fired by Bethlehem as a result. An open member of the CPUSA from 1942

until his death in 1995, at age 83, Joe Henderson was an organizer for the Laborers

Union and the ILWU during World War II.65

Ray Dennis, first black elected to the Cleveland CIO Council's executive

board, and one more African American who saw the party as a major force in the

fight for racial equality, was elected president of Die Cast Workers Local 35

(International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers) in 1943. In 1947 he went

on went on the staff of Mine and Mill, another left-wing union, travelling the

country to "beat off raids and secessionist movements within his union."

When he refused to sign a Taft Hartley anticommunist affidavit, along with other

members of his union, Mine and Mill along with 10 other unions, was expelled

from the CIO. Ray's Die Cast Division was forced to strike for 15 months in 1948

and after the strike was won, he became district director of Mine and Mill. Tried


and convicted twice of "conspiracy" under the Taft-Hartley act, Dennis' was

eventually vindicated by the U. S. Supreme Court. With the merger of Mine, Mill

and Smelter with the USWA in 1967, he stayed on as a staff representative in

Cleveland, having missed the USWA's purges of the fifties. He retired in 1977, at

age 65.

Ray Dennis told an interviewer in 1997,

Organized labor is the most democratic and progressive
force in our society. We suffered a devastating setback when
we allowed anti-communist hysteria to split our ranks. 66

Inland steelworker Nick Migas, an open member of the Communist Party

and organizer for the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in the thirties,

learned about socialism, as well as the destructive influence of racism, early in life

from his father--an IWW member--and "Big Bill" Haywood, the Wobblies leader.

When I saw how the company worked against the workers,
especially the foreign born workers who were in no position
to defend themselves, it kind of roused my feeling about those
people not getting a fair deal...We had a lot of Mexican workers
in my department where discrimination was practiced.
They were constantly kept on small, menial jobs--scrap yard,
labor gang, furnaces--dirty, menial, hard work.
And no chance of promotion. That's why the union swept
like a wildfire through the mills.67

Migas, an ally of left-wing Local 1010 President John Sargent, and “Wildcat


Willie” Maihoffer, led a wildcat strike in #1 Open Hearth when the company

refused to promote a black man to second helper on the furnace. Many of the white

workers were southern, and tended to back management's position. At a meeting

inside the plant at which the plant superintendent Gillies vacillated, Migas lectured

his fellow workers on racism:

...discrimination starts, maybe, with a Negro, but next it will
go to the Mexican worker...and then it will go to the Kentuckian,
the hillbilly....Then a so-called hillbilly won't be able to work
in a steel mill. And where will it stop?68

The man got his job. Migas was later elected President of USWA Local

1010 in 1945, having served briefly on the USWA staff until he was fired for

supporting insurgent George Patterson in a bid for Director of District 31 against

Joe Germano. Challenging USWA President Phillip Murray over his cold war

foreign policies at the 1948 convention, where he was an elected delegate, he was

beaten by goons.

Later red-baited out of the union (though he himself claimed he

always wanted to go back to the farm anyway) Migas is one more example of how

leftists, who also happened to be, it would appear, some of the best fighters for

minority rights, were removed. 69

In the late 1940's the purging of left wing elements from the CIO left it in


the hands of a class-collaborationist leadership which did little to fight racism. As

Art Preis says,

The right wing, led by the Murray-Reuther-Carey forces,
was indeed weak and vacillating on such issues as upgrading
of Negroes, removing barriers to skilled and better-paid jobs
for Negroes, and ensuring Negro representation on all union
committees, including the highest.70

The November 20, 1949 Daily Worker criticized the CIO convention's

lack of emphasis on these issues, and demanded,

…recognition of Negro leadership in the trade unions by
securing representation on the policy- making boards of
the steel and auto workers and of the CIO itself.71

Pre-dating the Reagan era's charges of "reverse discrimination," the Reuther

leadership defended the UAW's failure to nominate blacks to the convention on the

grounds that to run "unqualified" African Americans would be "Jim Crow in

reverse."72

Also in 1949, some in the Black-owned Pittsburg Courier accused the

CIO's Civil Rights Committee (CRC)--originally established as the Committee to

Abolish Racial Discrimination in 1942--of doing "little or nothing to overcome

discrimination against Negroes."73 While it was "clear from the outset that the CRC

was to be primarily a public relations organization with advisory powers," which

"served as an organization to fight Communists in the Negro community," by 1949


Willard Townsend, president of the virtually all African American United

Transport Service Employees, complained that the USWA was losing members to

the "Communist dominated" Mine Mill and Smelter Workers among Blacks who

"jump us for being Uncle Toms for the CIO."74 Clearly left wing unions had a

better reputation among blacks in the late forties than did the main-stream CIO

unions.

As I see it, the CIO's purge of the left and later surrender (my term) to the AFL

in 1955 hurt all workers, but especially minorities. As Ginger and Christiano put it

in their anthology The Cold War Against Labor,

The plain truth is that the left-progressive unions in the
CIO were those most active in organizing those virtually
ignored by the AFL: black and women workers and the foreign-born.75

Having effectively amputated its left wing, organized labor had crippled

itself in the fight for racial equality.

As sociologist William Wilson has shown, the decline of the U.S. labor

movement has hurt minorities, who had benefited greatly by belonging to unions,

but have lost jobs disproportionately in the job-cutting frenzy of recent years. Last

hired, they, along with women, were the first fired. He cites statistics which show

the percentage of blacks who were union members was nearly cut in half during

the period between 1969 and 1987.76 This lowering unionization rate hurt

unskilled black workers especially and accelerated the decline of vulnerable


minority neighborhoods, contributing to the ghettoization of blacks and growth of

the "underclass."77

A highly publicized strike involving black workers occurred in Memphis,

Tennessee in 1968, when 1400 city workers refused to collect garbage for two

months. Dr. Martin Luther King, who at that time was trying to forge a new

coalition with organized labor, was on his way to speak at a mass meeting in

support of the strike when he was assassinated at his motel. The sanitation

workers won some of their demands, including recognition of the union, affiliated

with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees

(AFSME), whose success in recent years has been largely attributed to a great

degree of Black-white unity.78

Chicago’s African –American Congressman, Charles Hayes, a leader of the

United Food and Commercial Workers, told a group of labor leaders in 1985 that

the issue which must be addressed in order to rebuild the labor movement and

renew the commitment to racial equality is jobs and full employment:

There's got to be some foundation laid for a fighting coalition
between the trade union movement and Blacks and minorities...
some common objective that we can seek together and I think
jobs is that objective....That's the number one issue before the
country today--jobs and unemployment."79


The USWA, a top-down, right-of-center union--especially after the red

purges of the fifties--would take until 1976 to accept an African American onto its

executive board, then only in response to embarrassing demands by the black

caucus' Ad Hoc Committee, which demonstrated outside the Steelworkers' 1974

Atlantic City Convention. The I. W. Abel leadership in fact created a special post,

of Vice President for Human Affairs, appointing Local 1011's Leon Lynch its first

officer.

Some rank and file black activists, who had supported militant Ad Hoc

Committee Chair Jonathan Comer for the appointment, considered Lynch an

"uncle tom" chosen for his conservatism and loyalty to President Abel’s right wing

"official family."

Attending my first USWA convention in 1976, this event brought home to

me the inevitable connection between the right wing, racism and red-baiting.

The USWA was in fact charged by the Equal Employment Opportunity

Commission (EEOC) with collusion with the basic steel companies in


discriminatory job assignments. Departmental seniority clauses in their collective

bargaining agreements with big steel locked blacks and other minorities into lower

paid jobs in the worst departments of the mills--coke ovens blast furnaces, etc.. U.

S. Steel and all the other basic steel companies--with the sole exception of Inland--

signed a consent decree admitting past discriminatory practices and agreeing to

million of dollars in back pay for affected minority employees. Militant Director

of District 31 Ed Sadlowski and his successor Jim Balanoff fought to extend the

Consent Decree benefits to Inland employees, obviously victims of the same racist

practices, but got little support from either the USWA International office or the

EEOC.

Having been deeply involved in the coalition which elected the first black

president of Local 1010, USWA, Bill Andrews, I can personally attest to the

divisive power of racism in the union, still felt to this day.

In 1985, William Wimpisinger, then President Of the International

Association of Machinists (IAM) called the CPUSA, "the major impetus to form

the CIO and to pass much of FDR's New Deal..." The party organized,

….unemployment councils in practically every major city in the
U.S. during the latter 1920's and early 1930's. Spearheading
those local drives to organize the unemployed into...mutual
support groups, and thence ducate them toward egalitarianism
and socialism, invariably were local Communist Party organizers."80


Fast writes, "In the factories, the Communist Party fought consistently for

unions, organization of the unorganized..."81 Virulent anti-Stalinist Art Preis

admits, "The Communist Party provided by far the largest number of zealous and

courageous local organizers in the early days."82

Even the reactionary anti-communist George Meany, who embraced the

turncoat Jay Lovestone and put him to work influencing U.S. cold war foreign

policy, respected the organizing ability of CIO Communists. “They were

outstanding organizers,” he told his biographer Archie Robinson in the late 1970’s,

admitting that “Lewis picked up the best organizers there were…He picked up

Commies.”83 Like Lewis, Meany could accept Communists as organizers, but not

as union leaders.

Successful unions like the United Mineworkers under Lewis, International

Ladies Garment Workers of David Dubinsky, and the Amalgamated Clothing

Workers of Sidney Hillman backed the incipient CIO with money and organizers.

In steel, nearly a third of the Steelworkers Organizing Committee's (SWOC) paid

full-time organizers were Communist Party members, hired for their skills and

dedication. Disciplined, experienced cadres of Communists, well aware that

leaders could call a strike but only the rank & file could win one, sought input from

the shop floor, and responded to the grievances of ordinary workers in formulating

demands.


Participatory democracy prevailed--at least while reds held positions in local

leaderships--to the chagrin of SWOC leaders like Chicago-Northwest Indiana

District 31 Director Joe Germano, who like Van Bittner and Phillip Murray wanted

to maintain tight top-down control and tried to curb rank & file input and power.84

Shop floor leaders like U.S. Steel South Works Local 65's George Patterson

admired and respected the Communists' knowledge of history, as well as union

strategy and tactics.85 Even anti-communists like Packinghouse Workers

Organizing Committee (PWOC) leader Philip Weightman acknowledged the

Communist organizers "..contributed...I may not have been as aggressive as I was

if it hadn't been for them, you see." 86

By the end of World War II, 14 of the 31 international unions of the

CIO were led by Communists. Nearly a third of the delegates at the 1946 CIO

convention were left-wingers.87

In May of 1946, AFL President William Green, "Attacking the CIO as

Communist-dominated...openly appealed to Southern industrialists to recognize

AFL unions," to fight against "Communist Forces."88 Reactionary and anti-

communist policies were hardly new to Green, or the AFL leadership, of course.

At the outset he denounced the CIO and the General Motors strike and

"...condemned the sit-down tactics as illegal and imported from Moscow."


He instructed central labor councils to unseat delegates from CIO locals and

revoked charters of councils refusing to purge CIO members--all this in the

thirties.89 Thus the right wing AFL leadership fought the CIO and progressive

industrial unionism from the beginning. The point is that the mass movement of

workers, led by a coalition of center-left forces, overcame not just the

industrialists, but the powerful forces of reaction within the established trade union

movement during the thirties and early forties. In the HUAC-McCarthy years, it

would be many of their former allies and comrades who sealed the fate of the reds.

A couple of years ago Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA, was

honored (albeit fifty-plus years late) with a plaque by the USWA for his leadership

role in organizing SWOC. This, the same USWA whose leaders encouraged,

indeed abetted his indictment and jailing in the 1950's. With Lee Pressman and

Irving Richter, most reds on the USWA, (UAW) and CIO staffs did not survive

the purges, or else became invisible.

George Meyers, once head of the Maryland CIO and now chair of the

CPUSA's labor commission, was in prison from 1953 to 1957 for "conspiracy to

teach or advocate the over-throw of the government." 90 After 1948, USWA

President Phil Murray applauded such actions, including the CIO's expulsion of 11

left wing unions, as "necessary to remove 'the dirty, filthy traitors.'" 91

This, the same Murray who but a few years before had defied the Americans


for Democratic Action's (ADA) newly anti-communist Walter Reuther at the 1946

CIO convention with a militant declaration for center-left unity:

Let no one create conflict within this movement....
this mighty organization, the CIO, is not going to be
divided by anybody....We have our divisions of opinion
and we, I suppose, in the years to come, will be sus-
ceptable to divisions of opinion. That is mighty healthy...

And even more forcefully at the USWA convention in 1946:

We ask no man his national origin, his religion, his beliefs.
It is enough for us that he is a steelworker and that he believes
in trade unionism...Our union has not been and will not be an
instrument of repression. It is a vehicle for economic and
social progress.... As a democratic institution we engage in
no purges, no witch hunts. We do not dictate a man's thoughts
or beliefs. Most important of all we do not permit ourselves
to be stampeded into courses of action which create division
among our members and sow the disunity which is sought by
those false prophets and hypocritical advisers from without
who mean us no good.92

Of course, once World War II was over, as Zeiger puts it, "Murray's vision

rested on hopes for a smooth transition from war to peace and on business-labor

collaboration…" [Italics mine]93 Yet he continued his support of participation by

the left through the 1947 CIO convention at Boston, declaring himself

unequivocally opposed to amendment of the constitution to provide for expulsion

of the reds which Reuther was demanding. He said that history had proven that

expulsions would take control of the unions away from the membership.94 Of

course he was right. Murray first signaled a change in attitude toward the


Communists at the May, 1947 meeting of the CIO executive board:

It is high time the CIO leaders stopped apologizing for
Communism...throw it to hell out, and throw out its
advocates along with it. When a man accepts office to
render service to workers, and then delivers that service
to other outside interests, that man is nothing but a
damned traitor.95

That year he also forced out suspected Communists Len DeCaux, Fred Avila

and Harry Gantt of the CIO News, and USWA Washington D.C. legislative

representative Robert Lamb.

By 1948 Murray had caved in to the Reuther-Green-Dubinsky forces. It has

been said that his Catholicism had a great deal to do with his denunciation of the

Communists. He was clearly under pressure from the virulently anti-communist

Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. He fired USWA General Counsel,

longtime CP member and, some say, brains behind his administration Lee

Pressman for--in the words of liberal journalist and USWA chronicler John

Herling--"loyalty to the Communist movement over that to the CIO and

Steelworkers Union." Herling, who deplores the red-baiting of "innocents", like

anti-communist I.W. Able by their union foes, does not hesitate to use

undocumented innuendo in describing the likes of "admitted" communist

Pressman.96 Actually it was in large part Pressman's support of Henry Wallace

against Murray's favorite, Truman (Pressman steered the platform committee of the


Progressive Party at the 1948 convention) along with Murray's attempt to flee the

sinking ship of communist affiliation, which influenced the decision to dump

Pressman after years of exemplary service to the USWA, CIO and the New Deal.97

The Henry Wallace campaign for President on the Progressive Party ticket

indeed provided the line of fracture around which rabid anti-communists like

ILGWU's David Dubinsky and the USWA's Van Bittner, brought their long-

simmering resentment and hatred for the reds into the open. Bittner welcomed "the

first open fight between the trade unionists and the communists," declaring

(ironically, as it turned out) "in the end I am sure it will do the CIO a lot of

good."98 The CIO executive board meeting in January, 1948, condemned the

Wallace candidacy 33 to 13. But the CIO Communists and progressives had

already committed themselves to Wallace’s Progressive Party. “Are they going to

be loyal to the CIO or loyal to the Communist Party,” Walter Reuther asked.

Supporting Wallace would become, according to David Brody, “the unpardonable

violation that led to the expulsion of the Communist-led unions in 1949.99

Reuther, while appearing at times more militant than Murray, was, it would

seem, more intent upon defeating the Communists than fighting the companies.

Direct confrontation with the Communists over the cold war Marshall Plan and the

Wallace campaign also suited (and politically benefited) the UAW executive who,

narrowly defeating R.J. Thomas for president of UAW in 1946 on an anti-


communist platform, had turned on his old comrades in the CP. By 1948 he

fired Irving Richter, the UAW's legislative rep. in Washington, D.C. for alleged

"communist sympathies", and sold-out a strike at "communist-dominated" Allis

Chalmers Local 248.100

Reuther's "liberal anti-communism" plumbed the depths of opportunism

when he took his sectarian battle before the public in Colliers magazine, attacking

Communists in the union as having a "fanatical preoccupation with conquest of

organized labor."101 Reuther, the red-baiter, had made a 180 degree turn from his

stand during the CIO organizing drive, when he had stated:

..let's be careful that we don't play the bosses' game by
calling for the red scare. Let's stand by our union and
fellow unionists. No union man, worthy of the name,
will play the bosses game. Some may do so through ignorance.
But those who peddle the red scare and know what they are
doing are dangerous enemies of the union."102

Yet his virulent--and public--anti-Communism would not spare Reuther

himself from the long memories of red-baiters like Barry Goldwater and Jimmie

Hoffa.103

On October 31, 1949, the CIO met in convention in Cleveland, Murray

declaring that the single issue before the convention was the expulsions of the left

wing unions. Eleven were expelled including Harry Bridges’ International

Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) the UE, the Mine, Mill and

Smelter Workers Union, the Fur and Leather Workers Union, the United Farm


Equipment Union, Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers, United Office and

Professional Workers, the United Public Workers, the American Communications

Association, the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards, and the

International Fishermen and Allied Workers. In all, according to the UE's Richard

O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, nearly a million CIO members were "purged for

their belief that unions should be run by and for the membership and not by cold-

war cliques for the benefit of big business."104

"Operation Dixie," the attempt to organize (largely white) textiles in the

South, led by Van Bittner, was a top-down campaign doomed to fail because it

ignored the lessons of the thirties. Officialy the Southern Organizing Campaign

(SOC) the CIO's effort tried to ignore racism, as well as its strongest foes, the left-

led unions. It failed to find local leaders and establish trust on the shop-floor

level. The CIO then spent millions "attempting to raid the memberships of [left-led

unions like] the UE, Mine, Mill and the FE."105 In Alabama, the USW “blended

anti-communism with overt racism” in its raid on the largely African-American

Mine, Mill and Smelter local at Birmingham. Using “elements close to the KKK”

the right-wing USW leadership left a long-lasting bitter taste in the mouths of

Black trade unionists. Operation Dixie failed in great part due to the loss of elan

and progressive leadership within the American labor movement resulting from the

red purges.106


Internationalism, always a vital issue to the left, suffered a mortal defeat in

1949,

when the CIO withdrew from the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).

The American labor movement turned its back on the largest labor organization in

history, representing (at its peak in 1978) 230 million union members in 303

unions in 126 countries.107 Organized in September, 1945 in the brief post-war

spirit of the United Nations, the WFTU program called for:

Freedom from every form of exploitation or social and
economic discrimination based on race, creed, color or
sex, and...equal pay for equal work...[WFTU] calls upon
trade unions all over the world to combat all attacks
against the economic and social rights of the workers, to
defend their vital interests, to secure progressive
improvement in their material welfare, and to promote
the cause of stable and lasting peace.

Anti-communism cut short this bold venture in the organization of the

world's workers. Red-baiting and cold war hysteria had split off American workers

from potentially the most powerful labor organization which ever existed, on the

basis that unions in "Communist" countries "behind the iron curtain" could not be

free. Reactionary leaders in the CIO joined with the AFL in reviving the rival

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) including unions from

fascist Argentina and Franco's Spain, whose membership never exceeded 25

million on its best day.108


A few left wing unions in the U.S., including the UE, still maintain

affiliation with the WFTU, and unions throughout the so-called "free world" paid

dues to both the ICFTU and the WFTU through the 1980's. Their logic, explained

to me by British and Australian union leaders at a WFTU metal-workers

conference in Berlin in 1987: the international character of the workers' struggle

demands that we not ignore the huge, broadly based WFTU.

The Taft-Hartley anti-Communist affidavit requirement put increased

pressure on non-communist union leaders, who by signing would not only throw

their Communist brothers and sisters to the reactionary wolves, but also

demonstrate their total disregard for Constitutional rights of free speech and

association. Many capitulated and signed. To those brave trade unionists who

refused, this act of surrender to the forces of totalitarian reaction and Orwellian

thought control would, in the words of the USWA Constitution, forever stamp

them as "devoid of principle and destitute of honor."

Labor "leaders" were at each other's throats, the members left in the lurch.

The split would never again heal. Dick Barry, President of UE in Canada,

decried the "..inter-union warfare...working to the detriment of us all." "All

workers," he says,

were victimized because employers...were able to take


significant advantage of the fact that so much union
energy was being taken up by interunion struggles instead
of unified struggle against the boss.109

As Fast puts it:

Communists and suspected Communists were being attacked
and driven from their leadership positions, from the
union...in this the anti-Communists (many of them in
their jobs because of the work and courage of the
Communist organizers) in the AFL and CIO turned and
led the hunt against the Communists.110

Veteran CIO leader John Brophy had predicted the result:

Red-baiting, lies, slanders, raising the cry of 'Communist'
against militant and progressive union leaders make up nothing
more than a smokescreen for the real objective of the people tha
t use them. The real objective is to kill the CIO, to destroy
collective bargaining, to destroy the unity of the organized
and unorganized workers, that the CIO is building throughout
the nation.111

And so the CIO was purged of unions and leaders of "leftist taint."

As Ben Gold put it, "The anti-communist campaign in which Murray now joined

the Truman Administration was directed against much more than the

Communists..."112

Anyone who took issue with the CIO leadership, especially on union democracy or


rank & file control, or support of the Democratic Party or especially U.S. foreign

policy, became targets. Guilt by association, whether associating with actual or

suspected Communists or merely agreeing with them on issues, was used to brand

militants, progressives and oppositionists as reds. Cold war anti-communism had a

lasting chilling effect on militancy and democracy throughout the American labor

movement.

With the surrender of the CIO to the right-wing AFL in 1955, the

purge was pretty much complete. According to Brody, the AFL-CIO merger and

the establishment of the Committee on Political Education (COPE) “marked an

irrevocable commitment [by the American Labor Movement] to the two-party

system.”113 AFL President George Meany, credited (along with CIO pres. Reuther)

with engineering that infamous "merger", was so far to the right that he considered

the anti-communist ADA and members of it such as the liberal guru John Kenneth

Galbraith "left wing" elements.114 This is but an example of the broad brush of

red-baiting wielded by right-wing union opportunists, which painted even

virulently anti-communist socialists and social democrats as red or pink. Many

who had red-baited their opposition also fell victim to the anti-communism.

As black steelworker, CP member and CIO organizer Jesse Reese (Local


1011, Youngstown Indiana harbor Works) says:

The Communists built the union. After we got the
union built, something happened to John L. Lewis, and
Mr. Philip Murray carried out his aims: he fired every
Communist organizer. He made an agreement with the steel
trusts, it seems to me...and the union's been going
back, back, back, ever since. It doesn't open its mouth.
Today we have in our unions what you might call a pet
company dog--led by the caretakers...the leaders of our
union. And our dog is being fed red-baiting and his
teeth have been pulled out (that's the no-strike clause)
and your dog don't bark no more..."115

After the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, union membership, especially in

steel, auto and among garment workers, began to decrease. White collar jobs, on

the increase, were not organized by the now-complacent leadership. Taft-Hartley

and right-to-work laws helped decimate organized labor's ranks.116 Socialists,

Communists, and "sympathizers" had indeed formed a "cadre" which in addition to

inspiring the movement, injected it with a tremendous amount of energy, and did

much of the unglamorous and sometimes dangerous work which made it the force

it became in the forties. Organized labor's leadership, in driving out the left wing,

cut itself off from major resources in terms of organization, leaders, people, etc.

It's been said labor amputated its own good, strong left arm, crippling itself in the

face of the class struggle. Completing the metaphor, the hemorrhaging would

nearly kill labor.


Movement theorists Piven and Clowers credit the Trotskyists and especially

the CP, as "an instigating force" in agitating and mobilizing the workers to action,

but stress the spontaneity of rank & file action, also quoting John Sargent:

You had a series of strikes, wildcats, shut-downs, slowdowns,
anything working people could think of to secure for themselves
what they decided they had to have.117

Yet, as was discussed previously (see page 7) rank and file leaders like Sargent

saw the left, and left-wing thinking as vital to the CIO movement.

Piven and Cloward, arguing from what might be described as something

of an anarchist perspective, downplay the importance of leadership and include

among the ranks of union leaders increasingly orientated toward management and

away from rank & file control even the Communists, for whom they claim

"Radical ideology was no defense against the imperatives created by organizational

maintenance."118 Commenting on the victory of bureaucracy over militant

"disruptive" unionism in the U.K., philosopher Anthony Skillen is also somewhat

cynical about bureaucratic union leadership's efforts to obtain industrial

democracy under capitalism:

It is questionable to what extent trade unions, with the
corrupting quasi-managerial sinecures they provide for the
career 'representatives' of the working people, can be entitled
the spokesmen and guardians of the shop floor.119


Pivens & Cloward and Skillen do an injustice to left wing unions like the

United Electrical Workers (UE) (survivors of the purges) and Hospital Workers

1199, who remain very democratic and rank & file oriented. UE's slogan, "The

Members Run This Union", I adopted for my administration as president of USWA

1010. Hospital Workers Union 1199 votes on practically everything, and still

negotiates contracts in the open, whereas most AFL-CIO unions went to closed-

door bargaining years ago.120 These critics miss the point that (in the U.S. at least)

it was the purges as much as bureaucratic tendencies which left the unions in the

hands of class- collaborators.

The chickens would come home to roost in 1980, with devastating

results for the labor movement. Having established a climate of cooperation and

collaboration with business and having driven out and purged the left along with

all but a remnant of militants from the unions' leadership, the AFL-CIO's right

wing leadership, Kirkland et al., was stunned, decked really, by the opening salvo

in the class war declared by Ronald Reagan on behalf of big business. The firing of

PATCO air traffic controllers found U.S. laqbor leaders totally impotent to fight

back. HUAC, McCarthyism, the McCarran Act, Taft-Hartley, and the anti-

communist opportunism of top union leaders had taken its toll on the labor

movement. Without the left, it had forgotten how to fight.

The relative prosperity of the 60's had led the industrialists to sue for labor


peace, which the now-purged and pacified union leadership was more than willing

to negotiate in return for modest wage and benefit packages which, in the long run,

did not keep up with inflation (in steel, at least).

The seventies saw unions like the USWA adopt a "horse trading" strategy,

negotiating away previous gains to satisfy newly perceived demands, avoiding

even the threat of a strike.

By this time the collaborationist leadership of much of the labor movement

had gotten seriously out of touch with the members, and few would describe most

of labor as a "movement" any longer. Terms like "business unionism"--or, the case

of the Steelworkers' David J. McDonald--"tuxedo unionism" came to be applied to

mainstream union leaders by the press, their opposition and their memberships.

When world-wide competition and market pressures hit them in the 80's, the bosses

went after wage concessions and, more importantly, work rule concessions which

would enable them to "downsize" more efficiently. "Rationalization" --the shut

down of less productive facilities and job combination and elimination-- put

thousands out of work in steel and other basic industries. It would take a new

generation of class-conscious workers to begin the rebuilding of militant trade

unionism in the USA.

There was a fight-back movement in the USWA, and other unions, in the


late 1960's 70's and 80's. I was part of that movement. In the 1960's and 1970's,

the insurgencies of Donald Rarick (and Emil Narick) challenged the "official

family" for the presidency of the USWA and, supported by progressives across the

country, sought to expand union democracy and militancy in the USWA. At Local

1010, Rank & File president John Sargent and his protégé, alleged former

communist Jim Balanoff, supported such efforts and fought for change at

conventions, even refusing to sign a (proclaimed sell-out) contract negotiated--

without rank and file input--by the McDonald-Able leadership in the 1960's.

Along with these remnants of the old left, the "new left" involved itself in

the fight-back movement in the 70's and 80's. I personally worked with members of

the CPUSA, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Democratic Socialists (DSOC), New

American Movement (NAM), International Socialists (IS) and a profusion of

Trotskyist and Maoist groups in the movement for democracy and rank and file

control in the USWA. The movement supported the Sadlowski campaigns for

Director of District 31 (1973) and President of the USWA (1977) as well as the

fight for the right to ratify contracts. Needless to say, I would refuse to name

names.121

Al Sampter of U.S. Steel Local 1014, long associated with the CP, and Alice


Puerela of South Works Local 65 and the SWP co-chaired the District 31 Right to

Strike Committee, a coalition of center-left forces which filed suit (with other rank

& file groups) on behalf of the rank & file against the I.W. Able's 1972

Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA) (see page 36) in 1973 and packed the

courtroom for the show-trial in Pittsburg with steelworkers.122

The Rank & File Caucus at USWA 1010, largest Local in the Steelworkers

union with nearly 19,000 members at its peak in the 1970's, was headed by John

Sargent until he retired in the mid sixties. Jim Balanoff was then elected chairman

and was elected president of the Local in 1976, Director of the giant District 31,

with 120,000 members, in 1977.

Both of those campaigns had to overcome vicious red-baiting, to which

would later be added race-baiting. In 1979 (and again in 1982 and 1985, the

center-left, black-white coalition which was the Rank & File Caucus elected the

first black President of Local 1010, William "Bill" Andrews, who served the

longest continuous time as President of anyone in the Local's history.123

What kind of union did we fight for? Harry Bridges put it quite well, I think

when he defined a left-wing union, before a congressional committee trying to

deport him as a Communist in the 1930's:

My definition of a left wing union...is one with a lot of
rank and file democracy and control. It's a union that


believes that its officers should be easy to remove...
and their wages and expenses should be no higher
than the highest paid--at the most--worker that's a
member of the union...It's also a union that recognizes
that from time to time it's gotta stand up and fight for
certain things that mightn't necessarily be wages hours
and working conditions: civil liberties, racial equality,
and things like that... 124

In the Teamsters Union (IBT) Pete Camarata, Douglas Allen and the

Socialist-led Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) fought to oust the corrupt

Fitzsimmons gang, and bring rank and file control to their union in the 1970's and

1980's.125

And in the United Mineworkers (UMW) Jock Jablonski was murdered (in

1969) by the corrupt Tony Boyle's henchmen for his attempt to build a Rank and

File movement, but Miners for Democracy (MFD)--launched at Jablonsky's--

funeral, finally ousted the criminal reactionaries, elected Arnold Miller (in 1972)

and infused the UMW with a new, democratic fighting spirit, still lacking in most

of organized labor to this day. Unfortunately, Miller turned out to be quite

conservative himself, not surprisingly, since MFD lacked left leadership.126

But we were running against the wind. Red-baiting was a constant reminder

that militants were considered outsiders and leftists, and leftists were not welcome

in the leadership of the mainstream American labor movement of the 60's, 70's and

80's. Insurgents, rank and file


leaders, anyone who argued for militancy and union democracy was branded red or

pink, and anti-communism among older workers still played a role in union

elections. The forces of reaction still controlled the AFL-CIO unions, by and

large.

In his farewell article in SteelLabor, retiring USWA president I.W. Able

expressed pride in the fact that the union he'd led had become a "bread and butter"

union, avoiding involvement with larger social (socialist?) issues, sticking to

wages, hours and working conditions. In a series of lectures he gave under the

auspices of the Steel Industry, at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1975, then-

president Able proudly termed the no-strike Experimental Negotiating Agreement

(ENA)--which the rank & file considered a sell- out--a "revolutionary approach to

traditional bargaining procedures."

Demonstrating how collaborationist and out-of-touch USWA leadership had

become, Able said that through the ENA "the United Steelworkers and the leaders

of the American Steel Industry, have helped point the way to labor peace in the

future."127

Within five years that industry would begin eliminating jobs on a grand


scale128, and within eight years would wring wage and work-rule concessions from

a USWA leadership too stunned to fight back. Further exposing how reactionary

American Labor leaders had become, he bragged about the AFL-CIO CIA front

group, the American Institute For Free Labor Development (AIFLD) later tagged

as a money laundering operation for the CIA-sponsored military coup in Chile,

which murdered democratically elected President Salvadore Allende and installed

the fascist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet at the behest of American

copper interests and ITT. Abel said AIFLD's mission was to "overcome

Communist infiltration and subversion, and develop effective and responsible trade

unions."129 In fact, AIFLD's unconscionable role in the subversion of democratic

Chile helped undermine and crush the subsequent strike by U. S. copper miners, by

restoring the flow of cheap copper from Chile.

Lloyd McBride, long-time anti-communist, and goon under Murray,

through vicious red-baiting and rumored massive vote fraud (especially in Canada,

where labor law is lax in that regard) narrowly defeated Ed Sadlowski of Chicago

U.S. Steel Local 65 for president of the USWA in 1977.130 Ed represented the last

hope of the communist and anti-communist left--the militant, progressive, rank &

file forces, young and old, in the Steelworkers' Union.

His campaign, though fraught with a measure of sectarian in-fighting, was


truly a center-left coalition effort. Groups like Ed Mann's and John Barbero's

Youngtown, Ohio-based Rank and File Team (RAFT), and the CP organized

National Steelworkers Rank & File campaigned vigorously for Sadlowski nation

wide.

We were defeated by Lloyd McBride and the USWA's "official family" of

bureaucrats only through the use of a lot of money, red-baiting and dirty tricks.

The lack of democratic and other trade union principles displayed by these and

other union leaders serves to underline the moral vacuum created by the purge of

most of the principled leaders.

In a press conference at the 1980 USWA Convention, I asked then-president

McBride what the union would do to stem the massive elimination of jobs just then

beginning in steel. His reply chillingly epitomized the bankruptcy--indeed, the

trap--of collaborationist union philosophy. His words are quoted roughly from

notes and memory, but their meaning was vividly etched into my consciousness for

all time at that moment:

As you know, under our system of private ownership, the owner
of a steel company, or any other company, has the right to
close down unprofitable plants. We believe in that system.
Therefore there is nothing...I don't know of anything...you tell
me if you can, what we can do.131

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirklan reiterated this same business


unionism position, rejecting class conflict, in 1980:

In creating their domestic trade unions American workers
cast aside all parties, conspiracies and secret societies
whose aim was to create any sort of 'dictatorship of the
proletariat.' They committed themselves to work within
the system, acknowledging the rights of others while
asserting their own. 132

As Zeiger puts it,

The ardent embrace of economic growth, combined
with the de-emphasis on redistributionist goals,helped pave
the way for the contemporary assault on organized labor
and the decline of union sentiment among workers.
Defensible as the isolation of the Communists and their
allies was[?!] the participation of some in the CIO in
red-baiting and radical-bashing helped to marginalize
even the non-Communist left and to make even the ardent
advocacy of racial justice a ground for suspicion.133

Long after the Reagan administration and its big-business backers had

declared war on the labor movement, the AFL-CIO was still peddling the same

pathetic rhetoric, e.g., this in a resolution passed by the 1987 convention:

A successful strategy for U.S. production requires the
cooperation of labor and management to increase
operating efficiency...134

Arguing against just this sort of class collaboration, the president of Britain's

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) says:

This concept of having a consensus with our class enemies


to try and ameliorate the worst excesses of the market
economy, is not unlike wooing the executioner to win
either a slight delay or a less painful death.135

UAW anti-Communist Paul Jacobs described how the purge of the left was

both symptomatic of and contributed to the top-down, undemocratic nature of

today's unions in this 1963 statement:

I submit that we made a great mistake when we kicked the
Communists out of the CIO--and, as you know, I was one
of those who fought most belligerently to throw them out.
I think now that the way the UAW leadership behaved
toward its minority was a mistake. We ran scared.
That's really why we kicked out the opposition.
And when we did it, we really threw the baby out
with the bath, because we set up a pattern of conformity:
we set up a pattern of refusing to break with traditional
ways of thinking.... That is why, for example, you can't
dignify what goes on at a UAW convention today by
calling it "debate." Policy questions are not being debated
at UAW conventions. What is being argued about is
administrative jazz and union legislative problems.
There are no arguments about foreign policy questions
or even about domestic policy questions.136

In 1996, progressive AFL-CIO presidential candidate Sweeney said of the

AFL's response to Ronald Reagan's union-busting strategy, initiated during the

infamous PATCO air-traffic controllers' strike, "We should have called a general

strike." But by then (1980) who was there to call it? And who would follow?

By 1997 there were positive signs that today's labor leaders, like the AFL's


Sweeney and the USWA's Becker, have re-learned some of the lessons of the

thirties. Reds are once again being hired as organizers, I'm told. That's a good

sign. But is this death-bed conversion sincere? Or is it but another cynical attempt

to exploit leftists and the rank and file until the crises wanes? The real lesson of

the CIO, I'm convinced, is simply that the interests of the workers as a class are

opposed to those of capital. Class-consciousness builds the union; class

collaboration and red-baiting destroys it. And the union's best leaders are workers,

who understand where our interests lie. The left has always understood this, and

fights consistently on the side of all workers. Have America's union leaders come

to understand this too, finally? There are reasons to be optimistic. But the history

of the CIO offers reasons to temper that optimism with caution.

If our union leaders have indeed learned the lessons of the past, America's

union members should never again have to ask our leaders, "Which side are you

on?."


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Able, I.W., Collective Bargaining Labor Relations in Steel: Then and Now
New York Columbia University Press, 1976.

Archives, Calumet Regional, Gary: Indiana University Northwest Campus,
USWA Local 1010 Records (CRA #115) Box 1, File Folders 1, 2, 3 & 21;
Box 3, File Folders 3&4; Minute Books, Executive Board 1943-1944.

Binkley, Elenore H., Reflections on the Labor Movement,of the U.S.A.,
New York: New Outlook Publishers and Distributors, 1985.

Boyer, Richard O. and Morais, Herbert M., Labor's Untold Story,
New York: Cameron Associates, 1955.

Brody, David. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth
century Struggle.

Cherny, Robert W. and Issel,William and Walsh Taylor, Kieran American
Labor and the Cold War: grassroots politics and postwar political culture
Published by Rutgers University Press, 2004
ISBN 0813534038, 9780813534039

Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago,
1919-1939, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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