Between the Hills and the Sea 9781501726798

Citation preview

BETWEEN THE HILLS AND THE SEA

LITERATURE OF AMERICAN LABOR Cletus E. Daniel and Ileen A. DeVault, Series Editors

In the LITERATURE OF AMERICAN LAHOR series we bring hack into print some of the best literature that has emerged from the labor movement and related events in the United States and Canada. We are defining literature broadly; the series encompasses the full range of popular writing, including novels, biographies, autobiographies, and journalism. F.ach book includes an introduction written especially for this series and directing the reader's attention to the historical context for the work. We believe that the titles in the series will he particularly useful to students of social and labor history and American studies. Our hope is that, both individually and collectively, the books in this series will contribute to a greater understanding of working-class experiences in our culture.

LITERATURE OF AMERICAN LABOR SERIES

BETWEEN THE HILLS AND THE SEA K. B. Gilden

ILR PRESS School of Industrial and Labor Relations Cornell University

Copyright© 1971 by Katya Gilden. Introduction by Oa,id Montgomery, copyright © 1989 by Come!! Universitv. All rights reserved. This new edition of Between the li ill.s and the Sea is designed by Kat Dalton. The text, with the exception of the front matter, is reproduced from the original version. published bv Doubleday and Company, Incorporated, in 1971. The cover photo is used with permission of Wide World Photos. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gilden, K. B. (Katya B.), 1914~ Between the hills and the sea I K.B. Gilden. p. em. - (Literature of American labor) Reprint, with new introd. Originally published: 1st cd. Garden Citv, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1971. ISBN o-87546-1 54-9 (alk. paper) I. Title. II. Series. [PS>557·IH27B48 1989] 8q'. 54--dczo 89-15651 CIP Copies of this book may be ordered through bookstores or directly from ILR Press School of Industrial and Labor Relations Come!! University Ithaca, NY q851~0952

4

CONTENTS

Introduction

\'II

ONE

The Sensitive Plant

TWO

Some Careless Rhyme Still Floats . ..

THREE

A Matter of Family and Friends

1 39

FOUR

Of Victors and Victims

221

FIVE

The March Syndrome

323

SIX

A Chinese Tapestry

377

SEVEN

Flight of the Cessna

441

9

97

INTRODUCTION

Between the Hills and the Sea centers on Mish Lunin and his wife, Priscilla, who were brought together in the aftermath of World War II by the hopes they shared that organized working men and women might transform industrial America into a more equitable and democratic society. Ten vcars later their dreams lie shattered. lie now belonged, Mish Lunin thought, "to a damned generation, damned by its faith and its errors." The labor movement has lost its vision and daring; the tenants in their fetid housing project shy away from Priscilla's appeals for action; Mish has long since lost his union office and is politically isolated at his joh in an electrical equipment factory; and their marriage is disintegrating. By depicting their lives in a New England industrial city during one eventful week in the spring of 19 56, Between the Hills and the Sea reveals the cost for working people of the Cold War and its political repression. It discloses the human toll of what sociologist Daniel Bell called "the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties.'" As the novel opens, Mish and Priscilla cherish memories of what they used to he and bite their tongues to avoid wounding each other verballv. Priscilla longs to rekindle in her husband the energy and talent for leadership that he displayed in the immediate postwar years as head of his large local union. These qualities had attracted her to him and persuaded her to leave college and the comforts of her pros1. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of l'olitical Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 19(n ).

Vlll

perous family. Although Mish remains ardently attracted to her, his working-class upbringing has made him scornful of quixotic gestures, keenly sensitive to the changed political environment of Cold War America, and highly suspicious that his wife envisages working people, including him, as her social mission. The fate of the couple is not determined simply by their personalities, however. Their destinies are also shaped by the power of corporate management and housing authorities, congressional investigating committees and legislation, their fellow workers' hunger for income and security, fears and suspicions fanned by the Cold War, and revelations by Nikita Khrushchev of Stalin's crimes. Neither Mish nor Priscilla is a Communist. In fact, Mish was encouraged to run for the presidency of his local union after the 1946 strike because he was a capable organizer with a keen sensitivity to details, timing, and power and a moderate. For a while, his politics made him acceptable to both left- and right-wing factions in the local. He was driven from office, however, because he refused to climb on the anticommunist bandwagon or to renounce his friendship for Bob and Maria Ucchini, two Communists who had helped found the local. Subsequently, Mish's understanding of how much is involved in organizing effective action leads him to shun, and even to ridicule, his wife's irrepressible impulse to storm the barricades against injustice: "Priscilla, you're living for something that's gone. Past. Over and done with. It WAS and it IS NO MORE!" The novel's authentic depiction of the efforts of two individuals to reconstruct their own lives, after the visionary labor movement to which they had once devoted themselves unreservedly collapsed under the impact of the Cold War, provides rare insight into American society in the 1950s. Although no local union underwent a political evolution identical to that of the fictional EWIU-UV Local ·317, veterans of the postwar struggles in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) easily recognize every controversy recounted in Between the Hills and the Sea. Many activists of that era can also recall all too vividly personal decisions and conflicts like those Mish and Priscilla experienced. Their story seems to have been erased from the

IX

pages of American history. It has been told, and told brilliantly, by K. B. Gilden.

K. B. Gilden K. B. Gilden is the pen name of the husband and wife writing team of Katya and Bert Gilden. Both were very familiar with the industrial world of which they wrote. Katya had spent her childhood in the Irish and French-Canadian railroad district of Bangor, Maine, where she listened in on the conversations of neighborhood men and women and accompanied the children delivering home lunch buckets to their fathers' places of work in the gasworks, foundry, and roundhouse. I Icr distinctive writing style drew upon her varied experiences: studying English literature at Radcliffe College, composing advertising copy for women's fashions, writing for a special agency that sought johs for boys out of reformatories, living in llarlcm, editing a weekly newspaper, and then marrving Bert Gilden and moving to Georgia, where they were involved in interracial rural action programs. Bert spent his childhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, among mostly Hungarian and Swedish neighbors and worked on a city newspaper before going to Brown University to study literature. After college, he worked as a film press agent and served during World War II as a tank commander in the North African and European theaters of action, where he was twice wounded. On his return home, Bert was determined to become a novelist but took a job organizing farmers' training courses for veterans in Georgia. In 1947 Bert met Katya, who was also fired by the ambition to write, and after a whirlwind courtship the two of them rnoved south and began working on the stories that ultimately developed into their first novel, Hurry Sundown. In the 1950s they returned to Bridgeport, where Bert worked in several factories while they completed the novel. Its publication in 1965, just as the civil rights struggle in the South was reaching a crescendo, helped the novel achieve immediate success. Paramount Pictures converted the book into a movie, which left the Gildens unhappy with its content but financially able to devote themselves unstintingly to writing their second novel. Bert died sud-

X

denly just before Between the Hills and the Sea was published in 1971. Katya still lives in Connecticut, where she teaches and writes. Katya Gilden calls their writing technique analytical realism-a term deliberately evocative of organic chemistry. They explore the development of individual characters who are revealed and transformed by the conflicts and dilemmas of the situation in which they live. "My subject," she explains, "is the individual in the grip of history." Although the huge electrical plant, the Tidal Flats housing project, the mayor elected on a labor ticket, the influential conservative congresswoman, and various other personalities in Between the Hills and the Sea bring Bridgeport to mind, the events and personalities are all fictional. This use of historical events as a backdrop against which to reveal the personal development of fictional characters is a distinguishing feature of the novel. This technique is also suggested in the title of a seminar Katya Gilden taught at Wesleyan University: "Inner Person/Outer World."' The Gildcns' own experiences had taught them that the lives of individuals cannot be divorced from the networks of social interaction and social hierarchies that shape personalities and through which individuals find expression. The vivid descriptions offactory work and the unrelenting rumbling of garbage trucks feeding the smoldering dump beside the housing project do more than provide a realistic setting for the action in the book: they also articulate the exploitation that is disguised by modern consumerism. The piecework gait of the women on assembly, their endemic resentment of the men around them (visiting dignitaries, foremen, set-up men, materials handlers), and their "constant interchange of anecdote and argument, friendship and feud, horseplay, festivity"-all "indiscernible at first"-reveal an 2

2. Jaspar McLevy was elected mayor of Bridgeport on the Socialist party ticket in 1933 and served until 1957. Clare Booth Luce served in Congress as a Republican from 1943 to 1947. 3· For biographical information on the Gildens and a discussion of their philosophy ofliterature, see Norman Rudich, "Between the Hills and the Sea (Un roman proletarian experimental des anccs 1970)," Europe. Revue Litteraire Mensuelle 55 (Mars-Avril 1977), 79-90. Katya Gilden discusses analytical realism in two letters that she generously made available to me: Katya Gilden to Allan Lewis. October 21, 1971, and Gilden to Otto Brandstattcr, August 8, 1973.

XI

underlying design of human relations in production processes of far deeper significance than the objects with which and on which the women work. And all these human relationships are being shaped by and expressed in a specific moment in history.

Rise and Rupture of the CIO The postwar history that generated and then shattered the dreams of Mish and Priscilla was marked by intense conflict over the future course of American social and political life and by the ominous escalation of global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The combined impact of strife at home and war clouds abroad transformed the daily lives and expectations of workers, as well as the character and role of the labor movement. The industrial unions had been formed during the depression of the 1930s in an effort to organize all workers employed by the same companies, regardless of their occupations, race, sex, religion, or political beliefs. They pursued aggressive collective action to improve working conditions and the lives of workers and their families. Most of these unions had been expelled from the fifty-year-old American Federation of Labor (AFL) for violating its craft union principles and in 1938 had formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The industrial unions had contributed strongly to the reform impulses of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and in turn had benefited from the government's encouragement of collective bargaining in industry. Workers who had previously played marginal roles in craft unions and electoral politics, or been excluded from them, lent ardent support to the CIO where they worked and to the New Deal when they voted. Among them were women, Afro-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and especially the children of southern and eastern European immigrants who had come to the United States at the turn of the century. Their quest for security, status, and participation in national life was summed up in the 1937 battle cry of striking steelworkers: "You are not going to call us 'Hunky' no more. " 4 4· Ewa Morawska, For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 273.

XII

The uprising of the ethnics had unleashed new forces in American politics. Although most successful political aspirants from industrial neighborhoods sought a place for themselves within the American social order, rather than its overthrow, neither they nor their constituents had anything hut contempt for the "rugged individualism" that former president Herbert Hoover and other conservatives identified with the American Way. Communist party members (like Mish's friends Bob and Maria Ucchini) earned prestige and influence among their neighbors by battling for the needs of the unemployed, creating new unions, and after 1935 forging a united front with Socialists, Farmer-Laborites, and other older radical groups, ethnic organizations, and liberal Democrats to further New Deal reforms. Because millions of Catholics were involved in the social and political movements of the 1930s, Catholic trade unionist groups were also formed by clergy and lay people to combat the Communists and uphold the teachings of the church within the CIO. 5 Although the new industrial unions made slow headway during the last years of the depression, and conservative resistance frustrated attempts to extend New Deal reforms in Congress and in state legislatures after 1938, the economic boom generated by World War II produced an unprecedented increase in union membership and power. While CIO unions enrolled most workers in the auto, steel, electrical, and meat-packing industries, the AFL grew even faster. In addition to swelling the ranks of skilled workers in its traditional craft unions, AFL constituents such as the machinists, electricians, and teamsters directed successful organizing drives at mass-production industries in ). The literature on these subjects is vast, but see Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Maurice lsserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Nell irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea lludson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979): Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 192 3-6o (Urbana: Univcrsitv of Illinois Press, 1983).

XIll

bitter competition with the CIO. The railroad brotherhoods and other unions independent of both the AFL and the CIO also grew rapidly. By the end of the war, more than 12 million Americans-32 percent of all nonfarm employees-belonged to unions. Although union representation remained rare in service and clerical occupations and in public employment, a record 83 percent of all mine workers, 6; percent of all transportation workers, and 87 percent of all construction workers were union members by 1947. Peak union membership in manufacturing-42-4 percent-was not reached until 1953, hut during the postwar decade, for the first and to date last time in American history, the average production worker in a large manufacturing concern was covered by a union contract. 6 Even more important than the expansion of union membership, and certainly more ominous to corporate managers, was the wartime expansion of the codified and informal authority of unions over work practices. Full employment during the war made workers bolder in challenging supervisors and regulations they found oppressive, while cost-plus government contracts and insatiable demand for their products had often sapped managers' resistance. Although the government had frozen wages and suppressed strikes, its War Labor Board encouraged industrywidc bargaining, union security, recognized status for union officials within the plants, seniority rights in layoffs and promotions, and negotiation over fringe benefits and job classifications. These were matters business executives had long considered their exclusive domain. Long-established company and craft union policies of racial discrimination also carne under attack, through the Fair Employment Practice Committee. At the war's end, therefore, the labor movement's sense of the changes it could effect in industrial life had expanded in many directions, while business leaders were issuing an alarmed cry for the restoration of management's "right to

6. Leo Troy, "The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unions: The Labor Movement from FOR toRR," in Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1986), 75-109. The table "Union Density by Major Industrial Sector, 1930-1985" is on p. 87.

XIV

manage" and the defense of "free enterprise" against "foreign-inspired collectivism. " 7 A strike wave, informed by this conflict and which in turn defined its meaning for much of the American public, began in the fall of 1945 and continued through the following year. The most widespread demand among workers was for higher wages-a major increase in hourly pay to compensate for the rise in prices and the sharp reduction in weekly incomes that came with the end of war-induced overtime work. Employers countered with demands for dismantling of the contractual authority unions had secured under the auspices of the War Labor Board, tightening of production standards and workplace discipline, and unrestricted managerial discretion in setting prices, locating plants, selecting and introducing technology, and hiring and promoting employees. During the early months of 1946 all of the major CIO unions were engaged in protracted strikes against the country's largest manufacturing corporations. The strikes by the United Electrical Workers (UE) against General Electric and Westinghouse were especially hard fought. The low wages paid women and union control over the setting of piece rates were among the prominent issues being contested. Massive picket lines shut down factories and offices each day, often in defiance of violent police attacks. But battles were waged not only with pickets; films and radio publicity, huge rallies addressed by wellknown personalities, sympathetic strikes, and other tactics were used in an effort to win public opinion. The settlements resulting from the strikes gave workers wage increases based on the government formula of 18 1/z cents per hour and raised but did not equalize women's pay rates. Equally important, most of the companies' demands were rejected. For General Electric, confronted by a strike in all its plants throughout the land for the first time since 1918, the workers' triumph 7· Howell John Harris, Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 48-58; for a more negative assessment of the influence of the New Deal and the war on the labor movement, see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso Books, 1986), 52-101.

XV

was so galling that the corporation dramatically revised its labor and public relations strategies. 8 At its convention in November 1946, the triumphant CIO resolved to spread the union gospel to America's many unorganized workers and to seek a "guaranteed annual wage" for every employed man and woman. It also adopted a political program that envisaged a significant expansion of the role of government in the country's economic life. The plan called for effective regulation of consumer prices, an excessprofits tax, and "an allocation and priority system" to direct materials toward the satisfaction of urgent social needs that unregulated markets had left unmet. I lousing, infant and maternal health care, "day care of workers' children," national health insurance, a fair employment practices law, and secure income for the elderly held privileged places in the CIO's program. Public, civilian, and international control of atomic energy and a single development agency for the valley of the Missouri River were two of the most grandiose projects the convention endorsed. The importance of world peace was also stressed, to be secured by universal disarmament, self-determination for colonial peoples, and continued collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union within the framework of the United Nations. This was not a socialist program, however. Rather, it represented points of agreement between the left wing and the moderates of the CIO, and in presenting it, President Philip Murray reaffirmed his own commitment to private enterprise." But despite the overwhelming support shown by workers for their unions in the 1946 strikes and the widespread popularity of the CIO's 8. Schatz, Electrical Workers, 167-87; James J. Matles and james Higgins, Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union (Englewood Cliffs, N.j.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 130-49; Harris, Right to Manage, 139-54; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1987). 144-51. 9· CIO, Final Report of the Eighth Constitutional Convention of the Congress of Industria/Organizations, November 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 1946, 38-115, 151-52, 15658, 277-78. The famous declaration, that the CIO "resents and rejects efforts of the Communist Party or other political parties ... to interfere in the affairs of the CIO," was adopted immediately after Murray's opening speech. Ibid., 113-14.

XVI

program, outside as well as inside of its ranks, the American labor movement was by no means a united force. The 4 million members of the CIO were then outnumbered by the 7 million workers in the AFL. Although AFL unions had been involved in many strikes that year and had collaborated locally with CIO unions in the citywide general strikes in Stamford, Connecticut, Rochester, New York, Lancaster and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Oakland, California, the AFL's top officers remained hostile to the CIO and to its reliance on government power to achieve social refonn. AFL unions regularly denounced CIO rivals as "Communists," and President William Green assured Congress early in 1947 that the AFL would not defend a Communist worker against dismissal. Moreover, factionalism was rampant within the leadership of the CIO, and both Walter Reuther's caucus in the United Auto Workers and the insurgent UE Members for Democratic Action had already raised the anticommunist banner against their rivals. The Gildens' novel quite appropriatelv depicts opposing groups selecting their slates for union office during parties celebrating the strike victory of 1946. 10

11

"Back on the Same Side" The lesson driven home to business executives by the strikes of 1946 was that they could not carry the day by reacting to labor's demands. Nor was it enough to win legislative restrictions on union strength and action, although the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 provided business with a major success on that front. A new consensus in management circles had emerged out of the 1945 Congress of American Industry, numerous studies by industrial relations research groups, the admonitions of business representatives on wartime government agencies, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1:177. The C!O's claims to 6 million members in 1946 were based on a blend of mutually contradictory ways of counting. 11. George Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold War America: "A Rainbow at Midnight" (South Hadley, Mass.:). F. Bergin Publishers, 1982), 56~86; Irving Richter, Labor's Struggles, 194