The T.U.E.L. to the End of the Gompers Era 0717806731, 071780674X

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VOLUME IX: The T.U.E.L. to the End of the

Gompers Era

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HISTORY OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

VOLUME IX: The T.U.E.L. to the End of the Gompers Era

BY PHILIP S. FONER

LIBRARY SERVICES UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA EVANSVILLE, IN

INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, New York

© 1991 by International Publishers Co., Inc. First Edition, 1991 All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA (Revised for volume 9) Foner, Philip Sheldon, 19!0-

History of the labor movement in the United States. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: —v.2. From the founding of the American Federation of Labor to the emergence of American imperialism —v. 5. The AFL in the prog-

ressive era, 1910-1915 —[etc.] —v.9.

The T.U.E.L.

to the end of the Gompers era, 1. Trade-unions—United States—History. 2. Labor movement—United States—History, |. Title.

HD6508.F57 1975 ISBN 0-7178-0092-X

331.88'0973

ISBN 0-7178-0388-0 (pbk.) Volume 9 ISBN 0-7178-0673-1 ISBN 0-7178-0674-X (pbk.)

75-315606

CONTENTS Preface Postwar Depression

New England Textile Strike, 1922 San Pedro Strike of the IWW Women Workers The TUEL — Predecessors

The TUEL — Formation and Early Development The TUEL — Advances Se SS Sw The TUEL — Setbacks The Railroad Workers . Machinists and Carpenters . The Miners, | . . . .

The The The The

Miners, Il — Nova Scotia Miners, Ill Ladies’ Garment Workers Fur Workers

. Men’s Clothing and Millinery Workers . U.S. Labor and the Soviet Union — RAIC 18. The Black Workers 19. Independent Political Action 20. End of the Gompers Era Notes

Index

323 339 361 374 401

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resend C731 RataLy The official labor delegates to the conference—Samuel Gompers, Sara Conboy of the United Textile workers, and L. F. Carter of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—also came with nothing concrete to offer. The more progressive repre-

sentatives, however, made two demands: (1) immediate relief for the unemployed, and (2) a cure for the disease in the future. Meyer London proposed the creation of public works projects for the benefit of the unemployed, along with steps toward “permanent relief through unemployment insurance.” The Amalgamated Clothing Workers submitted a plan for the elimination of slack seasons in the clothing trade by requiring manufacturers “to employ their workers all year round.”>4 None of these proposals received serious consideration. The first recommendation to receive attention came from the Committee on Emergency Measures, a majority of whom were manufacturers. The committee proposed that the wages of American workers be reduced to the level of German workers. In supporting the proposal, one manufacturer declared: “Mills in Germany in which I am interested are operating up to twelve hours a day for one-third of the wages we pay. They can undersell

us by 50 per cent.”©5 On behalf of the leadership of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Advance criticized Gompers, who was a member of the committee, albeit in the minority, for not speaking out vigorously in opposition to the “wage slashing proposal.” The journal suggested that the labor delegates tell the conference: If as a result of our victory over Germany, she is able to compete with us, the victory was Germany’s, not ours.

If Germany’s defeat has given her such an advantage over us that we must lower our standards of living 50 per cent in order to be able to meet Germany on the industrial field after her debacle in the military field, why should the burden be thrown upon labor? Let capital bear it. Labor was not responsible for the war; labor fought the war as it was told to by its masters,* labor did not amass fortunes * Aang neglected to point out that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers belonged in this category.

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from the war; labor did not draft the peace treaty. What the war yielded to labor at best was a job for about two years. If capitalism has made such a ghastly botch of the job it has undertaken, it should be frankly admitted that capitalism is bankrupt and let it relinquish its stranglehold upon the world by which it is producing misery in peacetime.

Advance concluded sadly: “Gompers and his co-delegates will not say

that to the conference.”°6 After declaring that the solution to the unemployment emergency was “primarily a community problem,” the National Unemployment Conference adjourned until October 10, when it would “consider additional reports.” Meanwhile, the conference adopted a proposal for quick relief, which called for the establishment of emergency committees representing the various elements in the community, setting up efficient public employment offices, assembling careful statistics, making home repairs at once instead of waiting until summer, and, building homes. Finally, the conference called upon people to “urge relatives and friends to make extraordinary sacrifices to assist their own relatives and acquaintances who are out of work.”°? Both Joseph H. Depress, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Samuel Gompers joined in endorsing the conference’s temporary proposals. “The trade union movement in each community will join energetically in the effort to assist in the task of providing work for the thousands who are idle,” said Gompers.°® Once more, however, he offered nothing concrete to further this objective. The one effective thing the labor group at the conference did accomplish was to temporarily block the move to get the conference’s endorsement for the allotment of another $500 million to the railroads. L.F. Carter insisted that if the roads got the money from the government, they should be required to use it for the employment of unemployed labor. “That spiked the plans of the railroad managers, who want to use the money for dividends,” one labor paper reported, “and the plan was sidetracked for a

while.”»9 But only for a while. In the end, the conference endorsed the proposal and recommended that $500 million be advanced to the railroads to help them out of their so-called “financial plight.” In a minority report, the two trade union members of the committee, joined by Ray Dickinson, editor of Printer’s Ink, declared that they approved of the advance, but only with the provision “insuring the expenditure of the money so appropriated in the reemployment of labor.” However, the majority report ignored this suggestion. The most significant of the reports to the conference was that of the Committee on Manufactures, of which Gompers, Conboy, and Carter were members. The report advocated a general reduction of wages to the level of

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

those of the workers in Germany, a policy of sharing the work by dividing up existing jobs, repeal of the S-hour law for the railroads, and the abolition of the Railroad Labor Board, which had given railroad workers something of a voice in determining their wages and conditions. In a minority report, Gompers, Conboy, and Carter charged that the attack on the Adamson Eight-Hour Law for railroad workers could only be construed as an effort to break down the principle of the 8-hour day, since the law had been enacted after the railroad unions had established the Shour day by voluntary negotiations. They opposed the demand for abollition of the Railroad Labor Board because that tribunal was “the only one in which the railroad workers can now present their claims relating to wages and conditions of employment.” The three labor representatives continued: There must be adopted no policy of wage reductions. Onthe contrary, there must be a policy calling for the highest possible rate of wages in every industry. Reduction of buying power stops purchasing which in turn inevitably stops manufacturing and creates unemployment.

The three dissenters urged the elimination of profiteering and asserted that management, having assumed the responsibilities which went with its functions, “has no moral right to tax the public for its inefficiency by costs fixed upon a basis of part-time production.” The minority report also referred to a portion of the majority report as “artfully worded and intended to imply that businessmen are now selling at a loss, and that the profits and interest have been deflated, and that the only factor that remains for reduction is the wage earner in his wages.”®! Unfortunately, while labor’s spokespersons at the conference advanced effective although unavailing arguments against the employers’ proposals, they did not come to the meeting with any program of their own. They simply participated in discussions of the program advanced by the representatives of monopoly capitalism. While the President’s Conference was meeting, Urban Ledoux (“Mr. Zero”) presented 50 unemployed men from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as “human documents of the misery the conference must abolish.” When the conference ended without any concrete proposal for dealing with the economic crisis other than a general wage reduction, Ledoux told reporters that the recommendation was “an evidence of selfishness and hardness of heart” which was leading toward “a violent revolution.”©2 Although social workers were disappointed by the conference’s failure to recommend meaningful proposals, most of them viewed the widespread publicity the conference received as serving “to focus attention on the

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problems of unemployment.”®3* However, a leading trade unionist scornfully rejected this view. “The beautiful speeches at the President’s Conference will bring no relief for the suffering workers,” he wrote. “The problem of unemployment will be dealt with effectively only when intelligently organized workers will themselves deal with it.”°4 As the conference ended, Advance observed sarcastically: “At last the vexing problem of unemploy-

ment is solved. What a relief!”®

PROPOSALS FOR IMMEDIATE AND PERMANENT RELIEF A number of proposals for dealing with the economic crisis—which did not surface at the conference—were widely discussed in the labor and liberal press as the delegates met in Washington. These included a comprehensive program divided into proposals for immediate relief and those for permanent relief, presented by the Chicago Federation of Labor. In the former category were these recommendations: That the Federal authorities shift the extension of credit from speculators to legitimate industry, especially the building industry. That Federal authorities open trade relations with Russia, so that Russia may place orders in the United States. That authorities of the City, State and National Governments begin construction at once on public works already planned and plan new

projects. That the Chicago officers of the Illinois not forthcoming, the relief through shorter

Federation of Labor take up unemployment with Federation of Labor, and that if immediate relief is Chicago Federation devise ways and means for hours of work.

For permanent relief, the following measures were advocated: That the standard working day be permanently shortened to provide work for the unemployed. That each industry organize so as to be able to give permanent work to the workers. That credit and bank facilities be made public utilities. That the Labor Department of the Federal Government organize a comprehensive employment bureau. That the State Labor Department be empowered to go over the books and accounts of any firm shutting down to ascertain whether the * Leah H. Feder argues that from the conference’s deliberations there emerged “the first clear-cut official statement as to industry’s responsibility to aid in the solution of the social

problems it had created...” (Unemployment Relief in Periods of Depression, New York, 1936, p. 297). But she offers no evidence in her brief discussion of the conference.

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

shutdown is a deliberate attempt against workers, and that the workers’

representatives be present at the audits.66 At a meeting of unemployed women in New York’s Union Square, Rose Schneiderman, speaking for the Women’s Trade Union League, called for more than temporary relief measures. “It is necessary,” she insisted, “for us now to find ways to overcome the scheme that permits this to be a recurrent problem. The plan should be one concerning every state and every city. It should be federalized, if possible, and we hope that it may be. It should be so arranged that public works should be under way when other things show slackness.” She continued: Let us build in such time the schools that we need so badly. Roads, bridges, and terminals are also needed. And then let us take the children out of the factories and put their fathers in, and put the children in school where they belong. We ask President Harding to issue a proclamation calling upon employers to take the men into their establishments and to send the children back to the schools.

The unemployed women at the meeting unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the reestablishment of Federal employment offices, an S-hour day, the abolition of night work for women, the immediate building of schoolhouses, the establishment of industrial training for women, the passage of the Nolan Minimum Wage Bill, the abolition of all avoidable

seasonal work, and a system of unemployment insurance.” The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) proposed the immediate adoption of the 4-hour day as the solution for the unemployment problem. “Cut down the hours of those who are now working and give the idle a chance at the jobs...” declared the Industrial Worker, official organ of the IWW. “It makes no difference what organization you already belong to, or to any for that matter; if you wish to do something for yourself and your fellow-workers, there is nothing that will benefit us as will a shorter work-

day. All together for the four-hour day.”68 Dr. Leo Wolman, director of the Research Department of the ACW, noted that even though unemployment was “by all odds the most serious of the modern industrial evils,” it had “so far received only curt and passing notice from the government.” “As a result,” said Wolman, “the great mass of industrial workers are at present left wholly without protection against the ravages of unemployment, and private measures of relief and prevention affect only an infinitesimal proportion of the industrial population of the country.” Wolman therefore declared that an unemployment program must (1) provide machinery for the better placement of workers; (2) seek to add to the number of available jobs, and (3) make provision for the support of those unemployed, who, in spite of all efforts to employ them, continued to be without work. In short, an adequate public unemployment program

POSTWAR DEPRESSION

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must provide a national and integrated system of public employment exchanges, a public policy, and an insurance fund. To this, he went on, should be added a system of national unemployment insurance to be financed by employers and employed workers.® Wolman conceded that his proposals were “moderate,” a characterization that was agreed to by Scott Nearing, even as he praised Wolman for advocating much-needed reforms. In a public letter of advice to President Harding and Commerce Secretary Hoover, Nearing urged that they ..ask Congress to appropriate half a billion dollars for immediate commencement of various public works—the building of post offices, the drainage of swamp land, the irrigation of arid land; reforestation; the construction of roads, and other permanent improvements that would be of some ultimate use to the community. Or they might inaugurate a policy of compelling the states and cities to begin contemplated public works. Again, they might set some more stringent check on the immense sums that are being paid in the form of interest and dividends. They might even make an effort to have the payment of all forms of interest, rent, and dividends stopped until there was enough to feed the hungry mouths of those who want to work. All these things are possible. The railroads are just getting money by the hundreds of millions—why not the unemployed? .... Excess profits taxes were heaped on to meet a war emergency—why not the same thing to meet the peace emergency? Men were conscripted to win the war—is there any good reason why wealth should not be conscripted to stave off hunger?’

However, Nearing did not include in his list a proposal made by Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, at the October 1921 convention of women delegates in Geneva of the Second International Congress of Working Women. Robins observed: “Everywhere unemployment, consequent hunger and suffering threaten the homes of the working world.” The first step to end this terrible state of affairs, she insisted, was “to make war against war” and demand that the billions spent on armaments be used for ending unemployment: Governments that can spend billions in destructive war must learn now to spend millions for constructive peace. Not doles in debasing idleness, but living wages in productive work, this we demand from the governments and economic order in all lands. Breadlines, soup kitchens, and thousands of idle toilers indict the governments and the social order of the world.71

Both Robins and Nearing believed that if the capitalist system failed to solve the problem of unemployment, it should be abolished. Robins, however, was willing to give capitalism another chance, maintaining that “either unemployment or capitalism must go. If competitive private industry cannot employ the able and willing workers, then competitive private industry is doomed.” Nearing, on the other hand, believed that the unemployment problem could never be solved under capitalism and would con-

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tinue “until the capitalist system that produces it goes over the precipice.”’2 In a debate with Professor Walter B. Pitkin of Columbia University on “Unemployment,” Nearing concluded: Our economic system offers no remedy to the widespread unemployment system now facing the country. The only cure will be found in doing away with the investors and turning over the means of production to the workers, who will produce, not for profit, but for the common good of all.73

While some of Nearing’s proposals were later adopted during the New Deal, none were put into effect during the economic crisis of 1920-1923. By the time the economic revival got under way late in 1922, not a single plan had been introduced to prevent future depressions or to lessen their impact on the working class. It was to take the Great Depression that began in October 1929 to alter this situation. In February 1922, the United States Employment-Service reported that surveys conducted in 231 of the principal centers of the country showed no general improvement in employment conditions. Nevertheless, after concluding that employment conditions had failed to give any indication of a “substantial improvement in business,” the report predicted that there “will be a decided change for the better by early spring.””4 The economic advances of the era of the so-called good times that were to end in 1929 were already underway. The Workers’ Party of America, a coalition of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, issued an appeal to all workers in June 1922, warning them not to be deluded by reports of a coming era of unprecedented prosperity into believing that the capitalists were about to usher in an era of “benevolent paternalism”: The working people of the country are face to face with a determined effort on the part of the capitalist owners of industry to place upon their backs the burden of paying for the destruction and waste and the breakdown of the capitalist machinery of production caused by the war. The workers are to pay in lower wages, longer hours and worse working conditions. The workers are to pay in a lower standard of living, poorer food, poorer homes, less opportunity for education and recreation for the men, wo-

men and children of the working class..”°

The Workers’ Party proposed the support of all strikes, education about the nature of the employers’ attack on labor, relief for the unemployed, opposition to injunctions and industrial courts, protection of civil liberties— and most important of all, the “building up and unifying the trade unions on the basis of a militant, progressive labor program.””6

CHAPTER 2

THE NEW ENGLAND TEXTILE STRIKE OF 1922 The World War I boom period brought bonanza profits and full employment to the New England textile industry. In 1920 however, a severe nationwide depression hit the mills hard. Textile prices collapsed, and Southern competition made the future for New England manufacturers seem bleak indeed. By this time the Southern mills were the leading textile producers of the nation. Their machines were newer and faster and their labor costs were lower. To increase their share of the market and to shore up their profits, New England manufacturers reduced wages, increased work loads, and demanded longer hours. The workers were led to believe that. these steps were necessary to keep the manufacturers in business and to prevent a number of them from closing down and following the trek to the South. In December 1920, the textile workers accepted a 22.5 percent pay cut. Fourteen months later, however, when the employers demanded an additional reduction of 20 percent, and when the New Hampshire and Rhode Island owners attempted to restore the 54-hour work week,” there was a wave of bitter, prolonged walkouts. As one worker put it: “Workers of New England have made up their mind to die like men rather than to work like

dogs under slave-drivers.”? The reaction of the mill workers was prompt. Weavers at the Royal Mills in the Pawtucket Valley (an area of mill villages southwest of Providence) walked out on January 23, 1922, shutting down the mills; The strikers marched through Pawtucket, calling out the workers in mill after mill. In the Blackstone Valley (a series of mill towns north of Providence), scattered locals of the United Textile Workers protested the owners’ announcement

* Rhode Island law regarding working hours limited the work week for women and minors to 54 hours, but did not limit the hours of male adults. (Leonard E. Tilden, “New England Strike,” Monthly Labor Review 16 [May 1923]: 900.)

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and called a strike. Unorganized workers in the Blackstone mills immediately joined in the walkout. By February the mills in both valleys were shut down, and the strike quickly spread to textile firms in Providence, in Lawrence, Massachusetts and in Manchester, New Hampshire. Soon what amounted to a general textile strike was in full swing throughout New England, with 60-80,000 workers struggling for 8 to 9 months to defend what they had achieved

during the war. The deep pay cuts and longer hours sparked a strike wave unprecedented in the New England textile industry’s 100-year history. Maine workers remained on the job, and operatives at a few Massachusetts mills decided to organize before striking. Elsewhere workers struck as soon as the new schedules went into effect. By April the looms were silenced across New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Textile workers denounced the manufacturers’ plans as “shuttle slavery.” Under the new rates, Lowell workers, who had averaged $27.40 a week in June 1920, would take home $16.46—substantially less than the $1,119 per year that a National Association of Cotton Manufacturers’ study had established as a “minimum standard of living” for a Lowell family. Women in Lawrence complained that the new wage schedules meant that they would earn from $11 to $11.50 per week rather than from $14 to $14.50. While the pay cuts aroused angry opposition, the key issue for New Hampshire and Rhode Island operatives was the extended work week.* They complained that the longer work week meant greater fatigue, less leisure time, and fewer jobs. The Amoskeag Corporation’s new schedule in Manchester added 35 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at the day’s end to the workday. Work began at 6:45 a.m. and ended at 5:30 p.m. Women workers objected that the new hours were especially burdensome for them, since they had to do housework and care for their children before

and after work.* For these reasons the New Hampshire workers refused to give up the 48-hour week. For strikers in Manchester, “Eight Hours” became the symbol of their solidarity and self-respect. Strikers placed cards bearing their slogan in their windows; demonstrations and rallies featured “Eight Hour” chants; strikers greeted each other with their watchword and taunted scabs with cries of “Eight Hours.” When asked the reason for his arrest, a man jailed for shouting the slogan at scabs replied: “Eight Hours.” “In this way,” writes Dexter Philip Arnold, “the strikers’ key demand became shorthand for their common bonds, their angry rejection of the mill owners’ ultimatum, and the struggle for their rights as workers and as citizens.”” * In Massachusetts, the law already provided for a 48-hour work week.

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

21

The strike was conducted mainly by two unions: the United Textile Workers of America, affiliated with the AFL, and the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, which was independent. The One Big Union, under the leadership of Ben Legere, a former Wobbly activist,> also played an important role in Lowell, Massachusetts. When the strike got under way, none of the unions were well organized. Less than one-half of the strikers in Rhode Island, and approximately one-quarter of them in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, belonged to a union. Nevertheless, the fact that there were no wage reductions announced in the highly organized textile cities of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts impressed the strikers with the need for a union.’ In any case, they left the conduct and management of the struggle largely to the unions and followed the lead and instructions

of the union officials In Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 2,400 people worked in the cotton textile mills, but only 300 of them belonged to the Amalgamated Textile Workers when the wage cut was announced. The majority of the union members were Finnish. While the most militant workers wanted an immediate walkout, Fred Harwood, the ATW’s organizer, urged them to wait until the union was stronger. The workers voted to delay the strike and while they delayed action, they actively recruited members. By March 1 the local ATW

chapter had 900 members and the strike was called. | dispatchquickly, responded Workers Textile United In 1922 the AFL’s ing organizers to numerous mill towns to aid the operatives and to claim leadership over the protests. Conservative views continued to dominate the UTW. Nevertheless, the AFL affiliate helped operatives to coordinate and maintain their strikes. On the whole, it proved more energetic and more effective than in previous strikes. Although craft locals remained an important part of the AFL union’s structure, practical day-today activities often resulted in a blurring of craft distinctions. At times, organizers set up mill-wide locals, and Manchester

activists even tried to sign up the Amoskeag’s office workers.!° When the United Textile Workers, claiming complete jurisdiction over the industry, refused to cooperate with other unions, the One Big Union held elections for a 50-member Lawrence Strike Committee, with proportional representation from each struck mill. Although it was dominated by OBU activists, the committee won the support of many unaffiliated strikers. The OBU used frequent mass meetings and rallies to mobilize mass picketing of the mills and established a regular weekly schedule for its newspaper, Lawrence Labor. OBU mass pickets also helped strengthen demonstrations outside mills organized by the UTW.!!

a, b See end notes

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Divisions between the UTW and the three independent textile unions— the OBU, the Mulespinners, and the AFL’s Loomfixers—weakened the Lawrence strike. Conflicts between the OBU and the UTW were particularly harmful. The UTW’s single-minded view of itself as the sole legitimate textile union was the primary obstacle to strike unity. When the walkout began, Ben Legere proposed a joint strike committee with representatives

from each striking union, but this was rejected by the UTW officials.!2

THE UTW AND THE ATW Outside of Lawrence, an amazing feature of the strike was the harmonious relationship between the United Textile Workers and the Amalgamated Textile Workers. The latter union organized the mills in the Pawtucket Valley of Rhode Island, Fitchburg, and parts of Lawrence, while the United Textile Workers dominated the rest of New England and was completely in charge of the strike in New Hampshire. The One Big Union exercised influence only in Lawrence.!3 For once—again with the exception of Lawrence—the effectiveness of a strike conducted by two competing organizations was not diminished by any conflict between them. In keeping with its outlook from its founding in 1919,* the Amalgamated Textile Workers functioned as an industrial union, including skilled and unskilled, men and women, and all ethnic groups in the strike. What was new was the fact that the United Textile Workers, for the first time, ignored craft divisions and followed suit—at least for the duration of the strike. The strike committees of both unions included the various ethnic groups within the mills. At strike rallies, both unions arranged for speeches to be given in English,

French, Finnish, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.4 The 1922 strike also helped bridge differences between old and new immigrants. For the first time, a major New England textile strike attracted sustained, large-scale participation by both groups. Unlike the case too often in the past, English- and French-speaking residents did not have to decide whether to join the walkout led by new immigrants. The employers helped promote this cooperation by demanding heavy sacrifices from all workers.!5** Clashes between strikers and scabs began soon after the strike got underway. In Pawtucket on February 21, a striker was killed by the police * See Foner, History of the Labor Movement... 8: 126-30. ** Although active in street protests, new immigrants held few prominent positions in the UTW-led struggles, and the Manchester strike committee did not include any southern or eastern Europeans. Nevertheless, common action by old and new immigrants was an important feature of the strike. (Dexter Philip Arnold, “‘A Row of Bricks’: Worker Activism in the Merrimack Valley Textile Industry, 1912-1922,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1985, p. 764.)

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

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and 17 were wounded, including 10 women strikers. On February 23, the day of the funeral, 5,000 marched in the funeral procession.16 The Cavalry Coast Artillery and the Sanitation Troops of Rhode Island were mobilized, and the state militia ringed the textile plants in the strike areas. There were clashes between the soldiers and strikers in which some of the latter were wounded, but Governor San Souci kept the entire state militia in the Pawtucket Valley at a cost of $3,000 a day. The New York World commented: “Rhode Island is run by the textile manufacturers to

suit their own purposes.”!? The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued weekly “confidential” reports on so-called disturbances during the strike, which appeared designed to bring in federal troops to crush the walkout. In Fitchburg, for example, these reports stressed “much disorder and several arrests” each week. The Bureau reported that on March 27 there were disturbances at “Mill R,” during which “windows were smashed, offices stoned, and several revolver shots fired?”’8A study of the Fitchburg police files and the conservative press by Edmund B. Thomas, however, reveals that nothing of the sort actually happened, and that the FBI’s “confidential” reports actually “manufactured” violence on the part of the strikers.19 Fitchburg’s Overseers of the Poor noted that many workers in the mill city lived “from hand to mouth” and that the least financial setback became

a major catastrophe for them.2 Since the same could be said of every community affected by the strike, it is not surprising that once the struggle began, aid for the strikers became essential. Within a week of the walkouts, many families needed assistance. As the strike continued into its second, and later its third month, the need became acute. This was intensified as families were evicted from houses owned by the mills.?1 The United Textile Workers, the Amalgamated Textile Workers, and the One Big Union all furnished strike aid. Unlike the UTW, which gave relief to its own members and to those attending its rallies, the OBU distributed relief cards to everyone who picketed, and offered legal advice to all strikers.2 In Rhode Island, the UTW furnished strike aid by checks and also issued $1 orders on specified stores for groceries, bread, and salt pork. “We set up thirteen restaurants in the Pawtucket Valley, three in Natick alone,” recalled Luigi Nardella, a member of the “Iron Battalion,” the name given to the workers who first walked out in Pawtucket and then went from village to village, convincing thousands of workers to resist the attempts to cut their pitiful wages. Nardella went on: There’d be one meal, sandwiches and plenty of milk for the children.... The doctors said that the children looked more healthy after the strike than before. We were proud of that. And we were giving relief to families who couldn’t come

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to the restaurants. We gave the more needy families coal, we gave them wood, and we gave them enough to get along.23

Strikers unable to go to the restaurants were given aid ranging from $4 to $8 per month. Two shoemakers were employed during the strike to repair the shoes of the strikers. Shoes and other wearing apparel were distributed. The United Textile Workers established commissaries and restaurants in New Hampshire. Food—especially groceries—was distributed to the strikers. The UTW housed evicted families in an enormous tent colony on unoccupied land in the city of Lonsdale, Rhode Island. The evicted families named

the tent colony “Camp Thomas” after one of the union’s organizers.”4 Mill town residents gave substantial assistance to the strikers, who regularly canvassed the city streets, selling tags, flowers, and buttons. Fundraisers waited outside factory gates on payday. Proceeds from whist parties, dances, concerts, and sporting events helped to swell union treasuries. Manchester Greeks and Russians raised funds for the UTW, and in Lawrence, new immigrant societies aided the OBU’s strike effort. Until it was overruled by higher authorities, a Manchester National Guard unit planned to donate the receipts from its spring ball to the UTW. Numerous unions dipped into their treasuries or sponsored benefits, and several voted to assess their members. By August, Manchester cigarmakers were contributing five percent of their weekly earnings to the UTW. The Franco-Belgian Cooperative, the Workers’ Cooperative Union, and both Russian and Jewish bakery cooperatives also aided the OBU. The strikers received aid, too, from local businesses. Merchants contributed food, shoes, clothing, ice, and coal. Doctors, dentists, barbers, and cobblers donated their services to the strikers. One Manchester furniture dealer provided trucks to pick up weekly donations of bread from the Lynn, Massachusetts bakers. The city’s theater and amusement park owners offered their premises for benefits, and Lawrence merchants provided prizes and refreshments for the OBU, as well as for UTW fundraising events. The strikers made it clear that they expected this support.25 In Massachusetts, the Amalgamated Textile Workers tried to obtain municipal relief for the destitute strikers, pointing out that since the factory gates were shut and the cities involved were exclusively textile communities, there was no possibility of work. However, the clerks of the Overseers of the Poor in Worcester, Lawrence, and Fitchburg turned a deaf ear to these requests, ruling that strikers were ineligible for relief, regardless of the circumstances. In Boston, however, under pressure from the Boston Central Labor Union, Mayor Curley overruled the Overseers of the Poor

and ordered funds allotted to the strikers.26

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

25

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the Workmen’s Circle, locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Jewelry Workers, and the Capmakers contributed large amounts to both the UTW and the ATW. The Party Cooperative Association of Paterson donated 6,000 pounds of flour; another cooperative bakery in New Bedford, Massachusetts contributed enough baked bread to supply the strikers for one day a week.2? In Fitchburg, the Finnish community was the first to rally behind the strikers. The Finnish cooperative grocery stores delivered food at cost to the strikers, while the Finnish Socialist bakery offered free use of its ovens. Later in the strike, Finnish grocers pledged part of their weekly income for strike aid. The Finnish organizations also sponsored most of the benefit

dances held in Fitchburg.2® “The small, neighborhood stores,” Edmund B. Thomas, Jr. points out, “seemed more willing to oblige their traditional customers with credit and special discounts, while the larger Main Street stores hesitated, waiting for an official resolution of the local Chamber of

Commerce—a resolution which was never forthcoming.”29 The unions claimed that the aid was substantial enough to enable the strikers “to remain out as long as it is necessary” to win their demands. The United Textile Workers sent the following release to the press to strengthen their argument: “School teachers in the Pawtucket Valley, R.I, report that the children are in better health now than they have been in 25 years, because we are feeding two good substantial meals to all strikers and

their families.”°° However, neither the funds raised nor the relief offered were actually sufficient in relation to the need. French-Canadian families, and even some Finnish families in the strike-bound communities decided to return to their homelands for the duration of the strike?! The real solution, of course, lay in an end to the strike on terms acceptable to the strikers. Union leaders expressed confidence that this would be the final outcome. “We are going to make them recognize us as human beings and not as just part of the machinery,” Fred Harwood, the ATW’s organizer in Fitchburg, told a strike rally.32 One way the ATW hoped to end the strike in victory was by expanding the walkout to all mill cities in New England. Some mills were shut down, but with the strike in its seventh week and relief rapidly dwindling, it became increasingly difficult to recruit workers in those mills not yet on

strike.33 Meanwhile, the employers were confident that many strikers, forced by the crush of debts and the lack of further credit, would soon be crossing the picket lines. It was not until mid-July, however, that the first strikers in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts crossed the picket lines, and even then, only in very small numbers—in Fitchburg, only fifteen.**

26

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

In A Word to the Public, distributed to the citizens of Fitchburg on April 21, the ATW sought to explain the workers’ reasons for striking. In essence, they were seeking “an American wage sufficient to maintain an American standard of living.” Workers, the union declared, must be able to provide their families with decent living conditions, and wages should not be reduced to “the level of bare subsistence.”°> The ATW leaflet was copied, in one form or another, in every strike town. Everywhere, the public was reminded that the mill owners had made large profits over the past ten years, very little of which they had shared with the workers. Wage increases had rarely kept pace with the increases in the cost of living. Workers could not accept the 20 percent cut and “hope to live decently.” The public was therefore urged to rally behind the strikers, support them with donations, and put pressure on the companies to settle the dispute.°® To all this, the employers had only one reply. From the very outset of the strike, they made no attempt to refute the workers’ statement that the average weekly wage for many of the operatives ranged between $14 and $15, while thousands of women operatives earned less than $7 a week. The employers’ only response was to raise the cry of competition from the Southern mills, with their cheaper labor. They could not, they claimed, afford to run their mills without this additional 20 percent cut. In Rhode Island and New Hampshire, the employers added the argument that it was impossible for them to exist with a 48-hour work week.” The mill owners ran advertisements in the press claiming that the average hourly wage in the Massachusetts textile mills at the beginning of 1922 was 40.9 cents, compared with 32.5 cents in Virginia, 29.2 cents in North Carolina, 22.9 cents in South Carolina, and 24 cents in Georgia. They argued that a 20 percent wage cut would lower Massachusetts wages to 32.7 cents an hour, roughly equal to that of Virginia, although still much higher than those in the rest of the South. Since New England workers were reputedly more productive than their Southern counterparts, the employers argued that the latest wage cut was necessary to keep their mills competitive. Otherwise, they maintained, they would either have to move to the South or go out of business.38

THE FINDINGS OF THE LABOR BUREAU In response, the unions presented the findings of the Labor Bureau that at their request had made a study of the economic factors in the strike. The data gathered by the Bureau proved: 1. Considering the cost to the Southern manufacturers of operating their mill villages—a cost that was not borne by the Northern manufacturers—the average weekly wage of the cotton mill worker in the North in

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

27

June 1921 was just 36 cents higher than that in the South. If the 20 percent cut were put into effect, the Northern wages would actually be $1.72 per week below Southern wages. 2. The Southern mills produced an inferior quality of goods and, as the employers themselves admitted, had a much lower rate of productivity. The workers in Massachusetts, with a 48-hour week, produced more than Southern workers on a 54-hour week, and those in Rhode Island and New Hampshire produced even more. 3. In many cases, the issue of “Southern competition” was a “myth.” For example, the B. B. & R. Knight Company, which controlled the Pawtucket Valley, was part of the Consolidated Textile Corporation that operated a large number of Southern mills. 4. The mill companies had been making enormous profits that had remained intact even during the postwar economic depression. Wherever profits appeared to have been reduced, it was as a result of overcapitalization during the period involved. The actual profit figures for several of the companies:

A. The Amoskeag company, with 17,000 workers in Manchester, made a 10-year profit of $30 million. Profits for the 5-year period of 1912-1916 were $8,040,250, and for the following five years, $22,462,202. On the

basis of its 1907 capitalization, it paid a 75 percent divided in 1921. One thousand dollars invested in Amoskeag in 1911 was worth more than $8,500 in 1922 exclusive of dividends. B. The Enckes Spinning Company of Pawtucket had paid dividends of 140 percent in the preceding five years. C. From 1914 to 1919, inclusive, the eight major cotton companies averaged 20.6 percent on an inflated capital, after heavy interest charges and other capital earnings had been covered. This was before the 22.5 percent wage cut in 1921, which had been accepted by the workers. 5. In 1920 cotton wages in the North were lower than any wages outside the textile industry, except in furniture manufacturing, and the differential between them and the wages in all other industries had increased between 1914 and 1922.°9 In all the strike towns, the unions called upon the employers to open their books to a public committee to either confirm or refute the findings of the Labor Bureau, and to justify management claims of poverty. They declared that if the companies would open their books and prove that they were incapable of paying higher wages, the workers would willingly accept the second wage cut. The unions in Lawrence issued the following statement on May 14, 1922:

28

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

Although it will mean hardship for our people if the manufacturers can prove that it is impossible for them to operate under the former wage, the textile workers can be relied upon to share the sacrifice, if this is proved. We don’t believe it will be, however. The workers are willing at any time to place their case before any fair board and abide by the decision rendered, after a thorough investigation of both sides in which all the facts are exposed.40

Invariably, the employers refused all such requests. The agent of the Amoskeag company was reported to have said: “It is nothing but socialism for a person to say that the public has any right to inquire into how much money a firm makes or how much it lays by for expansion.”*! The companies also rejected all proposals by the union for impartial arbitration. Even the commercial press accused the manufacturers of fearing that impartial mediators would “be more generous than the mill owners, who are quite willing to grind workers into abject poverty to keep mill profits high.’42 In mid-August, 29 weeks after the strike had begun on January 23, the situation stood as follows: Although the employers had opened mills for operation in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, the Daily News Record, the textile industry’s trade journal, indicated that they had been badly hit. The report for August 8, 1922 showed that the decrease in production resulting from the strike was over 250,000 yards of cloth. The tie-up of the New England mills had also resulted in a corresponding increase in the amount of production in the Southern mills. During the crop year from August 1, 1921 to August 1, 1922, the amount of raw cotton manufactured into clothing in Southern mills was 3,942,000 bales, as compared with 3,096,000

bales for the preceding year—an increase of 30 percent.*8 At the same time, the unions claimed that the strike was “still more than 80 percent solid,” and, statements of the manufacturers to the contrary notwithstanding, “there has not been a ‘steady influx’ of workers to the mills.” Russell Palmer, secretary of the ATW, discussing the situation in the Pawtucket Valley declared: There is no desire to return to work because the strikers feel that they might as well live on bread and beans and the other simple fare of the Amalgamated strike restaurants as to slave away their lives in the mills 54 hours a week for a miserable pittance like $14. The Amalgamated is still running 11 of the 13 strike restaurants that were established at the peak of the strike.

Palmer went on:

There can be no doubt of a victorious outcome if the friends of the textile workers ~ continue to furnish them with elementary food and shelter, so that they can continue their fight. The manufacturers have shown that they are frantically anxious to operate the mills, as cotton mills elsewhere have been working full, and many of them overtime—making money by the way, even though they are paying

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

29

wacecmlich the owners involved in the strike naively tell us would be “confiscatory.”

State and federal officials made half-hearted efforts to investigate the strike and to settle it, which they invariably abandoned after announcing that nothing further could be done.*5 Meanwhile, the competition was forcing employers to consider a settlement at the very time that the unions were finding strike relief so draining that they faced bankruptcy. In August, Fred Harwood left Fitchburg because the ATW could no longer afford to keep an organizer in that city.4®

THE LAWRENCE AND OTHER SETTLEMENTS Late in August, a Citizens’ Committee appointed by the mayor announced that the Lawrence mill owners had decided to settle. In a complicated effort to save face for them while giving in, a formula was arranged whereby the 20 percent wage cut would be ended as of September 1, although the additional wage would not appear in the workers’ pay envelopes until October 2, with retroactive pay for the preceding weeks. A week later, the plan was further clarified, and the board of strategy of the United Textile Workers met and recommended acceptance of the company’s terms to its affiliated locals. They, in turn, quickly met and voted to accept the terms offered. The local of the Amalgamated Textile Workers also met and voted to accept the offer. However Ben Legere, leader of the One Big Union, who had been critical of the leaders of both the UTW and the ATW during the strike, now opposed the settlement. The OBU’s view was rejected, and the strikers in Lawrence returned to work on the basis of the

rescission of the wage cut and the continuation of the 48-hour week.*? In other parts of Massachusetts there was not much division over the terms of the Lawrence settlement. In Lowell they were quickly adopted by the mill owners, although some complained that they were being forced “to follow the lead of Lawrence.” In Fitchburg the wage issue was resolved the same way, but the ATW insisted that all strikers be guaranteed their old jobs. The company refused to fire its new employees and would not pledge to rehire all the strikers. Actually the company wanted to get rid of the “radical elements” among the workers. The strike continued, but more and more of the strikers returned on the basis of the company’s offer. On October 15, 200 diehards met and agreed to call off the 29-week strike against the Parkhill Mill. There were no guarantees against discrimination, but the wage cut was rescinded.*® The first settlement in Rhode Island was made by the ATW on September 9 in the village of Crompton. There, the 48-hour week was obtained and the 20 percent wage cut was withdrawn. Within a few days, 3,500

30

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

workers of another Rhode Island mill returned to work. In that case, however, the 54-hour week was retained, although the wage demand was won, and the local, strengthened by its struggle, prepared for the next round.*9 The Rhode Island mills struck by the UTW settled at about the same time. A break in their ranks came on September 12, when the firm of Goddard Bros., which controlled 12 large mills in the Blackstone Valley, agreed to increase wages by 20 percent, bringing the scale back to what it had been before the strike began 34 weeks earlier. The firm also restored the 48-hour week. It was this firm, which controlled one of the largest chains of cotton mills in New England, that had been one of the first to cut wages in January, thereby bringing on the revolt of the textile workers.°9 The UTW also secured favorable settlements in other Rhode Island mills although in a number of them, the fight continued for the 48-hour week. This battle also continued in Manchester, especially.against the Amoskeag Corporation, as well as in other mill towns in the state. On October 10, 1922, in Suncook, New Hampshire, children of the strikers paraded, carrying small American flags in their hands and crying, “Eight Hours.” In the course of the parade, a mill official took a flag from a 17-year-old boy, broke it in three pieces and threw the pieces, with the flag, to the ground. The boy picked up the flag, whereupon the official tried to tear it away from him. The local union, claiming that the attack by the mill official constituted an insult to the American flag, held a patriotic demonstration on Columbus Day denouncing the action. Although the union, a UTW local, appealed to the Suncook post of the American Legion for support, that organization refused to consider the flag incident an “insult to the flag,” or even worthy of investigation. The strike for the 48-hour week continued in Manchester until November 25, when the UTW recommended that it be called off. “The real and permanent victory for the 48-hour week,” read the union’s statement, “is not to be won in the offices of the textile corporation, but in the legislative halls of the statehouse.” In Nashua, however, the strike for the 48-hour week continued

and was officially called off on March 10, 1923-in its 60th week.°2

“Textile Wages Raised,” read the New York Times headline on September 13, 1922, as it reported the rescinding of the 20 percent wage cuts in the mills of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. The labor press was more glowing in its reports of the end of the long strike. Typical was that in Advance, the organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers: The result of the strike in the cotton mills is a victory for both the United Textile Workers and the Amalgamated Textile Workers. The striking cotton operatives in New England have won a decisive victory after one of the longest and most

bitterly fought strikes in the history of the American labor movement23

THE NEW ENGLAND STRIKE OF 1922

31

The Amalgamated newspaper conceded that “the question of union recognition was compromised,” but it noted that the strikers had “defeated their employers in their attempt to reduce wages and in many, though not all, mills to increase hours from 48 to 54.”54 There was an ironic development after the strike ended. In 1923 the results of the Massachusetts “Special Investigation” of the textile industry were published. While the Commonwealth felt that temporary wage reductions during the business depression of 1921 were justifiable, the investigators declared: The financial condition of the textile industry as evidenced by the information in the possession of the department is sound and prosperous, and the department is of the opinion ... that a permanent reduction in wages on the basis of the reductions made was not necessary.55

Unfortunately, the investigation took place after the strike was over and had no effect on its outcome. However, it did underscore the correctness of the strikers’ long and bitter struggle. There was still another development after the strike. The Labor Bureau urged the leadership of the UTW to launch a new drive to organize the unorganized in the textile industry, beginning with the mills in Philadelphia. The Labor Bureau announced that it stood ready to help in the organizing campaign if the UTW would pursue the same methods it had used in the 1922 strike—organization of all textile workers, unskilled as well as skilled, women as well as men, foreign born as well as native born. The Bureau pointed out: The unorganized textile workers are only waiting for a signal to attempt to regain some of the losses suffered during the past two years. The successful termination of the textile strikes in the New England district has undoubtedly increased the prestige of the United, and makes this the psychological time for the UTW to make a drive on the unorganized workers.56

The Labor Bureau’s proposal was filed and forgotten. The ATW passed from the scene soon after the end of the 1922 strike, and the UTW felt no compulsion to continue the progressive policies it had been forced to pursue during the strike. It reverted to its former conservative, craft-conscious, class-collaborative policies and showed no interest in any campaigns to organize the unorganized textile workers. After a detailed exposition of the shortcomings and failures of the United Textile Workers, the historian Robert R. Brooks concludes: “From 1922 to 1933, the union appeared to consist almost entirely of a suite of offices, a complement of officers, and a

splendid array of filing cabinets.”°”

CHAPTER 3

THE SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE [WW In The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools published in 1924, Upton Sinclair wrote: I was about to begin the writing of this book, but found it impossible to keep my peace of mind in a “bull pen” civilization, and decided to do what I could to remind the authorities of Southern California that there is still supposed to be a Constitution in this country.!

In the spring of 1923, the Los Angeles harbor in San Pedro—21 miles from Los Angeles proper but still considered part of the city—was the scene of the beginning of one of the most militant free-speech fights and strikes of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Although the IWW usually favored short walkouts, this was one of its longest strikes, lasting until 1925.? Long known as the “open shop city,” Los Angeles had kept unions out of its harbor through a combination of the unwillingness of the bureaucratic leaders of the seamen’s and longshoremen’s craft unions to join forces, the hostility of the Los Angeles Times (which the Wobblies called “the bitterest newspaper foe of union labor west of the Wall Street Journal”),> and the opposition of powerful employers’ groups such as the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. Even though Wobbly agitators had long been active in the Los Angeles area, they had faced intermittent raids by city and harbor police. The “drive-the-reds-out” campaigns of the police were assisted by posts of the American Legion. In 1919 Los Angeles legionnaires had formed a “military branch” (with the apparent approval of federal, state, city, and county authorities) which specialized in raiding radical bookstores, beating up Wobblies, and harassing the landlord of

their meeting hall.4

32

THE SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE IWW

33

BACKGROUND TO THE STRIKE The 1923 strike therefore came as a surprise to both the shipowners and the local businessmen. Actually, while Los Angeles was conspicuously free of all union activities compared with other West Coast port cities, the potential for the 1923 labor upheaval was apparent to anyone who looked beneath the surface. Thus, when Pacific Coast shipowners sought to take advantage of a postwar shipping slump and attempted to cripple the International Seamen’s Union and the International Longshoremen’s Union (both affiliated with the AFL) by, among other actions, reinstituting both the recently disbanded employers’ hiring halls and the industrial passport system, the Los Angeles maritime workers, like those all along the Pacific Coast, were enraged.® However, there was nothing to suggest to the shipowners that the IWW would reap the benefit from the maritime workers’ grievances. For all practical purposes, the Wobblies appeared to be dead—all but destroyed by the vicious wartime persecution at the hands of both federal and state governments. This constant and unremitting repression had taken its toll on the IWW, and many of the Wobblies’ most experienced and effective leaders were either in jail or in the Communist Party. Persecution had thinned their ranks, and their energies were consumed largely by legal battles on behalf of the rising number of IWW “class war prisoners.”® Nevertheless, the growing skepticism among maritime workers of the value of the craft type of union organization, coupled with the shipowners’ postwar offensive, provided a fertile field for the revival of the seemingly dead IWW-at least on the maritime front. Longshoremen and merchant seamen alike were more than ever inclined to lend a sympathetic ear to the advocates of industrial unionism and to respond favorably to what they heard. The longshoremen at Puget Sound, San Francisco, and Los Angeles formed the Federation of Marine Transport Workers. The drive toward industrial unionism manifested itself among merchant seamen in a temporarily successful revolt against the once progressive, but now reactionary, long-time president of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), Andrew Furuseth. Furuseth opposed all industrial unions, but he was particularly antagonistic toward the IWW, which he accused of being an employers’ tool for breaking legitimate unions. The SUP revolt achieved some temporary successes, including control of the editorship of the union’s organ, the Seamen’s Journal, the appointment of a committee to work for closer affiliation with the longshoremen, whom Furuseth had portrayed as bitter enemies of the seamen, and the rejection of a “separate peace” only for seamen during a strike (a common practice under Furuseth). However, with the aid of the shipowners and the

34

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

local press, who joined him in red-baiting his opposition, Furuseth eventually regained full control of the Sailors’ Union.’ Furuseth’s success notwithstanding, it was clear to the worried AFL leaders in Los Angeles that there was a widespread sentiment among both merchant seamen and longshoremen in favor of industrial unionism. It did not take long for these fears to be realized. After months of inactivity, the Wobblies in January, 1921, staged a “gigantic” mass meeting in San Pedro, at which every mention of industrial unionism and the organization associated with it-the IWW-brought forth thunderous applause. Throughout the remainder of 1921 and well into 1922, the Wobblies continued to hold mass meetings and distribute their literature in San Pedro.®

CRIMINAL SYNDICALIST LAWS In October 1922, the police of Portland, Oregon began a drive to expel all IWW members from the city. Reports began to trickle into Los Angeles that the deportees would seek to spend the winter in the California city. Faced with an IWW invasion, the Los Angeles police sought to turn away the Portland deportees by beginning to arrest local Wobbly members.? The weapons they utilized were California’s criminal syndicalist law and the practice called “decasualization,” which relied on central registration and the use of company-controlled hiring halls (“blacklists” and “fink halls” in the jargon of the Wobblies) to weed out red-card holders among the longshoremen and the sailors.!° Twenty-two states, including ten of the eleven Western states, had passed criminal syndicalist laws during the immediate postwar years. These laws criminalized the advocacy of violent change in the economic and political order. A criminal syndicalist law typically contained a clause making any person who became a member of an organization advocating violent change guilty of a felony, and it was this membership clause of the California statute that was used to imprison the state’s Wobblies.! Although California’s measure closely resembled the laws passed by other states, it enforced its law most vigorously.!2 Moreover, California’s law remained on the statute books after others were repealed, and it continued to be used as an anti-radical weapon. In the San Pedro battle, the IWW faced still another aspect of the criminal syndicalist law. For the first time, the law on the statute books was modified by the police who enforced it as if it read “suspicion of criminal

syndicalism.”8 On this vague basis, scores of Wobblies were arrested and jailed. A series of raids by the police early in November 1922 netted three dozen Wobblies, who were charged with criminal syndicalism. At the urg-

THE SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE IWW

39

ing of its San Pedro branch, the IWW’s General Executive Board telegraphed all Western branches to ask “all footloose members west of Chicago ... to proceed at once to San Pedro.” The purpose was to compel the authorities to permit the IWW to distribute its literature and to hold street

meetings without police interference.!4 During the decade of the great IWW free-speech fights, which began in Missoula, Montana in 1906 and ended in Everett, Washington in 1916, the General Executive Board’s appeal “to all footloose members” had been heard frequently. After Everett, however, interest among the Wobblies in free-speech fights waned, and there was a feeling that such battles were more detrimental than beneficial to the IWW. With San Pedro (and in one or two other cities at the time), interest in free-speech fights once again surfaced. By mid-November, 1922, the General Executive Board’s call had produced some results, and the Los Angeles Times was reporting “radical hordes” of maritime workers arriving from the Pacific Northwest. Toward the end of the month, the San Pedro IWW concluded that sufficient reinforcements had arrived, and at a November 27 meeting, the local resolved that a free-speech fight would begin the following evening at 7:30 at Fourth and Beacon Streets “by members taking the soapbox and delivering short

speeches on the preamble and aims and objectives of the IWW.”!6 On the morning of November 28, the San Pedro Wobblies staged their first street meeting in several years. Police were present, but did not interfere. During the days immediately following, they continued to hold street meetings with the police attending but not interfering. On one occasion, three “paper boys” (sons of IWW members or sympathizers) were arrested while distributing copies of the Industrial Worker, Industrial Solidarity, and the Spanish-language Solidaridad, but they were quickly released. Within a week after proclaiming the free-speech fight, the San Pedro IWW jubilantly declared that the police had promised not to break up street meetings or to arrest “paper boys.” The San Pedro branch announced further that it was “lining up men hand over hand,” and that the branch had paid off its debt of forty dollars and had two hundred dollars in the bank. The Industrial Worker, the leading IWW organ, featured these reports under headlines reading “Pedro Fight for Free Speech Won.”!” However, the Wobblies were deluding themselves. Captain Clyde Plummer, in charge of the harbor police, responded to pressure from the shipowners’ association and the harbor businessmen and formed a special “Wobbly squad.” “We'll get them,” the sergeant in charge of the squad told the press confidently, “and we’ll drive them out of town.” On learning of the Wobblies’ plan to swarm into San Pedro, Chief of Police Louis Oaks

said: “Let ’em come. We’ve got plenty of rock piles here.”!8

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

Still, the police were at first hampered in their attempt to turn back the Wobbly invasion and halt the IWW’s influence. While some Wobblies were arrested and others were alleged to have fled as a result of the police raids, new men, unknown by the police, continued to arrive to take their places. Moreover, the presence at the harbor of both the AFL’s Federation of Marine Transport Workers and the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Union led to confusion, and the police often arrested and jailed men whom they thought were Wobblies, only to find that they were AFL seamen and longshoremen.!9 Admitting failure, the Los Angeles police abandoned the campaign to stymie the growth of the IWW through a policy of selective arrests of its most active members, and inaugurated a new policy—that of mass arrests of rank and file members. A week before Christmas, 1922, the “Wobbly squad” raided an IWW meeting, arrested all of the 60 men present, and transported them to the Lincoln Heights.jail in chartered “big red cars” of Pacific Electric. The police vowed to continue the policy of mass arrests of the “red brethren” until the IWW was driven from the harbor.?° The Los Angeles harbor Wobblies responded to the mass arrests by stepping up their campaign. Once again, the General Executive Board was asked to telegraph all Western branches and instruct them to call upon “all footloose members” to go to San Pedro. Within a week, fellow workers were reported to be arriving from throughout the West. Included among them were a number of active agitators and organizers. Although “paper boys” continued to be arrested, during a single week they sold over a thousand copies of the Industrial Worker and Industrial Solidarity, and 300 copies of Solidaridad. Street meetings were held several times each week, with 400--500 persons attending the general meeting and about 100 at the Spanish-speaking gathering. Only once was a speaker arrested.?! These activities produced results. The IWW’s membership increased by several hundred; by the spring of 1923, the Wobblies were reporting as many as 50 new members in a single week. At the same time, they claimed that the crews of two-thirds of the ships touching port at San Pedro were one-half Wobbly, “and one of every three ships [is] almost or fully one hundred percent Wobbly.” Moreover, the IWW was even stronger among the longshoremen on the docks than among the sailors. “All in all,” one local Wobbly wrote glowingly, “things could not be much better.”22

THE STRIKE All through the winter of 1922-1923, the Industrial Worker had repeatedly instructed IWW members to be alert for a “general strike” on May 1, 1923 to-free “the class-war prisoners”—fellow workers convicted of “criminal syndicalism” and imprisoned. However, the San Pedro Marine Trans-

THE SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE IWW

port Workers, now an important wing of the IWW, decided at the moment to quit work on April 25. This date was chosen instead of May order to create the element of surprise. Employers and the police alike been alerted to expect a strike on May 1. The Wobblies reasoned stopping work nearly a week before would find both employers and

37

last 1 in had that the

police unprepared.?% Nationally, the IWW demanded the release of political prisoners, while the San Pedro strikers geared their walkout to this and to local demands, circulating leaflets all over San Pedro that read: SAN PEDRO STRIKERS DEMANDS Release of all working men and women who are in prison for organized labor and working class activities. To do away with the Shipowners Association employment office, better known as the Fink Hall. A minimum wage for seamen of $100 per month. Three watches to prevail for all seamen except coal-burning firemen who shall have four watches. A minimum scale of $1 an hour for longshoremen. All overtime at double rates. That we, the strikers, pledge ourselves to continue the strike until all class-war prisoners are released from prison and jails and also pledge ourselves to be orderly throughout the strike, and refrain from indulgence of intoxicating liquors. STRIKE COMMITTEE

Marine Transport Workers

The San Pedro strike was thus both an economic and apolitical strike! Estimates as to the number of men who walked out in San Pedro range from 1,500 to 3,000. The president of the city’s principal open-shop organization—the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association—labelled the San Pedro strike “the most noteworthy disturbance of the year,” causing “an almost complete tie-up of the waterfront for several weeks, during which

time over sixty vessels accumulated at the harbor.”° And George P. West, an experienced student of industrial disputes, writing in The Nation, found that “the only place where the IWW strike was entirely effective was the port of Los Angeles. There, it was a complete tie-up.”26 The Wobblies proclaimed the strike as ninety-four percent complete and declared jubilantly: “Within our knowledge there has never been such a complete tie-up for three weeks in any port in the United States.” There certainly have been few more colorful ones. On May Day, “an airplane, painted red and bearing the word ‘SOLIDARITY’ in large letters, circled overhead dropping circulars” outlining the strikers’ demands and urging support for the IWW struggle, while at the same time, “a red automobile placarded ‘I.W.W.’ drove about the streets; and a fast launch visited ships in the harbor and

distributed literature.”2”

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The effectiveness of the strike led the chief deputy district attorney of Los Angeles to announce: “The time for action has come. We have decided to change the situation.”2® After declaring that the strikers’ meetings had “srown incompatible with public security” and would thenceforth be forbidden, the chief of police at the harbor sent 125 extra patrolmen to the harbor to prevent future meetings. Street meetings at Fourth and Beacon Streets—by then the traditional meeting place—were broken up and the people attending were arrested en masse. Two Los Angeles jails overflowed with strikers, forcing the construction of a temporary stockade.?? In response, the Wobbly leaders continued to hold mass meetings. However, following the banning of street meetings, the strikers secured permission from a sympathetic resident, Mrs. Minnie Davis, to hold their meetings on her property, which soon came to be known as “Liberty Hill.”8° Rising two hundred feet above the level of Third Street, Liberty Hill had several flights of stone steps leading up to it. At its top were hand-made wooden benches seating about 800 people, a small platform, six by nine feet, and standing room for several thousand. There, on the hill, the IWW held five meetings each week, with the meetings in English usually attended by between 1,000-3,000 people, and those in Spanish by from 500-800.3! The police broke up the night meetings on Liberty Hill, each time arresting several scores of Wobblies. However, they could not dampen the enthusiasm of the strikers and their sympathizers. On the contrary, it reached new heights.32 On May 9, twenty strikers were arrested on Liberty Hill. The following day, the Wobblies countered with a large five-hour protest march around the city jail. Even the local press conceded that the May 10 protest march was substantial, while Industrial Solidarity estimated that it included 5,000

participants.*3 The Los Angeles police responded with what the Times called “the greatest campaign against Reds ever made in the United States.” After a conference between city and county officials and officers of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, at which plans were laid for mass arrests and the construction of a stockade to house those arrested, the Wobbly squad raided the IWW’s defense office, confiscating their literature and arresting twenty-five persons. Later that the day, the office of attorney R. W. Henderson, defense lawyer for many Wobblies, was raided, his staff arrested and his papers seized. The principal event of the campaign was the breaking up of an evening meeting on Liberty Hill. Several hundred men were arrested and taken in special Pacific Electric trains to Los Angeles and the Lincoln Heights jail, where they were held without bail on charges of criminal syndicalism. Louis B. Oaks, Los Angeles chief of police, who had taken over direct control of law enforcement from the harbor authori-

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ties, warned; “All idle men at the harbor must explain their loafing and show that they are not IWW’s or go to jail.”34 On the morning of May 14, Oaks brought the problem of the mass arrests before the city council, which agreed that the overcrowded conditions of the jails warranted an expenditure for a stockade on the municipal

farm in Griffith Park.> Meanwhile, the United States government joined the attack on the strikers. The Department of Labor responded favorably to the shipowners’ request that it “house and feed strikebreakers at its San

Pedro station.”36 These developments failed to curb the enthusiasm of the IWW strikers and their sympathizers. On Monday night, May 14, San Pedro was in gala attire as if for a carnival. Thousands of workers brought their families into the downtown section to watch the “Wobblies” and “their marching, singing propaganda antics.” Out along the channels and lining the wharves of the harbor lay more than one hundred silent ships, jammed with lumber, steel, and other merchandise. Under the night lights, while the blue-coated policemen, carrying their billies, gruffly demanded that they “keep moving,” the Wobblies came swinging up Liberty Hill, roaring out “The Red Flag” and “Solidarity Forever.” Then came a group of young boys and girls from San Pedro High School, marching with wreaths on their heads and their cheeks bedaubed with paint. They carried crude paper banners reading “We support the strikers!” “This is too damned much for the police,” a reporter for the pro-labor Los Angeles Record wrote. “Wobblies and high school kids together, and as the high school kids move toward the Hill, the blue-coats attack them and smash their banners one by one and hurl them into the gutter.” The festival ended as the police arrested the Wobblies and their sympathizers on Liberty Hill and marched the Wobblies back to the Pacific Electric station. There, the Wobblies, “with another outburst of cheers and singing, mount the red interurban cars that will carry them en masse to

prison.”3? A comparison between this eyewitness account and the report in the Los Angeles Times demonstrates that newspaper’s bitter anti-labor bias. It wrote: “Sentiment against the strikers is growing, and police fear for radical action against them by the aroused citizenry here. Clashes between citizens and strikers have been narrowly averted in the past, but feelings against the reds, it is feared, might result in spontaneous action by citizens.” In fact, the exact opposite was true, and throughout the strike, the Wobblies found the community of San Pedro sympathetic.*®

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UPTON SINCLAIR AND FREE SPEECH It was at this point in the great San Pedro battle of the Wobblies against the shipowners, the local businessmen, the police forces of the city of Los Angeles, and the United States government, that Upton Sinclair became involved. Students of Sinclair have noted what Robert Fisher has called his “boundless affection” for the Wobblies. Fisher attributes it to “their romantic individualism, their lack of organization, and above all, their position at the bottom of the heap....”89 To these must be added Sinclair’s contempt for the American Federation of Labor. In 1914, Sinclair had criticized the AFL for organizing only the skilled workers in the United States, and he compared this unfavorably with the IWW, which he praised for organizing the great mass of unskilled workers.*° This criticism brought down on Sinclair’s head a bitter attack from AFL President.Samuel Gompers, who defended the Federation’s policies.4! Sinclair, however, was not convinced. During the ’twenties, he continued to attack the AFL. “I wish there existed in modern society a beautiful and altruistic labor movement,” he wrote in 1924, “instead of what does exist, a part of the capitalist system, partaking of the weaknesses and corruptions which are automatically produced in human societies by the continuous operation of mass rivalries and greed.” He continued: The American Federation of Labor is a machine, precisely like the Republican party .... It is a vested interest of high-salaried leaders, whose function is to dicker with Big Business for the best terms obtainable in the labor market. Many of these leaders are sincere but ignorant men, who have grown up in the present system and can imagine nothing else. Many others have accepted without realizing it what I call “the dress-suit bribe.” Still others are cynical corruptionists, who sell out their deluded followers, and permit labor unions to be used as weapons in the partisan wars of Big Business.42

The union that captured Sinclair’s imagination was the IWW. “The Industrial Workers of the World,” he wrote in 1914, “stands for the interests of a class of workers who are far more numerous than those represented by the American Federation of Labor.” As he saw it, “the employers were organized on a nationwide scale everywhere throughout the country, and the workers with their feeble craft unions were like men using bows and arrows against machine-guns. There must be One Big Union....”43 Sinclair’s affection for the Wobblies increased with each passing year. He pointed out that while Big Business usually tolerated, and even collaborated with the AFL, it fought the IWW relentlessly: “Every time the ‘Wobblies’ succeeded in organizing the workers and calling a big strike, all the agencies of capitalist repression were called in.”44

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If ever this was true, it was certainly so in the San Pedro battle being waged only a few miles from Sinclair’s home in Pasadena, but this was not enough to persuade him to become involved. Indeed, for all his enthusiasm for the Wobblies, Sinclair had only had a limited involvement in IWW affairs, mainly confined to lodging occasional public protests on behalf of jailed radicals and keeping them supplied with books while they “served time.” This level of interest continued also during the San Pedro strike, until the flagrant violations of civil liberties finally compelled him to leave his Pasadena house and become involved in the struggle. Only recently remarried to Mary Craig, Sinclair had settled in Pasadena in 1915 to pursue a quiet life of writing. He set for himself the goal of preventing his international reputation as a crusader for radical causes from interfering, for the next twenty years, with his personal writing plans and of remaining out of the public eye, limiting his support for the radical

movement to writing pamphlets or allowing the use of his name. Fearful that he would abandon his pledge and become involved in the San Pedro strike, and thereby neglect his writing and risk imprisonment in the city jail, his wife obtained a promise from him that he would not get involved.46 As the strike unfolded and police oppression mounted, activists at the San Pedro harbor tried to enlist Sinclair’s aid. Joseph A. Rychman, a Los Angeles attorney and ardent Socialist, wrote to Sinclair in January 1923, describing the mass arrests and the IWW’s court cases. However, even though Sinclair was beginning to show signs of increased interest in the struggle, Rychman was unable to persuade him to even say a few words at a mass protest meeting.*” By the fourth week of the San Pedro battle, with mass arrests and jails crowded with strikers a daily feature, Sinclair’s indignation reached the point where he felt compelled to ask his wife to release him from his promise not to get involved. He was bitterly opposed to the criminal syndicalism law and was enraged by its free use to break the strike."48 He scornfully observed in The Goslings that the public was “told by the Black Hand and its newspapers that this [criminal syndicalism] law is to punish men who advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” (The “Black Hand” was Sinclair’s name for the “inner council and directory circle of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association.”)*9 The public, however, did not know that the law on the statute books against criminal syndicalism had been modified by the police who enforced it “to read ‘suspicion of criminal syndicalism.’” That means [Sinclair wrote] that any man may be arrested at any time that any police officer does not happen to like the way he has his hair cut or the red flower in his button-hole. Crime and suspicion of crime are the same thing in our legal procedure, because men once thrown into jail are held there “incommunicado” without warrant or charge; they are not permitted to see attorneys, and their

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friends cannot find out what has become of them. They are starved and beaten and tortured in jail, so there is no longer any difference between innocence and guilt.50

What all this meant, Sinclair emphasized, was that “the ‘Black Hand’ is trying to smash industrial unionism.” They had cowed “the old-line unions,” had “purchased or frightened most of the leaders, and driven them out of politics, and are no longer afraid of them.” But now they faced a new movement—“the-mass union, the portent of the New Day’—and they were fighting this “as furiously as the Spanish Inquisition ever fought against heresy....”>2 Sinclair finally concluded that the strike was so important that he told the readers of The Goslings, his book about American schools: “This strike was a blazing searchlight, thrown into the very vitals of our invisible government; if you will follow it, you will see the whole system, and

understand every detail of its mechanism.”°? Not surprisingly, Sinclair told his wife: “Craig, somebody has got to protest.” Mary Craig Sinclair tried to discourage her husband, convinced that he could do more good by writing books. Moreover, she did not want to see him jailed and involved in an expensive trial. He replied that he was going to organize a “deputation to

protest to the mayor” before going to San Pedro.5? Sinclair was convinced that the police were acting as agents for the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. On May 7, when he and his brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, were in the office of Irving Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, they overheard a loud conversation between Rice and two men, one of whom they determined to be Andrew B. Hammond, a timber baron and owner of a fleet of lumber ships immobilized in San Pedro. Hammond, whom Sinclair called “one of the big ‘open shop’ despots of San Francisco, a bigger man even than Mr. Rice, ... had come down on the night train to lay down the law to the timid crowd at Los Angeles and insist that his ships be moved.” Sinclair overheard Hammond bellowing irately for action, pounding the table as he shouted, while Rice assured him that appropriate steps were

being taken to crush the strike.54 This Hammond encounter was an important factor in influencing Sinclair’s decision to intervene.°> On May 15, 1923, the Los Angeles Record announced, under the heading, “Plan Free Speech Fight”: Upton Sinclair and a group of Pasadena’s wealthy liberals will open a free speech fight Tuesday night at San Pedro, according to an announcement of the well_known author of “The Jungle” and other books . Sinclair, accompanied by more than a dozen Pasadenans, a number of them millionaires, will appear on “Liberty Hill,” San Pedro, at 8 p.m. after obtaining permission of the owner of the property, and deliver addresses to the strikers...

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“We are going to uphold free speech,” Sinclair said. “We are going to interview the mayor this afternoon and demand our civil rights and police protection while we exercise them. If we don’t get police protection and if our meeting is broken up, every member in our group will sue the city, the mayor, the chief of police, and the city council.” Sinclair concluded: We are taking up the challenge of the chief when he announces that he is going to arrest all idle men and hold them in jail. We are embarking on a campaign for the protection of American civil rights.

The entourage of eight men and women who accompanied Sinclair to the Los Angeles mayor’s office included three lawyers and his young, Mississippi-bred brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough. Mayor George E. Cryer received them, and they talked about the waterfront situation and their intention of holding a free-speech meeting on Liberty Hill. The mayor denied having any first-hand knowledge of the San Pedro situation, but expressed the opinion that the strikers were a dangerous lot. After hours of haggling, the mayor apparently agreed to instruct Captain Clyde I. Plummer of the harbor police to protect the group’s constitutional rights, provided that it did not “incite disorder.”°6 The mayor later denied having made any promise, but, as Sinclair wrote, “We believed him, and so we went to the harbor.” Sinclair then proceeded to get written consent from Mrs. Davis, owner of the Liberty Hill property, and, accompanied by his free-speech associates, he then went to explain his purposes to officials at the police station where he confronted Chief Oaks,

Captain Plummer, and Inspector Charles Jackson.°” Sinclair described Oaks as one of those “‘knock-’em-down and drag-’emout’ officials, and he went at me as if he could frighten me out of my wits, or at any rate out of his office.” In a loud tone of voice, Oaks, upon being informed that Sinclair was a charter member of the national American Civil Liberties Union, shouted: “American Civil Liberties Union? What’s the American Civil Liberties Union? What’s it got to do with Los Angeles? Did it tell you to come here? How did it tell you to come? Where’s the letter it wrote? What business have you got at the harbor?”® Sinclair stood his ground. He insisted that it was his constitutional right to speak on Liberty Hill, despite Oaks’s charge that the property owner was in violation of an unspecified ordinance by allowing her land to be used for the meeting. Sinclair began to read from the first amendment to the United States Constitution, but he was interrupted by Oaks, who told him to “cut out that Constitution stuff.” Then Sinclair asked point-blank if he would be permitted to read from the federal document in public. “Go ahead!” the chief roared, “You will be arrested and will go to jail, and let me tell you—you will stay there. There will be no bail.” Sinclair retorted by reading

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Oaks the bail clause of the Constitution, which Oaks immediately dismissed as irrelevant. The free-speech group then left the police station, promising to return prior to venturing up Liberty Hill.5? _

The six who decided to climb Liberty Hill that night included, aside from Sinclair, Mrs. Kate Crane Gartz, a close friend of the Sinclairs and a member of the wealthy Crane plumbing family, who often gave generously to various radical causes; her companion, a Mrs. Van Toe; Hugh Hardyman, Prince Hopkins, and Hunter Kimbrough. Mrs. Gartz had come to San Pedro with her overnight bag all packed, prepared for jail. Hardyman was an English journalist; and Hopkins, a Santa Barbara millionaire who edited Labor Age, was a veteran crusader, having been imprisoned and fined $20,000 for his pacifist activities during World War I. He had just recently changed his name to “Prynce” in order to avoid confusion with royalty. John Packard, Sinclair’s lawyer, was to stand by as a witness to the proceedings. The party returned to the San Pedro police station, where they requested a “technical arrest” so that they might have a test case. Denied this, they walked as far as the barricades that Oaks had constructed on the street leading to Liberty Hill. Cordons of police along the curbs restrained the crowds on the sidewalk. At this point, Kimbrough realized that they would need a candle by which to read on the dimly lit hill. He dashed back to town in search of one. When illumination was secured, the small group passed, uncontested, beyond the barricade and struggled up the hill, followed by only one reporter, Reuben W. Borough of the Los Angeles Record, and an escort of policemen and plainclothesmen.®! Puffing from the exertion of their climb, Sinclair and his associates paused for a moment on the flat top of the hill to catch their breath. Mounting a bench, Sinclair pulled out of his pocket a copy of the Constitution of the United States. “I have no light,” he said, “and without light I cannot read the Constitution of the United States.” Thereupon, Kimbrough produced a candle and lighted it. Sinclair opened his book and said quietly: “Friends, I did not come here to incite violence. I came up here to uphold the right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. I am going to read from that Constitution. I will read from Article I of the amendments.”

He then thumbed the pages to a turned-down corner. “It says,” he went on by candlelight, “that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

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A policeman stepped out of the circle of semi-darkness and approached the speaker. “You’re under arrest,” he said firmly. As Sinclair stepped down into police custody, Kimbrough snuffed out his candle and stuck it into his pocket. He stepped up on a nearby bench and incorrectly identified his brother-in-law’s text as the Declaration of Independence. He got no further. “You’re under arrest,” said a policeman. Then Prynce Hopkins mounted the bench. “We did not come here to incite to violence,” he said, and a policeman stopped him, shouting, “You’re under arrest!” Young Hugh Hardyman mounted the bench. “Friends,” he said, “this is a very pleasant evening, I think. It will be interesting to see how it will turn out. I am happy to be here....” “Are you trying to make a speech?” an officer cut him short. “Why, yes,” Hardyman answered. “You’re under arrest,” the officer retorted. Mrs. Gartz hesitated about mounting the bench, but by the time she had made up her mind to. join the speechmakers, Sinclair and the other arrested men were being escorted down the hill to Beacon Street, where strikers and strike sympathizers greeted them with cheers. There were still some officers on the hill, but Mrs. Gartz was finally prevailed upon by her

friends not to get herself arrested.® At first, the police seemed to have no definite plan. They drove their captives to the San Pedro police station, where they booked them on charges of suspicion of criminal syndicalism. When Chief Oaks arrived, the officers, after some deliberation, loaded them into another car and drove them around for hours, through hayfields and orange groves, evidently to frustrate any pursuers. After some time, the car halted at a small jail in Wilmington, a few miles north of San Pedro. There, they spent the night. Mary Sinclair, by this time wild with terror, was unable to get a writ to free her husband and his associates, or even to learn where they were. As one biographer of Sinclair notes: “In a time and town notorious for the killing of prisoners ‘resisting arrest’ or ‘attempting to escape,’ her fears ... were not unreasonable.” When the press finally learned where Sinclair and the others were being held, they descended on the Wilmington jail. Sinclair, described as appearing “happy,” paced the floor of the jail and issued a statement to a bevy of reporters regarding his reasons for being behind bars. “I don’t think,” he said, “that any community ought to enter the bull-pen stage of the industrial conflict without a few people who realize that that means protesting against it. The bull-pen is a definite stage and communities ought to think well before they go into it. Certain things happen in the bull-pen stage...” “You mean?” asked one of the reporters. Sinclair swung around on his heel, and shot back: “I prefer not to say what happens because some people might think I was making threats. I am against violence. I am just looking

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at the thing historically. Concentration camps have always been accompanied by grave abuses.” (This was a reference to the “stockade” which the mayor, the city council, and the Chamber of Commerce were planning to construct at Griffith Park.) The interview ended with Sinclair telling the reporters: “There is another reason why I have gone to jail. And that is that it is the only way I can get anything said in the United States. You gentlemen take down what I have to say through the bars. Otherwise you ignore me.” Sinclair and his free-speech associates were held in the Wilmington jail until late the following afternoon. Police Chief Oaks’s plan was to bring them into court moments before it closed at five. He would then have the judge immediately appoint defense lawyers, commit Sinclair and his companions to jail without bail, and then hide them from the press. Fortunately, one of Oaks’s own subordinates telephoned the plan to Mary Sinclair, who had attorneys in court with a writ to prevent the judge from committing them to jail. Mrs. Gartz furnished the excessive bail demanded

for their release.®© Oaks called in the press and explained that the action taken against Sinclair was necessary for the safety of the community. He called Sinclair “more dangerous than 4,000 Wobblies,” and the “worst radical in the country,” who had taken the law into his own hands, and he [Oaks] was

proud of the fact that he had demanded ajail sentence for him.6® He was proud, too, of the charges levelled by the city authorities against the four-man group who had tried to speak on Liberty Hill. These included the accusation that they were guilty of .. exciting discontent and disturbing the peace and quiet ... by discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain thoughts and theories, which ... were contemptuous of the Constitution of the State of California, calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the United States ... and which ... were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of business, affecting the rights of private property and personal liberty and which ... were calculated to cause any citizen ... present ... to quarrel and fight and use force and violence ... and in furtherance of the said conspiracy, stand, block, and obstruct public streets, sidewalks and highways ... annoy, molest, and embarrass the persons passing along the said streets... [They] conspired to intimidate, threaten and coerce persons from obtaining employment ... against the peace and dignity of the people of the state of California.6?

To prove these ludicrous charges, the police had in their possession, as “conspiratorial evidence,” two items taken from the “conspirators”: (1) a booklet of patriotic documents (with an American flag on the cover), published by the state of California, from which Sinclair had read the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and (2) one slightly used candle.®

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Once out on bail, Sinclair let loose the opening gun of his announced campaign to “show up” the chief of police, the city council of Los Angeles, the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, and the Chamber of Commerce. In a letter mailed from Pasadena to the Los Angeles press, Sinclair charged that Oaks had attempted to kidnap him, had denied him the services of attorneys, and had otherwise deprived him of his rights under the Constitutions of the United States and California. He reiterated his intention of continuing to speak on behalf of the San Pedro strikers, and he notified the press of a mass meeting to be called in Los Angeles immediately, at which he would speak. He invited the chief of police to attend and hear what he had to say about the “conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to brutally end the strike,” and charged that Oaks was the medium through which the association expected to accomplish this end: I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering and may be lost again through our cowardice.69

Printed as a leaflet, Sinclair’s letter to Oaks was widely distributed. Immediately after the release of Sinclair and his associates, civil liberties forces rented Los Angeles’s Walker Auditorium, where they held a meeting at which the crowd was so large that about 1,500 people had to be turned away. The meeting was opened with the singing of “America” by the audience, and a prayer by Reverend Bromley Oxnam, who was running for the school board on a progressive ticket. Then Sinclair spoke and introduced the other “jail birds.” Prynce Hopkins, having just returned from six months in Europe, told the audience about his experience in other nations, in none of which he had found “tyranny to equal that which we have right here in Los Angeles.” In London’s Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, he told the audience, he had heard not only loud denunciations of the government, but radical proposals made for its overthrow. He had also learned that Arthur Henderson, Labour Party leader, had furnished bail for an arrested Communist, even though he violently disagreed with the arrested man.”

This was the first of a series of meetings at Walker Auditorium at which Sinclair and others spoke to overflow crowds.” On May 19, a large delegation of what the press called “well-dressed people” confronted Mayor Cryer and compelled him to grant permission for Sinclair and the other “jail birds” to hold the meeting in San Pedro which they were to have held before they were arrested and jailed. Just eight

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nights after Sinclair’s arrest, a mass meeting was held on Liberty Hill. The Los Angeles Record estimated that there were at least 5,000 people present. A few policemen were also on hand, but they tried to remain inconspicuous. A little stand had been erected, just large enough for one speaker; there was no light except that from a half moon. Reverend Clifton J. Taft opened the meeting with a prayer; he raised his hands over thousands of bowed heads and said: Our Father, we are made of one clay. We want to be brothers here. We want the liberties that our fathers conceived on these shores to be passed on to our children, and our children’s children, undiminished. Amen.

Then Sinclair took the stand. He quoted the guarantees of freedom of speech and assemblage and went on to tell the story of the past eight days. The audience laughed and cheered as he told them that the chief of police had said that nine-tenths of the people at the meeting were foreigners who would not understand a word the speakers said. He introduced his wife and several other women. Then the other “jail birds” spoke. After that, several lawyers spoke, followed by a minister, a doctor, and then a member of the IWW, “by special permission from the police,” said a few words of thanks to the free-speech fighters on behalf of the strikers. “Free speech had won

another round!” the American Civil Liberties Union declared.’2 In this new, albeit temporary, atmosphere, the IWW and its sympathizers stepped up their opposition to the arrests and showed their solidarity with those already in jail. After a mass meeting on Liberty Hill, the crowd expressed this solidarity. The account in Industrial Solidarity noted: “To the jail,” was the next shout and with a half dozen gaily dressed young women in the van, the crowd marched ... to the ugly stone structure ... now filled with strike committee men and free-speech fighters. Round and round the long snake-like line went. The “Red Flag” was followed by..."Remember"...(songs) “In California’s darkened dungeons, “For the O.B.U. “Remember we’re outside for you” they sang, and the fourth line came back faintly from the men behind the barred windows: “And we’re in here for you.”

Meanwhile, the episode involving Sinclair and his associates was making headline news throughout the United States, and even in Europe, with editorial comments accompanying the news reports. Although it never explicitly referred to them in its editorial, the Los Angeles Times once again proved itself the most reactionary paper in the United States when it wrote:

It is with regret ... that the supporters of law and order, the defenders of American institutions, of American homes and American standards of living have been

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compelled to witness a little group of Utopians rallying to the defense of the forces of destruction, glorying in desolation, taking a sadistic delight in violence and protesting to the Mayor and the Chief of Police because they refuse to stand aside and permit the destruction to continue.

Then, referring to Sinclair without naming him, it continued: One of their number collected about him a mob of several hundred in open defiance of the law. Thoroughly unscrupulous, he drew from his pocket the Constitution,...a document he seldom loses opportunity to assail, and began to read extracts. By this device he thought to stultify the officers of the law. If arrested, he could pose as a martyr to the very document that every member of

the mob takes delight in reviling.”4

But the Times in its viciousness stood alone among newspapers, even in Los Angeles. “This is no Time for Bone-Head Tactics,” read the front-page headline in the Los Angeles Record on the day following the arrest of Sinclair and his associates. Editorially, the newspaper declared that, while it held “no brief for the IWW,” it did “respect the true American interpretation of constitutional rights. Sinclair, in this newspaper’s opinion, is making a spectacular play to show how constitutional rights are ignored by the authorities.” He was revealing that the Los Angeles authorities regarded “the Constitution as a mere scrap of paper to be respected or ignored as a matter of personal determination.” For this the city owed him a vote of

thanks. The Record followed this up with an editorial entitled, “Democratic America and Monarchial England,” in which it noted that “in monarchial England—they permit free speech.” “We teach our children that America is the cradle of liberty,” the editorial went on. “The forefathers were students of the successful government. That is why they plainly stated in the Constitution of the United States that freedom of speech cannot be abridged by Congress.” And yet here in Los Angeles, a chief of police, acting under the orders of a mayor who has been in conference behind closed doors with representatives of merchants and manufacturers, arrests a man for reading the Constitution of the United States. It is a dangerous, ignorant, unlawful thing for the chief of police, the mayor and his advisors to do.’

The repercussions of the episode were both national and international. Liberal, Socialist, Communist, and capitalist newspapers alike expressed their outrage. Typical was an editorial in the Hartford Times (the New York Times, on the other hand, was one of the few newspapers which did not comment editorially). Said the Hartford daily: There is nothing to indicate that the Constitution and the preamble thereof are to be read only at Fourth of July meetings, convocations of the Ku Klux Klan...and teas for women patriots. There is nothing in that preamble to indicate that the

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blessings of liberty were suspended during dock strikes or that they do not apply to socialist novelists .... It only requires a few instances of this sort of stupid oppression to prove to the satisfaction of many people of a certain unfortunate type of mind the truth of all the unkind things that Mr. Sinclair has been saying about the United States of America.?7

Bertrand Russell wrote from England, asking Sinclair: “Is it true you have got into trouble with the authorities because they take the same view of the Declaration of Independence as George III took? If so, you have my warmest sympathy and good wishes.””8 From Moscow, L. Malkin wrote to “Dear Comrade Sinclair; Your recent arrest raised a great storm here where your books are so popular. Several organizations passed resolutions

of censure of the American authorities.””? From the International Arbeiter Hilf (Workers’ Aid) of Berlin, Germany, came a cablegram reading: “Learn with distress of your imprisonment. Have you appealed to President Harding? Brotherly sympathy.” Sinclair replied: “Don’t worry. Customary in America.” However, taking the advice of the German workers’ organization, he appealed to President Warren G. Harding for assistance “in preserving the republican form of government at Los Angeles harbor”: I ask you to send officers of the United States army with me to the harbor to vindicate the rights of the citizens to read the Constitution of the United States on private property with the permission of the owner. The local chief of police has practically rescinded the Constitution and declared martial law. In the presence of many witnesses, including two attorneys, he ordered us to stop that “constitutional stuff.” I understand that you really believe in the Constitution. I await your immediate action. Please wire decision at my expense.

No answer came, but Sinclair’s appeal to the president was widely publicized. The nationwide criticism of the Los Angeles authorities was giving the City of Angels such a “black eye” that civic leaders were eager to make a deal with Sinclair. The managing editor of the Los Angeles Examiner called him on the telephone and asked how long the affair was to go on. “Until we have civil liberties in Los Angeles,” Sinclair replied. Saying that he was speaking on behalf of the business interests who ran the city, the editor worked out an arrangement with Sinclair. Under its terms, the charges against the four who had spoken on May 15 would be dropped in exchange for Sinclair’s withdrawal of his civil suit for false arrest. Sinclair requested also that the American Civil Liberties Union serve as a future guardian of free speech in Southern California, and that Police Chief Oaks be dismissed. “You have a ruffian as chief of police,” Sinclair declared, “and there’ll never be any decency in this town while he runs it” He was promised Oaks’s removal within a month and was assured that the other

THE SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE IWW

51

terms he requested would be fulfilled. Accepting this assurance, Sinclair dropped the suit against the city and returned to his writing. In addition to the dismissal of Chief Oaks, the San Pedro affair led to the formation of what is today the largest and most important of the constituent affiliates of the ACLU—the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union.®? It was largely the product of Sinclair’s activities. He refused to return, full-time, to his writing until he had assured himself that the Southern California branch of the ACLU was on a sound footing. He spoke at meetings, spent hundreds of dollars on ACLU work without expectation of reimbursement, and drove about Southern California on ACLU business.®? After the selection of Reverend Clifton J. Taft as director of the ACLU in September 1923, a series of Sunday night Open Forums began at the Los Angeles Music-Art Hall on South Broadway. The Forum provided a much needed platform where speakers of all viewpoints debated a variety of public issues and allowed themselves to be questioned by interested audiences.™4 One final result of Sinclair’s role in the San Pedro strike was the writing and production of a labor play. During his short stay in jail, he had seen and heard about the treatment accorded Wobblies in California jails. At his request, the IWW’s General Defense branch in California provided him with the number of political prisoners in the state and how many were, or had been, in solitary confinement. Taft wrote to city and county officials for similar information, which he passed on to Sinclair. Sinclair drew upon this information and upon personal contacts with Wobblies to produce “Singing Jailbirds.” Originally titled “California,” the play was a combination of speeches by Wobblies in jail, interspersed with the steady singing of a wide variety of IWW songs.°6 Writing years later about the effect of his intervention in the San Pedro strike on the rights of workers in Los Angeles, Sinclair noted: “So far as I can recall, there have been no mass arrests of strikers in the past twenty-

nine years.”8” This may have been true in the long run, but it was certainly not the case in the continuing struggle at San Pedro harbor. On the contrary, after Sinclair returned to his writing, the situation, as far as civil liberties for the strikers was concerned, grew infinitely worse. Sinclair, in fact, acknowledged as much when he reported in his “Postscript” to “Singing Jailbirds” that, even as the play was being set into type, the new chief of

police of Los Angeles had declared: “The big fellows in this town can do anything they like and get away with it. But the workers can’t even think what they want to think without being thrown into jail.” The new police chief called this “an outrage” and promised to end it once and for all in Los Angeles, including its harbor in San Pedro. After reporting this encouraging statement, Sinclair added bitterly:

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

And a few days after this speech was made, a mob of three hundred men, including policemen and sailors, raids a peaceful entertainment held in the IWW hall at San Pedro, and beats those present with baseball bats and clubs. One little girl is thrown into a vat of boiling coffee, so that the flesh is cooked from her limbs, and she is in the hospital, not expected to live. A number of men are dragged into automobiles, carried out into the country, and tarred and feathered. Repeated appeals to the police authorities in this matter result in promises of arrests, but no arrests .... Several weeks have passed, but the most determined agitation on the part of the American Civil Liberties Union cannot persuade the public authorities to give any protection to the working people at San Pedro, or any pretense of justice.88

Sinclair’s account of the mob attack on the IWW hall erred in one respect. It was not just “one little girl” who was thrown into a vat of boiling coffee. This brutal treatment was given to Lena Milds, age 10, known as the “Wobbly songbird”; Lillian Sunsted, age 8; May Sunsted, age 13; John Rodin, age 9, and Catherine Rodin, age 5; Andrew Kulgis, age 12, and Joyce Kodilda, age 4. Andrew Kulgis received an additional “hot grease” application from one of the sadists in the mob. All the children were beaten as well. * The press and the authorities did nothing about the terrible incident. On the contrary, the police and the vigilantes continued to harass the union. Raids were frequent and the police carried out a systematic policy of driving the IWW from the waterfront. By the end of 1925, the strike had been broken and the IWW suppressed, and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association was able to announce joyfully that the San Pedro harbor had been “cleaned up.” After 1924, the once powerful Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union on the Pacific Coast never again showed any real strength of its own. But the “Spirit of San Pedro” remained among the rank and file and even among some of the leadership of all the maritime unions.

* James

Imperial tion,

Gray,

"The

Valley

University

American

Agricultural

Civil

Liberties

Labor

of California,

Los

Union

Disturbances, Angeles,

1966,

of Southern

1930-1934," pp.

19-20.

California

Ph.D.

ana

disserta-

CHAPTER 4

WOMEN WORKERS EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN WORKERS The report of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor released in December 1920 conveyed the information that the number of women workers in industries formerly almost exclusively employing men was “increasing rapidly,” and that “about 35 percent more women than before the war” were employed in the iron, steel and related industries, in lumber, leather, stone, clay and chemical manufactures, the making of automobiles, electrical apparatus, agricultural implements, musical instruments, optical goods, rubber goods, motion pictures, in shipbuilding, in repair shops, on the railroads and street cars, etc. The report noted that women were now employed in these industries in a ratio of about one for every nine men. One of the significant features, according to the Women’s Bureau, was the evidence of a shift of women from the traditional women-employing industries such as textiles, the sewing trades, hotel and restaurants and domestic work, “to better paying industries previously occupied almost exclusively by

men.” A closer look at the situation revealed a less optimistic picture. For one thing, according to census statistics, on January 1, 1920, there were a little over 8.5 million women ten years of age and over gainfully employed in the United States. This represented an increase of nearly half a million since 1910, but taking the increase in population into consideration, there had actually been a decrease from 23.4 percent in 1910 to 21.1 percent in 1920. The census statistics revealed further that while women in greater numbers were entering occupations in which they had had scant representation up to that time, only a minority were actually going into entirely new occupations. The greatest change in any one occupation was in that of elevator tenders, where women increased in number from 25 in 1910 to 7,337 in 1920. There were also large increases in the number of women in the iron and steel industries—the number of semi-skilled operatives increas93

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ing 145.4 percent during the decade from 1910 to 1920—while the number of women laborers more than doubled. A greater increase, moreover, was shown in the number of women employed in automobile factories in 1920 than in any other manufacturing industry. Still, the greatest increases occurred among hairdressers, manicurists, laundry workers, store clerks, school teachers, stenographers and typists— all traditional women’s occupations.? On the other hand, the number of female servants and waitresses decreased from 122,367 in 1910 to 94,658 in 1920, and the number of dressmakers and seamstresses, not including those employed in factories, decreased from 38,850 to 22,785.5* According to a bulletin published by the New York State Industrial Commission in 1922, there were 1,135,948 women in the state who worked for wages—twice the number of women employed in. industry in Pennsylvania, then the second ranking state in population. Sixty-four percent of the women were employed in New York City, and more than 351,000 were employed in the manufacturing and mechanical industries. Figures also revealed that since 1910 there had been an increase in New York State of 151,560 women wage-earners and 347,749 men. The ratio of men to women workers in the various occupations remained about the

same as it had been. The only occupational group that showed a drop in the number of women employed was in domestic and personal service. But the proportion of women in the clerical group jumped from 34.5 percent in 1910 to 46.5 percent in 1920. There had been a 4 percent increase in transportation, and also a slight increase in professional and trade workers. On the other hand, there had been a slight drop in the percentage of women engaged in the manufacturing and mechanical industries and in agriculture. Although the percentage in the former industries had gone down, the actual number of women in these lines of work had increased by about 2,000.4 The first report on female Black workers by the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau appeared in the spring of 1922. It concluded that in most industries employing female labor, “there is discrimination against Negro women for similar work, hours of labor, working conditions, the type of labor performed and promotions.” Taking the food industry as an example of the special discrimination Black women faced, the report pointed out that in the abbatoirs and stockyards, Negro women trimmed, sorted, graded and stamped different portions of the * The statistics released by the Bureau of the Census for New York City are also revealing.

Pronounced increases for women were shown in the following occupational classes: clerks, except in stores, from 19,409 in 1910 to 68,949 in 1920; stenographers and typists, from 33,769 to 72,535; bookkeepers, cashiers and accounts, from 21,613 to 40,234; telephone operators, from 7,862 to 20,068 and trained nurses from 7,504 to 12,127 (New York Times,

Jan. 28, 1923).

WOMEN WORKERS

55

carcasses, separated and cleaned the viscera, and prepared the meat for curing and canning. However, they were barred from the more desirable work of canning and wrapping the meat and its byproducts. The work of Black women was usually done in the wet, slippery part of the establishment, where unpleasant odors filled the air, and where marked variations in temperature and humidity made the surroundings hazardous to health. Where Black women were employed in candy factories, they were without exception employed at the same tasks that were given to white women. These included the hand dipping of chocolates, machine tending and assorting, and wrapping and boxing candies. The work of Negro women in the canning and crystallizing of fruits, on the other hand, was confined to one occupation—seeding or pitting the fruit preparatory to the other processes. The work of Black and white women in the glass industry was entirely different. White women were engaged in assorting the glass products and etching or hand-painting glass globes and other articles, as well as in inspecting, packing and wrapping the finished goods. Black women were found in the most dangerous part of the establishment, where bits of broken glass at times flew in all directions. They were in rapid, continuous movement and heavily burdened with glass products, which they carried from the blowers to the ovens to be tempered. They were also employed in opening and closing the molds in which the hot glass is placed to be blown. In one of the plants investigated, an employer tried to promote Black women into more skilled occupations, but, the report noted, “union opposition forced him to discontinue the experiment.” The survey noted that the working day of the majority of Black women interviewed was greatly lengthened because of home duties in addition to factory work: Rising at 5 o’clock, she cooked breakfast, dressed the children and prepared food and made conditions around the house as suitable as possible for the children for the day. She was at her place of employment at 7 o’clock, and continued work until 5:30 in the evening. Returning home, there was a round of household duties that usually kept her busy until nearly midnight.

The report concluded on a pessimistic note: In most cases, the Negro woman

has no alternative, but must accept these

industrial handicaps and discrimination. Interviews with many of the women revealed the fact that they had fully observed the differences and felt humiliated and discouraged as the result.5

Still, as the following by a “Work-A-Day Girl,” published at about the same time, indicates, white working women also felt “humiliated and discouraged”:

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

The humdrum life And the humbug strife Of a work-a-day girl

In a rich man’s world. A dog were cherished More than she. In fact, he’s clever As he can be.

She’s of less value Than anything else In this money-mad world, Where poverty’s felt.

Rides in Fears Not even From

When you’re poor There’s no chance With the bosses to dance Or get in on his wedding chimes.

an auto not the whip. a curse his master’s lips.

She stands on the curb, Too weary to eat, While doggie rides by On a cushioned front seat,

So work on, you poor simp, Till you’re sick, weak and limp. For a pittance each Day of your life.®

The Boston Globe reprinted the poem, which had originally appeared in the Seattle Union Record. It did so to make a point. Commenting on the lines, “She stands on the curb/ Too weary to eat,” it observed: “Practically

all of us eat too much!”?

THE AFL AND WOMEN WORKERS As 1920 closed and the new decade got under way, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor reported that “many women are now included in the membership of the big international unions. More than 12,000 are found on the rolls of the International Association of Machinists, and there are many thousands in the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.” Furthermore, 8 percent of the trade union membership was now female, with 6.6 percent of working women organized8 The Labor Herald of Kansas City, Missouri, noting that more than 80,000 women office workers had joined trade unions during the period from April 1918 to April 1919, highlighted this fact in a headline that read: “This Marks the Expansion of the Labor Movement into Hitherto Unorganized Groups and Types of Workers.”* For the most part, these new workers were stenographers, clerks, accountants, etc. in the railroad offices * Another headline in the Labor Herald read: “For the First Time AFL sends Woman Delegate to the British Trade Union Congress.” The reference was to the appointment of Sara A. Conboy, a former carpet weaver, as the AFL’s delegate to the meeting of the British Trade Union Congress, which opened in Portsmouth, England on Septembe r 6, 1920 (Labor Herald, Aug. 20, 1920).

WOMEN WORKERS

57

throughout the country, and in various branches of the federal civil service. They represented about one-half of the total increase in membership recorded by the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, the National Federation of Federal Employees, and the local stenographers’ and office workers’ un-

ions—all of them affiliated with the American Federation of Labor? In addition to women office workers, school teachers were also reported to be rapidly adding to the strength of their organizations and the number of their local unions. The spread of trade union organization among the clerical workers and school teachers was considered especially significant, “because it marks the expansion of the labor movement into hitherto unorganized groups and types of workers, notably in the South, where a large proportion of the gains appear in the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks.” The Brotherhood increased its membership from 19,000 at the time the government took over the railroads to a total of about 160,000. A gain of 22,000 members was recorded in the month of January 1919 alone. Many of these new members were women.!° But events soon disclosed that any further progress in organizing women would be exceedingly difficult. In February 1921, a conference of AFL international and national unions called upon the public to recognize and support “the right of the working people of the United States to organize into trade unions.” Each union representative present appended his name to the document with the statement: “To the above declaration and appeal we pledge ourselves and those we represent.” Among those signing the appeal and pledge were the president and another representative of the International Molders’ Union and the president and secretary-treasurer of the Journeymen Barbers’ International Union, both of which expressly excluded women from membership.!! Samuel Gompers, Frank Morrison and all the other members of the Executive Council also signed the appeal on behalf of “the right of the working people of the United States to organize into trade unions.” Yet a few weeks later, Secretary Morrison wrote in answer to an inquiry: “The American Federation of Labor would have authority to issue charters to women members of a trade only where such course would be authorized by the international organization having jurisdiction.” How this operated was illustrated in the case of the women barbers of Seattle who, having been denied membership in the Barbers’ Union, asked the AFL for a separate charter and were refused because the Barbers’ Union objected. Thereupon, the IWW’s organ, the Industrial Worker, commented in an editorial headed “To Seattle Lady Barbers”: There is no charge that you have ever scabbed on other workers in your trade. There is no charge that you have ever done anything against the union rules, except that you were born as women. This is the great unpardonable fault you

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have committed, a fault inherited from the dark ages, when women were the acknowledged slaves of men... To those of you who are of the wage working class—this means the great majority of you—we would say, “Get into the Industrial Workers of the World.” We welcome every wage worker who is willing to work to better the conditions of the working class. We ask you to investigate this organization, to study its principles, to find out just what its aims and objects are. We feel certain if you will join with us you will find yourselves with a band of Fellow Workers who will march by your side to better things for all, instead of trying to crush you down.!2

The women barbers of Seattle received a charter from the Seattle Labor Council and had no need to desert the AFL for the IWW. However, other women workers who were excluded from international unions were not so fortunate. Writing in the June 1921 issue of Life and Labor, the official organ of the Women’s Trade Union League,* Mabel W. Taylor, organizer for the League, reported from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where many women were employed in the manufacture of furniture, that efforts to organize these women had failed. In giving the reasons, she pointed out that the union had refused to take the women into its organization and that when the women tried to organize separately, they were refused a charter by the AFL. The men in the shops then tried to have the women discharged by “belittling the amount and quality of the work they do, and by making the girls feel that they are interlopers.”13** — Aroused by these developments, the Executive Board of the League appointed a committee to confer with the AFL Executive Council to discuss the issuance of charters to groups of women not admitted to membership in the international unions of their trade, The committee met with the Executive Council on August 23, 1921, but nothing came of the discussions * The Women’s Trade Union League, an organization which brought together both wageearning and middle-class women, and both trade unionists and social reformers, was organized in 1903. For its formation and early history, see Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I, New York, 1979.

** Although the League concentrated on organizing women workers and lobbying for protective legislation for them in Philadelphia its most successful activities in the ’20s lay in organizing the wives of striking workers in order to gain support for their husbands’ union

activities. The League organized the families of cloakmakers, leather workers, carpenters, and shipyard workers. During a 15-month strike at the shipyard in the Port Richmond area of Philadelphia, which employed large numbers of Polish, Irish, and Italian men, the strikers pointed out to the union that their wives and mothers resented the fact that they did not bring home pay envelopes because of the strike. The union appealed to the League, which organized a meeting to which 12,000 women came—the wives, daughters, and mothers of the strikers. The League convinced them that a successful strike could mean better lives for the women and their families. After a series of such meetings, the women became so involved in strike activity that one striker commented:“It ain’t no use talkin’. It’s women that keep up our picket line. When any fellow gets lazy and his wife is in the auxiliary, she makes life so miserable for him he just can’t stand it. He has to get out on the picket line ... and if she’s afraid he won’t get there, she just goes with him” (“Organizing Wives and Mothers,” The Survey, May 13, 1922, p. 241).

WOMEN WORKERS

59

other than the suggestion by Gompers that conferences be held with those

internationals that excluded women.!4 But the League was not willing to rely on vague promises. Instead it met with a group of women delegates to the 1921 AFL convention and helped form the Women’s Committee for Industrial Equality. A resolution was drawn up to amend the AFL constitution. Introduced by delegate Ethel Haig, a tobacco worker, it read: Nothing in this constitution shall be construed as recognition of any right on the part of the American Federation of Labor, or any affiliated union, or of any officers of such union, to deny or abridge the right of workers to membership and to all the privileges of membership in the union of their trade or industry on account of sex; and women ina trade under the jurisdiction of a union which does not admit women to membership on the same terms as men shall not be denied a separate or direct charter from the American Federation of Labor for lack of consent of that union.

The amendment was deliberately drawn so as to avoid direct interference with “autonomy” by not making it mandatory for an international union to accept women. But it did provide that if entrance into the AFL was closed to any group of women by an international union, then another door could be opened through which they might enter. The issue was therefore clearly drawn. Either the AFL would recognize and support the right of women to be organized and would live up to its repeated and frequent declarations of support for the organizing of all workers, regardless of sex, or it would again use the slightest possibility of infringing on “the autonomy of the internationals” as an excuse for excluding women. The industrial equality amendment produced an interesting discussion, and a number of male delegates spoke out in its behalf. But the AFL leadership would have none of it. Claiming that exclusion was the result, not of prejudice, but of the fact that women were not suited for work in the trades that banned them, the Committee on Laws introduced a substitute resolution reading: “Resolved, that the international and national organizations that do not admit women workers give early consideration to such admission.” The convention then rejected a floor amendment calling upon the AFL itself to charter locals if affiliates prohibited entrance by female members, and it went on to accept the committee’s resolution by a vote of 164 to 73. The meaninglessness of this resolution was indicated by the fact that two of the five international that had banned women from membership—the Barbers and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters—were not scheduled to hold their conventions until 1924, and another—the Molders’ Union—had not even set the date for its next convention.* Moreover, each * The other two unions whose constitutions or bylaws barred women from membership were the Elastic Goring Weavers’ Association and the Pattern Makers’ League.

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

of the presidents of these three organizations informed the press that no consideration would be given to the subject of women workers by his union until its convention was held, and that there was little likelihood that it would receive consideration even then. And when a few months later, the Women’s Trade Union League appealed directly to the AFL Executive Council to issue charters to women if they were excluded by affiliates, the proposal was rejected. The council claimed it had no authority unless it was authorized by the unions invelved.!5 But the Committee for Industrial Equality remained hopeful. It changed its name to the National Woman’s Union and planned to fight for an even stronger resolution at the 1922 AFL convention. At that convention, Mary V. Halas, fraternal delegate of the NWTUL, drew uparesolution calling upon the AFL Executive Council to issue charters directly to women in occupations in which the unions refused to admit women to membership. She then had Luther E. Seward, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, introduce it. However, the Committee on Laws reported a revised resolution to the convention. It opened with fulsome praise for the AFL as having “since its inception ... done everything in its power to organize the women workers of the country and to obtain for them equal rights, political as well as economic.” Since, it claimed, only a few international unions refused to admit women to membership, “due largely to the nature of their work,” the revised resolution proposed that the Executive Council take up the subject with the trade unions involved and endeavor to reach an understanding “as to the issuance of Federal charters.” The revised resolution was quickly adopted. How little was to be gained by this approach became clear soon after the convention. The women barbers in Seattle applied to the AFL for a federal charter on the basis of the 1922 resolution. At first it was granted, but after a vehement protest by the International Barbers’ Union, it was recalled. At

that point, the whole procedure was abandoned.16

Thus, while the women delegates were permitted to attend its conventions and to introduce resolutions calling for the unionization of women workers, the AFL did little concrete along these lines. It did seem that the Federation was finally beginning to move in 1923, after the Supreme Court invalidated a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women—a decision that will be discussed below. The AFL reacted by raising the need for a unionization drive among working women. In February 1924, Gompers invited 45 unions to a national conference, declaring that “if they [women] cannot be protected by law, we should protect them by organization.” At the conference, a discussion took place about what agencies already existed to help the woman worker. In his presentation, Gompers stated that although the WTUL had rendered valuable service during strikes, it was

WOMEN WORKERS

61

“inadequate to the task” of organizational work, since its nature was largely “academic.” Its mission, he declared, was primarily educational, and he practically proposed that it be dissolved. In its place, he suggested the establishment, under his direct supervision, of an AFL women’s bureau that would include a female executive officer and that would lead a joint organizational campaign to be financed by the member unions. Less than three weeks later, Gompers sent his secretary, Florence Thorne, to Mary Anderson, head of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor and a leading force in the Women’s Trade Union League, to find out “if the League could be persuaded to go out of business.” A number of League members viewed the proposal of an AFL women’s bureau as little more than a device to undermine their organization, and the fact that it had the support of the Barbers’ and Carpenters’ Unions gave credence to these suspicions. Still, the League’s leadership was even prepared to abandon its organizational activities and act as a link between the trade union movement and the general public—provided that the AFL women’s bureau actually got under way. In a letter to Gompers signed by its Executive Council, the League pledged its willingness to coordinate its efforts with those of the AFL. The letter concluded: The fact that there are, according to the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, 3,156,600 women working at trades which come within the jurisdiction of the national and international organizations affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, and that the records of the American Federation of Labor show no more than 200,000 of the number in the membership of the American Federation of Labor, is a telling comment upon the overwhelming difficulties besetting the task of the organization of women. We believe that the coordination of effort in this direction under an able woman executive is the most important step that could be taken, and we gladly pledge the resources and the machinery of the National Women’s Trade Union League in aid of this undertaking.1

The proposed women’s bureau never became a reality. Of the 45 unions invited to the first meeting, only 13 sent representatives, and they objected to a women’s bureau as an infringement on their autonomy. After another conference, the plan was turned over to the August 1924 AFL convention. In its report to that convention, the Executive Council merely declared: “After considering the whole situation, Council felt that because of the very few pledges of substantial support to a separate and distinctive movement confined to organizing women wage-earners, it was obvious that a general concerted action would be impracticable.” The Executive Council then proposed, as the only way in which the AFL could deal with the issue, “that the Federation can promote the organization of women in industry by making available informational sources and material and by carrying on the

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

educational work necessary to a better understanding of the problem of women in industry and the necessity for constructive action.” Ironically, by 1924, not only were the five international unions that had barred women from membership still continuing that practice, but a number of others had publicly acknowledged that they officially opposed the admission of women. They included the Teamsters’ Union, the Brotherhood of Blacksmiths and Drop Forgers, and the United Mine Workers.!® However, the Women’s Trade Union League had by that time become convinced that women workers faced a more dangerous threat than that posed by the hostility of the AFL and its affiliates, and it had already decided to refrain from pressing the issue of the exclusion of women from _ AFL affiliates and the Federation’s failure to mount a meaningful organizing campaign among women workers. This greater menace, in the eyes of the League, was the threat to protective legislation, and in its effort to combat this danger, the League decided to shelve the campaign to change the policies and practices of the unions toward women workers.!9

THE CONTROVERSY OVER PROTECTIVE LEGISLATION At the beginning of the 20th century, in response to pressure from a coalition of progressive reformers, states began to enact laws governing the hours, wages, and sanitary and safety conditions of women workers in most

industries. Between 1896 and 1923, 26 states enacted such laws.2? The Supreme Court struck down legislation providing for maximum hours of work on the ground that it denied workers the right to make their own contracts of employment. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court, for the first time, accepted the right of state legislatures to set standards for workers’ conditions in non-hazardous occupations. Muller represented a challenge to a 1903 ten-hour law covering women laundry and factory workers. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld the law, whereupon Muller appealed to the Supreme Court. The National Consumers’ League, acting through Florence Kelley, engaged Louis Brandeis to write a brief in support of the statute. In the famous “Brandeis brief,” he not only demonstrated that the type of work regulated by the Oregon law was particularly taxing, but he also argued that the woman worker was in special need of protection. He based his argument on four “matters of general knowledge”: first, that women are physically weaker than and otherwise physically different from men; second, that damage to a woman’s health might affect her future reproductive capacity: third, that the health of a child may be damaged if its mother is overworked: and fourth, that excessive hours of labor

deprive the family of a woman’s services in the home2!

WOMEN WORKERS

63

On February 8, 1908, Justice Brewer handed down the unanimous Court opinion upholding the Oregon law. In a footnote, the court credited Brandeis for playing an important role in its decision.* it sustained legislation for women workers only on the basis of their biological role, saying: That woman’s physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage is obvious .... The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing, the influence of vigorous health upon the future well-being of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence.22**

After Muller, the enactment of protective legislation proceeded more rapidly, and organizations like the Women’s Trade Union League and the Consumers’ League devoted more and more of their time and energies to promoting the passage of such laws. Actually the WTUL’s efforts at lobbying for protective legislation were far less extensive than those of the Consumers’ League, but unlike the latter’s activities, those of the WTUL were often conducted by working women themselves. This was particularly true of the Philadelphia WTUL, whose chief lobbyist in the state capitol in Harrisburg was an unemployed hosiery worker. The WTUL coordinated the

efforts of both the unions and the Consumers’ League on behalf of protective legislation. It set up teams of workers and young women from colleges to canvas women’s clubs in Philadelphia with one-minute speeches in favor of protective legislation. In 1921 Mary Anderson summed up the position of the Women’s Trade Union League and other advocates of protective legislation for women workers when she wrote: “We cannot close our eyes to the fact that industry in all its past has laid the heavy burden upon the women .... At present and for many years to come, the problem of women, in industry

will be one which needs separate and expert attention.”24 However, it has been argued that the WTUL turned to legislation as the solution for women workers’ problems because it had become disillusioned with the prospect of * Most scholars credited the “Brandeis brief’ with having swayed the Court to uphold the Oregon law. For a different view, see Nancy S. Erickson, “Muller v. Oregon Reconsidered: The Origins of a Sex-Based Doctrine of Liberty of Contract,” (Labor History 30 [Spring 1989]: 228-50). ** In a detailed analysis of court decisions on protective legislation and women workers, Ann Corinne Hill concludes: “It is my contention that the courts, in their decisions on protective legislation, have legitimated rather than challenged the second-class position of women in the American labor force. After a hundred years of rulings on various aspects of the employment of women, the courts in general, and the United States Supreme Court in particular, have yet to recognize that women have a right to employment, a right to enter and pursue the occupation of their choice .... The courts generally see male workers as the norm and treat women as ‘aliens’ in the labor force.” (“Protection of Women Workers and the Courts: A Legal Case History,” Feminist Studies 5 [Summer 1979]:248.)

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organizing women into unions, especially since the AFL offered no real assistance. Other scholars have challenged this interpretation, insisting that the League’s support for protective legislation resulted, in the main, from its belief that, because of the changing nature of the work process owing to technological improvements, “the AFL’s elitist, craft-union, anti-government policy was no longer successful in solving industrial problems.” This did not represent either a change in goals or a rejection of the desirability of organization. It did, however, reflect the belief that organization alone “would never accomplish all that trade unionists deserve,” and that even working men, who had organizations upon which to rely, had “resorted to

legislation when that seemed the better plan.” The Women’s Trade Union League rejected the AFL’s philosophy of “yoluntarism,” which opposed legislative interference in the negotiations between employers and unions for a labor contract, and which placed almost total emphasis on the development of labor’s power through the formation of trade unions. It is true that the AFL reluctantly (and often in words only) endorsed legislation for female workers on the ground that their weakness required it, but its main emphasis was on the formation of trade unions and collective bargaining at the expense of political action and

legislative lobbying.2® Although the League was originally founded to organize women into trade unions, it made an early commitment to legislation and education as its other goals because it soon perceived “that women’s working experience required different solutions from men’s.”2? It soon became clear to some, however, that legislation was a two-edged sword. While it did protect women from many of the worst abuses of the early 20th century industrial system, some of it served to exclude women from certain occupations. After the signing of the Armistice, the Central Federated Union of New York City and Vicinity and the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electrical Railway Employees joined forces in lobbying for a law in the New York State legislature prohibiting women from working on the streetcars and subways between 10 P.M. and 6 AM. In the spring of 1919, the campaign was successful and the Lockwood-Caulfield bill, containing the prohibition, was passed by the legislature and

signed by Governor Alfred E. Smith.28 The day the law was passed, all the transit lines in New York City discharged every woman worker on the surface and subway lines. Women workers fought back militantly. The League of Women Employees of Railways, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Women’s Equal Opportunity League and the Interborough Women’s League for Equal Opportunity jointly sent a protest to Governor Smith, urging him to call a special session of the legislature to repeal “the obnoxious law.” “Women are not opposed to shorter hours,” the appeal declared, “but they are opposed to this law

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because it discriminates against the women and forces them to lose their jobs. We favor a law that applies to men and women alike.” Governor Smith rejected the appeal. All the women could do was to vow “retaliation at the polls” and pledge to seek legislation that would treat men and women equally.29 During World War I, the Women’s League for Equal Opportunity had been formed in New York City to lobby against the night-work law and the 54-hour statute. It was soon joined by the Equal Rights League, made up of women printers. However, both organizations remained small until after the war, when their ranks were swelled by women telegraphers, streetcar operators and others who had been working in traditionally male occupations and who stood to lose their jobs by legislative action. After 1918 both organizations sent lobbyists to every legislative hearing urging the repeal of existing protective legislation and the defeat of any additional laws.°° The chief opponent of protective legislation, however, was the Congressional Union, the most militant American suffrage organization, founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns when they broke with the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) early in 1913. The Congressional Union later changed its name to the National Woman’s Party. Both before and after the change, the organization was headed by Paul and was almost totally under her influence.?! A single-issue advocate of woman’s rights, she refused to permit any other issue to be raised at meetings and conventions of the National Woman’s Party. At its 1921 convention, the NWP in effect excluded Black women and paid no attention to the mass violations of their voting rights, despite the ratification of the woman suffrage amendment. Paul justified this stand on the ground that the plight of Black women was a race, not a sex issue, but this was just a convenient cloak for racism. Following a bitter quarrel with Paul in 1919 over this very issue, Walter White, director of NAACP, commented that “if they could get the Suffrage Amendment through without enfranchising

colored women, they would do it in a moment.”32* In 1921 the National Woman’s Party turned its major attention to a proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. It was very simple, reading: “No political, civil or legal disabilities or inequalities on account of * Referring to the National Women’s Trade Union League, Diane Elizabeth Kirby writes: “Their concern for black women workers was unusual for that period and once again differentiated the League from the exclusivist position of the American Federation of Labor and the nativist sentiment of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.” (“Alice Henry: The National Women’s Trade Union League of America and Progressive Labor Reform, 1906-1925,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982, p. 320.) Apart from the fact that Kirby exaggerates the absence of racism in the Women’s Trade Union League, it is strange that she does not include the National Woman’s Party among the organizations with an “exclusivist position.”

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sex nor on account of marriage, unless applying equally to’both sexes, shall exist within the United States or any territory thereof.”35 The issue of protective labor legislation for women was at the core of discussions of the proposed amendment. It would appear that before submitting the amendment to Congress, the National Woman’s Party underwent some change of heart with respect to protective legislation. In March 1921, Alice Paul advised the chairperson of the Massachusetts NWP to .. be very certain that none of the legislation which you introduce in any way disturbs any protective legislation that may have been passed in your state for the welfare of women. I do not think we want to interfere in any way with the so-called welfare legislation that has been passed at the instance of the Consumers League and other organizations for the purpose of protecting women from night work and from too long hours of labor, even though this legislation may not be equal for men and women. That is, it seems to me when there is an inequality in which the position of women is better than that of men, we do not want to bring the standard for women down to that of men, but want, on the contrary, to bring that of men up to the standard existing for women.

Whether or not Paul was sincere in favoring protective legislation is a matter of dispute. In any case, those in the NWP who opposed labor legislation restricted to women, led by Gail Laughlin, president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, persuaded Paul to support their position. In November 1921, Paul wrote to a New York member: “Personally, I do not believe in special protective labor legislation for women. It seems to me that enacting labor laws along sex lines is erecting another handicap for women in the economic struggle.”34 Paul’s letter sums up very well the argument of advocates of the equal rights amendment. They maintained that protective legislation that applied only to women was discriminatory, and that the effect of such laws was too often to restrict women’s employment rather than to “protect” them on the job.3> Opponents of the amendment took the position that it would eliminate labor laws that were necessary and beneficial to women workers.* This, however, is only a general summary of their position. The National Women’s Trade Union League immediately expressed concern lest both the state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, which were constantly on the lookout for loopholes in any social and economic legislation, would seize upon the words “disabilities” and “inequalities” as a pretext to declare unconstitutional special legislation in various states relating to women in industry, and would proceed to wipe out the special dispensations granted by. law to women workers after years of ceaseless struggle. Protective * This debate was repeated during the 1970 discussion of the Equal Rights Amendmen t on the floor of the House of Representatives. See especially 116 Congressional Record 137 (91st Congress, 2nd Session), pp. H-7947 - H-7985 (August 10, 1970).

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enactments granting special working hours and conditions of labor for women were on the statute books of many states. “What is now to become of them?” the WTUL asked. Moreover, it was not simply the equal rights amendment that posed a threat; the NWP made it clear that it was prepared to launch a campaign both to eliminate those laws that were already on the statute books and to defeat any new protective legislation. As Alice Paul, the leading spokesperson for the NWP, put it: We looked into the laws and found how unfair they were—man-made laws setting forth how long women might work, where and under what conditions. In some instances, perhaps, women were the better for them. But I do not wholly concede even that. If the laws had not been made, women would have been forced to organize and make the same agreements that men made. They would have made these agreements as a body of individuals contracting for themselves: There would have been no question of “thou shalt.” Men are not going to make laws which will place women in a position of industrial competition with them. Hence eight-hour laws for women and minimum wages for women... In times of unemployment, will an employer hire a woman who has the minimum wage and eight-hour protection behind her or will he hire a man without these handicaps? Theoretically, it might sound fine, but, getting down to brass tacks, what effect will these laws have but to drive women out of the fields of individual effort and free contracts?

The immediate reaction of the NWTUL and its various state organizations was that while the professional women who made up the bulk of the National Woman’s Party might not need the safeguards of special legislation, workingwomen did, and they would not be aided by a meaningless equality if the protective legislation they needed more than men was wiped out. In reply, the Women’s League for Equal Opportunity and the Equal Rights League pointed out that they had actually preceded the National Woman’s Party in opposing protective legislation, and that they spoke for many working women. * The Women’s Trade Union League launched a vigorous campaign to destroy the credibility of the women opponents of protective legislation. It insisted, first, that these organizations were not really working-class bodies, but were financed secretly by manufacturing interests, and secondly, that at best, they represented an atypical faction of the female work force. Workingwomen who opposed protective legislation, the League argued, were those who competed directly with men for work—as skilled typesetters, telegraphers and streetcar operators and in other occupations that traditionally belonged to men. Protective legislation placed such workers at a disadvantage in finding and keeping work. But most women workers, the League insisted, needed protective legislation and were not handicapped in

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their opportunities by such laws. And even if a few suffered, the vast majority benefited.*8 In its arguments for special laws, the league occasionally stressed the importance of guarding “the mothers of the race.” In the main, however, it emphasized the fact that women were not equal to men in the work force. “These laws apply only to women,” one league pamphlet stated, “because women’s hours as a rule are longer than men’s, women’s wages as a rule are lower than men’s.” Moreover, under existing social and economic conditions, women had no way of commanding a position of equality in the workplace. As Ethel Smith, speaking for the WTUL, said: For one reason or another, women do not organize into labor bodies as effectively as men. They are, in a good many instances, just transients on the job. It is not life work with them. Because of that, their labor strength cannot be compared with men. They cannot go to employers and make agreements for themselves. To keep them from being exploited, different states passed labor legislation. The Minimum Wage law is one; the eight-hour day is another. Without these laws, women might still be working life-killing hours at miserable wages.

The WTUL argued further that the whole theory of the equal rights advocates—that repeal of the protective laws would enable women to make arrangements with employers through direct negotiation and free contracts—was an illusion because it ignored the historic experience of the League itself in organizing working women. Only through collective action had labor been able to achieve its goals, and collective action was, according to League spokespersons, more difficult to achieve among women workers than among men. Nor were they likely to succeed in securing legislation that would protect both men and women-the only type of protective legislation the National Woman’s Party approved—since most of the protective legislation had been adopted in the first place only because of the argument that such laws were needed to eliminate “conditions which

are so threatening to our national life.”39

In a widely publicized address, Rose Schneiderman, president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League, denounced those “shortsighted feminists whose lack of social vision makes them think that women need no protection in industry.” While emphasizing the fact that even though women had the vote, they still needed “safeguards” in the form of protective legislation, Schneiderman insisted that the real protection for working women was through union organization: Organization is the only way to protect women in industry, the only way to get decent wages and improve working conditions. Women workers are sick of the “sob stuff” about the “poor working girl.” The union working girl and woman of today, wants higher wages and shorter hours, so that she may obtain education, music, friendship and recreation...

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There are 500,000 women working in New York State, but only 11 percent of them are organized. The problem of organizing the rest and of improving their working standards so that they may have time and money for self-improvement is the task which the organized women of the state have set out to accomplish. We are sick and tired of the opposition to our work by the “shortsighted feminists,” but despite their indifference, we will fight this question out to the bitter end. And we will win because will be fighting together—working men and working women-—fighting together for better conditions. :

The opponents of the National Woman’s Party were joined in their opposition by the forces of organized labor, and especially by the AFL. The position of organized labor was summed up in the following editorial in Labor, the national newspaper: The position of organized labor is that every law which discriminates against women should be repealed but that all laws which give them a better chance in the struggle for a living wage and decent working conditions should be retained and strengthened .... Employers’ organizations like the National Manufacturers’ Association will undoubtedly put their money and influence back of the National Woman’s Party proposal to repeal all laws designed to protect working women. The employers know that women workers are not in as good a position to resist the greed and injustice of employers as are men. Hence the need for special laws for women. The Women’s Trade Union League and other organizations which are authorized to speak for working women will marshal the opposition, and they should _ receive the support of every rightminded citizen.

Advance, the official organ of the progressive Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which had a large membership of women workers, accused the National Woman’s Party of “class heedlessness, doctrinaire folly, or something more sinister.” It even asked bluntly “whether great employers of women workers are not contributing to its campaign funds. We should like to see a list of the contributors. Beneficiaries of the System are missing a profitable opportunity if they are not on it.” The labor paper continued: Abolish the laws protecting women in industry in the name of equality, and the System will use their defenselessness under the law to subject them to even more cruel inequalities than before .... Equality is better established piecemeal—step by step .... The history of freedom .... shows that no lasting enfranchisement is ever won wholesale and at one it were, the United States would be a fatherland instead of a prison to stroke. If, Negroes.

The battle between the friends and foes of protective legislation for women was joined in earnest in 1923.* Early in January, the Women’s * For a good summary of this continuing battle, see Judith Sealander, “Feminist Against Feminist: The First Phase of the Equal Rights Amendment Debate: 1923-1963,” South Atlantic Ouarterly 81 (Spring, 1982): 147-61.

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Bureau of the Department of Labor called a conference in Washington on “Women in Industry.”* Mary Anderson, the bureau’s chief, invited Alice Paul, vice-president of the National Woman’s Party, to attend, but when Paul asked for a place in the conference program, Anderson informed her that this was impossible because the large number of organizations that had already been given such places. Thereupon, the NWP and the Women’s League for Equal Opportunity accused Anderson of allowing the presentation of only those views that supported the theory that workingwomen needed special legislation, and both organizations urged Congress to refuse funds for the conference. Their request was rejected, and the conference

proceeded without representation from the two protesting organizations.*% Then a month later, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Lucretia Mott, or equal rights amendment. Fifteen women opponents of the amendment, representing more than a dozen national organizations, spoke for two hours, arguing that the proposed measure, if adopted, would destroy the laws protecting women with respect to wages and hours of employment, and even mothers’ pension laws. Among the speakers who attacked the amendment were such veteran activists as Melinda Scott, Rose Schneiderman, Mary Van Kleeck, Agnes Nestor, Florence Kelley and Nellie Swartz. Scott, representing the United Textile Workers, for which she was now a leading organizer, made a deep impression on the committee when she said: What if it should take longer to secure equal rights for women by dealing with discriminations separately? Would it not be better to takealittle longer than to inflict upon millions of working women the suffering that would be involved by destruction of the laws which now give them decent hours and working conditions? The working women are not so much concerned about property rights— they have no property. The National Woman’s Party does not know what it is to work 10 or 12 hours a day inafactory; so they do not know what it means to lose an eight-hour-day or a nine-hour-day law. The working women do know, and that’s why they are unanimously opposing this amendment.

“We have worked for many years to get our labor laws for women, and we have had much litigation to establish them,” declared Agnes Nestor, president of the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League. “We do not want to do that all over again, especially when all that this amendment purports * An earlier meeting, called at the suggestion of Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers’ League, took place in December 1921. It was attended by leaders of the League of Women Voters, the National Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and Alice Paul and three other members of the NWP. Its purpose was to discuss the Equal Rights Amendment proposed by the NWP. At the meeting, Kelley asked Paul to hold the amendment back until the safety of protective legislation for women could be assured, but nothing came of the suggestion, and the meeting ended with the cleavage among women’s groups intensified. (Nancy F. Cott, “Feminist Politics in the 1920’s: The National Woman’s Party,” Journal of American History 71 [June 1984]: 57-58.)

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to do can be done without incurring such consequences.” Agnes Regan, secretary of the National Council of Catholic Women, followed with the argument that the amendment “flew in the face of fact, sense and philoso-

phy”:

The physiological differences between men and women, besides the obvious ones, are so many, so deeply laid, and so persistent, that no law can wipe them out. Woman should have in law definite specific rights, as nature has conferred upon her definite specific duties. It is neither justifiable nor reasonable to level down these rights for the attainment of a purely theoretical identity.44

Three spokespersons for the National Woman’s Party appeared at the hearing, but as they were outnumbered by the opponents, they refused to testify, pleading instead for a postponement. However, it was clear from both the proceedings and the statements of the committee members that the amendment was, for the time being at least, dead.45

ADKINS V. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL It was not long, however, before the foes of protective legislation for women scored a major victory. On May 25, 1920, the Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. petitioned the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia to set aside an award of the Minimum Wage Board fixing the minimum wage rates for women workers in hospitals and hotels at $16.50 per week. A major argument advanced by the hospital’s counsel (and endorsed by the District Hotelmen’s Association, which was supporting the hospital) was that the minimum wage law for women workers had already compelled industry to either substitute men for women or make the minimum the maximum rate, thus hurting instead of helping its presumed beneficiaries. Florence Kelley brought Felix Frankfurter and Mary Dewson into the legal proceedings to support the Minimum Wage Board’s decision. Frankfurter served as co-counsel and Dewson furnished evidence justifying the minimum wage legislation. One of the telling points made by the defense was that various industrial surveys, especially that by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1920, covering the earnings of half a million women, revealed that despite wartime wage increases, from one-quarter to one-third of the employees in such trades as cigar manufacturing, candymaking, and silk weaving received less than subsistence wages. The counsel for the District Board argued that minimum wage laws were both necessary and

effective in relieving the exploitation of women operatives.’6 The court ruled that the minimum wage law was constitutional. The District Court of Appeals then rendered two decisions. The first, on July 6, 1921, upheld the constitutionality of the law by a vote of 2 to 1, but a year later the full court decided against the law bya similar vote. The case was

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then argued before the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled on April 9, 1925, by a vote of 5 to 3, against the constitutionality of the minimum wage legislation. The court majority based its position on the right of private contract, insisting that while laws could be enforced to regulate working conditions, the employer and employee must be free of any restraint in determining between themselves what wages were acceptable.* While the majority did not overrule Muller v. Oregon, it argued that that decision no longer controlled because, with the passage of the 19th Amendment, women had achieved equality with men and no longer needed special protection in employment. The Court conceded that there were still physical differences between the sexes which could justify special maximum hours laws for women, but it maintained that these could not be used to justify the minimum wage laws. : Writing for the majority, Justice George Sutherland argued that, as far as the freedom of contract issue was concerned, the “ancient inequality of the sexes” had disappeared: “In view of the great—not to say revolutionary— changes which have taken place since the utterance, in the contractual, political, and civil status of women, culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment, it is not unreasonable to say that these differences have now reached the vanishing point.” Minimum wage laws for women, he went on, were therefore “no longer necessary.” Because of these “revolutionary” changes, the Court declared that women’s freedom of contract could not be restrained: To do so would be to ignore all the implications to be drawn from the present-day trend of legislation as well as that of common thought and usage, by which woman is accorded emancipation from the old doctrine that she must be given special protection or be subjected to special restraint in her contractual and civil relationships.

The Court minority contended that since there had been general acceptance of the fact that working conditions could be prescribed by lawmaking bodies, and since wages were only an extension of working conditions, it followed that they, too, were a proper subject for legislation. In his strong dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take these differences into account. I should not hesitate to take them into account if I thought it necessary to sustain the act.47 * The opinion of the majority was governed by the dogma of liberty of contract set forth by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York, 1905. In it, the Court ruled against a maximum hours law for bakers on the ground that it was not a valid health measure and thus unnecessarily interfered with the right of bakers to make contracts freely in determining

their working hours. In its decision, the Court’s majority elevated liberty of contract to an

absolute right guaranteed by the Constitution (198 U.S. 45 [1905)).

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Over half a century later, Ann Corinne Hill, analyzing the decision in Adkins, points out that “despite the heady equalitarian language of the Court, its main concern was not guaranteeing the individual plaintiff, who earned thirty-five dollars a month as an elevator operator, the right to compete equally on the job with men; rather, it was to quash the latest attempt at social welfare legislation.”48 The National Woman’s Party enthusiastically endorsed the Court’s decision. Equal Rights, the militant feminists’ magazine, approvingly quoted Justice Sutherland’s argument that women were able to safeguard their health and morals as well as men, and declared: When one finds the Supreme Court of the United States beginning to realize that women should be accorded emancipation from the old doctrine that she must be given special protection or be subjected to special restraint in her contractual and civil relationships, one can feel that at last the world is beginning to realize that women are adult human beings.49

The National Women’s Trade Union League and the Consumers’ League were both enraged by the decision and fearful of its consequences. At the time of the Supreme Court decision, 14 states had minimum wage laws for women. While the ruling did not repeal existing wage-setting laws in these states, Ethel M. Smith, the NWTUL’s legislative secretary, predicted that “a wholesale reduction of wages of women” in those states was “to be expected as a result of the Supreme Court decision.” However, the WTUL did more than simply lament the decision. In response to its call, representatives of 28 national organizations met in Washington on May 14, 1923 to study the effect of the Court decision and to decide on countermeasures.* President Samuel Gompers and Vice-President Matthew Woll of the AFL denounced the “usurpation of legislative and executive functions by the Judicial Branch of the government” and declared themselves as favoring, as a solution, the enactment of a law requiring the concurrence of seven or eight of the nine justices before a law could be declared unconstitutional. Florence Kelley went even further, calling for limiting the review powers of the Court, either by statute or by Constitutional amendment. However, Elizabeth Christman and Rose Schneiderman, speaking for the Women’s Trade Union League, argued that judicial reform was at best a remote possibility and demanded instead a vigorous campaign to organize women into unions as the only realistic course. Schneiderman declared that women wage earners “needn’t accept any wage cuts if they stand together like men for a single day.” Women’s work, she went on, was “just

* An earlier meeting called by the Consumers’ League on April 20, 1923 failed to produce a concrete program of action to undo the Court’s decision, and the NWTUL conference was

an effort to achieve such a program.

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as valuable as men’s”; it must be compensated as highly—and it would be, if only women organized. Then she lashed out: The idea of always being a “poor working girl” is nonsense. There is no reason why a working girl should be poor. Men bakers, for instance, who are organized, get good wages. Girls working in such a prosperous business as the candy industry get starvation wages because they are not organized. I want to say to the women in the District of Columbia, if they would organize, they would not only get the $16.50 a week formally guaranteed to them by law, but more.5?

The only concrete action taken by the conference, however, was the appointment of a national committee representing the AFL and the two leading women’s organizations to “work out a comprehensive trade union program to combat the wage slashing that already is threatening nine million wage earners in the United States as a result-of the Supreme Court

decision.”°! But in November 1923, the committee reported itself as being “hopelessly deadlocked.” For one thing, it was impossible to obtain agreement in favor of legislation checking the court, whether through a simple legislative act or by Constitutional amendment. Moreover, the plea for organization of women workers in order to meet the problem had little effect on the AFL leadership.°? Meanwhile, the entire structure of minimum wage laws for women workers was collapsing as state courts ruled such statutes invalid or as state legislatures repealed them. Except in Massachusetts, those few laws that remained on the books became “dead letters” under the impact of the Supreme Court decision. By the end of 1923, it was estimated that women’s wages in at least five of the states that had minimum wage laws had been reduced by one-third. New York State Industrial Commissioner Bernard I. Sheintag, after pointing out that the average weekly earnings of

women in that state’s factories were only half those of men workers, blamed the situation on the absence of “some form of minimum wage legislation that will help the thousands of women wage earners who are bravely battling to keep their heads above water.”®3 Thus by 1923 all the effort that had gone into improving the status of women workers through legislation appeared to have ended in failure. Most reformers, having put all their eggs into the legislative basket, now conceded that they were “baffled” and had nothing to hold out to working women.54

INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF WORKING WOMEN The Women’s Trade Union League did score one victory in 1923, but it did not take place in the United States. In Vienna, at the Third Congress of the International Federation of Working Women, the delegates of the League obtained passage of a resolution favoring labor laws for women, irrespective of

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whether or not such laws applied to men. This action, the League announced from its Washington headquarters, was “a victory for the program advocated by American working women” and a defeat for “the National Woman’s Party and its campaign to eliminate protective laws for working women.”°5* But even this victory was short-lived. At its Ninth Biennial Convention in June 1924, the League voted to disaffiliate from the International Federation of Working Women, which it had been instrumental in creating. The reason lay in the IFWW’s affiliation as a women’s committee within the International Federation of Trade Unions (Amsterdam), the international organization of Socialists. While the WTUL was unhappy over the proposed auxiliary status, the major reason for its disaffiliation was its desire to avoid antagonizing Gompers and other AFL leaders, who were completely opposed to any relations with an international Socialist organization. It is ironic that it was Rose Schneiderman, herself a former Socialist,

who introduced the resolution for disaffiliation.5 As we shall see in the next volume, the conflict between the National Women’s Trade Union League and the National Woman’s Party was to continue. Even for the time being, however, it is worth nothing the observation made by Nancy F. Cott after a comprehensive study of the controversy over the equal rights amendment proposed by the National Woman’s Party: While the antiamendment side was right, in that protective laws had improved conditions for the great majority of women in industry,** the proamendment side was also right, in that the laws had limited women’s opportunities in the labor market and had helped to sustain the notion that women were dependent and secondary wage earners. Supporters of protective legislation did not see that their expectations of women, rooted in biological and customary notions of women’s place and purpose, helped to confirm women’s second-class position in the economy. Nor did advocates of the equal rights amendment recognize the need protective legislation addressed or acknowledge that their program of equal rights would not in itself free women’s

economic opportunity from the stranglehold of the domestic stereotype.°” * An interesting aspect of the Vienna Congress was the discussion on the question of the organization of women. Rose Schneiderman delivered a speech explaining “the difficulties to be encountered in America when organizing women.” First, she emphasized that “they had all the nationalities there were in Europe,” and that many women workers had originally been “peasant women” in “their own countries,” without any trade union experience. Another problem was the “fluctuation of their membership. Every five years they had a total

change in the membership of their unions. Therefore, they had to continually teach the ABC’s of trade unionism over again.” (“Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Federation

of Working Women,” Vienna, Aug. 28, 1922, National Women’s

Trade

Union League Papers, Library of Congress.) ** However, Ann Corinne Hill points out that protective labor legislation for women has never covered all women workers. These laws, she writes, were originally enacted for the

protection of working women in factories. In some states, they were later extended to saleswomen and to women in laundries, restaurants, and canneries. Ms. Hill continues: “There have never been laws enacted to protect the vast number of female domestic workers or women in agriculture. At the peak of the protective labor legislation movment in 1930, only one-third of the eight and one-half million women working were covered by regulation of their working hours” (Hill, p. 249).

CHAPTER 5

THE TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: PREDECESSORS Several years after the steel strike of 1919, William Z. Foster® noted that the defeat was “a tremendous disaster,” not only because it destroyed the steel unions, but because it thwarted a “much greater plan.” Had the strike been a success, Foster would have proposed “the formation of a great organizing committee with branches in each of the big industries, to sweep the masses into the unions.” In this way he planned to transform the AFL into a federation of industrial as well as craft unions, embracing the major-

ity of the American working class. The defeat of the steel strike did not, however, diminish Foster’s confidence in the correctness of the “boring-from-within” policy or in the need for an organized, militant, left-wing minority. Even though there was at that time no chance of obtaining any cooperation from Gompers or other top leaders of the AFL, Foster set out to establish a functioning militant minority.? After resigning from his job as business agent of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen,* Foster spent several months writing The Great Steel Strike, after which he sought a job. He immediately discovered that he was c See end notes.

* From 1901 to 1919, Foster held an astounding array of jobs: in a foundry, stockyards, and steel mills, and as a steamfitter, lumberjack, motorman, and seaman. However, he most often worked in many different capacities on American railroads. He found employment there as a fireman, as second cook on a grading crew, airbrake repairman, interchange car inspector, car carpenter, and brakeman, mostly in Chicago’s switching district. Between occasional hobo organizing tours around the country, Foster worked as a railway car inspector, often for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. (Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster, Labor Organizer and Communist,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988, pp. 192, 222. I have drawn upon this well-researched study at different parts of the discussion of the TUEL.)

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blacklisted in the railroad industry. For several months, he worked as the business manager of New Majority, the official organ of the Chicago Federation of Labor. He left in November 1920 to form a new organization with two dozen other members, all in Chicago. It was called the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL).3 The TUEL was the third “League” formed by Foster to carry out the policy of working for change from within the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods. The first was the Syndicalist League of North America. From 1910 to 1914, the word “syndicalism” was widely discussed in the United States. As a matter of fact, there were 61 citations under “Syndicalism” in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature in this period, while the American Federation of Labor could stimulate only 15 articles. A recurring theme in the articles about syndicalism was the fact that it had its origins in Europe, particularly in France, but that there were serious prospects for its success in the United States. In any event, it should certainly be taken seriously. One writer observed that syndicalism was “more dangerous than labor

unionism because it is less stupid and less corrupt.” Another writer argued that the syndicalists were “out for plunder and respect nothing their enemies venerate. You may talk to them of country, of duty, of law and order, and they will shrug their shoulders at these words, which mean nothing to them.”4 Until the Syndicalist League of North America appeared on the scene, the word “syndicalism” was almost always associated with the IWW.

SYNDICALIST LEAGUE OF NORTH AMERICA As we have seen in a previous volume, Foster, then a member of the IWW, became convinced after a year’s study of the syndicalist movement in France, Germany, and England, that the IWW’s policy of dual unionism was wrong. Returning to the United States in 1911, he pointed out that the effect of dual unionism was to isolate the militants from the mass of organized workers and to strengthen the bureaucracy’s control of the old unions. Foster proposed that the IWW abandon its policy of dual unionism, adopt instead the policy of working within the existing trade unions, so successfully applied by the syndicalists in France and England, and devote itself to building a militant minority in these unions in order to revolutionize them. After a lengthy debate, Foster’s program was rejected by the IWwW.* In February 1912, Foster left the IWW and began to apply his ideas within the AFL by joining the union of his craft-the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen. Through correspondence, he also urged IWW members * See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4 (The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917), New York, 1965, pp. 415-34.

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all over the country to form Syndicalist Leagues and join the AFL unions. By July 1912, such leagues were in existence in Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, plus a number of other midwestern and western cities, and cities Nelson and Vancouver in British Columbia. The national organization was formed early in September 1912 without the benefit of a national convention, since it was agreed that the new movement was too weak to be able to afford such a gathering. Instead, by agreement among the already existing leagues, the Chicago Syndicalist League acted as the national conference. It drew up a constitution, selected an executive board, and elected Foster as national secretary of the Syndicalist League of North America. The organization’s constitution, based largely on the program previously adopted by the Chicago League, provided for the chartering of local leagues in the various industrial centers. Their members were empowered to subdivide themselves into craft or industrial groups of militants, according to the structures of their respective unions. In keeping with the SLNA’s belief in decentralization, the leagues were completely autonomous. Each league could determine its own qualifications for members. The various leagues collected their own funds, published their own journals and literature, and adopted and carried through their own local policies. The national office received no per capita tax, relying solely upon the sale of its journal and pamphlets and upon collections, etc., for revenue. Foster received no salary, working as national secretary after he had completed his twelve-hour, seven-days-a-week stint as a car inspector.5 The SLNA announced its formation in a statement published in September 1912, informing American workers that it was “an educational organization” which planned to establish branches everywhere, publish and distribute literature, and furnish speakers for unions and other organizations: “It will not organize unions except that it will assist workers wishing to organize and be a recruiting ground for all unions.” Furthermore, it was definitely not a dual union. In its first announcement, the SLNA did not elaborate on its program. This it did later through the pamphlet, Syndicalism, written by Earl C. Ford and Foster,** through articles by league members in the trade unions, and especially through the league’s press, which included its official organ, * The Syndicalist League of Vancouver had the following membership requirement: “In order to dispel any suspicion that it might be a dual organization in disguise, the League has made it a rule to accept no member unless he carried a card in the union of his trade or

Toa and continued membership on that card being paid up (The Syndicalist, Jan. 15, 1

s

** Arthur Zipser has written that Foster told him that Ford’s contribution to Syndicalism fen ofcontributing “the money to pay the printer” (Working Class Giant... [New York,

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The Syndicalist, published semi-monthly in Chicago with Jay Fox as editor and Foster as business manager;* The Toiler, a Kansas City monthly edited by Max Dezettel and Earl Browder; The Unionist, a St. Louis weekly; The International, a San Diego monthly edited by Laura Payne Emerson, and The Unionist, an Omaha monthly. The immediate objective of the Syndicalist League was to build a base of militant union members in the existing unions and also to propagate the principles of militant trade unionism among the unorganized workers. It was the duty of syndicalists to contact those men and women in the unions who had been fighting for militant unionism but had become discouraged, and, together with them, conduct an educational program for militant unionism. Leaflets were to be distributed throughout industry, urging unorganized workers to join the union. Many unions had only 20 percent of their trades organized and were not making any effort to reach the other 80 percent. On the contrary, they actually placed obstacles in the way through exorbitant initiation fees and high monthly dues. It was the duty of the syndicalists to combat these practices and to convince the rank and file that until their entire trade was organized, they could not really improve their conditions. Special stress was placed on the need to organize the unskilled. By ignoring them, the skilled workers were committing “a fatal error. For nine times out of ten, these very workers who are scorned by the skilled workers’ union, scab it out of business when it goes on strike.” In their educational activities, the syndicalists had to combat the policies of the conservative trade union leadership. They had to expose Gompers’ slogans of “A Fair Day’s Pay for a Fair Day’s Work” and “Harmony of Interests of Labor and Capital.” They had to point out the weaknesses of craft unionism in modern industrial society, and the need for democratic trade unionism. They were to condemn the lack of solidarity; the centralization of power, which produced corrupt and reactionary officials; the conversion of many unions into the private business of their officials; “the insidious influence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the National Civic Federation, and the lack of vision looking toward the final emancipation of

the workers.”® The powerful labor officialdom, which had been in the saddle for a long time and had become accustomed to ruling with an iron hand, was not about to yield its power easily. The militants were persecuted; the conservative union leadership got them fired from their jobs, and even run out of * The Syndicalist, which made its appearance on January 1, 1913, was actually a continuation of The Agitator, the anarcho-syndicalist weekly published in Home, Washington by Jay

Fox. The Agitator declared that “we have changed the name ... to The Syndicalist, the latter being a more representative title ” (The Syndicalist, Jan. 1, 1913).

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town, if possible. However, one weapon that the so-called “labor fakers” had used in the past against radical trade unionists—the charge that they favored dual unionism—could not be used against the Syndicalists. Within a short time, the militants were winning the respect of the rank and file. Workers who argued that “It Can’t Be Done” were reminded of what Tom Mann, who led the fight for militant unionism in England, had said: “Those of us who have tried, know it can be done.” Workers had to be assured that “the AFL is, and will be, what the workers want it to be, because it is their own creation.” It was therefore up to the workers to convert their unions into organizations that would serve their interests, and not those of the bureaucratic leaders.9 While the IWW insisted that the tactic of boring-from-within the AFL’s obsolete craft unions was a futile exercise, the Syndicalists believed that the Federation was moving in the direction of industrial unionism, and that it was the duty of the militants to hurry it along. They also believed that since the mass of the organized workers were in the AFL, it was the militants’ function not to isolate themselves from these workers. While the Syndicalists were convinced that industrial unionism was far superior to craft unionism, unlike the IWW, they did not believe that the craft unions . Should be destroyed, but rather that they should be amalgamated as a step toward industrial unionism. While the Wobblies visualized a highly centralized “One Big Union,” the Syndicalists vested ultimate authority in the locals and believed firmly in the principle of local autonomy and decentralization as a means, among others, of reducing the autocratic power of the conservative leaders of the international unions. Modelling themselves after the British syndicalists, the American syndicalists stressed the amalgamation of the unions in the different industries, which would culmina te in a National Federation of Industrial Unions. However, on a number of basic issues, the Syndicalist League was in agreement with the IWW. Like the IWW, it regarded political action by the working class, in the sense of participating in election campai gns and voting, as a waste of time and a diversion from the main task of agitating in the unions and direct action in the form of strikes. The Syndica lists made a distinction between legislative action resulting from the exercise of the franchise and that brought about by the influence of direct action, “such as the passage of the minimum wage bill in England during the recent coal strike.” The latter was “not political action. It is simply a registration of direct action.” However, as far as election work was concerned, this was “simply the state functioning,” and “the state is by its very nature an enemy of the workers, and more particularly the relatively militant part of the workers—the trade unions.” Basically, “the worker’s only hope lies in his

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continuing his trade unions, and developing the workers’ resistance by continued, everyday struggle.”!® Another key IWW principle—sabotage—was also endorsed by the Syndicalist League, and, under the heading of “Society Notes," its journals carried instructions such as the following: All rock drills are built fool-proof but all men are not fools. Don’t let any timber fall in the chute. It won’t pass through the gate. A few drops of sulfuric acid placed on top of a pile of wooden or cotton goods never stops going down. A piece of iron dropped in a crucible full of glass will eat through.

And repeatedly there was the advice: “The first principle of the saboteur

is not to get caught.”!! When some workers showed an interest in joining a Syndicalist League, but objected to any form of sabotage as “barbarous and uncivilized” and bound to antagonize the U.S. working class, The Syndicalist assured them that they were mistaken. Sabotage, it maintained, was a sure means “whereby our working class enemies, the scabs, who support the capitalist system, as well as the capitalists themselves, can be defeated.” Most important of all, the use of sabotage “proves that the worker has rid his mind of that vicious illusion called bourgeois morality, and regards as moral any means whereby the capitalist can be prevented from filching the earnings of the working class.”!2 However most workers remained unconvinced and the proclamation of a belief in sabotage, even if it was not too frequently

practiced,!3 proved a serious obstacle to the growth of the Syndicalist League of North America. While endorsing the anarchists’ hostility toward the state, the Syndicalist League criticized them for their opposition to the struggle for immediate demands, which the Syndicalists viewed as important in rallying the working class and educating it for the final overthrow of capitalism. Even while fighting the daily battles of the working class, the Syndicalist League

was determined to make it clear that the end toward which all its efforts were directed was “to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society in such a manner that exploitation of man by man through the wages system shall

cease.”!4 Like the IWW, the Syndicalist League emphasized that the future society would be achieved through the general strike, and, like the Wobblies, the Syndicalists were convinced that the general strike would not be difficult either to understand or execute. “The General Strike,” wrote Earl R. Browder, the Kansas City Syndicalist leader, “is not a complicated system of philosophy, morals, or religion. The most ignorant can understand the idea of the General Strike as well as the most cultured and perfumed

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college professor, and it is not necessary to read large volumes of dry text for a complete understanding of it.” All there was to understand were the following two lines: The workers fold their arms; And the industries of the world stop. The problem of how to cope with the armed forces during a general strike was solved equally simply. For one thing, the strike would tie up all supplies and transportation for the armed forces, thereby disorganizing and demoralizing them. For another, the workers under the leadership of the Syndicalists would teach the soldiers, most of whom came from the working class, “not to shoot their brothers and sisters who are in revolt but, if need be, to shoot their own officers and to desert the army when the

crucial moment arrives.”16 There was no agreement among the American Syndicalists as to how the future society would be organized. The general Syndicalist conception was

that the unions would constitute the basis for the future society, which was also a key IWW principle. The Toiler predicted that the AFL, in conjunction with the national and international unions, the state federations and the city central labor councils, would become “the directing and controlling agencies supervising the carrying on of all necessary services.” The city

centrals and state federations would be substituted for the existing municipal and state governments. Moreover, precisely because they would have these important functions in the future society, the unions had to be prepared to assume these responsibilities under capitalism. “Mr. Union Man,” Browder appealed, “your organization is the germ of a new society.

Keep it clear cut and clean.”!? Not all American ‘Syndicalists accepted this concept. Earl C. Ford and Foster, in their pamphlet, Syndicalism, published in 1913, took the position that labor unions were not producing bodies, and that the future society would have its own specific industrial organization, most likely based on the shop organization of modern industries: “The chief and permanent function of the Labor Unions in the future society will, no

doubt, be to serve as employment bureaus.”!8 While they differed over how the future society would be administered, all American Syndicalists agreed that there would be no room for the state:

“The Syndicalists see in the State only an instrument of oppression and a bungling administration of industry, and propose to exclude it from the future society.”29 In-their pamphlet, Ford and Foster claimed remarkable progress for the Syndicalist League of North America. Although it had been in existence for only a few months, it was “responsible for the removal of a number of

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abuses from, and the introduction of a number of improvements into, several international unions. It is also a potent factor in the various localities where it has branch leagues established.” Indeed, the League was demonstrating that ..the American labor movement is ripe for a revolution and that the conservative forces opposed to this revolution are seemingly strong only because they have no opposition. It is making them crumble before the attacks of the militant minority, organized and conscious of its strength."20

Later, in the booklet, Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom, Foster wrote: “Some believe the Trade Unions themselves will take hold of industry and manage it; that ‘the fighting group of today will be the producing group of tomorrow’; others dispute this.... They maintain that science, and not majority rule, will be the guiding force .... It would be industrial control by facts and figures, without the arbitrary human element.” He concluded: “But whatever system is adopted, the industrial slave-driver is doomed to go.”21

In view of the fact that the SLNA never grew to a membership of more than 2,000,22 the above statements would seem to be idle boasts. However, a study of the League’s activities reveals that during its existence of about two years, it did exert considerable influence. The Syndicalists were convinced that there was little hone of obtaining revolutionary action at the annual gatherings of the AFL unless the local, national, and international unions were first thoroughly revolutionized.23 At the national and international levels, the Syndicalist League was most active in the International Molders’ Union of North America, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, and the International Union of Timber Workers—all affiliated with the AFL. Tom Mooney, a member of Local 164 (San Francisco) was the spark who ignited the struggle in the Molders’ Union. Mooney became a member of the Syndicalist League shortly after it was organized and came to the 1912 convention of the Molders’ Union determined to organize a campaign against the leadership of President Joseph F. Valentine, a member of the anti-labor National Civic Federation. At the convention (which Foster also attended), about 70 of the 490 delegates were members of the Syndicalist Leagues. After a conference of these delegates, it was decided to conduct a struggle on the convention floor over the issues of the National Civic Federation and industrial unionism. Mooney introduced two resolutions: the first stated that no member of the international union could be a member of either the National Civic Federation or the Militia of Christ for Social Service, and the second called for the organization “of all workers engaged in and around foundries” into industrial unions, and the amalga-

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mation of all metal trades’ unions. Both resolutions were defeated, but the large vote they received—the first resolution was defeated by a vote of 221 to 148—showed that the Syndicalist League program had wide support in

the international.4 Indeed, the International Molders’ Journal conceded in 1914 that the sentiment for industrial unionism was growing within the International and attributed this to the International Foundry Workers’

Educational League established by the Syndicalists.2>* Calling themselves the “Progressive Movement of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers,” the militants of that international union launched a campaign in the local lodges for the election of delegates to the national convention who would vote for the initiative, referendum, and recall, and the reorganization of the union.on an industrial basis. Usually, the delegates were representatives of the rollers and other highly skilled workers, who voted into leadership men who served the interests of this small group of the membership. However, in the election of delegates to the 1912 convention, the “Progressive Movement,” led by the Syndicalists, was able to elect delegates in many lodges who represented the unskilled, underpaid workers. As a result, the 1912 convention was not controlled by the “aristocrats,” and this was reflected in the actions taken by it. The system of dues was changed; they were lowered for the unskilled and raised for the “aristocrats.” The convention also endorsed the initiative, referendum, and recall and supported the principle of industrial unionism.?6 Following the convention, the Amalgamated Journal, the union’s official organ, featured an editorial entitled “Syndicalism is New Weapon of Labor” and announced its support for the Syndicalist plan for bringing “all workers in one solid union, divided up for local convenience into groups of more closely allied interests.” It urged that the plan be applied in the organization of a steel mill, so that “everyone employed in the mill, from the janitor to the foreman, from the office boy to the stenographer,” would be united into one body.27 At the 1913 convention, the “Progressive Movement” once again exerted its influence, and the delegates readopted the resolutions passed a year earlier. A movement was under way to convert the union known as “the rottenest organization in the AFL” and “place the Amalgamated Association in the vanguard of the labor movement.” However, it did not gather * The International Foundry Workers’ Educational League was an educational organization. It collected no initiation fees, accepted only voluntary contributions and was financed by dues of 25 cents per month. (The Syndicalist, Jan. 1, 1913.) The reason for the use of the name “Workers’ Educational League” instead of “Workers’ Syndicalist League” was probably the same as that in Kansas City, where the Syndicalists used the name Workers’ Educational

League rather than its official name, Syndicalist League of Kansas City, because the official Mee smacked too much of foreign influence (interview with Earl R. Browder, July 23,

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sufficient momentum before the Syndicalist League went out of existence. Nevertheless, it was William Z. Foster and members of the “Progressive Movement of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers” who were to play the leading role in the great steel strike of 1919.28 At the time of the organization of the Syndicalist League, the IWW was the only organization making any real effort to unionize the lumber workers. The AFL’s International Union of Timber Workers had ceased to exist, and while its International Shingle Weavers’ Union was still alive, it had done little to organize the lumber workers. In truth, even the IWW’s membership in the industry was so small as to be inconsequential, and practically none of the 250,000 men employed in the forests and mills of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia were organized. In the summer of 1912, the militants who had formerly been Wobblies but were now members of the Syndicalist League decided to work inside the International Shingle Weavers’ Union to use the 2,500 shingle weavers as a natural center around which the entire industry might be organized.?9 Once in the Shingle Weavers’ Union, the militants raised the need to extend the union’s jurisdiction to include all the workers in timber, arguing that only in this way would it be possible to begin tackling the task of completely organizing the industry. President J. G. Brown was responsive to this proposal, and it received the endorsement of the Shingle Weavers’ Executive Board, the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, the Washington State Federation of Labor, and the British Columbia Federation of Labor. At the 1912 AFL convention, the Shingle Weavers asked for and received jurisdiction over the entire lumber industry. Furthermore, the AFL

promised financial help in organizing the timber industry.°° In January 1913, at its Portland convention, the International Union of Shingle Weavers, Sawmill Workers and Woodsmen was formed, with J. G. Brown as president. (The name was soon changed to the International Union of Timber Workers). The union was organized on an industrial basis and was to include all men employed in any capacity in the lumber industry, the logging camps, and the sawmills. Convention delegates who were also members of the Syndicalist League and called themselves “true industrial unionists” introduced a resolution calling upon the organization “to take in as members all workers in the lumber industry without respect to color, creed or nationality.” The resolution was unanimously adopted.3! In September 1913, The Syndicalist reported that the militants were achieving good results as organizers for the AFL Timber Workers’ Union. They were building solid local unions in Ballard (a suburb of Seattle), and in Tacoma, Everett, Bellingham, and Aberdeen. Contracts had been signed with the employers in all of these communities. The Syndicalist conceded

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that making such agreements required a good deal of reorientation on the part of the militants trained in the IWW tradition of regarding contracts as truces with the class enemy which must be avoided at all costs. However, they understood that contracts were essential in building a permanent union: “The ‘effete’ AFL may not be quite so radical in their propaganda as

the IWW, but they demonstrate the ability to get and hold the men.”22 However, everywhere that Syndicalist League members went organizing for the new union, they found lumber workers questioning the possibility of building “one union in one industry” inside the AFL. Jay Fox, editor of The Syndicalist and vice-president of the International Union of Timber Workers, reported the following conversation: But how about your affiliation with the AFL, said a worker to me. And when I assured him that the AFL offered no opposition to the transformation of the union into an industrial body, he was greatly astonished, for he had learned from the soap box orators that the AFL is a craft organization, and as such, will not tolerate industrialism in its ranks ....33

At the 1914 IUTW convention, a resolution calling for an eight-hour-day campaign in the woods and mills, introduced by the Syndicalist League delegates, was adopted. In February 1914, the union issued its demand for an 8-hour day to the employers, coupling it with the threat of a strike on May 1 if the demand was not granted. League members went into the camps and mills, mobilizing the workers for the 8-hour strike, and Foster joined their ranks as an organizer for the union. He reported that workers by the thousands were streaming into the union in preparation for a general strike on May 1.4 The strike never took place. The Socialist Party had launched a campaign for the passage of an Shour law in Washington through the initiative, which was to be decided at the polls that November. The union leadership, influenced by the SP, called a special convention where the strike was cancelled and it was decided to concentrate on getting the S-hour day through legislation. A compromise proposal by the Syndicalist delegates calling for support for both the general strike and the S-hour bill was voted down. The decision was a disastrous one for the union. The Shour bill was defeated, and “the action of the union in threatening a strike and then deciding to trust to political action” both disgusted and demoralized the lumber workers. Membership declined rapidly, and the union was eventually destroyed.29 -Although the Syndicalists were active in a number of international unions, the League emphasized that the main campaign had to be conducted on the local level, and that real results would only come as a result of “a persistent agitation and education for revolutionary unionism within

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the locals of each city.”°6 The greatest contributions made by the Syndicalists were precisely in those cities where Leagues were in existence. The Syndicalist League of St. Louis and vicinity helped build Waiters’ Union Local No. 20 into the fastest growing body in its international; it helped organize the taxi drivers and brought their union into the Central Labor Union, and it assisted the female telephone operators of the Southwestern Telephone (Bell) Company in forming a local of the IBEW. In the summer of 1913, the Bell telephone operators went on strike for union recognition; they won the support of the St. Louis Central Trades’ Council, which voted to set up a maintenance fund for the strikers and to call upon all unions to discontinue using Bell telephones. With the support of the maintenance men, a number of whom were Syndicalist Leaguers, the telephone operators won their strike. The St. Louis union became the first organization of switchboard

operators to be recognized by the Bell Telephone Company.3” In Nelson, B.C., the Syndicalists with Jack Johnstone at their head dominated the AFL unions in the area. In Chicago the League gained influence in the Railway Carmen, the Painters, the Barbers, the Retail Clerks, and other unions.°® In Kansas City, League members in the Barbers’ Union, Local 192 set up an educational and organizing committee and arranged for the distribution of literature to nonunion barbers explaining the importance of becoming union members. By November 1913, 100 percent organization had been achieved in the barber shops of Kansas City. In a whirlwind campaign, the militants organized office workers into the Stenographers, Typewriters, Bookkeepers and Assistants Union No. 14268 of the AFL. Earl Browder (who was working as a bookkeeper for the American Linseed Company and who directed the organizing drive) was elected president of the union. A number of contracts were signed with

private employers in mid-November.3*

THE LABOR FORWARD MOVEMENT At the meeting of the Industrial Council—the central labor union of Kansas City—on January 20, 1914, the newly organized office workers’ union introduced a resolution, originally drawn up by the Syndicalist League, calling for the launching, of a Labor Forward Movement.** * In January 1915, the union signed an agreement with three unions affiliated with the AFL covering their office workers: the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America, the Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers’ International Alliance, and the International United Brotherhood of Leather Workers on Horse Goods. These three agreed to employ only members of the union, to grant an 8-hour work day and a two weeks’ vacation, and to pay each worker $2.00 per day. It was one of the first agreements covering office workers. ** The Labor Forward Movement originated in Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1912 and was modelled upon the Religious Forward Movement, which had swept the country in 1911. (Tom Hanlin, editor of the Minneapolis Labor Review, is generally credited with having originated the idea.) Between April 21 and May 4, 1912, the unions of the Twin Cities, encouraged by the Trades Assembly of Minneapolis, conducted a campaign to stimulate

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Committees were set up to assist the special organizers: a finance com-

mittee, whose duty it would be to obtain funds for the campaign through voluntary contributions from all unions in the city affiliated with the AFL; a press committee, which would notify the press of all developments in the campaign and approve of all printed material, and an investigating committee, which would carry on a special campaign for the union label, visiting all business establishments in the city and urging the adoption of the label. The resolution was unanimously adopted, and a committee of seven was appointed to carry the plans into effect. At a meeting called by the Committee on February 15, 1914, to which eighty unions sent representatives, the Labor Forward Movement of Greater Kansas City was launched for a period beginning February 15 and ending May 1. (The period was later extended to May 15 in order to complete organizational campaigns already under way.) Max Dezettel, leader of the Syndicalist League and editor of its organ, The Toiler, was elected president of the Movement, and William T. Sheehan, another League member, was chosen financial secretary. Both were also elected as special organizers during the period of Labor Forward Movement and received commissions from Gompers as AFL organizers for a one-year period. The special organizers were to devote their full time to the Movement and receive a salary from the AFL. This last committee would also obtain information about any union member who neglected to demand the union label when purchasing goods. If, after an investigation, these members were found guilty, they were to be brought before their respective unions. The Labor Forward Movement in Kansas City was extremely well organized. Its executive board met weekly, while general meetings were held on interest in trade unionism, increase the membership of the existing unions, imbue the labor movement with new spirit, and disseminate information on the principles of unionism among the citizenry. One feature of the campaign in the Twin Cities was the close cooperation between the unions and the churches. Six unions were formed in Minneapolis during the campaign, and in October 1912, the AFL Executive Council unanimously approved the plan for a general Labor Forward Movement and recommended it to central bodies and all unions. The 1912 AFL convention endorsed the plan. (American Federationist 19 (October, 1912):828-31; Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1914, pp. 59-61). In 1912, “scores of city central labor unions, with AFL backing, initiated trade union

‘revivals,”” adopting “the methods of evangelism and the ideals of the Social Gospel to revitalize and blend with trade unions traditions.” (Elizabeth and Kenneth Fones-Wolf, “Trade Union Evangelism: Religion and the AFL in the Labor Forward Movement, 1912-16,”

in Michael H. Fisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, Working-Class America: Essays in Labor

Community and American Society, Urbana, Illinois, 1983, pp. 153-84). Strangely, the authors fail to mention the movement in Kansas City and the role of the Syndicalist League in launching the movement in that city, especially in view of the fact that the strongest Labor-Forward Movement, as far as labor militancy and growth were concerned, occurred in Kansas City. For a discussion of an earlier evangelical movement aimed at influencing the labor movement, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 3 (New York, 1964) Chap. 5.

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the first and third Sundays of the month. At the general meetings, held at the Labor Temple, lectures on the value of unionism were delivered to unorganized workers, who had been invited to attend through the mass distribution of leaflets and newspaper advertisements. Other means of agitation were adopted in order to attract the unorganized. Motion picture slides were prepared, urging the workers to join their respective unions in order to obtain shorter hours and higher wages. The slides were shown in all theaters by members of the Moving Picture Show Operators’ Union. Two thousand window cards were put in shops all over the city, calling upon workers to unite for higher wages and shorter hours by joining the AFL unions, to patronize only those establishments displaying AFL union cards, and to purchase only goods bearing the union label. In addition, two thousand bill posters were placed on billboards throughout the city by members of the Bill Posters’ Union, and union members regularly stood on street corners during their lunch hours and on Sundays, handing out small cards carrying the motto of the Labor Forward Movement: “Every wageworker must be a Union Man. An Injury to One is the Concern of All.”4° Meanwhile, the special organizers were at work in various industries, assisted by voluntary organizers. Organizing committees were set up in different factories and shops. Although the Syndicalists had put through a motion at the first meeting of the Labor Forward Movement to the effect that no political issues or discussions would be tolerated, they called upon the Socialist Party for assistance in the organizing drives and received its complete cooperation. SP members were used as voluntary organizers in the entire campaign, and they were especially useful in the drive to organize the packing houses, where the Party had influence among the Croatians and Russians who constituted the majority of the workers in the plants. The Packinghouse Union in Kansas City, a general industrial union, emerged from the organizing drive.*! The new spirit that affected the workers during the Labor Forward Movement is well illustrated by the strike of the Kansas City Nut and Bolt Workers. At the request of the educational committee of the Amalgamated Iron, Steel and Tin Workers’ Blue Valley Lodge No. 2, Dezettel and Sheehan, the special organizers, set about to organize the unorganized workers in the nut and bolt department of the Kansas City Nut and Bolt Works in Sheffield. They brought a few workers together, and a union was formed. The company thereupon discharged all members of the new union. In the past, this would have meant the end of the organizing campaign, for the Amalgamated had always ignored the unorganized nut and bolt workers. However, the spirit of solidarity generated by the Labor Forward Movement now made itself felt, and the Amalgamated announced that unless the discharged union men were reinstated, a strike would be called. When the

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company refused, the threat was carried out. Not only did the steel and tin workers strike to a man in sympathy with the nut and bolt workers, but the machinists, electricians, engineers, and firemen—each belonging to a separate craft union—joined the walkout; the plant was completely shut down and a picket line thrown around it. Labor solidarity spread. The next day, the company shipped a carload of bolts to Sugar Creek, where the Standard Oil Company had its Missouri storage tanks. However, the boiler workers refused to use bolts coming from the struck plant, and the car had to be sent back to Sheffield. There, it was about to be switched into the yards of the Nut and Bolt Works when the union switchmen walked off the job, refusing to switch it. After three days, the company gave in, reinstating the discharged men and recognizing the new union of nut and bolt workers. Every one of the 500 workers in the plant now held a union card. “The Power of Labor Solidarity” was the heading of the advertisement inserted in the Kansas City Star by the Labor Forward Executive Committee reporting the victory.42 Several other strikes were called during the Labor Forward Movement in order to gain recognition for unorganized workers, including the strike of the streetcar men, which ended in recognition of the Amalgamated Street Car Employees. However, most of the organizing drives ended successfully without the need to strike. Nor were all strikes for the sole purpose of organizing the unorganized. The structural steel workers, for example, won an increase in wages from $5 to $6 per day after a 4-day strike, while the workers at Montgomery Ward and Company won a wage increase without a strike.43 Speaking before the Commercial Club of Kansas City, Howard A. Fitch, president of the Kansas City Structural Company, warned that unless the employers fought back quickly, the Labor Forward Movement would be able “to unionize the entire city.” Even though this goal was not achieved by May 15, 1914, when the campaign ended, many previously unorganized trades were unionized-shoe repairers, retail clerks, waitresses, laundry workers, gravel roofers, streetcar men, bootblacks, telephone operators, lumber handlers, nut and bolt workers, packinghouse workers, etc.—and a number of unions that had been only partially organized before the campaign were now 100 percent organized. In addition, the use of the union label was greatly expanded, and wage increases averaging 5¢ an hour were gained by the steamfitters, the carpenters, the building laborers, and several other trades. “In general,” Max Dezettel reported to Gompers after the campaign was over, “our Labor Forward Movement has created a strong sentiment for unionism. New unions have been organized, and what is most important of all, it has put new life into the old unions.” The 1914 AFL

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convention pointed to the Kansas City Labor Forward Movement as a

model for all other cities to follow.44 There was good reason for this action. Labor Forward Movements were launched in other cities, especially in Philadelphia, in Seattle and Spokane Washington, and Massilon and Canton in Ohio. The most effective work, however, was done in Kansas City, and this was largely the contribution of the Syndicalists.* The Labor Forward Movement in Kansas City demonstrated that militant labor elements could make headway in organizing the unorganized through the existing unions once they began “to put new life into the old unions.” The fact that the movement was initiated by the Syndicalist League did not prevent the Industrial Council from endorsing it and making its leader the head of the entire campaign. Nor did it keep the national AFL from empowering two of the leading Syndicalist League members to serve as its special organizers. “I am positive a Labor Forward Movement can be made a success in every city if the active militants will get together and all do their part,” Max Dezettel insisted in a report to members of the Syndicalist League of North America.46 The Labor Forward Movement

spread to various cities in the North and West in 1916,4” but the Syndicalist League had little to do with that. In the summer of 1914, its national center in Chicago was closed and all that was left of the organizing were “disconnected groups of militants working here and there in the labor movement.”48 In February 1914, about a year and a half after the birth of the Syndicalist League of North America, The Toiler admitted: “We Syndicalists know that there are but few of us in number in America today.” By that time, most of the Syndicalist League papers had ceased publication for lack of funds. The Toiler itself had skipped some issues because it had no money to pay the printer; it published its last number in January 1915. Thereafter there were only two Syndicalist League papers; the Omaha Unionist and

the San Diego International. Had the Syndicalists moved into the major industries of the East in 1913, they might have made some headway. After the defeat of the Paterson silk strike in the summer of 1913, the IWW lost its following among the immigrant workers who had been its backbone in that region.°? However, the Syndicalists never took advantage of this opportunity, confining their activities almost exclusively to the area west of Chicago—the very region in which the IWW still had its greatest strength. Moreover, the SLNA was composed chiefly of skilled workers, mostly native-born, and it never attracted the unskilled, foreign-born workers.>! There is no doubt that the Syndicalist League’s opposition to political action and its emphasis on sabotage and the general strike limited its

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influence among organized workers. Still, the main reason for its failure was that the ground was not yet fertile enough to hold the seeds of the “boring-from-within” ideology. The majority of the militants turned a deaf ear to the Syndicalist appeal for the organization of revolutionary nuclei in AFL unions. The persistent influence of dual unionism among the militants doomed the League to an early death.*

INTERNATIONAL TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE In its final issue of January, 1915, The Toiler announced that “on January 16, 17 and 18, there will be an informal Syndicalist conference in Kansas City. Militant unionists from all parts of the country will be there... This is a most important thing to Syndicalists throughout the country, and everyone who can, should attend.” Foster, who had called the conference— the first gathering of Syndicalists from different parts of the country—was determined not to let the failure of the SLNA mark the death of “boringfrom-within” by the militants. The conference was actually held in St. Louis on January 17, 1915 and was attended by a dozen delegates from Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, and Kansas City. After discussing their past activities and the lessons to be learned from their experience in the Syndicalist League of North America, the delegates decided that nothing that had occurred up to that time proved the incorrectness of their policy. On the contrary, it was necessary to pursue that policy with increased vigor, and for this purpose, the delegates voted to establish the International Trade Union Educational League. Chicago was chosen as its headquarters. Foster was elected secretary, and a National Board with representatives from Chicago, St. Louis,

Omaha, and Kansas City was selected.52

The ITUEL was born just a few months after the outbreak of the First World War in Europe. Foster argued that the delegates should not take sides in the European conflict, adding that it was inevitable that the United States would enter the war. Therefore unionists should not have any illusions that they could prevent it. Instead, radicals within the unions should focus their main attention upon preparing to “take advantage of war conditions to organize the workers and raise bigger and bigger demands.” * Several years later, Foster attributed the demise of the Syndicalist League to the fact that “the radical element generally were still too deeply imbued with the secessionist idea to carry on constructive work within the trade unions.” (“Report to the First National Conference of the Trade Union Educational League,” Labor Herald, September 1922.) Still later, writing as a Communist, Foster reflected that the failure of the Syndicalist League was “primarily due to its incorrect program.” That program, according to Foster, was fatally flawed because of its simplistic concentration on trade union struggles, its abandonment of electoral activity, and its dependence on worker spontaneity. (William Z. Foster, History of

we ea 25.

Party of the United States, New York, 1955, p. 118; Johanningsmeier, p.

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According to Earl Browder, who was present, Foster climaxed his argument by reading from a letter he had received from P. Monatte, a leader of the French Syndicalists, urging the militants in the United States not to make the war an issue since doing so would interfere with their work in the

unions.°3* There was no discussion of the points raised by Foster, although the delegates approved of his position. Indeed, no resolutions on any subject were adopted. All that seems to have been done on a program was the temporary endorsement of the League’s pamphlet, Syndicalism, although Foster was commissioned to prepare a new work that would incorporate some of the lessons learned since the first statement of policy was published. The two Syndicalist papers—7he International in San Diego and The Unionist in Omaha—were carried over as organs of the new League but a new journal, the Chicago Labor News edited by Max Dezettel, soon became

its principal organ.54** In a manifesto issued in April 1915, the ITUEL announced that its purpose was to “place the labor movement upon a more extended, aggressive and effective basis.” It asserted: ...the need for a broader, more militant unionism than that of the present trade union has long been recognized by progressive unionists. They have understood that if the workers are to cope successfully with their industrial masters, the isolated action of pure and simple craft unionism must be succeeded by a much more united and concerted action. In the progressive development of the present trade unions lies the hope of the American working class, for we call attention on the one hand to the complete failure of all attempts to establish a more effective unionism by means of ideal dual industrial unions, and, on the other hand, to the continued growth and development of the trade unions.55

The theme that “the isolated action of pure and simple craft unionism must be succeeded by a much more united and concerted action” was developed further in documents issued by the two branches of the ITUEL— the Railroad Workers’ Educational League, and the Printing Workers’ Educational League of Seattle. Both emphasized that consolidations and the spread of “labor-saving machinery” were threatening the livelihood of the organized workers in these industries, and both called for uniting the separate unions “into one fighting unit,” leading to “the formation of that most powerful of labor unions, the Industrial Labor Union.” The Printers’ League’s document noted: * In 1919 Foster declared that he had sold Liberty Bonds at one time during the war.

(“Investigation of Strikes in Steel Industries,” Hearings before the Committee on Education

and Labor, U.S. Senate, 66th Congress, 1st session, pp. 398-99; Johanningsmeier, p. 240.) ** Unfortunately, the only existing copy of the Chicago Labor News (and that in a very fragile state) was destroyed by the library of the U.S. Department of Labor, where it had

been stored, before a microfilm copy, suggested by the present writer, could be prepared.

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We cannot cope with industrial conditions divided as we are, into small groups, each a law unto itself, seeking to promote its interests, many times at the expense of each other; to say nothing of the fact that many workers in the industry are unorganized. Our interests as workers are the same. All workers in an industry are integral parts of the industry; the labor of all is essential to the production of the finished article. If we are necessary to the employer, then we are necessary to each other. Employers sink their personal differences and organize in one union for the promotion of their mutual economic interests. But we, the workers in the industry, are divided and at war with each other. Fellow trade unionists, if in the past, through our isolated craft groups, we have gained benefits for those eligible to membership, how much more could we gain by organizing all workers in the printing industry into one industrial union. %

In the fall of 1915, the booklet Foster had been commissioned to write setting forth the program and policy of the ITUEL, was published in Chicago under the title, Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom.* Foster began with a detailed analysis of the report of the Industrial Relations Commission, issued that same year. He stressed the fact that the report proved that the majority of American families had to live on an income of ten dollars a week—“a standard of living lower than that of slavery! It is the mockery of all our boasted American freedoms. It is more; it is a crime against civilization.” Only the workers in the trade unions, he pointed out, enjoyed a higher standard of living, and the 3 million workers organized in the AFL and the independent trade unions “are by far the best paid, healthiest, most intelligent and forward-striving elements in the whole working class. They are the hope of every well-wisher of society.” Even the unorganized workers had benefited from trade unionism: They share the advantages of all the legislative achievements won by Organized Labor; the many Lien, Child Labor, Compensation, Safety Appliance, Sanitation, Education, and other labor laws. Moreover, the employers, terrified by the fear that their unorganized workers will wake up and join the unions, grant them many concessions ....

One might expect that Foster, having already conceded that legislative gains were significant for the workers, would then have emphasized the importance of political action. However, he was still a Syndicalist, and he went on to advance the syndicalist theory that a new society would be established by the trade unions. Foster believed that the unions, as such, were essentially revolutionary, whether they were led by conservatives or revolutionaries, because they were class organizations following a policy of securing all the concessions they could wring from the employers by force. * The booklet, Foster wrote later, was “the only formal statement of policy ever issued by the ITUEL” (From Bryan to Stalin, New York, 1936, p. 74).

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He felt that in view of the ever-growing strength of the trade unions, this trend would eventually culminate in the overthrow of the capitalist class by the economic power of the workers, whereupon the unions would take over control of society. To buttress his argument, Foster quoted Gompers’ reply to the question, “What does Labor want?” The AFL president had answered: “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof. There is nothing too precious; there is nothing too beautiful, too lofty, too ennobling unless it is within the scope and comprehension of Labor’s aspirations and wants.”* This led Foster to exclaim: It is idle to say that the trade unions will rest content with anything short of complete emancipation.... Permanently satisfied trade unions under capitalism would be the eighth wonder of the world, outdoing in interest the famous hanging gardens of Babylon. They would be impossible. With its growing power, Organized Labor will go on winning greater and greater concessions, regardless of how profound they may be. It is purest assumption to say that the trade unions would balk at the overthrow of the wages system.5?

Later, Foster was to concede that this theory of “the spontaneously revolutionary character of trade unionism” was, like Syndicalism in general, a gross overestimation of the power of trade unionism, and an equally great underestimation of the power of the capitalist state. In fact, Foster declared that his theory had “had in it... traces of Bernsteinism, which erroneously concludes that trade unions can permanently improve the workers’ conditions under capitalism.”°®** Riding the rails on a 7,000-mile tour through the West, Foster made a valiant effort to build the new League, but he failed. A few local militants tried to set up branches of the ITUEL, but their efforts were stillborn. The organization had even fewer divisions than the Syndicalist League of North America. In the end, the ITUEL was represented mainly by the local League

in Chicago.59 The Chicago group led by Foster included a number of important militants, among them Jack Johnstone, Joe Manley, Max Dezettel (until he became interested primarily in accumulating wealth through deals with criminal elements and quit the League), J. A. Jones, and W. Rice. It had its main base in the Painters, Railway Carmen, Carpenters, Machinists, Barbers, Retail clerks, Tailors, Ladies’ Garment Workers, Metal Polishers, and

Iron Molders. Many of its members were local union officials. Foster, while a car inspector at the Swift car shops in the stockyards, was elected business agent of the Chicago District Council of the Railway Carmen. * This was a quotation from Gompers’ pamphlet, What Does Labor Want?, New York, 1893, pp. 6-8. *« Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), a leader of revisionism in the German Social Democratic Party.

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During 1915 and 1916, the militants built a strong ITUEL delegation in the Chicago Federation of Labor and developed an excellent working relationship with the federation’s president and secretary—John Fitzpatrick and Edward N. Nockels. The ITUEL delegates rallied behind Fitzpatrick in his support for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers during its battles against the corrupt, reactionary United Garment Workers, which Gompers, in turn, championed against the Amalgamated.®! In appreciation of this support and of other League progressive activities, Fitzpatrick gave Foster the job of organizing the campaign in Chicago to publicize the Tom Mooney case and raise funds for his defense.* A mass meeting in the Chicago Coliseum in March 1917, organized by Jack Johnstone of the ITUEL, was a great success, drawing, Fitzpatrick noted, approximately 17,000 workers—the largest crowd for such an event in the Federation’s history.® On one issue, however, the ITUEL did not support Fitzpatrick in his clash with Gompers. In 1916 Fitzpatrick had supported the Socialist Party’s proposal for a national 8-hour law. Gompers opposed Fitzpatrick, insisting that only economic methods (i.e., collective bargaining) should be used to usher in the shorter working day. Foster and his group, still Syndicalists, strongly advocated a general strike to gain the 8-hour day and criticized Fitzpatrick for supporting legislative action to achieve this goal.® “Objective conditions were against the establishment of the ITUEL on a mass basis,” Foster wrote later. Even though less syndicalist than its predecessor; its policies were still “defective” and reflected serious theoretical flaws. Its “boring-from-within” policy and its rejection of dual unionism failed to evoke a favorable response from most of those connected with the left wing. Moreover, the Chicago Labor News, which the militants had hoped to build into the ITUEL’s principal national voice, was transformed by Max Dezettel into a conservative labor sheet, as the editor forged alliances with corrupt officials of the Building Trades, the Flat Janitors, and the Moving Picture Operators, broke with the ITUEL, and launched bitter

attacks against Fitzpatrick. By the spring of 1917, the Chicago group, the only viable force in the League, had dropped the name of the ITUEL and functioned as “a scattering of influential militants meeting each other only occasionally in the course of their work in the unions.” After two and a half years of life, the International Trade Union Educational League disappeared as a formal

organization.

d. See end notes.

* For the story of the Mooney case, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 7 (New York, 1987) : 78-95.

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Neither the Syndicalist League of North America nor the ITUEL had more than a nominal membership, but both of them had influence far greater than their small memberships would indicate. The militants infused a new spirit into several international and many local unions and educated thousands of members of these organizations on the importance of industrial unionism, amalgamation, and the organization of the unorganized. Sentiment for industrial unionism and amalgamation was emerging slowly in a number of unions, city central labor bodies, and state federations of labor, and it was acknowledged that this trend was greatly influenced by the efforts of the Syndicalists. Indeed, as David Montgomery points out, “avowedly syndicalist groups of workers were numerous, some of them inside the AFL.” He also notes that the demands of the great postwar strike wave “had a distinctly syndicalist emphasis on workers’ control issues.”©*

THE OBU When Foster wrote that the “boring-from-within” policy and rejection of

dual unionism had failed to evoke a favorable response from most of those connected with the left wing, he may have been referring to the temporary appeal to these militants of the One Big Union, which was created at a

4-day meeting in Calgary, Alberta, Canada from June 7 to 10, 1919 by delegates representing over 50,000 workers, almost all of them from Western Canada.** Although it was basically a syndicalist organization, the One Big Union was very different from both the Syndicalist League of North America and the ITUEL. It consisted of skilled workers who had left their AFL craft unions en masse, and it made little effort to organize the unorganized. Like both the SLNA and the ITUEL, the organization was anti-political, and its constitution contained a mechanism for resorting to general strikes in industrial disputes. However, its constitutional preamble spoke only vaguely of a future society, mentioning only that workers must prepare for the inevitable revolution through organization and education.© Although it pledged itself to the industrial form of organization, the OBU actually created very few industrial unions and engaged in very few * Although Montgomery notes the influence of syndicalism in the American labor movement during World War I and the postwar era, he never once, in several books and articles, mentions the contributions of the Syndicalist League of North America and the ITUEL. Indeed, he does not mention them at all. (See David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, New York and London, 1979; The Fall of The House of Labor:.... New York, 1987; “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 19191922,” Journal of Social History 7[1974): 30-46; “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United States, 1916-1923,” Labor/Le Travail 13 [Spring 1984]: 101130.) ** For a discussion of the founding of the OBU, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8 (New York, 1988): 34, 81, 83, 149, 250.

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strikes during the strike-filled years when it existed.* For a brief period, however, it did sweep everything in its path in Canada, as the workers in Western Canada, ready for a radical alternative to the American Federation of Labor--Trade Union Council (AFL-TUC), joined the OBU by the thousands. By January 1920, some 50,000 to 70,000 trade union members had taken out OBU cards.” The leaders of the AFL viewed the OBU with alarm, and by late March 1919, Federation Secretary Frank Morrison launched a campaign to combat it. While Morrison was concerned over the loss of AFL members to the OBU in Canada, he was particularly alarmed by its growing influence in Seattle and other areas of Washington State. Long a center of proIWW influence and dissatisfaction with the AFL, especially with the trade union policy of Gompers, Seattle’s activities could influence the entire state and much of the Pacific Northwest.® The main objective of the pro-OBU forces was the Washington State Federation of Labor, and its supporters made a great effort to send delegates to the annual convention scheduled to open in mid-June 1919. William Short, president of the Federation, warned Morrison that One Big Union advocates planned to control the Federation and “replace present

officers with officers favorable to this [OBU] policy...."°? The OBU forces did not win control of the Federation, but they did score a major victory, when over the opposition of the convention resolutions committee, the delegates adopted by a wide margin a resolution calling for a referendum

on the holding of an OBU convention.” There was no actual connection between the Canadian and Washington OBUs. The movement in Washington, for example, shied away from endorsing the Canadian OBU policy of secession from the AFL-TUC and the creation of a dual union. Since OBU leaders in Washington knew that, despite the former influence of the IWW, dual unionism was frowned upon by many trade unionists in the state, they made sure to broadcast widely their belief that the labor movement could be changed from within “and that it would be folly for anyone to try to destroy it [the AFL].” Rather, they would seek to organize the unorganized, reconstruct the labor movement along industrial lines, make sure that agreements with employers in similar trades expired at the same time, thereby eliminating jurisdictional disputes, and establish a universal transfer card.”

* David Montgomery makes the point that while the One Big Union the strikes ofthe epoch usually ascribed to it, “the myth of ‘One tous.” (“Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in 1923,” p. 105.) However, he fails to note that the fact that the OBU in the major strikes of the period opened the way for the growth Communists in the labor movement.

never played the role in Big Union’ was ubiquithe United States, 1916was no longer a factor in the influence of the

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Anti-OBU forces in Washington, mainly conservative AFL leaders, charged that the OBU was hiding its real objective—that of seceding from the Federation—and that if it should win in the referendum, it would cast aside its mask and espouse the same principle of dual unionism as the Canadian OBU. Meanwhile, miners in Butte, Montana laid plans for a One Big Union Conference and invited labor councils in the Northwest to send delegates to discuss the feasibility of forming a state OBU in Montana prior to the establishment of a national organization. Despite the bitter opposition of the AFL, the conference was held, attended by what the Butte Miner enthusiastically hailed as “Bolsheviki” delegates from Canada and the Pacific Coast. However, nothing concrete came of the conference. As the OBU challenge moved south of the Canadian border, the AFL mobilized all of its resources to destroy the movement. AFL Vice-President Matthew Woll warned the Executive Council: We must prevent the poison now injected in the movement of the Northwest from spreading to other parts and we must put out the smoldering fires now raging in that part of the country which may at some future time blaze up into a great conflagration in many of our industrial centers.?2

Morrison warned the Washington State Federation of Labor that if the referendum on the OBU, then underway, was not immediately halted, the AFL Executive Council would revoke the state federation’s charter, establish “a bona fide state organization” in its place, and seek to have the national and international unions affiliate with the new state federation. Although the ultimatum aroused anger among Seattle’s progressive unionists, the labor leaders reluctantly yielded to it, even while condemning its dictatorial nature. The referendum was called off, and with this action, the

OBU in Washington collapsed.’%¢ Although the OBU supporters may not have been sincere when they claimed that they had no intention of seceding from the AFL, it is significant that the militants had to reject dual unionism and proclaim that they would continue to fight for a progressive labor program inside the American Federation of Labor. This encouraged Foster to continue his efforts to establish a new organization to carry this policy into effect.”

THE INDIANAPOLIS MOVEMENT Two other factors gave impetus to this campaign. one was the fact that while not actually destroyed, the IWW had been seriously weakened by wartime repression. This inevitably made the AFL unions the center of

most militant strike actions.” In fact, the postwar era witnessed a proliferation of new forms of organization—shop stewards, shop committees, induse. See end notes.

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trial unions, and the One Big Union—and these new forms first emerged in AFL unions in this period. Another important factor was the formation during and especially after the war of the “progressive bloc” which emerged among the officers at various levels of the unions of the coal miners, machinists, railway workers, clothing workers, and textile workers, who rallied around proposals for progressive principles that included the amalgamation of related craft unions, public ownership and worker operation of the railroads and mines, the repeal of wartime repressive legislation, trade with revolutionary Russia and Mexico, affiliation with the Amsterdam International Federation of Trade Unions, and collaboration with the British Labor Party on social and international policy. Far less imbued with such advanced concepts, but still opposed to Gompers’ leadership were the top leaders of the unions of carpenters, typographers, teamsters, and miners, who came together early in 1917 as the “Indianapolis movement.”* Staunch Catholics—Ludwig Lore

referred to the movement as the “clerical Indianapolis movement”’®—the new group shared Gompers’ hostility toward the IWW and socialism, but it increasingly opposed his leadership and looked forward to the day when he would be unseated. In 1921 the Indianapolis movement backed John L.

Lewis as a candidate for president against Gompers.’? While he was no great champion of democratic trade unionism, Lewis shared the view of the union leaders affiliated with the Indianapolis movement who were “sickened by Gompers’ dependency upon the Federal Administration.” “They would not stomach,” Lewis noted, “the reverent awe which he had in his heart for the presidents....” Lewis’s belief in industrial unionism and his idea of “an all-inclusive union that would embrace all members of an industry regardless of skills or lack of skills’ was another reason for his break with Gompers, who, he felt, had betrayed a pledge to support such a trade union outlook.”®** Then, of course, there was Lewis’s tremendous ego and his ambition to be president of the AFL. Lewis was supported by the Hearst press, but Gompers was able to maintain the strength of his machine and gain the support of anti-Lewis elements as well. He was elected by 25,022 votes to 13,324 for Lewis. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters’ delegation voted as a unit for Lewis, as did the entire delegation of the International Association of Machinists, who explained that they were under instructions from their union to vote * The headquarters of the most important AFL international unions were located in Indianapolis, including the United Mine Workers, the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the International Typographical Union, and the Brotherhood of Teamsters and Chauffeurs. ** In a letter to Lewis in 1916 renewing his commission as a volunteer AFL organizer, Gompers wrote: “..It is the intent of the American Federation of Labor to organize thoroughly both the skilled and unskilled workers, wherever and whenever possible” (Gompers to Lewis, Jan. 24, 1916, John L. Lewis Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin). It did not take long for Lewis to realize that these were only words.

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against any candidate who, like Gompers, was a member of the National Civic Federation. However, the United Mine Workers’ delegation split, with three opponents of Lewis—Frank Farrington, Robert Harlin, and Alexander Howat—voting for Gompers. The delegation from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ union also split, with four delegates, including its president, Socialist Benjamin Schlesinger, voting for Gompers and two other delegates casting their votes for Lewis. David J. Saposs, economic consultant for the Labor Bureau, had tried to get the ILGWU delegation to cast a unanimous vote against Gompers. Writing to Nathan Fine of the New York Labor Party, he urged: “Gompers defeat depends upon a small number of votes. International Ladies’ Garment Workers hold balance of power.” Later, he wrote: Schlesinger plans to support Gompers in return for election as a fraternal delegate to the British Trade Union Congress... It is important that rank and file and local officials be stirred up to communicate with Schlesinger and his delegation and urge him to vote against Gompers. A mass meeting by dress and waist makers would have the desired effect. If you can communicate this information to some of the forward-looking members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and get them .o act, Gompers’ defeat would be assured.

Saposs emphasized that “a change in the leadership of the American labor movement ... means much for the future of the labor movement.” However, he exaggerated the power of the ILGWU. What mattered in the end was the fact that the largest unions voted unanimously for Gompers. The only exception was the Railway Clerks, whose delegation voted six-to-one for Lewis.”9 Saposs attributed Gompers’ victory largely to the fact that “the majority of the delegates to Federation conventions still have much fraternal loyalty to Gompers and greatly admire his ability. In their eyes, he and the American Federation of Labor are synonymous. Gompers’ followers have always cleverly construed an attack upon him as an attack upon the labor movement.” He went on to emphasize that .. Socialist and Labor Party delegates who supported Lewis did so under no illusions. They did not endorse his record as president of the Miners. Nevertheless, they felt that a change in administration would make it easier to bring about further changes in policies .... They also argued that Lewis, coming from a union with a militant and radical rank and file, was bound to carry out progressive policies, or at least not fight so vehemently against them as Gompers does.80

Upon his return from the convention, Schlesinger told members of the ILGWU: “I am glad Gompers was chosen again, for between Gompers and Lewis, he was the better man to lead organized labor. He has been tested

in many battles, and although with many of his ideas we do not agree, there is no doubt of his integrity, his courage and his loyalty to the labor

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movement.”®! Justice, the official organ of the ILGWU, went even further in praising the union’s delegates who had voted for Gompers: Until there will appear on the firmament of the American labor movement another leader who will be at least as capable, as popular and as honest as the veteran president of the AFL, Gompers’ hold on leadership is perfectly safe.... He is beloved and popular because he is the most forceful and typical expression of the labor movement. Perhaps under the stress of unusual economic conditions, our labor movement will change its face. Then, of course, it will find a different leader to take the place of Gompers, but not before that.

Luigi Antonini, one of the two ILGWU delegates who had voted for Lewis against Gompers, was infuriated by this obsequiousness on the part of a union paper that boasted of its Socialist outlook. He explained his vote in a letter to Justice: . I voted for Lewis because this was the most effective way of registering my protest against the administration of Samuel Gompers, his policies, his politics, his leadership and his eternal apostolic succession of himself. I am and have been for many years consistently and irreconcilably opposed to Gompers for innumerable reasons, the major of which are due to his hydrophobous hatred of Socialism and the Socialist movement, his systematic campaign of vilification against Soviet Russia, his connections with the Civic Federation, his unalterable opposition to industrial unionism, his senile stubbornness in “rewarding friends and punishing enemies,” his violent animadversion against internationalism and international affiliations, and so forth. Should the editor of Justice desire a bill of particulars against Samuel Gompers, I shall be glad to render him this service as soon as I can take a couple of weeks to write it down.... In conclusion... lest I be charged with undue tenderness toward Lewis, I beg to remind my critics that I suggested that the entire delegation of the ILGWU solidly abstain from voting altogether, on the ground that neither candidate for the presidency represented the enlightened and progressive viewpoint of our union.

“The convention of 1921 marked the high point of the formal opposition to the ruling groups in the Federation,” writes Philip Taft in The AFL in the Time of Gompers.* It is not clear just what he means by the “formal

opposition,” but certainly what might be called the “informal opposition” was already beginning to make itself felt. On the eve of the 1921 AFL convention, Advance, the organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which had been barred from sending delegates, declared that while Lewis was more advanced than Gompers on the issue of industrial unionism, it favored neither the president of the AFL nor the president of the United Mine Workers for the AFL presidency: “..Whoever of the two loses, the labor movement will not be the gainer. Both candidates belong to the same school of labor politicians, and the choice between them for the workers is

the same as the choice between Republicans and Democrats on the political

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field.” While the opposition to Gompers was on the increase, Advance went on, it was not based on “matters of principle. The ‘Indianapolis group,’ which constitutes the active opposition to Gompers, is no more revolutionary than he.” Rather, it was a group of “highly ambitious labor leaders,” determined to end Gompers’ long hold on the AFL presidency and “replace him with one of their own group.” However, Advance did note that there already existed a movement of militant progressives who had a program that “will probably cause sufficient stir in the AFL to make the present immobile body move.”®® This was the Trade Union Educational League, organized by William Z. Foster and two dozen other militants in November 1920.

CHAPTER 6

THE TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: FORMATION AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT After he resigned as business agent of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, William Z. Foster spent several months writing The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons, after which he sought a job. He immediately discovered that he was blacklisted in the railroad industry. He worked for several months as the business manager of The New Majority, owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor and the official organ of the Farmer-Labor Party of the United States.* Although he was still a Syndicalist, Foster had become convinced of the need for some kind of political action by labor. In addition, this helped Foster maintain his contacts with the Chicago Federation of Labor and its leader, John Fitzpatrick. The Federation was the center of “progressive” unionism, where radicals like Foster received a warm welcome. Fitzpatrick, like Foster, was committed to the development of a more powerful unionism, organized along “new lines.” Both men considered industrial unionism the key to the future growth of the labor movement, and both agreed that it was an “evolutionary principle.”!** Foster had supported the labor party in 1920 when it was a movement with broad support among Chicago unionists, with Fitzpatrick a leading proponent. For Fitzpatrick, the extensive use of the injunction against strikes in Chicago, and the success of the British Labour Party, were powerful arguments that moved him toward involvement in labor politics. As for Foster, he wrote later that “during the meat packing and steel * For the formation of the Farmer-Labor Party of the United States, see Philip S. Foner History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8 (New York, 1988):267-69. **John Fitzpatrick was born in Ireland in 1874. He emigrated with his uncle to the United States in 1882 and began work at an early age at Swift & Company in the Chicago stockyards. He learned the trades of blacksmith and horseshoer and became active in his local of the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers, and later, of the Blacksmiths, Drop Forgers and Helpers Union. In 1902, he was elected president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, an office he held continuously, except for one term beginning in 1908, until the 1920s. ohn H. Keiser, “John Fitzpatrick and Progressive Unionism,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1965.)

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campaigns, my old Syndicalist anti-politics had started to collapse. So much so that by 1920* I had begun to be active in the Labor Party then centering in Chicago.” Working as business manager for The New Majority, Foster occupied an important position and was involved in the day-today activities of the movement.* But Foster’s plans were still centered on the trade union front. Writing to Harry Ault in Seattle in October 1920, Foster gave a hint of his plans: After the election, a few of us here are about to launch a project which I think will interest you very much, and which I will explain in detail later on. Just now, we are laying our financial wires....** There is no special news from this point now. Things do not look too good. The industries are reducing forces heavily and the employers are in a militant frame of mind. It looks as though Labor is in for a real fight. Beyond question, attempts will be made shortly to force wage reductions in the basic industries. And if this is done in any of them, the rest are sure to take the same course. Possibly, however, things will look up somewhat after election.

By mid-November 1920, the Trade Union Educational League had been organized. Its first headquarters were in the building owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor. The twelve men who, together with Foster, organized the new League were all associates of Foster in the Chicago Federation of Labor, and The

New Majority treated the TUEL with respect.> While the new League resembled both the Syndicalist League of North America and the International Trade Union League in many respects, it also reflected Foster’s growing interest in industrial unionism. In a letter to Upton Sinclair on November 12, 1920, Foster declared that “it seems to me that it is time that the left wing of the great labor movement develops an industrial program. It had one fifteen years ago, but that led to the IWW and all the years of impotency. The time is ripe for another and the new one, if it is to fare better than the last, must call for the development of the inevitable indus-

trial unionism through the old unions.”® While at The New Majority, Foster received a letter from his friend, David J. Saposs, the labor scholar and educator, asking whether he would advise the latter to accept a position as educational director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and requesting Foster’s opinion as to what he should write about in a pamphlet to be published by The New Majority. Foster replied: * See Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 8: 147-69. **It is interesting that although he was still a Syndicalist, Foster observed to his “Dear Friend Harry”: “From the faint echoes of the strife reaching here it would seem that you fellows have a dandy chance to carry your state. If so, it will be an epoch-making achievement. More power to you, say I.” (William Z. Foster to Harry Ault, October 11, 1920, Harry Ault Papers, University of Washington Library, Seattle, Washington.)

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Why not accept the position with the Amalgamated, even though it is a little out of your usual line? I should think that after your long course of investigation and study that it would be a great relief to you to give expression to some of the stuff you have amassed.* You will surely do a good job of it under any circumstances. It is not easy for me to suggest a live thot [sic] for the proposed pamphlet. Why not take something like “Evolutionary Tendencies in the Labor Movement” or some other title with more punch to it but expressing the same thot. Then the work could touch on the progress being made with the various phases of the movement, as for instance (1) Structure; give a short outline of the development of the Railway Employees Department, the federations in the packing and steel industries, the national movements of the miners (instead of their previous district movements), etc. (2) Aims; the program of the progressive needle trades unions, the Plumb Plan,** etc. (3) Expansion; extension of the organization during the war, taking in of unskilled, immigrants, women, negroes [sic], etc. Of course, these are merely suggestions, which merely serve to indicate the general thot...

After he became educational director of the Amalgamated, Saposs arranged for Foster to conduct a lecture tour under the union’s auspices. Having launched the Trade Union Educational League, Foster departed on the tour. It was expected that he would promote the new League and it was therefore not surprising that the central focus of his lectures was the need for the “amalgamation” of the craft unions. On December 24, 1920, Advance reported that Rochester [NY] was “the scene of another great educational triumph ... when William Z. Foster told the members and other workers how hundreds of thousands of steel workers, who had never before been organized, were drawn into a solid fighting union in 1918 and 1919.” The account concluded with the statement that Foster had urged the workers at the meeting “to get rid of any official of a union who tries to stir up racial hatred.” The news that Foster, the former leader of the Syndicalist League of North America and the outstanding figure in the Great Steel Strike, was lecturing under the Amalgamated’s auspices led to a bitter attack on the union in the media, which cited it as further evidence of that union’s support for “Bolshevism and revolution,” which it had already demonstrated in its enthusiastic support for the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Soviet Union.*** A. I. Pearlman, manager of the Rochester Joint Board, replied: * Foster was probably referring to the material Saposs had put together in 1918-19 as investigator for the Americanization Study on Immigrant Workers and Trade Unions for the

Carnegie Corporation, and as investigator, in 1920, for the Inquiry into the Steel Strike of 1919 for the Interchurch World Movement Commission. i Hoe the Plumb Plan, see Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: *** See Foner, History Of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: 53-55.

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Foster is an intelligent labor leader trying to educate the workers to a sense of their own wrongs. He led a perfectly legitimate strike for the abolition of an outrageous 12-hour day, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers are proud that

they stood behind him.9 Charges had appeared in the media to the effect that the Justice Department had evidence that Foster was involved in a “secret agreement” to change the leadership and policies of the American Federation of Labor and that he was receiving support in this endeavor from the Amalgamated.!0 However, the Amalgamated replied that the only arrangement it had with Foster was “the same as it has with many other notable men in the country to lecture before our educational mass meetings.”!2 The accusation by an agent of the Justice Department was based on information that in November 1920 Foster, along with two dozen associates, had founded a new organization in Chicago called the Trade Union

Educational League.!2 Although Labor Herald, the official organ appearance until March 1922, long before leaflets, circulars and letters carefully setting methods of the new League. He selected

of the TUEL, did not make its that Foster had been issuing forth the objectives, rules, and 1,000 “live wire” workers to

receive these preliminary documents.}§ In a one-page leaflet called “A Statement of the Aims of the Trade Union Educational League,” Foster emphasized the “evolutionary process to industrial unionism” which the militant minority should further. It concluded with a request that “all workers desirous of making a real effort to put the labor movement upon an industrial basis ... communicate with the undersigned [Foster].” He pointed out that the trend toward industrial unionism would be gradual and that the unions “are constantly broadening and extending their scope of action. This they are doing through a whole series of get-together devices, familiar to all experienced trade unionists, such as amalgamations, federations, departments, local councils, joint agreements, common organizing campaigns and strikes, extensions of jurisdiction to include women, negroes [sic], the unskilled, etc.,

etc,”14 The first set of guidelines limited membership in the TUEL to members of trade unions in good standing, divided the organization into sections according to industry rather than craft, and affirmed that “the league is purely an educational body, not a trade union.” Foster carefully outlined a suggested order of business for the initial meetings of the local groups and made it clear that their most important function would be the circulation of the forthcoming Labor Herald. A propaganda campaign for the amalgamation of the 16 railroad craft unions would be the first concrete steps of the local Leagues, with the aim of influencing the convention of the AFL

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Railway Employees Department in April. The secretary of the railroad amalgamation committee was Otto Wangenin of St. Paul, a prominent Minnesota Farmer-Laborite who had been a member of the Socialist Party until 1917.5 The first TUEL circulars said nothing about political activities. Indeed, Foster specified that TUEL meetings “should not be confined to members of any one political party—to do so would be to condemn the new movement to sectarianism and powerlessness.”!® The TUEL barely got off the ground after its birth. “For over a year,” Foster noted later, “this body lingered along, more dead than alive, due as usual to the dualistic attitude of the radical element.” Both the Communist and Communist Labor parties, founded in 1919, were committed to dual unionism and opposed, and even ridiculed, Foster’s aim of attempting to build an effective and militant union movement within the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods.* In short, Foster wrote that the infant TUEL “seemed fated soon to join its luckless predecessors.”!” Two events in 1920-1921 had a significant influence on the development of Communist trade union policy and resulted in turning the Communists toward mass work inside the existing trade unions, with the aim of transforming many of them into militant, progressive organizations. This, in turn, completely altered the prospects for the TUEL.

IMPACT OF LENIN’S “LEFT-WING” COMMUNISM In June, 1920, V.I. Lenin’s classic work, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder was published in Russia. It was simultaneously issued in English and appeared in January, 1921 in the United States.** Chapter IV was entitled, “Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?” Lenin’s answer to this question was a devastating blow to the advocates of “dual unionism.” He wrote: To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the masses under the influence of reactionary leaders, agents of the bourgeoisie, labor aristocrats, or “bourgeoisified workers.” .... Every sacrifice must be made, the greatest obstacles must be overcome, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, stubbornly, insis* In its issue of Sept. 27, 1919, The Communist, organ of the newly-formed Communist Party, jeeringly labeled Foster as “E. Z. Foster” since he chose the easiest way to organize the workers, or so they believed. See also Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, New York, 1957, p. 313. ** Lenin had received a copy of Foster’s The Great Steel Strike and its Lessons from John Reed in the fall of 1920. Reed occasionally discussed American conditions with Lenin and wrote to him that Foster “has original ideas, a number of which are very valuable. I know

him personally.” (Arthur Zipser, Workingclass Giant: The Life of William Z. Foster [New

York, 1981], p. 65.)

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tently, and patiently, precisely in all those institutions, societies, and associations to which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses belong, however ultra-reactionary they may be. And the trade unions and workers’ cooperatives (the latter, at least sometimes) are precisely the organizations in which the masses are to be found...

Lenin criticized those who thought “that it is necessary to leave the trade unions, to refuse to work in them, to create new fantastic forms of labor organizations.” He condemned all attempts “to create an absolutely brand new, immaculate workers’ union” and pointed out the fallacy of progressives leaving the established mass membership unions to form “revolutionary” new unions with insignificant memberships. Among the organizations he singled out for criticism was the IWW for playing into the hands of reactionary leaders who were only too happy to be rid of progressive opponents. Lenin also hit hard at the boycott of political elections and the underestimation of the importance of struggles for immediate demands, which was a tendency among some Communists.!8 “It so happened in the early days of the TUEL,” Foster wrote, “I had happened upon Lenin’s famous pamphlet... Here, to my great joy and amazement, I found revolutionary dual unionism condemned and the boring-from-within policy endorsed much more clearly and forcefully than we had ever expressed it.”!9 After reading “Left-Wing” Communism, Foster sensed that there was a place for him and the struggling League in the

Communist movement.”° The other important event of 1920-1921 was the founding in July 1921 of the Red International of Labor Unions (known by the Russian abbreviation for it, “Profitern”).* The U.S. delegation to the first Congress of the Profitern in Moscow included Earl Browder, the Kansas City, Missouri Syndicalist, who had become a member of the Communist Party in January

1921,!** and Mother Ella Reeve Bloor. Foster went along as an observer, also serving as a correspondent for the Federated Press, a labor news service, to which he sent articles dealing with life in the Soviet Union. The invitation for Foster to attend came from Browder. Given the task of recruiting an American delegation for the forthcoming Congress, Browder promptly went to Chicago and looked up Foster, who eagerly accepted

the invitation and soon left for Moscow.22 * The Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) was established in order to counter the influence of the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Amsterdam International made up of reformist trade unions. (Albert Resis, “The Profitern: Origins to 1929,” unpub-

lished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1964, pp. 1-6.) ** Browder began organizing an anti-war “Action Committee” in 1916. For their efforts in propagandizing against the 1917 Selective Service Act, Browder and his brothers were imprisoned. After his release from Leavenworth prison in 1920, Browder left Kansas City for New York, where he joined the Communist Party. James G. Ruan, “The Working of a Native Marxist: The Early Career of Earl Browder,” Review of Politics 39 [July 1977]: 340-46.)

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Foster was particularly pleased to see the following statement adopted by the Profitern: The question of creating revolutionary cells and groups within the American Federation of Labor and independent unions is of vital importance. There is no other way by which one could gain the working mass in America than by leading

a systematic struggle in the trade unions.23

Foster’s dispatches from the Soviet Union covered a wide variety of subjects, but he was most interested in the Soviet trade unions. His articles indicating that the Soviet unions functioned in the workers’ interest helped reduce the impact of Gompers’ frequent attacks on the “undemocratic nature of the Russian labor movement.” Foster emphasized that the fact that “industrial unionism” prevailed in the Soviet Union was “not due to the sudden realization of a beautiful scheme .... On the contrary, it is the result of the everyday experience of the movement, the culmination of a

constant structural evolution to meet the needs of the workers.”24* After a three-month stay in the Soviet Union, Foster returned to the United States at the end of the summer of 1921. David Saposs remembered that when he met Foster at the train station in Chicago upon his return, he seemed like a “new man.” “His visit,” writes Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “had suggested to him that the Communist Party and Lenin had solved the problem of the relationship between trade unionism and revolutionary politics.” He returned from the Soviet Union convinced that practical trade union militants in the United States could learn from the experience of the Russian people, who had surmounted extraordinary obstacles and difficulties to establish and defend the Workers’ Republic?6 Foster’s experience in the Soviet Union completed his transition from Syndicalism to Communism.** Soon after his return from the Soviet Union, Foster secretly joined the Communist Party.2” At the same time, he embarked on an extensive nationwide tour speaking on the question, “What Ails American Radicalism?” He asked why it was that while in all other important capitalist countries, “radicals stand at the head of the labor movement and dominate its policies, here in this country, the conservatives and reactionaries are in almost complete control?” After conceding that some of the reasons advanced to explain this condition*** had been “of some influence in hindering the Foster’s dispatches appeared in a large number of labor papers, notably the Voice of Labor in Chicago and Advance in New York City. Foster later compiled his dispatches from Russia into a pamphlet, The Russian Revolution, which was published by the TUEL in 1921. ** A similar transition occurred at this time among a number of men who became leaders of the Communist Party in Italy, Great Britain, and Canada. (See Larry Peterson, “The Origins of Communist Labour Unionism in Europe and North America,” Labour/Le Travail 13

[Spring, 1984]: 106-07.) *** These included the fact that (1) “the democracy [sic] of our customs and institutions naturally check the growth of class feeling and ideas,” and (2) that “the opportuniti es presented for many years by the vast stretches of free land and tremendous industrial expan-

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growth of American radicalism,” Foster insisted that “far more important than all of these combined” was “the unscientific and impractical economic program of our radical movement. In fact, this program has literally paralyzed radicalism in this country.” The villain, according to Foster, was “the policy of separation, of dualism.” Thousands of militants had made great sacrifices to promote dual unions: “But to no avail. When compared with that of the trade unions, the combined membership of all those now in existence is almost negligible.” It all boiled down to one basic truth: “Dual industrial unionism—that is the principal ailment of American radicalism.” In Foster’s view, the worst feature of the dual industrial union program was “the disastrous effects it produces in the old unions. In them it poisons progress at the very source.” The reason for this was that the “very small number of militants” were “the very life blood of the labor movement.” In other countries, by working inside the old unions, they were able to “make the whole trade union movement flourish and prosper, and incidentally also the radical movement at large.” In the United States, however, the results were different: Here, when this class of militants in our unions become radical, they at the same time get infected with the virus of dual unionism. Then, instead of having their efficiency increased in the old unions, it is practically destroyed altogether. They promptly lose all interest in their trade unions and waste their great potential strength on the sterile utopian industrial unions current in their respective industries*....If the trade union movement in this country is weak and conservative, the radicals are chiefly to blame .... By pulling the militants out of the organized mass, they have been literally severing the soul from the body of labor.

Foster noted proudly that this criticism of the militants in the United States was endorsed by Lenin who, “in roundly condemning radicals who stay out of the old trade unions and start dual organizations, characterized this utopian policy as a sort of children’s disease of the labor movement.” It was time, Foster declared, to eliminate this “disease.” Not until this was accomplished and dual unionism abandoned would the situation change. He concluded: sion have constantly sapped the labor movement by drawing from its ranks, thousands of those intelligent, restless, ambitious spirits who are always the heart soul of every working class protest.” (William Z. Foster, “What Ails American Radicalism?” Socialist Review, AprilMay, 1921, p. 37.) * Foster denied that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers was, as often argued, “an exception to the general failure of dual unions,” noting that “this splendid union is commonly cited as the great justification of the dual industrial union policy.” This, however, was “an error.” For one thing, the Amalgamated was not an industrial union; like the other unions in the needle trades industry; it was “essentially a craft union.” For another, unlike other radical unions which “voluntarily set themselves up against old trade unions as a matter of principle,” the Amalgamated was forced by the United Garment Workers and the AFL leaders to establish itself as an independent union (Foster, op. cit., p. 37).

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When that is done, and done it inevitably must be, then we can look for a real renaissance in the labor movement. While the radicals have been wasting their efforts on experimental dual unionism, the old unions have been weak and neglected. Capitalism, taking advantage of the situation, has raced on practically unchecked and deeply entrenched itself. For the weak position of American Labor the radicals are chiefly to blame. The dual industrial union program must go.28

Foster’s lecture tour gave the TUEL a fresh impetus and brought it wide support.29 To be sure, what he said in his lectures was a repetition of his writings in The Agitator and The Syndicalist but the situation in 1921 was quite different from what it had been in the previous decade. For one thing, the IWW was no longer the strong organization that it had been when Foster first attacked it for its dual union policy. In most parts of the country, the Wobblies, if not completely destroyed by government oppression, were barely viable as labor activists. Especially important, however, was the fact that Foster’s trade union outlook had been endorsed by the greatest revolutionary of the 20th century—V.I. Lenin, theoretical and organizational leader of the first socialist state in history. In the eyes of most radicals in the United States, Foster’s stature soared, and with it, that of the trade union policy he espoused. It is significant that not long after Foster’s tour, a number of prominent IWW leaders left that organization

and endorsed the new TUEL policy.°° Another factor that gave substance to Foster’s lectures was the fact that the AFL leadership stubbornly refused to abandon its traditional conservative trade union policies and resisted any move in a progressive direction.

During the last week of February 1921, American labor officials representing 109 international and national unions affiliated with the AFL met in convention in Washington. It was the first meeting of union officers on this level since the one convened on the eve of America’s entry into World WAR I.* Not only all workers, but the entire American people had their eyes on the convention, and its actions received front page attention in newspapers throughout the country. And what did they learn? After considerable discussion, the convention announced: The American labor movement, speaking through its authorized representatives,... declares in measured and emphatic tones its unalterable determination to resist at every point and with its entire strength the encroachments of industrial tyranny and of fanatical revolutionary propaganda.

The convention adopted abill of rights of 5,000 words, which stated that labor, fighting against Bolshevism and radicalism supported from Europe, was threatened at home by the narrow and unscrupulous tactics of * See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 7 (New York, 1987): 101-08.

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some employers who had reaped a harvest during the war and were now attempting to destroy the labor organizations through their campaign for the open shop. As a practical program, there was the demand that Congress pass a series of laws which “are already in force in other civilized countries,” that labor disregard anti-labor injunctions, and that a publicity bureau be established. Major emphasis, however, was placed on the immediate need to close “the floodgates of immigration which has given employers an additional weapon in their efforts to reduce the American standard of living.”31 “This,” observed William E. Bohn caustically, “is labor’s official answer to a devastating anti-labor drive.”22 Two vital issues were discussed at the convention: the organization of the unorganized and the need to rebuild the federation along industrial instead of craft lines. Both were overwhelmingly defeated.* On its third day, the convention sustained the non-concurrence of the committee on organization in a resolution calling for “one body of workers through amalgamations, federations and protective agreements.” Presented by J. L. Pauley of the West Virginia State Federation of Labor, the resolution also urged all national and international unions to insert clauses in their working agreements whereby-they could “render assistance as is needed by any and all crafts, when called upon to do so.” It asked further that all unions arrange the dates of their contracts so that they would expire at the same time. The resolution was overwhelmingly defeated. Later, a resolution introduced by John F. Leheney of the Casper (Wyoming) Trades Assembly, requesting that internationals forego claims of autonomy in the interests of industrial unionism was quickly voted down without even being discussed. * The convention also voted down a resolution demanding that no war be declared without approval by the people through a referendum vote, and that those in Congress who voted for war should be the first to go. Two resolutions putting the convention on record for immediate efforts for a six-hour day were defeated. A proposed amendment to the AFL

constitution to elect officers of the federation by national referendum was promptly voted down. The convention instructed the executive council to prevent any modification of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and to work for the repeal of the “gentleman’s agreement” with Japan, “and in its place inaugurate a definite policy calling for total exclusion of all other Orientals.” It overwhelmingly approved the executive council’s characterization of the Soviet government as imposing a “brutal, indefensible tyranny” on the Russian people. The outstanding surprise of the convention was the passage, after a bitter struggle, of a resolution in favor of “legislation that will bring about the public ownership and democratic operation of the railways of the United States.” It also called for “all industries organized under corporate grants of privilege” to be reorganized so that those who “contribute to the industry will enjoy all the rights, privileges and immunities granted to those who contribute capital...” The wording was so vague that noone could agree as to exactly what it meant, and there was no provision made for its enforcement. However, David J. Saposs declared: ”When the American Federation of Labor discusses such issues, even ambiguously, and thereafter overwhelmingly endorses labor’s right to exercise such privileges, it has indeed departed from the beaten track of its chosen leaders.” (“Out of the Beaten Path: The Denver Convention of the American Federation of Labor,” Survey, July 16, 1921, p. 511.)

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Unskilled workers came up when the Organization Committee reported adversely on the proposal that more attention be given to the organization of such workers. The convention was so deeply stirred by speeches in favor of the resolution that it was referred back to the committee for further consideration. There, it simply died and was never heard of again.*° Dismissing these shortcomings, ILGWU President Benjamin Schlesinger hailed the convention as “the most constructive and the most successful convention of the American Federation of Labor I have attended so far.”34 Advance, however, ridiculed Schlesinger as either being deaf, dumb and blind, or having sold out to the Gompers’ machine. Calling the gathering “The Convention That Stood Still,” it exclaimed: “The Earth May Move, But Not the AF of L.” Advance concluded: “The Denver convention was simply new proof that the AF ofL is safe for stagnation and_reaction.”55 Further proof, in the opinion of Advance, was the investigation of corruption and graft in the building trades conducted by the Lockwood Committee of the New York State legislature. Robert P. Brindell, chairman of the AFL’s Building Trades Council, was convicted of extortion and sentenced to from five to ten years at hard labor in Sing Sing prison. Although Advance agreed that Gompers was correct in complaining that while the “labor man” was sent to prison, the convicted capitalists were let off with relatively small fines,* it found in the revelations proof that many leaders of the AFL were interested solely in lining their own pockets.36 Added to all this was the tremendous loss in membership in AFL unions, as well as in some of the independents, in those sections of their trades and industries where they had gained a foothold during the war years, such as meatpacking and shipbuilding. With the exception of the railroad shopmen, whose unions had successfully maintained themselves in part of the industry, unionism in those centers where it became established during the war had been completely wiped out. What it came down to was the fact that unions were fairly well entrenched in small shops and small plants, but seemed unable to make headway against the large, trustified plants. On the other hand, the giant corporations, having succeeded in eliminating the threat posed by wartime organizational gains, were now busily engaged in organizing company unions as a protection against bona fide unionism.3” For a fleeting moment, it had seemed that the AFL would do something to organize the basic industry that had successfully withstood unionization during and immediately after the war—iron and steel. As the Great Steel Strike of 1919 ended, Foster pushed for the continuation, rather than the disbanding, of the National Committee for the Organization of Iron and * Samuel Untermeyer, counsel for the Lockwood Committee, observed: “It is always comparatively easy to convict guilty labor leaders. I wish it were as easy to administer justice to the equally guilty men of business and finance.” (Advance, Dec. 16, 1921.)

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Steel Workers. “The fight must be a permanent one,” he insisted. Even as the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers was withdrawing from the committee, Foster proposed that a large corps of organizers remain in the field and that a steel workers’ bulletin in several languages be distributed regularly. He urged that “a vigorous campaign of education and reorganization .. be immediately begun and not cease until industrial justice in the steel industry will have been achieved.”38 Nothing came of Foster’s suggestions, but in the spring and summer of 1920, Roger Baldwin and the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union asked the National Committee for the Organization of Iron and Steel Workers about the possibility of beginning a free-speech campaign in western Pennsylvania in support of a new organizing drive. J. G. Brown, who replaced Foster after the latter resigned as secretary of the National Committee, replied that the withdrawal of the Amalgamated had caused the collapse of the Committee’s organizing work, and that he was “winding up

its affairs.”99 Still, on January 14, 1921, representatives of the AFL’s international and national unions in the steel industry, meeting in Washington, decided to launch “a new campaign to organize iron and steel workers throughout the country.” The unions announced that neither unemployment nor poor industrial conditions would cause a postponement of their organizational plans. The campaign would be conducted by a new committee to be officially known as the Executive Council of National and International Organizations in the Steel Industry, affiliated with the AFL. “This committee,” the press reported, “replaces the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, which conducted the great steel strike of last year.’4° It might have added that the Committee had been headed by John Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster, both of whom were anathema to the AFL leadership. David J. Saposs, who had gained a wide knowledge of the steel industry during his work for the Interchurch World Movement’s investigation of the 1919 steel strike, had a long talk with a member of the new committee and concluded that nothing would come of the move. He was convinced that the AFL, having virtually abandoned the field for over a year over Foster’s vigorous opposition, would do nothing beyond issuing public announcements of what it planned to do. A year later his prediction was confirmed, and Saposs wrote: “Up the present, the Executive Council of National and International Organizations in the Steel Industry has not considered it opportune to launch a new campaign or otherwise resume activity.”4! It never did! Some in the labor movement were not only not surprised by this development, but were convinced that it was hopeless to believe that the situation could be changed. They summed up their view of the movement in

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these words: “No sign of intelligent understanding, no vigor, no vision, no hope.”42 However, there were others who insisted that it made no real difference whether there was or was not any hope. In 1921 Frank Tannenbaum, a former Wobbly who had become a conservative academic authority on the labor movement,” published The Labor Movement: Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences, in which he argued that it was foolish to waste time attempting to radicalize the labor movement, since there was no real difference between the so-called conservative and so-called radical unions: “All labor organizations, regardless of their name, their ideals, their structure, or their method, actually do the same thing.”48 Foster dissented sharply from this viewpoint and also differed with those who argued that it was hopeless to attempt to radicalize the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods. He dismissed Tannenbaum’s view as an attempt to cover up the rigid trade union policies of the Gompers’ bureaucracy.“ As for the belief that it was hopeless to expect to transform the existing labor movement, Foster argued that this outlook was based on the expectation that the rank and file would spontaneously oust the reactionary bureaucracy and institute new, progressive policies. “The workers,” he told Saposs, “will not take the initiative; they must have leadership, which the militants will provide. They are ‘the brain’ and backbone of the masses.’ This was not a new argument for Foster. Even though he recognized the danger that it legitimatized the idea that workers cannot understand their own interests and need an elite to take action for them, he had used it frequently to advance the Syndicalist cause. Now, however, he pointed to new developments that showed how a small progressive group could alter a seemingly hopeless situation in the labor movement, as well as the possibility of recruiting new militants for work inside the reactionary unions. Both potentials, he maintained, related to the growing education of the workers; there were a number of developments that contributed to their increasing awareness,

On November 25, 1919, representatives from 32 newspapers met in Chicago and organized the Federated Press. They elected Robert M. Buck, an activist in the Farmer-Labor Party and the editor of The New Majority, as chairman. E. J. Costello, a former district manager for the Associated Press in Iowa, was chosen as secretary-treasurer. Scott Nearing, who had actively opposed United States entry into World War I, presided when Buck was unable to attend. E. B. (Harry) Ault, editor of the Seattle Union : For Tannenbaum’s role in the IWW and his subsequent career, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 4 (New York, 1965): 444-48.

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Record, the second labor union daily in the country, was one of the first directors of the new agency. At the outset, Federated Press included members with varying journalistic experience. Some worked on labor weeklies or left-wing dailies, while others were affiliated with commercial papers. All of the founding members, despite their differing political viewpoints and backgrounds, were united in the desire to set up an alternative news service for the large number of radical and labor newspapers around the country. They believed that labor news was treated in either a sensational or malicious manner by the standard press agencies. In December 1919, Federated Press received its certificate of incorporation as a cooperative news service from the Illinois Secretary of State. Buck, Costello, and William Feigenbaum, a Socialist activist, signed the papers setting forth the general purpose of the new press organization: “For the collection and interchange of domestic and foreign intelligence, telegraph and otherwise, news, photographs, cartoons, special signed and syndicated articles for newspapers and periodicals.” To spare the new press agency from a weighty tax burden, non-profit status was secured. This was essential because of the limited financial backing the press agency’s founders were able to scrape together. To the Federated Press, commercial newspapers, being antilabor by definition, could not handle labor news fairly or accurately. As a Federated Press writer put it: For years and years, union officials and publicity men have tried to get labor news into the daily papers, which have always had a couple of columns for the Junior League ball but seldom a couple of lines for a wage problem not related to debutantes .... The labor press is ... playing an important part in retarding the antilabor campaign. In the end, the real fighting against reactionary interests must be done by union members, without much help from outsiders .... Hence, it is essential for the labor press to get the full story to unionists.

The founders of Federated Press felt that the labor press needed a national clearing house to organize the distribution of prolabor information,* and their news service was designed to fill this need. Upton Sinclair, whose book The Brass Check was a major attack on the control of the commercial press by Big Business, declared: “I think that the work of the Federated Press is the most important now being done in this country...”

* Eight papers constituted its membership when Federated Press was founded on January 1, 1920. By the end of 1922, the number had grown to almost 100 papers—daily, weekly, and monthly—including Liberal, Farmer-Labor, Socialist, IWW, Anarchist, AFL, and independent labor papers. The managing editor of Federated Press was Carl Haessler. (Stephen J. Haessler, “Carl Haessler and the Federated Press: Essays on the History of American Journalism,” unpublished MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977, pp. 98-102.)

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Foster, who was a member of its executive board, noted joyfully that the new agency ... brings forcefully to our attention the revolution that has been achieved in labor journalism in the United States. Four years ago, this field was the most cheerless and disheartening prospect imaginable. There were hundreds of little sheets, each with its underpaid and overworked editor, trying to spring the material for his paper out of his own tired brain. There was the dry-as-dust and absurd AFL News Letter, with its stupid and trivial items from two weeks to six months stale, not to mention the petrified trade journals, full of cheerless and uninteresting technical matters and “women’s pages” giving the latest dress patterns. All in all , it was a picture of isolation, stagnation, desolation and hopelessness... The Federated Press brought organization into this neglected field. Under the influence of this new force, our press has made strides forward that are really remarkable. Our journals have a new life and vitality. Compare the journals of today with those of four years ago, and get a measure of the progress made. No other country in the world today has so good a labor news service and labor press; it is the one field of labor organization in which we are not lagging. This is another example of what a few live progressives can do, if they set to work in a sane, energetic, constructive manner.

There was also the upsurge of workers’ education, an area in which the United States lagged behind other countries, particularly Great Britain. The year 1921 witnessed two important advances in this field. The Workers’ Education Bureau of America was established and, following the example set in Great Britain, began to coordinate the activities of the many labor departments of trade unions with those of trade union colleges and schools. “The founders of the WEB,” James O. Morris points out, “conceived of workers’ education in part as a means of reforming the leadership and policies of organized labor. They wanted, for example, to popularize among trade unionists the need, as they saw it, for industrial unionism (amalgamation), a labor party, and greater militancy in the labor movement, and to spread the idea that unions ‘must go on’ after achieving higher wages and shorter hours, toward more ultimate aims if they were to satisfy

the demands of the workers.”47 The other important development in 1921 was the founding in Katonah, New York, of Brookwood Labor College, the first and only residential labor college in the United States. It represented the radical wing of the workers’ education movement. Its student body was composed of progressive-minded unionists, ranging in age between 21 and 35, and it was led by such noted educators as A. J. Muste, Katherine Pollak Elickson, Arthur W. Calhoun, Mark Starr, John C. Kennedy, and David J. Saposs. Brookwood’s program called for the abolition of war, the unionization of workers in industrial unions, the amalgamation of the existing craft unions, the organization of

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the unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the mass production industries, and equality for all workers regardless of sex, race, or nationality. The college planned to send its graduates into the labor movement, where they would conduct a campaign against Gompers’ trade union policies and mobilize forces “to get craft union members into industrial organizations.” As Richard J. Attenburgh points out, the labor colleges of the period, particularly Brookwood Labor College, served as a source of inspiration for contemporary activists interested in the “revitalization and reformation” of a stagnating labor movement.*® Another development of great significance, in Foster’s eyes, was the fact that simultaneously with the emergence of these radical workers’ educational activities, the Workers’ (Communist) Party had abandoned its mistaken approach to trade union activity and now had the potential of furnishing militants to transform the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods into progressive organizations. Having joined the Communist Party (although his membership was still secret), Foster was in a position to assist it in carrying out a correct policy in its relations with the trade unions. He was named leader of the Party’s trade union work and was appointed secretary of the Red International Committee, which functioned as the American branch of the RILU—a position later occupied by the TUEL. In Foster, the Communists had gained a workingclass leader of tremendous prestige and ability while he, in turn, had gained the allies he needed to make the TUEL a genuine force in the labor movement. In the view of David J. Saposs, an astute observer of the labor scene, the unity of Foster and the Workers’ (Communist) Party held out bright prospects for the TUEL. Foster, he wrote in a memorandum, was “admirably suited for leading the militants since he is a speaker, has energy, honesty, ideals, vision and organizing ability. The future of the labor movement rests in the hands of these militants as the present leadership is intellectually bankrupt.’”49 The party Foster joined had been formed in 1919 when left-wing Socialists bolted from the Socialist Party to form the Communist movement.* The movement itself divided into two factions—the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party—neither of which was able to make much of an impact. The raids directed against Communists and other radicals by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in January 1920 led to the arrest of thousands of Communists and the deportation of many hundreds. As a result, for two years the Communists retreated into an “underground” existence of limited public activity, and their membership declined from 40,000 to 10,000. * The formation of the Communist and Communist Labor Party is discussed in Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8 (New York, 1988): 237-55.

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In addition, all of the movements of earlier revolutionaries—the IWW, the Syndicalist leagues, and the One Big Union—faced “arrest, stagnation or outright failure” in 1920. The defeat of the strikes of 1918-1920 had convinced many industrial militants of the power of the state operating in the interests of the employers and brought home to them the need for a political strategy to supplement the economic struggles—just as the Communist Party emphasized. “Industrial organization, militant strike tactics, and economic strength were simply not enough,” concluded Larry Peterson in a study of “The Origins of Communist Labour Unionism in Europe and

North America.’”°° However, the Party’s trade union outlook was influenced by “dual unionism.” Even though it criticized the narrow craft unionism of Gompers and the AFL, it still followed the IWW in confining its trade union activity to organizing an independent revolutionary union outside the AFL. In reality, as Charles E. Ruthenberg, a founder of the Communist Party, pointed out: “The Party in 1919 and during 1920 was isolated from the

trade union movement.”>! When American Marxists received an English-language translation of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, and when they learned that the RILU had endorsed the TUEL’s policy of working inside the AFL, they finally realized that the existing trade union policy of the Workers’ Party was backward and irrelevant. The Workers’ Council group said of Lenin’s book: “The ‘Infantile Sickness’ might have been written with the American movement in mind, so well does it fit the mistakes of the Left Wing.” This shift in the Communists’ trade union policy from “dual unionism” and isolation soon became evident. On February 25, 1922, Foster published the first of a series of four articles in The Worker dealing with the principles

and program of the TUEL. These articles in the official organ of the Workers’ Party were reprinted as a pamphlet and received wide distribution®2 Foster began with the statement: “The American labor movement is the only important one in the world which still remains based on the principles of craft unionism.” The “rapid drift” toward industrial unionism, Foster continued, was in evidence everywhere except in the United States: “Here, we are still sticking in the mud of craft unionism and progressing only at a snail’s pace.” Indeed, from the standpoint of structure, the American labor movement was “at about the point of development that the European unions were fifteen years ago.” Politically, too, the American trade unions were in an “infantile condition,” having “not yet advanced to the point of even rudimentary political class consciousness.” Furthermore, the American labor movement displayed an “unequaled lack of idealism and social vision”; it had “no soul” and had not yet raised “the inspiring banner of working class emancipation.” It still had to learn that “the only solution of the labor struggle is by the abolition of capitalism.” In fact, the American

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trade unions “are the only general body of organized workers in the world that has not yet mastered this fundamental labor conclusion.” The AFL had even severed relations with the Amsterdam International because it was “too radical.” Yet a generation ago, “during the stormy ’80’s,” Foster went on, the American trade union movement “unquestionably led the world for militancy.” Since that time, too, America’s industrial history had been marked bya series of strikes “as bitterly fought as any ever known anywhere.” The reason for the “ultra-conservatism and extraordinary backwardness of the American trade union movement,” was that for the preceding generation “the progressive and revolutionary unionists” were working in a manner “contrary to the natural evolution of the labor movement.” Yet, as the experiences in Russia had demonstrated, “the fate of all labor organizations in every country depends primarily upon the activities of a minute minority of clear-sighted, enthusiastic militants scattered throughout the great organized masses of sluggish workers.” These live spirits were the “natural head” of the working class and the driving force of the labor movement. They were the only ones “who really understand what the labor struggle means and who have practical plans for its prosecution.” In every country where “these vital militants” functioned effectively among the organized masses, “the labor movement flourishes and prospers.” Where they failed to so function, inevitably the entire labor organization “withers and stagnates.” “The activities of the militants are the ‘key’ to the labor movement, the source of all its real life and progress.” In other countries, Foster pointed out, the militants had stayed in the old trade unions and, through their organization, activity, and determination, they were able to take the lead in directing the workers’ struggles. They had communicated something of their own fire and understanding to the masses, “with the result that their labor movement has been constantly pushed forward—intellectually, structurally, and numerically-to higher and higher stages.” In the United States, on the other hand, the militants, progressives, and radicals alike had followed an opposite course. For fully 30 years, they had systematically deserted and neglected the trade unions. As a result, the trade union movement had been “sucked dry of thousands and thousands of the best militants—the very elements who should have been its life springs, and thus its development has been blocked, its progress poisoned at the source.” Leaderless and helpless, deserted by the militants, the masses had been “intellectually and spiritually decapitated [and] left to the uncontested control of a conservative trade union bureaucracy, which has hardly a trace of real proletarian understanding and progress anywhere in itsmakeup.”

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In Foster’s view, two things were absolutely indispensable to the future life and progress of the American labor movement. First, the militants had to rid themselves of the dual-union, secessionist tendency that had so long negated their efforts, and secondly, they had to thoroughly organize themselves within the trade unions for the effective application of their energies and programs. He noted that substantial progress was now being made toward the accomplishment of these two vital essentials. In the first place, the militant rebels were freeing themselves rapidly from the coils of dual unionism, and in the second place, they were everywhere forming the necessary propaganda groups within the organized masses of trade unionists. The movement through which these developments were taking shape was the TUEL: “The Trade Union Educational League proposes to develop trade unions from their present antiquated and stagnant condition into modern, powerful labor organizations, capable of waging successful warfare against capital.” Instead of advocating the “prevailing shameful and demoralizing nonsense about harmonizing the interests of capital and labor,” the League was propagating “the inspiring goal of the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ republic.” The League favored organization by industry instead of by craft and urged that the craft unions be amalgamated “into a series of industrial unions—one each for the metal trades, railroad trades, clothing trades, building trades, etceven as they have been in other countries.” “Amalgamation,” Foster wrote, “will be made a burning issue all over the country.” The League, he continued, was flatly opposed to the existing policy of isolation of the workers of the United States, advocating instead affiliation to the “militant international trade union movement known as the Red Trade Union International [RILU].” The launching of the TUEL, according to Foster, marked “a turning point in American labor history.” It was the beginning of a new era in which the American labor movement would be modernized in keeping with the economic and industrial structure of the 20th century. Finally, it would make possible a turnaround in the progress of the labor movement: The program of the Trade Union Educational League is the only possible effective answer to the “Open Shop” drive of the employers. It is the sole means by which the American working class can take its proper place in the world battle of Labor.53

On March 4, 1922, The Worker endorsed the TUEL, declaring that every unionist who was “disgusted with the policies of the individuals now controlling the labor movement of the United States” had an opportunity to join an organization “which has a clean-cut policy for revolutionizing the American movement.” Unfortunately, the paper said, thousands of workers

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had given up hope of ever changing the domination of the labor movement by class-collaborationist, corrupt leaders: “Sporadic revolts against the abuses of authority and outright betrayals by officials of the Labor movement have been crushed because of lack of organization, and with each reversal, as the ranks of the radicals in the unions were depleted, they went over to the ‘pure’ unions. much to the delight of the bureaucrats.” The Worker went on: The Trade Union Educational League proposes to unite in a national organization all trade unionists who are willing to work for industrial unionism and a program of working class education within the trade unions. It intends, by uniting the radical forces in the labor movement, to solidify the ranks of the class-conscious workers and give to each one the confidence that comes from knowing that one is not playing a lone hand. For the first time, all workers in the trade union movement who see the danger to the workers in this capitalistic nation of a labor movement that still adheres to the outworn form of craft unionism have now an opportunity to unite for action. If the workers who now express their dissatisfaction in words really want to make the American labor movement a fighting force on the front of the class struggle, they have a chance to join forces with others of the same beliefs and work in the union, not as individuals, but as a solid unit.

“Nothing but apathy,” The Worker concluded, “can prevent the League

from becoming avirile force for militant unionists.”>4 On February 27, 1922, the TUEL came into existence officially at a series of local meetings held throughout the country. In the call for one of the meetings, Jack W. Johnstone,* secretary of the Local General Group, wrote:

The meeting will mark the beginning of the real work of the League. In a thousand different cities, at approximately the same time, there are taking place similar meetings, and for the first time in the history of the American Labor Movement, the radical and progressive trade unionists will have organized their forces, determined to inject a fighting spirit that is so badly needed in the trade union movement.

Amalgamation; Industrial Unionism; One Union for each Industry; these are our immediate slogans! We must instill into the trade union movement the recognition of the class struggle; this is the task that is before us. It can, it must, and it will be done. This meeting is not a mass meeting; only a few score have been invited. The job is a big one, and it can only be done through the intelligent, organized effort of the militant minority. You are not only expected to be in attendance yourself, but you are expected to bring with you at least two other real live wires.” * Johnstone, who had a Syndicalist background and had worked closely with Foster in the Syndicalist League of North America, had been the secretary-treasurer of the Stockyards Labor Council, formed by the Chicago Federation of Labor to head organizing activities among the packinghouse workers. (David Brody, The Butcher Workmen, A Study of Unionization (Cambridge, Mass., 1964], pp. 75-91; William Z. Foster, History of the Communist

Party of the United States [New York, 1952], pp. 230-31.)

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The local meetings adopted resolutions declaring that the militants would pressure the officials of international unions to “publish amalgamation data,” would seek the “creation of a weekly amalgamation paper for each industry, and advocate the calling of special amalgamation conventions of the unions in specific industries, as well as amalgamation referendums.” However, as Foster pointed out at the local meeting in Chicago, “adopting resolutions and creating sentiments is not sufficient. It is always easy to get the rank and file to do that. The militants must be organized to secure action. This is the purpose of the League and its subdivisions.”°6 In March 1922, the first issue of the Labor Herald, the official organ of the TUEL, appeared,* featuring “A Call to Action.” “Militants,” the Call began, “the time has come for action.” It informed the readers that the TUEL was launching a nationwide campaign to organize the militants to carry on the indispensable work of education and reorganization—“a work for which the hard-pressed trade union movement now stands in shrieking need.” The militants were scattered through many local unions, central labor councils, and other bodies, and there was little communication or cooperation between them. Indeed, the situation was one of “utter chaos.” To end the chaos, the TUEL plannedaseries of national drives, month by month, to organize the militants in one industry after another. When the circuit of industries was completed in about six or eight months, there would exist a well-defined organization of the militants in every trade union and industrial center in the country. At that point, a national conference would be held to draw up a constitution, elect League officials, and map out a complete educational program. The first drive was to take place for the purpose of establishing local general educational groups of militants in every trade and in all important cities and towns. Once established, these local groups would, in addition to their other activities, perform the vital work of carrying out the efforts to organize the militants in the respective industries. After this, the local general groups all over the country would proceed to organize the railroad educational organization. Local educational groups of railroad militants would be established and would be brought in contact with each other through the League’s general offices. Once this was accomplished and an organization of railroad militants established on a national scale, it would immediately embark upon a campaign to amalgamate the 16 railroad craft unions into one industrial organization.

* In announcing its appearance, The Worker declared: “The publication of the League—the Labor Herald—will serve to keep the membership informed of the organization’s activities in the various industries and will give full expression to the desire for progress which cannot now be had in any but a few of the trade union publications” (March 4, 1922).

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This would be followed by similar drives in other industries—metal trades, building trades, clothing, mining, etc—“until finally the educational organization covers every ramification of the trade union structure, and the rejuvenating influence of the organized militants makes itself felt throughout the entire labor movement.”°? The militants were urged to keep “two cardinal principles” firmly in mind during the campaign to organize the local groups: “The first is that all dual union tendencies should be suppressed.” The League declared itself as flatly opposed to “secessionism in the labor movement. Its rock bottom tactical position is that the rebels belong among the organized masses and should stay there at all costs.” To avoid any hint of dualism, the League did not permit the collection of regular dues or a per capita tax from members or sympathizing unions. It was financed through the donations of its members, the sale of literature, etc. The other cardinal principle militants were urged to remember was that “under no circumstances should the groups be confined merely to members of this or that political party or tendency.” Elsewhere—in England, France, and other countries—the organizations of trade union militants consisted of “all the honest, active, energetic unionists, regardless of their political beliefs, who oppose the timidity and incompetence of the old bureaucracy, and who are willing to adopt the radical measures necessary to make the trade unions into real fighting bodies”: And so it must be here. To be effective, the League groups will have to include all the natural rebel elements among the trade unions, even though they are not all cut according to one political pattern. Such groups as may fail to take this into consideration—that is, where they restrict their membership along party lines—will automatically condemn themselves to sectarianism and comparative impotency.

The “Call to Action” closed on a note of urgency. The TUEL, it said, had just presented “a practical program” for the thorough organization of the labor movement—a program which abandoned the “tendency to separate ourselves from the mass into dual unions”: This program represents the most important development in the labor movement for many years .... It constitutes the only means by which the workers of this country can be raised from their mental slumber and lined up definitely and clearly against the capitalists and their abominable profit system. If you are a wide awake militant, if you really understand modern militant tactics and are not blinded by the impossible theories that have about ruined the American labor movement, you will join hands with the League at once—not next week, or next month, but now, immediately. Get busy! Organize!°®

The advocates of dual unionism reacted with anger to the appeal. They charged Foster with being a tool of the conservative AFL leaders and

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attacked him as an enemy of the working class.5? However, they could not stem the tide of the “back-into-the-union” movement, which became the order of the day in left-wing circles. As David J. Saposs put it: “Boring from within ceased being the pet hobby of a small group of outstanding individuals and the exclusive expression of opportunist radicals. It now became also the watchword of the mass of revolutionary radicals.”© Writing in 1922, Marion Dutton Savage observed: “It is too early to tell how much influence this new Educational League will have within the AFL, but it approaches the problem of industrial unionism in a manner which may have far-reach-

ing results.”61 Eugene V. Debs agreed, writing in the April issue of the Labor Herald: “The Trade Union Educational League is in my opinion the one rightly-directed movement for the industrial unification of the American workers.”© Not only did John Fitzpatrick and Edward Nockels, the leaders of the

Chicago Federation of Labor, look upon the TUEL “with friendly eyes,” but on March 19, 1922, the Federation itself went on record in favor of the League’s appeal for amalgamation and industrial unionism. In its resolution, the Chicago Federation called upon the AFL to bring the international unions into conference “for the purpose of arranging to amalgamate all the various unions into single organizations, each of which should cover an industry.”64 The new TUEL quickly gained the attention of the National Civic Federation which, in turn, sought to involve the United States Department of Justice in suppressing Foster’s activities. While the first issue of the Labor Herald was being circulated, the Civic Federation sent copies of Foster’s “correspondence and material” to the presidents of the railroad companies. In addition, the NCF asked J. Edgar Hoover to “get inside” the TUEL and supply the names of “key” men. The Justice Department was informed that the “leading labor men” of the NCF could then see to it that the TUEL leaders were expelled from their unions. The Department was assured that this process would remain “absolutely discreet.” William J. Burns, the director of the Bureau of Investigation—-the forerunner of the FBl—wrote

that this was a “wonderful idea and we will be delighted to help out.”65 Subsequently, Burns had his agents follow Foster and take careful notes

on his speeches and meetings. In 1922, Burns assured one concerned citizen that the Bureau was “keeping in touch with all of [Foster’s] movements.” Robert H. Lovett, then an assistant attorney general, wrote to a concerned vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad that the Bureau of Investigation considered “Foster’s organization as one of the most dangerous in this country today because of the fact that it has as its fundamental purpose the amalgamation of all labor organizations in this country and the affiliation of the same with the Red International of Labor Unions.”

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THE FIRST TUEL NATIONAL CONFERENCE The June 1922 issue of the Labor Herald carried the Call for the First National Conference of the TUEL, which was scheduled to open in Chicago on August 26. For well over a year, the Chicago group had functioned as the national organization, drawing-up the rules, electing the national committee, publishing the Labor Herald, auditing Secretary-Treasurer Foster’s books, working out the general policies to be applied in organizing, and functioning as the League’s directing body. Now the time had come “to draw up our programs and organize our forces throughout the labor movement.” Representation would be based on the local general groups of the TUEL, each of which would be entitled to six delegates. Trade unions and central bodies could send only fraternal delegates. The proposed conference would not be held “for the purpose of furthering secession movements, but to work out an organized, intensive campaign of constructive, militant education in all the industries.” In the words of the Call: Militants! .... Do you believe that Organized Labor should have a real rebel spirit? Do you believe that the craft unions should be amalgamated into industrial unions? Do you believe that the trade union movement should have new and militant leadership? If so, come to the National Conference of the Trade Union Educational League. It will be one of the most important gatherings in the history of the American labor movement.§7

On August 26, as scheduled, the First National Conference of the TUEL got under way. The credentials committee reported the presence of 45 delegates from 26 towns and cities.* Among them were members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Proletarian Party, anarchists, syndicalists, and trade unionists unaffiliated with any faction. According to the Labor Herald, “The delegation included many of the most active and

influential militants in the American trade union movement.”68 Some were unable to attend. A telegram from the “Philadelphia Shop Delegates League, Waist and Dress Industry,” read: “Regret our inability to send delegates to convention, but can’t refrain from sending you our heartiest congratulations and wishing you success in the work you are undertaking.” Foster delivered the report of the national committee. He briefly reviewed the history of dual unionism in the American labor movement and described the rise and decline of the Syndicalist League of North America and the International Trade Union Educational League. The TUEL, he * These were Astoria, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cisco, Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Guelph, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Moline, Montreal, New York, O’Fallon,

Omaha, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Youngstown.

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acknowledged, had had a very feeble early history, but this had changed after February, 1922, and “at the present time, the League has groups and connections in practically all the important industrial centers of the United States and Canada.” In fact, its influence in the labor movement could be measured in part by the fact that “the powers that be are determined to crush it.” Despite this, the TUEL was “carrying on a militant campaign everywhere for the revamping of the present lackluster trade union movement into a genuine fighting organization.” Foster criticized the AFL for defeating a resolution calling for industrial unionism at its 1922 convention, even after Secretary Morrison had reported a loss of more than 700,000 members during the preceding year, bringing the total membership down to less than 3,200,000. The Pacific Coast delegation reported on its efforts to induce the Rank and File Federation to abandon dual unionism and-reenter the old unions. Active work was being done in the metal trades, needle trades, and provision industries. The Pacific Coast district conference had been held July 25-26, with delegates in attendance from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Plans had been laid for the organization of metal miners in the Rocky Mountain states, and officers had been elected to coordinate the regional work. The report characterized as satisfactory the general conditions for the spread of the League’s program and commented that the railroad men were taking to it “like ducks to water.””° Tim Buck, business agent for IAM Lodge 631 of Toronto, emphasized that the TUEL’s impact was being felt throughout Canada. The convention of the Nova Scotia locals of the United Mine Workers had “wholeheartedly endorsed the League, its program, its policies and its tactics...” It had also endorsed amalgamation and had invited the cooperation of other labor bodies in the effort “to create a unified front of labor against the master class.” The Nova Scotia miners had also voted to affiliate with the RILU and to send a delegate to its forthcoming congress. The League was also making its influence felt in Western Canada. Although Foster had been warned to stay out of Winnipeg, “the home and headquarters of the ““OBU”, he had ignored the warning and had won over an audience of Winnipeg workers to the League’s program. “The League today,” declared Buck, “is a definite power in the Canadian trade union movement, and its

influence grows constantly.”71 Resolutions were passed by the Conference denouncing the “frame-up

convictions” of Mooney and Billings, and Sacco and Vanzetti, and pledging “wholehearted support in the task of securing their release.” Similarly, release was demanded for “over ninety political prisoners confined in the various penitentiaries of America.” A resolution was adopted supporting famine relief for Russia, condemning the blockade of the Soviet Republic

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and calling upon the “workers of the entire world, and especially the workers of America, to show their solidarity with them in every possible way.” Another resolution praised the Russian-American Industrial Corporation, which had recently been launched on the initiative of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and commended the Corporation as presenting “an opportunity for profitable investment of the spare savings of the working class generally.” A long resolution on unemployment noted that there “can be no national solution for the unemployment problem while capitalism continues to exist.” The fight against unemployment, therefore, had “to take the form of a fight against the capitalist control of production”: Direct pressure of the working class against capitalist control of the productive processes is the only means of effective struggle against unemployment. Only insofar as this pressure is effectively exerted will the evil of unemployment be minimized, and only when capitalist control of industry is entirely abolished, and that control placed in the hands of the workers, will the final solution of unemployment be achieved.

Resolutions were also adopted dealing with specific trade union issues. The national committee was authorized to call a national amalgamation conference of the TUEL “for the purpose of bringing before the American labor movement the necessity of amalgamation, and to lay plans of education whereby the inevitable development may best be hastened.” A resolution on political action was adopted—the first time this had occurred at a convention in which Foster played a leading role. It stressed the importance of political action by trade unions as a means of exerting pressure upon the governments of their countries “in order to win them over or at least neutralize them.” In the United States, however, this political movement had been “thwarted and misdirected by the Gompers’ policy of ‘rewarding friends and punishing enemies”:999, This policy, which hooks the labor movement asa tail onto the capitalist political kites, literally poisons the trade unions. It introduces directly into their ranks all the corrupt influences of capitalist politics, besides keeping the organizations committed to the promulgation of capitalist economics. So long as it persists, the workers cannot acquire a class understanding of their class position in society. And without this, militant labor organization is impossible.

The Conference therefore condemned the Gompers’ political policy “as fatal to the success of the trade union movement,” and called upon “the workers of America to take the necessary steps for engaging in a militant campaign of independent working class political action.””2 The Conference also announced support for the Federated Press, proposed the shop delegate form of organization and industrial amalgamation, condemned secessionism and dual unions, and approved affiliation to the

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RILU. Trade union members expelled from their organizations because of activities on behalf of the TUEL, or for other reasons, were instructed to seek readmission. The coal strike then in progress was endorsed, and sympathy and solidarity were expressed for the striking railroad shopmen. The culmination of the resolutions came with the approval of workers’ control of industry, the abolition of capitalism, and the institution of a workers’ commonwealth. The slogan of the League from then on was to be “Work, not talk.””3 Reports of the industrial sections included plans for amalgamation in the building trades, railroads, metal trades, and needle trades. There were no delegates from the transport, food, and amusement sections; consequently, no reports on these industries were presented. The coal miners’ delegation submitted a progressive program for action in the United Mine Workers of America, and William Dunne was assigned to work with the metal miners. The police had seized the reports of the boot and shoe and textile industries during their raid, so that the delegates heard only a short summary of these reports.”4 The Constitution of the TUEL, adopted by the National Conference, stated that the League was neither a union nor a union center, but that it aimed to combine trade unionists within established organizations to achieve progressive policies. It expressly forbade the collection of anything in the nature of union dues from its members. The League was to be “purely an educational body, not a trade union.” Only “Sood-standing members of recognized trade unions” could hold office in the League and participate in its meetings. Financially, the organization would depend on voluntary contributions from individuals and local unions, the sale of literature, and a “Sustaining Fund.” The Fund was to be promoted by the sale of special Sustaining Fund Certificates. The national officers of the League were to be a secretary-treasurer and a national committee composed of the 14 secretaries of the national industrial sections. Between national conferences, the national committee was to carry out the policies of the League. The aim of the TUEL was -.. to carry on an intensified campaign of educational work within the trade unions to the end that the natural development of these bodies to ever more clearsighted, cohesive, militant and powerful organizations may be facilitated, and thus the labor movement hastened on to the accomplishment of its great task of working class emancipation. To organize all militant trade unionists into local general educational groups: to carry on the work of amalgamation between the various crafts with the aim of eventually bringing each craft into its natural basic trade industrially.75

Ten distinct principles made up the program of the TUEL: (1) rejection of dual unionism; (2) rejection of the AFL’s class-collaboration policies and

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adoption of the principle of class struggle; (3) industrial unionism through amalgamation of existing unions; (4) organization of the unorganized; (5) unemployment insurance; (6) a labor party; (7) the shop delegate system; (8) affiliation of the American labor movement with the RILU. (9) support for the Russian Revolution, and (10) the abolition of the capitalist system

and the establishment of a workers’ republic. Later, Foster conceded that the last three principles really did not belong in the program, since they blurred the distinction between a revolutionary party and a left-progressive movement to educate and change the trade unions.”6 All League members were urged to contribute at least $2.00 per year to the Sustaining Fund, which they could pay in installments, the first of which, however, had to be at least $1.00. Of the money to be collected, 50 percent would go to the national League and 50 percent to the local League. Every “real League fighter” would not only be a contributor to the Fund, but would help convince “all those who sympathize with the Trade Union Educational League” to contribute to the Sustaining Fund.”” Shortly after the Conference, the League applied to the American Fund for Public Service—the “Garland Fund’—which funded radical and progressive causes of which it approved. On December 22, 1922, Roger N. Baldwin, secretary of the Fund and a member of its board of directors, wrote to David J. Saposs: “Would you mind looking over this application from the Trade Union Educational League and giving us your judgment on it from the point of view of its place in the American labor movement, its possible usefulness and the soundness of its arrangement?”’8 Saposs’s reply is interesting, not only because it must have been influential in securing funding for the League, but also because of the evaluation it offered of the TUEL at the end of 1922: As one who has been following the labor movement for some twelve years, and who has had direct contact with it in one form or another for over five years, I feel there is vital need for an organization that will at least develop an intelligent opposition to the reactionary, routinized and visionless leaders controlling the labor movement. We need a trade union public opinion to check the arbitrary and intolerant attitude of the leaders; to make them more responsive to the wishes of the membership; to subordinate craft interests to those of the general labor movement; to discuss and understand constructive measures for a more cohesive

and efficient trade unionism; and to inject more idealism in the movement.

Saposs continued: From my observation of the activities of the Trade Union Educational League since its inception, I feel confident that it is the best equipped organization to foster the creation of a sound, progressive and constructive trade union public opinion. Its success in mobilizing the intelligent, “active” spirits, and in convinc-

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ing them that disruptionist tactics are fallacious, as well as its success in popularizing “amalgamation” is indicative that it bodes to be useful and constructive expectation.

Saposs concluded his letter: While its success is in a measure due to the fact that conditions are ripe for the ideals and tactics it propagates, I am of the opinion that most of the credit for its present achievements should be attributed to the sound judgment of its leaders. Many worthy and timely undertakings of radicals have failed solely because of the impractical, irrational and incompetent leadership. I have had occasion to observe the work of the members of the National Committee of the Trade Union Educational League and have found them able and intelligent administrators and tacticians, who will certainly avoid the mistakes of the radicals who have preceded them. I believe there are few activities that are as deserving of financial aid by the Fund for Public Service as the Trade Union Educational League.

CHAPTER 7

THE TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: ADVANCES The TUEL’s letterhead carried the heading: “Education—Organization— Emancipation.” Of the three stated aims, the second was the most important! Foster and other League leaders understood that in a trade union a progressive spirit depended on many factors in addition to the form of organization, although they also believed that the union’s structure was basic. From the very outset, Foster made it clear that the amalgamation of the craft unions in the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods was the princi-

pal object of the TUEL.! It is important to emphasize that the TUEL was not a dual union. It collected no dues, had no membership cards, and issued no charters. “It was to be an auxiliary of the trade unions,” Earl B. Beckner noted in the

Journal of Political Economy, “not a substitute for them.”2 It should be remembered, in this connection, that the “two cardinal principals” set down by the Labor Herald, under Foster’s editorship, included the suppression of all dual unions and the proposition that the new movement must not be confined “merely to members of this or that political party or tendency.”3* Yet, as the American Labor Year Book noted, the TUEL was “more than a propaganda body”: It is a fighting organization to force adoption of its program by the American labor movement. It urges its members to be active in all strikes of their respective trades. In conventions it carries on a systematic and thoroughly prepared camf. See end notes. * While emphasizing that existing unions must be stimulated to begin organizing, Foster did

urge the militants to take the lead in forming new unions where there were no unions or where “existing unions are hopelessly decrepit.” While recognizing the fact that AFL affiliation provided some legitimacy and protection for independent unions against the attacks of

the employers, Foster insisted that newly formed unions must not advocate unity at any price (William Z. Foster, Organize the Unorganized, Chicago, TUEL, 1925, pp. 13-14).

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paign against those officials and administrators whom it considers reactionary. It nominates candidates for union offices against those who oppose its program.4

As we shall see, the League carried on this work in many international unions, but it was Chicago, where Foster himself led the battle, that became the first center of League activity. The TUEL’s campaign for amalgamation was initiated by Foster, a delegate to a meeting of the Chicago Federation of Labor on March 19, 1922. Foster introduced a resolution declaring that the labor movement was suffering defeats from the employers’ antiunion drive because the latter were united, while the unions were divided along trade lines and unable to offer concerted resistance, It called upon the AFL to lead the way and proposed asafirst step that the Executive Council convene a conference of international unions to amalgamate all unions in the respective industries into single organizations. The resolution was adopted by 114 to 37.5 The AFL Executive Council rejected the proposal and directed President Gompers to go to Chicago to halt the movement for amalgamation. On April 11, Gompers went to Chicago to “capture the Chicago Federation of Labor from the Reds.” He bypassed the Federation and called a conference of several hundred union officials in the Hotel Morrison. At the conference, Foster and Fitzpatrick spoke in support of the amalgamation resolution. Foster claimed that if the unions in the steel industry had been united, the 1919 strike would have been successful, and he emphasized that if industries were not organized on this basis, the unions would be destroyed. Gompers, on the other hand, charged that there had “grown up in Chicago a spirit which breeds dissension, conflict of views, conflict of plans and of action [and] estrangement among men so that the great, powerful voice with which organized labor should express the hopes and aspirations, as well as the demands of labor, is not heard ... as of yore.” He blamed this on the TUEL, which he called “a monumentally brazen attempt” to dictate to the American labor movement. He claimed that Foster had came back from Russia to work, not for industrial unionism, but for the dictatorship of the proletariat, “with Foster as dictator.”* Moreover, Gompers maintained, he had come back with “many millions of dollars” to advance the aims of the TUEL: W. Z. Foster, who had no money, went to Moscow and came back and announced that he was building a great secret machine to undermine the American labor movement and turn it over to the Red International, owned by Lenin. He began * While Gompers bitterly condemned Foster and challenged his integrity, he appears to have retained some respect for him. He was later quoted as asking: “Is it not a pity that so much ability should be subverted to disrupt our labor movement.” (Samuel Gompers, Seventy

Years of Life and Labor, [New York, 1925], p. 518. Gompers is quoted in American Vanguard, Sept. 1923, p. 6.)

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publication of an expensive magazine and proclaimed “a thousand secret agents in a thousand communities.”

As for the Chicago Federation of Labor’s resolution, Gompers called it “an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the workers.” The AFL, he declared, favored amalgamation, but it could not be hurried, and “it must not be done as part of a conspiracy to annihilate the AFL.”6 Before closing the meeting, Gompers challenged Foster to a debate on the “general question of industrial unionism versus craft unionism.” However, when Foster accepted the challenge, Gompers refused to reply. Instead, as Foster noted, “Mr. Gompers has thrown out a smoke-screen of abuse and resorted to the use of the capitalist press to slanderously attack the League and its secretary.” He was referring to an interview in the Chicago Daily Tribune, in which Gompers charged that “Foster’s so-called amalgamation proposition” was nothing but a Soviet plot to capture and destroy the AFL, and that Foster was simply an “agent of Lenin.” The interview appeared on the front page under a headline reading: “GOMPERS HITS RED MENACE.”

In his letter to Gompers demanding that he abide by his challenge to a debate, Foster summarized the argument he would have advanced had the debate actually taken place: My contention is that craft unionism is obsolete. The old type of organization, based upon trade lines, can no longer cope successfully with organized capital. To fit modern conditions, our unions must be based upon the lines of industry rather than upon those of craft, the necessary industrial unionism will be arrived at, not through the founding of ideal dual unions, but by amalgamating the old organizations. Already the trade unions, by federations and other get-together devices, have made much progress in the direction of industrial unionism. I hold that this tendency should be consciously encouraged. We should not simply blunder along blindly. The thing that must be done is to boldly proclaim our inevitable goal of one union for each industry, and to adopt every practical means that will tend to

get us there at the earliest date.”

Gompers responded with a nine-page attack on the TUEL in the May 1922 issue of the American Federationist entitled “Another Attempt At Soviet Dictatorship Unmasked,” The tenor of the lengthy editorial is revealed by its opening paragraph: A few months ago, there was devised in Moscow a new scheme of destroying the American Federation of Labor and its constituent unions and replacing them by a Red Revolutionary Federation. One of the best-known American Reds spent several months in Moscow in consultation with Lenine [sic], Trotsky and Co., to develop the new plan. It is proposed to disrupt and destroy the American Federation of Labor by means of changing the form of certain of the organizations affiliated to the American Federation of Labor. It is proposed that when this reorganization is effected, there shall be affiliation to the Bolshevist International at Moscow.

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Accusing the “new organization” of being the brainchild of one man who was serving “the political ends of Moscow” and who was acting as “an unlimited and unabridged dictator,” Gompers insisted that the AFL had already settled the issue of industrial unionism, citing as proof the fact that “a number of industrial organizations” were affiliated to the AFL, including “the United Mine Workers of America, ...the largest industrial union in the world.” This alone, he declared, was enough to show “how utterly unnecessary and treasonable is any effort to disrupt the American labor movement on the question of industrial organization.” Gompers noted that the AFL had been attacked in the past-by the IWW, with its “One Big Union” principle, and by both the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party, “a withered and bedraggled wretch seeking shelter in whatsoever haven may be reckless enough or gullible enough to take it in.” Now, however, the AFL faced its “most sinister” threat, from “the Red International of Moscow.” “While starvation ravages Russia, Lenine [sic] , whose factotum is William Z. Foster, now of Chicago, the self-anointed would-be autocrat dictator of labor in America, [who] reaches out through his Red International to proselytize among the people of the world.”8 In reply, Foster reminded Gompers that he, Foster, had advocated adoption by the AFL of the principles of industrial unionism and amalgamation years before the Bolshevik Revolution: “Instead of such a movement being a new thing for me, I have been working constantly along those lines for the last ten years. During the packinghouse and steel industry movements, I had exactly the same thing in mind as I have now, namely, the strengthening of the influence of progressive and radical elements in the trade union movement. Your alarm comes at a rather late date.” “How long, Mr. Gompers,” he asked, “do you think that progress can be dammed up by waving the red flag and scaring the membership?” After denouncing Gompers for charging that he was using “Bolshevist funds to undermine American labor,” Foster declared that the books of the TUEL were open for the inspection of any auditors Gompers might select. He insisted that Gompers “make good on his insinuations”: Either he must prove his statements and innuendoes or stand convicted of flagrantly unfair propaganda. Mr. Gompers’ charge about my building a great secret machine to undermine the American Federation of Labor is ridiculous. The fact is that the Trade Union Educational League, the body which Mr. Gompers has in mind, operates in broad daylight. Its plan of organization was announced publicly several months ago throughout the labor press of the country...

Foster charged that Gompers had issued the attack on him because he suffered “from an anti-Russian complex ... Where Russia is concerned, he is more heartless than the international capitalist class itself”:

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Another factor making for Gompers’ blast is that he fears the new spirit of progress now taking shape among the rank and file of the trade unions all over the country. Under his leadership, the trade union movement has come to a standstill politically, industrially and philosophically. The Trade Union Educational League is working to break this deadlock and to give the movement the impetus to progress which it now stands so sadly in need of, hence Gompers’ violent opposition. He hopes to break its influence by waving the bloody shirt.9

The Labor Herald, after noting that despite Gompers’ Chicago attack on Foster and the TUEL, the Chicago Federation of Labor had refused to rescind its vote in favor of amalgamation, went on to boast: “These spectacular witchhunting orgies of Mr. Gompers, so far from hampering the League, have proved the most decided stimulant to its work,”!° Advance accused Gompers of having tried “to discredit the progressive element in the American labor unions with a cock-and-bull tale about its being supported by Bolshevist funds,” and predicted that the red-baiting campaign would fail.11 As we shall see, however, Advance underestimated the power that could be exerted by the redbaiters in the labor movement. The Chicago Federation’s action, over Gompers’ opposition, in support of amalgamation had no effect on the AFL convention held in Cincinnati in June 1922. Of the usual preconvention gatherings of the AFL departments, only the Metal Trades’ Department meeting considered the issues of amalgamation and industrial unionism, with the customary outcome. An attempt by several progressive Pacific Coast machinists to have the department declare for consolidation of crafts and industrial unionism in order to present a more solid front to the employers was overwhelmingly defeated. At the convention itself one delegate, Herman de Frem of the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union 12646 of New York City, introduced a resolution calling for amalgamation and industrial unionism. It was not even discussed. “Another convention—another mark of disgrace to the American labor movement,” lamented Advance.!2 Still another “mark of disgrace” came on the heels of the convention. Under the heading, “Gompers Outlaws a Union of Reds,” the New York Times reported on July 11, 1922: “The American Federation of Labor moved yesterday to head off the general attempt by Communist elements to seize control of legitimate labor unions in New York City by lifting the charter of Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union 12646. This union, it

was alleged, had already fallen under control of the Communists.”!8 Hugh Frayne, organizer in charge of New York state, took the action by order of Samuel Gompers. He appeared before the Executive Board of a union with a membership of more than 600 men and women, and informed the board that the union’s charter had been lifted, and that he would begin

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the organization “of a new local immediately, eliminating the Communist and radical element.” Frayne assured Leonard Bright, the union’s president, that he would continue in office since he was a Socialist, not a

Communist.!4 The Executive Board of the expelled local characterized the action of the AFL in lifting its charter as a “high handed” piece of “star chamber” procedure, and they pledged that they “will fight to retain affiliation in the federation." Finally, they bitterly protested the “amazingly arbitrary and unconstitutional procedure on the part of Mr. Gompers,” in ordering the charter revoked “without a trial, a hearing, or even a statement of charges.”!6 Advance characterized the revocation of the charter as “the first big gun of the AFL machine to head off those who wish to work within the old line craft union for progressive policies.”!” The New York Times praised Gompers and Frayne for having taken the action against a “communistdominated” union, but complained that they had not gone far enough. “Leonard Bright is an avowed Socialist,” the Times noted, “yet the Federation is to retain him as head of the reformed union.” It was also significant that among the most fervent supporters of Gompers’ action was Benjamin Schlesinger, Socialist president of the ILGWU. Unless the AFL acted to halt “the tide of socialism, the campaign against “W. Z. Foster’s Trade Union Educational League will not convince the nation that the Federation is a truly American organization.”8 But John Davis, Secretary of Labor in Harding’s Cabinet, differed with the Times. Addressing the annual convention of the International Printing, Pressmen and Assistants Union of North America, Davis applauded Gompers’ action in revoking the Bookkeepers’ charter, and further praised Socialists for supporting Gompers. “Unions must oust the radicals,” he declared, urging the AFL to continue the policy of expulsions. “They menace the whole system of our labor organizations, and trade unionism for its

own preservation must take steps to eliminate them.”!9 However, no other expulsions followed. For the federal and state governments were doing the work of eliminating the militants of the TUEL by harassing and prosecuting Foster and his allies, and furnishing the AFL

and number of its affiliates,as well as lodges of the Railroad Brotherhoods, with the names of TUEL members so that they could be harassed and expelled. All this was done to prevent Foster from addressing a Denver meeting of trade unionists interested in the TUEL. “We have characterized him as an undesirable in Colorado, and we have decided to have him keep right on going without any stop in Denver,” was the only explanation for the action by the authorities offered by the state’s attorney general.20

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Later in August, the Chicago headquarters of the TUEL were raided by that state’s attorney general. The raid followed a wreck of a Michigan Central train near Gary, Indiana, in which two enginemen were killed. After the coroner’s jury had declared that the men had come to their death “as a result of a plot to wreck the train’—a conclusion soon proved to be false— Attorney General Robert E. Crowe authorized the raid on the TUEL headquarters, charging that Foster had been “declared by Samuel Gompers...to be an agent of Lenin and Trotsky,” and noting also that he had visited many places where rail shop strikers congregated. (The Bureau of Investigation had evidently convinced Crowe that Foster had drawn up “extensive plans for the sabotage of the railroads in support of the strikers.”) A dozen Chicago policemen broke into the TUEL offices in Chicago and ransacked Foster’s desk and files.* After processing a truckload of books, records, and propaganda seized in the raid, the state’s attorney general grumbled to the press: “We found nothing to base any charges against anyone.”2! What he did not mention was the fact that his office had turned a list of Labor Herald subscribers over to the Bureau of Investigation.** Also turned over as a result of the raid was a complete list of Foster’s correspondents. As he had previously promised, Burns provided the National Civic Federation with the names of TUEL members so that they could be expelled from the unions to which they belonged.22 Although the raid produced no incriminating evidence, it was not long before Foster was in a Chicago jail. He was arrested in the city following a raid in a wooded valley in the small resort village of Bridgman, Michigan. There, at a secret convention, the Communist Party of the United States

was bringing to a close the underground phase of its existence.*** One of the tasks confronting the Bridgman gathering was the formalization of the relationship between the TUEL and the Workers’ (Communist) Party. “Until 1924,” notes Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “...Foster’s administration of the League was uncontested. For instance, for almost the entire year of 1923, until September, the National Executive Committee of the TUEL met separately from the Party and consisted solely of Johnstone, Browder, and Foster, with Samuel Hammersmark occasionally participating

in meetings.”23 * The Bureau of Investigation did not participate in the actual raid on the TUEL offices, a fact that angered Director Burns, who criticized the Chicago bureau chief for negligence. ** A subscription to the Labor Herald constituted TUEL membership, since the League was not a dues-paying organization.

** There were at this time two components of the Communist movement in the United States: (1) the official Communist Party, which continued to operate underground, and (2) the Workers’ Party, which functioned legally and publicly, publishing a newspaper and holding public meetings. The purpose of the Bridgman convention was to move toward a resolution of these two factions, one of which favored continuation of the Party’s underground component, and the other which favored abolishing it

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Max Bedacht, a leading Communist during the 1920s, observes in his unpublished memoirs that Foster’s “coming into the Party had not been a formal unification. It was the result of a correct policy which attracted the old militant propagandists for a clear working class trade union policy.” The formation and growth of the TUEL were important for the Party: Foster’s connection with the Party now enabled him to expand this work of his group and to improve its effectiveness. The proletarian ranks of the Party added new strength to his organization. The Party, on the other hand, gained the strength of the League and the extremely valuable experiences of Foster in that work.

However, Bedacht felt that “the Party committed a serious error”: The most effective step at that time would have been to subordinate the function of the League to the trade union work of the Party, and, likewise, to add the trade union members within the Party to the action of thé Trade Union League to create a strong apparatus for work with the trade unions.... Such an arrangement would have put the direct responsibility for the work in the trade unions on the whole Party leadership. It would have acquainted the leadership with all of the major problems of that work, and would have guaranteed the fitting of that work into the general activities and policies of the Party.24

Foster, having successfully eluded the Department of Justice agents who were following him so that he might attend the Bridgman convention, expressed his views on this issue. He spoke at night in a small clearing in the woods, with lanterns and torches illuminating the scene, and he proposed that the only way the relationship between the Party and the TUEL could be fully established was for the Party to get into the League “intensively” at all levels. Everyone present in Bridgman knew that at the time Foster spoke, only five percent of the Party’s membership was involved in the TUEL.

A report given to the Bridgman convention on the progress of the TUEL provides some insight into the extent of the League late in 1922. Overall, there were TUEL nuclei in 48 cities, and the circulation of the Labor Herald was 11,000. In New York, the League was active in the Hat and Cap Makers’ Union and the ILGWU, where it “practically controlled” the knit goods workers’ union. In Chicago, the TUEL claimed 70 members in 11 locals of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Among railroad workers in that city, 50 members were active in 4 locals, although the majority of them were unemployed. In the building trades, there were 42 members in 13 locals in 6 trades. The report listed the scope of activities in unions in Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, Buffalo, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth. In many cities, membership figures were low, with often fewer than ten in each trade in which the TUEL was active. However, for Foster, it was most important that militant

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minorities had been established. He informed the Bridgman delegates that “we no longer measure the importance of revolutionary organizations by their size.” In steel, unionism had been effectively crushed in 1919, so that it was not surprising that the report noted simply: “Difficulty in making entry into

steel workers.”25 One of those present at Bridgman was Francis A. Morrow, a Department of Justice informer. He revealed the names of 32 persons to the local sheriff, including Foster, Rose Pastor Stokes, Mother Ella Reeve Bloor, and Charles E. Ruthenberg, the Party’s secretary. Following this disclosure, the sheriff and his deputies raided the meeting. Foster, among others, escaped the raid, but he was arrested at the TUEL office in Chicago, just after issuing a statement denying his involvement in the convention, and was held in prison for several days. On September 12, he was taken into custody by the sheriff of Berrien County, Michigan, on a governor’s warrant for arraignment in St. Joseph, Michigan, and was released on a $5,000 bond. The charge was violation of the Michigan criminal syndicalist law. Both the federal and Michigan authorities announced jubilantly that, as a result of the arrest of 17 Communist leaders, the search for others who had been at the convention, and most important of all, the arrest and arraignment in Michigan of Foster, they had succeeded in “the breaking up of one of the greatest radical conspiracies of recent years.”26 Foster, who faced a 5-to-10-year sentence in state prison if convicted, was the first to be tried. “At last,” he wrote to Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union* on August 25, 1922, “the powers that be believe they see their long awaited chance to get me.”?’ He had written to thank the ACLU for having offered him its services “in contesting in the courts the action of the Federal and state authorities in arresting you for alleged participation in a secret Communist Convention in Michigan.” The offer, signed by Norman Thomas, Robert Morss Lovett, Scott Nearing, and Roger Baldwin, noted: We are making this special offer to you because we are so fully advised of your activities in the Trade Union Educational League to create a greater solidarity among the workers of America through the development of industrial unionism. We know that your program does not involve violence in any form, that it is entirely legal. It is advocated by some of the most substantial elements in American life outside the labor movement, notably several important religious associations, among them both Catholics and Protestants. If the authorities * The American Civil Liberties Union grew out of a Civil Liberties Bureau, established in 1917 as an adjunct to the American Union of Militarism, set up two years earlier. Its

founder, Roger N. Baldwin, a conscientious objector, resigned from the Bureau when called by the draft board and served time in prison. In 1920 the ACLU was set up on a permanent basis attracting, in addition to Baldwin, Rev. Harry F. Ward, Jeannette Rankin, Oswald Garrison Villard, Robert Morss Lovett, Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, and others.

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choose to attack the advocates of this idea, they should logically take into custody the officers of these religious associations in Washington and New York. They are well-known and easily reached. These considerations show the absurdity of the attacks on you. You are singled out because you have an effective means of putting the idea into operation; the other advocates have not. We are not concerned with the idea itself but solely with your right and the right of anyone else to advocate it. Our lawyers, our press service and our other facilities are at your disposal without cost to you or your association.

Foster was being prosecuted under one of a score of criminal syndicalism statutes that had been passed in various states during and after the war. As we have seen in our discussion of the IWW San Pedro strike, the statutes themselves varied in their definitions of “syndicalism.” Typical laws, like the one in Michigan, held it illegal to advocate violence or sabotage as a means of political or industrial reform. Some states were even more specific. The law in effect in Idaho, for example, included in its definition of “sabotage” such activities as loitering on the job, doing work improperly, waste, the publication of trade secrets, or slowing down work or production.

It is not surprising that organized labor perceived these laws as genuine threats. As early as 1919, the Michigan Federation of Labor had called for the repeal of the statutes under which Foster was arrested. He was accused under the provision of the Michigan law that forbade voluntarily assembling with any organization that advocated sabotage or violence.29 Unlike the situation during the Palmer raids in 1919-20, the defense of the Bridgman victims found an immediate response from large sections of the labor movement. Late in August, 1922, William F. Kruse, assistant secretary of the Workers’ (Communist) Party, informed Baldwin: We expect to get together a general defense conference, a sort of Conference to Combat Reaction, on which the cooperation of all labor and liberal groups with be saught (sic). If you can give me any leads on organizations or individuals in this party i of the country that should be approached on the subject, please do so at once.

Baldwin warned Kruse about the problems associated with such a plan.

Referring specifically to the proposed “general defense council,” he wrote: “I have had something of that sort in mind for some time. It will be better if the communist group or those commonly thought of as communists should not call it. We will be glad to do so in cooperation with other organizations

if you will outline just what you have in mind.”32

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Despite Baldwin’s reservations, the Communists assumed responsibility for raising bail and defense funds. The Labor Defense Council held its first meeting on September 26, 1922. Its National Committee consisted of Foster, Ruthenberg, Dunne, Browder, and Moritz Loeb—all Communists. They unanimously decided “to get in touch with Frank P. Walsh...and tentatively retain him as chief counsel.”* The committee authorized Ruthenberg, its secretary, “to borrow necessary funds to retain Mr. Walsh and to pledge the resources of this organization in this manner.”22 Even though Walsh demanded a fee of $50,000, plus expenses, the Labor Defense Council felt that a prominent attorney and important liberal figure like Walsh was worth it. Accordingly, Ruthenberg informed Walsh: “The fee for your service os to be $50,000 plus expenses, which we are to pay as follows: $12,000 at once; $12,500 by the date of the trial, and the balance in such amounts as the Labor Defense Council can pay thereafter.”34 Baldwin agreed to help with fund-raising and publicity but demanded that Foster he removed as “secretary” of the defense committee because his status as defendant in the case would appear to constitute a conflict of interest. He further requested that all persons associated with the effort refrain “from any political activities during the period in which they are employed.”** Foster assured Baldwin that he could “depend upon it that we will use every effort on this end of the line to see that the speakers stick

to their knitting while talking for the Defense Council.” The Labor Defense Council included Baldwin, Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Max Hayes, James H. Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, Father John A. Ryan, and a number of leading trade unionists who were on its national and local committees.** The Council distributed a leaflet “for the defense of the Michigan criminal syndicalist defendants prosecuted at the instance of the Federal Secret Service in its drive against organized labor.” The leaflet pointed out that the “Michigan Red Raids conducted by the agents of Attorney General Daugherty and the Michigan Department of Justice” constituted “a menace to the maintenance of freedom of speech and assemblage in America,” and went on: The fight of the arrested men is YOUR fight. Their imprisonment will result in further attacks upon your liberty. Their release will be a knockout blow to the reactionary forces that are attempting to make this a land of Czarism and slavery. * Frank P. Walsh, a liberal lawyer, was chairman of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations and headed the Committee on Industrial Relations, which was organized to continue as a private organization some of the investigative work formerly carried on by the U.S. Commission. During the early months of 1916, together with a group of investigative friends, Walsh formed the National Labor Defense Council to advise local lawyers in any defense case arising out of a labor struggle. (Marsha Walsh to Frank P. Walsh, Jan. 26, 1916, Frank P. Walsh Papers, New York Public Library.) Walsh had known Foster through

his work as counsel for the meatpacking workers during the 1918 arbitration. ** The Council held its meetings in the building of the CFL.

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We ask you for a gift this Christmas—a gift to yourself, a gift to your organization and a gift to the millions of workers toiling in every shop, mine, factory, mill and field, and finally a gift to free the twenty men who are fighting your battle. Yours for American Freedom,

LABOR DEFENSE COUNCIL*®

The response was immediate. Mass meetings were held in Chicago and New York, protesting the action of the federal and state authorities against Communists and trade unionists. The Chicago meeting was addressed by Ruthenberg, general secretary of the Workers’ (Communist) Party, Foster, and Robert M. Buck, editor of New Majority, the official organ of the CFL. After listening to and applauding Foster’s denunciation of the sell-out of the strike of the railroad shopmen by “$25,000-a-year labor leaders,” the CFL adopted a resolution protesting against his “recent arrest with other radicals”... In its issue of September 16, 1922, New Majority editorialized: The recent raids ... in which more than a score of trade unionists were arrested in Michigan and Illinois, are felt throughout the country as a direct attack upon the labor movement as a whole, particularly upon the progressive trade union movement. When in 1920 the red raids came and passed with hardly a protest from the unions and no concerted actions on their part, the 1922 raids find unions all over the country aroused and ready to take action on behalf of the labor men now in jail or facing trial. Now more than ever it is plain that the cause of the victims of the raids is the concern of the labor movement and that an attack on “reds” is a covert attack on unionism.

The Michigan and Detroit Federations of Labor, while assuring the public that they had no sympathy with Communism, passed resolutions in favor of the repeal of the state syndicalism law. The United Mine Workers in District 12 (Illinois) contributed a monthly check-off to the Labor De-

fense Council.38 Because the case against Foster was the weakest, the defense chose to have him tried first, on March 12, 1923. Foster was perceived throughout

the country as the central figure in the case; publicity put out by the Labor Defense Council emphasized his progressive role in the labor movement, and the New Republic noted that his “program of industrial unionism gave him an immediate importance beyond the Communist theorists,”29 Two widely distributed publications of the Labor Defense Council were “Eight Questions and Seven Answers About the Michigan ‘Red Raid’ Cases,” and “What William Z. Foster Means to the American Labor Movement.” The former publication began: 5

There is no Federal law in the United States under which the holding of, or preaching of Communist doctrines is a crime. Yet the raids and arrests were made «nder the direction and with the cooperation of the United States Department of

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Justice. Not a single overt act has been committed by, or charged against any of the defendants. They are being railroaded to jail solely because they are militant leaders of the working class and as such are dangerous to the employing class.

As for the timing of the raids, the pamphlet declared: The summer of 1922 in the United States has been the industrial warfare. Half a million coal miners have been decent standard of living and for preservation of their shopmen have been on strike; 200,000 textile workers much the same reasons.

scene of unprecedented on strike in defense of a union; 400,000 railroad have been on strike for

Answering the question, “Who Are the Men Involved?” the pamphlet said: “The nineteen men who are being held in this case are all of them active militants in the American Labor movement .... All these men are active and well known in the labor movement in their respective localities.” To the question, “Why Were These Men Arrested?” the answer given was: When the employing class finds the time ripe for an attack on the labor movement, it is always the outstanding labor militants that have to bear the heaviest burden .... The employing class fully recognizes that the labor militants are the life and breath of the labor movement and that with them out of the way, the labor movement is handicapped and doomed to impotency. In 1922, the United States Government and the employing class, faced by a nationwide industrial conflict, by the growing discontent and rebellious spirit of the American working class, by nationwide strikes that were fast threatening to spread into a nationwide general strike, knew its task and lost no time in performing it. “Remove the labor militants, the revolutionaries! Put them in jail, cut off their connections from the masses of the workers.” Such were the slogans and deeds of the bosses.

As to what the raids meant to the labor movement, the pamphlet replied: The Michigan cases are only the culmination of attack after attack on the American labor movement. They are only the latest outrages against the workers. They are only one more move to take away from the American workers the last vestige of their civil rights. If this attack is allowed to go unanswered, it can mean nothing less than a surrender to the forces that are trying to destroy free speech, free press and freedom of assemblage.

After describing the Labor Defense Council, the pamphlet asked, “What Can You Do?” and the answer given was: You can support the Labor Defense Council. You can support it with money to carry on its work. You can sacrifice out of your slender incomes money which will enable the Labor Defense Council to make its force felt throughout the length and breadth of this country. You can give funds to supply the legal defense in the Michigan cases....40

The other publication—What William Z. Foster Means to the Labor Movement-presented the details of Foster’s work in the labor movement, from his membership in the IWW to his activities in the AFL during the

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meatpacking strike and the great steel strike. It then outlined what he stood for: As a result of these many years of organizing and study, Foster has come to the conclusion that the salvation of the American labor movement lies in the adoption of a definite program of action: AMALGAMATION of the many various craft unions into a small number of powerful industrial unions, one for each industry; AGAINST DUAL UNIONISM as a harmful tendency in the American labor movement.

PROGRESSIVE LABOR LEADERSHIP, and doing away with the job holders and labor fakers; A LABOR PARTY to fight labor’s battle on the political field for the rights of freedom to organize, freedom of speech and assemblage. A WORKERS’ REPUBLIC and the abolition of capitalism.*

Then followed the statement: “He is being railroaded to jail solely because he is a militant leader of the working class, and as such is dangerous to the employing class.” The pamphlet closed with an appeal: DEFEND WILLIAM Z. FOSTER BECAUSE THE BOSSES WANT HIM IN JAIL. DEFEND WILLIAM Z. FOSTER BECAUSE HE STANDS FOR A STRONG UNITED LABOR MOVEMENT.

Commenting on this latter publication, Advance editorialized: In the present state of general reaction and apathy,** the progress made by the movement for industrial amalgamation holds out hope for a brighter future for American labor. American labor must be on the alert. Foster has incurred the genuine animosity of both the employing class and the big and small Gomperses by his successful campaign for a more effective form of labor organization. They are determined to remove him from the scene and destroy the movement he

heads.42

Advance pointed out that Foster was “not a Syndicalist, and thus should not be charged with having violated the Act against Criminal Syndicalism.” In reality, it emphasized, the trial had nothing to do with Syndicalism: The hatred of the ruling class for William Z. Foster is easily understood. Foster understands thoroughly American Capitalism and the American Labor Movement. He is known among the rank and file for his courage, integrity, and tireless activity. That makes him a formidable foe of those who would keep labor in ignorance and oppression. It is, therefore, easy to see why the enemies of labor are anxious to get rid of him....43

Foster’s trial began on March 12, 1923, in St. Joseph, Michigan. As the jury was being chosen, O. L. Smith, assistant attorney general of Michigan, * This “program of action” was usually called “Fosterism.” However, the last point was not usually included.

** Clearly, Advance did not agree with the statement in Eight Questions and Seven Answers.... about the “rebellious spirit of the American working class” at the time.

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who was directing the prosecution, informed the press that 15,000 copies of a circular issued by the American Civil Liberties Union, protesting the trial, had been distributed in Berrien County. The circular declared that the trial of the ..alleged Communists was brought, not because the local authorities were interested in it, but because the Federal Secret Service at Washington intended to wipe out the Communist movement in the United States. Having no Federal law under which to jail the men who met in their convention at Bridgman last summer, they used a Michigan State statute passed in the hysteria of a few years ago.

The chief witness against Foster was Francis A. Morrow of Camden, New

Jersey (“K-97"), who offered testimony connecting Foster with the Communist International, headquartered in Moscow, and with “the program of world revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Morrow testified that Foster had attended the Bridgman convention under the “party name” of Borden. He also testified—and the prosecution supplemented this testimony—that “Foster’s program to substitute the foreign industrial union for the American type of labor union, which he has been agitating, was down on the agenda as a powerful feature of the convention.” Maurice Wolff, another agent of the Department of Justice, identified a number of exhibits, including “The Russian Revolution” by Foster, copies of the Labor Herald, edited by Foster, and an anonymous petipiler “The Red Labor Internationale.” Foster testified in his own defense on March 29. Under questioning by his chief counsel, Frank P. Walsh, he calmly admitted that he had gone to Russia in 1921, had returned more determined than ever to advance the Trade Union Educational League, which he and a small group of militants had formed in 1920, and had started the Labor Herald as its official organ “to carry out the League’s program.” He admitted that at the time he had written Syndicalism (in collaboration with Earl Ford), he had advocated direct action, sabotage, the general strike, and anarchist methods, but declared that since then, he had repudiated the book and the doctrines of the syndicalist movement, and that the Communist views he now held were fundamentally different from and incompatible with syndicalism. As a Communist (though not a member of the Party), he said, he now believed in political action rather than direct action. Foster admitted his belief in the Soviet form of government and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He denied, however, that he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party, or that the TUEL had any organic connection with the Party, insisting that Communists made up only about ten percent of the League’s membership. He acknowledged having attended the Bridgman convention, but not in the capacity of a delegate. He claimed he was an observer who

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had come to propound the doctrines of the TUEL, which he had done in a speech to the gathering.* Prosecutor Smith appealed to the jurors’ patriotism in urging them to find Foster guilty. He pleaded with them to “keep faith with our war dead,” as he invoked the image of the crosses in Flanders Field. Walsh, on the other hand, in his appeal to the jury, drew comparisons between Foster and the early Christian martyrs. He quoted from Plato, Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence to demonstrate that Foster’s beliefs were in keeping with the finest traditions of mankind. In his charge to the jury, Judge Charles E. White took an approach that was unusual in a trial of a radical. He told the jury that they had to be convinced of two points in order to justify a verdict of guilty: in August 1922, when the Bridgman convention took place, did the Communist Party of the United States advocate the violent overthrow of the government? And did Foster go to the convention with the intent of furthering a plan for the violent overthrow of the government? The mere fact of assembly, the judge pointed out, was not a crime under the Michigan anti-syndicalist law, nor was the advocacy of a Communist social revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the various theories and policies of the Communist Party documents placed in evidence. In short, according to Judge White, the advocacy of Communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat was not in itself a crime or a violation of the anti-syndicalist law unless it was done by unlawful means.*4 On April 6, after 31 hours of deliberation and 38 ballots, the jury reported itself in a 6-6 deadlock and was dismissed. Time magazine (which had begun publication a month before), quoted Juror Russel Dum, a grocer, as he explained his “not guilty” vote: “They didn’t give us the dope. The prosecution didn’t prove that the Communist Party advocated violence...” Minerva Olson, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, said she had voted for Foster’s acquittal because she felt there was “more persecution of Foster than prosecution.”45 But Russell Porter, who had covered the trial from beginning to end for the New York Times, was convinced that there was another reason for the jury’s decision: Foster’s character and personality undoubtedly impressed the jury in his favor. His honesty and truthfulness on the witness stand, his frankness in answering * Most reports in the commercial press gave inflammatory versions of Foster’s testimony. Thus, the New York Times reported that he had admitted he had “brought back [from Russia] a program laid down by Lenin and other Russian Communists for a revolution in the United States based upon the organization of working men into industrial unions instead of the American craft unions,” and that he had also said that the object of “boringfrom-within” was “to overthrow the capitalist system and set up a Communist state of society” (Aug. 30, 1923). All this was sheer fabrication.

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questions about his advocacy of the Soviet form of government, made his sincerity apparent, and convinced those who heard him that he was actuated by high principle, even if misguided... People who were ready to see him hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square when the trial began came around to the point before it was over, where they did not want to see him convicted.

The verdict was a serious blow to the AFL leadership. Vice-President Matthew Woll, who had only scorn for the favorable comments on Foster and called him “simply an opportunist, riding on the crest of any movement that held out for the time being an opportunity for private gain and public notoriety,” tried to make the best of the verdict. Woll declared that Foster represented nobody but a handful of “cranks,” and that to retry him, as was being suggested in some circles, “is to make something of nothing.” The best solution, Woll maintained, would be simply to ignore him.47 Foster, writing to David J. Saposs on April 9, 1923, expressed the view that “we have done the very best in Michigan that we could expect under the circumstances .... Did you see the big story gotten out by Matthew Woll today, balling [sic] out the Michigan authorities for their foolishness in trying me and thereby making a martyr out of me. He advises them to drop the prosecution right away. I hope they take his advice.” Foster was confident that “the prosecution will have a great deal of trouble to convict me in that country if they make a second trial of it. When we went to trial, public sentiment looked very much against us, but before we left it had veered to our side."48 Gompers dismissed Woll’s proposal. Addressing the convention of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers early in May, he appealed to the union to work out the jurisdictional dispute with the United Hatters of North America, which had led them to withdraw from the AFL in 1917. Then, he declared, they could return to the Federation and join it, and most Socialists, in the fight against Foster’s campaign to annihilate the legitimate American labor movement. Gompers warned that the danger of annihilation by “cliques” who followed Foster should not be underestimated—constant vigilance and an ongoing offensive to undermine and destroy them were required.*9 Evidently not even the idea of assassination was out of the question as far as Foster’s foes were concerned. On August 27, 1923, while he was addressing a meeting of 2,000 garment workers in Chicago, three gunmen suddenly burst into the hall. One of then fired three shots at the TUEL leader, while the other two, guns drawn, stood guard. The gunmen then fled down afire escape.

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No one was seriously hurt in the rush for the exits, which was stopped by Foster, who kept on speaking.>° Indignant over the latest attack on Foster, Advance asked: Why does not the Chicago police find the gunman? Why does not the State’s Attorney in Chicago use his great power to bring the would-be assassin to the bar of justice? Why does not the Department of Justice use its great and vast machinery to apprehend the man who tried to kill an American citizen?

It answered: Because the American citizen happens to be William Z. Foster, the Department of Justice, the State’s Attorney, and the Chicago police permit a dangerous criminal to be at large and endanger the lives of other citizens rather than arrest the gunman and thus perhaps reveal the identity of the enemies of labor who sent him to commit murder.51

The gunman was never apprehended, but Foster and his colleagues had other things on their minds. For one thing, there were other victories to celebrate. Thanks to the ACLU, Foster’s “Colorado kidnapping” became a national issue. On August 11, 1922, following a seven-week speaking trip in the West, Foster wrote to Roger Baldwin of the ACLU: It seems to me this is a splendid opportunity to put those Colorado and Wyoming crooks ina hole. In this kidnapping business, they violated a dozen or more laws. There should be some way possible to put them on the pan about it. It would be a shame to let them get away with it without making a vigorous protest. Can the Civil Liberties Union be interested in doing something about it? I should think it would be a comparatively simple and inexpensive thing to force those authorities

over on the defensive.52

Ten days later, Baldwin wrote “To our friends in Denver: William Z. Foster has asked us to take care of his interests in getting redress for the recent deportation from Colorado and in making the most effective protest possible.” The ACLU had decided, Baldwin informed the recipients, to ask Carle Whitehead to institute whatever proceedings were possible under Colorado law in the courts, “and we are investigating the possibilities from here of getting the case into the federal court.” He continued: “But most important is another meeting in Denver, with Foster as a speaker, in order to make a public protest of national significance against the lawless action of Adjutant-General Hamrock.” Specifically, Baldwin asked “our friends in Denver” to see that the platform for the meeting was “well filled with Denver liberals who will, by their presence, express protest against the action of the state authorities,”

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to see to it that resolutions were adopted “directed against the recent conduct of the Colorado State Rangers in suppressing free speech and free assemblage,” to send letters to the newspapers commenting upon the incident, and to have protests from individual citizens directed to the governor.>3 Baldwin’s appeal produced results. When William E. Sweet, a liberal Democrat of Denver, was informed by a local ACLU member that Foster had been kidnapped and escorted out of the state by the Colorado Rangers, he wrote to Baldwin, indicating that he wanted to help the ACLU make the incident an issue in his forthcoming candidacy for governor.°4 Subsequent ACLU publicity portrayed Foster’s kidnapping as typical of “Ranger Rule” and of the “high-handed tactics” used by the current governor in dealing with organized labor. Foster wrote to Baldwin in August that his case “seems to have attracted a great deal of interest in Colorado. So much in fact, that it has became apolitical issue.”°5 Focusing on the problem of the Rangers and the deportation of Foster, Sweet was elected governor in November 1922. Following Sweet’s victory, Hamrock, the state’s adjutant general, resigned, along with dozens of Colorado Rangers.°6 Foster returned in triumph to Denver and spoke before a huge crowd in the Printers’ Union hall. “William Z. Foster, the Communist, Speaks Here,” read the headline in the Denver Bulletin of January 1, 1923, followed by the subheading: “Boneheadedness of Hamrock and His Rangers in Deporting This Parasite on the Workers Makes Him a Hero on His Return to Colorado.” The Bulletin noted that Foster was introduced by L. V. Anderson, “a member of the Brewery and Soft Drink Workers’ Union, who is also secretary of the Trade Union Educational League of Denver, a branch of Foster’s organization. This organization took an active part in the recent election and joined forces with the Colorado State Federation of Labor’s state labor central committee, which supported the Democratic ticket.” The Bulletin also noted that in his speech, “Foster no longer attempts to disguise his activities in behalf of the communist party in this country, but boldly tells the workers to emulate the example of the Russian workingmen and peasants and overthrow the government.” The Denver paper was doubtful if Foster’s visit “has done any harm to the labor movement of this state,” but added: Colorado’s experience with Foster should be a lesson to other states in dealing with radicals of Foster’s type. Persecution and deportation of these men only brings them the desired publicity they are seeking and helps them in their

destructive work.57

An extremely satisfied Foster wrote to Baldwin after the meeting that “it was a real treat to put one over on Hamrock and [former Governor]

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Shoup.” He predicted the “disintegration” of the Rangers and that “there will be some very interesting developments in the Colorado political area before long.”°8 During the period encompassing Foster’s arrest in Chicago, his arraignment in Michigan through the trial itself, and the satisfactory, if unexpected outcome, the TUEL was not inactive. On August 26, 1922, while Foster was at liberty on bond pending a hearing on a warrant for his removal to Michigan, some 22 militants, including a dozen women, attended a meeting of the TUEL. (The gathering was variously described as a convention, conference, and meeting.)* The reporter for the New York Times noted with surprise: “No attempt at secrecy was made, the doors were wide open and all comers were admitted without question.”°? However, this did not prevent the Times from repeating Gompers’ charge, buttressed by releases from federal and state authorities, that the TUEL was “a secret conspiracy.” Foster announced to the gathering that despite continued persecution, including raids on League offices, the work of the movement was going forward, and that “ninety-five percent of the radicals within organized labor had been enrolled in the League.” He predicted that the League’s program, especially its amalgamation and industrial unionism features, would continue to win converts among rank-and-file trade unionists and even among union leaders. There was no lack of evidence supporting this statement. League publications had gained a wide audience among rank-and-file trade unionists. In March 1922, the Labor Herald had a circulation of 10,000, which had increased ten-fold by the fall. Over 250,000 copies of Amalgamation, the pamphlet by the former anarco-syndicalist Jay Fox, were distributed during the summer and fall of 1922.1 Amalgamation opened with the declaration: MILITANTS, NOTICE! Organize! Join the Trade Union Educational League. This is a system of informal committees throughout the entire union movement, organized to infuse the mass with revolutionary understanding and spirit. It is working for the closer affiliation and solidification of our existing craft unions until they have developed into industrial unions.

In the pamphlet itself, Fox made it clear that the League also stood for “strong political organization of the workers,” convinced that the “Gompers policy” of rewarding labor’s friends and punishing its enemies “has not * Even this meeting was raided. On the evening of August 26, federal agents and Chicago police broke into the hall in which sessions were under way and took 11 participants into custody. Two of the men seized were said to be wanted by the Berrien County, Michigan authorities in connection with the convention of the Communist Party held in Bridgman. The other 9 were held for deportation as “undesirables ” (Chicago Tribune, Aug. 27, 28, 1922;-New York Times, Aug. 27, 1922).

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only reduced the workers to a political zero in the various legislative bodies, but it has also been the means of poisoning the unions with capitalistic economics and corruption.” Because “the building up of a militant labor party is one of the most important necessities of the labor movement,” the League was carrying the fight on this issue “into local and national unions everywhere...” ; Fox boldly asserted that the League subscribed “to the formation of the Workers’ Republic” by the overthrow of capitalism, advocated “the dictatorship of the proletariat, which means that none but the hand and brain workers, industrial and agricultural, should rule society,” and gave its heartiest support to Soviet Russia, the first attempt of the world’s workers to put their inspiring and scientific program into effect.” However, “the first and most urgent step in the great work of emancipation” was the establishment of industrial unionism through amalgamation. Fox presented an alarming picture of the power of the American capitalists. Organized into their own “industrial unions” to crush labor, they had simultaneously gained almost total control of the government, the educational institutions, the church, the press, and all other social organizations in the United States. Against this formidable power, labor was only able to offer craft unions, a weak and obsolete weapon in the twentieth century industrial conflict. The weakness was due also to the mistaken policy in the past of the progressive and radical forces withdrawing from the existing craft unions and setting up dual industrial unions, leaving the reactionary officialdom in complete control. The TUEL, Fox wrote, was fighting craft unionism through its struggle within the existing unions for amalgamation, with the eventual transformation of craft unionism into departmentalized

industrial unionism. According to Fox, a departmentalized industrial unionism met the objection to amalgamation that the industrial union “will throw all the workers together in a general mass, eliminating craft identity and thereby creating a confusion and general indifference among the rank and file that will weaken rather than strengthen the organization.” Fox pointed out that in every country where industrial unions existed, they were formed on the basis of departments, each of which contained several closely allied crafts: The League is urging this same form here. In each industry there will be one organization covering the whole body of workers, but this will be sub-divided into sections or departments for the principal branches of the industry. This will enable the respective trades to handle their particular problems efficiently and at the same time benefit from the strength of a whole mass.

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Amalgamation leading to departmentalized industrial unionism was going on all over the world, Fox emphasized. Only in the United States was it “lagging”: The American capitalists lead the world for enterprise, daring, and militant progressiveness. The American labor movement leads the world in the opposite directions. It is fully 30 years behind the times in its ideas and organization structure. Its officialdom has persistently remained capitalistic and has tied the labor unions to the chariot of industrial despotism. This bond must be broken and Labor released from the thralldom of capitalist thought by the sturdy militants who are now assembling under the banner of the Trade Union Educational League. The accomplishments of departmentalized industrial unionism through amalgamation is the first and most important step in the great work of emancipation.62

League pamphlets dealing with amalgamation in specific unions also gained wide readership. One of the most popular was distributed among building trades workers. It warned that “something has to be done to stop the retreat of the building trades workers, and done quickly or else the building industry throughout the country will be manned entirely by nonunion labor, which means that our standard of living and our working conditions will gradually sink down to the slavery level.” In the past, the pamphlet noted, the building trades had federated for mutual support, and, as a result, had gained higher wages, the 8-hour day, and better working conditions: But the law of change is ever at work. The employers have so strengthened their organizations that federations of crafts are not only unable to better the conditions of the building trades workers, but are actually in full retreat. They are forced to accept wage cuts and relinquish working conditions that we have won in many a hard fought and bitter struggle. The cause of our disastrous defeats is that we have failed to keep pace with the times. Although the employers have gone on steadily consolidating their organizations, we have neglected to do so with ours. Our present great need, and the one thing that we must have if we are to prosper and progress as a body of workers, is the complete amalgamation of all the building trades unions into one organization covering the entire industry.

The League pamphlet proposed the joining of all the building trades unions into one body consisting of 8 specialized departments: (1) Building Material Department; (2) Building Finishers and Maintenance Department; (3) Wrecking, Moving and General Laborer Department; (4) Wood Working Department; (5) Pipe Fitting and Power Department; (6) Iron Department; (7) Technical Department, and (8) Mason Department. The Wood Working Department, for example, would be made up of carpenters, cabinet makers, lathers, and pile drivers, and the Iron Department, of bridge and structural iron workers, boilermakers, sheet metal workers, machinists, elevator constructors, and machinery movers.

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The pamphlet declared that one of the main arguments used against amalgamation was that trade lines would be completely broken down, and the wages of the skilled workers “would sink to the level of the unskilled.” However, it insisted, this was contrary to the facts. Wherever the workers were organized industrially, the wages of the skilled workers were higher than in those industries where they were “still doing business along the old

craft union lines.” The reasons were obvious: “The craft union is a much smaller organization. Its vision is narrow, it depends solely upon its own efforts, it neither gives nor receives support from the other crafts in the same industry. Fifty percent of its energy is used fighting other organizations over jurisdiction.” An industrial union in the building industry, on the other hand, would “end all jurisdictional disputes and bring about cooperation between all the trades.” With the duplication of the work of officials reduced to a minimum and all the “hitherto lost energy turning toward the upbuilding of the organization, it would be incomparably more fitted to protect the interests of the workers than are present craft unions.” The pamphlet concluded: Building Trades Workers! To remain separated as we now are is suicidal. Amalgamation is the next logical step and is in harmony with progress. It will eliminate the disastrous jurisdictional disputes, and prevent forever such shameful situations as now exist in the building trades of Chicago, where one-half of the craft unions are fighting against the “open-shop” while the rest have accepted it. Amalgamation will increase our industrial power enormously .... Amalgamation is the one thing that can put our organizations in such a condition that they can effectively maintain a successful front against the militant employers. Amalgamation is the key to the fight in the building industry. Let us bring it to pass.®3

In March 1922, Foster had introduced his resolution favoring amalgamation of craft unions for adoption by the CFL. The first vote was 4-to-1 in favor; the second, despite the attack on Foster and others who favored amalgamation, was 8-to-1. Within a year, similar resolutions had been passed by 14 international unions, by 17 of the largest state federations, by scores of central labor bodies, and by thousands of local unions—3,377 in the railroad industry alone—and by the unions of building trades’ workers in every major city in the United States. In endorsing the TUEL program, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers pointed out to those who accused the League of following in the footsteps of previous radical labor groups: There is a difference between the teaching of the Trade Union Educational League and the leaders of the so-called “One Big Union” movement, as that movement has developed in several cities. William Z. Foster and the Trade Union Educational League stand for amalgamation of unions in each trade within the American Federation of Labor. They are not standing for the development of “dual unions” in opposition to those now in existence. Most of the advocates of

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one big union, notably the members of the IWW, stand for the building up of a new structure outside of the American Federation of Labor. When Foster advocates one big union, he means a combination of all the workers in each trade in an AFL industrial union similar in form to the United Mine Workers.

Only those in the labor movement who were either blind or indifferent to the basic changes occurring in the industrial scene could oppose the TUEL program, the Amalgamated declared, and it went on: In this era of industrialism, with the masters of industry controlling every part of our lives, labor must be united along the entire class lines industrially, politically and intellectually. In former days, that was a “wild dream” of idealists and theorists. Today, it is a vital necessity. If the labor movement continues along the old and narrow lines, it will be at its own peril. Labor cannot afford to be organized along narrower lines than its adversary, capitalism, if it intends to live and do things.

These words were being repeated in many labor journals. In the summer of 1923, Foster declared that it had been “calculated” that fully 1,500,000 trade unionists supported the amalgamation campaign. The New York Times reported that in a “labor referendum” undertaken by the TUEL among 40,000 local unions with a membership estimated at 5 million, “on the question of amalgamation of craft unions into industrial unions .... the sentiment of those who expressed an opinion favored the idea of amalgamation. It was announced that eleven state federations of labor and many central labor bodies favored the idea.’ During the same period, Amalgamation committees existed in the railroad, metal trades, needle trades, building trades, printing trades, food trades, shoe and leather, textile, marine, tobacco, and coal mining industries.®” In the fall of 1922, Advance reported that “interesting developments in the American labor movement have become manifest.” A new spirit, a new hope had emerged which had long been absent. In seeking the reason for these developments, the journal reached the conclusion that it was mainly because “the movement for amalgamation is gaining ground throughout the country”: The following State Federations of Labor have already endorsed the movement: Minnesota, Washington, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Utah, Colorado, Indiana, Oregon, Ohio and South Dakota.... Despite Gompers’ attacks, many central bodies have followed the example set by the Chicago Federation of Labor. Thousands of railroad workers’ locals have endorsed the movement. The Railway Clerks, at their recent convention at * Houston, endorsed it, as did the Maintenance of Way convention at Detroit. Three. months ago, the convention of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America endorsed the amalgamation movement. In the state of Minnesota, there was a Shopcrafts’ Legislative Committee for pur-

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poses clearly indicated by its title. The committee became interested in the amalgamation movement, made that cause its own, reorganized itself so as to admit delegates from all sixteen railway workers’ unions and is now carrying on a vigorous campaign for amalgamation among the railroad workers. A copy of their amalgamation plan was sent to 11,000 railroad local unions and the movement is rapidly gaining headway.

Advance went on to report that its study had led to another conclusion: The vitalizing force behind this movement is the Trade Union Educational League. While every state Federation and central body of the AFL frames its own resolution, the League insists that each resolution contain an expression of the principle of amalgamating all existing unions in such a manner as to create one all-inclusive organization for each industry.68

On September 1, 1923, the second TUEL national conference opened. It was attended by 103 delegates from 90 cities, including three from Canada and one from Mexico. In his introductory remarks greeting the delegates, Foster noted that in spite of a period of relative prosperity, the AFL was not gaining in membership. On the other hand, the principles of progressive trade unionism were gaining. Over two million trade unionists had expressed support for the principle of consolidation of the craft unions, and it was possible to state unequivocally that “the rank and file of American Organized Labor has been won to the broad concept of industrial unionism.” Nevertheless, it was still difficult to give organizational expression to the principles of progressive unionism, and the fight had to be carried to all conventions of international unions. The summary of the year’s activities of the TUEL presented to the conference emphasized that, in the main, the League had fulfilled the promise of its first national conference. The reports of the various industrial groups seemed to bear this out. The Building Trades Section announced the establishment of connections with militants in 65 large building trades centers in 19 states and 6 provinces. More than 11,000 copies of the League’s amalgamation program for the industry had been distributed. Because of the boom in the industry, the militants were ready to start an intensified industrial drive. The Railroad Committee reported the successful distribution of more than 100,000 copies of its amalgamation plan. Active amalgamation committees were operating in many centers, and alively bulletin was being published. Several district conferences had already been held by the militants in the railroad industry. The Printing Trades Committee reported that of the six international unions in that industry, three had already endorsed amalgamation. At the same time, the conference noted that “the reactionary officialdom of the trade unions” had launched a bitter attack against the left-wing militants in the railroad, mining, and needle trades’ unions, and in the AFL

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itself: “It is probable that 1924 will be characterized by a more systematic war against the left wing by the reactionary officialdom.”®9 Foster insisted, however, that this must not deter the TUEL from undertaking and carrying out “the greatest and most pressing task confronting the working class of America—the organization of the millions of unorganized toilers in the industries.” As things stood in 1923, “the unions, AFL and independents together, comprise not more than 3,500,000 members of a total of at least 25,000,000 eligible to join.” Organized labor controlled only the “barest fringe of the working class; the rest are helpless in the grasp of the exploiters. The great steel, textile, automobile, meat packing, rubber, metal mining, lumber, and general manufacturing industries are completely unorganized or possess only the weakest and most fragmentary unions.” . The situation, Foster noted, presented an exceptionally favorable opportunity “to accomplish this great indispensable task of organization.” Labor was in big demand in all industries. The workers were “in a militant mood

and, if approached right, will organize readily.” However, the situation also contained a danger: “Our prevailing prosperity is only a passing thing. It cannot last long.” It was bound to be followed by “one of the worst periods of depression that this or any other country has ever seen,” and when “the inevitable industrial breakdown” came, “woe betide Labor if it has not had the intelligence and initiative to strengthen its lines by organizing the unorganized.” The unions would be “crushed”: “At its peril will organized labor neglect the present opportunity to organize the unorganized.” Thus, the situation confronting the TUEL was clear: “The organization of the unorganized is the supreme problem of our times. Upon its solution depends the welfare if not the actual life of the whole labor movement.” To achieve this objective “is now the greatest task confronting the militants.”” While Gompers kept repeating his absurd, although well-publicized charge that the TUEL had secretly received “millions of dollars from the Soviet Union to undermine the American Federation of Labor,” the League was constantly strapped for funds. On October 24, 1922, Foster announced the establishment of a “Sustaining Fund” and declared in his appeal: At present the League, with no other income than the money taken in on subscriptions and sales of the Labor Herald, is making a tremendous impression on the labor movement. With real financial support, its policies would sweep the country. This support can and must be developed through the Sustaining Fund. All those militants who takeareal interest in the League’s highly successful battle ‘against the reactionaries and wish to see it culminate in victory, will get very busy

immediately and make the Sustaining Fund a success.”1

CHAPTER 8

THE TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: SETBACKS Actual membership figures were not released at the League’s national conference in September 1923. However, they would not have been highly significant, since the League was always more interested in measuring its strength by its influence rather than by counting heads. This influence was being seriously lessened. The conference was barely over when Eugene V. Debs, who had often been quoted as endorsing the TUEL, announced in Chicago on September 5 that the League “did not have his backing.”! In reporting the break between Debs and Foster, the New York Times gleefully noted that it would have a profound effect in diminishing support for the TUEL, since “Debs’s endorsement is said to have gained the attention of many Socialists because of their regard for the Socialist leader.” It noted, however, that Debs did not issue his statement until he had been visited in Chicago by a committee headed by Meyer Perlstein, vice-president of the ILGWU, which had only “recently expelled several of Foster’s men, denounced their leaders, and expressed hearty disapproval of the Foster program.” Ill and living in relative isolation, Debs had apparently yielded to their pressure to break with Foster and criticize the methods of the TUEL.2¢ More serious was the break between John Fitzpatrick and his followers in the Chicago Federation of Labor and Foster and his followers in the TUEL. In November 1922, Jack W. Johnstone* wrote to Fitzpatrick from g.See end notes. * Johnstone had worked closely with Foster ever since the founding of the first branch of the Syndicalist League of North America in Vancouver, Canada, in 1911. His experience as

chairman of the Stockyards Labor Council after 1918 made him an important figure in the Chicago labor movement. Samuel Hammersmark, Arne Swabeck, and Charles Krumbein were other Communist delegates to the Chicago Federation of Labor. (Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania, 1988, p. 539.)

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Moscow, where he was the League’s delegate to the Second Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern). “The one noticeable thing in Russia,” Johnstone wrote, “is that the standard of living is continuously getting better, while in all other countries it is getting worse...” Describing the celebration of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he wrote: Over 250,000 turned out on parade out of a population of less than one million... To look at the faces of the marchers, it was hard to believe that they had just come through and were still suffering from the most terrible famine and plague that the world has ever witnessed. Still it was drawn forcibly to your attention if you forgot for the moment the smiling faces and singing crowds, and looked at their ragged clothes, the lack of decorations that the capitalist mind thinks so necessary when celebrating. Still the thought was a fleeting one, and you were back singing, cheering, and yelling with the rest. The parade lasted for hours. It showed to the counter-revolutionists within where the support of the people is... ;

Fitzpatrick, who had expressed the hope that “the day was only near when the workers in the United States would be able to concentrate their efforts and do a job such as Russia has done,” was impressed by Johnstone’s report. Relations between the head of the CFL and the head of the TUEL grew even closer. However, after Foster’s Bridgman trial and his public acknowledgment that he was a Communist, his relationship with the CFL and its leaders grew increasingly more strained. Gompers and Fitzpatrick had been at odds for years over the issue of independent political action by labor, as well as other progressive labor issues, such as amalgamation and U. S. recognition of the Soviet Union. Throughout 1922, especially after the CFL had endorsed industrial unionism, the national leadership of the AFL increased its pressure on Fitzpatrick. The AFL leaders seized upon Foster’s announce-

ment that he was a member of the Workers’ (Communist) Party and went all-out to achieve a split between the Chicago Federation and the TUEL. Thus, late in April 1923, Gompers notified Fitzpatrick that the AFL would thenceforth cease paying a subsidy which amounted to one-half of the expenses of the Chicago Federation, including the rent for its offices and Fitzpatrick’s salary. Gompers explained in the letter that the AFL only paid the expenses of organizers who came under its “own direction.’* In addition, he wrote, the financial condition of the AFL had suffered because of unemployment and the need for combatting the open-shop drive of the employers, although in the eyes of progressive trade unionists, the latter reason was spurious, since the idea of the AFL engaging in a struggle against the employers was hardly in accord with reality.4® * Truman Cicero Benjamin describes Fitzpatrick as a “paid organizer” of the AFL (“The Chicago Federation of Labor,” unpublished MA thesis, University of Chicago, 1925, p. 3). h.See end notes.

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It was clear to any observer that, despite the reasons advanced by Gompers, he was really using the financial weapon to compel Fitzpatrick and the CFL to change the Federation’s political direction. Before long it became evident that the pressure was having its effect. That same April, Fitzpatrick publicly declined to address a May Day meeting sponsored by the Workers’ (Communist) Party in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He wrote to the event’s organizers that he was in favor of celebrating Labor Day, rather than what he called the European-inspired labor holiday: “The vast majority of American workers, both native and foreign born, resent what they regard as imported programs and they subscribe to the home-grown variety.” (Evidently Fitzpatrick did not know, or had forgotten, that May Day had originated in the United States.)* Fitzpatrick accepted instead an invitation to speak before the Grand Rapids AFL Central Labor Union. The president of that body praised Fitzpatrick for his “declination to address the Workers’ Party here,” and boasted: “The Central Body defeated a resolution endorsing the Labor Party as sponsored by the Trade Union Educational

League.”> Following this episode, Fitzpatrick and the Chicago Federation’s leadership took steps to distance themselves from the industrial unionism resolution that the organization had endorsed in March 1922. Ina circular letter, Fitzpatrick wrote that “much to our surprise and chagrin, it was insisted in some quarters that, by its action, the Chicago Federation of Labor had undertaken to pass final judgment upon a matter which could only be determined by the American Federation of Labor and its affiliated and international unions.” As if the purpose of this statement was not clear enough, Fitzpatrick added that “we resent the implication that we are in any way antagonistic to the American Federation of Labor or its president, Samuel Gompers.” Ending on a recriminatory note, the CFL president declared that his organization “is not connected in any way, either directly or through any of its officials, with the so-called ‘Trade Union Educational

League.’”6 The circular left no doubt about the fact that the leadership of the CFL had withdrawn all connections with the movement for the amalgamation of craft unions, and that it would no longer support any policy proposed by

the TUEL. Foster believed that Fitzpatrick’s circular was calculated to influence sentiment against the various TUEL-sponsored resolutions at the forthcoming convention of the Illinois Federation of Labor. He pointed out, accurately enough, that Fitzpatrick’s broad statement of policy had not been authorized at any meeting of the CFL.’ * See Philip S. Foner, A Short History of May Day, 1886-1986, New York, 1986.

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Two incidents gave an advance indication of the direction that the Illinois State Federation convention, scheduled to meet in September 1923, would take. At the end of August, the CFL overwhelmingly endorsed a measure introduced by a group of delegates, including leaders of the TUEL, that called upon the Illinois Federation to endorse a labor party “based upon the trade unions, farmer and labor organizations in harmony with the organized labor movement.” The original resolution had included “all working class political organizations” in the call, but this phrase was struck out of the final draft—a clear repudiation of the Workers’ Party. Foster, eager to retain harmonious relations with the CFL leadership, actually spoke in favor of the resolution as amended. Thus, through compromise, the Chicago Communists seemed on their way to reestablishing their voice in the CFL. As a long-time labor party advocate, Fitzpatrick could scarcely repudiate a stand as loosely worded as the CFL resolution. Yet, when the delegates of the Illinois Federation met in Decatur, Fitzpatrick abruptly disowned the labor party, simply because, as The New Majority put it, “Foster and his friends supported the amended resolu-

tion.”8 The other event on the eve of the Illinois Federation convention was the distribution by the AFL of a diagram it had composed that revealed its great concern over the extent of Foster’s influence. In this illustration, Foster was pictured as the integral element in a “net” that, as the accompanying text noted, “spreads over a large section of our articulate public life.’ How was such a relationship between Communism and American life possible? The key, according to the text, was the deceptive masking by the Communists of their ultimate revolutionary aims. By 1923, Foster fit quite neatly into the diagram, for he was, after all, the “borer from within.” “The names of many individuals and organizations are perverted to Communist propaganda purposes, doubtless frequently either without the knowledge or consent of the main body of the membership or affiliation,” the text observed.? At the Illinois convention Fitzpatrick, aided by AFL Vice-President Matthew Woll who spoke as the representative of Gompers and the Executive Council, led the forces opposing the TUEL and its program for the labor movement. Woll devoted most of his speech to a bitter condemnation of Foster and the TUEL. He cited past examples of labor organizations that operated on the principles of industrial unionism—the Knights of Labor, the American Labor Union, and the IWW-and emphasized that each of them had had a disastrous experience as a result. To embrace the idea of indus-

trial unionism in the 1920s—as Foster and the TUEL proposed—would, according to Woll, prove equally destructive to the progress of the labor

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movement. The AFL vice-president concluded his first speech with the charge that Foster, whom he repeatedly characterized as “Mr. Imposter,” only sought “the limelight so that there may roll into his coffers more dollars and cents to continue the nefarious work he is doing.” The TUEL, he declared, was an “insidious and subtle and dangerous” movement that

threatened to “destroy” the AFL. In response, Foster made a carefully reasoned defense of amalgamation, reviewing the packinghouse and steel campaigns, and concluded that they had been sabotaged by AFL officials, interested only in protecting their own interests. “I do not have to break up the labor movement,” he noted sardonically, “the labor movement is pretty badly broken up as it is.”2° In spite of the concentrated attacks on them, it soon became evident that the resolutions Foster and the TUEL endorsed had significant backing from the rank-and-file delegates. The amalgamation resolution, for example, was cosponsored by representatives of 18 local unions. Many of these delegates openly resented the red-baiting by the officials who had argued, in essence, that the resolution should be rejected simply because Foster and the TUEL had promoted it. “I have found out that anything that is brought into the convention that is for the benefit of the rank and file is called an IWW movement, a red movement, or something,” noted one disgusted delegate. Another pointed out that the local capitalist press “had inveighed against the TUEL and Foster”; no further proof was needed, he believed, that the TUEL-sponsored resolutions were in the interest of labor. Other delegates objected that the instructions of their constituents in the amalgamation issue had not been influenced by Foster and the TUEL; two of the unionists in favor of the industrial unionism resolution spoke for entire district councils, representing thousands of members. One speaker pointed out that “every local union in the district council I represent has gone on record for amalgamation, and I am not going back to the council and say I did not carry out my instructions.” On the first day of debate, the amalgamation resolution picked up momentum as numerous United Mine Workers’ delegates from southern Illinois, many denying their affiliation with the TUEL or the Workers’ (Communist) Party, rose to speak in its favor. However. at this point, as Foster rose for the first time to defend the amalgamation resolution, John Walker, who was presiding, abruptly closed debate and adjourned the session before Foster could begin his address. When the convention reopened that same afternoon, Woll took the floor before debate on the amalgamation resolution was allowed to resume and challenged Foster to tell where he had obtained the money with which he conducted the affairs of the TUEL. Woll charged that amalgamation was really “an attempt to take control of the political power of the state and

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represented an effort to destroy the leadership of the American Federation of Labor.” To this Foster replied: “The books of the Trade Union Educational League are open for inspection. I challenge them to examine them. Only one charge touched me, that I am bent on breaking up the labor movement. I risked my life in the steel strike and spent time in nearly every jail in the Pittsburgh district. I appeal to your intelligence. Don’t fall for Woll’s contemptible ruse. If you believe in amalgamation, be a man and vote for it.”11

But the appeal to the delegates’ intelligence was overwhelmed by a combination of anti-Communist, anti-Soviet phobia and the power of the AFL hierarchy. Victor A. Olander, secretary of the Illinois Federation, speaking for Fitzpatrick, sneered at Foster’s offer to open the TUEL books, calling it “empty, as the books of the Communists were the books that would show his support.” Foster was not only a Communist, he charged, he was still an IWWer at heart, and his amalgamation plan was in reality the “One Big Union idea.”!2 Feeling that Woll had not been effective enough, Gompers himself entered the debate. In a special delivery letter to the convention, Gompers warned the delegates that if they voted for the resolutions introduced by the TUEL’s representatives, in favor of amalgamation, a labor party, and recognition of the Soviet Union, the State Federation risked expulsion from the AFL, since such a vote simply “cannot be tolerated.”!5 The result was inevitable. The anti-League forces defeated, by large majorities, all the resolutions offered by the TUEL representatives. Fitzpatrick hailed the outcome and denounced Foster and other League leaders as “agents of Soviet Russia.” Thus, every issue on which the CFL had previously taken a positive stand was either tabled or voted down. As Foster noted, the central issue at the convention became “Communism versus Capitalism.” In the case of the statement endorsing recognition of the Soviet Union, the “reversal of policy” was also caused again “by the fact that the Foster delegates supported the resolution.”!4 As Edward P. Johanningsmeier points out: Collapsing under Gompers’ pressure on each of these issues [proposed by the TUEL], Fitzpatrick revealed his limitations as a “progressive” labor leader. John H. Walker, another putative progressive unionist, engaged in unabashed red-baiting of Foster at the convention. He had been threatened with loss of financial support of the Illinois Federation of which he was president if the organization persisted in its support of labor party activities.15

_ During the convention, Foster taunted Fitzpatrick and Walker for their disavowals of their previous positions: “Our leaders are abandoning these big issues and leaving it to the radicals to push them through. As fast as

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they abandon them, the radicals will pick them up and go to the [rank and file] with them, where they will secure a big following.”!® At a tumultuous CFL meeting in October 1923, Foster tried to hold Fitzpatrick responsible for the backsliding of the Illinois Federation. He stated that the Federation convention had been one of the most reactionary conventions ever held in the state, and that adoption of a CFL report endorsing the positions taken there “would mean the repudiation of the progressive work done by this Federation in the last few years.” Furthermore, he noted that while he had enjoyed their comradeship in the past, he could not continue to consider Fitzpatrick and Edward Nockels his friends. Two conservative officials—Victor Olander and Oscar Nelson—responded with bitter attacks on Foster’s ability and questioned his role in the meatpacking and steel campaigns, claiming that he had unjustly taken credit for the organizing work that had been done by others. Olander blamed the TUEL for the loss in membership that the AFL had suffered in the postwar period, when its membership had plummeted from 4,093,000 in 1920 to 3,600,000 in 1923. Nelson, a Democratic alderman, invited Foster to “coop' erate in the constructive work of the labor movement,” or else to tear up his membership card and “bore from without.” A “rising vote”—a classic intimidation tactic-was taken in the matter of the endorsement of the actions of the Illinois convention. The vote in favor was 114-26. When the issue was raised again at the next Federation meeting, it was tabled by a parliamentary procedure without a vote being taken.! The break between the Chicago Federation and the TUEL was a serious blow to the League. The TUEL had exercised considerable influence in the Federation—one-fifth of the Federation’s delegates were League members. Moreover, the alliance between Fitzpatrick and Foster had greatly enhanced the TUEL’s prestige among trade unions and had helped in the amalgamation campaign. Gompers seized the opportunity provided by the rupture between the Chicago and Illinois Federations and the TUEL to intensify his own attack on the League. He ordered the central labor unions of Minneapolis, Cleveland, Seattle, and other cities to expel all Communists and members of the TUEL and to conform to the official policies of the AFL, on pain of having their charters revoked. At the AFL convention in Portland, Oregon, held

early in October 1923, this policy emerged more clearly.!® The tone of the convention was set by the attack on the Federated Press. Early in the 1920s, the AFL had launched an investigation of the news agency. The investigation had been commissioned by a resolution at the 1922 convention in Cincinnati. Matthew Woll, Thomas J. McMahon, E. T. Dunn, and other delegates wanted to discover the source of Federated

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Press’s financial backing and of the political tenor of its reportorial features. A large majority of the convention’s delegates voted for the resolution calling for an investigation of and report on Federated Press and expected to be informed of the findings at the next AFL convention. Although it was presumed that it would conduct a fair and unbiased investigation, from the outset the committee headed by Woll was openly hostile to Federated Press. Woll viewed the agency as a disruptive organization which “persistently pursues a policy of attacking and undermining the trade union movement... and is consistently canvassing the labor movement for funds with which to continue its work of spreading misinformation and distrust of our movement and its policies.” Woll’s committee conceded that a number of AFL publications were members of Federated Press, subscribed to its service, and printed its material in their newspapers. The report’s conclusions, however, emphasized the profusion of what Woll considered the anti-AFL elements in Federated Press: We found throughout... services a continued domination of the issues by articles relating to the IWW, the so-called amalgamation movement, “political prisoners,” the Communist party, the Workers’ party, the Socialist party, and Russian affairs. That is to say, there is a continuous tide flowing through the Federated Press service of a pro-Soviet, pro-Communist, pro-revolutionary, anti-American Federation of Labor character.

Furthermore, went the report, the stated policy of Federated Press of including “all labor elements” resulted in opening the service to the revolutionary enemies of the AFL. The Woll committee pointed with horror to William Z. Foster’s name on the list of Federated Press’s executive board members. “If the Federated Press chooses to include communist organizations in the category of organizations of labor,” declared the report, “our only reply can be that the classification is inaccurate, repugnant and inadmissible. Agencies in whatsoever field they may operate cannot serve com-

munism and at the same time serve American trade unionism.”!9 The Woll committee concluded that Federated Press could not and should not have the support of trade union publications or trade union organizations. The recommendation, along with the entire report on Federated Press, was adopted unanimously by the convention delegates. Since the AFL officials regarded an independent labor news service as a serious threat to their leadership positions, they immediately set up their own

service to combat Federated Press’s “dangerous” orientation.2 The stand on Federated Press set the tone for the Portland convention. The report of the Executive Council directed its fire against the campaign for amalgamation. This propaganda, it declared, “is frankly revolutionary and has for its ultimate purpose not only the destruction of the trade union movement, but the eventual overthrow of the democratic government of

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the United States.” As was to be expected, resolutions for amalgamation were voted down by overwhelming majorities. So, too, were those calling for a labor party and for recognition of Soviet Russia. The convention also condemned the TUEL as a “communist conspiracy” and called for the expulsion of all TUEL members from the AFL’s constituent unions. Gompers notified all affiliates of this action and demanded that they “act in

accordance with the convention’s decision.”2! Although such actions were not unexpected at AFL conventions, an important precedent was established by which a Communist could be expelled merely because of his political opinions. This was to have repercussions at other levels. William F. Dunne, delegate of the Silver Bow (Butte, Montana) Central Labor Union, was barred from the AFL convention on the sole charge that he was a Communist. Dunne, the editor of the Butte Bulletin and soon to be editor of the Daily Worker, was a member of both the Workers’ (Communist) Party and the TUEL national committee. He had been regularly elected as a delegate to the 1923 AFL convention by the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Council of Butte. William Green, and Philip Murray of the United Mine Workers, moved that Dunne’s credentials be revoked since he was a member of the Workers’ (Communist) Party. Dunne admitted that he was a member and declared that he was proud to be a Communist. In defending his right to serve as a delegate, he stated, “_.a labor movement cannot be built by attempting to placate the employers and their hangers-on. You are trying to convince the employers that you are just as respectable, just as conservative, just as much interested in maintaining the wage-system as are the employers themselves. You stop at the same hotels, you wear the same clothes, you belong to the same fraternal orders, and you hob-nob with them in their clubs.”

Dunne questioned the right of his accusers to sit in judgment on him. Gompers then took the floor to support Dunne’s expulsion on the ground that there was no place in the AFL convention for a person who was opposed to the principles of the trade union movement. The motion to unseat Dunne carried by a vote of 27,837 to 198, with 643 not voting.?2 An independent observer noted that “the very makeup” of the Portland convention militated against progressive measures; it was “made up chiefly of

the presidents and secretaries of the affiliated trade unions.”?3 Joseph Schlossberg, secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, observed that the same convention which had acted to expel Dunne “gave a rousing ovation

to President Berry, who broke the Pressmen’s strike in New York.”4* The response of the Workers’ (Communist Party) to the expulsion was bitter: * Major George L. Berry was the international president of the Printing Pressmen’s Union

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Gompers and his machine take their stand with the employers, with the owners of industry. Their slogans are the slogans of the employers. Whether consciously or not, Gompers and his machine are the agents of the employers in the trade unions, and they are aiding to keep the unions weak by fighting against the measures which the Communists are advocating.25

As for Foster, he had predicted a month earlier that the Portland convention would overwhelmingly reject the TUEL program. The most important work of the League, he maintained, was to encourage the “re-

volt” against Gompers’ policies at the rank-and-file level.2® The results of the conventions of the Illinois Federation and of the AFL opened Foster up to attack from other sections of the labor movement. For a Wobbly and One Big Unionist, Ben Legere, the Portland defeat illustrated “the futility of Fosterism,” which he made the title of a pamphlet he published shortly ° after the convention. i Legere provided a devastating analysis of the reactionary nature of the Portland convention, which he attended as a spectator, and which, he asserted, “went to greater lengths than any convention to prove that the American Federation of Labor is an ally of the capitalist class on this continent.” The theory that “a revolutionary labor movement” could be built out of the AFL, Legere wrote, had been advocated for a generation: “It has been tried out over and over again and has always failed.” “If there is hope in the AFL,” Legere continued, “one would naturally expect to see some rays of it in Seattle.” However, nothing confirmed the “tragedy of labor” more explicitly than the “sad condition” of the AFL Central Labor Union in that city, where Foster had begun his career in radical politics. Since the 1919 general strike, Gompers had threatened the Seattle body with a variety of sanctions. At the Portland convention, James Duncan, formerly known as a radical advocate of industrial unionism, was forced to vote against amalgamation. Moreover, the convention issued an ultimatum to the Seattle central body that its members would face expulsion within thirty days if its governing body did not disavow a demand for recognition of Soviet Russia. Rather than continue to battle the demands of the AFL Executive Council, Duncan retired in 1924. His retirement, Harvey O’Connor pointed out, “marked an end... to the dramatic era in the Central Labor Council’s history.” “I came away from Portland,” Legere wrote, “more firmly convinced than ever that SECESSION and the building up of the ONE BIG UNION is the proper course to pursue.” He concluded: . The final truth about the TUEL is that it really amounts to nothing more in America than afairly efficient machine for maintaining the circulation of Foster’s monthly, “The Labor Herald ”

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Legere predicted that the TUEL would soon follow the Syndicalist League of North America and the International Trade Union Educational League into oblivion.2? When the Red International Committee met in New York on October 20, 1923, the status of the TUEL was the main topic of discussion. The delegates were heartened by a speech delivered by Losovsky, the head of the RILU, to the first session of the enlarged executive body of the organization.* (It was published in the October 1923 issue of the Labor Herald.) Losovsky hailed the work of the TUEL (the RILU’s affiliate body in the United States), as having assumed a “mass character”: For the first time in the labor movement of America,, a revolutionary wing has assumed real importance. The influence of the League grows steadily. It is now influencing, ideologically and politically, two millions of workers. This has frightened the reactionary leaders of the American trade union movement and forced them to carry on afierce struggle against the League. The small independent revolutionary unions existing alongside the League are trying in vain to compete

with its influence.28

Nevertheless, several delegates at the meeting expressed “pessimism” over the actions taken by the CFL, the Illinois Federation of Labor, and the AFL. Others, however, noted that in the case of the first two, the threats of Gompers and Woll had played a major role in the action of the delegates and that even then, many delegates had condemned the red-baiting policy of the leaders of the two federations. In the case of the third, “the convention was made up of officials, almost entirely, and its deliberations, therefore, did not represent the point of view of the great rank and file.” Foster went even further, insisting that the three recent conventions were “striking illustrations of the growing power of the revolutionary minority movement.” In order to fully understand that “growing power,” he maintained, it was necessary to study what was happening in a number of the trades, including the railroads, the mines, and the garment trades.29 It is to these developments that we next turn our attention.

* In his pamphlet, The Futility ot Fosterism, Ben Legere characterized Losovsky’s speech as “A Romantic Russian Picture” (Winnipeg, Manitoba, “One Big Union Bulletin,” 1923), p. 28

CHAPTER 9

THE RAILROAD WORKERS On October 6,1921, Labor, the national labor paper published by the four Railroad Brotherhoods, carried the following poem by Thomas H. West, the popular labor poet:* THE RAILROAD PROFITEERS

:

The men who own the railroads Are working every scheme To multiply their profits— To skim off all the cream. With rates now out of reason They’re anxious, it appears, To make a cut in wages— The railroad profiteers.

It seems to be their purpose To put the section men Back to the peon schedule, The good old “dollar-ten,” Shopmen, carmen, yardmen, clerks, Trainmen and engineers, Are getting too much money, Say the railroad profiteers. They also raise objection To the basic eight-hour day; That ten or twelve is just the thing These coupon-cutters say. But they’ll soon be shown where to head in— They’re flagged now, it appears; The “slow down” signal’s waving For the railroad profiteers.

* For a number of West’s earlier poems and songs, see Philip S. Foner, American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century, Urbana, Illinois, 1975.

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From its inception the TUEL laid particular emphasis on organization in the basic industries. The railroad workers were considered one of several strategic sections of American labor, and winning them to its program was one of the TUEL’s chief tasks.

THE RAILROADERS’ NEXT STEP The first of a projected series of pamphlets issued by the TUEL was The Railroaders’ Next Step by William Z. Foster, published in December 1921. (This was followed in 1922 by the Railroad Amalgamation Advocate, a bimonthly published by TUEL members of railroad unions.) The opening sentence of The Railroaders’ Next Step read: “The supreme need of the railroad men at the present time is a consolidation of our many labor organizations into one compact body.” This was to be accomplished by the fusing of the 16 railroad unions into a single and victorious organization. Foster pointed out that progress in this direction was already being made. As a result of severe lessons learned from repeated defeats, the system federations emerged. These were alliances of several crafts on individual railroads, and had been widely adopted over the previous 15 years. In fact while he was writing the pamphlet, such a federation had been formed by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Firemen and Enginemen on the Boston and Maine Railroad. Such federations served well to break down the narrow craft spirit of the unions, to check senseless jurisdictional disputes, and to develop a cooperative feeling. Victories had been won as a result of the unity built up by the system federation. A further step in the evolution of railroad workers’ unity was the grouping of the railroad systems of the country into three divisions, the eastern, the southern, and the western, and the formation of a defensive alliance among the men of all crafts on each division. Helpful as the system and divisional federations were, Foster continued, “evolution could not stop with them. In the face of the growing intelligence of the workers and the intensified power of the companies, they had to give way to a still broader type,” the concerted movement of the four brotherhoods on all railroads of the country. This was the fighting organization that led the threatened wage strike in 1916 and won the 8hour law with the provision for time and a half pay for overtime.* Similar developments had been going on among the railroad shop unions, such as the machinists, blacksmiths, and sheet metal workers as well as among the “miscellaneous” crafts, such as the telegraphers, clerks, and * See Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement ..., 6 (New York, 1982,): Ch. 10.

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maintenance of way men. The final step would be for all to unite in a solid union of the whole industry. In a section of the pamphlet entitled “The Failings of the Federation,” Foster explained whya close federation of the existing craft unions would not solve the problem. Federation was useful as far as it went, but, “whenever a federation goes into action, whether in conference or ina strike, its weaknesses are instantly apparent.” Utilizing his first-hand experience he had gained as secretary of the committee for organizing the steel workers in 1919, Foster set forth these weaknesses: Lack of authority on the part of delegates, holding back waiting for some other organization to take the lead, craft jealousies, refusal to live up to agreements, and deliberate sabotage were some of the obstacles that sent the steel organizing campaign drifting along with only a fraction of the strength of the 24 unions represented on the committee. Other attempts at federation showed the same ineffectiveness. Foster then presented a carefully worked out plan for the proposed amalgamation of railroad unions, with a description of the double affiliation probably necessary in order to bring in workers like the boilermakers and machinists, who might be in the railroad industry one day and some other industry the next. For these workers the industrial union might handle their immediate wage and hour questions, while their craft union took care of such things as benefit funds and their interests in other industries. But for the railroad industry the railroad industrial union “would be supreme. It would formulate the demands of all trades, present them together to the companies as one proposition, and strike as one man to make them prevail.”! Reviewing The Railroaders’ Next Step, Solon DeLeon observed in Advance: “If the other pamphlets to be issued by the Trade Union Educational League are as clinching as this, a new day in American union

literature is close at hand.’

CONVENTIONS OF THE RAILROAD BROTHERHOODS “The first big job of the league,” Foster wrote in a widely distributed TUEL bulletin, “will be to set up a widespread movement to enthuse the 16 railroad unions with fighting spirit and to amalgamate them into one compact organization ... A consolidation of the railroad unions would begin a new day for American labor. In April 1922, Foster presented the issue as Amalgamation or Annihilation" for the railroad workers: Amalgamation or annihilation! That is the alternative before railroad labor to-day. Like a malignant disease the “open-shop” campaign is spreading. Our unions are

in sad retreat before it. They can not withstand the terrific power of the united

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railroad owners. The latter move as a single unit. When we workers fight one company we have to fight them all. Moreover, the railroad owners have the undivided support of the banks, the courts, the newspapers, and the industrial interests generally. As against this monster unified power we have 16 independent craft unions, disunited, mutually jealous, and consequently developing only a fraction of the workers’ real power. The result is constant defeat for us. Our only real hope is in the fusing together of the 16 unions, so that all the great army of railroad workers can and must act as one body. Then alone can we withstand the mighty and ruthless employers. We must combine our forces or see our unions smashed altogether and our hard-won conditions ruined ....4

At the Railway Employees Department (AFL) Convention in April 1922, a group of industrial unionists called for increased cooperation among the railroad shop crafts. About 40 amalgamation resolutions were submitted by various system federations and local unions. Debate over the proposals consumed an entire day. The TUEL held a meeting during the convention at which Foster and William Ross Knudsen* pushed the amalgamation idea. Conservative unionists pointed to the Knights of Labor, the American Railway Union, and the IWW as past examples of the futility of industrial unionism. The Railway Carmen’s Journal reported that the convention had rejected amalgamation, or, as it termed it, “one big union.” The craft form of organization, the Journal argued,"is distinctly American"; amalgamation was thus a European idea as a result of which European workers were experiencing “chaos.” The delegates upheld “the sound and proven principle of craft organization, with its democracy and complete autonomy for each class of workers.” The Journal insisted that the failure of the Pullman Strike and the American Railway Union should remind railroad workers that “one big union’ leads to dictatorship, chaos, and quick dissolution.”5 In the months following the Railway Employees Department Convention, Foster and the TUEL conducted amalgamation campaigns at the conventions of four railway brotherhoods: the Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, the Conductors, the Trainmen, and the Clerks. At three conventions, the TUEL had to contend with the less-radical proposals put forth by Warren S. Stone, the chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Travelling to the various conventions, Stone advocated closer affiliation between the Brotherhoods, working-class political action and recognition of Russia. Partly from Stone’s efforts, the Trainmen adopted a resolution to join with the Switchmen, and the Firemen resolved to merge with the Switchmen, and the Firemen resolved to do so with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. These measures, Foster noted, were mildly progressive and should not be “sneezed at”; they showed that the Brotherhoods were willing to move, if only an inch. He also pointed to the fact that all four brotherhoods called * Knudsen would later challenge William Johnston for leadership of the IAM.

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for increased political action by labor, reflecting the influence of the TUEL. This was most clearly revealed by the actions of the clerks. They adopted a TUEL resolution for amalgamation of all railroad unions into one body, the industrial unionism proposal that Foster favored.®

RAILROAD SHOP CRAFTS STRIKE OF 1922 The Railroad Shop Crafts Strike of 1922 and its aftermath considerably strengthened the TUEL’s argument. At the time of the strike, there were 16 standard railroad labor organizations, Seven of them, consisting of railroad shopmen and affiliated with the Railway Employees Department of the AFL, left their jobs on July 1, 1922, in the biggest strike since the walkout of the steel workers in 1919. They included the blacksmiths, boilermakers, machinists, carmen, electrical workers and sheet metal workers, as well as the stationary firemen, who joined the strike on July 17. The “Big Five” operating Brotherhoods—the engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen and switchmen—did not join the walkout. Other non-operating organizations—the telegraphers, signalmen, clerks and maintenance-of-way men—did not strike officially either, but many of the clerks and maintenance-of-way employees voluntarily left their jobs. The total number of workers on strike ranged between 400,000 and

600,000. The origins of the 1922 strike go back to the Transportation Act of 1920 which returned the railroads to their private owners and established a Board of nine members to be known as the Railroad Labor Board. In 1921, in response to company requests, the Railroad Labor Board had approved deep reductions in wages. Most importantly, it proved powerless to prevent the contracting out of work to non-union employers. Conditions in the Railway Carmen’s craft became exceedingly difficult. A Chicago unionist wrote that nearly 50 percent of the Carmen’s work in the city disappeared because of the practice of contracting out.” In response to the wage cut, the 16 railroad unions met and directed that a vote be taken to determine whether the workers would be ready to strike should further reductions be ordered. Hence when in August 1921 the railroads requested a 10 percent reduction in wages, the strike vote was immediately ordered by the unions. It showed that 94 percent of the men were in favor of quitting work, and the strike date was set for October 30. President Harding asked the public representatives on the Railroad labor Board to do what they could to prevent the strike. After several conferences with the two sides, the Board announced on October 25 that

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no requests for wage reductions would be handled by the Board for some time in the future. Assured of this, the unions called off the strike At this point, the shopmen became the main target of both the railroad managers and the Board. The shopmen had already been angered by a reduction of 7 cents an hour in the wages of the shopmen, equivalent to an average cut of 12 percent, which was to go into effect on July 1. The Board also introduced several changes in work rules for the shop crafts. Protection against piece work was weakened; the seniority rule was modified so that management could have greater freedom to determine who was eligible for seniority; there would no longer be extra pay for work on Sundays and holidays. Instead, such work would be paid on a straight-time basis. In addition, the Board approved the farming out of shop work to contractors who hired non-union labor. The Board also sanctioned the anti-union activities of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The shop craft unions on the Pennsylvania had joined to form System Federation Number 90 in July 1918. This organization had thrived during the wartime government control of the railroads, but when the Pennsylvania returned to private hands in 1920, its management resolved to crush the System Federation and replace it with regional company unions. In 1921 the railroad sponsored an election to choose bargaining representatives, but it allowed only individuals’ names, not organizational designations, to appear on the ballot. The unions boycotted the poll and fewer than ten percent of the road’s shop craft workers participated. Shortly thereafter, Federation No. 90 held another election in which almost all of the more than 30,000 shop craft workers participated. The result was an overwhelming victory for the Federation, but the railroad continued to recognize only the company unions established through the earlier vote, and the Railroad Labor Board upheld its position. Efforts to avoid a shopmen’s strike began as early as December 1921, as the National Civic Federation attempted to mediate the issues in dispute. In April 1922, the Railway Employees Department of the AFL authorized the taking of a strike vote in the event that a satisfactory settlement was not reached. When this vote was taken in June, the shopmen indicated an overwhelming willingness to walk out if the Board’s decisions were enforced. Toward the end of the month, the shopmen’s unions notified the railroad executives that a strike would begin on July 1 unless the latter agreed to an immediate conference, ignored the wage-cut order of the Board and stopped the practice of having shopwork done by outside concerns employing nonunion men. These demands were rejected by the managers, who declared that the strike would be conducted against the government and not against them. On July 1, 1922, nearly 400,000 shopmen left their jobs.9

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When the strike began, Ben W. Hooper was chairman of the Railroad Labor Board, having been appointed in April 1921 by President Harding. A former Republican governor of Tennessee, Hooper regarded the labor movement as “alien to America,” and was willing to accept unions only if they were “docile.” When the shopmen struck, Hooper branded the walkout “an outlaw movement,” and on July 3, the Board, at Hooper’s request, passed an “outlaw resolution.” This stated that the strikers had forfeited all mediation and arbitration privileges guaranteed under Title III of the Transportation Act of 1920. The Board urged the railroads to employ strikebreakers and assure them that they would be viewed as legitimate employees enjoying all the benefits granted under both the Transportation Act and company regulations. It was permissible for management to form any type of collective bargaining associations they saw fit with these new employees. The companies whose lines entered New York then-jointly declared that all strikers would be dropped from the payrolls and would lose their seniority rights, a position soon adopted by nearly all the railroads affected. At this point, the question of seniority rights became the key issue in the strike, as the leading railroads insisted on stripping strikers of accumulated seniority and their claim to the benefits that their length of service entitled them.2° Although acknowledging the justice of the workers’ complaints and promising not to join the campaign “to destroy the unions and bring organized labor to its knees,” President Harding issued a proclamation on July 11 asserting that the workers who had chosen to take the places of the strikers had, by the decision of the Railroad Labor Board, “the same indisputable right to work as others have to decline to work.”! Three days later, the chairman of the Board brought the strike leaders and some of the railway executives together in conference. The executives agreed to cease the practice of having work done in outside shops but refused to restore seniority rights to the strikers. This doomed the conference to failure and the Board announced that it had ceased its efforts to end the strike. On July 31 President Harding proposed a settlement that provided that both parties were to recognize all decisions of the Board, that the carriers would withdraw all lawsuits growing out of the strike, that the employees were to be returned to work with seniority and other rights unimpaired, and that the railroads would not discriminate against the strikers. Although the railroad managers refused to restore seniority rights, the shopmen accepted the President’s plan. Harding then proposed that the men return to work and that the seniority issue be submitted to the Railroad Labor Board. This time the shopmen rejected the proposal. They had decided that going back to work without a guarantee on seniority would jeopardize much for which they had fought in the past. In an

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address to Congress, Harding denounced the strikers and warned that he

would invoke all laws, civil and criminal, against them.!2 Further efforts by government mediators failed to solve the seniority issue. Nor did the proposal of the Railroad Brotherhoods and other nonstriking unions to use their good offices. At this point Harding turned the handling of the strike over to Attorney General Harry Daugherty, a member of the “Ohio gang,” and a bitter foe of the labor movement. Daugherty first tried to break the strike by deputizing anti-labor businessmen as federal marshals with authority to take vigilante action against the strikers. When this did not succeed, he received executive permission to resort to an injunction. With Harding’s approval, he appeared personally before the Federal District Court in Chicago and argued that acts of destruction had taken place and that there had been interference with interstate commerce and the carrying of the mail. Daugherty declared that the maintenance of the strike by the union constituted an illegal conspiracy in violation of both the Sherman Act and the Transportation Act. By striking against the decision reducing wages, the union had expressed contempt for the Railroad Labor Board and for the United States itself. He declared further that he would employ the powers of the government “to prevent the labor unions

of the country from destroying the open shop.”!5* Dougherty’s appeal met with a ready response from Judge James Wilkinson, a Daugherty appointee and, like the Attorney-General, a bitter foe of organized labor. The temporary restraining order of September 3 and the injunction itself, issued two weeks later, was the most sweeping of its kind ever issued. Directed against the officers of the union, its members, and any persons aiding them, it forbade any interference with the railroad companies engaged in interstate commerce and with the transportation of the mails; preventing or attempting to prevent employees from entering em-

ployment or continuing it; conspiring to do these things or to interfere with, hinder, or annoy any of the employees; “the making of threats, intimidation, acts of violence, opprobrious epithets, jeers, suggestions of danger, taunts, entreaties, or other unlawful acts of conduct” toward the employers or officers of the companies or toward persons desiring to enter their employ; “aiding, abetting, directing, or encouraging any person or persons, organizations, or associations by letters, telegrams, telephone, word of mouth, or otherwise to do any of the acts aforesaid”; “inducing or * Later Daugherty claimed that “Red agents of the Soviet Government” controlled the rail strike, and it was nothing but a gigantic Red-inspired plot to make the railroads government owned and then to “substitute a Soviet regime” by revolution for our form of government. The strike leaders, he claimed, were agents sent directly from Moscow by Lenin and Zino-

viev. (Harry M. Daugherty [with Thomas Dixon], The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy, New York, 1932, pp. 127-40; Harry M. Daugherty, Lawless Disorders and Their Suppression [Appendix to the Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States for 1922], Washington, D.C., 1924, pp. 1-12, 17, 24, 29.)

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attempting to induce by the use of threats, violent or abusive language, opprobrious epithets, physical violence or threats thereof, intimidation, display of numbers or force, jeers, entreaties, argument, persuasion,, rewards, or otherwise” any person to quit his work or to refrain from entering it; engaging in, directing, or encouraging others to picket; “in any manner by letters, printed or other circulars, telegrams, word of mouth, oral persuasion, or suggestion, or through interviews to be published in newspapers or otherwise in any manner whatsoever, encourage, direct, or

command any person” to quit employment of the railway companies or to refrain from entering it. In addition to a number of other acts that the restraining order (and later the injunction) prohibited, the officers of the Federated Shop Crafts were ordered not to issue any instructions, requests, public statements, or suggestions calculated to get anyone to leave the employment of the roads or to refrain from entering it, and “using, causing, or consenting to the use of any of the funds or monies of said labor organizations in aid of or to promote or encourage the doing of any of the matter or things hereinbefore complained of.” In short, as Allan La Verne Shepherd points out, the court order “prohibited virtually every conceiv-

able act that could aid the strike effort.”14 “The Iron Heel in Action,” Advance angrily charged. “President Harding has finally decided to stake the temporary interest of the Republican Party for the greater and more permanent interests of Capitalism, Big Business. This is the meaning of the injunction... against the striking railroad workers.” It was “the most far-reaching injunction ever issued against striking workers. It is the last word in the art and science of industrial warfare. It forbids picketing, speaking, writing, giving out of news and interviews, paying of strike benefits and other strike expenses, and specifically forbids arguments in efforts to win over strike breakers.” But the “most dangerous feature” was the fact that it was sought and secured by the government, while all other injunctions were sought and secured by private employers. Thus the government, had “openly and officially made the strikebreaking task of the private owners its own task.” The big question was what was Organized Labor going to do about “this assault upon its life?” The Railroad Brotherhoods and the AFL Executive Council denounced the injunction and labeled the court order a violation of the Clayton Act,* the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This was not enough, Advance * The Clayton Act (passed on Oct. 15, 1914 during Woodrow Wilson’s first term) was an anti-monopolist measure supplementing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. It exempted “fraternal, labor organizations” from its provisions. Termed “Labor’s Magna Carta” by Samuel Gompers, it failed to live up to its name. Although it was expected to protect labor from the use of the injunction, Supreme Court interpretations deprived labor of its benefits. (See, Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement... 5 (New York, 1980): 137-39.)

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insisted. It was necessary to end the political practice of both the Railroad Brotherhoods and the AFL of “Reward the friends and punish the enemies.” “The danger to the ruling class will come when labor will stop ‘rewarding’ and ‘punishing’ and will, instead, take political power in its own hands.” At the moment, however, labor had “to stand loyally by the striking railroaders.”!6 This, too, was not enough, argued the TUEL. The League launched a campaign for a general strike of all the railroad unions to be followed by sympathetic strikes in other industries. “While the seven shop crafts, assailed with desperation by the companies, are fighting valiantly for their rights,” the TUEL International Railroad Amalgamation Committee appealed, “nine other unions are at work helping the companies to break the strike. It is a pitiful exhibition of working class division, and the leaders

responsible for it are guilty of criminal stupidity.”!” In Omaha, League militants encouraged the city’s Central Labor Council to endorse a call for a general strike to “break” the Daugherty injunction. A Bureau of investigation agent had previously reported to J. Edgar Hoover from Omaha in February that “Foster was gaining [a] foothold among all the radical labor unions in this part of the country.” Foster went on a speaking tour during the strike, followed by Federal agents. In Kansas City he implored the strikers to amalgamate their unions, and, according to a Bureau of Investigation agent present, concluded by saying that “Labor and Capital have no interest in common and that labor will not come into its own until Capital is crushed and destroyed.”!8 His speech held his crowd of 200 for five hours, and he was “interrupted by prolonged cheering.” The agent in charge in the city wrote to J. Edgar Hoover after the speech that “it is my opinion that the less this Bolshevik is allowed to talk during the present railroad and coal strikes, the better it will be for the country.” As the head of General Motors was to say later, the agent was identifying the good of the country with that of the corporation heads. According to T. C. Carson, the President of the Switchmen’s Union, the TUEL “flooded” strike centers with propaganda and its members appeared on picket lines to distribute pamphlets and handbills calling for a general strike and urging amalgamation of the Brotherhoods.!9 The Central Executive Committee of the Workers (Communist) Party of America issued a leaflet—“Defy the Injunction.” It read in part: The working class must show such utter contempt for the infamous injunction and so brazenly flout its violations in the face of the degenerates at the head of the government in Washington, that they will not even attempt to enforce it. Already, because of the universal contempt in which courts and injunctions are held by the workers, Attorney General Daugherty is trying to evade enforcement

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of the thing he himself created at the behest of the “open shop” employers who own and control every branch of the government. Unite to-day against this injunction and force your reactionary leaders to likewise act against it. This injunction is blow at the working class. Down with the injunction! On with the strike! Resist the terror of the master class. Make the strike general!

A leaflet issued by the Central Executive Committee of the Workers (Communist) Party of America was addressed “To the Railroad Workers— To the Shopmen—The Maintenance of Waymen, Clerks, and others affected by Wage Reduction” was widely circulated. It read in part: If the government orders soldiers into the district to protect scabs in the roundhouses, the shops, and on the sections, the trainmen should be compelled to refuse to carry them, as their only purpose is to shoot holes into the ranks of the working class and to break the strike. In a labor struggle the government is never neutral. It always serves only the capitalist class and you must resist all its mandates to the very limits of your power. i Over 500,000 miners are now on strike. Their cause is also your cause. You should have gone on strike with them long ago, but it is not too late now. You must stay on strike until they win all their demands, and they should stay out until you gain all yours. United, you, the working class can crush your enemies, the capitalist class with its brutal and murderous government, with all its prostitute judges, presidents, congressmen, and senators. Every militant member of the railroad unions on strike should see to it that the message of solidarity of the working class, and this call to action is carried to the trainmen, telegraphers, switchmen, and all others who are not on strike in the transportation industry. Unite for the struggle! Close your ranks! Make the strike general! Down with the Railroad Labor Board! Defy the injunction judges! Stop the enemy before it stops you!

In reply the leaders of the Brotherhoods launched a bitter attack of Foster and the TUEL. F. H. Flyozdal, Grand President of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way and Shop Laboreres, circulated a letter among railroad union officials attacking foster and his “radical propaganda” for a general strike. Flyozdal insisted that the TUEL program was visionary, that industrial unionism would come through “evolutionary process” and be achieved some time in the distant future. Hence, “circulars and propaganda emanating from Wm. Z. Foster or any other self-styled ‘amalgamationist’ can safely be ignored and forgotten.”22 With this kind of attitude on the part of the leaders of the Brotherhoods, it is hardly surprising that the:strike languished. Offered little more than verbal and some meager monetary assistance, the strikers became

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bitter and demoralized. Faced with continued recruiting of strikebreakers by management, a process hastened by the court’s restraining order, the strike continued to lose ground. In this situation, Bert Jewell, head of the AFL Railway Employes’ Department, concluded that it was necessary to strike a deal with a group of railway executives headed by Daniel Willard,

President of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.23 Out of these conferences

finally came an agreement during the second week of September. It provided that all men be returned to the positions they held prior to the strike, that as many as possible be put to work at the existing rate of pay at once, that all be put to work within 30 days, except those who had been proven guilty of violence, and that disputes concerning seniority or involving any other questions that could not be settled locally were to be referred for final decision to a committee of twelve representing both parties. There was to be no intimidation of either strikers or nonstrikers, and all lawsuits brought as a result of the strike were to be withdrawn. By the end of September, 78 roads had settled with the strikers on the terms of the Willard-Jewell Plan, as the settlement was called. A month later over 100 had done so, and about 225,000 of the strikers had returned to work. But the strike continued on the Pennsylvania, New York Central and the Long Island railroads, and as late as March 6, 1923, government agents reported that 120,000 men were still out. The wage issue was surrendered early in the walkout by the unions, but seniority rights were protected in the settlements concluded with nearly all of the important railroads. On a number of roads, however, the railroad managers simply ended their collective agreements with the shopmen, eliminated seniority for the strikers and set up company unions which the returning workers had to join.24 In December 1922, as individual unions came to settlement with the different roads, the TUEL held a national conference of its Amalgamation Committee. Four hundred and eleven delegates from every railroad craft and every district attended, despite letters sent to locals by Warren Stone, President of the Engineers, and William Johnston of the Machinists, warning unionists to stay away. Foster addressed the convention from the audience, and a plan for “departmental and industrial unionism” was adopted. In letters written to the trade journal in Foster’s craft, the Railway Carmen’s Journal, workers sought to understand the implications of the shopworkers’ defeat for all railroad employees. Many blamed “scabs” and the Daugherty injunction; others argued that the lesson of the strike was that the railroad workers must “use the ballot.” Several writers echoed the theme that “our recent shopmen’s strike has shown clearly that our form of organization is not what it ought to be.” An Ohio worker wrote that in his Lodge “they are all filled with the amalgamation idea.” Another that “there

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is on the part of the rank and file of the Brotherhoods a desire for consolidation,” and that the AFL concept of “loose federations” was clearly outmoded.?6 The TUEL was both enraged and encouraged by the tragic outcome of the strike. Denouncing “$25,000 a year labor leaders” for the manner in which they had conducted the strike of the railroad shopmen, Foster told the Chicago Federation of Labor: “The pitiful thing to me is that the whole struggle is due to stupid leadership. It is tragic when you remember that there are nine organizations at work while five are on strike on the railroads.” He continued: “Tf the rail workers were united into a solid mass instead of being divided as they are now, the railroads would never have attempted to start the present struggle. An army can’t go into battle divided. The artillery and air service couldn’t stand aside and say let the infantry do it, it isn’t our fight. But now a similar condition exists in the shopmen’s strike. The railroads pick out certain unions to beat. In combat, the other rail unions, including the big brotherhoods, are as shock troops for the railroads to defeat their fellow workers."

And defeat them they did. The reason was clear, said the TUEL: The shopmen’s strike failed for want of union support. The nine unions that stood by the companies killed it. Had these unions possessed the real, the true spirit of unionism—one for all and all for one-they would have walked out with their brothers and the greatest strike in history would have been won, hands down, in twenty-four hours.2?

The first national conference of the Metal Trades Committee of the TUEL took place during the Railroad Amalgamation Conference of December 1922. Despite the fact that the leadership of the IAM circulated a letter to the membership denouncing the conference, delegates from the IAM, Boilermakers and Helpers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Patternmakers, Blacksmiths, Sheet Metal Workers, Molders, and Metal Polishers attended. They approved a plan whereby industrial unionism would be brought about gradually, the first step being the merging of the Executive Boards of the 24 trades. At some future point, the trades themselves would be merged into five departments: Metal Miners, Smeltermen, and Blast Furnace Workers; Iron, Steel and Tin Workers; Mechanical Trades; the General Unskilled Labor Department; and the Technical and Clerical forces.28 Applying the lessons of the shopmen’s strike failure, the TUEL Amalgamation Committee of the Railroad Industry and the Metal Trades Committee intensified the drive to achieve complete unity of the railroad and metal trades unions with the ultimate achievement of industrial unionism. But

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the leadership of the AFL and railroad and metal trades unions were moving in an opposite direction.29 |

THE B&O PLAN After the settlement of the shop crafts strike, Gompers met Willard on a train bound for New York. He reported later that Willard informed him that he was trying “to make conditions such that there will never be any trouble on the Baltimore and Ohio.” Willard mentioned in particular his decision to use the services of an efficiency expert, Otto S. Beyer Jr., in order “to bring about complete harmony and efficient work.” The plan referred to was known as the Baltimore and Ohio Plan, and it was to become the major example of “the union-management cooperation programs that flourished

during the 1920s.”30* Under the plan, unions affiliated with the Railway Department of the AFL would be recognized and committees in the local shops would be union-management bodies. In the process, shop efficiency would improve and managementlabor relations would develop on a completely harmoni-

ous basis. The unions were “to be a party to the reforms and were also to initiate proposals on their own account.” At the heart of the plan was the establishment of the joint management-union committees which would discuss job analysis, work schedules, hiring of men and the improvement of

tools and equipment.3!

Beyer, an ex-army captain who had experimented with labor-management during the war, and William Johnston, president of the IAM, were instrumental in popularizing the plan. After initial failure to sell the plan to the railroad executives, they held discussions with Willard on the eve of the shop crafts’ strike. They found Willard sympathetic, but the strike interfered with the immediate institution of the plan. However, the Willard-Jewell agreement in September 1922 was greatly influenced by Beyer’s and

Johnston’s ideas.°2

Although the leaders of the AFL hailed the settlement of the shop crafts strike as a “great victory,” it was actually evidence of lack of labor solidarity and resistance to the powerful corporations. Advance pointed out that the outcome was inevitable when the railroad unions refused to follow the policy of amalgamation and industrial unionism advanced by the TUEL: * Among the plans for union-management cooperation were those in the Cleveland ladies’ garment industry, between the ILGWU and the employers; that in the cotton textile industry between textile manufacturers, north and south, and the United Textile Workers; that between the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, controlled by Josephine Roche, and the United Mine Workers; and that between the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Chicago clothing manufacturers, headed by Hart, Schaffner & Marx. Several of these plans are discussed below, but, for a summary of their provisions, see Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920-1933, (Boston, 1960) pp. 99-101.

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“American Labor lost one of its rarest opportunities for constructive working class solidarity when the leaders of the railroad unions turned a deaf ear to what William Z. Foster had made so clear in The Railroaders’ Next

Step.”3 The leaders of the AFL and the railroad unions also turned a deaf ear to Advance’s analysis. John P. Frey of the Molders’ Union, and widely viewed as the ideologist behind AFL policies, pointed to the settlement of the shop, crafts strike as evidence “that large employers of labor are viewing their industrial problem with a newer, better understanding, They are abandoning the attitude that they and they alone will determine what labor policies shall be.”34 Convinced that they could not win out against the large employers, the AFL leaders pushed the idea that union-management cooperation had to replace labor militancy as the only way to maintain the existence of the trade unions.> Beyer was permitted to set up an experimental scheme in the Greenwood shop of the Baltimore & Ohio in Pittsburgh in 1923. The following year it was extended to all B&O roundhouses and repair shops. The Railway Employees’ Department of the AFL officially endorsed Beyer’s plan and hired him as a counsel. In 1925, the plan was adopted by the Canadian National, the Richmond shop of the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Chicago and Northwestern and the following year by the Chicago,

Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific.%® Not long after the plan was introduced on the Baltimore & Ohio, Willard praised it fulsomely, claiming that it had introduced “a new mental attitude” in the plant because the workers understood “management’s ideals.” Workers had come to have a “keen, lively and personal” interest in their work. They wanted to see the B&O prosper “because it is in their own selfish interest that the company should prosper.3’ And prosper the company did under the plan. As Gompers pointed out in lauding the B&0 plan,

under it the company earned “extraordinary” profits. It was able to pull itself out of the deficit to “which inefficient and union-hating policies plunged so many railroads in the last few years” by reducing its costs. In fact, the B&O had taken away freight and passenger business from the

Pennsylvania and other roads operating with nonunion shopmen.® In

short, to Gompers, the B&O Plan proved that under a union-management partnership, all employers could earn profits for themselves, their workers, their stockholders and the general public. But there were dissenting voices. The TUEL attacked the B&O Plan as nothing more than a “class-collaboration device” to increase profits at the expense of the workers. William Z. Foster charged that the plan “involves abandoning all struggle against the employers,” and facilitating “increasing

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exploitation” of the railroad workers. Its essence was “to turn the trade

unions into near-company unions.”29 These attacks had a basis in reality. In February 1924, Beyer drew up a report entitled “Obstacles Which Are Blocking Progressive Cooperation on the Baltimore and Ohio.” The report gave substance to Foster’s charges. Beyer conceded that while the company was profiting from increased workers’ productivity, the workers were not being rewarded with increased wages. Indeed, President Willard opposed any wage increase. The B&O remained adamant on this issue, refusing any increases, including the workers’ demand for time-and-a-half pay for Sunday work. But wages were not the only problem. The B&O Plan had been heralded by union leaders, in part, because it promised to provide stable employment. But as speed-up increased, the company dismissed thousands of workers. All too frequently, union men were dismissed, while nonunion

workers were “retained.’”#9 In a letter to Willard on January 28, 1924, Beyer pointed out that because of disillusionment with the operation of the B&O Plan, workers’ enthusiasm had not lasted for long. But what mainly concerned both Willard and Beyer was the fact that the Plan was being increasingly attacked by Foster and the TUEL as well as by the IWW. Beyer was concerned that “recent developments were furnishing” a certain degree of “superficial validity” to the attacks on the Plan, and he urged Willard to meet with Machinist leader William Johnston to discuss the situation. Together they could “prevent failure of the Plan.’”41 However, Johnston admitted that he, too faced a serious problem. In supporting the B&O Plan, he had told the railroad shop men that under it, there would be “efficient service to the public, a fair return to the investors, and adequate wages and steady employment for the workers.” But as far as the workers were concerned, Johnston conceded, there was little gained. Meanwhile, they were being told by radical critics that the “men are doing all the cooperating and the Company is getting all the benefits.” This charge was “having its effect, especially, when the workers find that there is little if any improvement, in their condition of employment.”42

TUEL RAILROAD AMALGAMATION PLAN Union-management cooperative plans were tailored primarily to shop work rather than to the operation of the railroads. Nevertheless, the Railroad Brotherhoods’ accommodation with Management was not too different than that of the non-operating unions. The results were also quite similar. Thus, the railroads cut wage scales, reduced the number of union workers, and abrogated national agreements. Membership in the Brother-

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hoods reflected these policies and the failure to put up a struggle against them. The Trainmen’s union dropped from 196,000 members in 1919 to 177,800 in 1925; in the Conductors’ Union from 62,000 in 1922 to 58,600 in 1925; in the Firemen’s Union from 125,900 in 1920 to 106,600 in 1925; and in the Switchmen’s Union from 14,000 in 1920 to 8,900 in 1925. Those members who remained in these unions suffered pay cuts. On many lines, the operating unions continued to function as bargaining agents even though their numbers were reduced. But on such lines as the Pennsylvania, management sought actively to destroy the unions. Headed by President Samuel Rea and Vice-President W.W. Atterbury, the Pennsylvania led the way in the rail industry in contracting out repair work to nonunion shops and in fostering company unionism and strike-breaking. A persistent campaign was waged to institute the open shop and revise both wages and work rules to the company’s advantage.*8 The critical situation facing the railway unions was the subject of intense discussion at the conference of the TUEL International Railroad Amalgamation Committee held in December 1922. The 411 delegates launched a general amalgamation movement, and endorsed adoption of the Minnesota Plan of Amalgamation drawn up by TUEL members of the Minnesota Shop Crafts

Legislative Committee.** The Minnesota Plan opened: Railroad Unionism is in danger. The full force of the “open-shop” drive is now upon us. The companies are determined to wipe out the unions on the railroads and to establish a condition of serfdom for their workers. And they are all too successful in their efforts. Even the most powerful unions cannot resist their onslaughts, and as for the weaker ones, they are either being crushed outright or being converted through union-management devices into class collaboration, semi-company unions. Conditions are being worsened rapidly in every branch of the service. Wage cuts, lengthening of hours, abolition of overtime rates, re-establishing of piece-work and straight time for Sunday work, and the general elimination of union conditions are the order of the day. Faced by a militant and relentless foe, railroad labor is in disastrous retreat.

The solution proposed was a general merger of the 16 unions, which would bring many advantages to the workers. Chief among these would be far greater industrial power: “Complete amalgamation would give the railroad workers many times the power of the present craft unions.” Another important benefit of amalgamation would be the elimination of jurisdictional disputes among the railroad trades. Once the railroad workers were all in one organization, there would never again be seen “the sad spectacle of one group of trades working while the rest are striking. That disgrace would be forever gone.” A further advantage would be great financial economies in the operation of the organization: “The fusing of all the executives, organizing staffs, system chairmen, etc., into one general man-

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agement would avoid the tremendous crisscrossing and duplicating of work now prevailing, thus making for greater economy.” Considerable numbers of officials, who were duplicating each other’s work, would be rendered available to organize the great numbers of unorganized in the industry and “to carry on the highly expanded general activities of the amalgamated union.” In short, aside from its other virtues, amalgamation was “especially a measure of great efficiency and economy.” The Minnesota Plan presented a specific program of amalgamation. The amalgamated union would consist of six departments. Within these departments, natural trade lines would be preserved. Men of similar callings would meet together and discuss their common problems, but the departments would have no power in wage negotiations. They would all act together as parts of “one great machine.” In this great struggle, the appeal went on, the companies were strong because they were thoroughly united, while the workers were not: “All the important railroads in the United States are controlled by a dozen New York banks, which, in turn, are in the hands of a few financial pirates.” Railroad capital was “one gigantic organization which fights as a unit all over the country.” But railroad labor was “split into many fragments, into autonomous unions, amongst which real solidarity and concerted action is impossible. Against our mighty foe, we fight in little detachments, developing only a fraction of our power. That is why we are losing the battle. To oppose the mighty railroad combination of capital with single craft unions or loose federations of them is about equal to fighting the modern battleship with bows and arrows.”

There was “one way, and one way only,” in which the railroad workers could defeat the offensive of the companies: “We must bring about unity of action among the entire army of railroad workers, from the engineer to the section hand. Like the employers, we will have to act as a solid body all over the country... With the 1,800,000 railroad workers standing united and making common cause together, there would be no industrial power in the country able to withstand them.” To achieve this goal, it was necessary for the railroad workers to act intelligently: “To simply desert the old unions and to try to organize offhand a perfect organization, is a fatal mistake. That way lies dualism, disruption, and demoralization .... We must stay in our old unions and work diligently to merge them together through amalgamation....Our task is to work ceaselessly for and to everlastingly insist upon the amalgamation of the sixteen railroad unions into one mighty, all-inclusive organization.” The six departments would be: (1) Engineers and Firemen; (2) Conductors, Trainmen, Switchmen; (3) Clerks, Station Agents, Freight Handlers, Express; (4) Blacksmiths, Boilermakers, Carmen, Electricians, Machinists,

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Sheet Metal Workers, Stationary Firemen; (5) Telegraphers, Signalmen, Dispatchers; (6) Maintenance of Way. At the head of the general organization would be an executive council of 48 members. Each department would elect 8 members to the council, and of these two would come from each of the four divisions of the railroad industry, West, East, Southeast and Canada. Thus, the executive council would be “thoroughly representative, industrially and geographically, of the whole railroad service.” If all the 16 railway unions could not be induced to join the project simultaneously, as many as possible should be brought in. If only a few of the trades agreed at first to amalgamate, they could proceed with organizing themselves on the departmental plan and await the time when the rest saw the light. Federation of some of the railway unions had already done much to acquaint the.trades with each other and to teach them that they had a common fight to make. “But it is only an intermediate stage between the primitive state of craft isolation and that of the final amalgamation of all trades. We must go on beyond federation and actually join all our unions together. That is the inevitable course of labor development.” The appeal concluded: BROTHER UNIONISTS! Discuss this matter in your meetings; take it up through your international journals; instruct your officers and delegates to work for amalgamation wherever they may be; have your local unions, local federations, system federations, division organizations, and international union and brotherhood conventions adopt the following resolution: RESOLVED: That we favor the amalgamation of the sixteen standard railroad unions into one organization covering the entire railroad industry, and that we call upon our general officers to take the necessary steps so that a joint convention of all these organizations (or as many of them as possible) can be assembled to put this amalgamation into effect.

Discussing the Minnesota Plan, the New York Journal of Commerce predicted that it would receive wide support among the railroad workers. “These workers have been educated by the lack of solidarity during the shopmen’s strike. It was the fact that only seven of the sixteen railroad organizations were on strike while nine other crafts remained at work, that gave such an impetus to the amalgamation movement. Organized industry, as represented in the transportation companies, saved the day by reason of

this split, but railroad labor learned a lesson.’46 At least the workers learned it. Within six months after the Minnesota Plan was distributed to all railroad unions, it was endorsed by 3,377 local railroad workers’ unions. Seventy percent of the railroad workers of the United States and Canada approved of the plan.47

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But nothing really changed. In June 1926, the TUEL pointed sadly to the fact that the “four Brotherhoods still negotiate separate contracts with their employers.” There still was the “ridiculous” situation in which the men in the engine cab—engineer and firemen—belonged “to different and even antagonistic unions” while “in every other country, the men on the right and left hand sides of the cab either belong to the same union, or to

the general railroadmen’s union.”48

LABOR BANKS Another target of TUEL criticism was the labor banking movement among the railroad unions, especially the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The IAM led the way into banking, forming the Mount Vernon Savings Bank in 1920 with the dues of its 350,000 members, which provided a year’s revenue of $1,728,000. It soon used the bank’s funds to induce a Norfolk firm to break ranks with the employers’ association and bring a long strike to a successful conclusion for the union. The locomotive engineers were not far behind. On November 1, 1920, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Cooperative National Bank opened in Cleveland, Ohio. The president of the Brotherhood Bank was Warren S. Stone, who was also president of the Brotherhood. The stock was owned by the Brotherhood and by its individual members.*9 The Brotherhood’s bank grew rapidly, its resources increasing by almost a million dollars a month in its first year. In October 1921, the Brotherhood took over a bank in Hammond, Indiana, in cooperation with local unions of the railroad engineers, firemen, and conductors, and reorganized it as the People’s Co-Operative State Bank. In the following year, it opened a Transportation Brotherhood’s National Bank in Minneapolis and a bank in Spokane, Washington. Early in 1923 the Brotherhood entered the investment banking field by organizing the Brotherhood Investment Company. It had a capital of $10,000,000 and sold stock to the members and to the general public. In 1924-26 five additional investment corporations were established under the control of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The locomotive engineers came to own 14 banks, 8 investment companies, a printing company, and two skyscrapers.°° Other organizations followed the Brotherhood into the labor banking field. Between 1922 and 1924, the number of labor banks increased from 7 to 25. The movement reached its peak in 1926, when there were 35 banks with resources in excess of $126,000,000. Labor banking was promoted mainly by the railroad unions, but the Amalgamated Clothing Workers

created 7 banks and investment companies.>!

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The fervently pro-business New York Tribune hailed this development. Labor banking, it argued, was an important experience for all workers: There is probably no better way for workers, organized and unorganized, to learn the real problems of economics, the science of living, than to engage in such a venture. Whether they succeed or fail they will learn that they can get out of any business only as much as they put into it, in labor, in capital, and in business management. They will learn that each is entitled to reward in exactly the proportion in which it contributes to success.

But the real reward would be the harmonious relations between work-

ers and employers that would follow: That, in time, will produce a better understanding between labor and capital, and between the various groups in either class. It leads to an appreciation of problems and a willingness and ability to be reasonable in helping to solve them....52

The theory behind the labor banking movement was that it would secure for labor a measure of control over industry not possible through traditional trade union methods. Once labor banking was in full swing, the unions would no longer have to waste their time on the picket lines, but instead they would exercise the financial power obtained by mobilizing the workers’ savings in their own financial institutions. Labor banking would stem the open-shop drive, and permanently influence the labor policies of industry. Labor banks could aid well-disposed employers while they could, at the same time, keep the savings of the working class out of the hands of antiunion employers. Professor Thomas M. Carver, a leading advocate of labor banking, argued that by putting their savings in these banks and buying their stock, workers would increase their incomes and gradually “become capitalists.” In fact, the entire capitalist system would be altered! “Once labor had demonstrated its capacity to mobilize on the financial front, capitalism would easily recognize the parity of labor power with itself, and would even be willing to submit to being peacefully assimilated and annexed by that power.”>3 The “President’s Page” by Warren S. Stone in the Locomotive Engineers’ Journal championed labor banking with such arguments in every issue.4 But the TUEL answered Stone with the argument that labor banking was diverting the union from protecting the economic interests of its

members. The League warned that the labor banking movement was “the gangrene which has infected the official body of America’s railway unions, rendering them valueless, nay, worse than useless in their legitimate functions as the leaders of workingmen.”™ Instead of mobilizing the railroad

* David Montgomery writes that “some activities of progressive unionists moved in peculiarly American directions,” ‘one of which was “labor banks.” (“New Tendencies in Union Struggles,” pp. 97-98.) Actually, these included members of the TUEL who favored the B&O Plan as a way to save their weakened unions. Foster conceded that there were such mem-

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workers for higher wages, the union leaders were urging them to “Save part of your pay in our bank, and you won’t need more wages. Inalittle while you'll be living off capital and then may be you can quit working.”> When Stone dismissed these arguments with the claim that his attention to financial activities, which consumed so much of his time, never interfered with his work on behalf of the membership’s economic interests.°6 Foster launched a vigorous attack on the labor banking movement. In two pamphlets published by the TUEL, Misleaders of Labor and Wrecking the Labor Banks, Foster charged that labor banks and similar institutions “divert the attention of the unions away from their proper functions as organs of direct struggle against the employers and turn their activities into enervating and corrupting capitalist business channels. The real tasks of building the unions and defending the workers’ interests are forgotten.” The banks and investment companies of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers “are tied up with all sorts of labor-crushing capitalists. Inevitably the union leadership thus falls under the control of these enemies of the workers and does their bidding.” As a striking example, there was the mine operated by the locomotive engineers’ bank in West Virginia which paid non-union wages and refused to institute union conditions. Foster sharply attacked Stone’s theory of the “higher strategy of labor.” Stone argued that labor history should be divided into three epochs. The first was the beginning of class consciousness and organization; the second was a general struggle for the right of collective bargaining, and the third was to be an era of cooperation with the employers, rather than a war against them. The most striking manifestation of the new development was

the labor bank.5” The League’s warnings, however, were “scoffed at as the complaint of incurable radicals altogether out of touch with realities of life.” The Railroad Brotherhoods, and especially the Engineers, “lived in a golden

dream.”98 Then the inevitable happened. In 1925 the parent bank of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers in Cleveland decided to invest heavily in Florida real estate, even building a new town, Venice. Eventually, 50,000 acres of land were purchased. Although Florida real estate was hardly a sound investment, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Realty Company was organized to promote the scheme, capitalized at $1,000,000, and “a flood of money was poured into it, from insurance and pension funds, bers in the TUEL, “genuinely progressive and fighters of long standing, who hesitated to take a stand against the B&O plan, believing that it offers the only possible program for the unions in their present weakened state.” Foster called these progressives “cooperationists,” following a policy of defeat and “surrender.” (Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Pa. 1988, pp. 625-26;

Workers Monthly, Oct., 1925, p. 539.)

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from the banks and investment companies, from the sale of stock to the membership.” All told, $16,000,000 was invested in Venice, Florida.°? In 1926, rumors began to be heard that the whole financial structure of the Brotherhood was in danger. A convention of the Brotherhood held in Cleveland from June 6 to July 21, 1927, the longest convention ever held by the union, learned that the Florida venture was on the verge of bankruptcy. It set up a Committee of Ten to investigate the situation and come up with a solution. The investigation disclosed that the union’s financial ventures had been recklessly and incompetently conducted. No one, however, really knew how much had been lost. “I want to say,” declared the chairman of the Committee of Ten, “that at the end of the two years the committee will be badly mistaken if we don’t find ourselves with an indebtedness of approximately $8,000,000 hanging over us.” This did not, however, include the millions lost by members in buying the stock of the venture.* To cover its enormous financial responsibility as a result of its enterprises, the union assessed each member $5 a month for a period of two years. It also prohibited any further financial enterprises. Assistant Grand Chief Engineer Edington declared: I hope to see the day come when we can forget about investment companies, holding companies, realty companies ... and get back to the old Brotherhood as a labor organization.®

None of the objectives of the labor banking movement were achieved. Except for the Amalgamated Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago and the Amalgamated Bank of New York, founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1922 and 1923, respectively, the labor banks met with disaster. By 1929, the number had dropped to 18; by 1931, only 7 labor banks remained, and by 1933, the two Amalgamated banks were the sole survivors. “Not only the locomotive engineers, but all of organized labor should learn from the bitter experience of the B. of LE. trade union capitalism, its institutions and its false theories which are widespread in the labor movement,” wrote William Z. Foster in 1927. “The unions must cut loose from the labor banks and their destructive influence and be redeveloped as fighting organizations. Not the gathering together of the workers’ dimes by the trade union capitalist institutions and the cultivation of illusions that the workers can buy their way out of wage slavery, but the building up of the workers’ organizations, by organizing the unorganized, by amalgama\

* Shortly before the convention began, Warren S. Stone, head of the Brotherhood and the man primarily responsible for its labor banking and Florida investment program, died.

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tion, by democratization, by adopting a militant policy of struggle, by

launching a labor party—that is what the labor movement needs.”6!

That, of course, was the program of the Trade Union Educational League.

CHAPTER 10

MACHINISTS AND CARPENTERS In 1922 when the TUEL began its opposition to the class collaboration policies of the leadership of the International Association of Machinists, the union was in a sorry state. In 1920 the IAM had 330,000 members.

After the 1922 strike, 97,000. During the Shopmen’s Strike in 1922, 62 American railroads established their own company unions of shopmen.}

THE IAM AND AMALGAMATION The first national conference of the Metal Trades Committee of the TUEL took place during the Railroad Amalgamation Conference in December 1922. Despite the fact that the leadership of the IAM, headed by William Johnston, a Socialist dictator, circulated a letter to the membership denouncing the conference, delegates from the IAM, Boilermakers and Helpers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Patternmakers, Blacksmiths, Sheet Metal Workers, Molders and Metal Polishers attended.? They approved a document entitled AMALGAMATION OR ANNIHILATION A Practical Plan of AMALGAMATION For the Metal Trades Submitted by International Committee for Amalgamation in the Metal Industry

The document stated in part: Craft unionism was born in the village. The village has since grown into an industrial center, but lagging behind, away in the rear, we find the craft unions, unable to move forward, stuck in the mud of the intellectual bankruptcy of their leadership. This is the condition generally of the American Labor Movement, and especially is it true of the metal trades. In the small, undeveloped machine shop of early days, the machinists’ union functioned fairly well. Around the corner was the blacksmith’s shop and in it the “members of the blacksmiths’ union, and down by the river banks stood the small

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foundry employing members of the molders’ union. As long as this condition existed, the various craft unions functioned effectively and were ideal and logical. But now these things have changed fundamentally. The machine shop in its growth has added one department after another, first a drafting room, then a foundry, and as the industrial development advanced there followed in quick succession a boiler shop, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, pattern shop, pipe shop—making of the former primitive machine shop a gigantic institution, the modern metal industry... As the industry changed its forms and consolidated in every conceivable manner, the unions should have changed and consolidated likewise. But due to the intellectual bankruptcy of their leadership, who desire to maintain their well-paid lobs at whatever cost, to corruption, etc., almost nothing was done toward moving the unions along the road of progress... When the small shops grew into industries they were lost to the organizations. The present metal trades unions, outside of the railroad industry, have only maintained a grip in what are called small contract shops. Nowhere in the large plants is there to be found an organization. Only the barest fringe of the metal trades is organized.... According to the 1920 census, there were 4,000,000 workers employed in the metal trades, not counting the 400,000 railroad shopmen, or the Canadian metal workers. Yet today, in the whole of North America there are less than 400,000 workers, or 10 per cent, organized in the various metal trade unions, and four fifths of them are railroad men .... Craft unionism in the metal trades is dead; the undertaker must be called. Our present form of organization is a crime.

The solution was clear: “All the metal trades must be combined together.” With a scientific plan of amalgamation, the crafts would not lose their identity. The general body would be divided into several sections, each of which would have a number of subdivisions to correspond to the various divisions of the industry. The proposed industrial union would sign separate agreements with individual shops based on crafts. But the power of the entire union would be in the hands of one executive board. Thus a general metal workers’ union under one executive board would be created through the process of amalgamation. Hence the document closed: Amalgamation should become a burning question in the order of business at every local meeting of all the metal trades.... When two or more unions go on record favorably, immediate action should be taken to see that they amalgamate. This will help move the more backward organizations into action. Let amalgamation be the question of the hour. Metal tradesmen! Progress calls you to action. Concentration of capital, industrial development, are moving forward with terrific speed. Step on the throttle of amalgamation. Get off the rocky road of craft unionism, and enter upon the broad boulevard of departmental industrial unionism, the way to social emancipation.

ADOPT THIS RESOLUTION RESOLVED: That we favor the amalgamation of all metal trades organizations into one union covering the entire metal trades industry, and that we call

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upon our general officers to take the necessary steps so that a joint convention of all these organizations (or as many as possible of them) can be assembled to put this amalgamation into effect.

As the amalgamation plan and the resolution were being circulated throughout the metal trades unions by the TUEL, an incident occurred in early 1923 that came to be known as the “Toledo Case,” because the dispute between supporters and opponents of the TUEL developed in Toledo Lodge 205 of the IAM. Seven members of the Lodge were charged by other members with belonging to an organization that was antagonistic to the union, namely, the TUEL. The charges stated that the members had organized a local branch of the TUEL, advocated industrial unionism and sown dissension in the lodge. The seven were tried under the rules of the union, found guilty, suspended from the union for one year and fined $50 each. Before they were to be reinstated, it was proposed, they would have to sever their ties to the Workers (Communist) Party and the TUEL. Upon appeal, President Johns-

ton upheld the action of the local lodge.* Andrew Overgaard, a Chicago machinist who would play a large part in the Communist Party in the future, wrote in the Labor Herald that one issue in the dispute was the TUEL position favoring admitting Black workers to the IAM. In 1890, the AFL had refused to charter the IAM because it constitutionally barred Blacks from membership. It even went so far as to create a rival union, the International Machinists’ Union, which permitted Black workers to join. But in 1895 Gompers led the AFL in reversing its stand after the IAM removed the barrier to Black membership from the union’s constitution, and transferred it to the ritual, thereby achieving the same ban on Black entrance to the IAM. At the same time, the charter of the International Machinists Union was revoked, and Black workers continued to be refused

membership to the one union of machinists affiliated with the AFL. Following the ruling on the Toledo case, President Johnston formally enunciated the IAM’s future rule “that regardless of the published aims and purposes of the Workers (Communist) Party and the Trade Union Educational League, the respective practices as disclosed by evidence in this case clearly indicate that their net purpose is the destruction of the Trade Union Movement of America.”” (It took strange logic to equate the admittance of Black workers to IAM membership with “destruction of the Trade Union movement of America.”) “From this premise,” notes Mark Perlman, historian of the Machinists, “he (Johnston) naturally deduced that membership in the Communist Party was ipso facto grounds for expulsion from the AM.”8 I

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THE IAM AND THE “B&O PLAN” A major issue in the TUEL battle against the IAM leadership revolved about the “Baltimore and Ohio Plan” we have previously discussed. To Foster, nothing represented class collaboration of unions and capitalists more clearly than the “B&O Plan” which had been widely implemented in railway shops after the 1922 strike. It had been taken up by President William H. Johnston of the Machinists Union as “a means of getting the union into the good graces of the railroad corporations.”? The TUEL condemned this “infamous Baltimore and Ohio Plan,” and pointed out that at the Glenwood shops—one of the major shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where the plan had been in operation for two years, the Machinists’ local union had denounced it as nothing but “an agreement whereby the union purchased recognition from the railroad management by supplying efficiency engineers who, with the authority of the union, sped up production, and, at the same time, got rid of undesirable workers as well as any union working conditions which might hamper or reduce profits.” In short, declared the TUEL, the union had “become a supply corporation to the railroad companies, engaging in the business of selling labor just as another corporation may sell lubricants.” In this connection, they quoted from President Johnston’s first public announcement of the “B&O Plan,” made at a meeting held in the St. Louis YMCA, and reported in the November 24, 1923 issue of Labor, the railroad union weekly. He said: “The idea underlying our service to the B&O may be compared to the idea which underlies the engineering service extended to railroads by large supply corporations which have contracts with these railroads to furnish, let us say, arch-brick, superheaters, stokers, or lubricating oil.”!° The TUEL warned that if the “B&O Plan” were extended throughout the railroad industry, it would eliminate unionism altogether. It was a method by which the railroad management would capture the unions and turn them to profit-making organizations for industry. The Plan, in effect, was a direct competitor of the company unions, giving promise to industry of being more useful than even the company unions.!! In an article entitled “Company Unions and the B&O Plan,” a member of the TUEL machinists’ union explained how the Plan changed the labor unions into company unions: The company unions have the following purposes: 1. To provide regular means of access by employees through their representatives to the employer, and for consultation by the employer with employees through representatives. 2. To avoid interruption of production and to maintain maximum production.

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3. To give employees an opportunity to discuss conditions under which they work and the means of improvement. 4. To further the common interest of the employees and the employer in all matters pertaining to work, organizing and efficiency.

He then compared these avowed purposes with the statement of principles of the “B&O Plan,” as formulated by IAM Johnston and B&O Railroad Beyer: 1. Full and cordial recognition of the Federated Shopmen’s Union as agents of the employees. 2. Constructive and protective functions in railroad management, along lines laid down by these unions and their spokesmen. 3. Agreement between these unions and the management to cooperate for improved service to the public. 4, Agreement to share fully any subsequent benefits. 5. Perfection of definite administrative machinery to accomplish these purposes.

The TUEL contended that the “B&O Plan” contained all the principles of the “open shop” idea. The only essential difference between the “company union” plan of the National Association of Manufacturers, which was the open shop movement, and the “B&O Plan,” was that in the latter case, the union officials themselves contracted to use the power of the labor union to establish the principles of the open shop. “The labor union officials,” the TUEL continued, “had their own reasons for being anxious to make this kind of a deal with the employers. Their criminal mismanagement of the 1922-23 strike had demoralized their members to such an extent that the officials became alarmed at this danger to their salaries. They had to find a new method of renewing the flow of per capita tax into their treasuries, after the drastic loss of membership. On the other hand, the ”Open shop" employers were interested in the Plan for two reasons. First, because they were experiencing difficulties with their private company unions, and second, because they realized the need for an additional “line of defense” inside the workers’ organizations, to prevent the company unions from being captured by the workers.}8 The 17th Convention of the IAM was held in Detroit, Michigan, from September 15 to 27, 1924. The key issue of amalgamation consumed considerable time. Lodges 79, 235, 330, 337 and 119 presented resolutions favoring the amalgamation of the metal trades organizations into one union, covering the entire metal industry. The resolution declared that the employers were unitedly carrying on a vicious campaign against the unions, and that the latter were unable to make an effective resistance because of the division along trade lines. The committee on resolutions submitted a substitute for all resolutions dealing with the subject of amalgamation The

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resolution claimed that the Machinists had advocated amalgamation of all metal trades unions since 1919, but that the other metal trades unions had rejected all proposals. It then instructed the officers of the IAM to continue their efforts to secure amalgamation. A heated debate followed. Those who supported the recommendation of the committee on resolutions explained that, while they were in favor of amalgamation, they believed that the officers and members of the IAM had already done everything in their power to bring it about. They felt that amalgamation was not being delayed, prevented or opposed by the officers of the other metal trades unions, but was being fought by the members, the rank and file of these organizations; and they argued that the best solution of the problem was a campaign of education among the members of those unions, but that it was impossible to force amalgamation on them against their will. The delegates who opposed the recommendation of the committee and supported the original resolution, mainly members of the TUEL or their supporters, argued that the rank and file of the other metal trades unions, as of the Machinists, were overwhelmingly in favor of amalgamation, but that their officers had prevented them from taking any definite action. The members of all the metal trades unions, they insisted, really wanted industrial unionism, or some form of organization along industrial lines.

The delegates voted 107 to 42 to support the recommendation of the committee on resolutions. On the issue of the Toledo case, an investigating committee had been appointed and it presented a majority and minority report to the convention. The majority report, signed by six members of the investigation committee, recommended that the decision of the General Executive Board be reversed, that the fines be remitted, and that the suspended members be reinstated with full rights. The minority report, signed by four members of the committee, upheld the decision of the General Executive Board. In the debate that followed, Delegate Jensen called attention to the fact that in the city of Chicago, during the railroad strike of 1922, the members of the Workers (Communist) Party and the TUEL had cooperated with the union to the utmost in raising funds to carry on the strike, and that largely through the efforts of these two organizations, 15 or 20 thousand dollars were raised. Delegate Emme, a member of the Workers (Communist) Party, argued that the party was a recognized political organization with a ticket in the field in a number of states; that the TUEL was an educational movement; that neither could be regarded as a dual movement, and that both these organizations were strictly working class movements, having nothing to do with employers. He declared that the members of the League were very active members of the IAM, that they brought in a large number

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of members at a time when the membership ranks had been decimated, and that they constituted a militant group of the labor movement. Only one voice was raised in support of the decision of the General Executive Board, that of Secretary Davison. The Johnston machine had the necessary votes, and despite the fact that the majority report recommended that the action taken by the General Executive Board be reversed, 107 delegates voted to sustain the GEB decision, and forty-four voted to reverse it.!4 In early November 1924, the National Committee of the TUEL met to formulate strategy for the coming months in the IAM. Foster, who was concluding a presidential campaign as candidate of the Workers (Communist) Party, had delegated to Andrew Overgaard the task of creating an analysis and plan. The general opposition to the policies of President Johnston in the Machinists Union was split between “progressives” like Vice-President J. F. Anderson, and TUEL “left-wingers.” The program of the TUEL adopted by the Committee, included industrial unionism, organization of the unorganized, a labor party, opposition to the “B&O Plan”; opposition to racial discrimination and for a campaign to organize Black workers; opposition to the expulsion of TUEL members, recognition of Soviet Russia, and international trade union unity. One month later, Foster and William F. Dunne were delegated to approach the progressives to demand representation of the left wing on the opposition slate in the upcoming elections. They conditioned the support of the TUEL on the endorsement of a battle against the “B&O Plan,” a campaign to reinstate expelled members, a “militant campaign” for industrial unionism, support for a “class” labor party, and opposition to the presidential candidacy of Robert M. LaFollette. Significantly the latter two were not to be “splitting points.”15 Anderson rejected the TUEL overture, so the League ran its own candidates in the union’s “primary” elections. These candidates were able to demonstrate that a significant amount of support existed for the TUEL platform. Yet, after the nominating elections, the League withdrew its candidates and gave its qualified support to Anderson. In the general election that followed, Anderson did not make any public statement as to his position on the issues, but three other candidates on his slate ended up backing a program that was identical to the TUEL demands, minus the LaFollette provision. In the election in March 1925, Anderson lost by only 50 votes. He immediately charged that the election of Johnston was a result of the most blatant fraud. In this he was supported by the TUEL.!6 We will continue this story in our next volume. X

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THE CARPENTERS As with the Machinists Union, TUEL activity in the Carpenters’ Union was given impetus by the class collaboration policies of its reactionary leadership, headed by the arch-conservative, Republican William L. Hutcheson. The TUEL participated in the battle waged in the Chicago building trades against the Landis Award in September 1921. When a number of trade agreements had expired early in the year, employers sought to impose wage reductions. After a six-week strike, both sides agreed to arbitration, but the carpenters and painters, still operating under unexpired contracts, refused to cooperate. In his arbitration award, Judge Kenesaw M. Landis* reorganized time-honored union wage rates and attempted to impose uniformly low pay scales in a variety of building trades. Many locals refused to abide by the decision, and International officials were called to quell revolts. The resulting conflict saw manufacturers’ associations and the officials of the union internationals allied against rebellious sectors of the rank and file. Landis’s award “became the fighting issue of the open shop movement in Chicago.”!” Anti-Landis unionists organized huge parades against the award; several jobs operating under the decision were bombed. The Landis Award caused a split in the Chicago Building Trades Council, but after a long period of resistance, contractors began to sign agreements with anti-Landis shops. It was a notable instance of successful resistance to the open-shop manufacturers’ alliances of the early 1920s in

which the TUEL played a prominent role.!8 However, the following year in Chicago, President Hutcheson of the Carpenters signed an agreement that was in many ways a replica of the Landis award. It included: 1. There shall be no strikes or lockouts or stoppages of work, neither shall members of union collectively leave the work of a member of the Building Trades Employers Association. 2. There shall be no agreement providing for the discrimination of building material raw or manufactured. 3. The amount of work a man may perform shall not be restricted by a union or its representatives, and the use of machinery, tools, appliances, or methods, shall not be restricted or interfered with. 4. The employer shall be at liberty to employ or discharge whomsoever he sees fit.

* Landis was the judge who presided over the Federal trials of the IWW, and handed down . severe sentences of from 10 to 30 years in jail plus enormous fines. (See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 7 [New York, 1987]: 310-12.

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This agreement, known as the “Twelve Points,” was entered into by the Building Trades Association with the Building Trades Employers Association on October 10, 1922.1%* That same year, 1922, the TUEL published a small sheet, the Progressive Building Trades Worker, and opened headquarters in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Detroit to launch a joint drive to change the conservative policies of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.29 The drive at first dealt largely with the activities of Hutcheson in New York in 1916 and Chicago in 1922. In the 1916 New York strike, after 70 percent of the strikers had gained their demand for an increase of 50 cents per day in wages, Hutcheson, on the promise of a future increase in wages by the Employers’ Association, and without consulting the District Council, ordered the 3,000 men still on strike to return to work under the old rate of wages. When Hutcheson’s settlement was rejected, the Carpenters’ president still insisted that the men work for $5.00 a day when almost all were earning $5.50. Upon their refusal to obey, he suspended the entire membership of the 63 local unions, and recruited scabs to replace the men still on strike. When 64 delegates from the expelled locals were sent to the 1916 convention of the Brotherhood, the police were summoned to keep them from presenting their side of the story in the convention hall.21 The TUEL condemned Hutcheson’s conduct in the 1916 strike, and charged that in the events in Chicago, his order to return to work at the old rate of wages resulted in a reduction in pay for more than 13,000 members from the higher wages already won by them.22 Spurred by the TUEL, Local 181 of Chicago adopted a resolution denouncing the “Twelve Points” agreement of October 10, 1922, “as detrimental to the interests of the carpenters in that it surrendered the fruits of many hard fought victories at a time when no concessions were necessary.” The resolution also condemned the methods used in making the agreement as the “cheapest kind of political chicanery,” and demanded that the delegates to the Carpenters’ convention, then in session, read the agreement, and denounce it before the gathering adjourned. However, Hutcheson refused to permit

Local 181’s appeal to be read at the convention.23 In his opening address to the convention, Hutcheson denounced the followers of the TUEL as “men who have been brainwashed into believing that the propaganda that has been spread by men like Foster and his kind was more in keeping with the true principles of labor unionism than the principles of our organization... Every member of our organization should remember that the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of Amer* It was reaffirmed at a meeting of the Building Trades Council on June 12, 1926.

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ica is a trade union organization, and that any time any member advocated anything that pertains to Industrialism, Communism, or any other ‘ism’ that has for its purpose the disintegration of our Brotherhood or the putting into effect of what might be termed an industrial organization, there is no place in our organization of that kind of man.... Advocates of

this sort of thing should be kicked out quickly.”24 On March 1, 1924, the police, in collaboration with the local carpenters’ leadership and other AFL leaders, raided a meeting of the TUEL in Los Angeles, and arrested the 39 men and women present. The authorities confiscated all the materials there, and after taking the names, addresses, and local union affiliation of those arrested, released them on their own recognizance. Two days later, the TUEL asserted, the list of names and

addresses, together with the minutes and a list of those who had contributed to the Labor Defense Council, were in the possession of the Carpenters’ District Council. The raid, the League charged, was a conspiracy between the labor officials and the police. Sixteen members of the Carpenters’ Union, who had been present at the League meeting, were expelled by the order of President Hutcheson, and the local unions were instructed to strike their names from the books.25 The expelled members appealed to the General Convention in 1924. Although the appeal was forwarded by registered mail, it did not come before the convention. On September 27, the appeal was heard by the General Executive Board together with delegates from Locals 158 and 426 of Los Angeles. The GEB held that the TUEL was antagonistic to the United Brotherhood of Carpenter and Joiners, and sustained the act of the President in expelling the 16 members. The Board recommended, however, that if the suspended members filed affidavits with the general office swearing that they had severed all connections and affiliations with the League, and never again would give it or any similar organization any recognition, support, encouragement, or assistance, they should be permitted, upon payment of all back dues and per capita taxes, to continue their membership in the Brotherhood, but not permitted to hold office in or serve as committeemen of any local union for a period of five years. But the suspension of James McClure, who the GEB viewed as the most active in the League, was to be permanent.26 To the suspension the 16 members made a vigorous reply, including In the event that we swear away our freedom of thought, speech, action in this manner, then the General Executive Board will permit us to continue membership in the United Brotherhood under the following conditions: that we shall not be permitted to hold office in any Local Union, or serve as committeemen of any Local Union for a period of five years.

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In other words, they would seal our lips and prevent us from doing any real progressive work in the Labor movement in Los Angeles. Every Union man knows that there is only one reason for belonging to a labor union in Los Angeles, and that is to be a live wire and keep on fighting on the job and in the Local Union for a better organization and better working conditions. In other words, if a man did not have some ideal that he could work for in his organization he might as well not belong: because every one knows that the mere fact of a carpenter carrying a union card does not make any difference to him in securing a job and wages in Los Angeles at the present time.

The expelled men also announced their intention to continue their fight

for a trial and for reinstatement.2”

THE “HOME AFFAIR” A key issue pushed by the TUEL and other opposition forces at the 1924 convention revolved about the “Home Affair.” This related to the Hutcheson plan to build a home for aged carpenters. The TUEL and other forces in the union charged that the plan was designed to build a home at an extravagant cost with Hutcheson, his cronies and the builders sharing the excessive costs. The TUEL favored a pension instead of a home. Hutcheson had raised the question at the 1920 convention. However, opposition was strong and the officers were given permission only to look into the advisability of establishing a home. After officers of the union had been royally treated by Florida land speculators, the Executive Board issued a circular in March 1923 endorsing the creation of a home in Florida. The carpenters were requested to vote in a referendum for or against the purchase of a home. In June the Executive Board announced the favorable passage of the measure and, in December 1923, the purchase of a home site near Lakeland, Florida was announced. The price of the land alone came to almost half a million dollars. (The eventual cost of the completed home was $4 million.) When the rank and file carpenters discovered the cost of the land alone, a flood of bitter anti-Hutcheson feelings swept the union, and protests against the purchase “poured into Indianapolis from all points of the compass.” Shortly after the vote was announced in July, Local 562 of Everett, Washington, complained that its members had voted against the home proposition, yet had been recorded as voting for it. (This was a typical Hutcheson device although it was not usually exposed.) Hutcheson brushed off the complaint with the reply that he had appointed the Tabulation Committee, and it had not committed any irregularities. A special investigating committee was then appointed by the Everett local, and it sent out 50 questionnaires. The committee found that at least four other local unions felt that their votes had been tampered with. With this, the officers

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of the Everett local demanded a recount. The Executive Board refused the request on the ground that “the constitutional limit of thirty days had passed after the commission of the grievance.” The Everett local then sent out 500 letters of inquiry. From this random sampling, they discovered that at least 30 locals felt that their vote had been falsified, and that the home measure had failed to get a constitutional majority by at least 196 votes. Still the Executive Board did nothing. Early in 1924, C. J. Mulcahy of Local 632, Providence, Rhode Island, distributed a circular among the various locals initiating a vote to abandon the home project, and put a pension in its place—the plan proposed by the TUEL. Mulcahy won the support of 280 local unions from 46 states and Canada, representing about 70,000 members, behind his petition. Again, the Executive Board turned down the opposition with a series of highly technical reasons. The home issue next came before the 1924 convention. The opposition was led by Mulcahy and Morris Brown, member of Local 376 of New York City, who was a leader of the TUEL in the Carpenters’ Union. With the support of various opposition locals throughout the country, these two men introduced several resolutions proposing reduction of Hutcheson’s power. Not one resolution passed. For daring to challenge Hutcheson’s home project, Mulcahy was attacked by Hutcheson’s goons and beaten up. Still Mulcahy made sure to be present at the last session of the convention when the home issue was finally taken up. Mulcahy asked that the Executive Board’s refusal to conduct a second vote on the establishment of a home be repudiated by the convention. A delegate arose and moved to table his appeal. Hutcheson refused to allow debate on the motion. Here is a sample of the dialogue that followed: Delegate Mulcahy: “Give us the right to be heard.” Hutcheson: “The motion is not debatable ....” Delegate Mulcahy: “Do I understand then that the appeal of Local Union No. 361 will not be heard before this convention?...” Hutcheson: “It is laid on the table indefinitely.” Delegate Mulcahy: “I appeal your decision.”

The proceedings of the convention then states: “Delegate Mulcahy refused to obey repeated requests ... [to] come to order.” Hutcheson: “Delegate Mulcahy will be recorded in the proceedings as no longer a delegate in this convention.”8

On the eve of the 1924 Carpenters’ Convention, the TUEL had published and distributed an Appeal of Local Union 376 to the membership of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America to the

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Twenty-Second General convention from the Decision of General President William L. Hutcheson and the General Executive Board. The Appeal set forth an 18-point program. It is worth reprinting in full since it presents the League’s program to reform the second largest union in the country, under one of the most corrupt and reactionary union leaderships in the United States.” It included: 1. Affiliation to the Building Trades Department. 2. Abolition of the National Board of Jurisdictional Awards. 3. Development of job control, so that the workers can put an end to the speed-up system and stop the discharge of workers at the mere whim of the boss. Building strong job committees means building a powerful union. 4. A five day, forty-hour week. 5. Uniform agreements for all building trades workers to expire at the same time in each district. 6. All agreements to be ratified by the rank and file. 7. A joint drive to organize the unorganized under the slogan: “A 100% organized industry.” 8. Old age pensions. 9. Reinstatement of the Los Angeles expelled members and re-admittance to union activity of Fred Burgess of Philadelphia. 10. The right of minority opinion to freedom of expression in the union. 11. The right of the General President to suspend members or locals to be abolished. Such rights to be voted in the General Executive Board, who will act only on the recommendation of State or District Councils. 12. National Conventions to be held biennially. 13. Committee on Rules to govern Conventions to be elected by the delegates assembled. 14. Organizers to be elected by a referendum vote in the districts they

represent. No appointed organizer shall be a delegate to state or national conventions.

15. Amalgamation of the building trades upon a departmental basis along the lines laid down by the 1913 convention of the Building Trades Department. 16. International affiliation with the Building Trades International Secretariat, to include the Russian Building Trades. 17. Independent Working Class Political Action to protect the political interests of the workers. 18. Recognition of, and trade relations with, Soviet Russia?

The General Executive Board reprimanded Local 376, New York, for supporting this program of the TUEL.

* In “Empire in Wood: A History of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners,” Robert A. Christie dismissed the “Appeal” as “a long-winded eighteen point platform which included a series of internal reforms in the Brotherhood, ostensibly designed to make it a more democratic organization.” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1954, P. 476.) At the same time, he concedes “the facts” set forth “seem to be reliable,” and that the TUEL, for which he has only contempt, “was able to establish a strong foothold in the United Brothernone because of Hutcheson’s recklessly autocratic methods.” Why, then, the cheap sneer “ostensibly”

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It charged that the program “contained planks in opposition to our laws and constitution and not in conformity with our objectives.”°9 Just what these were was not spelled out. The 18-point program was designed to oppose Hutcheson’s re-election in 1924. However, the opposition was split, with Morris Rosen and William K. Brown, both of Local 183, running for Hutcheson’s office. (Rosen was the TUEL candidate.) Hutcheson was reported to have received 77,989 votes, Rosen 34,436, and Brown 9,014.31 The 18-point program of the TUEL seemed to have gone the way of every proposal at a Carpenters’ Convention aimed primarily at creating a more democratic union. They were all defeated. But, as we shall see in our next volume, the TUEL 18-point program continued to win support among rank and file carpenters after the convention had seemingly buried it forever.

CHAPTER 11

THE MINERS: I During World War I (1914-1918) there was a tremendous increase in the U.S. output of coal. The wartime activity in iron, steel, munitions and shipping absorbed much of the increased coal production. An additional demand was created by the closed mines in the wartorn areas of Europe. There was a net increase of about 800 new U.S. mines each year. At the same time, many old mines increased their capacity by the installation of new machinery. High prices and profits drew into the industry more operators, more mines and more miners, The United Mine Workers of America

grew to 400,000 members by 1919.1 During the 1920s, the United Mine Workers, then the nation’s most powerful union, was engaged in a bitter struggle for survival. Among the critical problems facing the membership was the organization of nonunion miners in the Southern Appalachian fields, the bituminous coal areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and especially West Virginia; the relative decline in the demand for coal as a result of increasing competition from electricity, oil and natural gas; technological changes that enabled the operators to produce the same amount of coal with fewer miners, and the increasing dissatisfaction with the autocratic rule and class-collaboration policies of President John L. Lewis and his administration within the

United Mine Workers.? “The miners of America are the most progressive workers in the country. But their officials are among the most reactionary.” Thus opened an editorial entitled, “The Struggle in the UMWA,” published in the Workers Monthly of December 1924, calling John L. Lewis a “corrupt...class-collaborationist tyrant" and “a cog in the machine of Calvin Coolidge and the Republican party,” the TUEL paper* ranked the struggle for democratic, * The Workers Monthly replaced the Labor Herald. It called itself “Official Organ of The Workers Party and the Trade Union Educational League,” thus closely identifying the League withthe Communist Party.

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honest, militant leadership in the miners’ union among “the most impor-

tant in the entire American labor movement.”3

THE LEWIS MACHINE John L. Lewis was born in 1880 of a Welsh mining family in Lucas, Iowa, a coal-mining community. Between 1897 and 1901, Lewis worked as a farm hand and coal miner. He then left the family home to wander in the mountainous West, from which he returned to Lucas late in 1905 to once again mine coal. However, he refused to settle into the life of a miner, instead taking over the management of the local theater. In 1907 he ran for mayor of Lucas, but lost. That same year he joined a grain and feed business. It failed. He speculated in the grain market and lost. But he married “above him” to Myrta Bell, a physician’s daughter. In 1908 Lewis and his wife moved to Panama, Illinois, a coal company town with a strong local of the UMW, one of the ten largest in the state. They were followed by the rest of the Lewises. A year later, John’s brother Thomas became a police magistrate. In 1910 John became president of the union local. From that time on, he never again entered the mines as a worker. He resigned the local post in 1911 to become special organizer for AFL president Samuel Gompers. He was succeeded as local union president by Thomas, who was at the same time manager of the coal mine that employed the union members. The Lewis family, as Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine make clear in their biography of John L. Lewis, “enriched themselves at the expense of the union members.” A later investigation “uncovered a pattern of corrup-

tion and embezzlement whereby Tom and Dennie as well as their father, Thomas H., maintained a dual set of books, issued illegal checks, and forged checks to double the expenditures approved by the local union.” Despite this, John L. Lewis never criticized or dissociated himself from his brothers. In his quest for power in the labor movement, Lewis relied entirely on corruption. “Wherever possible,” Dubofsky and Van Tine point out, “Lewis used influence, voters and power he controlled in the large union local to inveigle patronage appointments from UMW superiors rather than run for office and face a union electorate.”4 From the beginning he was involved in election fraud. From 1911 to 1918 he never ran for office, yet his rise to power was phenomenal. In June 1915, UMW President John White appointed Lewis as union statistician, undoubtedly in payment for his support. Lewis “engaged in electoral shenanigans worthy of the most cunning of big-city bosses.” On July 15, 1917, White appointed Lewis as business manager of the United Mine Workers Journal, a powerful position from which he could influence the thinking of the union miners. A short time

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later, White resigned as UMW president to join the wartime Fuel Administration and was succeeded by Vice-President Frank J. Hayes, “an amiable, ineffectual dipsomaniac,” who had no heart for the routine work connected with the job of chief executive. Hayes appointed Lewis as vice-president, but with the president continuously drunk, Lewis completely took over the union. On February 6, 1920, Hayes resigned and Lewis was confirmed by the UMW Executive Board as president. Thus, Lewis had moved to the top of the UMW but had presented himself for approval by the membership only once!° At this time the formal organization of the UMW was based on “locals” - composed of from 20 to 500 members each, with the several thousand locals grouped into 25 districts, and these districts unified into an international government which consisted of president, one vice-president, one secretary-treasurer, minor offices, the administrative staff and an executive board. While it appeared on the surface that an adequate amount of democratic machinery was available to make these officials responsible to the union membership, the truth is that the UMW’s constitution placed no restriction on the president’s activities as long as he asserted and maintained the power of interpreting its meaning and application. To be sure, issues were supposed to be settled by majority vote at the conventions to insure that the will of the union’s rank and file members prevailed. But here, too, the power of the president was decisive. Basically, work at the UMW conventions was conducted by committees, and the committees were appointed almost exclusively by the president. He had complete control over the credentials committee, which decided who should be admitted to the convention; the committee on agenda, which decided which subjects the convention would take up, and the committees which recommended to the convention exactly the resolutions on various subjects that the president favored.§ The President could and did manipulate parliamentary procedure to make sure that the actions he favored were approved on the convention floor. During the 1920 convention, Lewis refused to recognize a motion from the floor, and when asked whether the convention was to be ruled by parliamentary law or not, he replied, “Yes, but before parliamentary law comes the rule of reason.” Soon Lewis discarded even “the rule of reason” and ran UMW conventions as it suited him. He recognized only those whom he wished to speak, closed the debate when he wished, had objectors forcibly thrown out, and in general disregarded the desires of protesting delegates, no matter how many. To those who objected, he thundered: “May the chair state that you may shout until you meet each other in hell and he will not change his ruling.”” The control over their own affairs, stipulated in the constitution as belonging to the districts and locals, was also greatly curtailed in practice.

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The formation of districts was largely under the control of international officers who could arrange these subdivisions with considerable latitude in order to carry out their policies. New locals were created by union organizers who owed their jobs to the president. The election of organizers, Lewis

argued, would reduce “efficiency.”8 Lewis exercised control over districts and locals through his power to

suspend or revoke the charter of any group within the union for any reason and for as long a period as he saw fit, subject only to the approval of the executive board. Any district or local that opposed him found itself under “a kind of martial law,” with the regularly elected officers replaced by emergency officers appointed solely by the president. These “provisional” officers took over and “reorganized” the group with the help of “field workers” and continued to govern as long as Lewis so desired. Through the use of “provisionalism,” Lewis prevented the emergence of other important candidates for his position by liquidating potential rivals in the local and district administrations. His control over credentials and discussions in the convention was the second line of defense against his

opponents.!° A number of other provisions served to secure the president’s complete control over the union. First, he controlled the union’s official publication through the executive board, and during the 1920s the Journal was turned into “a banal house organ, devoted chiefly to Lewis’s life and works.” Secondly, centralization of union finances gave Lewis control over the purse strings and left little official funds for opposition groups to use to promote their causes. The administration was also able to influence members of the union by the use of the patronage at its disposal. Technically, the rank-and-file had the right to use the “recall,” under which an officer might be forced to stand the test of another vote if enough of the members were dissatisfied with his administration. But the machinery was difficult to employ. Five percent of all the members had to sign the initial petition for the recall of an officer, and thirty percent had to sign a second petition within 30 days in order to force a new vote on the official involved.!? In a union of half a million members, it was exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to obtain 150,000 signatures in a short time, particularly in view of the fact that opposition members had to finance the procedure themselves and that the instigation of such action was likely to

result in expulsion from the union.!’ Under the union’s constitution, the president had the power to suspend or revoke the membership of any individual or group within the union, for any reason and for as long as he saw fit. Lewis consolidated his power by fraud, bribery and corruption. He usurped from the districts the right to elect their officers and appointed his

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henchmen as officials. He created an army of gunmen and gangsters. The 1920 national convention put the finishing touches on the dictatorship when it gave him authority to expel union members, revoke charters of the subdivisions and local unions, and set up his own organization in their place. This, as Spencer D. Pollard notes in his study of democracy in the government of the United Mine Workers, enabled Lewis to establish a tight, monolithic dictatorship.14 But it did not eliminate resistance. Because of his actions in ending the great coal strike of 1919, which we examined in volume 8, Lewis faced strong opposition within the union. In spite of an injunction issued by Federal Judge A. B. Anderson of Indianapolis at the request of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, ordering the UMW officials to call off any strike, 400,000 miners went on strike November 1,1919, for a 60 percent increase in pay, a 6-hour day, and a 5-day week. Judge Anderson issued the final injunction on November 8, giving the union 72 hours in which to cancel the strike. Lewis chose to capitulate. He made no attempt to resist the injunction, held no referendum, and did not even announce the terms under which the miners should go back to work. The terms, when finally disclosed, provided for an immediate wage increase of 14 percent, and left the disposition of all other questions to the judgment of a commission to be appointed by President Woodrow Wilson. After holding extended hearings, the commission granted less than half of the miners’ demands. The coal diggers obtained a 27 percent wage increase, but the demands for a 6-hour day and 5-day week were ignored. Illinois miners demanded that the International leadership take immediate action either to renegotiate the Washington Agreement, or to declare it non-binding. Because of the extensive cooperation between recently installed International President John L. Lewis and the federal government over coal policy during the war, the insurgents also denounced the UMW leadership as “the apologist for and the beneficiaries of a capitalist system that is now in crisis.”!© “Like a pusillanimous poltroon,” wrote one critic of Lewis, “he betrayed the rank and file, obeyed the injunction and cowered behind the skirts of ‘Americanism.’”!® (The last phrase related to Lewis’s explanation in calling off the strike that “We are Americans. We can not fight the government.”) John Walker, leader of District 12 (Illinois) told Mother Jones that Lewis’s “surrendering and bowing in abject submission, allowing the men to be driven into the mines like cattle, without a fight at all ... makes the decent Mine Workers, who understand what it means, blush with shame.”!7 ~In 1920 dissension mounted among rank-and-file miners in the Pennsylvania: anthracite districts over the contracting system used by the operators. Under the system, the coal companies rented out parts of their mines to contractors, each of whom was free to make up his own labor force from

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nonunion sources. Apart from the fact that this represented competition of cheaper labor, union miners complained that the contractors were awarded the richest working places in the mines and that whenever there was a shortage of empty coal cars, preference was given to the contractors. They also complained that the coal companies used the threat of substituting contract for union work to force the union men to make concessions which violated the union agreement with the operators.!8 Lewis declined to intervene in the controversy. In the summer of 1920, in order to avoid a direct violation of the union agreement, the miners of District 1, the area most affected by the contracting system, under the leadership of Rinaldo Capellini, took a simultaneous “vacation” from work to force some recognition of their grievances. At the peak of the walk-out, 135,000 miners were on “vacation,” but the vigorous efforts of the government and the Lewis administration broke the strike after several weeks.19 A year later, the seething discontent over the contracting issue took the form of a rebellion against the administration’s candidates for office in District 1. Despite every device employed by the Lewis machine to prevent it, Capellini, the leader of the “vacation” strike, was elected president of the district by the disgruntled miners.2? But Lewis now employed another one of his strategies to squelch dissent; he simply bought off Capellini. As soon as he was installed as a member of the “official oligarchy,” Capellini became an ardent and aggressive Lewis supporter.?! But the contracting issue did not die. In 1924, over strong opposition from Capellini, a general grievance committee led a walkout of 30,000 miners in the Wilkes-Barre area to protest against the contracting system and other grievances. The strike was finally suppressed by International headquarters, but before it was ended, Lewis had expelled 12,000 members from the union.22 Elected UMW president in December 1920 as a “conservative,” John L. Lewis was strangely enough, the “progressive” candidate opposing Gompers’ reelection as AFL president in 1921. But as one historian has pointed out: “Lewis was not the person to rally progressive opposition.”23 As a convention delegate from the Chicago Federation of Labor noted: “It was not a fight along clear-cut lines. Mr. Lewis, posing as the radical or progressive candidate on a progressive platform, was neither radical nor progressive.” He reported that progressives in the UMW refused to support Lewis,

casting 1,596 votes for Gompers.”4 For his part, Gompers effectively attacked Lewis as being dominated by the Hearst newspapers. Gompers won

reelection, by a vote of 25,022 to 12,324, with 947 not voting.

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THE MINERS’ PROGRAM “A class-conscious working-class movement with a clear political program emerged among bituminous coal miners in the post-World War I period,” writes Alan Jay Singer in his study of ideological conflict in the

UMW.” The program was originally laid down by the 1919 Cleveland UMW Convention. It proposed “Nationalization of the Coal Industry,” and the “Six-Hour Day and Five-Day Week.” But in 1921, District 2 (Central Pennsylvania), already emerging as a center of rank and file activism, appealed: That program will remain a pious hope and a vague aspiration until the rank and file know what the program means, why it is needed here and now, and how to get it, That means that the discussion in miners’ locals must center around the program.... Our challenge to the present basis of the coal industry is this: The private ownership of the great natural resource of coal is morally indefensible and economically unsound. It means that coal is mined for the comparatively few owners, instead of the use and service of the public. It results in chronic mismanagement of the mines. It results in exploitation of the miner through overwork, underpay, inadequate safeguards, bad housing, accidents, and long and unnecessary periods of enforced idleness. It results in unemployment when millions of consumers need coal. It results in high prices for coal when democratic methods of production would reduce cost, increase production and give a good American life to the miners. The miners program could be progressively enacted inside of a few years if the miners willed it...

It was not enough for the miners to will it. It was also necessary to wrest control of the UMW from John L. lewis and his henchmen. While they occasionally gave lip-service to the Miners’ Program, basically they were committed to cooperation between the union and the operators and to stifling and ousting any elements in the union who opposed such coop-

eration.2? As President John L. Lewis consolidated his position as chief executive officer of the UMW in the early 1920s, he became more and more dictatorial in asserting the authority of the International in Indianapolis and less and less mindful of the rights of industrial or subdistrict officials who challenged his decisions. Thus in August 1921, District 12 President Frank Farrington wrote an article for the United Mine Workers Journal which was devoted to a description of the reasons for celebrating Labor Day. It was rejected for publication. Upon inquiring why, the editor informed Farrington that, after consulting Lewis, it had been decided that the article contained material intended to create discord in the ranks of the union membership. “I serve notice on you,” the editor wrote, “that neither you nor anyone else may use the columns of the Journal for any such pur-

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pose.” Farrington protested this decision at the 1921 convention of the UMW, but to no avail. It was partly as a result of this censorship that District 12 established its own Journal, the Illinois Miner, early in 1922 which, for a time at least, reflected the opinions of the rank-and-file mem-

bers more accurately than the official journal of the UMW.28

ROLE OF ALEXANDER HOWAT At the UMW convention in September 1921, Lewis faced a coalition of opponents. Known as the “Big Four,” they included Frank Farrington and John Walker of District 12 (Illinois), Alexander Howat of District 14 (Kansas), and Robert Harlin of District 10 (Washington).* While the “Big Four” were united in opposition to John L. Lewis and his International henchmen, they held radically different trade union views. Frank Farrington was a pure-and-simple business trade unionist who shared Lewis’s trade union philosophy of collaboration with the coal operators, but opposed the UMW president because of his own political ambition. John Walker and Robert Harley were Socialists and union politicians. Although they argued against Lewis’s policies and endorsed a platform calling for a campaign to organize unorganized mines, the formation of a labor party to advance the interests of the working class, and called for government intervention in the bituminous coal industry and possible nationalization of the mines, they “sacrificed principles and made political deals with the business unionists in order to gain office.” Furthermore, Walker, a former president of the Illinois district, and president of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, frequently made deals with Farrington. He saw an opportunity in Illinois to help stifle “rank

and file militancy on a number of occasions.”9 Alexander Howat, a Socialist, of UMW District 14 (Kansas), on the other hand, was bent on ending the dictatorship in the union and make it serve the interests of the membership rather than those of Lewis and his machine. Howat rejected the concept of the sanctity of the contract, arguing that the willingness to strike was the miners’ “principal weapon.” After World War I rank and file resentment, pent-up by a wartime no-strike pledge, exploded in a series of wildcat strikes, and then a national strike in violation of a federal injunction, that neither the districts nor the national office could control.** While Farrington appealed to Lewis for the

* The Trade Union Educational League was not yet part of the coalition against Lewis. Not until late 1922, at a TUEL conference in Chicago, was the “mining program” presented. It called for an alliance between railroad workers and miners, the lack of which weakened both unions; the negotiation of national rather than district agreements; the organization of unorgan-

ized miners, and the direct election of organizers. (Labor Herald, September 1922, p. 22.)

** See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: 141-146

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authority to suspend membership rights of wildcat strikers.* Howat supported the Illinois wildcatters and led strikes in violation of the contract in

Kansas.*° Although Howat has been treated as inept and a drunkard by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine in their biography of John L. Lewis, they concede that “at his best,” he “exemplified the militancy, flavor, and cour-

age of rank-and-file miners.”2! Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1876, Alexander Howat came with his parents to the United States in 1879, finally settling in Crawford County, Kansas. He began his first work in the mines at the age of ten, and in 1902 he was elected a board member of the Miners’ Union of District 14. In 1906 he was elected to the presidency of District 14 and served until 1914, when he refused to stand for re-election because of a charge that he had accepted bribes from the operators. According to McAlister Coleman, the rank-andfile never questioned Howat’s honesty or his militancy. The charge was

proved false, and Howat was re-elected in 1916.32 During the 1919 coal strike, Howat and District 14 stood firm and criticized Lewis for capitulating. In 1920, the Kansas legislature passed the notorious law creating a Court of Industrial Relations designed to enforce compulsory arbitration and prevent strikes in labor disputes. Howat was bitterly opposed to the law, calling it unconstitutional, and he notified the miners that the law would be ignored and fought. Ninety percent of the Kansas miners walked out when Howat and other district officials were arrested for defiance of the Industrial Court law. Howat’s defiance led to his being sent to jail, along with August Dorchy, secretary-treasurer of District 14. The jury informed the public: We find the defendant guilty, but we are of one mind that the industrial court law is not a good law and recommend that it be taken from the statute books. We do not feel that Howat and Dorchy committed a crime in calling the strike in this particular case.33**

Howat was in and out of jait for almost three years for defying the anti-labor law. (“They used to say you can’t keep a good man down,” * When Farrington removed the charters of the 24 locals whose members had participated in the wildcat strike, several Peoria (Ill.) locals sent a joint telegram to district headquarters in Springfield, which they addressed to “His Royal Highness Lord Farrington and members of the Imperial Family.” Their answer was that he could “go to hell and take the charter with you, for may we not advise you to get passports to Holland and join our friend Bill Hohenzollern, for the miners will not stand for the organization being kaiserized any longer” (Sylvia Kopald, Rebellion in Labor Unions [New York, 1924] p. 117.)

The reference to “Bill Hohenzollern” concerns the former Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany

who was granted residence in Holland after Germany’s defeat in 1918,

** In July 1922, William Allan White, the famous editor and publisher of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette was arrested for violating the “Industrial Court” Act when he placed a

placard in the Gazette’s window announcing his sympathy for the striking railroad workers. (Advance, Aug. 4, 1922.)

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editorialized Advance. “Soon we have to change it in the case of Alexander Howat to, ‘You can’t keep a good man out of jail.’”)34 While he was in prison, strikes in defiance of the law continued to spread. The coal operators’ association in Kansas appealed to the International union to force the miners back to work in compliance with the contract. Instead of rallying to Howat’s aid, Lewis and the International Executive Board agreed with the mine operators that the UMW contract had been violated, removed Howat and other District 14 officials from office, and replaced them with their own appointees. Eighty-three Kansas locals who remained loyal to Howat were also expelled from the union, causing large numbers of union members to lose their jobs. Lewis justified his action with the argument that he was acting in response to pleas from Kansas miners who wanted relief from Howat’s “ruinous” administration. “The miners of Kansas,” Lewis cried, “shall not be permitted to be sacrificed to the whims and caprices of a demagogue.” But a study of the dispute concluded that “Howat had wide support,” not only in Kansas, but throughout the union. In 1920, as the anti-administration candidate for vice-president, he had received 132,416 votes against the administration candidate’s 145,452.35 Howat had the support of progressive trade unionists throughout the country. And no more so than in Illinois’ District 12. As John H. N. Laslett notes in his study of District 12: The Illinois radicals did all they could to help Howat, while at the same time using him as a weapon in their own struggle against Lewis.* They donated $100,000 from the district treasury to help Howat carry on his legal battle, and provided financial aid to many individual Kansas miners who had lost their jobs as a result of the dispute. In addition the Illinoisans agreed by referendum vote, to assess themselves one dollar per month in additional financial support until the dispute was over. They did this despite strong opposition from the International, which had declared the Howat administration a dual organization in opposition to the officers that Lewis had appointed to replace it, and despite rumored threats that if District 12 persisted in its support for the Howat faction, Lewis would lift their charter, too.36

Mary Heaton Vorse, who visited Howat while he was in jail, remarked that there was “something in his fighting spirit that even jail could not

touch.”” In that spirit, Howat defied Lewis’s order to send the men back to the pits. The International president then appointed three members of his executive board to make “a thorough investigation of conditions” in Kansas. The committee studied the situation and, since they were all Lewis’s * At every Mine Workers’ convention in the early 1920s, the “Howat affair,” as it was known, and his appeals for reinstatement were used by militants as powerful weapons in their attacks on Lewis and his increasingly despotic machine. Howat emerged as a champion of the rank-and-file, local autonomy, and the right to strike.

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henchmen, presented a report sustaining Lewis’s contention that the miners were on strike in violation of contract and recommending a resumption of work in compliance with the agreement. Howat was then ordered to appear before the international executive board. Nothing was said by Lewis

and his executive board about the Kansas Industrial Court.

The District 14 leader refused to obey the executive board’s decree, and Lewis brought the matter before the UMW international convention in September 1921. He asked the convention to sustain the international executive board’s action. For almost a week, the delegates debated the proposition. Howat’s supporters contended that the adoption of Lewis’s recommendation would constitute taking sides with the operators against the miners. Although Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas voted for Howat, the Lewis machine was able to overwhelm their votes, and its recommendation was adopted by a final vote of 2,753 to 1,781. Despite Howat’s defeat, the 1921 UMW convention at Indianapolis was marked by several signs of progress. This included evidence of the growing revolt of the rank and file. As a result, in its final days the convention made several advances. The most important single accomplishment by the progressives was the mine nationalization resolution. This reaffirmed the miners’ endorsement of public ownership at the Cleveland Convention two years before. It declared that the natural resources, particularly timber and coal, were being despoiled under a system of production which wasted from 33 to 50 percent of these resources for the sake of maximum dividends; and it held that “the coal supply of our nation should be owned by the commonwealth and operated in the interest of and for the use and comfort of all the people in the commonwealth.” The resolution demanded immediate nationalization of the coal industry of the United States and instructed the international officers of the union to prepare a bill for the purchase of all coal properties at a figure representing actual valuation of these properties, and for the operation of the mines by governmental commissions on which the mine workers would be given equal representation. It further instructed the union officers to appoint a committee to prepare a report showing the savings of public ownership, and to carry on a campaign of education on nationalization among all people whose support was necessary to achieve this goal. Lewis appointed a progressive committee to draw up a nationalization statement. The chairman was the outstanding figure in the fight for nationalization—John Brophy, president of the 45,000 coal miners in District No. 2 in central Pennsylvania.* (The other two members were William Mitch, * As president of District 2, Brophy had had drawn up “The Miners’ Program.” Approved by the district convention in February 1921, the program advanced nationalization of the mines

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Secretary-Treasurer of District 11 in the Central Competitive Field, and Christopher J. Golden, President of District 9.) The appointment of the committee, with power to use the columns of the United Mine Workers Journal, and to spend funds of the union in an educational campaign gave encouragement to the rank-and-file progressives. A score of resolutions were also passed in favor of the freedom of all political prisoners, self-determination of Russia and Ireland, the formation of a new political party combining forces of organized labor and the organized farmers, and requesting Samuel Gompers to call a conference of labor unions and farmers to effect this purpose. Among the actions of the convention was the selection of Alexander Howat as a delegate to the International Miners’ Conference to be held in 1922 in Europe. At the previous international convention, attended by delegates from every important country in the world, plans were formulated for the calling of an international miners’ strike in case of threat of war. The Congress also urged nationalization of mines and other public industries. Howat would have no power to commit the American miners to international action for the prevention of war, but his selection guaranteed that the miners in the United States would hear a good deal about this issue on

his return.29 The selection of Howat to represent the United Mine Workers abroad did not signify the cessation of the battle between the Kansas miners and John L. Lewis. While the Kansas miners, supported by the Illinois district, continued in a state of rebellion against the international officers, Lewis proceeded to liquidate his adversary. On October 12, 1921, he suspended the Kansas district’s charter, ousted Howat and other district officials and named “provisional” officers to reorganize the unit. When the miners were arrested and jailed for battling the scabs authorized by Lewis to break their strike, their wives and daughters took over the picket lines, and fought the state militia for the right to replace their husbands and fathers. When Van A. Bittner, Lewis’s henchman, condemned the women pickets, they published “a scathing reply” in the Pittsburg, Kansas press. The leaders of the and a 30-hour week to unify and stabilize the coal industry in the public interest. It stressed

the need for education and research in order to accomplish this goal. (District 2, UMWA, Proceedings of the Special Convention, February 22-25, 1921, pp. 32-36, 38-l, 43-73; Socialist Review, April-May 1921, pp. 43-44; Sister M. Camilla Mullay, O. P., “John Brophy: Militant Labor Leader and Reformer: The CIO Years,” Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1966, p. 17.) »> Essentially District 2’s “The Miners’ Program” followed the militant “Miners’ Program, passed over Lewis’s opposition at the 1919 UMWA convention. This had been widely publicized in the district. John Brophy, A Miner’s Life, ed. John O. P. Hall [Madison, 1964], pp. 111-22, 178-212; Alan Singer, “‘Which Side Are You On?’: Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1928,” unpublished Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1982, pp. 133-69, 211-24. The 1919 UMW convention instructed the International Executive Board to draw upabill for presentation to Congress providing for government acquisition of all coal

properties in the United States

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women picketeers were promptly arrested without a word of protest from Bittner. The miners who continued the strike were expelled from the union by Lewis’s order. New local unions were organized to replace those whose charters had been revoked. Howat’s local union lost its charter, and the international officers held that Howat was therefore no longer a member of

the United Mine Workers.*° Howat and 125 of his suspended followers came to the 1922 international union convention. The militant Kansan forced his way onto the platform and demanded that his appeal from the action of the international officials be heard. Lewis interrupted him and declared he was not entitled to any consideration as he was not a delegate or even a member of the union. The president insisted that the convention consider only wage matters and ruled that Howat’s appeal to the delegates to consider reinstating the deposed Kansas officials and locals out of order. When a storm of protest broke out, Lewis permitted a debate on whether Howat could appeal the chair’s ruling to the convention.*! It was in an effort on Howat’s behalf that 92-year-old Mother Jones made her farewell speech to a United Mine Workers’ convention. She had traveled to Kansas to organize and speak in support of Howat, and she had organized a movement for Howat to be released from jail on bond so that he could attend the UMW convention.42 During the vote on whether to grant Howat a hearing on his expulsion, Mother Jones interrupted the proceedings. “She did not ask permission to speak but walked quietly up to the front of the stage and held up her hand,” wrote a correspondent. “Absolute quiet prevailed as she remonstrated with ‘her boys.’ She begged her beloved coal diggers to save the Kansas miners’ union, to quit fighting among themselves.”43 And she told the delegates: I have known Alex Howat for twenty years, and while I have not always agreed with Alex, I want to make this statement to the audience and to the world: That my desire is to have a million Alex Howats in the nation to fight the battle of the workers. He has fought for his men and he has fought that damnable law that the governor of Kansas put on the statute books to enslave the workers. He fought it nobly and he is willing to go to death for it, and because he did it he was put in jail and denounced. If Alex Howat never did anything else he called attention of the nation to that slave law... I don’t feel very much like talking today, but here is one woman who, if I stand alone, I will stand behind Alex Howat for the fighting qualities he has and for the manhood he has shown.

The convention was in wild disorder while the case was being discussed. When the chair called for a rising vote, the Howat supporters won. However, the administration forces succeeded in obtaining a roll-all vote, and Lewis’s

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ruling was sustained by a narrow margin amid stormy scenes verging on rioting.*® Howat returned to jail in Kansas after the convention, and when he was granted his freedom after serving nearly three years, he immediately began a joint struggle for reinstatement and against the policies of the Lewis Administration. In his battle against Lewis, he endorsed the program of the TUEL and had its full support, as well as that of the Workers’ (Communist) Party. At a meeting of the Red International Committee on February 11, 1922, William Z. Foster, its Secretary, called the “Howat case” the “supreme fighting issue” in the battle against the “Lewis machine” and reported that, with the support of the TUEL, “a movement is now on foot to impeach Lewis for his arbitrary and

unconstitutional handling of the Howat case.’”46

Howat had high respect for the TUEL and William Z. Foster. In an article in the Labor Herald entitled “How I Became a Rebel,” Howat wrote of the TUEL: “I am for it. Foster is doing great work. The TUEL has got hold of a big idea. The best fighters in the trade unions are naturally radical and progressive. When they learn to organize and act in one body in the unions, a new day will dawn for American labor.’47 The “movement” that was “on foot,” according to Foster, was temporarily postponed by an unusual event that occurred in the coal industry on April 1, 1922. Rarely did the miners in both branches of the industry—bituminous and anthracite*—walk out at the same time. Their negotiations and contracts were entirely separate. But in 1922, not only did the miners in the unionized bituminous fields walk out, but so, too, did the union miners in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. What is more, many of the miners in the major nonunion fields—especially Somerset, Fayette, and Westmoreland counties in Pennsylvania—joined the walkout. Over 600,000 coal miners left work on April 1, 1922, or shortly thereafter, in the largest coal miners’ strike in United States history. The fields of West Virginia and Alabama, however, were scarcely touched by the strike. Before discussing the great 1922 strike, it is important to understand the reasons for this situation.

WEST VIRGINIA World War I brought great prosperity in West Virginia, especially in the Logan County mines. But the industrial peonage that had provoked the Cabin Creek-Paint Creek strike of 1912-13** still prevailed. Wages had not * Bituminous, or soft coal, was primarily an industrial fuel, while anthracite, or hard coal, was a household fuel. ** See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 5 (New York, 1980): 182-95.

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kept up by any means with the increase in the cost of living. Miners were still paid in scrip, good only at company stores. They still worked 10, 12, and 14 hours a day. Their villages were still policed by armed thugs recruited by the Baldwin-Felts strikebreaking agency, especially in Mingo, McDowell, and Mercer counties. In Logan County, Sheriff Don Chafin had replaced Baldwin-Felts men with his own army of deputies paid by the coal companies. Miners still lived in camps where the company-owned dwellings were, in the words of the U.S. Coal Commission, “old, unpainted board and batten houses—batten going or gone and board fast following, roofs broken, porches sagging, a riot of rubbish, and a medley of odors.” Organizers still took their lives in their hands in counties where employers still preferred to deal only with the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency instead of the UMW. The “whole territory,” Philip Murray, UMW vice-president declared after a visit to West Virginia, “with thousands of inhabitants, is absolutely under the control of the operators. The individual is hopeless.’”48 In the notorious Hitchman (1917) ruling, upholding the yellow-dog contract, the Supreme Court added to that hopelessness. Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor disclosed that largely through holding companies and interlocking directorates, the companies controlling certain West Virginian nonunion mines, namely the U.S. Steel Corporation and the Pennsylvania Railroad, also controlled the coal industry. The labor policies for the nonunion mines were directed by U.S. Steel and the Pennsylvania Railroad—both controlled by the House of Morgan. In 1919 the miners in Mingo County decided that they had had enough, and they applied to the local United Mine Workers for a charter. When all the miners who were identified as supporting the move were discharged and evicted from the company houses, a bloody series of strikes followed in Logan, Mingo, McDowell, and Mercer counties. The mine operators immediately dispatched contingents of their private detectives, armed to the teeth with revolvers and Winchester rifles, to conduct a war against the new union members. This private army proceeded to ferret out all the organizers and active members of the union and to evict them and their families from the mining company properties. Union organizers were beaten up and thrown out of the district. But the miners informed the public: “We are going to organize these fields regardless of the opposition. Men are beaten and jailed because they have dared to ask for their constitutional rights, and get them we will.’49 Late in August 1919, union miners in the Kanawha fields, enraged by these assaults, began a march over the mountains to Logan and Mingo counties, where they hoped to shut down the nonunion mines and break the iron-grip of Sheriff Chafin. While some of the marchers returned home before they advanced very far, the bulk of them—5,000 strong, and most of

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them armed—crossed over into Boone County. There they were confronted by Governor John J. Cromwell, who threatened them with federal troops and charges of treason if they crossed into Logan County. This threat had the desired effect; the marchers disbanded and were brought to Charleston by special trains. The governor boasted to the press that he had broken up “a deliberate plan to discard the work of Washington and Jefferson, of Madison and Monroe, of Lincoln, of Cleveland, of Roosevelt and ... substitute the ideas of Karl Marx, or Nicola [sic] Lenin and Leon Trotsky.” Assisted by the governor, gunmen continued to raid union halls in the southern counties. One of their main targets was Matewan, on the Kentucky border. Matewan was known as “The Home of the Hatfields and McCoys.” These two families had been shooting at each other for years, but their bloody feud was ended by unionism. The Hatfields and McCoys joined the UMW and were striking together when Albert Felts, head of the Baldwin-Felts agency, came to Matewan with eleven armed agents to evict those miners who had joined the strike. Young Sid Hatfield, the Matewan sheriff, and himself a former miner, refused to do the evicting; hence the influx of gunmen. When the Baldwin-Felts gunmen appeared, Sheriff Hatfield deputized twelve men to defend the town. A McCoy was one of these men. A battle broke out between the miners and the gunmen. When it was over and the smoke had cleared, three townsmen, including the mayor, and seven gunmen were dead. Among them were Albert and Lee Felts, the strikebreaking chiefs. The “Matewan Massacre”* of May 19, 1920, sparked further violence and during July and August, more than forty men died in Mingo County alone.®! Hatfield and other miners were charged with murder. “I entered one of the trials of the Matewan defenders,” Art Shields, veteran labor reporter, recalled, “in a little courtroom, where the judge sat with his back to the court and his feet on each side of the open door. All visitors, including two U.S. Senators, were frisked from ankle to neck. But the real drama was the futile attempt of the coal trust to wrest a guilty verdict from the jury.” After a two-month trial, Hatfield and the other miners were acquitted of the Matewan murders for lack of evidence. On August 1, 1921, however,

Hatfield was assassinated by mine-guard deputies.52 Hatfield’s murder triggered a second march on Logan. “Sid Hatfield,” Art Shields wrote, “was a popular hero, and men grabbed rifles all over the state. Volunteers from Ohio and Pennsylvania were among them. Many Negroes were marching. It was a sudden, spontaneous uprising. Coal trains were commandeered. And several thousand men were deep in enemy terri* “Matewan,” a film about the coalfield war in the West Virginia during 1920-21, written and directed by John Sayles, made its appearance on the screen in August 1987.

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tory when I arrived before Labor Day, 1921. Their objective was Logan City. This was the main anti-union stronghold. It was ruled by Sheriff Don Chafin who was known as the millionaire gunman. He had personally killed a dozen men, the New York World reported.” Logan County, which Don Chafin ruled, has been described by Winthrop D. Lane as “a leer in the face of liberty, a feudal barony defended by soldiers of fortune in the pay of mine owners.”°3 A Congressional investigation of conditions in West Virginia was in progress, but the union miners were unwilling to wait for the results. They began arming themselves and gathered in large numbers for the march into Logan County. It soon became clear that this time the operators were not going to rely on private gunmen and state militia to beat back the marchers. Their new ally was President Warren G. Harding in the White House. Brigadier-General Henry Bandholtz arrived in Marmet and warned the miners that they would face federal troops if they moved further, and that the White House had sent him to demand that they disband and return home.>4 Mother Jones, the aged “Miners’ Angel,” veteran of many miners’ battles and those of other workers, joined the marchers at Marmet and at first encouraged the angry miners.°> However, when the march threatened to get under way involving at least 5,000 armed miners and thousands of defenders on the other side, she reversed her stand. She addressed the miners at Marmet and told them that she had a telegram from President Harding requesting that the miners “abandon your purpose and return to your homes and I assure you that my good offices will be used to forever eliminate the gunmen from the state of West Virginia.” The telegram was signed “Warren G. Harding, President of this great republic.” However, it was actually a “bogus” message made up by Mother Jones, who had reached the conclusion that the march would end in tragedy for the armed miners, and had joined the procession simply to turn them back.* The union officials asked Mother Jones to allow them to see the telegram, but she refused. The officials then telegraphed to Washington and received a reply from President Harding’s secretary that the president had not sent any such telegram to Mother Jones, and they so informed a committee of the miners’ army. This exposure of her deception seriously injured Mother Jones’s influence with the miners.°® Although the urgings of other union leaders temporarily halted the march on Logan, it was resumed after a week. Meanwhile, men and boys *\In his autobiography Art Shields writes that Mother Jones had good reason to fear that the march would end up in a battle that would cost the lives of miners, and that “her Bae a were fulfilled.” (Art Shields, On the Battle Lines 1919-1939 [New York, 1986], p.

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were armed with rifles of every description, including many high-powered guns, army Springfield rifles, and similar weapons, and workers walked about with two pistols strapped to their waists. Machineguns were brought in mounted on automobiles, and other miners carried Browning rapid-fire guns which they had used in France during World War I. Red Cross nurses arrived with improvised automobile units, a large red cross marked on their sleeve bands, while on their caps they had sewn “U.M.W.,” signifying the United Mine Workers of America. Food supplies were commandeered, military passes stamped with the union seal were issued, and doctors were ordered to accompany the “workers’ army” and care for the wounded. However, the marchers never made it to Logan. In the early stage of the battle, the miners were victorious. The ill-assorted army of Baldwin-Felts thugs, state police, and anti-union vigilantes were routed by the miners’ army. So complete was the rout that in a rage Sheriff Don Chafin ordered two aviators who had been acting as air scouts to carry hastily constructed bombs of large size, made of gas mains loaded with powder and chunks of iron and with glass containers filled with poison gas. “Chafin’s aviators,” as they were called, then bombed four union villages in three days and dropped 20 bombs, Of these 8 exploded and tore great holes in the earth but did not hit any dwellings or people. However, it was no fault of the aviators that no one, including women and children, were hit. They flew too high to aim accurately, forced to do so by the high-powered rifles of the miners

who were sent back from the march to protect the villages.5” Later, Art Shields, who covered the battle for the Federated Press and the Liberator, visited the villages that had been bombed, and told Mother Jones that he was amazed that such things as “airplane bombings of miners’ villages could happen in America.” “Mother Jones looked at me in surprise,” he reported. “Don’t you know where you are?’ she said. ‘This is the place where they have been murdering men and women since labor

first began taking coal out of the ground in West Virginia.””°® While the miners’ villages were being bombed by “Chafin’s aviators,” federal troops arrived in the battle area. Six thousand soldiers, assisted by 20 airplanes under the command of Brigadier-General Billy Mitchell were ready to prevent the union miners from entering the nonunion county. For two days—September 2 and 3, 1921—the “Battle of Blair Mountain” raged as armed union miners fought the U.S. Army, the infant air force, local deputy sheriffs, and private gunmen. On September 4, the miners surrendered and were disarmed. Three deputies had been killed; 40 local gunmen were wounded, and one of the six air service planes had crashed killing

four aviators. Union casualties were never revealed.59

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The Industrial Worker, official organ of tne IWW, compared the miners of West Virginia to the citizens of Paris who “took up arms in 1871 against their oppressors.” In the same tradition, “the miners of West Virginia took up arms to defend themselves against brigands and murderers. War has been declared by the coal operators and the government of the United States against working men who are American citizens because they will not bow their necks to the authority which would enslave them.”©? The Messenger, the Black Socialist monthly published in New York by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, declared editorially: “The coal operators seem to be the monarchs of all they survey. Even the President of the nation dares not challenge their ruthless rule. The workers of Mingo are just as much the subjects of the coal kings, as were the moujiks of Russia under the Czar. They, like the Negro slave, have no rights which their masters are bound to respect.* It is, also, interesting to note in this connection that there are both white and black workers in this imperial preserve. Another case where race prejudice goes aflying before the avenging wrath of the God of Private Profits.”®! On November 1,1921, the United Mine Workers Journal quoted the following from the Baltimore Evening Sun which described the bitter struggles in Matewan as having “revolved principally around the question as to the right of the miners in the non-union fields to organize.” The Sun continued: But the fight has not been a fair one. Through the power of their money these operators have brazenly bought up the politics of the State. Through their control of successive State administrations they have controlled the law offices and controlled the courts. Paid private detectives and plug-uglies employed by them as spies and mine guards, with the aid of deputy sheriffs paid from out of the mine companies’ treasuries, have ruthlessly brushed aside every constitutional guarantee claimed by the miners as to the right of peaceable assemblage, as to the right of free speech and even as to the right of jury trial—all in an effort to crush every attempt on the part of the miners to organize. These are not empty charges. They have been supported time and again by evidence collected by Congressional investigating committees. To say that there can be industrial peace or peace of any kind in West Virginia under such conditions is to assume that the state is ripe for slavery... This being the case, have not the American people as a whole the right to demand that the Constitution be definitely re-established in West Virginia? That the system of private enforcement of the law—or what the private companies choose to regard as the law—be abolished, and that an honest effort be made to get at the root of the trouble...? How about using the same authority to suppress

* The reference is to the notorious Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) in which--Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared, in writing the majority opinion, that Negroes “had no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” (See Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans 2 (Westport, Conn., 1983]: 221.)

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the lawlessness of the mine owners as well, and to enforce both sides to an agreement?

On the 50th anniversary of what he called “the biggest armed struggle in U.S. labor history,” Art Shields wrote that he would “like to correct some misunderstandings about this dramatic chapter in working-class history”: The armed march was not an insurrection, although the miners fought state police as well as company gunmen.* It was not an attempt to take over the mining industry and to change the social system although there were many former Socialists and a number of Communists among the marchers. It was an armed mass movement in defense of union brothers, who were being butchered and enslaved by the minions of murderous financiers. And it followed extreme provocation.

The armed march had nothing in common with acts of anarchist violence by lone individuals or handfuls of individuals. It was a grass-roots movement, to use an old phrase. It was a movement of men united by strong class feelings. They came from more than a hundred different communities with their own supply organizations. The march demonstrated some of the creative qualities of a militant working class that will in time take power. And it left behind a feeling of pride that persists after fiftyyears.”

A special grand jury at Logan immediately began to investigate the miners’ march. In charging the jury, Judge Bland declared that if it found that the armed miners had marched into Logan County “in defiance of the law,” any person in the march might be indicted for “murder in the first degree” for the deaths that had taken place. On September 17, the grand jury brought in indictments against 500 members and officers of the United Mine Workers for “murder, insurrection, and carrying arms.” The 500 included three UMW officials, who were immediately dismissed by President John L. Lewis. William Blizzard, president of Subdistrict 4, District 17, UMW, was acquitted of the charge of treason on May 27, 1922, but the Reverend J. E. Wilbur, the “miners’ pastor,” and his son were convicted of murder in the second degree in trials held during the spring and summer of 1922. In legal battles over the next two years, most of the charges against the other defendants were dismissed, or they were either acquitted or paroled. In 1923 Governor Ephraim E. Morgan released those miners who were still imprisoned and who had families. The released men returned to the same conditions which had provoked the bloody uprisings. However, Frank Keeney, the local UMW organizer, told a reporter: “They say we shall not organize West Virginia. They are mistaken. If Frank Keeney can’t do it, someone will take his place who can. But West Virginia will be organized

and it will be organized completely.”6 * They also fought the U.S. Army and Air Force.

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And West Virginia was organized! In 1932, the NorrisLaGuardia Act became law. In addition to imposing limits on the judiciary in labor disputes, the law forbade the yellow-dog contracts which had served as the foundation for the Hitchman ruling in 1917 and the Red Jacket ruling in 1927 by the Supreme Court, both of which stemmed from West Virginia cases and played a major role in the successful effort of the coal operators to defeat the UMW during the 1920s. In 1933, armed with the National Industrial Recovery Act’s Section 7(a), the United Mine Workers surged into the coal fields to organize the miners of West Virginia, and within a few years, Keeney’s prophecy was fulfilled.

ALABAMA A bitterly fought strike of the Alabama coal miners was conducted by the UMW during the fall and winter of 1920-21. The strike call was issued on September 4, 1920, and about 12,000 of the 27,000 miners in Alabama responded. The operators attributed so great a response to the fact that about 80 percent of the miners were “southern Negroes who are easily misled, especially when given a prominent role and both races are members.” Although wages, hours, and other grievances were involved, the main issue in the strike was union recognition. But the operators publicly stated that one of the major obstacles to recognition was the UMW’s practice of “associating the black man on terms of perfect equality with the

white man.”66 While this was an exaggeration, the fact is that unlike other AFL organizations, since the late 19th century the UMW had organized Black coal miners and had supported them during strikes against the coal operators. Moreover, the UMW appointed Black organizers, and for a time, Blacks

were chosen to serve on the union’s highest elected councils.®” To be sure, the UMW’s commitment to racial equality was hardly consistent. The union did little to erase the racial division of labor in coal mining, in which Black miners most often got less skilled positions, while the white miners jealously guarded their higher-paid jobs. A slowly progressing mechanization of coal mining in the 20th century widened this racial split. White miners took most of the machine operators’ jobs, leaving lower-paid manual tasks to Black workers.®§ Nevertheless, there is no question that the UMW was far in advance of most other AFL affiliates on the issue of Black-white unity, especially in the South. On September 13, 1920, Judge W. L. Grubb of the Federal District Court issued an injunction against the UMW officials and miners forbidding interference in any manner, with the operation of the mines of the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company, including peaceful picketing. Governor Tho-

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mas E. Kirby moved to break the strike by calling out the National Guard and the Alabama State Law Enforcement Bureau. Strikers were beaten and arrested. In many mining camps, miners and their families were required by company guards to have written passes before they were allowed to leave the camp for any reason. By February 1921, thousands of strikers had been evicted from their company houses and left homeless. The union furnished

tents for these strikers and their families.© By February the strike had begun to weaken and the miners began to drift back to work. In the hope of preventing defeat, the UMW agreed on February 22 to let the governor decide the outcome of the battle by ruling for or against the strikers’ demands. As the union might have expected, Governor Kirby handed down a decision on March 12 that rejected every demand of the strikers. He ruled that it was not necessary for the operators to recognize the union or even, “to do anything for the betterment of the mine workers of Alabama.” Moreover, the governor declared that the operators were under no obligation to reemploy striking miners.” The United Mine Workers Journal called the governor’s ruling an “unholy attempt to run the union out of Alabama,” but the union agreed to abide by it! For all practical purposes, the United Mine Workers had been

destroyed in Alabama.”!* As one scholar notes, “when the UMW called a nation-wide strike in 1922, the Alabama mines ran full-time, supplying

markets usually filled with coal from the strike zones.” But he adds: “During the coal strike of 1922, Negroes were imported from the Southern states to the Western Pennsylvania coal fields, but when informed of the

situation, the Blacks joined the UMW in large numbers.””2

* "In 1923," Richard A. Straw points out, “UMW strength in Alabama was below 2 percent...” (“The United Mine Workers of America and the 1920 Coal Strike in Alabama,” Alabama Review [April,1975], p.127.)

CHAPTER 12

THE MINERS: Il The most militant and class-conscious district of the United Mine Workers of America was not situated in the United States. It was District 26, composed of the Cape Breton miners of Nova Scotia, Canada. In the Cape Breton coalfield the emergence of organized labor began in the 1860s. In 1868 coal miners at Crow Bay (Port Morien) attempted to form a union, but the organizers were arrested and forced to disband the organization.! Permanent trade unions became established in the years after the formation of the Provincial Workmen’s Association at Springhill in 1879. The PWA’s approach to collective bargaining was not aggressive, and no written agreement was signed until 1905. The PWA’s reluctance to press strong wage demands was most clearly reflected in the idea of class harmony which pervaded the association’s ritual: “Our object is not to wage a war of labour against capital, nor to drive trade by oppressive measures from the locality. On the contrary, by mutual concessions between masters

and men, we seek to have it carried on with advantage to both.” The growth of large-scale capitalism in Cape Breton after the 1890s led to several confrontations that revealed the weaknesses of the PWA. The most important of these took place in 1904. When the steelworkers’ lodges at Sydney struck against wage reductions, they faced troops, militia, strikebreakers, and evictions. The strike ended in complete defeat and a blacklist of union leaders.? The defeat encouraged the growth of a reform movement within the PWA. Much attention focused on proposals to increase dues, strengthen the defense fund and allow a membership vote on union officers. The most far-reaching reform was a proposal discussed as early as 1902-affiliation with the United Mine Workers of America. In May 1908, delegates to the Grand Council authorized a referendum on the choice of “putting the PWA in.better condition or joining the United Mine Workers of America.” The vote was 2,860 in favor of the UMW. At the end of the September council 230

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meeting, the vote was set aside, and in the following months, rebellious lodges began to dissolve and form UMW locals. In January 1909 the locals received a charter as District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America.4 UMW supporters soon met discrimination in the mines; lodges were blacklisted and Dominion Coal refused to meet UMW officers. On July 6, 1908, District 26 began a strike for union recognition. But PWA members remained at work under military protection while UMW members faced arrests and evictions from company houses. Although the UMW spent almost $1 million in Nova Scotia in 1909-10, the strikes at Glace Bay, Inverness, and Springhill all failed. The failures were disastrous for the miners. The PWA never recaptured its former support among the coal miners, and membership in District 26 dwindled to a few stalwarts. In 1915 the International union withdrew the district charter.> But this was not the last to be heard of the United Mine Workers in Nova Scotia. By the summer of 1916, two years into World War I, the effects of rising prices in the industrial district had led to a growing agitation for wage increases among the coal miners. The agitation continued to gain strength, both within the PWA lodges and the locals of a new provincial organization, the United Mine Workers of Nova Scotia (UMWNS). The companies granted several wage increases in 1916, but at the end of the year, they rejected further requests from the PWA and refused to meet officers of the UMWNS.® In March 1917 both the PWA and UMWNS applied to the Department of Labour of the federal government for conciliation boards. Following a visit by a federal official, the government on April 19, 1917 appointed a Royal Commission. The Chisholm Commission (named after its chairman, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice J. A. Chisholm) recommended a large wage increase, and also succeeded in reconciling the rival unions. Meeting with the officers of each union, the commissioners secured an agreement that the two organizations would amalgamate.’ On June 12, separate conventions of the PWA and UMWNS met in Sydney and concluded plans for a provisional union to inherit the PWA’s agreement with the coal operators. The reunification of the coal miners in one union was the key theme in the speeches at the founding convention of the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia (AMWNS) in October 1917. A toast reflected the spirit of the occasion: Here’s to the convention assembled Let it be remembered The split has been welded at last.

Let us prove to all classes We’re not such damned asses As we have been in the past.

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In March 1918, after a referendum vote 96 percent in favor, the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia affiliated with the United Mine Workers of America. The AMWNS brought with it into the UMW the preamble to its constitution, which read in part: Whereas a struggle is going on in all nations of the Industrial world between those who labor and those who appropriate the wealth resulting from social labor; This irrepressible struggle over the distribution of the proceeds of labor is ever bringing more and more strength to the working class and imposing upon it ever greater duties and responsibilities; And, believing that all rivalry, whether between individual workmen or organisations, can bring to them only disastrous results:— We therefore declare it to be our irrefutable duty to join hands and forces to form all miners and mine laborers in Nova Scotia into a trade union for the purpose of securing to its members the social value of their labour and procuring such legislation as they may require from time to time.

The preamble was retained word for word in the new constitution

adopted by District 26, UMWA, in April 1920.

One can measure the radical approach of the Nova Scotia miners to the problems of industrial society by the actions taken in November 1918. The delegates to the AMWNS convention endorsed the principle of public ownership of industry, and asked the government “to nationalize all industries and their operation for the benefit of the country instead of for private enrichment.” The convention also endorsed a “Reconstruction Report” which proposed a list of specific demands and a far-reaching program of social reform. The report called for improved living conditions in the coal towns, the repeal of war measures such as conscription and the orders-incouncil restricting freedom of speech, assembly and the press. A statement for “nationalization of coal mines and other essential industries” reiterated the earlier resolution for public ownership. The longest section of the report advanced an analysis of which the most relevant section was entitled, “The Unemployed.” Here the report predicted the likelihood of “grave dislocation of profit-making industry” after the war and warned that “many thousands of willing workers will, if matters are left with private capitalism, probably be walking the streets in search of employment.” Accordingly, the report recommended a ten year program of public works, housing and social construction in order to prevent unemployment.!! What accounts for the radical militancy of the Cape Breton miners of Nova Scotia? ~ Despite the advance of machinery and the division of labor, the Cape Breton-mines of Nova Scotia remained largely hand-powered. About four in five of the 10,000 Cape Breton miners were employed underground. More

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than half the underground miners worked at the coal face, in isolated 20-foot wide “rooms.” The miners, usually working in teams of two, extracted the coal from the seam and loaded it into wooden boxes. In the coal mines of Nova Scotia, mining remained dangerous work. Accidents were a common fact of life among the miners. In 1917, 294 accidents were reported, and in 1918, 362 accidents. In the years 19201923, the annual fatalities in the British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco) mines of Nova Scotia, averaged 2.11 per 1,000. In the same period, the rate in Britain was 1.00 per 1,000 employees. The years from the mid-1890s to the mid-1930s revealed no substantial improvement in fatality rate in Nova Scotia. In 29 of the 40 years, the rate exceeded 2.0 deaths per 1,000, and in another 8 years, the rate exceeded 3.0 per 1,000.12 In the decade after 1917, safety was a major concern among the Cape Breton miners. “Blood on the Coal” increased the demand for public ownership of the mines without compensation for the operators. James Bryson McLachlin, the leader of the militant miners, argued for this position before the Royal Commission on the Coal Mining Industry in Nova Scotia (the Duncan Commission) saying: The workers have put too much into these mines. Three lives in every thousand. This is more than all the millions they (the operators) have put in. Over the period of years they have put the money in, the workers have put their blood in it.13i

Between the years 1917 to 1926, a total of 64 strikes occurred in the Cape Breton mines. Fourteen of them were wage disputes, including the three major district-wide strikes against wage reductions in 1922, 1924, and 1925.4

Several strikes in the Cape Breton mines had political dimensions. In July 1918 many locals carried out a one-day protest strike when the provincial legislature rejected the 8-hour bill. The Halifax Herald reported the mines were closed by the miners “to show the government they had some power.”15 “The Russian Revolution and the Winnipeg General Strike,” notes David Frank, “inspired wide interest and sympathy among the miners [of Nova Scotia].” On May 1, 1920, in response to an appeal from Winnipeg for demonstrations in support for the arrested leaders of the general strike, the coal miners of Nova Scotia closed the mines for a one day general strike.1™* At the 1922 district convention, May Day was adopted as a formal holiday, and in 1924 the district constitution was amended to include May First

as an annual holiday. May Day was observed with parades and meetings.” i See end notes.

* For the Winnipeg General Strike. see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: 79-87.

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The most important strike in the category of political acts was the sympathetic strike in which the coal miners shut down.all the Cape Breton mines in order to force the withdrawal of troops and police from Sydney, where the steelworkers were engaged in a strike for higher wages and union recognition. As we shall see, when the coal miners came to the assistance of the steelworkers in July 1923, the employers, provincial government, John L. Lewis and the entire leadership of the UMW combined to punish them and their union. The majority of strikes during this period were disputes involving workers’ control of the organization of work in the coal mines. These disputes involved such issues as the status of the union, the use of machinery, the duration of the working day, and the managers’ authority to change work rules and assignments, and to discipline and dismiss employees. In April 1918, 2,000 men at the four northside.mines operated by the Scotia company took a “holiday” because management “evaded meeting mine committees.” The strike succeeded in gaining meetings between the Scotia management and the new Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia. Subsequently wages were adjusted by a Royal Commission.1® Later in the year, the Scotia miners again went on strike, this time to establish the union’s closed shop at the mines. In this case four employees promoted to the position of mine examiners withdrew from the union. One mine was idle four days, while the other three mines came out in support for the last two days of the strike. As a result, the deputies returned to the union. In several disputes still later, the miners were successful, as before, in forcing non-members to leave the mine or to join the union.19

The largest number of disputes over the managers’ authority involved the dismissal of individual miners. “Number one Princess Collier was idle Saturday on account of two of the employees not receiving their lamps,” went a report in the Sydney Post. “This action seemed to dissatisfy the remainder of the workmen who immediately returned home until those men were reinstated.” In nearly all cases in which the miners went on strike to protest the dismissal of fellow workers, they won either a compromise or a complete victory in protecting the discharged men.?! As a result of the frequent strikes in which the coal miners took issue with managerial authority and engaged in collective action to demonstrate their protest, the Montreal Agreement, concluded in the fall of 1920, included several clauses specifying the company’s authority over the workplace. A section of the agreement, entitled “Management of Mines,” stated: “The right to hire and discharge, the management of the mine and the direction of the working forces are vested exclusively in the Company, and the United Mine Workers of America shall not abridge this right.”22

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But when the district convention took up the Montreal Agreement, the contract was rejected by a vote of 76 to 20. In the end, however, following extreme pressure by the district officials, a referendum vote approved the contract by a margin of 6,449 votes.23 However, under pressure from the union membership, more radical union leaders sought to eliminate the provisions of the Montreal Agreement, which vested complete authority to discharge in the company’s power. They supported spontaneous protests originating in workplace actions and, in the major strikes of the 1920s turned to “direct action” as a tactic through which the union’s major goals could be pursued. Upon the expiration of the Montreal Agreement and two subsequent agreements, British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco) attempted to introduce large wage reductions. The coal miners refused to accept the reductions, and a long, militant strike followed. At meetings in December 1921, union officers sought a renewal of 1921 rates, but the corporation announced plans to cancel the existing rates (a 12.5 percent reduction) and to reduce wages a further 25 percent below the 1920 scale. The reduction amounted to a one-third cut in wages, but was commonly known as a 37.5 percent reduction. Conciliation proved

ineffective.”4 In June 1923, a local strike over the discharge of a number of workers at the Florence coliery soon threatened to become adistrict strike. When a group of nine surface workers were discharged, the 750 men at their mine went on strike in protest. The strike spread rapidly to three other northside collieries and the shipping piers of North Sydney, bringing the number of strikers to more than 2,000 men. On the third day of the strike a meeting of several thousand miners at the Alexandria Rink in Glace Bay called for a general walkout in the northern districts as well. Although the strike began, like most stoppages, in an unauthorized walkout, the district executives supported the action. District secretary-treasurer McLachlan gave two principal reasons for supporting the strike. “The men dismissed,” he said, “were old employees of the company .... They have never worked in any other place than the coal mines of this company. Some of the men dismissed are maimed, having been injured in the service of the corporation and they must get a living whether they can make profits for the company or not.”25 Secondly, McLachlan linked the protection of these jobs to a larger source of dissatisfaction, the reduction of wages in 1922. “Once the men are out, we propose to clean out all,” he added. “We will ask for the return of the 1921 rates and a complete settlement of serious grievances which

have been in the slinger for months past.26

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While peaceful, the tie-up also included the withdrawal of the maintenance men from the mines. The company was forced to reinstate the men, and promised to negotiate any future redistribution of the work force at the Scotia mines without changes in the rates and wages of the men

affected.2” Restriction of output was a traditional tactic among coal miners, and was used to exert pressure upon employers when traditional methods of fighting were proving to be ineffective. This tactic, of course, was not

confined to the coal miners and was widely used by the IWW.78 In the Scottish coal fields “ca ’canny’—going slow—took several forms: limitation of hours and shifts at the mines, and the regulation of coal loaded by a miner in one day. The usual day’s work was referred to as “the master’s dag”; in protest the miners loaded “the wee dag.”29 McLachlan was familiar with these practices as a youth in the coal fields of Scotland in the 1880s, and he played an important part in popularizing the tactic in Cape Breton. In November 1921, as the negotiators for renewal of the Montreal Agreement approached a climax, McLachlan urged the miners to follow the example of the early Scottish unions: “It never occurred to them to consult the operators at all in securing many of the things which they wanted. They simply went ahead and legislated for themselves without ever once consulting the operators.”°° In the first three months of 1922 restriction of output played an important part in the wage struggle. In February the miners rejected the findings of a conciliation board by a vote of 8,109 to 1,352. In the absence of support for strike action from the International office of the UMW-by this time John L. Lewis, whose first consideration was to stop anything that threatened the power of the operators—detested District 26’s battles to achieve control of the workplace—the coal miners turned to restriction of output as an alternatives! A miner who worked at No. 5 colliery in 1922 recalled how the slowdown operated at his mine: All the men agreed in the local union to load six boxes of coal, that’d be leaving off four boxes. We generally loaded ten... The driver took his time and the man that was working at the face took his time....And the shiftman had his coal on....the man who was putting up the timber...and he seen a light coming, he’d get up and he’d start to move around.... But you couldn’t do that on the surface, you know, because all the surfaceman could do was handle the coal that was coming. We all endorsed it and put into effect. And it was effective ... There were only a couple of mines in the district that were kind of slow in endorsing this slowdown, but before it went into effect too far the whole district endorsed it, 4 erethey had it going for months. And the company hollered. They were getting urt.

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In mid-February a reporter for the Halifax Herald found that the “Fabian tactics” were a “spontaneous growth, arising from the men themselves as their method of expressing dissatisfaction with the wages now in force... Beyond question, it has operated to cut down production in some mines by

something like 50 percent.”35 Following rejection of the proposed contract on March 11, McLachlan issued a formal circular appealing for general adoption of the policy: War is on, and it is up to the workers in the mines of the British Empire Steel Corporation to carry that war into the “country” of the enemy. There is only one way to fight this corporation and that is to cut production to a point where they cannot any longer earn profits. Every contract man who voted against acceptance of the wage agreement last Tuesday should at once cut down his production to a point where he can get about the same wage as the low paid men in the mine, and at the same time see to it that every day a paid man takes the full eight hours each day to send his reduced output on the surface.

As a result of McLachlan’s appeal, joint meetings of the locals in Glace Bay and New Waterford districts endorsed the policy, and after a stormy meeting in which the union officers were equally divided, on March 23 the district executive endorsed the strike as district policy. Minister of Labour James Murdock charged the miners were “un-British, un-Canadian and cowardly to pretend to be working for a wage rate in effect while declaring to the world that only partial and grudging service will be given.”35 McLachlan twice addressed lengthy open letters to the members of the House of Commons, and the dramatic protest attracted national attention to the crisis in the coalfield. On March 30, the western labor MPs, William Irvine and J.S. Woodsworth, launched an emergency debate in the House of Commons. Ina stirring speech, Irvine, the Calgary labor M.P., declared that wages in Nova Scotia coal mines were 71 percent lower than in Alberta, while the cost of living was 17 percent higher; that the men had been working for less than a living wage, and were still expected by the company to agree to a reduction of at least 37.5 percent. He pictured the conditions in the coal fields where parents were not able to send their children to school for lack of clothing, and stated that all attempts at conciliation having failed, and that lacking funds with which to inaugurate a strike, the miners had been compelled to carry on the war-

fare against the company by striking on the job.® In June 1922, in the midst of the strike, the report of District 26’s policy committee, adopted by delegates to the district convention, included a brief analysis of the state of the coal industry. Though brief, it was enough to infuriate the operators and the Provincial Government. The report began by stressing that in North America “there are enough coal mines, and enough mines opened and equipped for production, to produce almost two

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tons of coal where only one ton is required.” The result of overexpansion in the coal industry was a “superabundance of wealth from production in coal,” which employers and governments cited as the cause of idle time and wage reductions. Such then, was the “cruel reason that the mineworkers of this province are being asked by employers and Governments to accept as sufficient justification for all the misery now endured by the miner and his family.” The report condemned this reasoning with the conclusion: “Such is the petty state existing among coal miners in Nova Scotia as a result of the determination of the ‘Captains of Industry’ to run the coal business.” The last paragraph of the report attracted the most attention. Here the policy committee outlined several steps to link the local conflict to a national and international class struggle. A short declaration stated: that we proclaim openly to all the world that we are out for the complete overthrow of the capitalist system and capitalist state, peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must, and we call on all workers, soldiers and minor law officers in Canada to join us in liberating labor.3?

On August 15, 1922, the “strike on the job” was replaced by the “100 per cent strike” for the retention of the 1921 wage scale. When the strike began at midnight on August 15, pumpmen, firemen and other maintenance workers joined the walkout. Stablemen removed the pit-horses from the mines before quitting work. Crowds of strikers marched to the power plants at Waterford Lake and No. 2 colliery in Glace Bay and tied up these operations. “No greater tragedy has occurred in Canadian history,” fairly wept John Moffett in the Canadian Mining Journal, “and it is being conducted with a callous recklessness that savors of madness.” In the press, rising water levels were reported in the mines, and at No. 2, “the largest coal shaft in the world is in danger of complete destruction.” McLachlan, however, minimized the dangers of the “100 per cent” tactic: “don’t believe what the officials are telling you about a little water and a little gas putting the mines out of working order forever,” he told reporters. “Let the mines fill up with water and fill up with gas, and then hand the worst one of them over to the UMW, and in two weeks we will have it back

into better working shape than the Dominion Coal Company ever had it.’28

As soon as the strike began, in response to the request from the operators, the federal government dispatched some 1,200 troops into the coalfield. The armed men occupied Dominion No. 2 colliery, the largest producing mine and the site of the power station for the Glace Bay area mines. From a District 26 convention of coal locals in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, came this appeal to the troops: ~ Over the heads of the Government, we appeal to all soldiers and minor law officers... When you are ordered to shoot workers, don’t do it. When you are

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bere = arrest workers, don’t do it. When you are asked to spy on workers, don’t 0 it.

The “100 per cent strike” intensified the conflict between John L. Lewis and District 26. The removal of men from the colliery powerhouses, pumps, fans, engines and other equipment exposed the mines to the danger of accumulated gas and water. Under International union policy, UMW maintenance workers were expected to remain at work during strikes provided the employers continued to pay the wages specified in the last union contract. In advocating the opposite tactic in July 1922, McLachlan warned the miners “that they must forget all the ethics that they had been taught about the property of the owners. “No worker must be left on the job taking care of the property of the owners while they grinned like hyenas as they starved the workers back to submission. The workers must remember they were pitting their empty purses, and the empty stomachs of them-

selves and their families against the millions of the operators.”*° The “100 per cent strike” ended when British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco) reduced the wage cut from 37.5 percent to 20 percent.* Relations between the leadership of the United Mine Workers and District 26 continued to deteriorate after the strike ended. The June 1922 policy report of District 26 included a proposal for the District to apply for membership in the Red International of Labour Unions. Before the convention ended, delegates were appointed by McLachlan to visit District 18 to seek their cooperation in sending a delegate to the next RILU convention. Present at the Truro convention was Tim Buck, an organizer for the recently formed Workers’ (Communist) Party of Canada. On McLachlan’s invitation, Tim Buck had spoken in union locals before the convention and addressed the delegates on the subject of the Red International, but according to his memoirs, he was asto-

nished when the proposal to join the RILU was introduced. After the convention, McLachlan and other radical union leaders joined the Workers’ (Communist) Party as well as the TUEL and during the following two or three years both organizations had a strong influence on the union leadership. The three principal officers of District 26 in 1923 and those elected in 1924 were Party and TUEL members, and one of them recalled that there were about 250 Party and TUEL members in the Glace Bay district during this period. Sympathy for the Russian Revolution played some part in the party’s growth, but as David Frank points out, “just as radicals among the coal miners had supported the Socialist Party

of Canada before the war, in the 1920s they also welcomed the opportunity to join a national radical organization.”43 Moreover, District 26 viewed with favor the battle the TUEL in the United States was waging against the ruinous, dictatorial policies of John L. Lewis.

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In the election of new district officers in August, the coal miners gave strong support to McLachlan and his comrades. The radicals won election to all four main offices: President, Vice-President, Secretary-Treasurer, and International Board member. During these months spokespersons for the Workers’ (Communist) Party and the TUEL toured the mining district repeatedly. The earliest visitor had been Joseph R. Knight, who toured Nova Scotia in April and May, 1922, on behalf of a Russian relief fund. In the next year Trevor McGuire, H. M. Bartholomew, “Red” Malcolm Bruce and “Moscow” Jack MacDonald, the party chairman, all attracted large audiences. The party’s and the TUEL’s influence was increased when Tom Bell, a party organizer from Toronto and Winnipeg, was appointed editor of the Maritime Labor Herald. When the May Day parade took place in Glace Bay in 1923, it was hailed as a great success in the Labor Herald and The Worker. The parade was headed by the union leaders and Tom Bell carried “the biggest red flag in Canada,” 20 feet by 12 feet, bearing the slogans “Workers of the world, unite” and “Long live Communism.” Despite an icy rain, the parade included between four and five thousand marchers. Later 5,000 people attended a meeting in the Alexandria Rink. Glace Bay Mayor Dan Willie Morrison was in the chair and, in addition to the union leaders, the speakers included the other labor MPs, Joseph Steele and Forman Waye. Although the day’s events had attracted considerable criticism in the commercial press, Forman Waye proclaimed the spirit of the occasion most accurately when he declared: “The only way we can accomplish anything is not by splitting the working class, but by solidifying it on the industrial field and on the political field.”44 Nothing could be more distasteful to John L. Lewis and his henchmen. Indeed, in the fall of 1922, Lewis and the entire International office of the UMW had began to show increasing concern over events in District 26. At the October International board meeting, the board gave Lewis “full power to take whatever action he thought feasible to bring District 26 back to earth.” Possibly fearing disruptive actions by Lewis, McLachlan wrote him in January requesting a ruling on the district’s right to join the Red International. The international board issued an extensive report stating that the Red International was “an outgrowth of the One Big Union” and had the purpose of “first, control, and afterward the destruction of the bona fide trade union movement.” District 26 was ordered to withdraw the application or face the loss of its autonomy. On February 1, 1923 the

district executive voted to comply with the order.45 But this surrender did not harmonize relations with the international union. Another source of conflict was the agreement ending the 1922 strike in District 26. In May 1923 a committee of five international board

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members visited the district and attempted without success to renegotiate the contract with the British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco). In their. report they stated that the wage scale in Nova Scotia was “the lowest in any of the districts of the coalfields of North America and was the only district where a reduction of wages was forced on the miners.” The committee found “a splendid feeling of loyalty to the United Mine Workers,” but also “ample evidence of the machinations of the red outfit of Moscow.” At the June board meeting the UMW issued an order requiring new executive elections and warning that all candidates must be in sympathy with the UMW’s objectives. When District 26 met in convention in New Glasgow in June, the delegates rejected Lewis’ attempt to restrict the eligibility of candidates and noted that new elections were already planned for August 21. The delegates also made plans to take a referendum vote on whether to strike for the 1921 rates. Although Lewis warned that a strike without international sanction was unconstitutional, a strike vote took place on July 3. Two major locals, Springhill and Dominion No. 12, refused to vote, and the turnout was low, but the result was 3,175 to 2,574 in favor of strike action.*6 In his references to Nova Scotia as one of the centers of a Communist conspiracy to capture the UMW, Lewis was indicating he was prepared to take disciplinary action in District 26 if he felt that this was necessary. For their part, McLachlan and the district executive appeared to pursue a cautious policy. The district retreated on the issue of the Red International, and in February McLachlan wrote to Lewis: Remembering Kansas and District No, 18, and how these Districts were split into fragments, we are prepared to retreat from almost any position, rather than give anybody the opportunity to smash our solidarity. The onus for splitting this District shall never rest on this Executive Board.4?

But the events of the following months provided Lewis with an opportunity to intervene in District 26 with disastrous results for the Nova Scotia miners.

Since the defeat of the 1904 steel strike, union organizing efforts at the Sydney plant of Besco had failed. The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers organized lodges at the plant in 1917, and by 1923 they were gaining strength in an intensive organizing campaign. In December 1922, the steelworkers voted 1,562 to 1,021 to reject a company proposal for a plant council. By early February 1923, steelworkers’ organizer Forman Waye claimed the plant was 75 percent organized. When a

union man was dismissed for disciplinary reasons on February 13, a walkout began. The union closed the plant for five days and the steelworkers believed that the principle of union recognition was established in the

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settlement. But when a Department of Labour official visited in late March, he found the company continued to oppose union recognition, the checkoff, and the eight-hour day. When he interviewed the steel union officials, he found the officers of the miners’ union were also present. In early February, District 26 had joined the steel union in an alliance “something like a local One Big Union.” At the March meeting, McLachlan and Livingstone both spoke at length and declared that “the miners were determined to support the steelworkers, and if necessary that they would come out in sympathy with them.”48 On April 9, 1923, the New York Times reported from Nova Scotia: The thousands of steel workers and mine workers employed by the British Empire Steel Corporation in Nova Scotia, who are demanding increases in wages, a closed shop and the check off system of collecting dues, are planning to bring Alexander Howat of Kansas and William Z. Foster of Chicago east on speaking tours to perfect the organization of the strikers. Howat is to be brought by the mine workers and Foster by the steel workers. Both are expected to take part in a May Day celebration now being arranged for Sydney, N. S., the center of the coal and steel industry.

Despite the fact that most of the steel workers were earning less than 35 cents per hour, the Besco board of directors again rejected the steel union’s wage demands on June 21, 1923, and the offer to sign a contract in return for recognition alone. The crisis finally broke on the morning of June 28 when the union began to close the steel plant. Stormy scenes took place at the coke ovens and the plant gates as crowds of pickets attempted to shut down the operations and prevent maintenance men and non-strikers from entering the plant. On June 30 soldiers arrived from Halifax and on July 1 a force of provincial police also arrived. On the evening of Sunday, July 1, a squad of mounted provincial police charged up Victoria Road from the plant gates and attacked people in the streets, giving the day the name, “Bloody Sunday.” As news of the violent episode spread to the surrounding mining communities, protest meetings took place in the coal towns on the following nights. At a mass meeting at the Alexandria Rink in Glace Bay on July 2, several thousand miners demanded that troops and police be withdrawn from Sydney within 24 hours. The next night the union leaders reported on their meetings with company and provincial officials. The miners’ meeting again proclaimed support for the steelworkers and declared a strike to demand the withdrawal of troops and police. The next morning the tie-up in the Cape Breton coalfield was complete. At this time McLachlan and Livingstone also issued a circular letter to the union locals in which they described the events of July 1, and sought to spread the sympathetic strike beyond Cape Breton:

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No miner can remain at work while the Government turns Sydney into a jungle... Call a meeting of your local at once, and decide to spread the Fight against

Armstrong in every mine in Nova Scotia.49

Two days later, on July 6, McLachlan and Livingstone were arrested. The charge, Attorney-General W. J. O’Hearn told reporters, was one of “unlawfully publishing false tales whereby injury or mischief was likely to be occasioned to a public interest, namely the government and provincial police of Nova Scotia.” The removal of the apprehended men to Halifax, a distance of almost 300 miles, effectively eliminated the union leaders from the strike scene for several days.5° From the beginning the Nova Scotia miners had had to combat John L. Lewis as well as the British Empire Steel Company, the Provincial Government and the troops and police sent into the strike zone. At the very outset, Lewis promptly sent a telegram opposing the strike action. District 26 leaders placed Lewis’ telegram before the rank and file, along with the strike ballot. A majority voted for the strike. Lewis, however, did not accept

this decision.5! When the Nova Scotia miners actually went on strike in sympathy with the steelworkers, Lewis again intervened. (Company officials had at once contacted Lewis.) Lewis warned Livingstone on July 7 that a sympathetic strike was in violation of the contract, against union policy, and that the

withdrawal of maintenance men from the mines was also indefensible. As Livingstone and McLachlan were by this time in jail in Halifax, district vice-president Alex S. McIntire replied on behalf of the executive. He argued that the strike had no connection with contract or wage issues, but was a protest against the use of armed force in labor disputes; the strike was “a political struggle of Canadian workers against an evil from which we have suffered for years. Our international Union must understand that its jurisdiction does not give it authority to prohibit workers in Canada from waging a political struggle against use of armed forces which are being used to smash our labour movement.” Lewis was unmoved. On the evening of July 17 he released a long telegram ordering the suspension of the district’s autonomy. Lewis removed the executive board, appointed a provisional president and ordered the resumption of work at the mines. The stormy telegram read in part: I am familiar with the constant intrigue between yourself, your evil-genius McLachlan, and your revolutionary masters in Moscow ... No doubt the present strike in Nova Scotia corresponds to your idea of a revolution against the British Government and is in pursuance thereof...You may as well know now as at any time in the future that the United Mine Workers is not a political institution and cannot be used to promote the fallacious whims of any political fanatic who seeks

to strike down the established institution of his Government.52

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The men Lewis appointed to replace the ousted officials had been defeated by a 5-to-1 margin the previous district election. This new leadership secured a court injunction depriving the deposed leadership of headquarters and funds.°3 The miners were forced to retreat. At a mass meeting held in Glace Bay, July 18, they denounced Lewis for having “lined up with provincial and federal governments and the British Empire Steel Corporation.” Three days later, the coal strike ended; not long after, the steel strike was over. By the middle of August, the last of the troops had left. Not only was the strike lost, but the miners’ union in Nova Scotia was seriously weakened by the intervention of the international union on the side of the operators, the suspension of district autonomy, and the removal of the district’s strongest and most militant leaders. Still, as Charles Lipton points out: “Later, legislation was enacted at Ottawa greatly restricting the use of militia in strikes. This was a major reform, and much of the credit for it belongs to the miners and steel workers of Cape Breton.”>4 For the moment, however, Lewis was jubilant. He made much of the fact that the Red International of Labour Unions had sent $5,000 for relief of the Nova Scotia miners. He charged that “Bolshevik gold” was behind the

strike. Evidently District 26 contemplated quitting the United Mine Workers and joining the One Big Union. On August 20, 1924, the records of the Executive Committee, Trade Union Educational League read: “1. [Foster] asked Lozofsky to cable Nova Scotia urging them not to split from the UMWA. 2. that Alex Howat be asked to issue a statement to the Nova Scotia miners, urging them not to split from the UMWA, 3. that the TUEL write an article for publication in the Maritime Labor Herald exposing the OBU and urging them not to split from the UMWA. 4. that Foster write a personal letter to McLachlan

urging him to fight against the split.56

District 26 remained in the United Mine Workers, but Lewis was convinced that he had extracted the District’s teeth and, at the same time, removed a thorn from his side.

CHAPTER 13

THE MINERS: Ill Early in 1922, the United Mine Workers of America began bracing for a fight to maintain the 1921 rates in the mine fields. Union agreements in the bituminous and anthracite industries were scheduled to expire on March 31, 1922. Refusing to make an agreement to continue at work in case no contract was concluded by the end of March, the miners invited the operators in the Central Competitive Field to a joint conference to be held in January. While operators in Indiana and Illinois accepted, those in Western Pennsylvania and some of the Ohio operators rejected the invitation, and the proposed meeting was called off. The reason for the refusal of operators in Pennsylvania to attend soon became clear. Following the lead of West Virginia and Alabama, whose bituminous operators had lowered the wage rate and were operating nonunion, Thomas Watkins, president of the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company and of the Central Pennsylvania Bituminous Operators’ Association, demanded that District 2 miners break with the national agreement and mine coal on the 1917 wage scale. Everywhere, Central Competitive Field Operators pressed the union to accept a lower wage scale and permit the mechanization and reorganization of production without interference.2 But rank-and-file miners pressured the union not to yield an inch to the operators’ demands, and raised the slogan, “No Backward Step.” In January 1922, the anthracite miners adopted demands for a 20 percent increase in pay and the introduction of the checkoff, under which the companies would deduct and turn over union dues to the UMW treasury. The wage issue was critical. The average anthracite miner earned from $1,400 to $1,600 annually, about $200 to $400 short of what the UMW estimated to be the minimum required to maintain a family of four. Negotiations on these demands did not begin until March 15. Meanwhile, the bituminous operators in parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania posted notices of wage reductions of 35 to 40 percent and announced the aboli245

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tion of the checkoff, to take effect at the expiration of the existing contracts. At the same time, Indiana operators adopted a resolution favoring a drastic reduction in wages.* Meeting in convention in mid-February, 1922, the miners decided to oppose wage reductions and suspend work, beginning April 1, unless a satisfactory agreement with the operators in the Central Competitive Field was reached before that time. Lewis then proposed that the operators and the union meet in joint conference. But many of the bituminous operators refused, expressing a willingness to meet the miners only in district conferences and to draw up district agreements. Efforts by President Harding to bring about a joint conference of operators and miners fell through. On March 15, negotiations began for a new wage scale between the anthracite operators and the miners. The operators, closely connected with leading Philadelphia and New York banking interests, demanded a 21.5 percent wage reduction and vigorously rejected the checkoff, which they feared would increase the union’s power. Moreover, they suggested that the next contract run for four years, but that wages be negotiated annually. If wages could not be agreed upon each year, the operators proposed that the issue be automatically settled by arbitration. This guaranteed a union rejection, since the operators knew the UMW would never accept a determination of wages bya third party.® In response to the operators’ claim that the industry was losing money, the UMW proposed a thorough investigation of anthracite profits by the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission. The operators refused to even discuss this. In fact, they would not discuss any issue unless the union accepted the principle of arbitration. Since the miners refused to yield on this issue, negotiations were at a complete impasse.” The operators were convinced that the union would not risk a nationwide strike. For one thing, with the industrial depression and the large stocks of coal in storage, the operators felt they could beat the miners and this would also be recognized by the union. For another, with iron, steel and railroad companies running 25 to 50 percent below capacity as a result of the postwar depression. industry could stand a shutdown. In fact, everywhere union miners were being told, “No work today.” Finally, they believed that the non-union fields were capable of supplying the nation’s coal needs for a substantial period in the event of a strike so that pressure from

the government and public for them to settle would be minimal.8 But the operators underestimated the miners’ determination to resist wage reductions and to win their demands. Moreover, Lewis threatened to form an American “Triple Alliance” of miners, railroad workers, and longshoremen to protect the union’s wartime gains. On April 1, 1922, the UMWA called a strike in both union and non-union fields, for it was

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essential for success that the strike be spread to the non-union fields. Production in the anthracite and bituminous mines ceased as 600,000 men stopped work in the first simultaneous walkout of anthracite and bituminous workers in the United States. Not only did union and non-union miners stop working nationwide, but in Utah, the miners forced the union to let them join the walkout. After the Utah coal operators announced a 30 percent wage cut, the miners, many of them Greek-Americans, were ready to strike. The UMW leadership was actually engaged in organizing the miners for the first time after the failure of a strike in 1903-04, but felt that the union strength in the state was too weak to include Utah in the national strike call. But the Utah miners, responding to the wage cuts and promises of better protection against the coal company abuses through a strong union organization, rejected the UMW leadership’s position, and went on strike without the official sanction of the union headquarters.? Since anthracite and bituminous coal mining were two distinct and separate industries, each strike would have to be settled separately. In the bituminous industry, the operators were seeking not only wage reductions, but were trying to destroy the union by replacing national bargaining with local contracts. In the anthracite fields, wages, the checkoff and compulsory arbitration were the basic issues. In Pennsylvania’s nonunion fields, where the miners had also joined the strike, the operators, led by the steel industry and its captive mines, were determined not to recognize the uni-

on.10 During the strike, dissension in the union almost entirely ceased and opposition to the Lewis leadership was put on hold, except in the Illinois District where Frank Farrington conducted a war of words with Lewis and threatened to undermine the strike by signing an independent agreement with the Illinois operators. By contrast, Alexander Howat urged all-out unity to win the strike: The coal corporations of America are today organized in all parts of the country, and are making another fight to crush the life out of the Miners’ Union... Knowing this, as we do, let us all put our shoulder to the wheel and stand firm in the fight for justice for the coal miners of this country, who have fought and suffered and struggled for years, trying to improve and better their conditions. Let there be no backward step. Let the Labor Movement of America assert itself. Let us serve notice on the coal barons once and for all, that the miners are going to fight on for a brighter and better day, and that we are not going back to the days of old."

Throughout April, May and June, the strikers in the union and non-union fields held fast in the face of injunctions, company guards, and state militias. In Utah the situation was fairly chaotic. After the strikers had armed themselves to resist company guards escorting scabs into the mines,

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several violent struggles broke out in which one scab was killed and several strikebreakers and strikers wounded. Utah’s governor proclaimed martial law and sent in the National Guard. The Guardsmen began a roundup of strikers on the morning of June 15. Some three hundred miners were herded to a vacant lot, where Major Elmer Johnson ordered the strikers to turn in their weapons. The National Guard also posted sentries on all roads leading to and from the mines and placed machineguns on the hills above the strikers’ tent colonies, set up by the union after the strikers’ families were evicted from the company houses.!2 The initial policy of the National Guard in Utah toward the strikebreakers was favorable to the strikers. Major Johnson declared that coal operators would not be permitted to ship strikebreakers into the struck mines. Strikebreakers en route to the mines at three towns were turned back by the guardsmen. At one of the mines, five Japanese strikebreakers were uncovered by an officer of the Guard who could speak Japanese.'$ United Mine Workers officials praised the National Guard for its neutral position. In a letter published in the Wyoming Labor Journal, John Ramsey, a UMW leader in Utah, noted: Judging from the wail of the local press, Carbon County, Utah, operators are not so sure of their position as they were when they finally induced Governor Mabey to order state troops into this field. The advent of the militia meant to them, as it has in most previous strikes, that they could freely import strikebreakers under any form of misrepresentation and be protected in so doing by the militia, but to their bitter chagrin they are now discovering that the National Guard of Utah is not a strike-breaking agency. It protects men who are voluntarily seeking employment at the coal camps, if necessary, but will not permit men to be shipped in under false representations as to conditions as the practice has been since the strike started. Operators are therefore raising a howl and are as anxious to get the troops recalled as they were primarily to have them in field. but without avail so far, and a condition we hope will continue.!4

Precisely as Ramsey’s letter appeared in the Wyoming Labor Journal, the National Guard ceased preventing the entry of strikebreakers into the previously closed areas and “adopted a position much more in harmony with the wishes of the coal operators.” The headlines of a Salt Lake Telegram article of July 6, 1922, declared “National Guard is not Preventing Men from Replacing Strikers.” The article reported that “because of a potential coal shortage that would bring great hardship to the public, the National Guard would no longer prevent men from entering the coal fields to work.” Adjutant General W. G. Williams confirmed the report, declaring

that “strikebreakers would now be allowed in the mines.”!6 On top of this, Guard officers, using their power under martial law, denied union officials the right to address gatherings of miners who were at work in the coal camps in order to persuade them to join the strikers.

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UMW attorney Samuel King attempted to persuade Governor Mabey to stop the anti-strike activities of the Guard, but got nowhere, following which King pointed out how unjustified was John Ramsey’s early optimism: The original policy of the National Guard ... was just and fair, but it only prevailed for a few days ... after which the guard became, as the operators desired it should

become, a weapon in their hands to destroy the morale of the striking miners: that it be used to protect strike breakers and to safeguard the operators in the enforcement of their policies designed to destroy organized labor.17

In Kansas, Oklahoma, and Washington especially, the strikers were met by anti-labor laws and pro-company governors. In Somerset County, Pennsylvania, a strong open-shop region where the mines were controlled by companies tied to the Mellon National Bank, the Girard Trust Company, the Guaranty Trust and the Reading, Interborough and Erie Railroads, and in the case of the Consolidation mines controlled by the Rockefeller interests, Coal and Iron Police terrorized the strikers. Union organizers, sent in by District 2 over the opposition of John L. Lewis—who did not favor extending the strike to non-union fields—were run down by mounted police. Women and children were arrested for parading in support of the strike. The Coal and Iron Police also used fraudulent searches for illegal moonshine to ransack the homes of striking miners. With the help of the ACLU, District 2 pressed the local courts to enforce freedom of speech and assembly in company towns. A major legal victory occurred when a Somerset judge ruled that union meetings were not in violation of an injunction that prevented interference with non-union min-

ers going to work.!8 During all this the strikers held on doggedly. Foreign-born miners in many parts of the country proved to be the backbone and heart of the strike. Operators used this fact to appeal to nativist sentiment, charging that the strikers were imbued with “foreign principles of radicalism and anarchy.” The Rockefeller-dominated Consolidation Mining Company cried that “the relations with our labor were pleasant; the miners have been working regularly, there was never any trouble of any kind’—until local Italian miners, members of the “terrorist Black Hand,” began “terrorizing

non-union miners.”!9 The strikers paid no heed to red-baiting or foreign-baiting. “It was not unusual,” writes Alan Jay Singer of the strike in Somerset County, “for meetings to bring together Slavic, Italian, Hungarian, Negro, and [white]

American miners.”2° The strikers paralyzed production in both the bituminous and anthracite fields, and kept it to a mere trickle in the hitherto nonunion fields of Pennsylvania, such as Somerset County To take care of the increasing

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number of strikers evicted from company houses, and to provide food and clothing, cooperative stores and strike relief centers were set up. Years later the daughter of a strike leader described one such strike center: A train load of tents came into our town. They were put on a local coal miner’s truck and he took them up and tossed them off in our yard .... Then men and women would come and they’d get in line and the clothes would be doled out to them .... The salt pork and salt side came in wooden barrels. The mob [sic] would line up at our house and my Dad would whack off a chunk for this family, and a smaller chunk for the smaller family.21

On June 2, in the midst of the strike, the United States Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in the Coronado, Arkansas, coal miners’ case. The Coronado Coal Company had sued the United Mine Workers for damages resulting from an open-shop fight the company forced upon its employees. The lower court convicted the miners’ union, and awarded the company damages of $200,000 which, under the treble penalty provided by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, meant $600,000. It took eight years, but the Supreme Court finally upheld the lower court. The leading point in the unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, was that labor unions may be sued under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for damages to business arising from a strike, and that the strike funds of the unions may be attached as security. The UMW leadership maintained that there was one favorable aspect in the decision, for the national union of miners was not shown to have been responsible for the alleged damages—the district organization alone being liable—Judge Taft’s decision released $1 million of the UMW’s funds which were being held by the courts. This money became available for strike benefits in the 1922 struggle. Hence the union’s lawyers pronounced the decision “a great victory.” Many in the labor movement disagreed.* Advance voiced a widespread view when it editorialized: It would have been a great victory if the decision had not carried with it the ruling of the highest court, from which there is no appeal, that unions and individual members and officers may be sued under the anti-trust act for strike damages. Now all unions are exposed to the greatest danger that ever confronted American labor. Carried to its logical conclusion, the most powerful organizations may be paralyzed by tying up their funds in protracted anti-trust litigation. It took eight years before a final decision was reached in the Coronado case... * Gompers denounced the Coronado decision as “a blow at the very foundation of the organized labor movement of America. Such a decision, if it holds, means that the big employer and the big financier can impose any condition on the working people and they dare not resist.” Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Progressive Republican from Wisconsin, agreed: “While the Coronado Coal Co. decision sets aside the money judgment rendered against the defendants, it is mostly ominous in what it foreshadows for the future of labor in this country.” (Advance, June 16, 1922.)

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It should also be noted that while unions are made liable for damages to property caused by strikes called by them, employers are NOT made liable for injury caused to property or human life by forcing a strike or lockout upon their employers. Large numbers of miners have been thrown out of their “homes” and otherwise subjected to great hardship and misery by the open shop campaign of their employers. Their is no legal redress for them. If the employers should charge them with damage to property in connection with the industrial struggle, those unfortunate workers and their organization would immediately be haled to court under the latest decision. The United Mine Workers “won avictory” which is already endangering its present fight with the mine owners.

The last reference was to the fact that suits aggregating $1,000,000 were being filed against the county officials and against the United Mine Workers of America, for the alleged damage done in the strike. The suits against the union were to be brought on the supposed precedent established by the Coronado Coal Co. decision.?4 Fortunately, the strikers received a boost when the railroad shopmen went on strike on July 1, ending the shipment of non-union southern coal. Before the shopmen’s strike, soft coal production was 5,226,000 tons, but in the first week of the strike, it was down to 3,678,000 tons.24 As coal stocks diminished and nonunion production failed to satisfy the demand, a major fuel crisis faced the nation. But the Harding Administration, believing that the miners would soon grow weary of the struggle in both the bituminous and anthracite fields, adopted a “hands off” policy. As the operators refused to budge, talk began to be heard on the need for public ownership of the mines. Senator William E. Borah of Idaho said he might favor the experiment of public ownership. New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London asked the government to declare the mines to be vested with a public interest and to place them under its control. On June 21, an event occurred which produced federal action. Just outside the militant union stronghold of Herrin, Illinois, in “Bloody” Williamson county, an operator attempted to run a mine with imported strikebreakers protected by heavily armed guards. A large force of armed union men and local sympathizers surrounded the mine, placed the strikebreakers and guards under siege and demanded their surrender. The armed guards opened fire. After one miner was killed (some accounts indicate two were

killed), a savage retaliation occurred as about twenty strikebreakers and mine guards, who had surrendered, were slain. On June 29, 1922, John H. Walker, Illinois UMW leader, wrote to Mother Jones: “Very sorry for what happened in Herrin. Two of our men, defenseless and unarmed, were killed. That provoked the rest to do what they did.”25 “We, the Jury, find that the deaths of the deceased were due to the acts direct and indirect of the officials of the Southern Illinois Coal Company.”

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Such, after a five-hour inquest, was the speedy verdict of the coroners’ jury appointed to investigate the deaths of two union miners and nineteen non-union strikebreakers in the bloody clash at Herrin. C. K. McDowell, superintendent of the mine, who was himself killed in the fighting, was named as the murderer of one of the union men. One of the strikebreakers, though wounded himself, swore that he saw McDowell fire the fatal shot. Despite the jury’s finding, over two hundred union miners were arrested, but all were acquitted.?6 Herrin was not the only scene of a bloody battle between union miners, strikebreakers and mine guards during the 1922 struggle. On July 17, 7 union miners, 12 company thugs and the sheriff of Brook County were killed in a battle at Cliftonville, West Virginia. When news reached the UMW local in Avella, Pennsylvania, a few miles away, that the Richland Coal Company in Cliftonville had evicted its old employees and imported strikebreakers, the union immediately furnished the evicted families with tent homes. Then when the union miners in Avella learned that company gunmen and strikebreakers were firing on the tent colony and otherwise harassing the men and women there, a march was begun on the night of July 16 by 800 Black and white union miners. They covered the ten miles to Cliftonville before dawn, and when the strikebreakers appeared, they appealed to them to stay out of the mines. Shots rang out and one of the union pickets fell dead. The battle began and before it was over, 7 union miners, Sheriff H. H. Duval, and 12 company guards lay dead. In the next few days, hundreds of miners were arrested. Forty-three miners were tried and sentenced to prison for terms that ranged from 3 to 10 years on the charge of “conspiracy” to commit murder. Today, a memorial exists in Avella in honor of the union miners slain during the 1922 strike.2? “A by-product of the fighting at Herrin,” observed the labor press, “is that the government has decided to make some move in an attempt to hasten a settlement of the coal strike.”*8 On July 1, the same day the walkout became a formal strike by approval of 99.5 percent of the voting membership, representatives of the miners and operators met with President Harding at the White House. Since Lewis refused to discuss separate district agreements, nothing was achieved. On July 9, President Harding issued a plan for settlement—largely the brainchild of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover—which proposed that the miners return to work immediately under the old contract (the March 31 wage scale level to be effective until August 10, 1922) while the dispute was decided by a federal arbitration commission consisting of three men appointed by the union, three by the operators, and five by the government. The plan also included the creation of a Federal Coal Commission to investigate every aspect of

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the coal industry, and to determine a temporary wage scale to be effective until March 1, 1923.29 A majority of the bituminous operators agreed to the President’s proposal, but the union officially rejected it on July 15. The miners wanted very much to have the industry investigated, the union pointed out, but it refused to arbitrate the three basic rights of complete union recognition— the checkoff, the eight-hour day, and the living wage. President Harding then showed where he stood. He invited the operators to resume operations, sent telegrams to the governors of twenty coal producing states, asking them to protect the efforts of the operators to work their mines, and instructed the War Department to keep its forces ready for strike duty.3° On August 1, Lewis sent the bituminous coal operators of the Central Competitive Field another invitation to confer. On August 7, Lewis signed with operators responsible for the production of 60 percent of the nation’s bituminous coal. Other operators soon followed, and on August 16, lewis ordered all union men back to work. The United Mine Workers under the agreement were successful in preventing the proposed wage reduction that had precipitated the strike. The union and the coal companies agreed to accept the 1920 wage scale until April 1923. With the gradual resumption of mining in many districts, those operators who had at first refused to participate in the conference signed the agreements that were reached asaresult of it, extending the old contract until April 1, 1923. By September 1 most of the union soft coal fields were

in full operation.2! There were variations in the agreement in various districts. In Utah the operators announced the rescinding of the wage cut that had precipitated the strike, and agreed that wages would “approximate the average wage scale in effect in eastern and western fields.” In short, restoring the wage scale in effect before the 30 percent reduction in April. But in addition the operators promised to reward the loyalty of those men who had worked

during the five month strike with a bonus.32* The anthracite strike continued until September 3. Eight days later both sides signed an agreement extending the old contract, an agreement proposed by Senator George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania.*3 On September 22, the Borah-Winslow Act created a United States Coal Commission to investigate the entire coal mining industry and issue separate reports on bituminous and anthracite mining. Not a single representative or sympathizer of the UMW sat on the Commission, while several

of the seven members were noted for their anti-unionism. The Commission * Two and a half years later 65 miners sued the Independent Coal and Coke Company of Utah for wages promised them as a bonus for their “loyalty” during the 1922 strike. Their disillusionment led to a short strike in 1925. (Wyoming Labor Journal, March 27, 1925.)

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did expose the terrible conditions under which the miners worked and lived, but it refused to recommend any form of nationalization and endorsed the principle of nonunion mines as a restraint on the power of the UMW. It did recommend limited government regulation which would have required the operators to submit annual financial reports as well as the federal licensing of interstate coal shippers. Congress, however, ignored the

recommendation.*4 Lewis and his allies hailed the settlement of the strikes, which had lasted more than 160 days, as a tremendous victory, especially in view of the extensive wage cuts that almost every sector of American labor was experiencing at that time. Gompers congratulated the UMW president on his union’s achievements. “The lesson that is found in the miners’ strike,” Gompers wrote, “is that unity, solidarity and a righteous cause are invincible.”°5 There was indeed tremendous unity and solidarity displayed by the miners, but in the settlement Lewis agreed to, the fundamental issues of wages and the checkoff were no closer to solution in September than they had been in March. The failure to achieve some form of union recognition was a serious blow to younger unions in the strike. One student of the strike points out that this “left the UMWA in Utah ina nearly lifeless state until 1933.”36

Lewis, moreover, completely abandoned the principle of unity and sollidarity with respect to the nonunion mines. Many of the operators who signed the agreements with the union ran nonunion as well as union mines. A proposal by John Brophy, president of District 2, demanding that the strikers should not return to work until their employers had signed for all their properties, including those that had previously been nonunion, was rejected by Lewis. Lewis even promised mine owners that he would not demand agreements covering their nonunion properties. When union members in District 2, acting on their own, refused to return to the pits until their employers also signed for nonunion miners, Lewis ordered them back. Brophy tried to persuade Lewis to support the miners of District 2 and include them in the final agreement, but failed. Finally, faced with an ultimatum from Lewis to back down or face expulsion from the UMW, Brophy yielded, and, bitterly, ordered the men in the union mines back to

work.3? * The United Mine Workers did not, however, abandon the Utah fields as they had following the 1903-04 strike. Instead, they remained to provide legal and monetary support for 16 strikers who had been arrested during the strike. The efforts to secure justice for the 16 men took nearly four years, and cost the union a great deal of money. But they produced results. Most of the accused men were acquitted; others were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but were given the sentence of one year. On March 20, 1926, paroles were granted to those in prison. (Allan Kent Powell, “Utah and the Coal Miners’ Strike of 1922,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Spring, 1977): 148-49.)

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Lewis’ conduct in the strike consisted of militancy in words and class collaboration in deeds. He continued to maintain publicly that the miners would take no backward step, and he raised the threat of nationalization of the coal mines if the operators did not yield. But he backed away from proposals for nationalization and the American “triple alliance” he had promised to create in the event of a strike. And whenever the miners took militant action to enforce these principles, and especially when they tried to use the strike to organize the non-union mines, he threatened them with expulsion from the union.** Small wonder that a tribute to Lewis appeared in the Financial World of New York: “Capital can doff its hat to him in admiration and deep in its heart wish there were more like him.... Lewis is capable of understanding there must be an amicable partnership between capital and labor....”89 Lewis’s role in the 1922 strike brought the growing opposition to his leadership to a head. Following the strike, the miners went back to the pits at wages based upon a modified 1919 agreement.* But for the first time since 1898, the union negotiations had failed to get all the operators in the Central Competitive Field to agree to the same contract. The operators gleefully informed the press that the CCF had been repudiated. Thomas W. Atkins, President of the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company, declared: “The Central Competitive Field to which we attribute most of our past difficulties, was definitely given up and abandoned....49 Major companies like U.S. Steel were now able to operate union mines in Illinois and Indiana, while operating non-union at Frick Coal in Pennsylvania. Consolidation Coal, the Rockefeller company, signed union agreements for its northern West Virginia mines, but continued to operate non-union in Maryland and Central Pennsylvania. Peabody Coal ran union in Illinois and

non-union in Pennsylvania.*! Still Lewis insisted that the miners “have won their fight... There is no longer any thought in any quarter that wage reductions will be imposed in the mining industry. The question here is one of procedure without undue humiliation of the operators. We have no desire to humiliate them.’42 But the operators had no hesitation to “humiliate” the miners. The restored pay scale following the rescinding of the wage cuts which precipitated the strike was short-lived, and miners were forced to fight pay reductions year after year. They also had to fight death, as distressingly high mortality rates

* Many fields, however, were racked by wildcats as union while thousands of miners in the outlying districts who national contract and union recognition remained closed August 14, 1923, did District 2 end the strike in Somerset Side Are You On?’: Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1982, pp. 127, 166.)

miners refused to return to work had joined the strike to win a out of the agreement. Not until County. (Alan J. Singer, “Which Workers of America, 1919-1928,”

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continued to plague the industry. As the American Association for Labor Legislation noted for 1922: The fatality rate in our coal mines is three times as high as that of Great Britain and has been so for many years. No up-to-date comparison with other countries is

available, but in 1910 our coal mine fatality rate was four times that of either Austria or Belgium. Yet according to expert testimony many natural conditions in this country, including rock formations and depth of mines, are considerably more conducive to safe mining. Ignorance, carelessness and indifference are responsible for our high accident rate.

The Association cited official figures showing that for the past years an average of 2,396 men had been killed annually in U.S. coal mines, and that during the first quarter of 1922 alone 566 coal miners had been killed. An estimate based upon data in Utah indicated that there were more than 150,000 non-fatal coal mine injuries annually in the country, and that in addition to killing about three miners in every thousand American miners, one miner in every five was injured more or less seriously. The Association blamed insufficiently stringent laws, inadequately trained inspectors, ignorant foremen and fire bosses, indifferent employers, uninstructed and careless miners, and lack of sufficient concern in top union circles. During the strike two groups emerged to defend the “miners’ freedom,” and lead the rank and file miners against the despotic, class-collaborationist policies of the Lewis administration. One group was located in District 2 (Central Pennsylvania) and centered around its District President, John Brophy. The other was centered around William Z. Foster and many of its leaders were affiliated with the TUEL and the Workers’ (Communist) Party. UMWA District 2 included 14 counties centered around the Central Pennsylvania counties of Cambria, Clearfield, Indiana, Jefferson and Blair. John Brophy, its leader, was elected president in 1916 as a dissident candidate who challenged nepotism, and the refusal of District officers to battle the operators for refusing to pay for pushing cars to the surface in the narrow seamed mines. Soon after he was elected president, Brophy endorsed a UMW organizing drive in the nonunion coal fields and supported rank and file democratic participation in the union. He warmly endorsed the political program of the 1919 UMW Cleveland convention which called for nationalization of the mines, the organization of the unorganized and the formation of a labor party, as the “Miners’ Program.” Brophy publicized the “Miners’ Program” through a series of pamphlets and labor education workshops across the district. In addition, women’s auxiliaries were organized to involve wives in understanding the issues and to organize strike support and picketing. District 2 and the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor jointly sponsored a Workers’ Education Bureau, and held a series of labor “Chautauquas” where speakers addressed different

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aspects of the “Miners’ Program.” The District also published its own paper, the Penn-Central News, to spread its ideas.44* District 2 put it succinctly: If the rank and file know the facts and how to act as a unit in changing conditions, they can obtain every just and reasonable demand. The weakness of labor is not because of the strength of the opposition on the part of the owners. The weakness of labor is in our own indifference to conditions under private ownership and autocratic management. When we as miners know what we want with a lively conviction we shall win.

As chairman of the UMW’s Nationalization Research Committee, Brophy used his position to advance the program for the nationalization of the mines, and to present the case for nationalization effectively. Although Lewis and his henchmen denied the NRC access to the UMW Journal to present its findings to the membership, the Committee published its reports independently through District 2 and sympathetic journals. How to Run Coal and The Government of Coal were outstanding examples of NRC publications. The pamphlets spelled out Brophy’s argument that coal had to be treated as a public utility, and the coal industry was compared to the Post Office as a public necessity, which should be owned and operated for the benefit of the people and not for private profit. How to Run Coal also pointed out that since the coal industry was so dependent on transportation, “the miners’ program is one with the program of the railroad workers

for nationalization of the railroads.” Nationalization, according to Brophy, was also the basis for achieving total unionization and the creation of a labor party. In a speech to the 1922 District 2 convention, Brophy emphasized: If labor and other forward looking groups want to accomplish anything substantial in the way of enacting progressive laws, it must provide either sufficient opposition to compel the dominant party to action or vote them out and fill their

places with labor’s own representatives.46

The demand for nationalization of the coal mines was an issue close to the hearts of many miners. The UMW had frequently gone on record favoring such nationalization, and Lewis himself had spoken in favor of it on more than one occasion. However, as was typical of him, his words were rendered meaningless by his actions, and he even had the United Mine Workers Journal, the union’s official organ, condemn nationalization as a “Communist plot.”47 In 1920 Brophy’s committee submitted a report stating that the coal industry was “so disorganized and mismanaged” that the situation ap* In calling for such a paper, District 2 made the point that “there is no modern, progressive labor paper going into the home of each miner. Such a paper would discuss nationalization and workers’ control in each issue.” (Socialist Review, April-May, 1921, p.44.)

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proached “catastrophe.” It was clear, the report went on, that “the game is up-—the old game of speculative profits, overproduction, shortages, sky-high prices, unemployment, gunmen, spies, the murder of miners and asullen, desperate public.” The operators had a fresh explanation every year for this annual crisis: “One year it is a car shortage, another year high wages, then the war, then government interference. Of thought-out plan and remedy they have offered none.” The committee continued: The only large-scale proposal has come from the UMW in their demand for nationalization. It is the only proposal that grapples with slack work for the miners, high prices and irregular supply for the consumer.48

Lewis rejected the report and proposed instead that the problem of unemployment be dealt with by closing down several thousand mines and eliminating about 200,000 miners. In a letter to the United States Coal Commission, he urged the operators to “close down 4,000 of the unnecessary coal mines,” noting: “The United Mine Workers cannot close down these mines, because it has no such right, power or authority. Nor can it, for the same reason, put 200,000 miners out of the industry. But the operators can do it if they will. We challenge them to make the start.”49 The Trade Union Educational League as well as District 2 condemned Lewis’s proposal, calling it reeking with “toadyism towards the capitalists and contempt for the workers.”°® At the same time that District 2 was advancing its “Miners Program” against the opposition of John L. Lewis, the TUEL was seeking to unify the rank and file opposition to the Lewis machine, and establish a democratic, militant, miners’ union. While the TUEL was handicapped because it lacked a district base of support similar to that of Brophy’s in District 2, it had the advantage of William Z. Foster’s long experience in combatting bureaucratic officialdom and the support of capable, militant rank-and-file leaders among the miners.>! The TUEL had supported the 1922 strike and had praised the solidarity and militancy of the miners. The League had appealed to the railroad workers to support the miners, raising the slogan, “Haul No Scab Coal.”®2 But the TUEL condemned Lewis for concluding the agreement ending the strike without any consideration for nonunion men who had suffered so much during the struggle in solidarity with the union strikers, and who were now left entirely at the mercy of the operators. The TUEL also criticized Lewis for his attitude toward the railroad shopmen, who had remained on strike after the miners had returned to the pits, holding out in the face of the worst anti-labor injunction in American history. Lewis not only rejected any efforts to call sympathy strikes by the miners in support of the. shopmen, but when he learned that there was a demand emerging

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for the AFL Executive Council to consider a general strike, he voiced the opinion that “any serious contemplation of such policy is in error.” Shortly after the 1922 strike, William Z. Foster, on behalf of the TUEL, called a meeting of rank-and-file miners opposed to John L. Lewis’s policies. They gathered in Pittsburgh on February 10, 1923, at what was called the “Progressive International Conference of the United Mine Workers of America.” The Conference adopted an 8point program calling for: (1) nationalization of the coal mines; (2) organization of the unorganized miners and the inclusion of nonunion miners in settlements; (3) election of union organizers by the rank and file, instead of their appointment by the international officers; (4) remodeling of the union constitution to bar fraudulent elections; (5) a six-hour work day and a five-day week; (6) endorsement of amalgamation; (7) a fighting alliance between the miners and railroad labor, and (8) the establishment of a national agreement for all miners. A special demand was advanced calling for the reinstatement of Alexander Howat and August Dorchy. The Conference announced the formation of the Progressive Miners’ International Committee and warned: The reactionary officialdom which is thus trying to strangle the United Mine Workers of America will not find such easy sailing today...as they have heretofore. The Progressive Miners’ International Committee is organizing the forces of the militant rank and file in every district and subdistrict of the Union... With organization, the Progressives are finding power, and before long the bankrupt leaders will find themselves discarded by the membership, before which they are already discredited.54

Kept aware by spies of everything that occurred in Pittsburgh,* John L. Lewis immediately charged that the conference was solely the work of William Z. Foster on behalf of the Workers’ (Communist) Party. In truth, while Foster played an active role in organizing the conference, the meeting was also the result of work by “militant local leaders” of the UMW. “They combined the experience of many years of struggles in the union,” Alan Jay Singer points out, “a concept of organizational discipline learned from the Communist labor movement, and an intimacy with rank and file militancy in the UMWA.” They included Thomas Myerscough, leader of the Charleroi group in Western Pennsylvania, who was a member of the Workers’ (Communist) Party, Anthony Minerich of North Bessember (Local * As Alan Jay Singer points out: “One of Lewis’s most effective devices against rank and file insurgency was a spy network of ‘organizers’ on the International payroll. The ‘organizers’ kept track of potentially dangerous rank and file militants..to report on dissident meetings, to spread dissension in districts and locals hostile to Lewis, to locate loyal miners willing to oppose insurgents in their locals, and to collect potentially damaging information that could be stored for future uses... When the network proved inadequate, private security police and informers were hired to supplement the data.”(Singer, op. cit. p. 119.) All the material and data collected were filed at the UMWA headquarters, which housed a huge anti-Communist file

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4238), and Patrick Toohey of Local 1724. Other men who helped organize the conference and played significant roles in it were Alexander Howat and August Dorchy of District 14 (Kansas), Dan Singer, president of local 4701 in District 12 (Mausa, Illinois), and a number of representatives from District 2, including Powers Hapgood.°>* Together with Foster, these militants formed the organizing committee at Pittsburgh to call the second conference in June 1923. The call for the second conference rejected dual unionism and insisted that the opposition forces were determined to fight for change within the UMW.*® On June 2, 1923, the militants met again in Pittsburgh. This time, 200 delegates from twelve UMW districts, including several from Canada, and two from District 2, one of whom was Powers Hapgood, attended. They consisted of Communist and non-Communist militants. In sharp contrast to most UMW conventions, where International officers and staff dominated proceedings throughout, the Pittsburgh conference was run in an open and democratic manner. All nominations were made directly from the floor, and delegates from District 2 and other non-Communist miners were selected for responsible positions. A rule was established that no speaker could address an issue a second time until everyone who desired had a chance to

speak.>” In his speech opening the 1923 Conference, Foster pointed out that the United Mine workers offered a splendid opportunity for militant activity. To a greater extent than in any other union, he declared, the “revolutionary elements” had remained within the ranks of the organization, shunning dual unionism and helping to infuse it with “a progressive if not revolutionary spirit” that was greater than in almost any other union. Unfortunately, he went on, up to that point, “the struggle for progress in the UMWA has been a desultory and unsystematic guerrilla warfare, mostly upon a local or district basis and usually upon minor issues.” What was needed was first, to unite all the progressive forces in the various districts into one uniform movement, and secondly, to lay plans for the setting up of an organization capable of putting that program into effect. Foster was followed by Alexander Howat, who endorsed his analysis and declared that he himself was being victimized because he “refused to become a cog in the corrupt administration and to do Lewis’s bidding.” He considered the Progressive movement being launched in Pittsburgh as “of * Powers Hapgood was a graduate of Harvard University who joined the United Mine Workers while researching a book in Bear Creek, Montana. At a March 2, 1921 meeting with John Brophy he decided to become a union organizer. He wrote to his mother: “The more I see of these fellows in the labor movement the better I like them and the more I feel that I will stay in the labor movement and work for a better society from the inside.” In April 1922, Brophy appointed Hapgood an organizer in the Somerset field. (Singer, op. cit., p. 181; McAllister Coleman, Men and Coal, [New York, 1943], p. 111.)

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historic importance and that it would result eventually in cleaning out the crooks and reactionaries not only of the Miners’ Union but also of the whole American labor movement.” August Dorchy, the expelled vice-president of the Kansas district, also addressed the gathering. He told the delegates that in his experience, “it was hard to tell the difference between the union officials and the mine operators either in their makeup or point of view.” In fact, “often the employers show more sympathy for the miners’ cause than do the latter’s own efforts.” The Conference condemned the Lewis Administration for betraying those Pennsylvania miners in the 1922 strike who had previously been unorganized and who had fought so splendidly, only to be left out of the agreement and forced to continue to work under an “open shop.” It commended President Brophy of District 2 for having refused to be a party to “such treachery” and for his protest against Lewis’s action in abandoning these strikers. It then called attention to “one of the worst abuses in the Miners Union’—the appointment of organizers by the International President. These organizers were not sent to organize the unorganized, but rather into the “various organized districts to play his [Lewis’s] politics against his enemies.” As a remedy for this evil, which the conference said was “eating at the vitals of the whole organization,” it proposed that organizers be elected by the membership. The conference endorsed the 8point program adopted at the February conference, including the demand for the reinstatement of Howat and Dorchy. It then adopted resolutions calling for recognition of Soviet Russia by the government of the United States, endorsing the work of the Friends of Soviet Russia and the Russian-American Industrial Council, and pledging support to Mooney and Billings, Sacco and Vanzetti, the McNamara brothers, the IWW prisoners and political prisoners generally. It condemned dual unionism and repudiated ..all dual union attempts, whether these are brought about by the Lewis administration striving to drive progressive elements out of the union, or whether they come from mistaken zealots who believe that the way to strengthen the labor movement is by destroying the old trade unions and starting the whole movement over again on a new basis.°8

The basic demands were: nationalization of the mines, organization of the unorganized coal fields, abolition of the appointive power of International and District officers, release of political prisoners, recognition of the Soviet Union by the U.S. government, and renewed efforts to establish a national Farmer-Labor Party.

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The Progressive Miners Conference was hailed by Foster as “the most significant and promising move yet made in the development of the left wing in the American trade union movement.” It had “launched the leftwing movement definitely in the heart of the most powerful and strategic union in this country.” It had demonstrated the real possibility of unity between Communists and non-Communists in building a powerful rank and file movement in the United Mine Workers of America.°9 Unfortunately, Foster was over-optimistic in his prediction of the prospects for unity of the rank and file movement. Although two delegates from District 2 attended the June conference, they did so without the approval of John Brophy. Brophy was unwilling at this stage to work with any organization which was aligned in any way with Communists. While he respected the Communists’ seriousness and their tremendous organizing ability, he believed they were bent upon imposing transplanted “Russian methods” on the rank and file movement. Perhaps most important of all, Brophy still believed that a rapproachement with Lewis was possible, and was willing to work with the UMW president in his crusade against the Progressive Committee; a crusade he was convinced would end with the expulsion of the Communists from the UMW by the International Executive Board as

“dual unionists.”©° We will see in our next volume that Brophy later abandoned his efforts to work with Lewis and sided with the Communist miners in the union. But for four years after the Pittsburgh conference, he did nothing to interfere with Lewis’s orgy of redbaiting. Frank Farrington, the opportunist President of District 12 who had previously been a powerful critic of Lewis on the issue of local autonomy, made an alliance with the UMW president against the “reds” as the progressives geared up their efforts. Farrington split with Howat over the latter’s alliance with Foster, and this weakened the opposition. Despite entreaties from Foster and others, Mother Jones deferred to the advice of William Green and declined to attend the Pittsburgh Conference.®! In his analysis of the Pittsburgh Conference, Foster predicted that the Lewis Administration would immediately take reprisals against those who attended or supported the Conference, would denounce the movement as “an attempt of the Communists to wreck the UMWA,” and would even resort to violence, not excluding murders against those who dared to advance the program adopted at Pittsburgh. However, he assured the militants that * all such contemptible terrorism cannot stop Pittsburgh Conference. death of the corruption

methods will come to naught. Frame-ups, expulsions, and the progress of the great movement set afoot by the The progressive rank and file of the miners are sick to and treachery of their reactionary leaders, They are going

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to clean the organization from top to bottom. The first conference of the Progressive International Committee of the United Mine Workers of America began a new era in the Miners’ Union.62

So far as John L. Lewis was concerned, it began “a new era” in the sordid history of his despotic rule. Dispensing almost entirely with other union business, Lewis devoted the bulk of his time to a systematic campaign against his opponents. He used the precedent established when Alexander Howat was removed from District office by the International Executive Board to seize control of Districts and locals opposed to his policies. At the same time he launched a comprehensive campaign to destroy the Progressive International Committee. International organizers in District 5 were assigned to follow Thomas Myerscough and Alexander Howat and disrupt efforts to organize the Progressive Committee’s June

1923 convention. Hired agents infiltrated both the convention and a Work- _ ers’ Party caucus. They provided the International office with transcripts of the proceedings and alist of all participants and their affiliations. On June 20, 1923, Lewis issued an official circular declaring the Progressive International Committee a dual organization, despite the committee’s repeated opposition to dual unionism. In a sweeping statement Lewis charged that association with known communists was sufficient proof of dual intentions and banned any “boring from within.” In. effect Lewis claimed the authority to expel any UMW member who associated with left-wing organizations or challenged the union’s leadership. He instructed all Districts and locals to expel any union member who participated in the Progressive Conference. On July 11, 1923, Lewis ordered John Brophy to discharge Powers Hapgood and the other District 2 delegate who had attended the Pittsburgh Conference because they “treacherously consort with the avowed enemies of our organization and participate with them in their sinister and

reprehensible activities." Not a word, however, about the progressive program adopted at Pittsburgh. At the Tri-District Anthracite Convention in July 1923, Lewis launched a bitter attack against Communism and ordered three Communists in attendance, whom he called “industrial buzzards,” to “remove your carcasses without the door.” Just outside the convention hall, a group of pro-Lewis thugs severely beat Joseph Manley, Foster’s son-in-law, who was an observer at the convention, and one of his associates. Lewis then took a brief recess from his crusade to deal with what has been called “the shortest coal strike known in this country.” On September 7, 1923, after a strike that lasted only five-and-a-half days, a new two-year anthracite agreement—negotiated by Governor Gifford Pinchot, progressive governor of Pennsylvania—was reached which included a ten percent wage

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increase for day and tonnage miners, a voluntary system of dues checkoff in which union delegates, not management, collected the money, and an eight-hour day for miners working a longer working day. Despite the ten percent wage increase, anthracite miners earned less than those in the bituminous fields, and the operators still rejected the idea of a closed shop,

continuing to run many of their mines as non-union.” Advance heaved a sigh of relief over the brief duration of the strike which, it declared, had it been prolonged, would have produced the cry of “Bolshevism” and “revolutionism.” “The strike having been settled quickly, the miners are good citizens and legal Americans.”® But not all miners! Immediately after the settlement of the 1923 strike, Lewis returned with renewed vigor to the campaign against the Progressive International Committee. His red-baiting now reached a new low as he issued a report entitled “Attempt by Communists. to Seize the American Labor Movement” that was serialized in six installments in a number of newspapers, and even published in the Congressional Record, and was later printed as an official United States Senate document. The report tried to discredit liberal (such as the ACLU) and Communist groups working in the labor movement as agents of Moscow trying to subvert American workers in an effort to destroy the American way of life.* Subtitled a “White Paper” on the “Bolshevik Threat to the American Labor Movement,” the report was prepared by Ellis Searles, a Lewis crony and editor of the UMW Journal. Searles charged that a Communist movement was out “to capture control of the unions of the American Federation of Labor” had been under way for five years, and that “three times in three years the Bolshevik leaders, operating through the Trade Union Educational League, have attempted armed insurrection and revolution in the United States.” These were the steel strike of 1919, the railroad shopmen’s strike of 1922, and the bituminous and anthracite strikes of 1922. Even the “Herrin Massacre” was part of the plot. According to Searles (standing in for Lewis), the TUEL was being financed by the Soviet Union, to the tune of one million dollars, to disrupt responsible trade unions, especially the United Mine Workers, subvert the AFL, and capture American labor for Bolshevism. A special fund had been contributed to the TUEL by the Soviet Union, Searles charged, for fomenting armed insurrection among coal miners during the 1922 strike. He blamed the Communists for seeking to expand the strike to non-union mines to bankrupt the UMW, for sabotage in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and for planning the massacre of scabs in the bloody battle at Herrin, Illinois, during the strike.® * The. American Civil Liberties Union was particularly accused of working with “Communists” in District 2 during the 1922 strike in Somerset County. The ACLU replied that it had “confined ourselves scrupulously, consistently and exclusively to the one and only question with which we are concerned—free speech, free press, and free assemblage.” (New York

Times, Sept, 11, 1923.)

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Overlooking the harsh criticism of his presidency of the American Federation of Labor by Lewis when he campaigned against him at the 1921 convention, Gompers announced his “hearty endorsement of the campaign being conducted by the United Mine Workers against pro-Soviet and Com-

munist propagandists.” Referring specifically to the “White Paper,” Gompers declared that “the union’s articles should arouse progressive Ameri-

cans to the danger that confronts America.””9

While Brophy did not as yet break with Lewis, he did denounce (although only in correspondence) the suspension of Progressive Committee members, and rejected labeling “boring from within” as dual unionism. Alex Howat publicly condemned Lewis’s redbaiting as a weapon in the interest of the operators.”! But Frank Farrington decided to bury the hatchet and abandon his opposition to Lewis. On May 21, 1923, Farrington informed Lewis that unless the “real believers” in the UMW joined forces, destructive elements would quickly gain control, and “the Red Flag will be our standard...” By June, Lewis and Farrington had formed a coalition directed against radicals in the union, all of whom were labeled “Commu-

nists,” regardless of their political affiliation.’ As Herbert Harris observes: In response to the rank-and-file movements to oust Lewis from his despotic and autocratic rule, Lewis indulged in some of the most vicious and vitriolic red-baiting that this whole period of anti-Bolshevik hysteria records. Everyone who

fought him was excoriated as a minion of Moscow.73

1924 UMW CONVENTION The battle between the Lewis machine and the Progressive Committee came to a head at the January, 1924 convention in Indianapolis, the first International Convention of the United Mine Workers since February 1922. Here the anti-administration forces put up a determined fight. Howat, Hopgood, TUEL delegates and anti-Lewis conservatives all joined forces to mount a major challenge to Lewis’s leadership. For this purpose, they held meetings to mobilize the opposition to Lewis. At one such meeting, a large number of uniformed policemen were present, and the deputy in charge was under instructions to arrest anyone who made “seditious” statements. The convention itself was probably the most tumultuous in UMW history. “Wild demonstrations by supporters of the opposition, fist fights, delegates swarming into the ailes battling Lewis’s sergeant-at-arms were regular features of the convention. The outcome of votes on important

matters was bitterly contested.””4 The opposition forces demanded the election instead of the appointment of international organizers; the election of committees by the convention instead

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of their appointment; the reinstatement of Howat; the restoration of the Nova Scotia district’s charter; the revision of the union’s election system

and election, instead of appointment, to fill vacant international offices. In the fight against Lewis’s power to appoint union organizers, the dissenters at first succeeded, in a standing vote of 760 to 743, in stripping the president of his appointive power. Lewis then resorted to a roll-call vote in which he announced that the motion was defeated, 2,263 to 2,106. He then simply ignored the cries that the result had been falsified, and re-

tained his appointive power.”6 Numerous resolutions were presented to the convention by locals favoring the reinstatement of the Nova Scotia district, but the Lewis-appointed Committee on Resolutions proceeded to ignore these rank-and-file sentiments, and endorsed the action of the International executive board. A number of delegates then took the floor to protest the suppression of the Nova Scotia district’s autonomy. Lewis answered that he had acted in a way that only revolutionaries could object to. “Sound business sagacity and business sense led me to extricate our organization from the hands of men

who had debauched the organization in that field.”?? As soon as Lewis concluded, protests erupted from all parts of the hall, but there were cries of “question,” and Vice-President Philip Murray, who was presiding, put the motion to close the debate. This was carried. The convention then voted and, after a dubious voice vote, Murray announced that the delegates had adopted the committee’s report which endorsed the

revocation of the Nova Scotia charter.”8 One resolution was passed that merely stated: “We hereby express ourselves as being opposed to any organization which is in sympathy with the

Fosterites, regardless of the name under which they disguise themselves.””9 Tom Myerscough, a Communist miner and leader of the progressives in District 5 of Western Pennsylvania, had been expelled on the charge of dual union activities because of his work in the TUEL. Myerscough appealed his expulsion to the convention, but the Committee on Appeals and Grievances, dominated by Lewis, recommended no change. A delegate thereupon declared that he presumed Myerscough would have an opportunity to present his case from the convention floor. “You may presume so,” replied Lewis, “but that won’t make it so.” When Myerscough attempted to speak in his own behalf, Lewis cut him off and informed him that since he had not been reinstated, he was no longer a member of the union and so could not speak.8° When Howat again attempted to get his case before the convention, Lewis ruled that he was not a delegate and therefore did not have the right to a hearing. He did, however, have the right to a hearing before the Committee on Appeals and Grievances. Howat and his followers then rushed the platform in an effort to be heard but were stopped by Lewis’s

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strong-arm men. Wrestling free, Howat began an appeal to the convention, but Lewis had him dragged from the platform. In the face of loud protests, Lewis adjourned the meeting. About half of the delegates remained in their seats to hear Howat deliver a lengthy speech exposing the tyranny and

policies of the Lewis Administration.81*

Lewis was proud to send Charles Evans Hughes, President Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, a copy of the resolution he had rammed through the convention denouncing the Soviet Union for seeking to overthrow the government and labor movement of the United States. “I am gratified,” Hughes responded, “at this indication of the opinion of the delegates to the convention with respect to the

importance of maintaining the institutions of this country.”82 The expulsion of Howat, Myerscough and other opponents of the Lewis machine was a blow to the left wing. But the TUEL had established itself as an important force in the union. The TUEL militants had built close ties with other forces in the anti-Lewis opposition. Howat, who was closely associated with the PIC, remained supportive of Foster throughout 1924, and was one of the few important labor figures to endorse Foster’s candidacy for President of the United States that year. He lobbied for the PIC program at the Illinois District Convention of the UMW. After the adjournment of the 1924 convention, the PIC organized a large gathering of delegates who subsequently endorsed a demand for Howat’s reinstatement and the impeachment of Lewis.83 In August 1924, the TUEL issued a call for support among the Illinois miners and started a campaign of its own against wage cuts and unemployment. One of the key aspects of this campaign was the establishment of Unemployment Councils.** This proposal was immediately denounced by Frank Farrington and his henchmen in District 12’s executive as leading to the creation of dual union organizations. But unemployment councils were set up in a number of the District’s mining towns, including Belleville,

Sesser, and in Christopher in Sub-District 9.4 Evidence that the uprising against Lewis at Indianapolis was not an isolated event was the fact that the PIC was sufficiently encouraged later that year to nominate three candidates to run against the Lewis Administration in union elections. They included George Vozey, a Communist miner * After the convention, Howat was offered the Superintendency of the Sheridan Mines in Kansas which would pay about $6,000 a year. Howat refused the offer, and announced that as long as he was connected with the mining business, he would be on the side of labor.

(Thomas C. Menninger, “The Fight of Alexander Howat for the Right to Strike,” unpublished MA thesis, Kansas State Teachers College, 1946, p. 68.) ** In his letter to Mother Jones advising her not to attend the Pittsburgh Conference, William Green wrote on May 21, 1923, “Work at the mines throughout the Western District is very poor. Many of the members of our Union are idle altogether while some others are working 1 or 2 days per week.” (William Green to Mother Jones, May 21, 1923; Edward M.

Steel, editor, The Correspondence of Mother Jones {Pittsburgh, 1985], p. 281.)

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, and in Illinois District 12, for President; Arley Staples, for Vice-President d adopte Joseph Nearing for Secretary-Treasurer. They ran on the program at the Pittsburgh Conference of 1923. Vozey secured 62,843 votes for the of International presidency, against Lewis’s 136,209. This was nearly half in force the votes cast,* indicating that the PIC had become a significant

the United Mine Workers of America.®°

As we shall see in our next volume, the rank-and-file miners’ movement opposing Lewis and his policies was to grow in the years following the 1924 convention and elections, as the forces in the Progressive Committee and the Brophy forces in District 2 coalesced into the “Save the Union” Committee. But before we leave the dramatic story of the struggle for democratic, militant trade unionism in the United Mine Workers of America, let us listen to a Communist TUEL’er. In a letter to Anton Gardin, a miner who was studying at Brookwood Labor School in the Spring of 1923, J. A. Hamilton of Charleroi, Pennsylvania wrote in part: We are glad to hear from a miner who is preparing himself for better service in the labor movement. One thing that holds back the Progressive Movement in all industries is the lack of workers with the “pep,” ability, training, knowledge. The tendency has been for the natural leaders to “rise” and desert their brothers. This will stop of course as the middle-class ranks become more and more crowded, and as the ideals of true unionism become more widely spread. The Program of the Prog. Intern. Comm. is a reflection of the demands of the outraged rank and file, who in our opinion will at the present time be satisfied with nothing less than abolition of appointive power of officials; also are opposed to trusting conventions to elect any permanent officials. Our view is, that in times of popular upheaval such as is now taking place in the Miners Union, the form of government is secondary from the standpoint of getting the proper men elected. The proper ones, and only ones to elect, are those whom the fight against the reactionary Lewis machine brings to the front. These will be elected regardless of the form of election because if the Progressive element does succeed in getting control it will be only after they have secured such an overwhelming preponderance of opinion among the rank and file that it will be impossible to keep them out of office, and impossible for them to resist the pressure to take office... One of the most radical changes between the present regime and the one that is coming will be a difference in spirit. The present view point of the officialdom of practically all unions is statictet well enough alone; avoid any trouble; don’t strike or if a strike is started, quit before the employers become too much handicapped. Action in opposition to this policy is only undertaken when the rank and file cannot be resisted. But any progressive regime worthy of the name will be militant...

* On the eve of the election, the Trade Union Educational League warned that Lewis would do what he had done in the past, an namely, win the election “through an ability to count

votes in-his own direction no matter how they are cast.” “Miners, protect your ballots!” the TUEL urged. (Workers Monthly, December, 1924, p. 90.)

CHAPTER 14

THE LADIES’ GARMENT WORKERS It is not surprising [wrote Communist journalist William F. Dunne] that the problem of whether to take power and the methods by which it was to be secured, should arise first for the left wing in the needle trades. The needle trades’ unions (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, International Fur Workers’ Union, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and the Millinery Workers’ Union) are the most advanced section of the American labor movement from the standpoint of political understanding. To prove this contention, it is only necessary to cite the fact that even the needle trades bureaucracy mouths glibly the phrases of social revolution, that in words it acknowledges the class struggle, that at all needle trades conventions, the flag-waving 100 percent Americanism, which is the hallmark of the rest of the labor movement, is entirely absent. The rank and file, the most active elements with a large mass following, at least have had anarchist and socialist training. There are, of course, exceptions to the above, but it is idle to compare the needle trades membership with even the most advanced sections of other AFL unions, such as the International Association of Machinists. Such a comparison only serves to disclose that the difference between the needle trades and other unions is the difference between the American and European labor movements.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was born at the turn of the century. In its early years, it was relatively weak but it grew rapidly at the end of the first decade of the 20th century during a series of spectacular mass strikes known as “The Uprising of the 20,000” and “The Great Revolt.” In 1914, a group of Socialists who had been active in the union in New York from its beginnings were elected to leadership.*

EARLY OPPOSITION

IN THE ILGWU

By the end of World War I, the ILGWU had over 100,000 members and was one of the strongest unions in the country. During the war, the ladies’ * For the mass strikes and their impact on the ILGWU, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 5 (New York, 1980): 226-50; Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement 2 (New York, 1980): 320-88.

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garment industry had experienced a large demand for military clothing for both men and women. This was followed in the postwar period by an unprecedented consumer demand. However many of the workers who took jobs in the industry worked at low wages in out-of-town unorganized shops, which led to a general undermining of union standards. At the same time, the base of the industry shifted from the large or inside shops to the small contractors dependent upon the jobbers.* This change brought confusion to the trade as large shops closed, workers lost their jobs and the ILGWU faced a loss of power in the industry. A whole variety of shop problems, such as discharges, discipline, working conditions and the use of machinery, went unresolved. A major grievance was the piecework system, under which the union and employer in each shop agreed to a per-unit wage payment. The more the worker produced, the higher the pay—but, as one dressmaker recalled, piecework meant ..long hours, and where I worked you couldn’t get up from the machine to go to the bathroom, or anything like that .... You’d always get an argument, “You’re getting up again.” And if you came in late you’d get an argument .... They [the employers] always wanted to chisel you on the price because it was always

piecework.?

The onset of the postwar depression of 1920-1921 worsened these conditions. At the same time, many members felt that their union was becoming further and further removed from them. The business agent who served as the immediate link between the worker, the union and the employer covered so many shops that he was unable to deal effectively with the problems in each establishment. The union’s immediate representative, the shop chairperson, elected by the workers, could only collect dues and was not able to influence policy. Women members had additional grievances. Although they constituted a majority of the workers in the industry and in the union, they had no voice in the leadership at any level; few of the business agents or shop chairpersons were women. The ILGWU leadership resolved to maintain its power, regardless of industrial conditions and membership discontent. The incumbents, relying on the disproportionate representation of the out-of-town shops on joint boards and at conventions, resisted all efforts to change. Because of the constitutional and organizational structure of the ILGWU, two locals (the New York dressmakers and cloakmakers), with close to a majority of the * The garment industry was characterized by three kinds of employers: the inside manufacturers, who owned regular shops that produced finished goods for the market; the jobbers, who did not maintain any shops but purchased material and gave the work out to manufac ee andthe submanufacturers, or contractors, who maintained small shops with few machines.

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workers in the industry, were grossly underrepresented at union conventions.

Those workers who sought to bring about change in the ILGWU banded together to challenge the incumbent officials and to reform the union. Known as the “left-wing opposition,” this movement arose because, as one group stated, “conditions of the labor movement in general and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in particular created a spirit of revolt among the militant workers..with the greatest grievances arising over the autocratic rule of the union bureaucracies.” Other workers blamed ... the structure of our present organization...[which] is such that it centralizes the entire control of the organization in the hands of a few, thereby bringing about a state of affairs in which the majority of the membership is uninformed and indifferent to union matters and does not participate in the shaping of policies,

tactics, and activities of our unions.3

The first group to challenge the conservative leadership of the ILGWU were the members of Local 25 in New York City. The women dressmakers and waistmakers of that local had been in the forefront of the heroic struggle in 1909-1910 to build the ILGWU into a permanent and viable union. They had fought both the union officials and the employers’ efforts to reduce the “Protocol of Peace,” which had ended the 1910 strikes, to a mere scrap of paper. Even after the United States entered World War I, with the union leadership supporting the war, the dressmakers and waistmakers led the antiwar movement among the rank-and-file through their Current Events Committee. In 1917 many of Local 25’s members enthusiastically supported the October Revolution in Russia and in 1919 they called

upon the ILGWU to affiliate with the Communist-led RILU.4 The early Communists were among the most active men and women in the ILGWU, such as Rose Wortis of Dressmakers’ Local 25 in New York City and Dora Lipschutz of Local 100 in Chicago. As we shall see, in the struggle against the union’s bureaucracy and its policies, the Communist garment workers won the support of many rank-and-file men and women who were not Communists. The ILGWU leadership, noting that many women workers supported the Communists, advanced sexist explanations for that support. For example: “The demagogue in the labor union, so it would seem, has a more fertile field for his machinations in those locals where the woman element is large!” And: “We have ... among us a large number of women, an easily excitable and emotional element, which is at all times quicker influenced by a fiery, tempestuous phrase than by a quietly spoken truth.” Rose Wortis pointed out that, contrary to the generally accepted theory about the conservatism of women, women workers in the ILGWU were

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... always to the front ranks of the progressive labor movement, the first to lend an ear to new ideas and organizational reforms, and the first to raise the banner of revolt against the corrupt leadership in the needle trade unions when the latter abandoned the policy of militant struggle in favor of a policy of hearty cooperation with the employers.5

Although by 1923 the left-wing opposition in the ILGWU had become identified as almost exclusively “Communist,” in the first three years after World War I, it included anarchists, syndicalists, and radical Socialists, who, along with the Communists, competed for the support of the ILGWU membership in an effort to stem the decline of the union’s influence. They were united in their effort to reform the union along the lines of the Shop Stewards’ Movement that was sweeping England,* and to reconstruct the ILGWU along shop lines, which meant replacing the craft local with the shop as the basic unit in which all crafts would be united. A conference of 320 waistmakers’ and dressmakers’ shop delegates, held in New York City in May 1919, unanimously adopted a manifesto that criticized the existing trade union practice of organizing workers “into craft groups,” thereby weakening the solidarity of the workers. They organized the Workers’ Council movement to advance the shop delegate system in the ILGWU.°** Late in 1919 the radicals in Local 25 elected a majority of the Executive Board and moved immediately to institute the shop delegate system. The General Executive Board struck back by moving to split the local into dressmakers’ and waistmakers’ locals, both affiliated to a new Dress and Waist Joint Board. At first, the reason given was that the local, with its 30,000 members, was too large to be managed effectively, but the real reason soon emerged as the GEB pointed to the role of alleged “outside elements” whose actions “incited and manipulated ... internal dissensions.”

* The Shop Stewards’ Movement gained prominence in Great Britain after 1914, and especially after World War I. While British industry developed and was mechanized, most of the unions remained craft-oriented and unsuited to meet the challenge of the new industrial order. Radicals regarded the union organization as archaic and advocated having the shop stewards speak for all workers in a shop, and not only for a specific craft. (Branko Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards Movement and Workers’ Control, 1910-1922, Oxford, 1959, pp. 205-30. See also David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925, New York, 1987, pp. 415-17.) ** In a ridiculous statement, Stanley Nadel explains the militancy of women workers in the ILGWU as stemming from the fact that,“as romantics, they ... tended to perceive the union officials, who had worked so hard to improve conditions in the shops, as routinized bureaucrats—after all, these officials were not organizing a revolution and they even negotiated with the bosses.” (“Reds versus Pinks: A Civil War in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” New York History, January 1985, p. 51). In his MA thesis (Colurnbia University, 1973), Nadel put it differently: “Romantic as they were, they were also realistic in their appraisal of many officials as routinized bureaucrats, and the influence of the Current Events Committee spread wide and deep throughout the union” (“The Communists and the Needle Trades, 1920 to 1928,” p. 16). By some miracle, the “realistic appraisal” of many union officials became a romanticized vision.

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Although Local 25’s Executive Board finally accepted the decision, the battle between the radicals and conservatives continued. During the local elections in the spring of 1921, when it appeared that the radicals were winning the support of the membership, the GEB established a special committee to supervise the election and examine the candidates with respect to their “general moral and mental fitness.” In June, the special committee found 12 candidates in Local 25 guilty of improper conduct and meted out punishments ranging from one-year suspensions to two years’ removal from the union, with forfeiture of all rights and privileges. The left wing correctly characterized the action as the beginning of an “expulsion policy.”” However, this failed to stop the shop delegate movement.8 The industrial and union problems that had brought it into existence remained unsolved, in spite of the efforts of the leadership to revise the cloak contract, which had been virtually nullified by inflation. In 1921 the New York Cloak Joint Board arbitrarily reached an agreement with the employers in the form of a “Supplemental Agreement” or “Memorandum,” calling for greater productivity on the part of the workers. The union leaders and manufacturers agreed to establish a joint commission which would seek ways to improve the workers’ productivity, and it issued its final report on November 1, 1921. The union also agreed to submit to a special appeals committee any grievances brought by the employers against workers for not working sufficiently hard on the job, or, as they put it, “soldiering on the job.” The union said it would “sustain” the committee’s actions, including dismissal from the job, if a worker’s record “substantiated the contention of the employer.”? Left-wing garment workers condemned this agreement, not only because it granted the manufacturers the right to discharge workers for lack of productivity, but also because it could be used to rid the shops of union members whom the employers and union leaders disliked. In October 1921, the left-led Locals 1 and 9 officially denounced the agreement.!9 One garment worker noted later that the agreement “gives the left wing a chance to organize [and] to fight for a more decent leadership.”!! By the time the 1922 ILGWU convention met, a solid bloc of radicals had organized themselves into Shop Delegate Leagues, with branches in every local in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and other garment manufacturing centers.!2 The Shop Delegate Leagues carried on a spirited campaign for the election of delegates to the 1922 convention, calling for “rank-and-file control through the shop delegates; equal representation on all bodies of the international; a procedure for recall of officers; uniform initiation fees, and a Needle Trades Alliance.”!% They also pointed to the union leadership’s inactivity in the face of the employers’ open-shop drive, which had already cost the union a loss in membership. The campaign elected 72

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delegates of the total of 233. In 1920, the radicals had numbered less than one-fifth of the 250 delegates. By the time of the 1922 convention, the strength of the left wing had increased so greatly that the three leading conservative officers—President Benjamin Schlesinger, First Vice-President Morris Sigman, and General Secretary-Treasurer Abraham Baroff—lost their elections as local delegates. They were seated only as a result of the offices they held.!4 During the convention, the radicals introduced many proposals designed to make the ILGWU a more democratic union, specifically through the adoption of proportional representation, the shop delegates’ system, fair assessment rates, and new election procedures. Since proportional representation would have struck at the very cornerstone of the conservatives’ power—the small rural locals—they fought the proposal vigorously, and it was finally pigeonholed by referring it to the incoming GEB for action. Julius Hochman, a leading union official, was the only conservative leader who supported the shop delegate system, pointing out that there was a need for a “long-felt... change of form of our organization.” While the other leading union officials feared the shop delegate system, Hochman was convinced that the incumbents could control the reform, once it was instituted. Nevertheless, the proposal was ultimately defeated by a vote of 141 to 49. During the convention, Abraham Cahan, the bitterly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist editor of the Socialist Jewish Daily Forward, attacked the left wing of the ILGWU and all Communists. The convention then went on to endorse the Socialist Party, and, over the objections of the left, to donate money to it. Then the leadership rammed through a resolution expressing the convention’s .. wholehearted indignation and resentment against these malicious intermeddlers and disrupters and warns our men and women in our organization against these sinister influences which are not aimed for their benefit, which have not their true interests at heart, but which are seeking to destroy and demolish what has been built at so much cost and sacrifice.

Although the shop delegate system had been rejected by the convention, the issue was far from dead. Even though President Schlesinger remained in office and the General Executive Board was reelected, the major questions facing the ILGWU-the shop delegate system, the changing producing forces in the industry with the rise of the jobbers, and the growth of nonunion labor—all remained unresolved. The leadership had refused to consider any proposals that might threaten their power and was confident

that it could contain the left wing through expulsions and suspensions.

Its confidence was strengthened when the anarchists split with the Communists over the latter’s refusal to support a resolution calling upon the

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Soviet government to free political prisoners. The anarchists thereupon withdrew from the Shop Delegate League and became strong supporters of the ILGWU administration. Saul Navosky, the anarchist leader, became the editor of Justice, the chief ILGWU journal, while Rose Pesotta, another leader of the anarchists, became the union’s only woman vice-president.16

GROWTH OF TUEL INFLUENCE IN THE ILGWU In 1923 the Communist movement rose to a commanding position in the battle for the support of ILGWU members against the leadership’s policies. An important factor here was the triumph in left-wing circles of a trade union policy that emphasized the need for struggling within existing unions for progressive principles. According to Rose Wortis, before 1923 the left-wing movement “offered a solution” for many of the problems facing the needle trades’ workers, but “was doomed to failure because, instead of acting as a propaganda group, it aimed to replace the union....” Wortis was referring to the fact that the Shop Delegate League spurred the formation of a TUEL section in the ILGWU with its demand for “militant industrial unionism,” “militant action in the struggle for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions,” and the amalgamation of craft unions into broader based units. The left wing in the ILGWU affiliated with the TUEL in 1921.1”* In 1922, the needle trades’ unions, with their radical memberships, many of whom supported the Russian Revolution, became a major focus of TUEL activity. On November 22, 1922, a Needle Trades’ Section of the TUEL was organized. The idea of a united body of workers in the clothing trades was not new. The Needle Trades’ Workers’ Alliance of America, promoted by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, had been established late in 1920, uniting the unions of the ladies’ garment workers, the men’s clothing workers, and the hat, cap and millinery workers. Sensing that such unity promised to bring greater strength to the clothing workers, the employers denounced the Alliance as a “One Big Union,” which “is unAmerican and unpatriotic.”

* The influence of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder was an important factor in this change. While conceding this, although he labels it “taking their orders from

Moscow,” Stanley Nadel argues that the left wing of the ILGWU “were also adopting the familiar Socialist Party strategy...” of “boring-from-within.” (Nadel, “Reds versus Pinks,” p.

54). However, David Saposs, a leading student of the labor movement in the 1920’s, observed of the Socialist policy of “boring-from-within”: “Where the Socialists remained in their unions, they busied themselves in preaching socialism and urging support for the party, only incidentally criticizing craft unionism and the other industrial and economic policies of the conservative leaders.” (David Saposs, “What Lies Back of Foster [The New Turn in Radical Trade Union Tactics],” p. 4, David Saposs Papers. See also Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United State, 3 [New York, 1964]: 387-92.

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However, they had no real reason for alarm. The Alliance was only a “loose federation,” which did nothing but hold occasional meetings, and by June 1921, its secretary, Max Zuckerman, conceded that in no sense was there a real alliance of the needle trades’ unions. The Alliance expired early

in the fall of 1921.18 The November 22, 1922 meeting of the representatives from the ILGWU, the millinery workers, the capmakers, the journeymen tailors, and the fur workers of New York was attended by 40 delegates, all of whom were members of the Shop Delegate Leagues. The meeting made it clear that the battle of the militants would be conducted within the needle trades’ unions, and that no attempt would be made to replace these unions with new ones. In addition to attacking the policies of the incumbent officials of the needle trades’ unions for sacrificing the interests of the workers for the profits of the employers, the TUEL section’s program dealt with some concrete proposals for solving the major problems of the needle trades: submanufacturing that moved part or all of the production process to non-union areas, and the development of the jobber, whose presence represented a constant pressure driving down wages. The program proposed that the unions make the jobber responsible for conditions in those shops performing his production, and to accomplish this by organizing all the shops working for one jobber into one shop committee. The program went on to maintain that the only way for the union to deal with the out-of-town problem was to organize wherever the employers moved to escape the union. No single union had the resources to carry out such an organizing drive; therefore, the program urged the amalgamation of the various needle trades’ unions into a single industrial union organization. The meeting also called for affiliation to the RILU and active support for the Soviet Union. The TUEL Needle Trades’ Section, after pointing out that women workers in the needle trades had started the ball rolling with a demonstration on March 8, 1908 in New York, which led two years later to the establishment of International Women’s Day on March 8,* urged that the same date in 1923 be dedicated to rebuilding militancy and democratic unionism in the needle trades’ unions.!9 At a subsequent conference held in May 1923, the Needle Trades’ Section of the TUEL endorsed the Jewish-language newspaper, Freiheit, and

also independent working class political action.2 *At the International Socialist Congress in 1910, Clara Zetkin, the German Socialist Party leader, moved that the day of the demonstration of the American working women (March 8) become an‘International Women’s Day, and that March 8 each year be dedicated to fighting

for equal rights for all women in all countries. Under Zetkin’s leadership, the first Interna-

tional Women’s

Day celebration was held in Copenhagen,

Denmark that year. (Philip S.

Foner, editor, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, New York, 1984, pp. 108-09.)

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In the battle in the needle trades’ unions, the rightwing Socialist leadership had the support of the Socialist Party which, although it had been weakened nationally, still exercised influence among Jewish workers, and of the Jewish Daily Forward, with its large circulation, as well as that of its bitterly anti-Communist editor, Abraham Cahan. The TUEL had the support of the Workers’ (later Communist) Party. In 1922, Jewish Communists began publishing the Freiheit, a daily newspaper, edited by Moissaye Olgin, which consistently attacked the right-wing leadership of the needle trades’ unions. The Worker, and after January 1924, the Daily Worker, proved invaluable in mobilizing wide support for the radical garment workers in their struggle to carry out the program of the TUEL.2! This program was especially attractive to the workers in the garment industry, particularly in New York and Chicago. Many of them were Socialists; they had been active in the postwar shop delegates’ movement; they were more favorably inclined toward industrial unionism than other unionists, even though the structure of the needle trades’ unions was based on craft unions on the local level, and they were admirers of and in sympathy with the Russian Revolution, both because of their interest in socialism and because the revolution promised an end to the oppression of their people (the East European Jews) in the country they had left behind. To these factors must be added the fact that the workers in the needle trades were becoming increasingly restless because of the worsening industrial conditions and the autocratic, class-collaborationist policies of the Socialist leadership of their unions. The TUEL answered their needs, with its demands for the amalgamation of the craft unions into industrial organizations, for the organization of the unorganized garment workers, and for the recogni-

tion of Soviet Russia by the U.S. government.22 As the TUEL’s program for social and industrial change came to attract more and more garment workers, ILGWU President Schlesinger came under increasing pressure to launch a campaign to destroy the movement. Schlesinger vacillated, apparently not having a stomach for the kind of battle that was being urged upon him. Finally, on January 13, 1923, he resigned and was replaced by Morris Sigman who was determined to act decisively to eliminate the left wing. The attacks against the TUEL increased, but the organization nevertheless continued to grow. In the 1923 elections, the TUEL won a majority of the seats on the Executive Board of Local 22 and of the Philadelphia Joint Board; it also won a dominant influence in the executive boards of Locals 1 and 9 in New York and Local 15 in Philadelphia. In addition, it gained a strong foothold in the Chicago locals and threatened the administration’s hold on the Chicago Joint Board.

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The Sigman administration went into action to reverse these setbacks. In the spring of 1923, the GEB, citing its constitutional power to bar members from joining “dual unions,” warned those workers who were aiding any radical groups to cease their activity. It then proceeded to establish a committee to investigate the activities of all left-wing leagues. After brief deliberations, the committee concluded that the left was led by outside radicals who employed devious methods to subvert the ILGWU. When the new executive board of Local 22 was to be installed in June, the old board refused to step down, claiming that the left-wing majority of the new board were “members of a dual union” (the TUEL), and therefore were not eligible to serve. The decision was appealed to the GEB, which undertook an investigation, after which the old board’s action was sustained in full.28 In July 1923, the GEB announced that it was placing the highest priority on “ridding our Union of this pestilence .... No more dilly-dallying on this question should be tolerated, as it was clear that our Union could not endure half-loyal and half-disloyal.” Louis Pankin, business agent of Local 10, later told an interviewer who asked him what he thought of these procedures: “Well, the democracy was a little bit shattered because of the fight between the Communists and the members. We had to sort of stay away from the demands of democratic rules. You had to in order to save

the union....”24*

BEGINNING OF THE ANTI-LEFT CRUSADE On August 10, 1923, Justice predicted that the “group of destructionists will be driven out of the union.” There was, it declared, no alternative: “Our International will not allow these reptiles to stay in the union and undermine it from within.” Six days later, the GEB, charging that the TUEL members were “undermining the very foundations of the Union and are its enemies,” directed all locals and joint boards to order their members to desist from “all activities in the leagues in any shape or form,” and warned workers who continued as members of these groups that they would “be brought to trial on the charge of conduct detrimental to the organization,” and would face expulsion from the union. While the directive was also aimed at other opposition groups in the union, it was clear that its specific target was the largest and most influential of them—the Trade Union Educational League.?5 « So. few locals complied with the directive that on September 29, 1923, the GEB made it clear that the August ultimatum was not merely a “sug* One is reminded of the United States general in the Vietnam war who said: “We had to burn down the village in order to save it from Communism.”

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gestion” to the membership, but a “definite order that must be complied with unconditionally.” If a local was not satisfied with the decision, it had the option of appealing the ruling to the next convention or disaffiliating from the union; if it refused to comply, it would face reorganization by the GEB.?6 In Chicago, two women members of the Chicago Joint Board were charged with belonging to the TUEL and with attempting “to direct the affairs of the union...through caucus meetings planned and carried out by this league directed by persons not belonging to our union.” A trial committee appointed by the Joint Board brought in a majority report of “not guilty” and a minority report of “guilty.” The board approved the minority report. The two workers, after being called upon to resign from the TUEL, refused and were expelled from the Joint Board.2” One of them, Dora Lipschutz, insisted that they had been expelled simply because they had dared “to speak for policies which we believe to be necessary for the best interests of our organization.” The administration’s response was that the expelled members could be reinstated only if they declared publicly that “they accept the policies laid down by the present officers.” In a letter to President Sigman, the expelled members replied that they were “ready to go to great lengths” to strengthen the union, but they were not willing “to surrender...the inalienable rights of the rank-and-file membership to propagandize for amalgamation, for the labor party, for the shop delegate system, and other measures associated with the left wing .... For us to agree to any such demand would be treason to the labor movement. We will never agree to any proposal that involves such a violation of the fundamental principles of unionism.” The “Expelled Members’ Statement” concluded: We were expelled because we advocated the program of the left wing. While methods of advocating this program may be made a matter of discussion, we feel that it is useless to further discuss our right to advocate the policies in which we believe. We are ready at all times to meet with you, with any members of the General Executive Board, or with committees from any part of our union, to work out ways and means of restoring unity in the organization upon this basis. Whatever may be your action in the matter, we will continue to fight for the interests of the workers in the shop, and we confidently expect to retain the esteem of these workers in the future as we have in the past.” *

The action in Chicago was soon emulated elsewhere. When 19 left wingers in New York’s Local 22 refused to quit the TUEL, they were * It was at a meeting of garment workers in Chicago’s Ashland Boulevard Auditorium on August 27, 1923, protesting the expulsion of the members of the Chicago Joint Board, that three gunmen burst into the hall and tried to assassinate William Z. Foster. More than half of the audience was made up of women affiliated with the ILGWU. The gunmen were never apprehended by the police. (See n50, p. 385.)

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expelled from the local’s executive board and barred from holding office in the ILGWU for five years. Not only were 14 of the expelled members women, but they were replaced by 18 men and one woman.?9 Some locals tried to resist the purge orders, but they were informed that if they did not change their policy, they could be “excluded from the international.” In Philadelphia, Locals 2 and 15 voted to defy the administration edict, and their charters were immediately revoked. The rationale for the attack on the TUEL was that it constituted a dual union and the ILGWU constitution prohibited membership in a dual union. In the Chicago case, ILGWU Vice-President Meyer Perlstein argued that the two expelled officers had attended secret caucus meetings that elected a slate of candidates for business agents in the local elections and discussed union business. To Perlstein, this constituted dual unionism and was therefore sufficient ground for the expulsions.?! It was a weak argument. Advocates of dual unionism conventionally called on workers to leave the old unions and join the new dual unions, and they attempted to negotiate wages and working conditions. But the TUEL made “no demands directly upon the employers; it carries on no negotiations with them; it signs no agreements with them.” It collected no dues, chartered no locals, and called no strikes. Moreover “the Trade Union Educational. League is flatly opposed to dual unionism,” believing that radicals should prevent rather than encourage splits in the union movement. The league was exactly what it claimed to be: an opposition movement within the established unions. As such, it naturally discussed union business and endorsed candidates for office. League members were targets

of attack because they “advocate ideas that endanger their [the right wing’s] control of the union...and because the rank-and-file of our membership, suffering great hardships, is beginning to place confidence in us.” The left wing vowed continued opposition to the officials, who, they charged, planned to return the workers to sweatshop conditions through collaboration with the employers and the ultraconservative AFL leadership.22 The TUEL did make a serious effort to resolve its differences with the ILGWU’s leadership. In October and November 1923, at the direction of the TUEL’s National Committee, Foster wrote to Eugene V. Debs, asking him to intervene in the ILGWU conflict, informing Debs that “the state of affairs [in the ILGWU] is now a desperate one. The reactionary officials who opposed industrial unionism, Soviet Russia, and many other principles long advocated by you, are trying to expel the left wing, which they cannot

meet in fair argument.” Foster denied that “the Trade Union Educational League is a disruptive organization” and asked Debs to do what he could to halt the expulsion of TUEL members from the ILGWU.

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In April 1923, as we have seen, Debs had offered an unequivocal endorsement of the TUEL. Now, in his reply, Debs noted that there were many “conflicting statements” about the nature of the “unfortunate controversy involving the expulsion of your members from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers.” It was essential, he declared, that the controversy “which menaced the interests of the organized workers” be settled “before further disaster follows.” He proposed that a committee of union officials and one representing the TUEL meet and try to resolve the controversy. He indicated a desire to attend such a conference so as to learn “the truth about the situation concerning which only the most conflicting reports have come to me.”* Foster informed Debs in reply that the TUEL’s National Committee welcomed his proposal and agreed with him that “a stop should be put to this matter before further harm is done.” The Committee was convinced that such a conference could only produce “good results” and recommended that it take place in Chicago, where the Committee was situated, “so that there will not be too much expense.” It expressed the hope that Debs would arrange to attend. This time, however, Debs indicated that previous commitments and the state of his health would probably prevent his being able to be present. (“I am not at all my normal self nor have I been sinceI left prison....”)** In any case, he still thought the conference was an excellent and necessary step and suggested that Foster propose it directly to the ILGWU officials. If they agreed, and if the conference was held, “and if it is possible for me to be in attendance, health and other conditions permitting, I shall, if desired, gladly render any service in reaching the desired end in my power.”°3 _ Foster thereupon wrote to President Sigman “on behalf of the Trade Union Educational League, proposing to you that there be a conference arranged between representatives of your organization and ours, at which the general question of the controversy over the League shall be considered. We make this proposition in all good faith, hoping that a way will be found to end the deplorable situation. We trust that you will accept.” At the same time, Foster made public the correspondence between Debs and himself and his letter to Sigman. * In his study, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Edward P. Johanningsmeier discusses the Foster-Debs correspondence, but he does not mention Debs’s proposal that committees of union officials and the TUEL meet to try to resolve the controversy (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1988, pp. 594-95).

** Debs had been convicted of violating the Espionage Act by opposing American involvement in World War I. He was sentenced to ten years in prison on September 14, 1918, and incarcerated in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. He was pardoned by executive order of President Warren G. Harding on December 23, 1921. The White House announced

that Debs and 23 other political prisoners would be released on Christmas Day

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He told the press that if Sigman refused to agree to the proposed conference ..it will demonstrate beyond all question of doubt that his charges against the League are fallacious and that he does not want a settlement except by the destruction of the left wing. It will prove that the real basis of the attack against the League is not that it is a dual union but that it carries on a militant campaign for amalgamation, a labor party, and other progressive measures that are obnoxious to the Gompers bureaucracy.34

The only answer from the ILGWU leadership was a continuation of the expulsion policy. Chicago’s Local 100 was placed into receivership and new officers appointed to replace those expelled on the charge of being TUEL

members.°> In the fall of 1923, Louis Hyman, a spokesperson for the left wing

(although he was not a Communist),36 summed up the situation in the industry as one of “severe crisis” characterized by low wages, the return of the old piecework system, widespread unsanitary conditions, and shops employing only five or six workers. Submanufacturers, operating in an extremely competitive market, were slashing their costs to the bone by running substandard shops that undercut wage scales and lengthened the hours of work. However, unemployment was the “greatest problem,” and the existing collective agreement was to no small extent responsible for this. Under the reorganization clause, employers were able to discharge workers at the beginning of each season, with the result that in some shops they fired up to 50 percent of the work force. Moreover, employers had a free hand in discharging workers on such vague grounds as “incompetency, misconduct, insubordination in the performance of work ... breach of

reasonable rules ... and soldiering on the job.”8” Even the union administration admitted the deteriorating economic situation, and with great fanfare, announced a ten-point “New Industrial Program” (dubbed the “Ten Commandments”), designed to combat the severe decline in working conditions in the industry. The union program demanded a 44-hour week with union wages and conditions in all shops with 14 or more machines. It proposed that during the slow season, the jobber should divide the work among his submanufacturers, who should do the

same for their workers. The jobber would be allowed to deal with only five outside shops at one time and could engage additional contractors only after all his submanufacturers were working at capacity. Most important, the jobber was therefore to be considered the actual employer of labor, responsible for working conditions.*® The “Ten Commandments” died stillborn. The cloak jobbers simply refused to accept responsibility for wages and working conditions. At the end

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of 1923, Justice, in its annual review, described the year as a “period of unusually hard times, long slack and economic and moral depression.”39

THE 1924 CHICAGO STRIKE In the winter and spring of 1924, the ILGWU was involved in a general strike against the dress manufacturers of Chicago. The strike, launched on February 27,1924, had as its aims a 10 percent wage increase, a 40-hour week, and collective bargaining in the industry. Ninety percent of the 3,000

strikers were young women, and they put upa heroic fight.49

Before the strike began, many Chicago women members of the ILGWU urged Meyer Perlstein, the union’s vice-president, to restore the expelled members to full membership so that they could contribute to the struggle. “What are we going to do without Dora Lipschutz, who in strike after strike has given every ounce of energy and every minute of time to leadership in the strike—and who now is expelled and not even allowed in this hall?” one of them asked. Perlstein rejected their appeal, but Dora Lipschutz, speaking for the “expelled members,” declared that they would nevertheless support the strike unequivocally. The TUEL endorsed this position, and Black TUEL members in Chicago began a campaign to force Negro employment agencies to sign agreements not to send scabs to shops on strike. In a letter to Negro churches in Chicago, these League members, signing themselves “A Committee of Colored Strikers,” wrote: The greatest blow to the cause of the strikers at this moment is the constant stream of non-union colored girls who are now being brought into the shops to defeat the strikers. These girls are being supplied by various colored labor agencies on the south side. This is unfair to the union girls of both races, and it is the thing that has contributed more to the state of antagonism existing between the two races today than anything else.

The Committee urged the Black clergymen to advise “your congregations not to aid the employers to defeat the union by sending colored girls to take the jobs of the strikers.” It was able to report success in this campaign, including a pledge by the Urban League of Chicago not to

furnish scabs to the dress manufacturers. The very day the strike began, Judge Dennis E. Sullivan issued a sweeping injunction against any form of picketing. Over 500 women strikers were arrested for violating the injunction, and jail sentences of from 15 to 50 days were handed out to 90 of them. Meanwhile, police and private thugs freely attacked the women strikers. State Attorney General Crowe worked openly with the manufacturers’ lawyers, even assigning police attached to his office to strike duty. In a letter to Crowe, President John Fitzpatrick of the CFL said: “We had hoped you would have some regard for womanhood

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and that there was some limit at which you would stop in your desire to serve the interests of unfair employers. But we were bitterly disappointed.’”42 At the end of the first week of the strike, Mother Jones, en route to California from New York, stopped off in Chicago long enough to speak to the “girl strikers.” “This strike of yours is war. It is damned real war,” she told them. “You girls are fighting and I want to tell you to keep on fighting. Don’t care about police in or out of uniform. Don’t care about jails, courts, or injunctions. Picket, strike, fight.” Then she declared: “You girls should get the entire labor movement of this town behind you. They can help you.

Get them to do it.”48 Women strikers appeared before the executive session of the CFL’s “Committee of 15” to appeal for support of their strike. If the strikers submitted to the mandates of Judge Sullivan, they told the committee, the strike was lost. On the other hand, if they insisted on their right to picket the shops that refused to settle, “the strike will be won.” Late in April, almost too late to be of much help, the CFL did appeal to all Chicago unions to aid the garment strikers. “These women strikers are making a great heroic fight,” the Committee of 15 declared. “Do something now to help them.”44 But while the strike dragged on and women strikers continued to be fined and jailed, the leadership of the ILGWU was devoting all its attention to the battle against the left wing at the convention scheduled to open in Boston in May 1924. By the time the convention met, the Chicago strike had ended in defeat.*®

THE 1924 ILGWU CONVENTION The left wing ran candidates for delegates to the ILGWU’s 1924 convention wherever they could, but the inequitable representation system favored the small locals controlled by conservatives, and once again ensured rightwing domination of the convention. For example, a local union of 21,000 members had 13 delegates, while seven locals of seven members each—49

people in all—had 14 delegates!*6 The Credentials Committee, led by Joseph Bressler and David Dubinsky, recommended that the convention refuse to seat any delegates-elect accused of being members of the TUEL. The convention supported the committee on every one of the challenged delegates, even when the challengee denied having ever been a member of the TUEL or maintained that he or she had resigned. Local 25’s Rose Wortis, a leading Communist, was alleged to have remained in the TUEL until March 1924, resigning only to gain eligibility to run as a delegate to the convention. Speaking in her own defense, Wortis explained that “the Trade Union Educational League is not a dual union,” and added: “I do not think that the decision of the General

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Executive Board was for the best interest of our industry.” She said that she had resigned because it was not possible to be active in union affairs and still be a League member. The convention nevertheless voted to exclude her by a vote of 185 to 40.47 As in previous conventions, the left-wing delegations proposed a system of strict proportional representation on joint boards and at conventions,

and the adoption of the shop delegates’ system of organization in the locals. Both proposals were rejected by the convention. In fact, rather than democratize the union, the right-wing leaders instituted a series of measures that placed even more control of the union in the hands of the GEB and the president. The list of offenses was expanded to include acting to the detriment of the “interests of the ILGWU” by slandering the organization or its officers. The GEB was given explicit power to revoke the charters of or reorganize recalcitrant locals. All GEB orders had to be complied with fully, and the Board had final authority to interpret the law according to its “plain and obvious meaning,”48 The 1924 ILGWU convention adopted a constitutional amendment barring from membership in the union anyone “holding membership or office in a dual union or in any other organization not constituted or functioning within this constitution.”4? That formulation neatly sidestepped the problem of whether or not the TUEL was a dual union. The conservative leadership emerged from the convention with greater total control over the union structure. The comparatively large left-wing in New York Locals 1, 9, and 22 were now under right-wing control and loyal to the policy of eliminating the TUEL’s influence. Most of the left-wing strength in the outlying districts—Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago—had been eliminated by the removal of elected local leaders.°° In New York, the situation was now ripe for a major strike against the cloak employers. The areas of conflict were the establishment of a union label, a minimum yearly employment guarantee, an unemployment fund, a 40-hour week, and increased minimum wages. The union got nowhere in its efforts to achieve these demands without a strike. The Employers’ Protective Association not only broke off relations with the union, but even abolished its Labor Department. This led Justice to lament: “In the last five years, conditions in the cloak industry have been going from bad to worse and they have now become well-nigh intolerable.”>! The rank and file, by a vote of 31,483 to 449, voiced its desire to strike, but the leadership, fearing that a long strike would bring with it a resurgence of radical activity, agreed to the formation of a fact-finding commission appointed by Governor Alfred E. Smith to study the situation. The commission’s recommendations formed the basis of a settlement. It recommended that all shops employ a minimum of 14 workers; that all work be

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done by union labor, and that an unemployment fund be established into which the employer would pay an amount equal to two percent of his weekly payroll, while the worker contributed one percent of each paycheck. The commission rejected the union’s request for a 40-hour week, higher minimum wage scales, a provision that there be a limitation on the number of contractors used by each jobber. Even though President Sigman acknowledged widespread rank-and-file unhappiness with the recommendations, he fought the left-wing demand that the proposals be rejected. After a bitter debate, the overwhelming conservative majority adopted the report. Thereupon, Morris Hillquit, counsel for the ILGWU, wrote to Governor Smith that “the credit is due primarily to your personal intervention.” However, Paula Elliot, in her study of Governor Smith, concedes that “many members of the ILGWU did not share Hillquit’s satisfaction with the agreement.”©2 : The union continued to lose membership—down from 94,000 in 1920 to 61,000 in 1924. By that year, too, the jobbers controlled approximately 75 percent of the market. The result was increased unemployment and shorter work seasons. Another result was that although the right wing seemed to be in secure control of the union, the continuing economic dislocation in the industry, the packing of the 1924 convention, and the changing of the Constitution proved, as we shall see in the next volume, that the right wing victory was a Pyrrhic one.®3

CHAPTER 15

THE FUR WORKERS At the end of September 1926, no more than 125,000 wage-earners— less than one percent of the total in the United States—worked a five-day week. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study late in 1926 researched union workplaces in 66 cities and found that only about 40,000 unionists out of a total of over 764,000 surveyed worked a five-day, 40-hour week. A little over ten percent of these did so only on a seasonal basis. Even in the most highly organized trades, like the building crafts and newspaper printing, no more than six percent of union members worked the 40-hour week.! To raise the demand for a five-day, 40-hour week in 1926 was considered visionary, and to win such a demand was truly miraculous. Yet the left-wing New York Joint Board of the International Fur Workers Union, led by Ben Gold, a 27-year-old militant and an open Communist since 1919, won just such a major victory in 1926, achieving the five-day, 40-hour week in one of the most militant strikes in American labor history. This is not as surprising as it sounds, since there has rarely been an American trade union quite like the one built by the fur workers. Rarely has a union faced so many obstacles, overcome so many and such powerful enemies, and won so much for its members. Small in numbers as unions go, and in an industry far from basic, the fur workers’ union was one of the most important labor organizations in the era of the Trade Union Educational League.* Its history is a living refutation of the slander that Communists and left-wingers were the enemies of American labor. In 1913, after a militant and victorious strike in New York a year earlier, the furriers’ union was organized into an international out of several small locals. The new union affiliated with the AFL. It had local unions in all the fur centers in North America, but was based in New York City. By 1919 the union had about 10,000 members, about 7,000 of whom were in New York, * “Although Communist agitation was not limited to the furriers’ union, Communists scored the most complete and enduring victory in this union.” (Robert D. Leither, “The Fur Work-

ers Union,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 3 [October 1949]: 169.)

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thus making the manager of the New York Joint Board the most important officer in the union.

RISE OF THE LEFT WING From its very beginning, the furriers’ union was plagued with gangsterism. The owners of the fur shops hired gangsters to keep out the union, and the union either hired others to resist or developed its own “talent.” The first manager of the New York Joint Board, Isidore Cohen, even defended the use of strong-arm methods by the union against its own members when he wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward that “one must use the whip” against the workers. In 1917 Cohen was replaced by a reform administration, but the techniques he had developed were later revived by his successor, Morris Kaufman who, like Cohen, was a member of the Socialist Party. In 1919 the “progressives”—men and women fur workers who had been active in the fight against the policies of the Cohen administration—joined with some of the young furriers to create an anti-administration left wing— the Furriers Agitation Committee. In the elections held in July 1919, the left wing elected Ben Gold and Aaron Gross, both members of the left wing of the Jewish Socialist Federation, to the New York Joint Board.? Ben Gold, born in Bessarabia, then part of Czarist Russia, came to the United States in 1910. He was thirteen years old when he took his first job in a fur shop. He joined the Furriers Union in May 1912 and was active in the 1912 strike. While working in the fur shop of Kaufman & Oberlander during the day, Gold was rounding out his education by attending the Manhattan Preparatory School at night. He was determined to study law, but this ambition was never realized. During the early years of the Furriers Union, Gold participated in many rank-and-file actions to halt the corruption and bureaucracy in the union. In 1916, he joined the Socialist Party and, despite his youth, became the leader of the left-wing and progressive forces in the union. He was doing quite well personally, earning $100 a week as a fur cutter. However, he was enraged by the gangsterism and bureaucracy in the union and was moved by the struggle of the small group of progressives to restore the control of the union to the workers. Together with other progressives, Gold dedicated himself to breaking the power of the right-wing machine. With his election to the Joint Board, the rank-and-file opposition movement began to crystallize. The battle for democratic unionism now got under way in earnest.3 At every meeting of the Joint Board, Gold lashed out at the gangster system and methods. He demanded that the rank and file be organized to carry on the work of the union. Gold would introduce a motion and Gross

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would second it. Battling Kaufman every inch of the way, Gold and Gross soon made their influence felt, even though all their proposals were voted down by Kaufman’s majority. Despite these setbacks, Gold kept pointing out that the conditions of the fur workers were miserable, that the speedup system was intense, the wages low, the hours long and that the periods of employment were short, followed by long periods of unemployment. Within weeks the administration moved to impeach Gold. However, a special meeting called for this purpose was turned into an anti-administration rally by Gold’s impassioned speech attacking the use of gangsters to rule over the workers, condemning the denial of the most elementary rights to the membership and charging that the fur workers were being systematically underpaid and overworked. A special committee investigated his charges and, finding them “groundless,” suggested that the left wing apologize in the union newspaper. Then, turning its attention to another target,

the administration tried to force the removal of the left-wing business agent of Local 74 in Newark, New Jersey, because he had protested against the exclusion of Black members from a union dance. When the local refused,

its charter was revoked.*

THE 1920 STRIKE Early in April 1920, the postwar depression hit the fur industry and by April 25, more than half of the fur workers in New York City were out of work. Taking advantage of the depression, the fur employers tried to impose cuts and layoffs. The union retaliated with a general strike, which dragged on for 30 weeks.° Both the employers and the union employed gangsters; rather than rely on the rank-and-file workers, the union picketing committee hired professional pickets at $20 to $25 a day. The gangsters on both sides—sometimes the same men—used the strike as an excuse to extort money from employers and union alike, without regard to who

had hired them.§ In this bleak and sordid picture, there were a few bright spots. In the district covered by Casino Hall, stretching from 25th Street down to East Broadway and over to Brooklyn, and including some shops on 38th Street, the workers themselves conducted the strike, did the picketing and stopped the scabs from working. Casino Hall was the strike hall under Ben Gold’s leadership, and as soon as Gold was appointed chairman by the General

Strike Committee, he set up a rank-and-file picketing committee. The gangsters were afraid to enter the district, let alone Casino Hall itself. A reporter for the Kaufman-controlled Fur Worker described the scene there: In the Casino Hall circles here and there, they would see the workers all absorbed in listening to some one of our active committees talking to them in aspirit of

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comradeship. For instance, the Hall Chairman, B. Gold, with his keen logic and irrefutable arguments, explaining to the workers the situation in the trade, and compelling the weakest man of the circle to pay full attention to his remarks. At another circle, we would find his right-hand man, Gross, or Shapiro, or Rackow, or any of those who are working under his guidance and inspiration. or his Secretary Maurice Cohen, paying minute attention to the various details of the clerical work necessary in the conduct of the strike, keeping records of each and every man in the hall, knowing his whereabouts, his faithfulness to the strike and everything to be known of every man and woman registered therein. They would find them all deeply engrossed in their work, the atmosphere leavened with activity; every striker, man or woman, fully appreciating the seriousness of the situation and ready to do his or her utmost to assist in whatever work is necessary to carry on this great struggle.”

The majority of the shops and strikers, however, were in halls under the control of men who leaned on gangsters in the operation of the union and the conduct of the strike. In an effort to save the strike and rekindle the enthusiasm of the workers for the struggle, Gold appealed to Kaufman to get rid of the professional hoodlums on the union payroll. “The Picketing Committee,” he told Kaufman, “must be organized and composed of the best devoted and loyal class-conscious men that are able to fight for the interests of the union, not to protect the scabs. No strike can be won when you kill the morale and spirit of the workers. You engage the workers in their own fight and they will do it.” The progressives assured Kaufman that they ea guarantee to furnish a picketing committee of more than 100 workers who would work without pay. Gold was willing to accept the post of chairman of such a committee, provided that he was not required to handle any money and provided further that Kaufman got rid of the gangsters. However Kaufman and his henchmen rejected the plan. In the first week of strike, when it was clear that Kaufman would do nothing to improve the conduct of the strike, a committee of progressives visited Socialist Congressman Meyer London and urged him to use his influence to save the situation. London informed them that, in his opinion, Kaufman would rather lose the strike than allow anyone else to intervene. He did, however, contact Dr. Judah L. Magnes, the impartial chairman of the conference committee made up of representatives of the union and the employers. Arguing before the representatives of the employers that if they did not settle the strike, they would “ruin another season,” Magnes urged them “as practical businessmen” to settle the strike. “It is in the interest of the workers,” he appealed, “but much more in your interest because you’ve got much-more to lose.”®

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When the strike was finally settled in its 30th week, the old agreement was extended. At a meeting in Manhattan Lyceum on December 18, attended by a total of 324 fur workers, the terms of the settlement were ratified. The union’s treasury was exhausted. A large part of the close to $900,000 spent by the union had ended up in the hands of gangsters. The union was heavily in debt. Its prestige was shattered. Its membership was only a shell of what it had been before the strike, with 650 members left out of the 10,000 it had at the beginning of the strike. The 1919 agreement, on which the settlement was based, was a dead letter. Those fur workers who were fortunate enough to find jobs were forced to work 50 hours a week, to accept wage cuts ranging from 25 to 50 percent, and to work unlimited overtime at the regular hourly rate. In all of the shops, union control was a thing of the past, and in most of them, the open shop

was in effect.9 At this point the entire membership, or what was left of it, joined the anti-administration forces in demanding the resignation of all the officers. Under overwhelming pressure, Kaufman resigned as manager of the Joint Board but retained the presidency of the international union and converted it into a paid office by adopting the additional titles of general organizer and editor of the union newspaper, the Fur Worker. Through his control of the small out-of-town locals, many of which were only paper organizations created to provide convention delegates, and by maintaining the unequal weighting of convention representation, which gave the out-of-town locals control over the union’s General Executive Board, Kaufman was able to dominate the international and use it as a weapon against the New York

members.!°

THE 1922 IFWU CONVENTION On June 5, 1922, the Fifth Biennial Convention opened in Philadelphia. In his report to the delegates, Kaufman spoke of the importance of achieving unity and harmony in New York. He called for an end to “internal strife and factional fights” and pledged to cooperate with all groups prepared to achieve this goal. The progressive delegates from New York, led by Gold, Samuel Liebowitz, Joseph Winogradsky and Max Suroff, were prepared to make important contributions toward achieving unity and harmony. They soon discovered, however, that Kaufman’s emphasis on the need for unity was simply for the record. Making ruthless use of his machine, he saw to it that not one of the progressives was appointed to the all-important Credentials Committee or to any of the other important committees.

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Over the opposition of the progressive delegates, Kaufman’s machine adopted redbaiting resolutions that the progressive delegates labeled as “open provocation to bar unity from entering the ranks of the union.” Kaufman also jammed through a resolution granting a charter to the retail fur workers over the opposition of the Joint Board. At Kaufman’s initiative, Max Pine of the United Hebrew Trades approached the progressive delegates and told them that Kaufman was ready to cooperate with them. However, Pine said, they would have to denounce the publications of the Workers, (Communist) Party and agree to actively oppose the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which had undertaken a project to assist the Soviet workers in reconstructing their war-devastated industries. The progressives responded with their own conditions for unity: elimination of the strong-arm men from the union; organization of the unorganized fur workers, and genuine union democracy, including the election of the international president by a referendum vote of the entire

membership. These proposals were quickly dismissed by Kaufman. Kaufman’s reelection was a foregone conclusion. Control of the out-oftown delegates gave him the votes by a margin of 37 to 8. The same control gave him a General Executive Board composed entirely of his

henchmen.!2

TUEL FURRIERS SECTION The conflict between the right and left wings often reduced union meetings in New York to bloody brawls. In the course of their struggle against the Kaufman regime and for militant, honest, and democratic trade unionism, the progressive forces in the Furriers’ Union joined with others who were combatting similar tendencies in the needle trades. On November 22, 1922, forty rank-and-file delegates from shops of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Journeymen Tailors, and the Furriers’ Union met in New York City and formed the Needle Trades Section of the TUEL. Ten days later, the Furriers Sec-

tion of the TUEL was born.}8 It was in the Freiheit, the Communist Party’s Yiddish daily newspaper, that the Furriers Section of the TUEL issued its first call. Published on January 11, 1923 and written by Gold, it read in part: Brothers and Sisters: We know from experience that when control of the union is put into the hands of a small group of individuals, no matter how fine their intentions, the union cannot remain the instrument which successfully protects ~ the workers from the abuses of the bosses. And needless to say, the intentions of the present leaders of the Furriers Union are not the best.

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The Furriers Section of the Trade Union Educational League desires to draw the workers into union activity in order to assure that no clique shall be able to retain control of the union and deal with it as they see fit in their own interest. The League strives to guarantee that the leadership of the union shall come from the rank and file. The League believes that the shop chairman system should become the established system for running the union.’*

Within two years, the Furriers Section of the TUEL had grown into a mass movement, speaking for the vast majority of the fur workers in the battle for progressive, militant trade unionism. When contract negotiations opened at the end of 1923, the left wing launched a campaign to compel the leadership to inform the members of the union’s demands. The administration agreed to present the union’s proposals to membership meetings of the various locals. At the first of these meetings, held at Local 15 (the finishers), the leaders of the left wing tried to question Kaufman and challenge the proposals. A fight broke out, and Kaufman ordered his strong-arm squad to drive the protesters out of the hall, using chairs and knives. The “sluggers” then tried to have Gold arrested, but when the police saw the extent of Gold’s injuries and heard his side of the story, they arrested the leaders of the strong-arm squad instead. (After the fight, Gold needed eleven stitches to close a wound in his head.) In court, the police were reversed by the district attorney, and Gold was jailed. Mass protests led to the dropping of the charges, but not before the Jewish Daily Forward had accused the left wing of beating up

Gold themselves in order to create a martyr. In January 1924, Gold and five other left-wing leaders, including Fanny Warshafsky and Esther Polansky, were brought up on charges of having instigated the fight. Although the union constitution provided that charges against members were to be heard by their locals, the administration ordered them tried instead by the grievance committee of the Joint Board. When the accused workers refused to accept this procedure, they were tried in absentia and suspended for two years. During this period, they were to be deprived of the right to either run for office or participate in local meetings.1¢ The International convention in May 1924 did little except ratify the administration’s actions. All charges made by the left wing were tabled and the appeals of the suspended members rejected. The convention then went on to declare the TUEL a dual union and climaxed the proceedings with a series of constitutional amendments designed to ensure that the opposition would never again be able to argue that the administration was violating the constitution by suspending or expelling them. The GEB was empowered to suspend or expel any member “who attempts or takes part in a protest meeting or unauthorized meeting against the union, or anyone who

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will slander or libel the union or the officialdom.” The Joint Board was empowered to try members who had charges brought against them, thereby granting ex post facto ratification to the proceedings against Gold and his five codefendants.!” By hastily amending the constitution after the left-wingers had been suspended, the right-wing machine confirmed the left-wing charge that the Joint Board had acted unconstitutionally in suspending the six left-wingers for their refusal to appear before its grievance committee to answer charges against them. The convention continued the existing GEB in office. Kaufman closed the convention by accepting his reelection as president “as an endorsement of my policies as president of the International Union.”!® On May 25, 1,000 fur workers met in New York’s Webster Hall in response to a call by the Furriers Section of the TUEL. Gold described how

the right-wing machine at the convention had cut off discussion on the real problems facing the fur workers, how constitutional amendments were jammed through without any discussion, and how the convention had ignored unemployment and other pressing issues in the trade. Resolutions adopted by acclamation at the meeting registered the fur workers’ protest “against the despotic laws and regulations created at the convention; against the neglect of their tasks and duties to the workers by the union officials, particularly at this critical time; against the dictatorship which our officers have set up in our union; against the fact that certain individuals use the union for their own personal ends.” “Inside of one year,” Gold declared in closing the meeting, “this International will collapse and the left wing will take over.”!9 In the elections held in the fall of 1924 for delegates to the Joint Board, the left wing backed a group of “progressive” candidates, who won a majority on the incoming board. When it met in November, it reinstated Gold’s membership rights in the union and appointed a committee to investigate corruption among the Joint Board officers. This investigation finally exposed the corruption that was rampant in the administration. A picture gradually emerged of the union’s failure to enforce agreements with employers, of the use of union funds to hire thugs against militant workers, and of outright thievery.?? Stuart Chase, the noted economist and then the certified public accountant for the Labor Board, was engaged to examine the books and records of the Joint Board. After only a brief investigation, Chase reported many discrepancies in the union’s finances: “Large donations and appropriations are being made without proper record in the minutes of the Joint Board... There has been a very serious increase in expenses during the past three years without a corresponding increase in income... There is a strange

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difference in the balance between stamps and dues—amounting to over 26,000 stamps.”

One of the items in Chase’s report aroused particular indignation. It showed that money contributed by the fur workers to assist strikers of other unions had never reached those strikers. A special assessment had raised a fund to help the 1919 steel strike, but “nothing was paid to the steel workers.” Seven thousand dollars had been collected to aid the 1922 miners’ strike, but only $2,000 had gone to the miners. “Thus,” Chase concluded, “the Joint Board seems to have a habit of collecting special assessments for beneficiaries from which the beneficiaries receive no benefit!”21 On April 15, 1925, the manager of the Joint Board testified and admit: ted stealing from the union. He also implicated the secretary-treasurer and then resigned. The Joint Board thereupon appointed a committee of five to

manage the union until the next election.22

TRIUMPH OF THE UNITED FRONT In the ensuing election of officers of the Joint Board, the United Front (of “progressives” and left-wingers) ran a slate of candidates on a program drawn up by the left wing. The program was based onafive-point “pledge”: 1. To do everything possible to do away with the terroristic methods which have ruled the union in the hands of the former administration. 2. To establish a completely democratic system of elections and action of officers, assuring the complete right of the members to differences of opinion and complete freedom to express their opinions, as well as complete responsibility for organizational activities on the part of the administration to the membership. 3. To remove from power every person found guilty of breaking of union principles, in order to do away with corruption in the union. 4. The recognition of the right of every member to belong to whichever political party he chooses. 5. To mobilize every capable union member to assure and improve the economic conditions of the fur workers.

The officers were divided between the two groups, with the “progressives” getting five of the eight positions of business agent, the assistant managership, the post of secretary-treasurer, and seven of the other ten positions. Gold was to become the new manager, and the left wing was to get six other offices, of which two would be occupied by women—Fanny Warshafsky and Esther Polansky as business agents for Local 15.23 On May 23, 1925, the election took place under the supervision of representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was the first honest and orderly election held in the Joint Board in many years. Four

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thousand workers poured out to vote, and the United Front won every one of the Joint Board offices.?4 The coalition installed Gold, then known as a leader of the TUEL, as manager of the Joint Board, which held jurisdiction over most of the nation’s organized fur workers. The Board authorized its new manager to take action against corruption in the locals. Gold proceeded to seize the books of the locals and to suspend their executive boards, pending the July elections. Examination of the locals’ books led to charges against the members of several of the executive boards. In an attempt to put a stop to the cleanup process, the ousted officials again brought in gangsters, but the strong-arm squads were rendered completely impotent. Every day promptly at twelve noon, hundreds of fur workers came to the union office to protect their organization from the gangsters. At night after work, they would be back again, prepared to fight off any attack. The executive boards remained dissolved. At local meetings, each attended by over fifteen hundred workers, Gold’s action was approved. Two weeks later, several gangsters showed up in Gold’s office. Pulling a gun from his pocket, the leader of the gang demanded “back pay” due them from the union. He insisted that the union owed them thousands of dollars for past “services rendered.” Gold coldly informed the gangsters that he had not hired them, and that if they wanted payment, they should go to the men who had used their services. The gangsters threatened to shoot if the money was not turned over immediately. While this drama was unfolding in the union office, a signal had been flashed to the market and shops. Hundreds of workers dropped their tools and rushed to the union office. They seized the gangsters, disarmed them, and drove them toward the stairway. On the stairs, scores of other workers gave the gangsters a taste of their wrath. Their clothes torn to shreds, their faces and bodies mauled and bleeding, the gangsters finally staggered out of the building and collapsed in the street. Even though they were defeated, the strong-arm men still tried to make a deal with Gold. If they were paid off, they said, they would remain neutral. Nothing doing! was the reply. If they were put back on the payroll, they would help the left wing against the right wing. Again: nothing doing! Gold had only one answer to all these propositions—"Get out and stay out, and if you don’t, the workers will make you regret it." And the workers’ guard outside the union office, day in and day out, made the Furriers Union off-limits for any strong-arm squads.?>

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ORGANIZATION OF GREEK FUR WORKERS With the gangsters out of the picture, the New York Joint Board launched an intensive effort to organize the entire fur market. The rankand-file workers became the mainstay of the organizational drive. About 300 volunteers, half of them women, served without pay on the organization committee, which watched the shops day and night and on Saturday, Sundays, and holidays, to guard against unauthorized overtime. They stopped over 200 shops from working overtime, and another 200 were halted until they agreed to sign up with the union.26 Most of the unorganized fur workers were brought into the organization. This included the Greek workers who, up to then, had been outside the union. During the 1920 strike, a large part of the scab work was done in the Greek shops. Following that disastrous strike, many Greek shops did finishing contracting for the big manufacturers. Time and again during the Kaufman administration, resolutions were passed urging the GEB to organize the Greek workers. The resolutions were filed and forgotten. The united front administration set up a special committee to organize the Greek workers. By August, 500 Greek furriers were attending meetings. The Joint Board reduced the initiation fee to onethird of the regular amount, Greek workers began to fill out membership cards and assist in the organizing campaign. On Tuesday, October 27, 1925, a call was issued for a general strike in the Greek shops. The demands of the union were for a 44-hour week, pay for 10 legal holidays, time-and-a-half for overtime, a minimum scale of wages, and all other union conditions prevailing in the industry. The next morning, 1,500 Greek fur workers were on the picket line, and they stayed there for ten days. The strike ended in complete victory. On November 4, the union signed closed shop agreements with the majority of

the Greek manufacturers. The workers won all their demands, including substantial wage increases. The agreements were timed to expire on January 31, 1926, together with the contract of the Associated Fur Manufacturers, the major manufacturers’ association. Negotiations with the Greek manufacturers would then be conducted simultaneously with those with

the Associated Fur Manufacturers.2” The organization of the Greek shops placed the union in a stronger position for the impending battle with the employers. As Women’s Wear Daily observed: In the trade it is declared that the successful culmination of the Union’s drive on the Greek shops will make its position much stronger when it meets the employers across the conference table in December to work out a new agreement.

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During the strike of 1920, by far the greater part of the production that helped break the strike came from the Greek shops. Should there be a strike because of the failure to reach an agreement to replace the one expiring by limitation on December 31, the union will be in a much stronger position with the Greek workers organized than it has been in strikes heretofore. .

Elections for local executive boards and for the Joint Board resulted in a clean sweep for the united front, giving it complete control over the New York organization. The local executive boards and the Joint Board were rid of the corrupt elements who had previously dominated the union. Their places were taken by men like Jack Schneider, Sam Resnick, Isidore Shapiro, and others, mainly members of the TUEL, who had distinguished themselves in the struggle for clean, honest, and progressive unionism.29

THE 1925 IFWU CONVENTION At the Seventh Biennial Convention of the International Fur Workers, the machine controlled 34 votes, chiefly from small, out-of-town locals; the opposition numbered 41 delegates from the New York Joint Board, with its 12,000 workers. Among them were 26 left-wingers under the leadership of Ben Gold, and 15 “progressives” led by Hyman Sorkin. The 41 New York delegates came with specific instructions adopted at local meetings just two weeks prior to the convention. They were instructed to present a solid front against the machine on all issues. They were to fight for a militant program to help solve the problems in the fur trade and to ally the fur workers with the most progressive sections of the

labor movement.2? The first real battle arose over the machine’s attempt to bar Gold and Samuel Mencher from the convention. The majority report of the credentials committee (appointed by Kaufman) recommended that Gold be excluded from the convention because he had been expelled and because charges were being brought against the Joint Board. The machine then attempted to postpone the debate on seating Gold until after the case against the Joint Board had been presented to the GEB. However, the majority of delegates were determined to seat Gold before taking up any charges against the Joint Board. The battle raged throughout the morning and afternoon sessions and late into the evening of Tuesday, November 10. It ended with the passage of a motion to seat Gold.31 This was merely the opening skirmish. The next three days were taken up with the battle over the report of the GEB on the controversy between

the International and the Joint Board. The report bitterly attacked the

left-wing militants and the TUEL, accusing them of being “Moscow agents.” It charged the left wing with “sabotaging” the 1920 strike, with arousing

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“passion and discontent,” with “slander and undermining the organization,” and with “provoking fist fights” at meetings—all at the dictates of the Workers (Communist) Party. As soon as the reading of the report was finished, one of Kaufman’s supporters moved that it be referred to the Committee on Officers’ Reports. No time was allowed for discussion of the report until the committee reported its findings. The next morning, the Committee on Officers’ Reports submitted its report. As was to be expected, Kaufman’s handpicked majority on the committee recommended finding the New York Joint Board guilty. A minority report presented by Jack Schneider of the left wing moved to reject the report and to condemn the International officers.22 At this point, Kaufman was riding high, but the situation changed when Gold took the floor. For two hours, he defended the Joint Board against the accusations set forth in the report. Step by step, he covered the history of the union since 1919, relating the story of assaults upon members—the corruption and graft-the maintenance of a spy system—the protection of favored shops—the overwhelming fear—and the alliance with the underworld to wipe out opposition in the union at whatever cost. Gold pointed out that even in 1919, when there were no Communists in the union and certainly “no crystallized left wing,” there was already “strong opposition to the leaders” because of their dictatorial tactics and the “strong-arm methods against those who had other opinions.” In fact, he declared, Kaufman had been forced to resign as manager of the Joint Board before the 1920 strike. After disposing of the charge that the opposition elements had sabotaged the 1920 strike, Gold turned to the formation and activities of the TUEL. Without the TUEL, he insisted, “the union would have been ruined today.” “The TUEL left-wingers,” he said, “are a factor in the labor movement, standing for the interests of the rank and file in the building up of a powerful union to fight the bosses.” He then described how the fur workers had learned to fight the alliance of the Kaufman machine, the manufacturers, and the underworld, and had finally swept the united front of left-wingers and “progressives” into office. Within a few weeks, the manufacturers knew “that the union was no longer broken down and decayed,” and the gangsters knew that their hold over the union had been smashed. The membership backed the new administration in the Joint Board in the elections and continued to do so. In closing, Gold appealed: If you think this Joint Board is guilty because we got rid of the graft system—if you think we are guilty because we enforced union conditions—if you think we are guilty of organizing the unorganized—f you think we are guilty because we have a union that has never been organized before—if you think we are guilty because we delivered the union to the members with free speech, with free determination

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of policiesif you think we are guilty of this crime, if this is a crime-you can convict us....33

After Gold had finished speaking, Kaufman hurriedly recessed the session. In the afternoon session, Kaufman waited until all others had spoken on the report before he himself addressed the delegates. Then, as he closed

the debate on the report, he announced dramatically that he held in his hand a telegram which contained orders from the Central Executive Committee of the Workers (Communist) Party to William Weinstone, organizer for the TUEL and Daily Worker correspondent at the convention. The telegram, said to be signed by Charles E. Ruthenberg, the general secretary of the Workers Party, was supposed to contain instructions to the left-wing delegates as to how the various offices in the International should be distributed at the elections. Significantly, it dealt mainly with the necessity of breaking the power of Hyman Sorkin and his “‘progressive” followers. Here was proof, Kaufman cried, that an “invisible power” was seeking to

control the union.*4 Ruthenberg immediately denied the authenticity of the telegram and publicly declared that its use “shows up the machine as the unscrupulous clique resorting to every device to maintain power.” However, the machine’s strategy paid off. Out-of-town delegates, who had been wavering in their support of the machine, were brought back into line by the hysteria created by the alleged telegram. Most important, the forged message from the Workers Party gave Sorkin and his followers an excuse to break the

united front.°> To hasten the split in the united front, the right-wingers withdrew the committee’s report and submitted a compromise which justified the International and “forgave” the Joint Board. In return, the International was to be recognized as supreme. Refusing to allow any further debate, Kaufman rushed the matter to a vote. A group of the “progressives” voted with Kaufman, and the resulting vote was 37 to 28 in favor of the compromise. Eleven “progressives” abstained.** The following day, the last of the convention, the left wing sought a reversal of the vote for the compromise. Gold introduced a resolution declaring that the New York Joint Board had cleaned out corruption and had fought against the reign of terror that had been built up by the machine. The resolution instructed the incoming GEB “to work in closest harmony with the New York Joint Board for the purpose of maintaining a strong and unified International.” After failing to prevent a vote on Gold’s resolution, Kaufman introduced

a new compromise resolution which declared that the disputes between the New York Joint Board and the International were “liquidated and that the incoming GEB shall not revive them or take any action upon matters that

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occurred between the two bodies prior to the convention.” However, the left wing refused to yield, and Kaufman finally had to agree that both resolutions—Gold’s and his—be handed to a committee of five, which should begin immediately to work out a new resolution acceptable to both sides. This committee brought in a unanimous declaration that the Joint Board had fought against the violation of democratic principles and membership suspensions, but that under the chaotic conditions created in the organization by the internal struggle, the Joint Board had not lived up to all constitutional interpretations. Nevertheless, under these special circumstances, the actions of the Joint Board against the International were justified. The resolution pledged support to the Joint Board and declared that the dispute between the Board and the International was liquidated. It urged the incoming GEB not to revive it or take any action upon matters that had occurred between the two bodies prior to the convention. Thus,

the entire report condemning the Joint Board was thrown out.”

ELIMINATION OF KAUFMAN In the election of officers, Kaufman was finally forced out of the leadership, and Oizer Schachtman, a more moderate right-winger, was elected in his place, with the left-wingers and “progressives” joining together in his support. In the election of first vice-president, however, the united front split. Isidor Winnick was named by the “progressives” to oppose Gold, and when the right-wing delegates joined the “progressives,” Winnick was elected, 41 to 29. In the end, the GEB was composed of four members of the Sorkin group, two members of the Kaufman machine, two who wavered between Sorkin and Kaufman, and two left-wingers (Aaron Gross and Harry Englander). Two other Board members, from St. Paul and Montreal, were later to fall to the machine, which controlled the elections in those locals.38 In spite of the split in the united front and the betrayals by the “progressives” under Sorkin’s leadership, the convention marked an important advance for the fur workers. The Kaufman leadership was ended and his policies repudiated. The effort of the right-wing machine to destroy the Joint Board had failed, and the strength of the left wing had made itself felt. To be sure, the machine still controlled the GEB, but, as Gold declared: Only for a short time is not as in the days how it may combat against Kaufmanism

has the machine saved itself from complete annihilation... It gone by. The force of the organized membership has shown its enemy.... Furriers know no half-way battles. The fight will be brought to its completion.39

As we shall see in the next volume, this was an accurate prediction.

CHAPTER 16

THE MEN’S CLOTHING AND MILLINERY WORKERS The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was born in 1914 in a militant struggle against both the employers in the men’s clothing industry and the bureaucratic leaders of the United Garment Workers of America, AFL. Its formation resulted from the exclusion of the delegates of the socialist-led locals from the 1914 convention of the United Garment Workers. They were excluded because they represented a newly organized majority of the union’s membership and the UGWA officers feared that they would lose their coveted and financially well-rewarded positions as leaders of the union. The excluded majority held its own convention in the name of the UGWA, but were denied recognition by the American Federation of Labor later that year, and had to change its name.* As late as 1920, the Amalgamated was still being denied recognition by the AFL,** by which time it had enrolled about 175,000 skilled and unskilled operators in the men’s clothing industry, mostly in cities including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Rochester. This was an amazing achievement in a highly competitive industry that was still dominated by small shops, in which 60 to 70 percent of the workers were unskilled women.! Actually, although the leaders of the union were socialists, they were not involved in the Socialist Party. Sidney Hillman, president of the ACWA and leader of its Chicago locals, was organizationally independent, while Joseph Schlossberg, the union’s secretary-treasurer and leader of its New York locals as well as editor of its English-language weekly, Advance, was an ex-member of the Socialist Labor Party. In 1921, a spokesman for Chicago’s clothing manufacturers made the shrewd comment: “While the * For the events leading to the formation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America,

see, Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 5: 256-64; Philip S>Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement \[New York, 1979]:284-310. ** The Amalgamated Clothing Workers did not affiliate with the AFL until 1933.

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Amalgamated leaders hold socialist beliefs, in practice they ‘save their socialism’ for the evening meeting.”? Moreover, even at “the evening meeting.” Hillman and the other Amalgamated leaders emphasized that they stood four-square for increased productivity on the part of the workers, and that on this issue, “we have no quarrel with the industry.” Yet in contrast to the bitter hostility of AFL leaders toward the Soviet Union, not only were Hillman, Schlossberg, and most of the other ACWA officers staunch supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, but when the Soviet Union faced a famine after the Russian Civil War, Hillman headed a massive drive for famine relief, which was backed by all the Amalgamated’s resources. Addressing the 1922 convention, Hillman conveyed the thanks of the Russian people to the union for its contribution of $200,000 to the relief effort. He then, as we shall see in our next chapter, proposed that the convention authorize the General Executive Board to set up a million-dollar corporation to promote industrial reconstruction in Russia. The convention enthusiastically approved the proposal, and the Russian-American Industrial Corporation, to help finance Russian clothing factories by workers’ investments in the United States, was established in the following months.** When William Z. Foster founded the TUEL, he was supported by the Amalgamated leaders. In 1920, the union helped organize a nationwide speaking tour for Foster, and when Foster came under attack in December of that year, Schlossberg wrote an editorial in Advance defending him. In the summer of 1921, Foster and the RILU sent the Amalgamated congratulations on its defeat of an employers’ lockout “from the throne-room. of the Czar,” and Schlossberg “all but wept with appreciation in his report of this to the readers of Advance.”® In August 1921 the Amalgamated began its big push for Russian Relief, and Hillman toured the country to organize it. Over the next few months Advance ran a number of articles by William Z. Foster on Russian conditions and on Russian unions as part of this campaign. When anarchist Emma Goldman condemned the Bolsheviks in 1922, she was denounced in the editorial pages of Advance for attacking the Russian Revolution. There was some left wing opposition to the ACWA administration in this period. A Tailors’ Committee of the Amalgamated was organized early in 1921, but it was supported only by a Communist splinter group known as the United Toilers Party.”

* When Lenin died, Sidney Hillman was in the Soviet Union on behalf of the corporation, and he wired his wife, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman: “The Russian-American Industrial Corp. is deeply grieved over the death of the greatest workers’ statesman of all times” (copy of telegram in ACWA Correspondence Files).

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PROGRESSIVE REPUTATION OF AMAGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS For several years, the left wing in the Amalgamated refrained from criticizing the union leadership. For one thing, the union was viewed in left-wing circles as not only one of the strongest in the country but also perhaps the most progressive. Writing in the Liberator, the organ of the newly formed Communist Party, Michael Gold, soon to become a leading Communist writer, declared ecstatically: “I went to the fourth biennial convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers held in Boston at the end of May, 1920 and I loved every moment of it.... It was a soviet of the sweatshops—of practical and serious delegates discussing the problems of an industry nearly their own.”8 The last reference was to the widespread view at the time that the Amalgamated, dominated by socialist influence, offered a vision of true industrial democracy in which workers would divide the profits of capital and exercise control over the work process as well.? The TUEL did organize branches in the Amalgamated, but they were in general support (albeit at times critical) of the administration.!° During this period, the chief opposition to the Amalgamated leadership came from women members who objected to the small number of women in the leadership of a union whose membership was 60 to 70 percent female. In Chicago’s Local 39, a group of women led by Sarah Rozner ran for delegate to the 1920 Amalgamated convention on this very issue, but they were all defeated. The women were infuriated. As Rozner recalled: “Up to that time I was mainly class-conscious, but when I saw that they [the leaders] were so ruthless, so indifferent to the biggest part of the organization, the women, I thought, how can we stand by and ignore it?” As a result, Local 275, the women’s local in Chicago, was formed. Through their own local, the women were able to occupy a place of leadership, for within the structure of the ACWA, every local had a representative on the Joint Board and every local nominated a business agent. Not only did the Amalgamated leadership grant Local 275 its charter, but by the middle of the decade, there were women’s locals in several cities. In October 1924, moreover, a Women’s Bureau was launched within the ACWA, with Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca in charge.1! Unfortunately, the Women’s Bureau was short-lived, and the Amalgamated leadership reversed its attitude with respect to meeting the special needs of women members. At about the same time, the relationship between the left wing and the Amalgamated leadership also underwent a change. While. the TUEL supported the Hillman administration, not without critical evaluation of some of its policies, the right-wing Socialists were

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launching an attack on the administration. The Jewish Socialists gathered around the Forward had long been unhappy with the independence of the Amalgamated, not to mention the union’s contribution of $3,000 towards

the founding of the Freiheit, as a rival to the Forward.2

But as Steve Fraser points out: “It was Bolshevism... which transformed a polite, if edgy relationship into open antagonism... By 1922 the Forward group had assumed a posture of militant anti-Communism and found Hillman’s attitude [of political friendship with the Soviet Union] detestable.” As Fraser puts it: “From 1920 through mid-1924 the SP was against the Amalgamated leadership because it considered it too independent, too heterodox, and above all, too insensitive to the dangers of Bolshevism.”!3 The right wing Socialists launched a campaign in the Forward in the spring of 1923. In June they called upon the pressers of Local 3 to stop paying dues and, in July, they led a struggle against the Amalgamation of the Tailors, Locals 2 and 5. The Secretary of Local 2 was beaten up by the right-wingers in a drive to terrorize the Local and disrupt its meetings. At the same time, the left wing actively fought in defense of the Amalgamated leadership.4@ The alliance between the ACWA administration and the left-wing TUELers was largely based on joint support of the Soviet Union, industrial unionism, amalgamation, and the formation of an independent labor party. But in the area of industrial relations they had serious differences, and a strike in the summer of 1924 brought these out, at the same time that the Amalgamated and the Workers’ Party split over political action. Hillman and his supporters believed that the only way the union could secure itself in the chaotic clothing industry was to promote order and organization in the industry, and to encourage the development of larger manufacturers. They felt that the union had to take the lead in this because the employers were too weak and fragmented to do so themselves. As part of the strategy of the 1924 strike, which ended victoriously for the Amalgamated, the union refused to deal with individual employers and forced them to form an employers’ association. They did this because they had found that such agreements were easier to enforce. The left wing vehemently disagreed with this policy, Its position was that the weaker the employers were relative to the union, the more the workers could win from them in wages, hours, and working conditions. For the union to foster an employers’ association was seen as “class treason,” and any form of cooperation with employers was “class collaboration.”15 Nevertheless the alliance was still strong when the Amalgamated held its sixth biennial convention in May 1924. Robert Minor, a leading Workers’ Party spokesperson and an editor of the Daily Worker, addressed the convention as follows:

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When anyone receives an invitation from your Union to be a guest at one of its

Biennial Conventions, one cannot but feel a tremendous thrill of joy and pride. There is something about the spirit of the Amalgamated Union which is associated in the minds of workers throughout the world as connected with the great ultimate destiny of the labor movement. .. There are many things the Amalgamated does that are associated irrevocably with its name, showing its broad spirit and militant way in which it acts. Recall to mind the forty-four hour week. Recall to mind the fact that the forty-four hour week is a beginning, not an ending—-there is better coming. Some of us are very much touched by the singular act that the Amalgamated Union manages to have a 100% celebration of that great International Labor Day, May Day, every year. The mere fact that the Amalgamated is able to get away with that, making May Day a holiday... typifies the spirit of the Amalgamated... In another thing we have to pay our homage to the Amalgamated ... The Amalgamated committed itself to independent political action ... the great issue of the present time.... It is hardly necessary to say that the singular activity and initiative of the Amalgamated in stepping to the fore and going to the rescue of the first workers’ Republic on earth, Soviet Russia, is an act which is forever on the roll of honor of the world’s labor movement...

Minor’s speech outlined the basis of the alliance. Later it was used by the union administration, when a split in the Amalgamated appeared, as evidence that the left wing “must be insincere in its subsequent criticism of

them when it had so recently been praising them so highly.”!” Minor had emphasized, too, that among other reasons for which “we have to pay homage to the Amalgamated” was the fact that “the Amalgamated committed itself to independent political action...the great issue of the present time.” But during the summer of 1924, the left wing and the Amalgamated leadership split on this very issue. On the eve of the Conference on Progressive Political Action, held in Cleveland on July 4, 1924, the TUEL members of the Amalgamated publicly asked the union leaders if they planned to be “silent spectators” at the proceedings or to speak out in behalf of “a real party of the exploited farmers and workers.”!8 The answer came quickly. The conference refused to seat the Workers’ Party delegation, and the Amalgamated’s delegation, which had already been seated, did not protest. The left wing denounced this “great betrayal” and supported William Z. Foster, the Workers’ Party candidate for President, while the Amalgamated campaigned for Robert M. LaFollette, the presidential candidate of the Progressive Farmer-Labor Party, a campaign that Hillman helped to

arrange.!9 Once the LaFollette decision was finalized, the TUEL emerged as the leader of the opposition to the Hillman administration, while the SP right abruptly made peace with the union leaders, “sensing the chance for a major assault on the CP.” After 1924, as we shall see in our next volume,

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the Hillman administration conducted a bitter war against the left, “calling in their erstwhile opponents from the SP for assistance.”2° The minutes of the National Committee of the TUEL contains the following entry for August 27, 1924: Amalgamated Clothing Workers Foster presented the report on the ACWA to be forwarded to the RILU. He criticized it as having originally contained no mention whatever of the TUEL. He stated that he had corrected it to include such mention. Moved that the report be approved and sent to Lozovsky with the recommendation that Hillman be extended no special favors upon the basis that he is cooperating with the left wing. Adopted.”4

BATTLE OF THE MILLINERY WORKERS In 1924, the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ International Union was received back into the AFL after a six-year suspension and was given permission by the federation to include the millinery workers in its mem-

bership.” Although its influence in the International GEB was not strong, the left wing in the United Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery union was important in many locals, and it had a substantial following. After the merger, the left wing raised the demand for the organization of the unorganized women millinery workers. A leaflet signed by “TUEL members of ‘the United Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union” pointed out the need for the campaign: There are 1,400 people in Chicago engaged in the millinery industry. Of that number the overwhelming majority 1s composed of women. The women are unorganized while the men have a union. The man milliner’s working conditions are protected by his union agreement. His wages are $40 a week and thereabouts and he is paid time-and-a-half for overtime. This is very important as during the rush season he often works twelve hours a day and seven days a week and there is a large semi-idle season. The work is mostly piece work. For not being organized, the women milliner pays in the following way. Her wages are $25 a week and thereabouts. There is no limit to her working hours a week and no extra pay for overtime. During the rush season the woman milliner toils from eight in the morning till eight at night. Sunday is included in the week’s work with only one dollar extra. The boss hires and fires women milliners whenever and whomever he pleases. He fixes the prices for the workers to bring him the largest profits without interference from the girls. He is not responsible to anyone. He knows that the only thing a dissatisfied girl can do is to leave the factory. She has no union to protect her. Now that our union has merged with the hatters, it is time to begin to provide the woman milliner with a union to protect her.

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The International did nothing in response to this appeal, but locals with large left-wing memberships did launch organizing drives to unionize women millinery workers. Results in Chicago, Boston, and a few other cities were significant, but the outstanding success was in New York, where Millinery Hand Workers’ Union Local 43, composed entirely of women millinery workers, was organized. The members elected aleft-wing leadership, with Gladys Schechter, an 18-year-old worker, as president. Schechter, a member of the TUEL, earned the reputation as “the ‘Joan of Arc’ of the Millinery Workers’ Union.’”24 Established with 400 members in November 1924, Local 43 had grown tenfold by November 1926. It was made up mostly of young women under twenty-five years of age. It had become the second largest local in the International and it claimed “the largest local of women workers in the United States.”* With four young women as business agents and organizers, the union had established control in many shops, where working hours had been reduced from 50 to 44, wages increased, and general working conditions improved. The local prided itself on the fact that it had “established an educational institution consisting of lectures, courses, and shop educational conferences dealing with the specific problems of women work-

ers in the industry and the problems of the working class generally.” But all this had been accomplished under left-wing leadership by members of the TUEL. The right-wing International leadership was anything but pleased by this development, and it did not relish the organization of women millinery workers outside of New York under left-wing leadership. International President Max Zaritsky and Samuel Hershkowitz, the rightwing manager of the New York capmakers’ local, determined to follow the pattern set by the right wing in the other needle trades unions by eliminating the left wing. Controlling the General Executive Board through paper locals outside New York, created precisely for the purpose of giving such control to the right wing, they began their campaign at the 1927 International convention.?6 The GEB report to that convention denounced the TUEL members in the organization and declared that although “we have practiced tolerance toward them and even employed them as organizers ... we would recommend that the convention should express its condemnation in the strongest possible terms of those elements in our ranks who interfere with and obstruct the constructive work that the general organization is engaged * On February 16, 1929, Labor referred to Local 105 of the National Federation of Federal Employees, with over 1,500 members in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington D.C., as “the largest single organization of women workers in the United States and the largest local affiliated with the National Federation of Federal Employees.” It had been first organized.in 1909 and chartered by the AFL as Federal Labor Union No. 12,775. It affiliated with the National Federation of Federal Employees in 1918.

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in.” The left-wing delegates fought back, led by the delegation representing the Millinery Hand Workers’ Union, Local 43. Gladys Schechter declared: We contend that the developments in our union during the past two years sincé our last convention are in complete contradiction to the analysis and conclusion drawn by the General Executive Board’s official report with reference to the activities of the left wing in our union. Not only have these elements not been a hindrance to the work in our organization, but on the contrary, they are the very ones who are responsible for and are to be credited with the gains made by our union during the past two years. The best example of this is Local 43, which, under a progressive administration, has carried through a successful organization campaign, increasing the membership from 400 to 4,000. Similar results have occurred in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. In all these locals, it was the left wing that constituted the backbone of the organization campaigns and made possible the achievements in which we all take pride. We believe the recommendations of the General Executive Board to express condemnation of the left wing in our organization is in complete contradiction to the policy of tolerance and not conducive towards the preservation of unity in our ranks.

Delegate Schechter then concluded: I am a member of the Trade Union Educational League. You claim the TUEL brings in dissension. As long as there are differences of opinion, there will be dissension. I would not belong to that organization one-half hour if I were under the impression that it is there to disrupt our union.27

Having led the defense of the left wing, Local 43 became the first target of the right-wing attack. Following the convention, the GEB established Millinery Local 24 in New York under Socialist leadership, then ordered Local 43 to dissolve and its members to join the newly created Local 24. The justification? That Local 43 was created and was functioning as a “dual union.” When Local 43 rejected the charge as unfounded and refused to dissolve, it was subjected to a veritable reign of terror, climaxed by gangster attacks on Local 43 women strikers outside the shops they were picketing. In one instance Frieda Fraiclass, a Local 43 organizer, was attacked and severely beaten in her own office. In a plea for public support, Local 43 stated: Hundreds of women milliners, loyal to the union which they had built, were thrown off their jobs by the bosses at the demand of the International officials. Many of our members were brutally assaulted by the gangsters hired by the right-wing officials. Many members were clubbed by the police and imprisoned upon the instigation of the right wing. Moreover, when our local carries on strikes for the enforcement and protection of the workers’ economic conditions, the right-wing officials provide scabs for these firms and grant concessions at the expense of the workers.

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The attack on Local 43 was only the beginning. The charters of the locals of women milliners under left-wing leadership in Boston, Chicago and other cities were revoked. Demoralization swept through the ranks of the union’s membership. Nevertheless, the right-wing offensive continued, and by 1928, the situation was summed up as follows: Zaritsky is determined to smash all the militant locals which stand for the maintenance of union conditions. He is trying to eliminate from the union all progressive and militant workers who distinguish themselves in organizing thousands of unorganized workers. Instead of combatting the open-shop danger, instead of utilizing the unified strength of the union for organizing the thousands of unorganized workers, instead of protecting the interests of the workers, Zaritsky is pursuing a policy of splitting and smashing locals, thus helping the employers to defeat the workers and destroy the union.29

The process was completed at the 1929 international convention. Leftwing leaders, including those of Local 43, were expelled, and the constitution was amended to ban membership in a dual organization and to authorize the suspension of any local that refused to obey the decisions of the GEB.®? In opposing this action, delegate Irving Smoliak of St. Paul declared: “Despite the policy of terrorism and intimidation practiced by the official leadership, we will continue to fight within the International for improving the conditions of the workers. But if we are expelled, we will not remain unorganized, but will join the industrial union that represents the interests

of all the needle workers.”2! The “industrial union” was the Needle Trades Workers’ Industrial Union, whose formation as an independent left-wing union we will examine in the next volume.

CHAPTER 17

U.S. LABOR AND THE SOVIET UNION, 1922-1928: THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION On June 2, 1922, Advance reported: The Fifth Biennial Convention held last month at Chicago issued a mandate to the officers of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to form a corporation with a capitalization of $1,000,000 to assist in the economic reconstruction of Soviet Russia. The first steps have already been taken in carrying out this mandate. The officers have filed papers with the State of Delaware for the incorporation of the Russian-American Industrial Association. As soon as the charter is received the

sale of shares will begin.

.

The Amalgamated has only taken the initiative. An appeal will be issued to all American labor to cooperate. The price per share will be fixed at $10 so as to make the shares accessible to all workers. This is the first opportunity for American labor to help Russia build up her economic life. The capitalization will be increased if conditions should warrant it. With capital and facilities permitting, the activities of the corporation may be extended to industries other than clothing... President Sidney Hillman started the ball (rolling) by bringing back with him from Russia last fall an agreement signed by Lenin for the Soviet government for the concession of six clothing factories in Petrograd and * In 1921 there also took place the establishment of a predominantly American industrial

colony of some four hundred workers in Western Siberia in the Soviet Union. The Project

Kuzbas, as it came to be known, was the brainchild of the IWW activists, Herman Calvert and William (Big Bill) Haywood, and a Dutch Communist, Sebald J. Rutgers. With the help of American technology, management skills and administrative streamlining, daily coal out

put per miner in Kemerovo had increased from one tenth of a ton to one ton by 1925. In

March 1924 the chemical plant, which had been under construction since before the War, was at last fired up. While providing by-products for use as dyes, and in medicine, this chemical factory, the first in Siberia, became in time the cornerstone of a burgeoning metal-

lurgical industry. In his book, Project Kuzbas: American Workers in Siberia (1921-1926), J.

P. Morray concludes: “Project Kuzbas still stands as an inspiring example of American-Soviet friendship and cooperation despite many obstacles. As such, it deserves to be more widely known, to be cherished and celebrated in our own perilous times.”(New York,1983, p.185.)

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three in Moscow.* All in active operation provisional upon the raising in the United States of a fund of at least $1,000,000.

At the end of Advance’s announcement was a “subscription blank” which was to be cut out and forwarded to the Russian-American Industrial Corporation. The subscription was for “capital stock of the corporation at

$10 per share.”! The RAIC grew out of a series of consultations between Hillman and the Bolshevik leadership, including several discussions with Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Kamenev, and various trade union officials in the Soviet Union.2* Hillman had three conferences with Lenin, and spent nearly two hours with him at the end of September 1921. The Bolshevik leader emphasized to the American trade union leader the critical need of the New Economic Policy for technical knowhow and skilled workers.** “We are willing,” Lenin told Hillman, “to pay out to foreign capital hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in order to get them to develop Russia-economically for us. We are willing to pay for technical knowledge, technical skill, and for anything that will help us build up Russia.”3 Hillman was so moved by his meetings with Lenin that in an interview published in Jzvestia shortly before his departure for the United States, he indicated that the ACW would not stop with the clothing industry: “Our aims are much higher; we will begin with this industry, and then grant

credits to the other trusts.’”# Some historians argue that the joint agreement between Lenin and Hillman was possible because both agreed on the value of applying the Taylor system of scientific management. The Amalgamated leadership had made its peace with Taylorism, as expounded and practiced by the father of scientific management. To be sure, before the Revolution, Lenin had bitterly denounced Taylorism as the “scientific method of extortion of sweat.” But after a detailed study of Taylor’s experiments in rationalizing work, Lenin shifted and endorsed Taylorism, which had already been adopted by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. “We must organize in Russia,” said Lenin, “the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes.” In other words, Hillman and Lenin saw eye to eye on Taylorism.° Hillman unveiled the plan for the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) in a speech at the 1922 Amalgamated convention. He told the delegates that the union had concluded an agreement with the Supreme * The project appears to have originated with Sidney Hillman. ** The New Economic Policy was designed as an interim arrangement, a “cooperative capitalism” distinct from private commercial institutions, and at the same time a species of state capitalism under Soviet autonomy from direct state regulation, and provided with credits. (E.

a Nee The Bolshevik Revolution,

1917-1923 (London, 1957): 299, 302, 304-10, 335-

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Council of National Economy of the Soviet Union (the Vesenkho) and with the All Russian Clothing Syndicate to jointly operate and modernize nine clothing and textile factories in Moscow and Petrograd. In the speech, which was enthusiastically applauded by the delegates, Hillman accused the Allies of “attempting to starve Russia into submission to the rule of international financiers,” and argued that disaster would result “if the masses were prevented from determining for themselves the course of economic reconstruction.” Cooperation with the Soviets was not a question of being “for Bolshevism or against Bolshevism, but of being for or against slaughter of millions of people.” He was convinced that the Russian proletariat, together with the great material wealth of the Soviet Union, “made it perhaps the most promising place to invest in all of Europe.” Hillman made it clear that the corporation to be formed jointly by the Soviet Union and the ACW would “remain in the hands of organized labor. In other words, while we are willing to have participation of others, we want the control to be within organized labor, so that it will not be used as an instrument for exploitation and exploitation only.” He asked the convention to subscribe a substantial amount of money for the shares as an

investment in the corporation. “We want this convention to authorize the issuance of shares at $10 par and leave it open to every worker or nonworker to take as many as he feels he can in order to help Russia and to help himself.” He continued: I want the Amalgamated experience put into those industries, and the Amalgamated energy and enthusiasm, and the energy and enthusiasm of all the people who are willing to contribute to make it possible for those who today are struggling against odds that are almost inhuman, to help themselves. I do hope that this convention unanimously, without considering that there is any room for division, with the kind of an enthusiasm that will not only give hope over there, but give new hope to ourselves, sends forth the message that our organization has still the courage to undertake other enterprises that will be helpful not only to ourselves, but to others.

Hillman swept on, aiming his remarks at labor leaders like Samuel Gompers, AFL president, who had hated the Bolshevik Revolution from outset and conspired constantly to overthrow the young Soviet Union: I say, my friends, that if you cannot help Russia, please let her alone. You did not go there and help them overthrow the Czars. They had to do it themselves. They had to solve their own problems of reconstruction themselves also. Have we, who are thousands of miles away a right to denounce 120,000,000 people and stop the American people from saving their lives? *

Hillman concluded his speech by outlining the concrete plans of the RAIC. He emphasized that the Soviet assurances respecting preferential

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access to the raw material and government contracts made it a “sound business as well as a fraternal undertaking.” He revealed that he and Lenin “did not discuss the revolution in the United States or even in Russia. We did not discuss any theories ... It is much more important to have a proper policy than a great deal of noise.” He assured members of the union’s General Executive Board who might be worried about the risk in the investment, that Lloyds of London “felt confident enough about the arrangement with us” to insure the undertaking,® After the convention voted general approval of the plan, the RAIC was launched by the ACW in June 1922 with president Sidney Hillman as president, General Secretary-Treasurer Joseph Schlossberg as vice-president, Assistant General SecretaryTreasurer Jacob S. Potofsky as Secretary-Treasurer, and Dr. Leo Wolman of Columbia University as economic adviser. All of the union men were . staunch supporters of the Russian Revolution. While Hillman was in the Soviet Union in 1922, one of his three visits to that country, a ship loaded with food and other materials valued at $200,000 and fully paid for by the members of the Amalgamated, pulled into a Soviet port. Hillman returned from a relief mission in Russia just in time for the 1922 Amalgamated convention where, in addition to unveiling the RAIC, he conveyed the thanks of the Russian people to the union for its contribution of $200,000 to the relief effort.” Hillman cabled the news of the formation of the RAIC to Lenin and received from A. I. Rykoff, who was one of the three men in Moscow who were handling Lenin’s work during his convalescence in the country* the following cable headed: “Lenin’s message to You.” It read: Sidney Hillman Russian-American Industrial Corporation Your communication in reference to RAIC campaign received. Soviet Government satisfaction. Assuring all possible support Soviet Government urges exercise all efforts speedy realization your plans. Rykoff, Acting Chairman, Council Labor and Defence

In July 1922 the radical press, and even some papers of unions affiliated with the AFL, published the following statement by Karl Radek, one of the leading figures in the Soviet Government: The aid which the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America decided to furnish Soviet Russia should serve as an example to the proletarians of other countries. The American clothing workers have pointed the way that is most beneficial to Soviet Russia, and which if followed should contribute considerably to the liberation of the Russian workers from the yoke of foreign capital. Such a step ~ would lighten the work of preserving the social conquests of the revolution and * V.I. Lenin was shot in an assassination attempt by anarchist Ross Kaplan in 1921.

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would accelerate the economic development of Soviet Russia which in its turn would be in a better position to aid European proletariat in its struggle of liberation. Hillman, the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, is not a communist, He is an honest American worker who, having arrived in Russia not for the purpose of making revolutions but for the purpose of aiding the Russian workers, made an excellent study of the conditions under which we are living, and then returned to America to organize the relief work. The ACW union is not a communist organization; it is a union of workers suffering under the dictatorship of capitalism. This union is not part of the fellow A. F. of L. headed by Gompers,* but in time of need it furnishes more aid to the other unions than some of the biggest labor organizations.** This is due to the spirit of solidarity that pervades it. That is why after the ACW had heard Hillman’s report they declared: “We helped the famine sufferers by sending them $200,000, but that was only temporary relief; we must aid in a way that will do away with the famine in Russia altogether.” The Russian workers will receive this news with great joy not only because $1,000,000 means material relief but also because the spirit in which the American clothing workers have given this money is the spirit of the Russian workers.

Once the Amalgamated convention had voted general approval, Hillman returned to Soviet Russia in the late summer of 1922 to negotiate specific contractual arrangements. The corporation expected to raise $1,000,000 by issuing stock at ten dollars a share. Arrangements were codified in three contracts: a general agreement with the Council of Labor and Defence authorizing the RAIC to do business with other Soviet agencies and underwriting the RAIC’s contracts with these agencies; an agreement with the Vesenkho pledging a minimum annual divided of 8 percent and the return of the principal should either party choose to dissolve the venture after an initial three-year period; a profit-sharing arrangement with the All Russian Syndicate, which included a provision for the re-investment of all earnings over 10 percent. The initial RAIC investment of $200,000 was delivered in

early 1923; the first shipment of machinery, mainly small machine parts, arrived earlier, in August 1922; and the first partial dividend of 3 percent was declared in mid-1923.1° The agreements established a Control Board comprised of representatives of the RAIC and the Soviet government with voting power proportional to the size of each party’s investment in the enterprise. This meant the ratio of voting strength was 7:2 in favor of the Russian Clothing Syndicate. But because the Soviets were above all interested in securing * The ACW was kept from joining the AFL until 1933 because it had seceded from the reactionary, corrupt United Garment Workers of America. ** This is a reference to the great amounts the Amalgamated contributed to leading strikes of the period, especially to the Great Steel Strike of 1919 led by William Z. Foster.

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the technical and administrative experience of the Americans, actual management was quickly turned over, in large measure, to personnel of the ACW. In fact, the ACW even supplied skilled workers and industrial engineers to plants functioning outside the Syndicate.! The RAIC agreement established fifteen branches around the country which channeled capital equipment, managerial expertise, and skilled labor from the RAIC to various clothing and textile plants. Although the original negotiations covered plants in Moscow and Petrograd only, the final arrangements included factories in Kazan, Nizni, and smaller industrial centers, and gave the corporation the right to import raw materials. The latter concession was opposed by the Soviet Foreign Trade Bureau, which zealously policed the intrusion of foreign capital across the border of international trade. Lenin intervened, however, and the exceptional status of the RAIC was allowed.!2 RAIC plants were valued at between $2.5 and $5 million and were equipped to manufacture suits, coats, shirts, underwear, caps, gloves, overcoats, as well as certain textile products. Hillman was optimistic about the RAIC’s commercial prospects, especially given the fact that it would not have to contend with the problem of seasonality that chronically disrupted the American industry. He anticipated an annual turnover of $40 million, and was supported in his judgment by financial adviser Leo Wolman and legal advisers Max B. Lowenthal and Maxwell Brandwen, all of whom had come to work for the ACW on the recommendation of Felix Frankfurter.18 This period of Soviet development was also featured by the return of U.S. emigres who reported organized “American Departments” which used the “last word in efficiency methods” in order to create a “genuinely American attitude to work.” Thus, for example, a group of 36 American tailors joined the Moscow Tailoring Combine, originally established during the Revolution by a returned Baltimore garment worker, Gorgardiov. Pravda noted that they “have raised its work to such a level of efficiency that the combine has become a model establishment .... there are now six cutters to 150 machines, whereas formerly there were fifty cutters when hand machines were used.”“After the RAIC was established, the Amalgamated supplied this experimental factory, which included its own cooperative store, with an experienced manager from a unionized plant in Rochester. Another group of 120 U.S. deportees, armed with 200 sewing machines, took over an old clothing factory and established the Third International Clothing Works. In general, hundreds of clothing workers from America who came home to Russia after the Revolution brought with them “special machines for special types of work, and some of the latest electrical equipment for cutting, pressing and other processes.”!5

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In addition, skilled cutters from the most advanced factories in Rochester, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were sent to Russia to provide technical advice and training. They reported to scientific management experts that in every essential respect the revitalized Soviet clothing factories resembled modern unionized plants in the United States. The machinery was up-to-date, and workers’ representatives participated in the fixing of

rates,16 Garment manufacturer Abraham Cohen also visited the Russian clothing syndicate and observed that most of the critical skilled positions were

manned by Americans from companies like Hart Schaffner and Marx, Sonneborn & Co., and Snellenburg & Co., which had pioneered, in collaboration with the ACW, the introduction of scientific management reforms in the men’s clothing industry. Cohen noted that piece work and the 8-hour day were the rule in all RAIC factories.!” Writing in Advance in February 1922, William Z. Foster, who was then in Moscow, described “a general clothing shop, making men’s and women’s and children’s garments. Occupying five floors of a big, modern factory building, it employs about 700 workers. The place is managed by Brother Bogaratchoff, formerly of the Baltimore Baster’s Local of the ACW. In the face of great difficulties, he is making it into a model shop, which shall serve as a basis for the reorganization of the Russian Clothing Industry. In this he is assisted by a number of garment workers who had formerly been in the United States. These showered us with greetings.”!8 Interviewing Igor Petrovsky, representative of the RAIC in Moscow and formerly active in the ACW, Jessica Smith wrote from the Soviet Union on January 9, 1924: Petrovsky spoke with enthusiasm of the progress of the clothing factories and the soundness of the All-American Clothing Syndicate as a business proposition. He also told me: “The work of the Clothing Syndicate has already been proved a success by the payment of the first dividend to the American investors. For the second period of operations we will be able to pay even larger dividends than we originally guaranteed. I therefore advise American workers to do everything possible to assist in the distribution of the shares. I will vouch that it is a good investment; of course, the more capital the American workers put up the farther and the faster we will be able to go in the expansion of the industry so greatly needed to clothe the Russian people.!9

At the end of 1923, a dividend of 3% was paid to all the stockholders of the Russian-American Industrial Corporation who had paid in full their shares. This covered the first half year of the existence of the RAIC. A

second dividend of 5% was declared in January 1925.29 Commenting on the payment of the first dividend, the Communist Party weekly, The Worker, remarked editorially:

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It is safe to state that few of those 5,500 believers in Soviet Russia expected, or cared for the 3% dividend. They looked on their purchase of stock as a contribution to the strengthening and extending of Workers’ Rule. We are sure that these working class investors will use their dividends as part of new purchases of shares in the RAIC, so that the first million dollars worth of stock will soon be disposed of thus materially extending the laudable efforts of the ACW Union in aid of their Russian comrades in the needle trades. One way to help Soviet Russia greet its 7th year is to support the “RAIC” of

the ACW.

On November 22, 1922, the New York Tribune reported that William Thompson, one-time law partner of Clarence Darrow and President of the American Cotton Oil Company, had resigned as financial adviser of the RAIC. In the story accompanying the announcement, the Tribune declared that Thompson was of the opinion that the work of the RAIC was “more likely to be a charitable than a profitmaking one,” and that he did not “believe that the Soviet government would keep its pledge.” The commercial press was jubilant over the report of Thompson’s resignation. But the New York Call, a socialist daily, published statements from various labor leaders representing unions who had purchased stock in the RAIC, and who expressed confidence in the entire transaction. Officers of the Joint Board of the Dress, Waist and Embroidery Workers Union, which had voted to purchase $1,000 worth of shares, declared that “regardless of how capitalists might think of the investment, it was 100% sound from the point of view of the working class.”22 Reached by the Daily News Record in London on his return trip from the Soviet Union, Hillman disputed Thompson’s reported statement, noting: “The enterprise has the personal interest and attention of Lenin and the improvement in working conditions indicates the test to America that the plan can be worked out and will be successful.” Since his first trip to Moscow, he added, the efficiency of the workers had noticeably increased. “I cannot,” he conceded, “say the same for the managerial end. There

changes are required. The overhead of the factories is too heavy.”23

While in Berlin, Thompson was reached by the RAIC by cable and in answer to an inquiry replied regarding the correctness of the alleged interview in the Tribune that it was “too florid and contained some inaccuracies.”*4 Later Thompson senta friendly greeting to the RAIC mass meet: ing in Carnegie Hall making clear his opposition was strictly a financial and not a political position. “I learned with regret,” his message read, “that certain statements of mine have been so misrepresented by a hostile press as.to convey the impression of my bitter opposition to the work of reconstruction in Russia undertaken by the Russian-American Industrial Corporation, and I am anxious to let you know that this is not the case, and I am

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using the occasion of your mass meeting and reception to Mr. Hillman (on his return from the Soviet Union) to tell you that I still have the same friendly and sympathetic interest in the venture and all the confidence in your constructive purposes.”25 Hillman then informed the audience that Thompson had advised trying a safer venture in the export trade in aiding the Soviet Union, but that he and others in the RAIC had disagreed. As for the alleged statement by Thompson quoted by the Tribune that he did not believe the Soviet government “would keep its pledge,” a statement which Thompson denied, Hillman commented: As for the trustworthiness of Russia—Russia is absolutely safe, Russia is honest and has always been honest. She has made no promise which she has not kept. She makes none which she doesn’t keep. To those who do not trust Russia, I have nothing to say. I address myself entirely to those who do trust Russia. The Russia you trust is not the same as last year. It is a Russia whose social and economic security have been noticeably improved....26

As for the future, Hillman declared: “the next few years will tell the story of labor in Russia. If they know how to make revolutions, but not how to manufacture, they are a failure.... It is not a question of communist or non-communist. It is a question of whether labor can run industry or whether labor must have a master with a whip and be condemned to wage slavery forever.”2? Advance commented sharply on the Thompson affair, criticizing the former financial adviser to the RAIC for having “allowed his resignation to be cabled from Berlin to the anti-Russian and anti-Labor press instead of addressing it to the office of the Russian-American Industrial Corporation at New York after his return, or before, if haste was essential. Thompson knows conditions in this country and should have realized what use would be made of his statement by the enemies of Russia and of the labor movement.” Advance then observed: When we organized the Russian-American Industrial Corporation it was precisely because of Russia’s economic helplessness. We undertook to contribute our mite to Russia’s industrial reconstruction because her millions of men and women need our help. True, a million dollars cannot go far. But at least, it makes a beginning—a real beginning. With single threads a shirt is produced, says the Russian proverb. Our appeal for American labor’s support rests upon Russia’s economic sufferings and her dependence upon outside help. And we have implicit faith that the guarantee of her government is, to say the least, as good as that of any capitalist one. Hardly a shareholder in the corporation has invested his money primarily to earn a dividend. All of them did so first of all in order to help Russia. Many made it known that they wanted no profits from Russia.... Russia is looking to

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the workers of the world. They are her natural friends. She has no others. We must help Russia. She is waiting for us. We must not fail her.

On November 24, 1922, two days after the New York Tribune published the distorted interview with Thompson, Congressman Johnson of Washington, chairman of the House Immigration Committee, attacked the ACW on the floor of the House of Representatives, as being responsible for the “high cost of clothing in the United States.” The union, he charged, “recently received from the Soviet Government of Russia a concession to manufacture clothing in Moscow, an enterprise for which they sold $5,000,000 worth of stock among their own members. Its weekly paper, Advance, is one of the reddest permitted to circulate in America.” How the Russian-American Trading Corporation through the sale of stock (the five million dollar figure was picked out of the air) caused the “high cost of clothing,” Congressman Johnson did not bother to explain nor did he attempt to prove his next statement that “native Americans” had been “driven out of the tailoring business by aliens,” because the ACW and the Soviet Union had made it possible for “thousands of Russians without any experience in tailoring to come to this country, join the union without paying dues and be given jobs enabling them to earn $40 to $60 for a 40

hour week from the start.”29 Advance dismissed Johnson’s statement as “nonsense,” and demonstrated that it was the retailers who were responsible for the fact that Americans had “to pay $50 for an overcoat.”°° Although the Nation and the New Republic joined Advance in characterizing Johnson’s charge as “nonsense,” the enemies of the RAIC endorsed it and gave it wide publicity! These did not include only conservative industrialists and bankers. Samuel Gompers joined in denouncing the RAIC and charged the Amalgamated with conspiring with the Soviet government to deprive native American workers of employment. Gompers’ wrath at the venture was sparked by his hatred of the Soviet Union, his paranoid anxiety about the Bolsheviks taking over the American labor movement, and his anger at the determination of the Amalgamated to continue as an independent union, and not return to the United Garment Workers. In the eyes of Gompers and the other leaders of the AFL, the

Amalgamated was an “outlaw union.”?! Joining Gompers in his opposition to the RAIC were those union elements associated with the Jewish Forward, and those circles of right-wing Jewish socialists who had, by this time, become unshakably anti-Soviet. They voiced their opposition to the RAIC and even called for a Congressional investigation of the enterprise.°2 ‘ They were answered by the Workmen’s Circle, a Socialist mutual aid organization with a membership reaching 100,000 and branch organiza-

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tions in different parts of the United States. Its membership was made up of progressive Jewish workers. Eighty-six branches of the Workmen’s Circle met at a conference in New York in the spring of 1923 for the sole purpose of promoting the sale of stock in the RAIC. Opponents of the RAIC in Jewish circles made every effort to prevent the conference, but were rebuffed. The conference decided unanimously to inaugurate a campaign for the sale of $100,000 worth of stock among the members of the Workmen’s Circle in New York. A large committee was elected to begin the work immediately, and was also empowered to establish contact with branches of the Order in other cities, and in general, stimulate the work for the RAIC everywhere.°3 The RAIC lasted only a few years; the RAIC experiment was over by the end of 1925. The RAIC eventually employed more than 15,000 workers in 25 plants in 8 Russian industrial centers, and accounted for 20 to 40 percent of the capacity of the Soviet clothing industry created during the

initial phase of the New Economic Policy.34 Several reasons have been advanced for the end of the joint venture between the Soviet Union and the ACW, such as the union’s concern over the intensive attacks by conservatives, and AFL and Socialist leaders on the venture, as well as the break between American Communists and the Amalgamated leadership after 1924. However, Steve Fraser, who has studied the subject carefully, dismisses these factors, and concludes that “the RAIC was decidedly not the victim of an otherwise extraneous political struggle, and on the part of the ACW may have had more to do with the depletion of the union’s treasury by the protracted International Tailoring Strike of 1925.”35 During its brief existence, the RAIC was of great assistance to the Soviet Union by acting as its purchasing agent in the United States. This was of immense help in the matter of buying machinery for the clothing shops of the Soviet Union. In addition, the corporation was the means of opening a medium for transmitting millions of dollars from persons in the United States to their relatives and friends in the Soviet Union, who were badly in need of financial assistance. Through contracts concluded between the RAIC and the Industrial Bank of Moscow, a transmission service for American dollars was established by the Amalgamated Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, and the Amalgamated Bank of New York, the two banks owned by the ACW. These banks were the pioneers in transmitting U.S. dollars to Russia, and by the beginning of 1925, over nine million dollars had been sent through them to various parts of the Soviet Union. The Amalgamated Bank boasted that

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As a result of the money transactions thousands of persons who would almost certainly have starved for their want, were enabled to survive the critical period in Russia, and are now back on their feet and self-supporting.36

As for the clothing industry in the Soviet Union, the Amalgamated declared: The clothing manufactured in the factories established as a result of the money invested in them through the RAIC, has no doubt saved thousands of Russian men and women workers from death through freezing. The accomplishments of the RAIC until now (January 1925) speak for themselves and the members of the Amalgamated have cause for pride that it was this organization that opened the way for this work in behalf of the workers of Soviet Russia.37

CHAPTER 18

BLACK WORKERS Commenting on the 1921 AFL Convention, The Messenger, the Black radical weekly edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, observed: The recent convention of the American Federation of Labor held in Denver, Colorado, was colorless except for a fight for the presidency between Gompers and John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America. The convention opposed trade with Russia; refused to condemn the unspeakable Ku Klux Klan; ratified Gompers’ withdrawal from the Amsterdam Labor International; closed the door in the faces of Negroes and women; re-elected its archaic pilots; then adjourned... The American labor movement still lags.

We have seen the curt manner in which the 1921 AFL convention dismissed the pleas of women delegates for equality. The same treatment was handed out to Black delegates. A key issue for Blacks was the written exclusion of Black members by federation affiliates, and the 1921 convention settled this matter decisively against the interests of Black labor.* The battle began when Jordan W. Chambers, representing the Colored Coach Cleaners’ Union in St. Louis, aiming specifically at the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, introduced a decisive resolution requiring all member bodies to take the word “white” out of their constitutions, and every national or international union having jurisdiction over classes of work in which Blacks were employed to admit * The convention also delivered a setback to the efforts of the Black delegates to present resolutions condemning the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the South and urging the federal and state governments to take steps to crush the organization. The New York Call declared that “it was the duty of the convention not only to consider the resolutions of the Negro delegates, but to enlarge them to automatically exclude from membership any worker who holds membership in the Ku Klux Klan. It was an opportunity to draw the line on this matter, not alone in the interest of the Negro workers, but as a matter of self-protection for all the organized workers. Hutcheson of the carpenters is reported to have claimed the credit for objecting to any consideration of the resolutions. This shameless conduct will certainly have to be a atoned for in the years to come. The membership and its interests have again been sacrificed by the reactionaries” (June 18, 1921).

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workers regardless of creed, color, or nationality. This requirement was to be complied with before the AFL’s next annual convention. Should an affiliate fail to comply, the Executive Council was to revoke its charter. Two other resolutions introduced by Black delegates dealt with the same issue. One, by the union of Negro boilermakers from South Carolina, called for elimination of the term “white helpers” from the regulations defining certain classes of boilermakers’ helpers’ work. The other called for a conference at an early date of the Executive Council, the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and the Colored Freight Handlers to work out a plan for redressing the grievances of the freight handlers, particularly the refusal of the clerks to admit Black workers or to appoint representatives to look after the freight handlers’ interests in their dealings with the railroads. Any arrangement emerging from the conference was to be temporary, because it was taken for granted that the clerks at their next convention would accept the AFL’s 1920 recommendation to extend full membership to Blacks.* Only the resolution relating to the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks was approved by the Committee on Organization and later by the convention. On the other two resolutions, the committee would recommend only that the grievances of the Black workers be turned over to the Executive Council, which was to call meetings of the railway carmen and the boilermakers with the complaining Black workers within three months after the

convention.? The Black delegates refused to be bought off by this maneuver. Delegate Chambers pointed out that the carmen had done nothing in the year since the AFL convention had told them to drop the term “white” from their bylaws. To call for another conference was an insult to the Black members, and Chambers therefore moved that the committee’s recommendation be rejected and his original resolution adopted. When Gompers declared Chambers’s motion out of order, the delegate from the Colored Coach Cleaners appealed to the convention. For the first time in many years Gompers was overruled; the convention voted to recommit both resolutions, which the Committee on Organization had refused to endorse, to the Committee on Laws. The AFL bureaucracy rallied quickly from this defeat, and the Black delegates received no better treatment from the Committee on Laws. Both proposals were again rejected with the observation that their adoption would commit the AFL to interference with the autonomy of its national affiliates. The Committee on Laws, too, suggested conferences between the Executive Council and the interested parties. * See Philip S. Foner History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: chapter 11.

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Chambers still would not give up. To circumvent the objection that his resolution violated the principle of trade union autonomy within the AFL, he moved that action against the national affiliates that persisted in barring Blacks be taken by the annual conventions rather than by the Executive Council. Gompers promptly sustained a motion that Chambers was out of order on the ground that he was merely resubmitting the motion that the Committee on Laws had turned down. A delegate from the Stereotypers International, a member of the TUEL, rose in Chambers’ defense and bitterly charged the delegates with denying Blacks the right to organize. “How can we hope for them to realize freedom in industry,” he asked, “unless the American Federation of Labor gives them the same rights we enjoy?” He continued: I have discussed this with various individual delegates and they all agree with the principle, but they are sidestepping the issue, and I say to those in organized labor .. the rights of the Negro have got to be considered, whether you like it or not. We are having the rights of international unions raised against this American principle the same as we have States rights against the rights of all the people of the country. The fight we make for industrial democracy, is the fight we make for political democracy, and we can no longer afford to deny equal rights [to] Negroes.4

A delegate from the laundry workers asked Gompers whether, if the convention decided to declare that AFL affiliates must eliminate racial discrimination, it actually had the power to enforce its decision. Gompers replied that the convention could not enforce such a ruling if the affiliated bodies refused to abide by it. Daniel Tobin, Treasurer of the AFL and Chairman of the Committee on Laws, supported Gompers by repeating the now familiar argument that the federation had no power to dictate to any international union the class of men they shall or shall not take in. That right, he declared, belonged to the unions themselves.5 A move was made to suspend debate on the entire matter, and the delegates voted to accept the report of the Committee on Laws. The Black delegates were left with the oft repeated words of President Gompers that the AFL had always declared it “the duty of all workers to organize regardless of sex, nationality, race, religion or political affiliation,” and with the slim hope that the conferences to be held between Black unionists and the railway carmen, the railway clerks, and the boilermakers would result in equal membership for Black workers. Only one of the three projected conferences was ever held, and it accomplished nothing to advance the interests of Black unionists. The 1922 convention of the railway carmen provided for the admission of Blacks in separate lodges, which were placed under the jurisdiction of the nearest white locals. Since the union would offer Black workers nothing beyond auxiliary status, it saw no reason for a conference with representatives of

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the Colored Coach Cleaners. The AFL Executive Council agreed, revoked the charters of the federal locals of the coach cleaners, turned them over to the carmen, and washed its hands of the matter. The boilermakers did not even bother to give Black workers auxiliary status. They retained their constitutional bar against them and forgot about holding a conference with leaders of the Colored Boilermakers’ Helpers’ Union. The AFL Executive

Council found this quite satisfactory.6 Representatives of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks and the Colored Freight Handlers did get together in the summer of 1921, and as a result the freight handlers obtained the right to form boards of adjustment on each rail line, which were to act in cooperation with representatives selected by the clerk’s union to protect Black workers in negotiations with railway management. The introduction at the 1922 railway clerks’ convention of a resolution calling for elimination of the “whites only” clause in the constitution provoked such an uproar that it was immediately declared out of order. This, too, proved satisfactory to the AFL, and no action was taken against the clerks for failing to live up to the federation’s request to drop its written exclusion of Black members. The matter was not even submitted by the Executive Council to the next annual convention which, technically at least, had the power to expel any affiliate that violated its law by a vote

of two-thirds of the delegates assembled. The provision was being used to expel unions accused of being “Communist dominated,” but there was no likelihood that two-thirds of the delegates to an AFL convention would vote for expulsion of an affiliate to enforce the principle of equal membership for Blacks.” Thus, by the time Samuel Gompers’s lengthy tenure as president of the AFL came to an end with his death in December 1924, the only significant action for Black labor taken by the organization he had headed—the recommendations at the 1920 and 1921 conventions to the railroad clerks, the railway carmen and the boilermakers—had produced absolutely no results. During this quarter-century, moreover, not only had Black workers been unable to register a significant increase in AFL membership, but the number of federation affiliates denying admittance to Black workers by constitutional provision or ritual had climbed from four to eleven.8 “Jim-Crow unionism” had also increased, especially in the several Black local and federal trade unions in the AFL under the aegis of the Executive Council. In 1911 only eleven Black unions held direct charters from the federation, but by 1919 this number had jumped to 161. Most of the new separate unions were made up of railway workers, and their organization was due not so much to the limited interest shown by the AFL in recruiting Black members as to the government policy of dealing with employees only

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through organizations during the period of federal control of railroads in

World War 1.9

By the end of 1924, the number of Black locals had declined to fifty-one. The rapid decline was not explained by the international unions’ absorption of the Black locals. The freight handlers, who comprised the majority of the Black locals, had been denied entrance into the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks by a constitutional ban, and the boilermakers and machinists, who had jurisdiction over a fair number of segregated locals, continued to keep them out of the unions of their crafts in the same way. Other unions, such as the railway carmen and the blacksmiths, took in the Black locals but gave them only second-class membership, under the supervision of white locals. In short, ten years after the exodus of Black workers from Southern agriculture to Northern industry—a decade that had seen a phenomenal growth in the number of Blacks employed as industrial workers, and at the end of which it was widely acknowledged that “Negro labor is a part of American industry, a spoke in the wheel of American production,” Black labor was no more able to gain large-scale admission to the AFL than before the Great Migration. Whatever slight steps the AFL took in the direction of racial equality in the postwar period was largely prompted by the appeal of the IWW to Black workers and the rise of independent Black unions.!! Unfortunately, it was soon unnecessary for the AFL to pursue even this minimum policy of equalitarianism, for both of these threats to the federation soon disappeared. After a promising start, the IWW campaign to recruit Blacks, especially among waterfront workers, was seriously set back by the severe repression under the federal Espionage Act and state Criminal Syndicalist laws.* Among the victims of the repression was Benjamin Harrison Fletcher, Black leader of the Philadelphia Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union. Under his leadership, the Philadelphia branch had been highly effective in nullifying the employers’ traditional practice of playing Black and white workers against each other. After a series of militant strikes, marked by Black-white unity, the Philadelphia branch won wage increases, shorter hours, and union recognition, becoming one of the most effective locals in the entire IWW.** When Fletcher headed a drive to extend the gains won by the Philadelphia branch along the entire Atlantic Coast, the shipping interests, allied with the government against the IWW, decided he had to

be stopped.!2

* See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 7: 292-315. ** See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 4: 125-27, 245.

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After a farcical federal trial in Chicago where 101 Wobblies were convicted of violating the Espionage Act, many received sentences of up to 20 years in prison and heavy fines. Fletcher was sentenced to 10 years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and fined $30,000. Condemning the trials of the IWW leaders as a deliberate effort to stem the drive to organize the unorganized, especially the Black workers, The Messenger, joined by W.E.B. Du Bois, launched a campaign to bring about Ben Fletcher’s release. “We respect the Industrial Workers of the World,” Du Bois wrote in The Crisis of June 1919, “as one of the social and political

movements in modern times that draws no color line.”!8 At first the response to the campaign was not encouraging. This was the period of the great “Red Scare” and the Palmer Raids, and few Black organizations were willing to speak up for a militant leader convicted of “conspiracy and violating the Espionage Act.” But slowly the campaign for Fletcher mounted, and petitions and letters from Black and white Americans urged President Harding to pardon the Black Wobbly leader and release him from the federal penitentiary. In December 1921, the Department of Justice, in its “Report on All Wartime Offenders Confined in Federal or State Penitentiaries,” advised the Attorney General against recommending executive clemency for Ben Fletcher. The reason was stated quite bluntly: He was a negro [sic] who had great influence with the colored stevedores, dock workers , firemen, and sailors, and materially assisted in building up the Marine Transport Workers Union, which at the time of the indictment had become so strong that it practically controlled the shipping on the Atlantic Coast.14

In 1923 President Harding commuted Ben Fletcher’s sentence and he was released from prison. (In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted him a full pardon.) Fletcher remained in the IWW and continued to speak and write on industrial unionism and the need for labor solidarity. But by this time the IWW was considerably weaker than when Fletcher had entered prison. While the IWW was not destroyed by wartime repression, what was left at the war’s end was further weakened bya split in the ranks over attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the Communist International. One group supported the first Socialist state, and another refused its support because the Soviet Union had not based itself on the principles of syndicalism favored by the IWW. The one IWW union that still had a substantial number of Black members was the Philadelphia local of the Marine Transport Workers Union (Local 8)—2,000 of its 3,500 members were Black. Local 8 was the pride of those who believed that industrial unionism was the solution to racial problems. “Colored and White Workers Solving the Race Problem for

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Philadelphia,” was the headline over an article about Local 8 in The Messenger of July 1921. In an effort to break down “insidious, anti-labor solidarity propaganda,” especially in the reactionary, corrupt AFL’s International Longshoremen’s Union in Philadelphia, Local 8 established a Forum in June 1921. Here a series of lectures were held every Friday night for members and others who wished to attend. The subject of the first lecture was “The Relation of Organized Labor to Race Riots.” The subject was prompted by the riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma when an angry white mob attacked where the Blacks lived, shot at them through the night of May 31, 1921, and then burned much of the Black business and residential section during the night and subsequent day. At least thirty Tulsans lost their lives, and many Blacks were injured in the night of burning, looting, and shooting. Property losses may have topped the $1.5 million mark.5* The speaker at the first Local 8 forum pointed out that “just as labor fights race riots it fights the wars between nations.” “Only labor can stop race riots.” “Just as the bosses of the workers profit from national wars, so the bosses of the workers profit from race wars; it is to the interest of the capitalists to keep the workers divided upon race lines so that they could rob them more easily and successfully.” He stated: If the white and black working class are kept fighting over the bone of race prejudice, the artful, hypocritical yellow capitalist dog will steal up and grab the most of the profit. Race riots serve the interests of the employers of labor, by keeping the workers divided, at daggers points.16

“Brief, pointed and enthusiastic questions and discussions followed the lecture,” reported The Messenger. “Each speaker deplored and condemned the Tulsa riot in Oklahoma. With a sound working-class instinct they laid the cause of the Tulsa massacres at the door of the labor-hating, profiteering, conscienceless Ku Klux Klan, predatory business interests of the

South.”!?

The Messenger’s enthusiasm was tremendous: Here ... was a living example of the ability of white and black people to work, live and conduct their common affairs side by side. There were black and white men and black and white women at this meeting, No rapes, no lynchings, no race riots occurred’ Isn’t it wonderful! Let the southern press together with its northern, eastern and western journalistic kith and kin, bent upon their base, corrupt,

* Some 6,000 Black Tulsans spent the night of June 1 interned in the Convention Hall and at the fairgrounds. Some were released beginning the next day but the imprisonments would continue for others for as long as two weeks. For the next month Blacks carried identification cards, were prohibited from purchasing firearms, and for the next several months, Black Tulsans lived in makeshift residences including tents (Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 [Baton Rouge, La., 1982)).

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wicked and hateful mission of poisoning the wells of public opinion with the virulent spleen of race prejudice, take notel... Here the workers are trying to democratize knowledge, for they, too, are learning that knowledge is power and that if the capitalists control all the knowledge, they will control theworld.)®

Local 8’s forums were later continued by the American Negro Labor Congress, a pro-Communist organization,* which reported in 1927 that the forums were attracting wide audiences of Black and white workers in Philadelphia.19 But by that time the founder of the forums, Local 8, was no longer in existence. It had been engaged in constant battle after the war with the national IWW on a wide variety of issues, and in 1923 the local severed relations with the IWW, charging the General Executive Board with a deliberate plot to dominate it and dictate its activities even against the best interests of the membership. Harassed constantly by the government and further weakened by internal disputes, the IWW could do little to take advantage of the vacuum created by AFL indifference to the organization of Black workers. To be sure, IWW journals in the postwar years agreed that there had never been a more favorable time “to organize colored men and women,”2? but by 1921 even The Messenger, the fervent champion of the IWW in Black circles, conceded that the organization was too weak to hold out hope for the Black workers.?! Even Fletcher realized when he emerged from federal prison that the organization was too weak to fulfill its mission. He therefore called for the formation of a separate Black labor federation. “There are fully 4,000,000 Negro men, women and children, ready to participate in such a Negro Labor Federation,” he predicted.2 Although it would promote the general welfare of the Black workers, the federation’s main purpose would be to compel the AFL and the railroad brotherhoods to reverse their racist policies. Fletcher’s vision of an independent Black labor movement never became a reality. The separate unions that might have served as the foundation for such a movement either disappeared, lost most of their members, or failed to grow. The National Alliance of Postal Employees—extended in 1924 to include all 22,000 Black workers in U.S. Postal Service—never got off the ground because of its inability to win the official federal government recognition accorded to white unions. In 1926 the Alliance claimed only 1,700 members.?3 The Railway Men’s Benevolent Association received a fatal blow when its effort to have the so-called Atlanta Agreement declared null and void failed after the government relinquished control over the nation’s rail * The American Negro Labor Congress will be discussed in the next volume.

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system. This agreement was worked out between the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and federal railway officials during the war with the aim of driving Black workers from positions they had long held on the roads. The four railroad brotherhoods made effective use of the Atlanta Agreement in the postwar years to oust Black railwaymen from jobs acquired during the war. The Railway Men’s Benevolent Association attempted in late 1921 to bring the various groups of Black railway workers into one organization to prevent Blacks from being forced out of the industry. When the effort failed, the association soon disappeared. The number of Black workers in skilled and semiskilled occupations on the nation’s railroads declined especially during the next decade. All Black spokespersons could do was declare that, in their strikes, “the railroad unions richly deserve defeat.”24* The National Brotherhood Workers of America, formed in 1919, collapsed after two years. Its initial strength had been among Black dock workers in the Tidewater area of Virginia, but the International Longshoremen’s Association, with financial support from the national AFL, succeeded in recruiting those workers into its ranks. With the postwar reduction in shipyard workers, the brotherhood lost most of its base. Just before its dissolution in the summer of 1921, the Brotherhood announced its intention to unionize the Black workers in the cotton fields as well as in every branch of industry. “How long are we to wait for justice at the white man’s hands?” it asked, denouncing the AFL for its failure to organize the Black workers. The Brotherhood disappeared shortly thereafter with the question

still unanswered.2° The Messenger and the leaders of the Brotherhood had split about a year before the latter’s demise. Officials of the Brotherhood had charged that The Messenger editors were more interested in winning financial support for their magazine than in building up the new Black labor movement. Randolph and Owen went their own way in 1920 to form first the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF) and then the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes. The FNF was to be an interracial organization, but control was to rest with Blacks who knew the problems of Black workers. The program called for the establishment of committees for weekly educational assemblies, a labor committee to gain entrance for Black workers into industry and unions, a boycott committee * During World War I, the railroad lines and the railroad brotherhoods had worked out unwritten agreements confining Blacks to low-level and menial occupations in railway work. When the federal government assumed control of the nation’s rail network late in December 1917, it simply sanctioned the informal agreements between railroad management and the unions by prohibiting the hiring or advancing of Blacks to positions they had not occupied in the past. Under the so-called Atlanta Agreement the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and the U.S. Railroad Administration agreed upon rules relating to seniority, job classification, and the composition of train crews that resulted in driving many Black workers from positions they had long held on the railroads and relegating them to menial jobs.

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to wage campaigns against racist merchants, and a Tenants’ League Committee to secure decent housing for Blacks. Through boycotts, rent strikes, labor agitation, and general education, the FNF would mobilize Blacks into a powerful direct-action group to win improvements as workers and con~ sumers. Fourteen branches across the country were established, and the plan was to build an international organization, for it was “no more possible for Negroes in America to be indifferent to what takes place in Haiti, Egypt, or Trinidad, than for New York Negroes to be indifferent to the fortunes of Negroes in Florida. The success of Negroes in one place encourages and emboldens Negroes in another.”?6 But apart from the chapter in Philadelphia, none of the branches amounted to much, and they soon disappeared, along with the national organization.2” The National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism among Negroes was no more successful. With Owen as president and Randolph as secretary, it produced an impressive letterhead listing an advisory board of white leaders of the Socialist Party and of the needle trades’ unions; Morris Hillquit of the Socialists, Joseph Schlossberg of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Rose Schneiderman and A. J. Shiplacoff of the ILGWU. With the assistance of the Socialist political and trade union leaders, the association was to act as an educational and organizational force to bring all Black workers into unions based on class lines and ultimately to unite Black and white workers into a mighty class-conscious power capable of effectively challenging capitalist domination of American economic and political life.28 But for all the praise and attention the association received from the Socialist press and in the journals of the needle trades’ unions, for all the honors Randolph and Owen bestowed upon the ILGWU, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Fur Workers, and other unions for their support of The Messenger, nothing was accomplished. It was difficult for Black workers to summon much enthusiasm for an organization endorsed by Socialist leaders when the party was doing very little in the struggle for Black equality in American life, still clinging to the old Socialist concept that their was no special Negro problem in the United States, that Black workers were just the same as white workers, and that when Socialism would be achieved, the problems of Black people would be solved.29 Moreover, the Socialist needle trades’ unions, whose officials were on the association’s advisory board, did little to bring Black workers into their trades or recruit them as members. These facts did not, however, interfere with The Messenger’s rhetoric in favor of the Socialist Party and

the Socialist unions.°?

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In 1923 The Messenger issued a call for the formation of a United Negro Trades. Modeled after the United Hebrew Trades, it was to provide the machinery for bringing Blacks into unions and to further the interests of those already within organized labor. But the United Negro Trades proved no more successful than the previous ventures launched by The Messenger. By then, the Black monthly had alienated many Black workers by its ceaseless attacks upon Marcus Garvey.* The efforts of Randolph and Owen to have the Black nationalist leader deported as an undesirable alien won them the approval of the Socialist political and trade union press, but it antagonized the Black masses, especially in the industrial centers of the North, who viewed Garvey as their champion and joined the Universal Negro Improvement Association by the hundreds of thousands.3! In its controversy with Garvey, The Messenger lost the support of its contributing editor, W. A. Domingo, a militant and articulate Black spokesperson for Socialism, who resigned from the magazine. As it became increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union and Communism, The Messenger lost young black militants like Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and others formerly associated with both it and the African Blood Brotherhood, who moved into the Communist camp.*2 Randolph and Owen continued to denounce “race prejudice within the unions,” but conceded that little could be done about the situation... since “there is no machinery which can be set in motion either to get the Negroes in the unions...or to see that those who are in get justice both from the point of view of getting jobs in their trades and being elected officials in their unions.”°4 In 1924 The Messenger ceased to call itself the sole organ of “scientific radicalism” among Negroes the world over and adopted the subtitle “World’s Greatest Negro Monthly.” About the same time, Randolph abandoned his interest in promoting Socialism and a separate labor movement among Blacks and devoted himself primarily to organizing the Pullman porters. Among his close associates was Frank R. Crosswaith, a Black Socialist and bitter anti-Communist. (Discouraged and depressed by the racist experience his brother had in the Socialist needle trades’ unions, Chandler Owen abandoned the Party, moved to Chicago, and ceased to be

active in promoting the organization of Black workers.)°4 Hoping to win an * Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born in Jamaica and apprenticed to learn the printer’s trade. He came to the U.S. in 1916 and established his race organization in Harlem. The Universal Negro Improvement Association won millions of followers, although the exact number is disputed, on a platform of racial pride, the development of an independent Black nation in Africa, and the control of the economic and political life of Black communities in America by Blacks themselves. Garvey started all-Black businesses such as the Black Star Line, a shipping enterprise funded by Black stockholders. The movement was very much set back when Garvey was jailed in 1925 for mail fraud, a charge his followers maintained was completely false.

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AFL charter for the porters as an independent national union, Randolph kept The Messenger free of any criticism of the federation and its leadership for their indifference to the plight of the Black worker, their rigid adherence to craft unionism, and their neglect of the unskilled and semiskilled of all races and nationalities. When Gompers died late in 1924, The Messenger, which had once been among his severest critics, paid tribute to the late AFL president as a “dynamic and interesting” personality. It conceded that he had always been “diplomatically silent” on Black labor, but emphasized that the number of Black trade unionists had increased under his regime. But it did not furnish evidence for this assertion. In 1925, as we shall see in our next volume, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was established with Randolph as general organizer, and The Messenger became the union’s official organ. Randolph turned the editorship of the once-radical magazine to George S. Schuyler, who pro-

duced its monthly issues until it ceased publication in the spring of 1928.°° The battle against the trade union philosophy and practices of the AFL as they related to Black workers in particular, abandoned by The Messenger, was carried forward in the early 1920’s by the Communist Party and the TUEL. As far as the former was concerned, this required a change in approach to the issue.

COMMUNISTS AND THE “NEGRO QUESTION” When it was organized in 1919, the Communist Party inherited from the Socialist movement the view that there was no need for a special program

on the Negro question.?” It was considered purely and simply an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists. The Black worker, according to Socialist doctrine, was, like the white worker, a worker, and the Socialist Party had no special message for him. As Eugene V. Debs put it: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.” The solution of the “labor question,” leading in the end to socialism, “would bring in its train the solution of the ‘Negro question.” With such a general outlook, the distinctive features of the situation faced by Black people were overlooked, and their special needs and demands were ignored. The prevalence of racism in society as a whole, including the working class and affecting the party itself, was underestimated, if not

entirely ignored.38

~ Gradually, however, the Communist Party developed a more effective and meaningful approach to this question. In part, this was the result of the influence of members of the African Blood Brotherhood who joined the

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Communist movement. The Brotherhood was formed in 1919, shortly after the split in the Socialist Party. Many of its leaders were Socialists who were enthused by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. They welcomed the call of the Communist International for the unity of workers of all races and its stand for the liberation of subject and colonial peoples. Led by Cyril H. Briggs, the African Blood Brotherhood brought a militant program for Black freedom to the Communist movement, and its members were to constitute

the core of Black Communist leadership for some years to come.29 The theoretical insights that opened the way for a new interpretation of the “Negro Question” by the Communist Party came from Lenin. As early as February 1913, in a short article entitled “Russians and Negroes,” Lenin observed that traces of slavery were reflected in the deplorable condition of Blacks in the South of the United States “unworthy of a civilized country.” He drew an analogy between that condition and the situation of the Russian peasantry who were “almost freed” from the bondage of serfdom at about the same time as the emancipation of the American slaves.?9 In other writings, Lenin saw the American Negroes as an “oppressed nation,” a condition arising from the history of oppression within the semi-feudal agrarian system of the South. After November 1917, Lenin urged the American Communists and others in the left-wing movements to pay special attention to the problems and grievances of the American Negroes, to concern themselves with their immediate demands and not to repeat the past errors of the Socialists by ignoring them. This influenced the break with the traditional position of the Socialists and the early Communist

Party on the Negro question.*!

TUEL AND BLACK WORKERS William Z. Foster’s experience in the packinghouse campaign of 1918 and the steel strike of 1919 had convinced him that no effective organization of the mass production industries was possible unless special attention was paid to the Black workers.* Yet he also knew from experience that there was strong opposition to white unions among Black workers, grow* During the steel strike of 1919, Black strikebreakers were recruited from the South in

increasing numbers. After the strike, Foster laid much of the blame for use of Black scabs at the struck mills at the feet of the unions: “many of them sharply draw the color line thus

feeding the flames of race hatred.” The success of unionization, he insisted, required the unions to “open their ranks to Negroes, make an earnest effort to organize them, and then give them a square deal when they join.” However, at the height of the strike, he made a statement which he later very much regretted. “The colored worker,” he asserted, “is not very responsive to trade unionism. He seems to feel that the best way he can solve this problem is to break down the white working man. He acts as a scab at all times.” (Interchurch World Movement, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, New York, 1920, p. 37; Edward P, Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1988, pp. 385-86.)

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ing out of their frequent betrayals and their indifference to the Blacks’ needs. Hence, both as a Communist influenced by the Leninist approach to the special character of the Black question, and as a practical trade union organizer, Foster called upon all TUEL militants to join in a campaign “to open all unions to the Negro workers.” To this end, it was necessary to educate white unionists on the self-defeating effect of racism on organized labor and to impress upon Black workers the need for and the possibility of joining with whites in a common struggle against the employers. The Labor Herald (of the TUEL) helped in the educational work with articles on the problems of the Black workers and the need for unity. The issue of April 1923 carried a story dealing with the Black worker who had migrated from the cotton fields to the steel mills only to find that rent, food and clothing cost more than he was making, He learned, too, that he was the last to be hired and the first to be fired. But saddest of all, ..he learns to distrust the white workers, who will not take him into their unions, yet who call him scab because, as an unorganized worker, he must take whatever job is offered him. For years, various unions, while uttering official platitudes about no discrimination on the basis of nationality, color, creed, or politics, really followed the policy of Negro exclusion.*

The article went on to point out that friction between Black and white workers was “being nourished and developed by the employers for the purpose of dividing the workers and forcing upon thema fratricidal struggle.” Unless the workers confronted the employing class with their ranks united, regardless of race or color, they would never succeed: “All workers, Negro and white, foreign-born and native, skilled and unskilled, must organize industrially and politically, and thus present one front against the

one enemy.”43 Even more pointed was an editorial in the Labor Herald of July 1924, headed “Negroes and the Unions.” It merits extensive quotation, for it was the most fully developed TUEL statement on the subject of Black workers: Trade unions that neglect or discriminate against the Negroes (and there are many such in this country) are following a narrow, short-sighted policy that will ultimately lead them to disaster unless it is changed. Leaving aside, for the moment, all questions of the interests of the Negroes themselves (which are an essential part of the interests of the working class), and * Despite official pronouncements on racial equality by AFL officials and conventions, the Federation did not establish any enforcement machinery to prevent its unions from discriminating. Between 1910 and 1920 the number of AFL affiliates denying admittance to Black workers by constitutional provision or ritual had risen from 8 to 11. By the end of the 1920s, 24 International unions discriminated directly in their constitutions or rituals, while others discriminated informally. Ten of these unions were AFL affiliates. Expectations that the great.northward migration from the southern states would open wide the doors of the

AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods proved illusory. (Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, New York, 1981, pp. 154-55.)

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looking at the matter only from the selfish interests of the unions as now constituted, it is becoming plainer every day that if the labor movement is to be saved from destruction at the hands of the “open shop” campaign... they must break down the prejudices instilled by capitalist institutions, they must accept the Negroes on a basis of equality and they must organize them into complete solidarity with the white workers, native and foreign-born. It is no accident that in the industries dominated by the most militant enemies of labor, the Negroes are being brought in, in constantly increasing numbers. Because the unions are so short-sighted that they neglect the organization and education of our black brothers, they are thereby inflicting deep injury upon themselves. They are forcing the Negroes into the position of strike-breakers. They are delivering a terrible weapon into the hands of the employers. For the preservation of the unions, to defeat the “open shoppers,” in order to build up working-class powerthe Negroes must be brought into the organized labor movement on a mass scale. All discrimination must be abolished. Every worker must be united in the unions without regard to race, creed, or color. It is time to put our high-sounding principles into effect if we would preserve the trade union movement.

Hence the section on the Negro problem in the TUEL program, adopted in 1924, stated: The problem of the politically, and industrially disfranchised Negroes shall occupy the serious attention of the League. The League shall demand that the Negroes be given the same social, political and industrial rights as whites, including the right to work in all trades, equal wages, admission to all trade unions, abolition of

Jim-Crow cars and restaurants.45

The leaders of the TUEL were not content to spout generalities about human brotherhood, which often were nothing but excuses for inactivity on the issue of Negro labor and a convenient mask for the prejudices of the trade unionists who uttered them. Instead, the TUEL leadership called upon the militants to work among the white sector of the trade union movement, saturated with prejudice against the Negro, and win the support of the white unionists for a policy of opening all unions to the Black worker and assuring him an equal opportunity to work on the same terms as the white worker.*® James W. Ford, a Black delegate to the Chicago Federation of Labor, described how the TUEL militants worked in the early 1920s. At one meeting of the federation, he charged the AFL leadership with discrimination and “immoral trade-union conduct” toward Negro workers. As he had anticipated, several white delegates accused him of defending workers who were mainly strikebreakers. To his utter surprise other white delegates came to his defense, although he was the lone Black delegate. “They not only supported fully the charges I had lodged against the bureaucracy but succeeded in forcing it to permit me to continue my remarks.” He later learned that these delegates were left-wingers and Communists, under the

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leadership of William Z. Foster, and that they were leading a fight as members of the TUEL for the rights of Negro workers. Ford immediately joined the League and later the Communist Party and became active in the battle against “race prejudice in the labor movement.”47 The TUEL leaders were not generally successful in combating racism in the unions or in recruiting Blacks. They grievously underestimated the resistance among white unionists to their program on the Negro question and often found them so blinded by race prejudice as “to prefer exploitation to cooperation with the colored man.” The militants failed, too, to appreciate the resistance of the Black worker to the white unions, caused mainly by their experiences with organized labor but deepened by the

influence of the conservative Negro church and by the belief of many Blacks employed in industry that their interests resided with the employing class rather than the white unionists. “The experiences of the Negro seeking work,” commented Opportunity, the organ of the National Urban League, in October, 1924, “has forced him to believe that there is as much sacredness about the principles involved in his right to earn a living as were involved in the principles for which the white trade unionists stood.”48 While thousands of workers rallied to the TUEL and conducted a series of strikes under its leadership, especially, as we have seen, in the textile and needle-trades industries, few Black workers were involved in these activities. Few were touched by the great strikes in the needle trades, “since few of them,” The Crisis noted, “are in the clothing-making industry.” The same was true of the textile industry. All told, few Blacks had been recruited into the unions by the militants.*9 This situation, as well shall see in our next volume, would change.

CHAPTER 19

INDEPENDENT POLITICAL ACTION In the presidential election of 1920, the Farmer-Labor Party nominated Farley P. Christensen of Utah as its standard bearer, but the party made a poor showing. Christensen received no electoral votes and only about 250,000 popular votes—no more than one percent of the presidential vote.* The Harding landslide appeared at first to have completely buried all prospects for a new farmer-labor political movement. However, the economic crisis of 1920-21, which the Harding Republican administration did nothing to alleviate, reawakened interest in independent political action. One sign of this development was the growing cooperation between the Farmer-Labor Party and the Trade Union Educational League.!

CONFERENCE FOR PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL ACTION (CPPA) Another came with the founding in 1922 of the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA). The CPPA was initiated by the railroad workers’ unions, several of whose leaders** issued a call to all workers, farmers and other democratic organizations in the United States, proposing a national convention for progressive political action. The convention was held in Chicago’s Masonic Temple on February 20 and 21, 1922 with 250 delegates in attendance. They came from the Non-Partisan League, various Farmer-Labor parties, the Farmers’ National Council, the Single Tax League, the Committee of Forty-Eight, the Public Ownership League, the * The Farmer-Labor Party is discussed in the previous volume of the History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8: 256-74. ** They were William Johnston, president of the Machinists, Martin F. Ryan of the Railway Car Men, Warren S. Stone of the Locomotive Engineers, E. J. Manion of the Telegraphers, Timothy Healy of the Stationary Firemen, and L. E. Sheppard of the Railway Conductors (Labor, Feb. 4, 1922).

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Socialist Party and the Methodist Federation of Social Services. But the basic element was the trade unions. Delegates were sent by the 16 railroad unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 9 state federations of labor and-various city central labor councils, altogether representing about one-

third of the country’s trade unionists” Proposals to create an independent working-class party were made at the convention, but neither the Socialists nor the Farmer-Labor representatives were able to muster enough support for the idea. In the end, a compromise resolution was adopted allowing each organization to act at its own discretion—that is, either to work for the election of progressive candidates within the old parties or to nominate its own candidates. The convention decided to form a national federation of the organizations represented in Chicago, called the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA). A national committee of 15 was selected to guide its activities; William Johnston was chairman and Frederic C. Howe was secretary. At this early stage, the CPPA represented an important step in the direction of progressive political action, but few of its leaders favored the establishment of a new party. While Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, did speak out for a third party, the other trade union leaders quashed the proposal.* State CPPA’s were organized in some midwestern, northwestern, and western states, and preparations got under way for the CPPA’s first campaign in the elections of 1922. Working with the railroad unions and the AFL, the CPPA set out to elect progressive Republicans and Democrats and strengthen the “Labor Bloc” in Congress. CPPA speakers appealed to workers and farmers, pointing to the decline of agricultural prices and the severe unemployment during the Harding administration, its reactionary role during the 1922 coal miners’ and shop craft railroad unions’ strikes, and the sweeping injunction secured by Attorney General Henry Daugherty. To the CPPA, it was clear that an alliance existed between the

government, the judiciary and “Big Business.”® In the 1922 elections, Robert M. LaFollette was overwhelmingly reelected governor of Wisconsin; E. F. Ladd and Lynn Frazier of the NonPartisan League in North Dakota were sent back to Washington; and in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party sent Magnus Johnson and Henrik Shipstead to Congress. In Nebraska, progressive Republican R. B. Howell defeated old-line Democrat Gilbert Hitchcock for the Senate. Some of the leading reactionary congressmen and senators, including Albert B. Cum-

mins, the archenemy of many progressives, were defeated.® Labor* claimed that the 1922 elections marked American labor’s “most

significant victory ever at the polls.”” While the rail unions had played a * Labor, a daily paper, was sponsored by the Railroad Brotherhoods.

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leading role in this victory of the CPPA, the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and even the American Federation of

Labor had participated and worked closely with the CPPA8

The victories of 1922 strengthened the determination of the trade unions in the CPPA to stay clear of a third party and continue nonpartisan political action. Others within the CPPA, led by the Chicago Farmer-Laborites and Socialists, disagreed. At a meeting of the CPPA leadership in December 1922, they urged prompt action in organizing a CPPA-backed third party. They were overruled, with William Johnston, the Socialist president of the Machinists, leading the battle against the third party.? Still Warren S. Stone, president of the Engineers, while agreeing that the CPPA should continue to work through the old parties, warned that if both of these parties nominated reactionaries in 1924, there would be a third

THE 1922 CPPA CONVENTION While the National Committee of the CPPA felt strongly that a third party was not needed, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Farmer-Labor Party intensified their efforts to bring about the formation of an independent labor party. The idea of a third party was also supported by the Socialists, by the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The conflict within the CPPA reached a climax at its second convention held on December 11 and 12, 1922 in Cleveland. The delegates attending represented organizations with an aggregate membership of no less than 3 million. By the time the convention met, local branches of the CPPA already existed in 32 states. The first conflict at the convention arose over the seating of the delegates from the Workers’ (Communist) Party, which had sent Charles E. Ruthenberg and William Z. Foster as its representatives to help those delegates who favored independent political action. The Credentials Committee seated the delegates representing the Socialist Party but refused to seat Foster and Ruthenberg, as well as the delegates of several militant trade unions. In fact, the committee did not even mention the Workers’ Party delegates, and when Ruthenberg addressed the chair and demanded a report on the Workers’ Party credentials, he was told that no such credentials had been received. When they were found, the chair contended that the Communist program conflicted with the goals of the CPPA and of democracy in general. Ruthenberg protested the decision and denounced it as an attempt to weaken the left forces. He was supported by the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Farmer-Labor party, both of whom demanded the seating of the Workers’ Party delegates.

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The leaders of the Railroad Brotherhoods, supported by Morris Hillquit of the Socialist Party, refused to budge. They denounced the program of the Workers’ Party, calling it “un-American.” Although the Socialists did not agree with the “un-American” designation, they supported the exclusion of the Communist delegates. In the end, the Workers’ Party delegates were not admitted.!2 The platform that was adopted in Cleveland was called the “postcard platform” because of its brevity. It included demands for the repeal of the Esch-Cummins railroad law and the operation of the railroads for the benefit of the people; public control of the coal mines, water power and hydro-electric power in the interests of the people; the direct election of the president and vice-president and the extension of direct primary laws to all states; Congressional legislation to end the Supreme Court’s practice of declaring laws unconstitutional; the raising of prices that farmers received and the reduction of prices that consumers paid for farm products; increased tax rates on high incomes and inheritances, and the payment of a soldier’s bonus by restoring the wartime excess profits tax; legislation providing minimum essential standards for employment of women; equality for women while improving existing political, social and individual standards, and state action to insure maximum benefits of federal maternity and infancy acts.!8 To the Farmer-Laborites, however, the platform was a secondary issue. Their delegates introduced a resolution endorsing independent political action and proposing the immediate formation of a new national party. However, the Railroad Brotherhood leaders refused to go beyond a “nonpartisan political program,” and since they had the majority of the votes, they were able to defeat the third party resolution, 64 to 52. With this, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Farmer-Labor Party delegates, led by John Fitzpatrick, officially announced their withdrawal from the CPPA and moved to form a new third party in 1923. The Socialists voted to remain in the CPPA, but the Communists decided to join the Chicago Federation and the Farmer-Laborites in forming a Farmer-Labor Party. Foster believed that his alliance with Fitzpatrick, which had operated well during the packinghouse and steel organizing efforts, along with Fitzpatrick’s endorsement of the TUEL and its campaign for amalgamation, could now be used to further the cause of independent political action.“ From every point of view, the results of the second CPPA convention were most unfortunate. By rejecting the delegates of the Workers’ Party and opposing the proposal to form an independent labor party, the leaders of the rail-unions and the Socialists isolated themselves from the left forces and provoked a sharp split in the CPPA. On the other hand, by withdrawing from the CPPA, the more progressive forces placed themselves outside

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of an important mass movement and surrendered the organization to the conservative union leaders.

CHICAGO FARMER-LABOR PARTY CONVENTION After leaving the CPPA, the CFL and the Chicago Farmer-Laborites issued a call for a Farmer-Labor Party convention in Chicago on July 3, 1923, in order to take steps to immediately form a Farmer-Labor Party. Invitations went out to all groups and individuals on the left, as well as to many international unions. The Workers’ (Communist) Party, which had

been excluded from the CPPA meetings, was invited to send delegates.!5

“Build the Labor Party,” declared the Labor Herald, organ of the TUEL. The Cleveland Conference, it went on, had “disgusted every red-blooded worker who can see little difference between the leaders who dominated that Conference and Gompers.” But now a new opportunity existed to build “a strong and powerful Labor Party.” The newspaper went on: Every progressive and militant union man is glad to know that the political forces of Labor are gradually being brought together. The Convention called by the Farmer-Labor Party for Chicago, July 3rd, to which have been invited all unions, farmers’ groups, and workers’ political parties, is one sign of the extent to which the idea of unity has developed. It is another promise that the end is in sight of Gompersism; it is a token that the workers are preparing for independent class action in the field of politics... The road to political unity of the working class lies in the direction of bringing together the various political groups and labor organizations that now exist. In order for the Labor Party to develop its real power, its doors must be open for all workers to come in. The moment any arbitrary exclusion rule is set up, that moment solidarity of the workers is denied, and one group is set against the other. A united front of all must be the slogan.}®

In June 1923, at a meeting of representatives of the Workers’ Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, it was agreed that if the July 3 convention attracted representatives of at least half a million workers, the new party would be formed. “At this point, however, Fitzpatrick was having second thoughts. The CFL was coming under considerable pressure from the AFL Executive Council, the leaders of the Railroad Brotherhoods and the leaders of the Socialist Party not to go ahead with the convention. The AFL also cut off its subsidy to the Chicago Federation and ceased paying half the organizing expenses of President Fitzpatrick and half of the Federa-

tion’s office rent.18 When the convention opened as scheduled on July 3, 1923, 650 delegates were present. They had been sent by the West Virginia Federation of Labor, the central labor councils of Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Buffalo, the UMW, the needle trades’ unions, the Workers’ Party, and the

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farmer-labor parties of states. Among the delegates was the legendary Mother Jones, now in her 93rd year.!9 At the opening session, Fitzpatrick stressed the need for unity. “How foolish and ridiculous it is for the workers to be divided,” he said, “when the Bosses of Big Business are united everywhere .... We are going to come out of this conference with some sort of an arrangement, some kind of solution, some sort of a working agreement that will centralize our efforts, and cause all our difficulties to vanish.” But Fitzpatrick soon rendered this plea for unity meaningless by arguing that “it would be suicide” to allow the Workers Party into the hall. He asked that all revolutionary groups be excluded, but the convention rejected this plea. Mother Jones, who had voted against Fitzpatrick, addressed the delegates and urged them to organize a new political party of workers and farmers. Thereupon, Joseph Manley, Foster’s son-in-law and a delegate of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, moved that the conference declare itself in favor of forming a Federated Farmer-Labor Party and immediately set up an organizing committee for that purpose. Fitzpatrick and his supporters, however, argued against the immediate creation of a new party. Fitzpatrick angrily charged that the Communists wanted such a party so that they could dominate it. Ruthenberg replied that the purpose of the conference was to form a Farmer-Labor Party and it was not an idea that had originated only with the Workers’ Party. Moreover, he added, the Workers’ Party had no desire to dominate such a party, but it did draw the line at being excluded. He then urged “united action” for a new party. Ruthenberg was supported by the vast majority of the delegates. By a vote of 500 to 40, the convention decided to organize a new political party to be called the Federated Farmer-Labor Party (FFLP). Manley was named

secretary-treasurer.”° By this time, however, Fitzpatrick and his allies had left the convention, never to return.

FITZPATRICK-FOSTER SPLIT After the Chicago Convention, Fitzpatrick let it be known that the relationship between the CFL and the TUEL was ended. The Federation repudiated its previous stand in favor of amalgamation, and Fitzpatrick launched a drive to oust TUEL delegates from both the Chicago Federation and the Illinois State Federation of Labor. As we have seen, this made it easier for Gompers and the AFL Executive Council to launch their own drive to oust the Communists and TUEL members from the Federation and its affiliates,

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At the time, Foster placed the blame for these developments squarely on Fitzpatrick’s shoulders. In “An Open Letter to John Fitzpatrick,” published in the Labor Herald, Foster accused the president of the CFL of capitulating to the AFL bureaucracy and of being unwilling to “make a militant fight” for a radical labor program: This is because you are a regular of the regulars. You will not break completely with the official family and become an outcast, a disrespectable in the movement, a fate which every progressive leader must undergo at our present stage of development. You are determined to maintain your official standing in the labor movement, and especially to retain the presidency of the Chicago Federation of Labor. For you every tactical consideration depends on that.21

Later, however, Foster acknowledged that the Communists had themselves made serious mistakes in their decisions relating to the labor party issue during 1922 and 1923. The first was in following Fitzpatrick and the Farmer-Labor Party when they abandoned the Conference for Progressive Political Action. To be sure, the CPPA had voted to bar the Communists, but it should have been clear that it was the CPPA and not the Farmer-Labor Party that represented the real opportunity to build a genuine labor party, and the Communists should have sought to maintain some relationship with the CPPA. However, once having gone along with Fitzpatrick, it was a mistake to break with him at the Chicago Conference and to establish the Federated Farmer-Labor Party over his opposition: The W[orkers] Pfarty}Fitzpatrick split on July 3, 1923 was particularly harmful in that it spread throughout the trade union movement. Eventually, it largely divorced the Communists from their center group allies, breaking up the political combinations which had carried through the amalgamated and labor party campaigns, not to mention, in its earlier days, the Mooney campaign, the meatpacking and steel organizing drives, and various other progressive movements. The left-center split on July 3rd was one of the basic reasons why the Gompers bureaucrats could ride roughshod over the left wing at the AFL convention a few months later.22

THE ST. PAUL CONVENTION AND THE NATIONAL FARMER-LABOR PARTY In the fall of 1923, William Mahoney, editor of the Minnesota Labor Advocate, the official organ of the Minnesota labor movement, persuaded the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to invite some 350 national representatives to St. Paul on November 15 for preliminary discussions about the 1924 presidential election. Among those invited were representatives of the Socialist Party and the Workers’ Party, as well as Joseph Manley, secretarytreasurer of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party. The Socialist leaders pro-

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tested the presence of the Communists and refused to attend. However, the conference went ahead and Manley played an important role at the meeting, He joined in the decision to call a national convention in St. Paul for June 17, 1924, to organize a new national farmer-labor party and nominate candidates for president and vice-president. Manley informed the readers of The Worker that the “Federated Farmer-Labor Party will join in a great national campaign in support of the candidates of the Farmer-Labor movement nominated at the convention called in St. Paul....”28 When the press reported that representatives of the Workers’ Party and the Federated Farmer-Labor Party had been invited to the St. Paul convention, the CFL warned the leaders of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party against any further relations with these two groups, but the warning was ignored. In fact, when called upon to exclude the Communists from the June 17 convention, “Red” Cramer, representing the left-wing Farmer-Laborites, argued that Minnesota’s success was due to its “open” policy on Communists. “They are not very numerous,” he declared, “but they are good workers and a splendid dynamic force .... They can help a great deal if they are with you, and they can make a lot of trouble if you keep them

out.”24 Meanwhile, forces were at work in the CPPA in favor of independent political action. Democrat William G. McAdoo was the early choice of most of the railroad unions for the presidency, but after it was revealed that his law firm had taken a legal fee from Edward Doheny, who was connected with the Teapot Dome Oil scandal,* his candidacy was irreparably damaged. Although Alfred E. Smith, New York’s Catholic governor, was viewed with favor as a presidential candidate among rank-and-file railroad workers, the chiefs of the brotherhoods, most of whom were Protestants, would not support Smith.2 Increasingly the CPPA placed its hopes on a presidential campaign by Robert M. LaFollette. Since LaFollette was out of contention for the Republican ticket, this meant supporting him as a labor party candidate.2® But LaFollette, although he supported many of labor’s political demands, was opposed to running as a candidate of a labor party. The American way, he said, was to run as an independent individual, not to form a.“class party.” He was especially determined to dissociate himself from the radical groups in the labor party movement who were scheduled to meet in St. Paul on

June 17,1924.27 * The Teapot Dome Scandal was associated with the corruption of the Harding Administration. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, whose office administered the Navy oil reserves in Wyoming which bore the name Teapot Dome, leased it and a California oil reserve to individuals who were not required to engage in competitive bidding. Revelations that Fall

had suddenly obtained wealth intensified the demand for the investigation which disclosed widespread corruption.

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On May 28, 1924, LaFollette published an open letter to the Attorney General of Wisconsin in which he condemned the leaders of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party for cooperating with the Communists and for inviting the Workers’ Party to the left-wing convention. Not only did he refuse to support the convention, but he called on his supporters to stay away from St. Paul.28 The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party published a strong statement disagreeing with LaFollette’s position. They pointed out that while they, too, had their differences with the Workers’ Party on many issues, they were prepared to cooperate with the Communists in establishing a third party because their experience in Minnesota had demonstrated that the Communists were valuable allies. Nevertheless, LaFollette’s repudiation of the St. Paul convention, combined with the attacks on it by leaders of the CFL, the AFL and the CPPA, kept many potential delegates away.29 This became evident when the convention opened on June 17. While 500 delegates from 29 states participated, most of them were farmers. The response from the trade unions was weak. Only two large unions—the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers—sent official delegates. All the other union delegates in St. Paul represented small, local organizations.°9 A bitter debate broke out between William Mahoney, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor leader, and the Communists. Mahoney warned that the immediate formation of a new party was premature and could be a serious obstacle to concerted actions by all the participants in the progressive movement in the 1924 elections. The Communists disagreed, and after lengthy debate, the convention voted to establish the National Farmer-Labor Party, adopt a platform, and nominate candidates for president and vice-president for the 1924 election campaign.*! The convention then adopted a platform calling for the nationalization of monopoly industry, banks, mines, public power, transportation, communication, a legislated minimum wage and maximum workday; a federal system of social insurance; transfer of land ownership to those who worked it; equal rights for Negroes; immediate recognition of the Soviet Union, and the right of self-determination for all the colonial possessions of the United States.32 After adopting the platform, the delegates first elected Clarence Hathaway, a leading Minnesota Communist and a machinist, as executive secretary, and then nominated candidates for the approaching election. The convention chose as its presidential candidate Duncan McDonald, former UMW head in Illinois, and for vice-president, William Bouck, chairman of the Farmer-Labor Party Executive Committee and chief of the Western

Progressive Farmers League of Washington.*8 Despite the decision to form a Farmer-Labor Party and nominate a presidential ticket, there was support among some delegates for LaFollette.

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The convention voted for negotiations with the Conference for Progressive Political Action on the question of joint support for a LaFollette ticket. But the Workers’ Party viewed LaFollette as “a petty-bourgeois reformer” and informed the delegates that “the only basis upon which the Workers’ Party will accept LaFollette as the candidate is that he agrees to run as a Farmer-Labor candidate, to accept the party’s platform and its central control over the electoral campaign and campaign funds. “As might be expected LaFollette rejected these terms. The Workers’ Party had ruled out any possibility of agreement with LaFollette’s followers.**

WORKERS’ (COMMUNIST) PARTY NOMINATES ITS OWN CANDIDATES The National Farmer-Labor Party was stillborn. On July 8, 1924, the Central Executive Committee of the Workers’ Party voted to support a resolution by William Z. Foster to enter the election campaign itself with its own program and its own candidates.** William Z. Foster was nominated for president and Benjamin Gitlow for vice-president on the first national Communist presidential ticket. Thereupon, the Executive Committee of the National Farmer-Labor Party withdrew the McDonald-Bouck ticket, and announced its support of Foster and Gitlow. In explaining its action, the NFLP’s Executive Committee said that it was all because of what had happened in Cleveland. When it was organized, the NFLP had hoped to achieve a united front with the CPPA and together to create a truly independent movement of workers and farmers, a farmer-labor party for the presidential election. But the CPPA had “decided against the united front,... against the political independence of the workers and exploited farmers [and] ... against a farmer-labor party.” Instead, at its conference in Cleveland on July 4, 1924, the CPPA had “surrendered to LaFollette, betrayed the farmer-labor masses into the hands of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and rich farmers, and thus destroyed the only chance for a united front campaign in the coming presidential election.”***

* When. it became clear that LaFollette would run in 1924 as an independent, American Communists discussed the issue with leaders of the Communist International. With Lenin dead, the leader of the Comintern Executive Committees at that meeting was Leon Trotsky, who advised the American Communists to work against LaFollette. (Tom Foley, “The LaFollette Campaign of 1924,” Political Affairs 48 (Sept-Oct. 1969]: 37.) ** After the election, Foster wrote that the decision of the Central Executive Committee was “because our party accepted the advice of the Communist International not to enter into an alliance with the third party movement nor to support the independent candidacy of LaFollette.” (William Z. Foster, “The Significance of the Elections: Three Stages of Our Labor Party Policy,” Workers Monthly, December 1924, pp. 89-90.) *** The statement was signed by Alex Howat, Chairman, C. A. Hathaway, Joseph Manley, Alfred Knutson, and Scott Wilkins.

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This “betrayal at Cleveland” meant that the Workers’ Party was the “only political labor organization in the United States which stands its ground and fights without compromise against LaFolletism dominating the labor movement.” By placing its own presidential ticket in the field, the Workers’ Party had guaranteed “that the idea of a farmer-labor party in the United States will not be totally extinguished and that when the time comes the masses will again rally to the united front banner which still remains the only solution of the difficulties of the oppressed masses.” Because of all of these factors, “the National Executive Committee of the National FarmerLabor Party consented to permit its presidential candidates to withdraw and to endorse the candidates of the Workers Party of America.” The Committees pledged itself “to support in every way possible the campaign and the candidates of the Workers Party and calls upon the workers and

exploited farmers of the country to do likewise.”36 The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Federation immediately denounced the Communists for duplicity, and a drive was launched to eliminate all Communists from both the Federation and the Minnesota labor movement. The Minneapolis press was soon reporting that the Communists had been driven out of the Federation, that Clarence Hathaway had been expelled from the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly and that other expulsions of Communists would soon follow.” Thus, the Communists were isolated still further.*

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PROGRESSIVE

The Cleveland Conference of the CPPA, which the National FarmerLabor Party called a “betrayal,” was held after the Republican and Democratic conventions. The CPPA waited to see if LaFollette had any chance for nomination on the GOP ticket. However, not only was he not nominated, but attempts by a small group of his followers from the Wisconsin delegation to influence the Republican platform were bluntly rejected. The platform that was adopted was a hymn of praise for the Republican Administration for having ensured economic prosperity. The party promised to maintain the high standard of living, to help the farmers and defend the interests of the workers, and to pass laws abolishing child labor and reduc-

ing the work week. Measures to limit immigration were also approved.38 * Tom Foley, a Communist journalist, wrote in 1969: “LaFollette’s campaign...was the biggest independent movement outside the two party system ever to emerge in U.S. history, and if the Party had been associated with it, it clearly could have developed important ties with the most advanced sections of the labor and farmer movements, as well as with the progressive intellectuals and urban reformers.” (“The LaFollette Campaign of 1924,” (Politi-

cal Affairs 48 [Sept-Oct 1969]: 31.)

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As anticipated, Calvin Coolidge, who had become president when Harding died in 1923, was nominated to seek the presidency in his own right. For vice-president, the Republicans named Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago lawyer and banker. The Democratic convention opened in New York City’s Madison Square Garden on June 24. After a furious battle in the broiling heat of the New York summer, the forces of William G. McAdoo and Alfred E. Smith were deadlocked. The delegates finally selected John W. Davis, a conservative New York corporation lawyer and legal consultant for the House of Morgan, as the Democratic candidate for president. Charles Bryan, governor of Nebraska, and the brother of William Jennings Bryan, was nominated for vice-president. The Democratic platform promised to follow the “Wilsonian tradition” and promote international cooperation through the League of Nations, lighten the tax burden, change tariffs in favor of the farmers, stabilize industry and finance, ensure full employment, limit arms appropriations, provide aid to war veterans, and to introduce laws prohibiting child labor. On the subject of the rights of citizens, the platform included the general statement: “The Democratic Party believes in equal rights to all

and special privileges to none.”?9 With LaFollette out of contention for the Republican designation and with the nomination of a Wall Street lawyer by the Democrats, the CPPA’s course was set. On July 2, its National Committee authorized William H. Johnston to send a telegram to LaFollette asking him to run for president. “The Democratic and Republican parties have both forfeited all claims to public confidence,” Johnson wrote. “Under the recent administrations of both of them, there have been grave scandals and flagrant betrayals of the public trust.” The letter closed: Recognizing you as the outstanding leader of the progressive forces in the United States, we ask, therefore, whether you will under present conditions become a candidate for President of the United States. We should, also, appreciate a message from you setting forth your view of the present political situation.49

LaFollette’s letter of acceptance was received on the afternoon of July 4, 1924, the day the CPPA convention opened in Cleveland. To the 1,000 delegates present, LaFollette indicated that he accepted the nomination as an independent and not as a candidate of a third party: “...if the hour is at hand for the birth of a new political party, the American people next November will register their will and their united purpose by a vote of such magnitude that a new political party will be inevitable.” LaFollette was nominated as an independent, and Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat who

was LaFollette’s running mate, was also nominated as an independent.*!

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The CPPA election platform was based on a program proposed by LaFollette himself. It was mildly socialistic and strongly liberal, calling for the crushing of private monopoly; the public ownership of the nation’s water power resources and strict public control of all other natural resources; a liberal revision of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon’s tax program, which favored the rich; a bonus for veterans; protection of the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively; aid for the farmers and cooperative enterprises; repeal of the Transportation Act and public ownership of the railroads; abolition of the use of the injunction in labor disputes; abolition of the Supreme Court’s power to nullify legislation; adoption of a child labor amendment; denunciation of American imperialism; independence for the Philippines, and a foreign policy that would promote treaty agreements with all nations to abolish war. In this connection, the platform also called for a reduction in armaments and for a public referendum on any declaration of war.42 The Socialist Party convention of 1924, held in Cleveland immediately after the CPPA convention, endorsed LaFollette and Wheeler. When Eugene V. Debs supported this endorsement, Foster was furious. As he saw it, Debs’s “capitulation” only confirmed the tendency of Socialists to “desert” the working class. “What will the working class, what will the workers, who have followed you for so many years in building up some semblance of independent political action, now think when you abandon it all, and give your unqualified endorsement to the personal campaign of an individual who is not only not a socialist, but is avowedly anti-socialist.” Debs responded with a bit of redbaiting, unusual for him. He attacked Foster’s connection with the Comintern. “Having no Vatican in Moscow to guide me I must follow the light I have,” he insisted. Debs questioned whether the Socialist party could afford to “disappear from the scene” by

severing itself from the LaFollette movement. While admitting that the movement LaFollette headed was not a workers’ party,* Debs claimed that many of its policies would benefit the common people.’3 The Workers’ Party, however, continued to view the LaFollette ticket as “petty bourgeois and dominated by labor aristocrats, millionaire liberals and reformist Socialists.”44 Jay Lovestone wrote in the Workers’ Party

pamphlet, The LaFollette Illusion: Mr. LaFollette, the champion of the little capitalists, differs with Coolidge and Davis ... primarily as to the best method of perpetuating the wage system .... LaFollette is and has been trying to fly in the face of industrial development. The * Other Socialists, while supporting LaFollette, conceded that he did not head a workers’ party, and were “conscious of their ideological differences with the Wisconsin senator.”

(James Weinstein, “Radicalism in the Midst of Normalcies,” Journal of American History 58

(Spring 1979]: 776.)

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fact of the matter is that, economically, great industrial units are both desirable and inevitable.

Lovestone then went on to attack LaFollette for not demanding the

immediate socialization of industry which, Lovestone maintained, was the only real solution.

AFL ENDORSES LAFOLLETTE-WHEELER TICKET On August 2, 1924, the AFL Non-Partisan Committee submitted a report to the Executive Council, noting that both the Republican and Democratic conventions had nominated candidates “unacceptable to labor.” “There remain,” it went on, “the candidacies of Robert M. LaFollette and Burton K. Wheeler, the first an independent Republican, the second and independent Democrat running as such....” The two were praised for having “throughout their whole political careers, stood steadfast in defense of the rights and interests of wage earners and farmers.” Their platform met the economic issues of the day “in a manner more nearly conforming to La-

bor’s proposals than any other platform.”46 At its meeting on August 4, the AFL Executive Council endorsed LaFollette and Wheeler as independent candidates. The endorsement, however, was qualified: Cooperation hereby urged is not a pledge of identification with an independent party movement or a third party, nor can it be construed as support for such a party, group or movement except as such action accords with our non-partisan

political policy. We do not accept government as the solution of the problems of life. Major problems of life and labor must be dealt with by voluntary groups and organizations of which trade unions are an essential an integral part. Neither can this cooperation imply our support, acceptance or endorsement of policies or principles advocated by any minority groups or organizations that may see fit to support the candidacies of Senator LaFollette and Senator Wheeler.4?

The last point was intended to make it clear that by its action, the AFL was in no way associating itself with any third party involved with the

CPPA, by which it meant the Socialist Party in particular.48 To make certain that this was clearly understood, Gompers wrote in the American Federationist: I want to emphasize the fact that our support of Senator LaFollette does not in any way, or to any degree, identify us or commit us to doctrines advanced by any other group that may be supporting the same candidates. These candidates have the support of minority groups, in themselves of no great importance, but with . which we are and have been in the sharpest kind of disagreement. We shall continue to oppose these doctrines at all times ...49

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Although for the first time in the history of the AFL, it had abandoned its non-partisan political policy, it did not, as has been sometimes stated, endorse a third party. The CPPA had created the Progressive Party when it nominated LaFollette and Wheeler, but the AFL stressed that it was su

porting them as “independent” candidates.50*

.

THE PROGRESSIVE CAMPAIGN OF 1924 The presidential campaign of 1924 was a hard fought one. Both the Republicans and Democrats sought to keep labor from defecting from their ranks. The Democrats relied largely on former Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to rally support for that party’s presidential candidate. The Republican effort was more ambitious. Its National Committee established a special Labor Bureau under the guidance of J. P. McArdle, a Republican labor leader, which issued literature to workers designed to discourage

labor support for LaFollette5!

In October, LaFollette toured the country, visiting the big cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic states and traversing the industrial centers of the Great Lakes region and the agricultural areas of the Midwest. In all his speeches, he called for a struggle against monopoly domination, denounced both the corruption in the Republican Administration and its governmental policies and advanced the program of reforms outlined in the CPPA election platform. LaFollette’s energetic campaigning seemed to presage a large vote, and perhaps even victory, at the polls.52 Inevitably, the Progressive campaign brought down on LaFollette’s head the charge that he was a dangerous radical, a Red, a Communist and a destroyer of American institutions. On October 18, 1924, the Saturday Evening Post carried an article charging that even though LaFollette opposed them, the Communists were mobilizing support for him: “Numerous of the leading members of the Workers’ Party, which is the William Z. Foster party, are now actively canvassing for LaFollette.” As the campaign progressed, the alleged “Soviet-Progressive united front” became a leading Republican charge. When the Cincinnati Enquirer discovered that 213 college professors had indicated their support of LaFollette, it called editorially for the discharge of these teachers “attached to recognized heresies.” The country would be safer, it declared, “if they are relieved from all duties as instructors of the youth of the nation.” Employers tried to frighten their workers from voting for LaFollette by

painting a grim picture of the economic depression, mass layoffs and mil* Kenneth C. McKay argues that in fact, a third party did not exist in the election of 1924 as far as the candidacy of LaFollette was concerned, although there were plans to form one

after the election (7he Progressive Movement of 1924 [New York, 1947], p. 153.)

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lions of unemployed which would inevitably follow if LaFollette were elected. The heads of large firms even coerced their employees into pledging to vote for Coolidge and sometimes even into contributing to the Republican campaign fund by threatening to discharge anyone who refused to do so or

who indicated support for the Progressive candidate.54 The Progressive movement had serious difficulties in developing the kind of unity that was needed to overcome these obstacles. Blacks displayed little interest in the LaFollette campaign—partly because of their traditional ties to the Republican Party, but also because LaFollette and his supporters simply ignored the Negro question. The CPPA platform said nothing about the Negro, but both the NAACP and the Black Socialist weekly, The Messenger, edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, sought to extract from the Progressive Party some recognition of the particular needs and grievances of Black Americans. Their efforts, however, were in vain. Nevertheless, the LaFollette movement did get the support of both the NAACP and The Messenger, as well as from such Black leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois, William Pickens, James Weldon Johnson, and Bishop Hurst of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all of whom actively supported LaFollette and urged Negroes to vote for him. However, there is little to indicate that Black voters as a group supported LaFollette on

election day.*4 “Ten million women will vote for LaFollette and Wheeler,” Ethel M. Smith, legislative secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League told the press in late September, “For the first time since woman suffrage became law,” she continued, “women have a real incentive to vote in a national election—a constructive platform with a real cause behind it and candidates who mean what that platform says. No man in public life has done so much as Senator LaFollette to translate the organized women’s

program into law and practice.”"° However, putting LaFollette and Wheeler on the ballot in various states so that the women could vote for them proved to be very expensive, time-consuming, and often frustrating.°® LaFollette and his supporters had extremely limited funds at their disposal. Instead of the several million dollars that had been promised, the CPPA contributed about $50,000 to the campaign, while the AFL “was only able to collect a paltry $25,000 for election purposes.” According to a special Senate Committee’s official data, the Republicans spent $4,200,000 on their campaign, the Democrats $904,000, and the Progressive Party only $200,000.57 Organized labor was far from unanimous in its support of the Progressives and many labor leaders who did support them did so with somewhat less than complete enthusiasm. As the historian of the Progressive movement has noted:

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Labor’s interest in the LaFollette candidacy seems to have been in proportion to LaFollette’s chance of winning. Conditioned to a campaign strategy by which success was measured by the immediate standard of victory or defeat at the polls, the labor leaders began to fear, before the campaign was completed, that their bargaining power within the old parties would be seriously impaired.58

To bolster labor’s spirits, songs supporting the Progressive candidates were featured at rallies. “When Labor Votes in November,” sung to the tune of “Marching Through Georgia,” went in part: We'll rally to our leader—Bob LaFollette brave and true; We'll show the Wall Street flunkeys what the working class can do; We've planned to have our freedom, and we’re going to put it through— When Labor votes in November.

CHORUS: Hurrah, Hurrah—LaFollette is the man, Hurrah, Hurrah—with “Battle Bob” we stand; We’re going to make him President—you bet y’boots we can— When Labor votes in November.

But spirited songs could not obscure the fact that the funds labor had promised failed to materialize and that many of its organizational plans were never carried out. In the last week of the campaign, a number of labor groups announced their independence of the AFL Executive Council and declared their support for the Democratic candidate. On October 30, the Executive Council of the Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York, representing one-fifth of the entire AFL membership, switched from LaFollette to Davis’But Advance, of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, urged the membership to ignore these developments, and for each member to “add his vote to the protest which will be made by the progressive American workers by voting as workers and let a big protest vote serve notice upon the oppressors of labor that the day of reckoning is coming. Some day there will be a great and powerful political labor movement in this country. Let a big protest vote of labor serve to arouse enthusiasm for

such a movement.”61

THE ELECTION RESULTS In the presidential election of November 4, 1924, Coolidge polled 15.7 million votes, or 54 percent of the total. Davis received 8.4 million votes, or 29 percent, and LaFollette polled 4,822,000, or 16.5 percent. LaFollette won the 13 electoral votes of his own state, Wisconsin.® Although the Progressives polled the largest popular vote of any third party in American history, they received a much smaller vote than had been

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expected. There are many explanations for this. Prosperity in many areas— even agriculture had a temporary recovery that summer—made “Keeping Cool with Coolidge” attractive. Where the Republicans’ appeals were not successful, their threats were still effective in getting rank-and-file workers to cast their votes for the GOP. A. Philip Randolph blamed LaFollette’s “surprisingly poor” showing partly on his failure to speak out on the Negro question: “It is quite probable that LaFollette would have polled a large Negro vote had he made a single speech to them.” But Randolph attributed most of the candidate’s weakness at the polls to the lack of money and the endorsement by the Socialists. The latter, Randolph argued, “invited some improbable comment, alienated a number of farmers and workers, as well as quasi-liberal supporters” and was “a source of much confusion to the public.” * The last point referred to the fact that in some states, the independent ticket was listed on the ballot as Socialist, and in some, notably New York, Socialists were accused of using the LaFollette-Wheeler campaign organization to advance their own candidates for state office. As a result, it was said, many antagonized moderates and Catholics either voted for Davis or Coolidge or failed to vote at all.© LaFollette drew some of his strongest support in the highly urbanized and industrial sections of the East. Although he failed to carry any major industrial center, he did receive a sizeable number of votes. Nevertheless, Kenneth McKay, the historian of the movement, has calculated that railway labor gave the Progressive Party somewhat in excess of 200,000 votes. Even if true, it would indicate that less than a majority of the railway workers voted for LaFollette and Wheeler. In fact, it would also appear that many members of AFL unions also did not back a man who explicitly supported labor’s cause. McKay concludes: The Progressives did not receive a full measure of support from organized labor. Labor’s original reluctance to endorse LaFollette and Wheeler before alternative courses were exhaustively explored, its wavering, inadequate support during the campaign, its early retreat in the face of defeat, its indecent haste to abandon the progressive movement and humbly solicit the old parties for a share of the political swag once more, all of this demonstrated that organized labor—at least, large and controlling sections of it, particularly in the American Federation of Labor and the Railroad Brotherhoods, were not prepared to face the logical consequences of a real break with the entrenched political machines.67

The assumption has always been that, with the exception of a few pockets like Cleveland and San Francisco, labor failed dismally to vote for LaFollette.® However, after a detailed and meticulous study of the 1924 election returns, James H. Robinson concluded:

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Only one county, Milwaukee, and one major city, Cleveland, were carried by LaFollette, but he ran second in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Des Moines, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, Rochester, Portland, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. Most of these cities are grouped in the “industrial heartland” and in the West and Northwest, but LaFollette also made a respectable showing in parts of New York City, in Baltimore, and in Boston, while he did poorly in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Kansas City and St. Louis.®9

In evaluating the failure of the farmer-labor party movement, David Montgomery concludes that “The heart of the problem was that labor unions in basic industries were virtually wiped out during the 1920-22 industrial crisis, and those unions had been the base of progressive politics

in the AFL.””° But they were also a minority as compared with the Gompers’ machine. In fact, Gompers used the defeat of LaFollette as an occasion to proclaim, in an American Federationist editorial that “as a matter of democratic principle, American labor does not want a separate political party and as a matter of practical politics is far too wise to indulge in any such futility.”71 Echoing Gompers, many labor groups pointed to the election results as demonstrating the validity of the traditional approach of organized labor. The AFL National Non-Partisan Political Campaign Committee declared that “the launching of the third party movements has been proved wasted effort and injurious to the desire to elect candidates with favorable records. The 1922 and 1924 political campaigns definitely determined this fact. Experience therefore has taught labor [that] to be successful politically it must continue in the future, as in the past, to follow its non-partisan

policy.””2* For his part, Gompers declared that the AFL would adamantly oppose any labor support for a new party, and the Federation’s Executive Council endorsed this stand.”

END OF THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY The CPPA met in convention in Chicago in February 1925 to decide on its future political course of action. Before the convention opened, the railway labor leaders met in a downtown hotel to draw up recommendations to the larger gathering. Despite previous pleas of the Socialists and appeals from Johnston of the Machinists, all the leaders except those of the Machinists voted to abandon independent political activity. The majority * Kenneth C. McKay sees the distrust and ill will between the Socialists and the trade unions as a decisive factor in the breakup of the progressive movement. Labor leaders, he argues, were firmly committed to the doctrine of non-partisanship and to working within the capitalistic system, and saw little to be gained and much to lose in a futile third party. The Socialists, however, felt that the workingman could improve his lot by voting for his real interests, and by changing the system. They were especially critical of the trade union

leaders’ complacency and conservatism. (The Progressive Movement of 1924, pp. 200-04.)

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decided to submit a resolution to this effect to the CPPA convention which

was to meet later.”4 When the convention opened, David B. Robertson of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen submitted the resolution. Speaking for the railway unions, Robertson emphasized that “we are not a political party. We are a band of workers working along non-political [sic] lines....” The best way to serve the interests of the members they represented was for the union leaders to work for progressive candidates within the regular parties, and by “remaining free from entangling alliances with any political party.” The Farmers’ National Council quickly seconded this position. A. H. Hopkins of the Committee of 48 urged the delegates to form a Progressive Party,* and the Socialists, let by Morris Hillquit, proposed the formation of a new American Labor Party. Then Eugene V. Debs spoke up in favor of continuing independent political action.” These words fell on deaf ears. The railway unions severed their connection with the CPPA and independent political action.”6 Most of the AFL unions joined the exodus, and the entire third party movement collapsed.?”**

EVALUATION OF THE COMMUNISTS’ ROLE IN THE ELECTION The Communist national ticket succeeded in getting on the ballot in 19 states in 1924, and its candidates received 33,076 votes. However, although it was historically important that the Workers’ Party had for the first time nominated its own candidates, the Communists had sacrificed their valuable alliances with John Fitzpatrick, the CFL and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Federation. After the election, Foster justified the decision to dissolve the National Farmer-Labor Party and run candidates of the Workers’ Party by stating that the NFLP “was composed only of the Workers’ Party and more or less vague numbers of sympathizers. The masses had gone to LaFollette,” and that the Communists could not follow the masses into a movement dominated by the petty bourgeois and the labor bureaucrats. Confronted with this situation, the Central Executive Committee of the Workers’ Party had, after extended debate, “unhesitatingly cut loose from the National Farmer-Labor Party and placed its own presidential candidates in the field.”

This decision, Foster concluded, had proved “to be a wise one.”?8 But in his History of the Communist Party of the United States, published in 1952, Foster indicated that the wise decision would have been to have supported the LaFollette movement while seeking to remedy its short* The Committee of Forty-Eight was founded in 1919 and played an important role in the

early stages of the CPPA. It ceased to exist in 1925. ** Robert M. LaFollette died on July 18, 1925.

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comings. Thus he wrote: “The LaFollette movement represented a united front of workers, petty bourgeois and farmers in the struggle against monopoly capital, with the petty bourgeois and labor leaders in control. Time, experience, and the work of the Communists were necessary to change that domination, but to withdraw from the movement, as the Communists did, was a political error. The Party should have gone along in critical support of the LaFollette movement.”79 The Progressive Party died with the election of 1924. Its program was kept alive, especially by the TUEL. In the twenty proposals contained in its “Program for Building the Trade Unions,” presented by the TUEL to the AFL’s 1926 Convention in Detroit, Proposal Number 4, “A Labor Party,” read in part: The present AFL policy of supporting candidates on the ticket of the Republican and Democratic Parties is absolutely fatal to the interests of the working class. It checks the growth of class consciousness. It makes a unified, successful fighting front of labor against capital impossible and it destroys all real representation of labor in government .... In place of this ruinous policy, the AFL shall declare for the formation of a labor party, which shall make a bloc with the organized farmers. To put this policy into effect, it shall immediately call conferences in the various cities and states for the purpose of establishing labor parties, and later hold a national labor party convention.

Labor should enter the November elections under its own banner....°?

The TUEL also proposed the incorporation of the “following main planks” in the political program of the Labor Party: (a) Revision of the tax and tariff laws so as to take the burden of taxation and higher prices thru the tariff off the workers and farmers. Higher surtaxes on the incomes of the great corporations and multi-millionaires; (b) Legislation outlawing the use of the injunction, police and soldiers in labor disputes; (c) The general 8hour day in industry; (d) Fight against all proposals to register, photograph and fingerprint foreign-born workers; (e) Industry to bear the cost of unemployment thru legislation making compulsory the payment of trade union wages to all unemployed workers, funds to be raised thru higher taxation of profits; (f) The prohibition of the labor of children under 16 years of age, with provisions to maintain the children of workers and provide for the children up to the age of 16; (g) Relief to the farmers thru adoption of the principle of the McNary-Haugen bill and the addition(al) appropriation of a half billion dollars to provide for the establishment of co-operative marketing associations controlled by the farm organizations and for the improvement of agricultural production; (h) The nationalization of large scale industry, including mines, railroads and the great manufacturing industries, food distributing organizations, etc. The establishment of workers’ control and the participation of the workers in the management of these nationalized industries; (1) Reduction of the army and navy andafight against militarism and imperialism. The withdrawal of American soldiers from all foreign territory. Immediate independence for the Philippines and Puerto Rico and the

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right of self-determination for all other American colonies and possessions. (Daily Worker, Sept. 7, 1926).

The AFL Convention did not even consider this proposal, but the TUEL did not give up the campaign for a Labor Party. At a meeting of the National Committee on January 17, 1927, the following resolution, introduced by William Z. Foster, was adopted: Active steps shall be taken for the formation of local committees in all industrial centers to work for the building of a Labor Party, those committees to be composed solely of delegates from trade unions. The initiative for the formation of such committees shall come from local unions. The local T.U.E.L. groups shall unofficially give support to such committees.81

CHAPTER 20

END OF THE GOMPERS’ ERA “An era ended with the death of Gompers,” wrote Philip Taft at the very beginning of his The A.F: of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger.) It came to an end dramatically. On November 9, 1924, four days after the presidential election, Samuel Gompers left Washington, accompanied by his nurse—he had been seriously ill since May—Secretary Frank Morrison, and a party of AFL employees, to attend the Federation’s 45th convention in El Paso, Texas. Gompers and all the delegates at El Paso knew that this would be his last convention. He had presided over every convention since 1886 with an interval of one term (1895). During these 38 years he had domi-

nated the labor scene. From November 17 to 25, Gompers, deadly ill, presided over every session of the convention, although one morning he was physically unable to get to the hall. Vice-President James Duncan and John P. Frey decided to recess that session rather than hold it without Gompers. On the opening day, Gompers prepared a speech William Green read for him. “It was,” says one of his biographers, “the message which he wanted to leave with the labor movement as his heritage.” After recounting the early efforts to form a national labor organization, he stated that the AFL was “an organization that had no power and no authority except of a voluntary character. It was

a voluntary coming together of unions with common needs and common aims. This feeling of mutuality has been a stronger bond of union than could be welded by an autocratic authority. Guided by voluntary principles our Federation has grown from a weakling into the strongest, best organized labor movement in the world....” Green continued reading:

Men and women of our American trade union movement, I feel that I have earned the right to talk plainly with you. As the only delegate to the first Pittsburgh convention [in 1881] who has stayed with the problems of our movement through to the present hour, as one who with clean hands and with singleness of purpose has tried to serve the labor movement honorably and in a spirit of consecration to

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the cause of human liberty—the principles of voluntarism. No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion. If we seek to force, we but tear apart that which, united, is inevitable. There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient, but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than the education of constructive development... Events of recent months made me keenly aware that the time is not far distant when I must lay down my trust for others to carry forward... As I review the events of my sixty years of contact with the labor movement and as I survey the problems of today and study the opportunities of the future, I want to say to you, men and women of the American labor movement, do not reject the cornerstone upon which labor’s structure has been builded, but base your all upon voluntary principles and illumine your every problem by consecrated devotion to that highest of all purposes—human well being in the fullest, widest, deepest sense. ...AS we move upwards to higher levels, a wider vision of service and response will unfold itself. Let us keep the faith. There is no other way.

The second day of the convention, 1,000 delegates attending the convention of the Mexican Federation of Labor crossed over the border from Juarez and marched into the hall to the applause and cheers of the American delegates. In the afternoon, the delegates of the AFL returned the visit, to Juarez. After the convention, Gompers and the 350 delegates went to Mexico City for the inauguration of General Plutarco Calles, the first labor President on the North American continent, in whose election Gompers had played an important part. On December 3, Gompers called to order the fourth congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor in Mexico City. As President of the Federation, he gave a speech in which he reviewed the history of the organization since its founding in 1918.* Gompers was reelected president by acclamation. But he was not present to receive the honor. He remained in bed, and three days later, was taken out of his hotel room in a stretcher for the trip to San Antonio so that he could die on American soil. At the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, at 4:00 a.m. on December 13, he passed away.* On December 18, after the casket had been lying in state at the American Federation of Labor headquarters in Washington, the funeral services were held in New York. Before the casket was lowered into the grave, James Duncan delivered Gompers’ last message, which the AFL President had entrusted to him: Say to the organized workers of America that as I have kept the faith I expect that they will keep the faith. They must carry on. Say to them that a union man carrying a card is not a good citizen until he upholds the institutions of our * For the formation of the Pan American Federation of Labor, see Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor Movement and Latin America: A History of Workers’ Response to Intervention, Vol. I, 1846-1919 [South Hadley, Mass.], 1988, pp. 172-80.

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country and a poor citizen of our country if he upholds the institutions of our country and forgets the obligations of his trade association.5

In the main, editorial comments in the commercial newspapers and magazines hailed Gompers as the saviour of American labor. “For years,” Benjamin Stolberg wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Samuel Gompers was American labor,” the Moses of labor’s “forty years in the wilderness, its daily struggle for manna, its defense against inner rebellion and outer attack.”® But not all was praise for the dead labor leader. The Industrial Worker, organ of the IWW, announced the passing of the AFL President under the headline: “SAMUEL GOMPERS DEAD SINCE 1917.” It observed: Whether Sam Gompers has ceased to breathe Gompers has been long dead since 1917 so far as During that year he moved over into the ranks more interested in banking, politics, finances and the class struggle.”

is not to be considered. Sam the working class is concerned, of the bourgeoisie and became office managing than he was in

Editorially the Industrial Worker expanded on this theme: Since 1917 Sam Gompers became Samuel. He lost his touch with the vast labor movement. Once Sam Gompers found a word of help for Moyers, Haywood and Pettibone, for the Lawrence strike, for Ford and Suhr, for the McNamaras, for Joe Hill* but when war came and he was lionized in England, when cables carried columns about his movements, we find another man. In 1916 Gompers was heart and soul an anti-militarist.... In 1924, at the El Paso convention, he was a militarist, ready to pit one set of workers against another set of workers in order that by killing one another, parasites might prosper. To understand this change the worker must consider the transition of this worker from a wage slave himself to butlered gentleman living among the rich. Economic determinism will work its way. This was not a case of putting a beggar on horseback, but of a virile son of the working class being corrupted by environment. Sam Gompers believed in organization around a tool rather than a process. He could not grasp industrial unionism although he was a wise economist. He saw industry change from the competitive conditions of the hand tool age to the cooperation of the machine process but he did not change with industry in this respect because at the critical moment he had become the companion of parasites and their habits warped him the wrong way...

In the previous volumes of the History of the Labor Movement in the United States, we have followed at length the career of Samuel Gompers. Let us here recapitulate the main themes. Samuel Gompers was born in a London tenement on January 27, 1850, the son of Dutch Jews. In June 1863, after taking up cigarmaking under his father’s tutelage, urged on by * For the Moyers, Haywood, Pettibone Case, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor

Movement in the United States 4: 40-59. For the Lawrence Strike, see ibid., pp. 306-50; for Ford and Suhr, see ibid., pp. 261-72; for the McNamaras, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 5: 32-55; for Joe Hill, see Philip S. Foner, The Case of Joe Hill, New York, 1965.

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hardships in England and prospects in America, the Gompers family sailed for New York City. Though not thirteen when he arrived in New York, Gompers was already an experienced cigarmaker. He joined Local 15 of the Cigar Makers’ International Union in 1864, holding, as he always proudly said, union card No. 1, and continuing as a member until his death. Although his formal education had ceased at the age of ten, Gompers attended lectures and debates at Cooper Union. He further enhanced his skimpy formal schooling by joining in the readings and discussions that flourished in the cigar shops. The influence of Marxism on the young Samuel Gompers was considerable. He wrote that the principles of the First International, under Marxist leadership, appeared to him “as solid and practical.” He acknowledged that as a result of the influence of the Marxists, there developed a clearer understanding in working class circles “that the trade union was the intermediate and practical agency that would bring the wage-earners a better life.” Looking back much later on these formative years, Gompers stressed the influence of a Swedish-born socialist and labor leader, Ferdinand Laurrell, had exerted upon his thinking. Laurrell, to whose memory Gompers dedicated his autobiography, had been a leader of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International) in the Scandinavian countries, and he introduced Gompers to the socialist exiles from Europe. A disillusioned socialist himself, Laurrell advised Gompers to attend socialist meetings: “Listen to what they have to say and understand them, but do not join the party.” He warned him against “zealots and impractical visionaries,” and stressed that the trade union was the cornerstone of the labor movement. “Study your union card, Sam,” Laurrell told him, “and if the idea doesn’t square with that, it ain’t true.” The depression of 1873 took a heavy toll of the American trade unions. The Cigar Makers’ Union lost five-sixths of its members and in 1877 was reduced to a thousand people spread over 17 locals. Gompers plunged into the task of reorganizing the New York City local. In 1875 he became president of Local 144 and supervised the continuing work of organization and consolidation. The New York City cigarmakers won their first strike in years and obtained a 15 percent wage increase. But an 1877 strike against the tenement-house sweatshop system ended in failure, leaving Gompers, by then the father of five, unemployed and blacklisted. Laurrell found him a job, however, and he again threw all his energies into union work. Together, Gompers and Adolph Strasser undertook the task of reorganizing the cigarmakers. Following the lead of the “new unionism” in Great Britain, they resolved to rebuild the Cigar Makers into a cohesive, financially stable organization. They proposed to give the national officers complete authority over local unions; to set high dues; to build a financial

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reserve, and to establish a system of unemployment, sickness, and death benefits that became the foundation of “business unionism.” By 1881 the Cigar Makers’ International Union had become the strongest, most financially secure trade union in the United States, the model for all others, and Gompers was recognized as an indefatigable and excellent union organizer. Although he belonged to the Knights of Labor, Gompers became dissat: isfied with that organization’s confused leadership and its subordination of trade unionism to reformism. While he and other craft union leaders were extolling the virtues of the “new unionism” exemplified by the Cigar Makers’ International Union, the Knights of Labor leadership was growing increasingly hostile to these principles. Consequently the craft union leaders, headed by Gompers, began to call for the creation of an American national labor federation modeled after the British Trades Union Congress. Over 100 delegates gathered at Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, November 15, 1881, to establish the new federation. Gompers represented the Cigar Makers, one of 30 trade unions present, along with 46 local assemblies of the Knights of Labor. Gompers was chairman of the committee on the constitution, and it was his group that submitted the final plan of organization. But his proposal that the organization be called the Federation of Organized Trades Unions of the United States and Canada was fought on the convention floor because it meant that the proposed labor federation would organize only skilled craft workers and would not organize the unskilled as well. On a vote the name was changed to the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada—to encompass the skilled and unskilled. This was to remain the name until it was changed in 1886 to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But already it was becoming clear that when he worked in behalf of a new national labor federation, Gompers was thinking almost entirely in terms of the needs of skilled workers.* The meteoric rise of the Knights of Labor in the years 1883-86 completely overshadowed the birth of the new federation. But when the Knights began to wage war on trade unionism in favor of uniting skilled and unskilled workers in mixed assemblies, craft unionists who had belonged to both organizations, abandoned the Knights and decided to make the American Federation of Labor their sole national labor center. As their president they chose 36-year-old Samuel Gompers. He held that office from 1886 to 1895, when dissatisfaction of union members as a result of the prevailing economic depression, plus a * In reviewing the first volume of the Samuel Gompers Papers, covering the years 1850-86, Gary M. Fink notes that the documents reveal the “resilient Marxist influence in Gompers’ social and economic thought,” but also “illustrate a conservative strain in Gompers’ trade union philosophy that would become increasingly dominant in his later years.” (Review. of

Stuart B. Kaufman, ef al editors, The Samuel Gompers Papers, Volume I, The Making of Union Leader, 1850-86 [Urbana, 1986], in Journal of Southern History, 1987, p. 238.)

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strong show of strength by socialist delegates, resulted in the election of John McBride. At the 1896 convention, Gompers was again elected president, and he held the office until his death in 1924. But to Gompers the trade unions were meant to be “organizational centers” for the skilled, to enable craft workers to protect their monopoly on jobs at the expense of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. To be sure, Gompers again and again claimed to be working for the whole American working class, and he insisted that the AFL spoke for all workers and not merely the skilled. But while saying this he continued to ignore the needs of the unorganized—Black men, new immigrants, all women—the increasing millions of unskilled workers in the mass production industries. Increasingly, under Gompers’ leadership, the AFL functioned on a narrow basis without any long-range aims except to preserve the status of the skilled workers and obtain for them better wages and shorter hours. By the time of Gompers’ death, the AFL was an organization that lacked access to power, for it deliberately excluded from its ranks millions of workers in the new automobile, rubber, and steel industries, millions of Blacks and women, and unskilled immigrant workers. Gompers and his fellow trade-union leaders never recognized that a course of action that in the 1870s created a union movement, was inappropriate in 20th century American society. Ignoring the importance of political power, Gompers and his associates emphasized direct economic action against employers, even after it was clear that by itself this was inadequate to the challenges posed by increasing industrialization and monopoly capitalism. Although Gompers refused to acknowledge it, pure and simple trade-unionism was too limited a strategy to confront the challenge of 20th century America, and to meet the needs of factory workers—the unskilled, Black and women workers who constituted an ever-growing sector of the workforce.? While Friedrich A. Sorge criticized Gompers for concentrating only on the organization of skilled workers in craft unions, this leading Marxist in the United States of the late 19th century praised Gompers for helping the young AFL avoid errors of the past in its operations. Among them was a practice seen clearly in the case of the Knights of Labor, of permitting all sorts of non-workingclass elements, including even employers, to belong to a labor organization. The AFL under Gompers was exclusively for wage earners. There was room for non-workingclass elements, even employers, to work jointly with the trade unions in broad, progressive movements, but the unions had to be preserved for the workers. Another danger to be avoided was permitting the workers’ organizations to be diverted from the immediate problems facing them. A major error of the past was that of hitching the labor movement to the wagons of different panacea: peddlers, who promised an easy solution to all of the problems of

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the working class. In this category, Gompers placed such utopian movements as the single tax, currency reform, producers’ cooperatives, and other enticing, all-embracing plans to lift the working class out of wage slavery by a shortcut. _ One of the results of the middle-class reformist panaceas was that they tended to push the class struggle out of the minds of the workers by spreading the illusion that they could be transformed into farmers, independent businessmen, and cooperative self-employers in an economic system under which workers were likely to remain workers throughout their lives. “A struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world,” the American Federation of Labor stated in its first constitution, words written by Gompers, “a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer which grows in intensity from year to year,” threatening “disastrous results to the toiling millions,” These words reflect the influence of Marxism on the young Samuel Gompers, who wrote to Frederick Engels, the cofounder of Marxism, on January 9, 1891: “I have respect for your judgments,” and described himself “as a student of your writings and those of Marx and others in the same field.” While Engels criticized Gompers and the early AFL for “their narrowminded trade union standpoint,”* he credited him with having “more workers behind him ... than the S.L. [Socialist Labor] Party” in the United States. Sorge, who transmitted the correspondence, agreed with Engels. He viewed the AFL in its formative stage, despite weaknesses and inadequacies, as an important step forward for the American working class. Although it represented only a small minority of the American working class, the skilled workers, its approach was a working-class approach, unlike many of its predecessors that had a middle class outlook. The early Gompers, in correspondence, speeches, and published writings encouraged the “thorough organization” of the entire working class, including Blacks, women and unskilled workers—but not Chinese or Japanese—urging labor solidarity on grounds of economic self-interest. “You must bear in mind the fact that employers of labor care very little whether the workers in certain industries are men or women,” he warned a correspondent. “What they are after, particularly, is to get the work done cheaper and unless you make friends of your women coworkers you will make enemies of them; and both antagonistic to each other you will be * In Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, which he edited, Kenneth Lapides suggests

that three ideas constitute the heart of Marx’s and Engels’ theoretical contribution on the trade unions. The first is that “trade unions are an inevitable outcome of the rise of industry and the growth of the working class.” The second is that the trade union struggle is “an essential precondition for any political transformation that the workers might initiate.” The third is that trade unionism is “insufficient to abolish the root cause of the workers’ distress, the labor-capital relation, and that without efforts to “broaden their aims and defend all of society’s oppressed, the unions risked degenerating into almost reactionary enclaves ofprivilege.” (Westport, Conn., 1987.) [Now available in paperback from International Publishers, N.Y.]

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

playing into the hands of your employers.” Similarly, with respect to Black workers, Gompers wrote: “If we fail to organize and recognize the colored wage workers we cannot blame them very well if they accept our challenge of enmity and do all they can to frustrate our purposes. If we fail to make friends of them, the employing class won’t be so shortsighted and will play them against us. Thus if common humanity will not prompt us to have their co-operation, an enlightened self-interest should.” Words, of course, are cheap. But in its formative years, the AFL did practice what Gompers preached. In 1891 Gompers visited the national convention of the National Association of Machinists to persuade the machinists to remove their constitutional ban against Blacks. When the delegates refused, and insisted on their discriminatory policy, the AFL, at Gompers’ insistence, sponsored the formation of a new union, the International Machinists Union. In the call for its founding Convention, the new union emphasized that it would seek to unite the machinists into an organization “based upon the principles which recognize the equality of all men working at our trade regardless of religion, race or color.” On the basis of this principle, the new Machinists’ Union promptly received a charter from the AFL. A similar policy was adopted at this time by Gompers toward the Brotherhood of Boilermakers and the Iron Ship Builders of America. When those two national organizations consolidated their forces in 1893, a color line was inserted into the constitution, limiting membership to “white workers” in these trades. The AFL not only refused to grant the union a charter, but assisted in organizing an independent union of Boiler Makers which opened its ranks to Blacks as well as whites. The union promptly received a charter from the Federation. But Gompers yielded swiftly to the racists within AFL, and by 1895 he had began to countenance admission of unions to the federation that openly excluded Blacks. By 1900 he endorsed Jim Crow unionism, and refused Black workers charters to federated locals when their affiliated unions would not grant jurisdiction. He now placed the blame for exclusion and segregation on the Black workers themselves, insisting that they were “natural scabs who were not fit for inclusion in the labor movement.” By the turn of the century, Gompers had become a leading racist in the labor movement. This was especially reflected in his attitude toward Asian workers. His pamphlet Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Cooleeism: Which Shall Survive? is replete with vicious attacks on Chinese workers, and was widely distributed by the Asian Exclusion League. Gompers, however, was a persistent and consistent champion of women’s suffrage, and he pleaded with AFL affiliates to organize women workers.But he often undercut his appeals by publicly voicing time-worn

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stereotypes about working women. Most women, he argued, worked for “pin money,” and he opposed their continuing to work on the ground that they undermined the wages of male workers. He believed that woman’s place was in the home, and that they should not venture into industry. He attributed the small numbers of women unionists primarily to the refusal of women to join men in a drive to improve standards in the industries in which they were employed. Not even the great uprising of the needle trades’ women workers in the strikes of 1909 to 1913 could cause him to change his male supremacist opinion. At the insistence of Gompers, the AFL constitution contained the following clause: “Party politics, whether they be Democratic, Republican, Socialistic, Populistic, Prohibition, or any other shall have no place in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor.” He fought any attempt to alter that stand. In a lecture on the subject, “Should a Political Labor Party Be Formed?” he emphasized that a labor party was, at least in this country, as politically impossible as producers’ cooperatives and socialism were industrially impossible. What, then, should organized labor do in politics? Simply demand from government immunity from interference so that it could use its own economic collective power to bargain with employers. The government, he asserted, should be neutral in labor disputes, leaving it to the unions and employers to settle their disputes at the bargaining table. When it became clear that this was a naive view of the way in which government in the United States operated, Gompers reluctantly conceded that labor would have to engage in political action. But it would do so only under the slogan, “reward your friends and punish your enemies.” Under no circumstances would labor support independent political action; moreover, labor’s political goals were to be limited. Gompers opposed government-sponsored workmen’s compensation and old-age pensions, except for government employees; eight-hour laws; unemployment compensation; and comprehensive health insurance. From the beginning, Gompers championed voluntarism, and the use of economic power alone to gain labor’s demands. The Federation had always opposed eight-hour laws, but after 1914 the American Federationist, edited by Gompers, was filled with antistate articles. The Federation did favor legislation, but only to help those groups that were perceived as not able to help themselves. These groups were primarily women, children and federal employees. Who can ever forget the following amazing statement Gompers wrote in the American

Federationist in 1916? Sore and sad as I am by the illness, the killing, the maiming of so many of my fellow workers, I would rather see that go on for years, minimized and mitigated by the organized labor movement, than to give up one jot of the freedom of the workers to strive and struggle for their own emancipation through their own efforts.

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Although he opposed territorial annexation after the war with Spain in 1898, and became avice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, Gompers endorsed extension of United States commerce, power, and influence by peaceful means. A strong United States, he argued, could control the markets of the world without territorial annexation. To counter revolutionary ideologies current among Caribbean and Latin American workers, Gompers in 1918 formed the Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL). He remained its president from its formation to his death. The aim of the PAFL was to build federation-like unions south of the border, and to establish an AFL-PAFL alliance to facilitate the expansion of United States trade and investment in the Caribbean and Latin America. Like most trade unionists of the era, Gompers was a firm opponent of the use of force to settle disputes between nations. He considered himself a “doctrinaire pacifist,” and served as vice-president of the National Peace Congresses of 1907 and 1909, which had as their main purpose the abolition of war as an instrument to enforce the nation’s foreign policy. When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Gompers immediately denounced the conflict as “unnatural, unjustified and unholy” and “condemnable from every viewpoint.” In the October 1914 issue of the American Federationist (which he founded and edited from 1894 to his death), Gompers cautioned against American involvement in the European conflict, contending that the United States should pursue a policy of neutrality. Then, on November 18, 1915, Gompers helped defeat a resolution opposing military training presented to the AFL convention. In so doing, he announced that he was through with pacifism. He now called for abandoning the slogan “Peace at any price” and urged that American aid to the Allies in winning the war of “democracy over autocracy.” It was impossible “for any important world power to remain neutral,” Gompers insisted, and “the United States could not escape becoming involved in the European war.” He conceded that he “had been living in a fool’s paradise,” and argued that “after all it was necessary for men to be prepared to defend themselves.” By October 1916, convinced that America’s entry into the war was almost certain and that preparedness was urgent, Gompers accepted the leadership of the Committee on Labor of the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense. In March 1917 he presided over a conference of 148 trade union leaders he had summoned to Washington to draw up a Labor Declaration on entrance into the war. The conference adopted a statement, drawn up by Gompers, that concluded: “Should our country be drawn into the maelstrom of the European conflict, we ... offer our services to our country in every field of activity.” Thus led by Gompers, the AFL pledged its support for the administration’s drive to enter the war and so, when President Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress on April 2,

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1917, to ask for a declaration against Germany, “he was already assured of the support of organized labor.” Respectability had been growing for Gompers since he met regularly after 1900 with the leaders of the trustified industries (many of them antiunion) in the National Civic Federation, an organization devoted to steering the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods in the direction of collaboration with employers against radical influences in the labor movement. Support for Gompers increased with the election of Wilson as president in 1912—a victory Gompers attributed largely to the AFL. The success of his political philosophy of rewarding friends and punishing enemies seemed crystallized in the passage during the first Wilson administration of the Clayton Act, which appeared to remove unions from the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Gompers hailed the act as “Labor’s Magna Carta.” In 1916 Wilson congratulated Gompers on the occasion of the laying of the foundation of the new AFL headquarters, and the following year the president attended the AFL convention. By then it seemed to many that Gompers was the second most important man in the nation. During the war the AFL had doubled its membership to four million. This tremendous growth appeared to vindicate “Gomperism,” as the AFL president’s labor philosophy was now called. Indeed, Gompers was convinced that those principles would bring increasing victories for labor in the postwar world. But he was bitterly disappointed. “And now,” he declared in 1920, “after giving that loyal service, and our dead are buried in Flanders Field, we come to the United States to find the reaction. Where we entered the war for the destruction of militarism, and particularly for the destruction of autocracy, we find industrial autocracy being forced upon the people of the United States.” The liquidation of the war industry, the mounting antiunion offensive— supported by the national, state and local governments—and a hysterical “red scare,” stimulated by the Bolshevik Revolution, combined to bring about a sharp decline in union membership. But the workers struck foreibly against employers’ attempts to destroy their organizations. In Seattle, a walkout of shipyard workers was transformed into a five-day general strike; textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts struck; hundreds of thousands of steel workers in the mills of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana were idled; police in Boston went out; and half a million workers in the coal regions left the mines. All fought for wage increases to meet the rising cost of living, reduced hours (from twelve hours a day, seven days a week in steel), and union recognition. The strikers received little attention or sympathy from Gompers. On the contrary, the “old fox” as he was now referred to, made no effort to conceal his horror at labor’s growing militancy. In Europe at the Versailles Peace

4

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TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

Conference (having been appointed by Wilson a member of the Commission on International Labor Legislation) during the Seattle general strike, he deplored the class character of the struggle. He refused to support most of the other strikes, and although he did give his blessing to the steel strike, he undercut the revolt by insisting that the craft union structure be maintained in unionizing the enormous mass-production industry—an important factor in the strike’s failure. As the open-shop drive advanced and strikes ended in labor defeats, even Gompers began to have second thoughts about the success of his policies. Perhaps the cruelest blow came from the Supreme Court. “When the Clayton Act was enacted,” he wrote in the American Federationist, “it was believed that the day of injunctions in industrial disputes was past. The law provided that no more such injunctions would be issued.” It did not take long for workers to realize how frail was “Labor’s Magna Carta.” The Supreme Court decision in the Hitchman’s Coal and Coke case in 1917, upholding an injunction in favor of “yellow dog” contracts requiring workers not to join unions, was followed in the 1921 decision in the Duplex Printing Case, undermining the main provisions of the Clayton Act. Then in the Coronado decision, the United Mine Workers were once again prosecuted under the Sherman Antitrust Act. For 37 years Samuel Gompers provided the American Federation of Labor with strong and stable leadership, and his position in the Federation and rising stature as a public figure enabled him to wield influence beyond the powers vested in his office. But he used his leadership primarily to advance the cause of business unionism and craft autonomy while combatting radicalism in the labor movement. Although he became a bitter foe of the socialists, Gompers always claimed that he based his trade union principles on the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It is true that Marx and Engels attached the greatest importance to the trade unions and believed that they formed the cornerstone of the labor movement. But they had always stressed the fact that the trade unions were important because they served “as organizational centers for the broad working masses” and therefore called for “the drawing of all workers in their ranks.” In 1920 Gompers received a serious rebuke. The members, especially the younger members of Local 144 of the International Cigar Makers’ Union in New York City, a local which Gompers had founded and which had elected him its first president in 1875, rejected the AFL president as one of its delegates to the AFL convention. The rejection was a double blow since it occurred on Gompers’ 70th birthday. “I believe,” explained Morris Brown, secretary of the Local, “that the failure to elect Mr. Gompers as a delegate was due to the younger men in the union. They are progres-

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sive and believe Mr. Gompers is too conservative to advance the cause of

labor with proper speed.”1°

In a withering analysis of Gompers’ last AFL convention, William Z. Foster wrote bitterly: “In the 43 years of its history, the American Federation of Labor has held many reactionary conventions. But the one in session in El Paso, Texas, Nov. 17-25 [1924] was the worst ever. Absolutely nothing of a constructive nature was done. On the contrary, a strong drift to the right, to more intensified class collaboration was evidenced in all its deliberations.” He continued: The Trade Union Educational League militants introduced a series of resolutions dealing with leading points in the left-wing program. These included resolutions calling for a General Labor Congress, to consist of representatives of trade unions, workers, political parties, shop committees, the unemployed, etc., for the purpose of consolidating the ranks of labor politically and industrially and to launch a militant attack on the capitalist system; the recognition of Soviet Russia, abolition of racial discrimination against the Negroes; nationalization of the mines and railroads; amalgamation of the trade unions; organization of and relief for the unemployed; demand that all the forces in the Pan-American Federation of Labor be mobilized for a struggle against American imperialism; condemnation of imperialist schemes against China; demand that the RILU plan for international unity be endorsed, and the solidarity of labor be achieved; protest against the criminal syndicalist laws; release of Mooney, Billings,* Ford, Suhr, Kline, [sic]** Sacco, Vanzetti and other political prisoners; condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion.

“Almost all of these propositions,” Foster noted, “were either ignored or voted down overwhelmingly.” After discussing other aspects of class collaboration and support of U.S. imperialism manifested at the El Paso convention, Foster concluded: In this crisis the duty of the left wing is clear and imperative. The revolutionaries in the Trade Union Educational League must renew the fight for the adoption of militant policies and leadership by the unions. The Gompersian leaders are hopelessly reactionary, nothing constructive can come from them .... The only quarter from which leadership can come is from the left wing. The fate of the labor movement depends upon the growth and development of the revolutionary forces in the unions. We must realize this fact and redouble our efforts for the extension and establishment of the Trade Union Educational League in every phase and stage of the trade union movement.

In our next volume we will discuss the degree to which this challenge was realized.

* For Mooney, Billings, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United

States 7: 78-95. ** For Charles Cline, see Foner, U.S. Labor Movement and Latin America, pp. 128-29.

NOTES 19. Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker,1619-1981, New York,

PREFACE 1.See

David

Montgomery,

“Trends

in

Working Class History,” Labour Le Travail 19 (Spring, 1987): 18; David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays in Twentieth Century Struggle, New York, 1980, pp. 48-81; Stanley M. Jacony, Employing Bureaucracy: Manag-

ers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945, New York, 1985.

2. Sylvia Kopald, Rebellion in Labor Unions, New York, 1924, p.123 3. Political Affairs, May 1937, pp. 35-36 4. Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions, Bloomington, 1980, p. 24

1982, p. 132

20. William M. Tuttle, Jr, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, New York, 1970, pp. 130-32 21. New York Call, Feb. 14, 1921; Ralph Richard Watkins, “Black Buffalo, 19201927,” Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Buffalo, 1972, pp. 88-89

22. New York Times, April 9, 1922 23. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, pp. 134-36; New York Times, Aug. 18, 1921 24, Zaragosa Vargas, “Mexican Auto Workers at Ford Motor Company, 1918 1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, American

Culture, University of Michigan, 1984,

:

5. The Nation, Sept. 5, 1987, p. 39

pp. 238-39

6. David Montgomery, “Thinking About American Workers in the 1920s,” Inter-

national Labor and Working Class History 32 (Fall, 1987): 16-17

7. Labor History 20 (Summer 1979): 279

25. New York Times, Jan. 25, 1921 26. 27. 28. 29.

Ibid., Jan. 7, 1921 Ibid., July 12,17, 1921 Ibid., Jan. 24, 1921 Feder, p. 314

30. Philadelphia CHAPTER 1. POSTWAR DEPRESSION 1. Robert

H. Zieger, American

American

Unions,

Workers

1920-1985,

New

York, 1986, p. 3

2. Leah Hannah Feder, Unemployment Relief in Periods of Depression: A Study of Measures Adopted in Certain American Cities, 1857 Through 1922, New York, 1936, p. 292; New York Times,

192

34. Advance, Sept. 30, 1921 35. New York Times, Sept. 16, 1921 36. Ibid., Sept. 17, 21, 1921

37. Feder, p. 319 38. New York Times, Sept. 10, 1921 39. Advance, Oct. 21, 1921

4, Advance, July 22, 1921

5. New York Times, Jan. 24, 1921 “Business,”

AO. Ibid., Aug. 6, Oct. 28, 1921

in Harold

41. Udo Sautter, “Government and Unemployment: The Use of Public Works be-

Stears, ed., Civilization in the United States, New York, 1922, p. 414; John A.

fore the New Deal,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 60-62; Daniel Nelson, Unemployment Insurance: The American Experience, 1915-1935, Madison, 1969, pp. 13-19; John B. Andrews, “A Practical Program for the Pre-

Hobson, Economics of Unemployment, New York, 1923, p. 23; John A. Hobson, “The Limited Market,” Nation 120 (1927): 150-52; Advance, Oct. 7, 1921,

pp. 5-6

7. Advance, May 20, 1921

vention of Unemployment in America,”

8. New York Times, Feb. 4, 1921

American Labor Legislation Review 4

9. Advance, Sept. 30, 1921 10. 11. 12. 13.

(May 1914): 126-58

42. New York Times, Dec. 3, 1918 43. Sautter, p. 65

Feder, p. 292 Advance, July 22, 1921 Ibid. Ibid., July 29, 1921

4A, Ibid.

45. ee York Times, Feb. 26, March 5,

14. New York Times, Oct. 31, 1921 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ibid., Oct. Ibid., Jan. Ibid., Feb. Ibid.,-Nov.

13,

(Oct. 1, 1921): 15; Feder, p. 318 33. eo Evening Transcript, Jan. 16-23,

3. New York Times, Jan. 24, 1921 Garrett,

Jan.

31. Feder, p. 314 32. William L. Chernyry, “Mr. Zero, the Man Who Feeds the Hungry,” Survey 47

Sept. 25, 1921

6. Garet

Public Ledger,

1921; New York Times, Jan. 14, 1921

191

46. 47. 48. 49.

2, 1921 1, 1922 10, 1923 15, 1921

374

Socialist World, Aug. 1921, p. 6 New York Times, Sept. 10, 1921 Advance, Sept. 30, 1921 Ibid., Oct. 7, 1921

NOTES

375

50. New York Times, Sept. 10, 1921 51. Feder, p. 296 52. Report of the President’s Conference on Unemployment, Washington, D.C., 1921, p. 27 53. Ibid., pp. 32-34

ticularly women workers. (Robert R. Brooks, “The United Textile Workers of America,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1935). As we shall see, its ac tions and policies changed temporarily during the 1922 strike. The Amalgamated Textile Workers of

54. Advance, Sept, 30, 1921

55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Report of the President’s Conference on Unemployment, pp. 122-35; Ad-

America was formed late in 1918 because

vance, Oct. 7, 1921 58. Advance, Oct. 7, 1921

59. 60. 61. 62.

Ibid. Ibid., Oct. 14, 1921 Ibid., Oct. 30, 1921 Feder, p. 319; Advance, Oct. 30, 1921

63. Mary Van Kleeck, “Unemployment Ended?” Survey 41 (June 15, 1921):

387-88

64. B. German in Advance, Sept. 30, 1921

65. Ibid., Oct. 7, 1921

66. New York Times, Feb. 7, 1921

67. Ibid., Sept. 25, 1921 68. Industrial Worker, Sept. 24, 1921 69. Dr. Leo Wolman, “What To Do About Unemployment,” Advance, Oct. 6, 1921 70. Advance, Oct. 7, 1921

71. Ibid., Oct. 28, 1921 72. Ibid., Oct. 7, 28, 1921 73. Ibid., March 10, 1922

CHAPTER 2. THE NEW ENGLAND TEXTILE STRIKE OF 1922

=.

1. Evans Clark, “Textile Force vs. Textile

Facts,” Nation 114 (April 19, 1922): 46364 Tilden,

“New

unionists

in New

University, 1984. See also Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8 (1988): 126-140.

76. Ibid., Sept. 19, 1923

E.

textile

erson, New Jersey and Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia

74. New York Times, Feb. 6, 1922 75. Advance, June 9, 1922

2.Leonard

many

England had lost faith in the United Textile Workers and decided to create their own militant, radical organization. Headed by the former clergyman, A. J. Muste, the fledgling union was sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. It included many former IWW members, opponents of World War I, and foreign-born workers who had been strongly influenced by the Shop Steward Movement in England, and especially by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The ATW conducted several bitter strikes in 1919, especially in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The union’s militancy and its victory in Lawrence helped it to grow in 1920 to some 50,000 members. (David J. Goldberg, “Immigrants, Intellectuals and Industrial Unions: The 1919 Textile Strike and the Experience of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America in Passaic and Pat-

England

Strike,” Monthly Labor Review 16 (Jan. 1923): 899-901; “Closed Mill Gates,” Survey 73 (March 4, 1922): 884; Edmund B. Thomas, Jr., “The New England

Textile Strike of 1922,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 15 (Jan. 1982): 21 3. Dexter Philip Arnold, “A Row of Bricks’: Worker Activism in the Merrimack Valley Textile Industry, 19121922,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1985, pp. 758-62 4. Ibid., pp. 769-75 5. Ibid., p. 778 a. The United Textile Workers of America, a conservative, class-collaborationist union under the leadership of John Golden, had a long history of maintaining a craft union outlook and ignoring the needs of the unskilled workers in the mills, espe-

cially the foreign-born, and again par-

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Legere lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he worked as a machinist

and railroad clerk. As a member of the Socialist Party’s industrial union wing, he aided Connecticut textile workers during the spring of 1912 and later coordinated speaking tours for the Ettor-Giovanitti Defense Committee. That fall, the IWW sent him to help textile strikers in Little Falls, New York. He was promptly arrested on trumped-up charges and spent a year in jail. Upon his release, he began a career as a professional actor. While touring Canada in 1919, he observed the groundswell of unrest that led to the Winnipeg General Strike. Although deported to the United States by the Royal Mounted Police, Legere remained a champion of the Canadian One Big Union. He formally split with the Amalgamated Textile Workers’ Union at the end of 1920, when he came to Lawrence to lead the OBU’s 1922 strike.

6. Robert R. Brooks, “The United Textile Workers of America,” Ph.D. dissertation,

376

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

Yale University, 1935, pp. 307-08; David J. Goldberg, “Immigrants, Intellectuals and Industrial Unions: The 1919 Textile Strike and the Experience of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America in Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey, and Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1984, pp. 505-06; David Montgomery, “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United States, 1916-1923,” Labour/Le Travail 13 (Spring 1984): 186 7. Brooks, p. 308 8. Tilden, p. 901 9. Thomas, Jr., p. 22; Goldberg, p. 506 10. Arnold, pp. 770-71 11. Ibid., p. 778 12. Ibid. 13. Goldberg, p. 504; Tilden, p. 904 14. Advance, Sept. 12, 1922; Thomas, Jr., p. 27 15. Arnold, p. 764 16. Pawtucket Journal, Feb. 24, 1922; Tilden, p. 908 17. Tilden, p. 908; New York World quoted in Advance, Oct. 27, 1922 18. Tilden, p. 909 19. Thomas, SJr., p. 23 20. Ibid., p. 24 21. Ibid., p. 23

22. Tilden, pp. 911-12; Arnold, p. 779 23. “An Interview with Luigi Nardella,” Radical History Review | (Spring 1974):

120-35 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Tilden, pp. 910, 919-21 Arnold, pp. 770-73 Thomas, Jr., pp. 24-25 Advance, Sept. 12, 1922 Thomas, Jr., p. 23

29. Ibid., p. 24 30. Advance, April 21, 1922 31. Thomas, Jr., p. 25; Tilden, p. 921 32. Thomas, Jr., p. 26

33. Ibid., p. 24 34. Ibid., p. 26 39.A Word to the Public About the Strike

of the Workers Employed in the Part-

chill Mills, n.p., 1922; Thomas, Jr., p. 24 36. “The Strikes and the Public,” Current Opinion 73 (Sept. 1922): 315 37. Clark, pp. 463-64; Herbert A. Jump, “A Hundred Acres of Industrial Idleness,” Outlook 130 (April 26, 1922): 690 38. Pawtucket Journal, April 15, 1922; Thomas, Jr., p. 26

39. Elsie Gluck, “The New England Textile Strike,” Advance, Oct. 27, 1922 40. Thomas, Jr., pp. 240-25; Tilden, p. 903; “A Big Strike Against Wage Cuts,” Liferary Digest 72 (Feb. 25, 1922): 13; “New England’s Textile War,” Ibid. (April 1, 1922): 14 41. Advance, Oct. 27, 1922

42. New York World, Aug. 15, 1922 43. Daily News Record, Aug. 8, 1922; Advance, Aug. 18, 1922

44. Advance, Aug. 18, 1922 45. Tilden, p. 911 46. Ibid., p. 912; Thomas, Jr., p. 28

47. New York Times, April 17, Sept. 2, 1922; Tilden, pp. 913-14 48. Thomas, Jr., p. 28; Advance, Sept. 2, 22, 1922 49. Advance, Sept. 2, 1922 50. Ibid.; Tilden, p. 913 51. Tilden, p. 916 52. Ibid., pp. 917-18 53. Advance, Sept. 2, 1922 54. Ibid., Oct. 27, 1922 55. Thomas, Jr., pp. 25-26 56. Labor Bureau to Thomas F. McMahon, President, United Textile Workers, (Ca. 1922), David J. Saposs Papers, State His-

torical Society of Wisconsin, hereinafter referred to as “Saposs Papers.” 57. Robert R. Brooks, p. 349

CHAPTER 3. SAN PEDRO STRIKE OF THE IWW 1. Upton Sinclair, The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools, Pasadena, 1924, p. 17 2. Actually, the IWW did not intend to conduct a long strike at San Pedro, and a Wobbly told a strike meeting: “This strike is going to be over in a few days ..« This organization does not believe in long strikes.” (Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1923) 3. Industrial Worker, Feb. 24, 1926 4. Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry, A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911-1914, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1963, pp. 163-64 o . John H. Krenkle, “The History of the Port of Los Angeles,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Claremont Graduate School, 1935, p. 110; Giles T. Brown, “The West Coast Phase of the Maritime Strike of

1921,” Pacific Historical Review 19 (Nov., 1950): 385-96; Paul S. Taylor, The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, New York, 1923, pp. 52, 142

>.

For repression of the IWW, see Philip S.

Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 7 (New York, 1986): 292-314 7. George P. West, “Andrew Furuseth Stands Pat,” Survey I (Oct. 15, 1923): 86-88; Taylor, pp. 143-44; Perry and Perry, pp. 163-65. For a full study of Furuseth’s career, see Hyman Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth, Emancipator of the Seamen, Berkeley, 1959.

NOTES

8. Nelson Van Valen, “Cleaning Up the Harbor’: The Suppression of the I.W.W. at San Pedro 1922-1925,” Southern California Quarterly 66 (Summer 1984): 148; Industrial Worker, Feb. 12, 19, March 19, 21, April 16, May 20, June 3,

1922 . Los Angeles Times, Oct. 20, 24, 1922 10. Perry and Perry, pp. 182-83 ss Eldridge F. Dowell, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States, Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, LXVII, Baltimore, 1939, pp. 21, 48, 145;

Woodrow C. Whitten, “Criminal Syndicalism and the Law in California: 19191927,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1946, pp. 1-3 12. Frieda Kirchway, A Survey of the Work-

ings of the Criminal Syndicalism Law of California, New York, 1926, pp. 9-10 13. Ibid., p. 19 14. Industrial Worker, Nov. 18, 1922 15. Philip S. Foner, Fellow Workers and Friends: IL.W.W. Free Speech Fights as Told by Participants, (Westport, CT), 1981, pp. 17-19. One of several objections to the free-speech fights was that while they attracted widespread attention and even aroused sympathy among many who were hostile to the doctrines and activities of the IWW, they interfered with effective conduct of strikes. Wobbly organizers objected that strikes were lost because they were allowed “to degenerate into a free-speech fight,” and charged that this was precisely what the employers wanted. Free-speech fights, it was further charged, did not result in any organizational growth in the community affected. For one thing, freespeech fighters scattered as soon as they were released from jail, and some of the most competent organizers left to participate in other free-speech battles. The purpose of the free-speech conflicts—to organize the unorganized—was forgotten in the hour of victory. 16. Los Angeles Times, Nov. 18, 1922; Industrial Worker, Nov. 25, Dec. 29, 1922

17. Industrial Worker, Dec. 16, 1922 18. Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 17, 18, 29, 1922 19: Van Valen, p. 150 . 20. Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 1922, Jan. 6, Feb. 24, 28, April 29, May 5, 1923; Van Valen, p. 151 21. Industrial Worker, Dec. 30, 1922; Art Shields, “The San Pedro Strike," Indus-

trial Pioneer I (June 1923): 15; Van Valen, p. 151

377 22. Industrial Worker, March 31, April 7, 11, 18, 25, May 5, 1923; Shields, p. 15; Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 1922

23. John

24. 20. 26.

21.

S. Gambs,

The Decline of the

ILW.W., New York, 1932, p. 215 Industrial Worker, Feb. 24, April 25, 1923; Industrial Pioneer | (June 1923): 14 Industrial Worker, May 26, 1923 Los Angeles Times, Jan. 29, 1924 George P. West, “After Liberalism Failed,” The Nation CXVI (May 30, 1923) 629; Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1923; Industrial Worker, May 23, 1923 Industrial Worker, May 9, 16, 19, 23, 1923

28. Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1923 2a. Los Angeles Times, May 3, 4, 10, 1923; Perry and Perry, p. 184

30. Van Valen, p. 156 31. “A Visit to Liberty Hill,” Industrial Pioneer I (Aug. 1923): 35-36

32. Ibid. 33. Industrial Solidarity, May 19, 1923 34. Los Angeles Times, May 11, 13, 15, 19, 1923; 1923

Los Angeles

Record,

May

14,

35. Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1923 36. Ibid., May 11, 1923; Van Valen, p. 157. Earlier the officer in charge of the Navy submarine base at San Pedro had turned down a request to quarter strikebreakers at the base. (Los Angeles

Times, May 5, 9, 1923; Van Valen, p. 157 Sts Los Angeles Record, May 15, 1923

38. Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1923; Van Valen, p. 158

3 © . Richard B. Fisher, “The Last Muckraker: The Social Orientation of the Thought of Upton Sinclair,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1953, p. 351 AO. Samuel Gompers, “Upton Sinclair’s Mental Marksmanship,” American Federationist XXI (1924): 301 4 — . Ibid., pp. 302-05. Gompers defended the AFL with four statements: (1) there are few entirely unskilled workers in the United States, and consequently the problem of their organization, he implied, was of little significance; (2) the AFL includes within its membership more unskilled workers than the IWW; (3) unskilled workers must learn to organize themselves in terms of their own special problems as the skilled workers had done; and (4) the AFL had organized the workers in such mass-employment industries as cement manufacture, freight handling, paving, and mining. 42. Upton Sinclair, The Goslings, p. 410

43. Upton Sinclair, They Call Me Carpenter, A Tale of the Second Coming, New York, 1922, p. 180

378

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

44. Quoted in Fisher, p. 351 45. Robert Whitaker to Upton Sinclair, July 9, 1918, Upton Sinclair Papers, Lilly Li-

73. Industrial Solidarity, May 26, 1923; Los

brary, Indiana University. Hereinafter cited as “Sinclair Papers, Lilly.” 46. Martin Zanger, “Politics of Confrontation: Upton Sinclair and the Launching of the ACLU in California,” Pacific Historical Review 38 (August 1969): 383 4 x . Upton Sinclair to Mooney Defense Committee, Jan. 12, 1923, Thomas J. Mooney Papers, Microfilm x-x5, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; JJ. Rychman to Upton Sinclair, Jan. 24, 1923, Sinclair Papers, Lilly 48. Zanger, p. 384

74. Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1923 75. Los Angeles Record, May 16, 1923 76. Ibid., May 17, 1923

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Upton Sinclair, The Goslings, p. 5 Ibid., p. 7 Ibid., p. 6 Ibid., p. 7 Mary Craig Sinclair, Southern Belle,

New York, 1957, p. 280 54. Upton Sinclair, “We Get Arrested a Lit-

Angeles Times, May 24, 1923; Los Angeles Examiner, May 24, 1923

77. Hartford Times, May 18, 1923. See also Cincinnati Post, May 23, 1923; John-

stown (Pa.) Daily Democrat, May 27, 1923; Baltimore Sun, May 24, 1923, clippings in Sinclair Papers, Lilly 78. Bertrand Russell to Upton Sinclair, June 2, 1923, Sinclair Papers, Lilly 79. L. Malkin to Upton Sinclair, June 12, 1923, Sinclair Papers, Lilly

80. Los Angeles Record, May 18, 1923 81. Sinclair, Autobiography, pp. 231-32; Mary Craig Sinclair, pp. 292-93 82. Zanger, p. 399 83. Upton Sinclair to HaldemanJulius, June 1, 1923, Sinclair Papers, Lilly 84. Upton Sinclair, “Civil Liberties in Los

Angeles,”

tle,” The Liberator VII July 1923): 16; The Goslings, pp. 13-15 55. Zanger, p. 390

56. Upton Sinclair, “We Get Arrested ...” The Liberator VII (uly 1923): 16-17; The Nation CXVI (June 6, 1923): 647 57. Sinclair, “We Get Arrested ...” p. 17 58. Ibid.

59. Hunter S. Kimbraugh,

“Cut Out That

Constitution Stuff,” HaldemanJulius Weekly (1923), no pagination; Zanger, pp. 391-92 60. Sinclair, “We Get Arrested ...” p. 20; Zanger, p. 392 61. — Upton Sinclair, “Upton Sinclair’s Arrest, "New Republic XXXV (July 11, 1923): 100; Upton Sinclair to Frederick R. Wedge, Jan. 10, 1927, Sinclair Papers, Lilly

Industrial

Pioneer

1 (Aug.

1923): 27-29; Clifton J. Tuft, “Rise and Progress of the American Civil Liberties

Union in Southern California,” Open Forum I (Dec. 6, 1924): 1

85. Floyd Dell, Upton Sinclair, A Study in Social Protest, New York, 1969, p. 181 86. Upton. Sinclair, “Singing Jailbirds: A Drama in Four Acts,” Pasadena, California, 1934

87. Sinclair, Autobiography, p. 232 88. Sinclair, “Singing Jailbirds,” p. 95

CHAPTER 4. WOMEN WORKERS 1. Labor, Dec. 25, 1920 2. New York Times, Jan. 28, 1923 3. Ibid., Feb. 19, 1922

62. Los Angeles Recorder, May 16-17, 1923 63. Mandus Vult Decipe, Upton Sinclair, p. 197 64. Los Angeles Record, May 16, 1923

4. Summarized in Advance, May 19, 1922 5. New York Times, April 9, 1922 6. Seattle Union Record, March 4, 1922 7. Boston Globe, reprinted in ibid., Jan. 21,

65. Mary Craig Sinclair, pp. 283-88 66. Los Angeles Times, May 16, 17, 1923;

8. Labor, Dec. 25, 1920

Los Angeles Recorder, May 16, 1923 67. Sinclair, “We Get Arrested...” p. 22; Zanger, p. 396 68. Zanger, pp. 396-97

1922

9. Labor Herald (Kansas City, Mo.), April 4, 1919

10. Ibid. 11. American

New York, 1962, pp. 228-31 70. Prince Hopkins, “Fighting For Free Speech With Upton Sinclair: What Happened in Los Angeles,” Labor Age, 1923, pp. 21-22 71. Zanger, p. 399; Los Angeles Times, May "22, 1923 72. Mary Craig Sinclair, pp. 290-91; HopPea p. 22; Los Angeles Record, May 20,

Federationist

20

(March

1921): 122; Samuel Gompers, Seventy

69. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair, 12. 13.

14. 15.

Years of Life and Labor, 2: (New York, 1925) 483-84,494,510 New York Times, March 2, 1921; Industrial Worker, June 13, 1923 Life and labor, June 1921, p. 32 Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present, New York, 1980, p. 134 Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1921, pp. 74, 85-88, 94-95

NOTES ° 16. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1922, pp. 101-02, 322-26; Theresa Wolfson,

The

Woman Worker and the Trade Unions,

New York, 1926, 17. Judith Anne Scalander, “The Women’s Bureau, 1920-1950: Federal Reaction to Female Wage Earning.” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1977, pp. 108-09

18. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1924, p. 49; Wolfson, p. 71 19. New York Times, Aug. 15, 1924 20. Elizabeth Brandeis, “Labor Legislation,” in John R. Commons, et al, A History of Labour in the United States 4 (New York, 1935): 88-122, 21. Muller v. Oregon, 208 US 412, 421-22 22.Diane Kirby, “The Wage-Earning Woman and the State: The National Women’s Trade Union League and Protective Labor Legislation, 1903-1923,"

Labor History 28 (Winter 1987): 73

23. Barbara Klascznska, “Working Women

in Philadelphia, 1900-1930,” Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 1987, p. 259 24. Quoted in Diane Kirby, “The WageEarning Women and the State:...” 25. Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and As Sisters, Columbia, Missouri, p. 142; Nancy Schrom Dye, “Feminism or unionism?: the New York Women’s Trade Union League and the labor movement,”

Feminist Studies 3(Fall. 1975): 111-25; Susan Estabrook Kennedy,"‘The want it satisfies demonstrates the need of it’: a study of Life and Labor of the Women’s Trade Union League, International

Journal of Women’s Studies 3 (1980): 301-406; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States, New York, 1982, p. 205; Alice Henry, The Trade Union

Woman,

New

York,

1915,

pp.268,275-77; Kirby, Ibid., pp. 56-57; Alice Henry, Women and Labor Movement, New York, 1923, pp. 136,141 26. Kirby, pp. 59-61

27. Ibid., p. 59 28. New York Times, Dec. 4, 1918, Feb. 13,

15, 1919 29. Ibid., May 23, 24, 1919 30. Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Protective Labor Legislation, New York, 1925, pp. 222-23, 278-350. See also Barbara Babcock et al., Sex Discrimination and the Law, Boston, 1975

3 — -Inez

Haynes

Irwin,

Story

of the

Woman’s Party, New York, 1921, pp.

18-34; Susan D. Becker, The Origins of

the Equal Rights Amendment: Ameri-

can Feminism Between the Wars, Westport, CT, 1981, pp. 16-35; Peter Geidel, “The National Woman’s Party and the

379 Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment,

1920-23,” Historian 42 (Aug, 1980): 557-80 32. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, New York, 1981, p. 118; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Discrimination against Afro-American Women in the Woman’s Movement, 1830-1920,” in Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, editors,

The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, Port Washington, NY, 1978, pp. 17-27; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920, New York, 1965, pp.

163-218, 33. Foner, Women and the American Labor

Movement, p. 139 34. Nancy F. Cott, “Feminist Politics in the 1920’s: The National Woman’s Party," Journal of American History 71(June

1984): 56-57

35. Judith Sealander, “Feminist Against Feminist: The First Phase of the Equal Rights Amendment Debate, 1923-1963,”

South Atlantic Quarterly 81(Spring 1982): 149-50 36. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 139 37.a Baker, pp. 242-44

38. Life and Labor, January, 1920, p. 60; May, 1920, p. 38; Nancy Schrom Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League of New York, 1903-1920,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1974, pp. 431-33; Foner,

Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 141; Seattle Union Record, Sept. 23, 1922

39. Seattle Union Record, Jan. 21, 1922 40. Advance, July 1, 1921 41. Labor, Jan. 3, 1923. See also Samuel

Gompers, “Equal Rights Law Will Hurt Women,” Jan. 21, 1922

42. Advance, April 7, 1922

43. New York Times, Jan. 11, 20, 1923; J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen, Social Feminism in the 1920’s, Urbana, Ill., 1973, pp. 44, Labor, Feb. 16, 23, 1923, 45. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 143 46. Joseph Andrew Lieberman, “Their Sisters Keepers: The Women’s Hours and

Wages Movement in the United States,

1890-1925,” Ph.D. dissertation, Colum-

bia University, 1971, pp. 405-28; Florence Kelley, “The District, of Columbia Minimum Wage,” Survey 45(Feb. 12,

1921): 702 47. Adkins v. Childrens Hospital of the District of Columbia, 261 US 525 (1923), 522-23; New York Times, April 10, 1923

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

380

48. Ann Corinne Hill, “Protection of Women Workers and the Courts: A Legal History," Feminist Studies 5 (Summer 1979): 254-55 49.“Minimum Wage Decision,” Equal Rights 1(April 1923): 14-15

50. New York Times, May 16, 1923; Labor, May 26, 1923

51. Labor, May 26, 1923 52. New York Times, Nov. 14, 1923 53. Labor, April 14, 21, 28, Nov. 23, 1923

54. Lieberman, p. 432 55. Labor, Aug. 25, 192356. New York Times, June 17, 1924; Mary Anderson, as told to Mary Winslow,

Women at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson, Minneapolis, 1951, p. 196 57. Cott, “Feminist Politics of the 1920’s,” p.

61 CHAPTER 5. TUEL: PREDECESSORS c. William Zebulon Foster (February 25, 1881-September 1, 1961) was born in Taunton, Massachsetts, the son of James Foster, an Irish immigrant who was forced to seek political exile in the New World in 1868 because of his nationalist Fenian

activities.

He

was

a carriage

washer and stable hand until his death in 1900. He married Elizabeth McLaughlin, a textile worker, born in England of Scotch-Irish ancestry. She bore 23 children, only five of whom lived to adulthood. She died in 1900 at age 53. In 1880, the Fosters moved to Philadelphia. Following three years in school, Foster terminated his formal education at the age of ten when he was apprenticed to a craftsman. During his ’teens, Foster did men’s work in a number of industries. In the summer of 1900, he heard a socialist soapbox orator urge the abolition of the profit system. Foster was converted to socialism and was committed to it until the end of his life. From 1901 to 1905, he shipped out in square-rigged sailing vessels. Then he quit the sea to devote himself to promoting the gospel of socialism. He belonged to the left wing of the Socialist Party. In 1909, Foster went to Spokane, Washington to report on a “free-speech struggle” for a socialist newspaper. Hundreds were jailed in the Spokane struggle, including Foster. He spent 7 weeks in prison, where he joined the IWW, the organization that was leading the freespeech fight. For the:next 10 years, Foster was identi-

fied with the movement called “syndical-

ism,” which he defined as “that tendency

in the labor movement to confine the revolutionary class struggle of the workers to the economic field, and to reduce the whole fight of the working class to simply questions of trade union action.” After a year in Europe, from 1910 to 1911, studying the labor movement and its syndicalist manifestations, Foster “became convinced that the policy of forming left-wing unions, such as the IWW, was wrong—the leftwingers, he argued, should "bore from within" the established AFL unions. Failing to win the IWW leadership over to this view, he left the organization, became a car inspector, and joined the AFL, inside which he was to work from 1917-1928.

Arthur Zipser’s Working Class Giant: The Life of William Z. Foster (New York, 1987), while flawed, fills a void in the history of American radicalism. While biographies of Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Daniel De Leon, Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Victor Berger have been published, until Zipser’s book appeared there was no single volume available on Foster’s life. A more detailed study is Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1988, but it covers only the period up to 1926. Nevertheless, it is a carefully researched work, using many sources for the first time. I have benefitted from Dr. Johanningsmeier’s references to these important but hardly used sources. 1. Typed transcript of the hearings of the Commission of the Interchurch World Movement, Box 26, Saposs Papers, pp.

24, 25, 26, 30, 35 2. “An Open Letter to John Fitzpatrick, Labor Herald, Jan. 12, 1924, p. 6 3. Arthur Zipser, Working Class Giant:

The Life of William Z. Foster, New York, 1981, pp. 61-62 4. Current Literature 52 (June 1912): 685; (May 1912): 555; Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1988, pp. 172-73, hereinafter referred to as “Johanningsmeier.” 5. The Agitator, Sept. 15, 1912 6. The Syndicalist, Jan. 1, 1913 7. W. Z. Foster in The International, San Diego, Aug., 1914; The Toiler, Nov. 1913, Jan., 1914

90 The Toiler, Nov., 1913, July 1914; Earl

C. Ford and Wm. Z. Foster, Syndicalism, Chicago, 1913, pp. 40-41

NOTES 9. The Toiler, April-May 1914; The Syndicalist, March 15, 1913 10. The Syndicalist, Feb. 15, May 1, July 1,

Sept. 1-15, 1913; The Toiler, Nov., 1913;

Feb. 5, 1914 ~ The Syndicalist, 11. Feb.

1913

15, March

15,

12. The Toiler, Feb., 1914 13. Interview with Earl R. Browder, July 23, 1963

14. Ford and Foster, pp. 30-31; The Interna-

tional, Aug., 1914

15. Earl R. Browder, “How I Can Help Bring

About the General Strike,” The Toiler, Jan., 1914 16. Ford and Foster, pp. 5-6; W. Z. Foster

381

37. The Syndicalist, March

15, 1913; St.

Louis Post-Dispatch, June 17, 18, 24, 30, 1913; The Toiler, April-May 1914

38. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 64 39. The Toiler, Nov., 1913, March, 1914; Kansas City Star, July 14-16, Nov. 12, 14, 20, 1913; Interview with Earl Browder, July 23, 1963 40. C. F. Steckhahn, “The Labor Forward Movement in Greater Kansas City,” The Toiler, April-May 1914; Kansas City Star, March 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, April 5, 6, 8, 1914 41. American Federationist 14 (June 1914): 501; Interview with Earl Browder, July 25, 1963; The Toiler, April-May 1914

and A. Jones, “The Future Society,” The

42. The Toiler, April-May 1-14; Kansas City

Toiler, March 1914 17. The Toiler, January 1914 18. Ford and Foster, pp. 5-6; Foster and Jones, “The Future Society,” The Toiler, March 1914

44. American Federationist 14 (June 1914): 501; Proceedings, AFL Convention,

19. William Z. Foster, Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom, Chicago, n.d., p. 23 20. Ford and Foster, p. 5 21. Ibid., pp. 48-49

22. The Syndicalist, Sept. 1-15, 1913 23. The Syndicalist (London), March-April 1913; The Toiler, July 1914 24. Eugene V. Debs Scrapbooks, “Labor Struggles, 1912-13,” p. 19, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University; William Z. Foster, “The Molders Convention,” International Socialist Review 12

(Dec. 1912), pp. 486-87 25. International

Molders’

Journal

50

(1914): 12,459 26. Amalgamated Journal, Jan. 4, 1912; The Agitator, July 15, 1912; Jesse S. Robin-

son, The Amalgamated Association of

Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, Baltimore, 1920, p. 55 27. Amalgamated Journal, Aug. 15, 1912 28. The Syndicalist, Jan. 1, May 1, 1913; Robinson, p. 55

29. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 4 (New York, 1965): 219-32 30. British Columbia Federationist, Dec. 13, 1912, Jan. 17, 1913; The Syndicalist, March 1, 1913

31.B. C. Federationist, Dec. 13, 1912; Cleveland Socialist, Feb. 8, 1913 32. The Syndicalist, May 1, Sept. 1-15, 1913 33. The Toiler, July 1914 34. Ibid., April-May 1914 35. Vernon H. Jensen, Lumber and Labor, New York, 1945, p. 122; William Z. Fos-

ter, From Bryan to Stalin, New York, 1937, p. 66 36. The Toiler, Jan. 1914

Star, April 2428, May 1, 1914 43. Kansas City Star, May 1, 2, 1914 1914, pp. 59-61

45. American Federationist 14 (June 1914): 501 46. American Federationist 14 (April 1914): 309; (May 1914): 421; June 1914): 501; Max Dezettel to Samuel Gompers, June 4, 1914, American Federation of Labor Correspondence

47. Proceedings, AFL Convention, pp. 5961; Interview with Earl Browder, July 23, 1963

48. The Toiler, Jan.Feb., 1914, Jan., 1915;

Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 68 49. The Toiler, Jan., 1915

50. Foner, History of Labor Movement, 4: 371-72

51. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 67

52. The Syndicalist, Feb. 15, March 1, May 1, June 1, Sept. 1-15, 1913

53. Interview with Earl Browder, July 23,

1963 5A. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 73 55. Ibid., p. 74

56. Weekly People, April 24, July 24, 1915; Solidarity, Oct. 2, 1915 57. William Z. Foster, Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom, Chicago, n.d. 58. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 74 59. Ibid., pp. 81-82 60. Ibid., pp. 82-83 61. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 5 (New York, 1980): 320-22; Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York, 1979), pp. 368-76

62. Johanningsmeier, p. 245 63. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 6 (New

York, 1982):

178; Proceedings,

AFL

~

382

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA Convention,

1915, pp. 132-46, 224-26;

Foster, From Bryan to-Stalin, p. 84 64. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 85 d. Part of the reason for this was the imprisonment of a number of the Leagues’ leading members for their opposition to World War I as an imperialist conflict, seeking a “redivision of the world’s colonies” among the major powers. Earl Browder and his brother, William, leaders of the Syndicalist movement in Missouri, were sentenced to serve one year

each in Platte County jail for “resisting the draft” and two years each in Leavenworth for “conspiracy to block the draft.” The two were convicted after they had formed the “League for Democratic Control,” which sought a court order to restrain the governor and sheriff from making the draft laws operational. Earl Browder served 28 months in 1917-1919 for his opposition to the war. (Roger Elliot Rosenberg, “Guardian of the Fortress: A Biography of Earl Russell Browder, U. S. Communist General Secretary from 1930-1944,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981, p. 42). 6 o . David Montgomery, Workers Control in America, New York and London, 1979, p. 82; “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United

States, 1916-1923,” Labour/Le Travail 13 (Spring 1984): 104 6 2 David Jay Bercuson, “Western Labour Radicalism and the One Big Union:

Myths and Realities,” Journal of Canadian Studies, May 1974, pp. 3-11 67. Ibid., pp. 8-9 68. David Jay Bercuson, “The One Big Un-

ion in Washington,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 69 (1978): 128-29. 69. Ibid., p. 130 70. Ibid.; Seattle Union Record, June 23, 1919 Bercuson, “OBU in Washington,” p. 131 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., p. 132 73. Ibid., p. 133; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, New York, 1987,

pp. 342-43;

Bercuson,

.., “The

ane Big Union in Washington,” pp. 133-

Philip Taft writes that “the One Big Union tried to invade the United States,” but “made little impact upon the labor scene in the United States.” (Organized

Labor in American Industry, New York,

~ 1964, p. 344.) On the other hand, David Jay Bercuson argues that the One Big Union in Canada and the Pacific. Northwest “represented a greater potential threat to the AFL than any other rival

movement up to that time, including the IWW. OBU advocates were not bums or blindlestiffs, but skilled tradesmen, veterans of craft unionism who attacked from within; they included Canadians who withdrew their locals, lodges, councils, and federations from the AFL, and the Washingtonians, who claimed that secession was not their intent.” (“The One Big Union in Washington,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 69 (1978): 134.) Although Bercuson omits the influence of the OBU in the New England textile mills, especially in Lawrence after the 1919 strike, he exaggerates the influence of the organization in the Pacific Northwest. More important, to identify the IWW only with “bums or bindlestiffs” is inexcusable elitism and ignores the influence of the wobblies among industrial workers and other non-migratory workers. Taft, in turn, ignores the influence of the

OBU in the Pacific Northwest and emphasizes only its temporary impact in the New England textile industry. 74. William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, p. 134 75. David Montgomery, “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United Statest 1916-1923,” La-

bour/LeTravail (Spring 1984): 110-12 76. Ludwig Lore in American Labor Year Book, 1921, New York, 1922, pp-46. 77. Melvyn Dubofsky & Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: Biography, New York, 1977, pp. 88-90 78. Ibid., p, 191. 79. David J. Saposs to Nathan Fine, October 21, 1921, Saposs Papers

80. Ibid. 81. Justice, Oct. 29, 1921

82. Ibid., Oct. 30, 1921 83. Ibid., Nov. 2, 1921

84. Philip Taft, The AFL in the Time of Gompers, New York, 1959, p. 213 85. Advance, Oct. 22, 1921 86. Ibid.

CHAPTER 6. THE TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: FORMATION AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT 1. New Majority, July 31, 1920 2. William Z. Foster to David J. Saposs, Oct. 11, 1920, Saposs Papers

3. Advance, Dec. 10, 1920 4. New York Times, Dec. 8, 1920 5. Advance, Dec. 10, 1920 6. New Majority, Nov. 20, 1920 7. Ibid.

NOTES 8. “Report to First National Conference of Trade Union Educational League,” La-

bor Herald, Sept. 1922 9. William Z. Foster, From Bryan Stalin, New York, 1937, pp. 23-25

383 bor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, New York, 1982, pp. 222-29

34. Justice, March 8, 1921

to

10. V.. Lenin, “LeftWing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, New York, 1934, pp. 36-38; Emphasis in original. See also Philip S. Foner, “Lenin and the American Working Class Movement,” in Daniel Mason and Jessica Smith, editors,

35. Advance, march 15, 1921 36. Ibid., Dec. 16, 1921

37. Robert 38.

Lenin’s Impact on the United States, New York, 1970, pp. 127-29

1 _ . Roger Elliot Rosenberg, “The Early Ca-

39.

reer of Earl Browder,” Review of Politics 39 July 1977): 349-50 12. William Z. Foster in Foreword to Lenin and the Trade Union Movement by A. Losovsky, Chicago, n.d., pp. 5-6; Earl R. Beckner, “The Trade Union Educational League and the American Labor Movement,” Journal of Political Economy 13 (Aug. 1925): 415-16; Arthur Zipser,

Working Class Giant: The Life of William Z. Foster, New York, 1981, pp. 6266 13. William Z. Foster, “What Ails American Radicalism?” Socialist Review, April-May 1921, pp. 36-40 14. George Morris, “Sixty Years of Commu-

nist Trade Union Work," Political Af fairs 58 (Aug.-Sept. 1979): 5-6 15. Morris, p. 6

16. New York Times, Feb. 24, 1921 17. William E. Bohn, “Labor’s Answer to the Open-Shop Drive,” Socialist Review, April-May 1921, p. 42 18. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1921, pp.

19-21, 46-52, 182-96 19. Advance, July 15, 1921

20. Ibid., July 1, 8, 15, 1921 21. Ibid., Feb. 11, 1921; New York Times, Feb. 13, 1921 22. Advance, July 15, 1921 23. New York Times, Jan. 15, 1921 24. David J. Saposs to Editor, Labor Age (1922), Saposs Papers

25. Advance, Sept. 9, 1921 26. New York, 1921, pp. 33-34, 56-57 27. Notes dated 1921 in Saposs Papers

28. Ibid. 29. Labor Herald, quoted in “The Federated Press,” copy in Saposs Papers 30. Notes dated 1921 in Saposs Papers; James 0. Morris, Conflict Within the

AFL: A Study of Craft Versus Industrial Unionism, 1901-1932, Ithaca, N.Y., 1958, pp. 99, 105-06 31. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1921, pp. 114-20 32. Labor Herald, March 1922, p. 167 33. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1921, pp.

232-37; Philip S. Foner, Organized La-

40. 41.

W.

Dunn,

Company

Unions,

New York, 1921, pp. 82-90 Brody, Steelworkers in America, p. 262; David Saposs, “In the Wake of the Big Strike: What the Workers Thought Six Months After,” Labor Age, Jan., 1923, pp. 6-7; Johanningsmeier, p. 391 Minutes, Executive Committee, ACLU, Nov. 3, 1919, Jan. 5, 1919, July 12, 1920, p. 85; ACLU Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, Vol. 228; Johanningsmeier, pp. 391-92 New York Times, Jan. 14-17, 1921 David Saposs to William Z. Foster, Jan. 20, 1921, March 16, 1922, Saposs Pa-

pers 42. Advance, March 25, 1922 43. Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor move-

ment: Its Conservative Function and Social Consequences, New York, 1921, pp. 122-30 44, William Z. Foster to David J. Saposs, April 10, 1921, Saposs Papers

45. Ibid. 46. The Federated Press: Founding and Growth, New York, 1920, pp. 6-35 47. James O. Morris, Workers’ Education in the United States, Ithaca, N.Y. 48. Richard J. Attenburgh, Education

for

Struggle: The American Labor Colleges in the 1920s and 1930s, Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 225-32 49. George

Morris,

pp. 6-7; Notes

dated

1921, Saposs Papers; Minutes of RIC, New York, Feb. 11, 1922, Earl Browder Papers, Series 2, Box 19, “TUEL Folder,” George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University; Zipser, pp.

72-73 50. Larry Peterson, “The Origins of Communist Labour Unionism in Europe and North America,” Labour/Le Travail 13

(Spring 1984): 116-17

5 —_. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, New York, 1966, pp. 164-281, 311-441; Robert K, Murray,

Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, New York, Toronto, London, 1964, pp. 210-62; William

Preson, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 19031933, Cambridge, Mass., 1963, pp. 221-

32; William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States, New York, 1950, pp. 164-93, 202 52. Workers Council, May 1, 1921 53. The Worker, Feb. 25, March 4, 11, 18, 1922. See also William Z. Foster, Trade

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

384

freely and to select such representatives as they choose. Unless this is done, there will be constant industrial war-

Union Educational League Principles and Program, New York, 1922 54, The Worker, March 4, 1922 55. J. W. Johnstone to Fellow Worker, February 23, 1922, Copy in Saposs Papers; Notes dated 1922 in Saposs Papers

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Labor Herald, March 1922, p. 6 Ibid. Ibid. Industrial Solidarity, March 24, 1922 David J. Saposs, Left-Wing Unionism, New York, 1926, p. 50 61. Marion Dutton Savage, Industrial Unionism in America, New York, 1922, p.

60 62. Labor Herald, April 1922, p. 16 63. William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States, New York, 1952, p. 204; New Majority, Dec. 24, 1921 64. New Majority, March 25, April 22, 1922 65. Johanningsmeier, pp. 431-32

fare.” In The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons, Foster concluded that “when

our militants generally adopt English methods and turn their wholehearted attention to building up and developing the trade union movement—that hour will be the dawn of a new day for American labor.” (The Survey, Dec. 20, 1919, p. 266; Foster, Steel Strike, pp. 66-67). 1. New York Times, Aug. 27, 1922 2. Earl R. Beckner, “The Trade Union Educational League and the American Labor Movement,” Journal of Politicai Economy 13 (August 1925): 417 3. Quoted in Advance, Sept. 2, 1922

4. American Labor Year Book, 1925, p. 102 5. New Majority, March 25, 1922 6. Minutes of the AFL Executive Council,

May 9, 1922; Philip Taft, The AFL in the Time of Gompers, New York, 1957, pp.

66. Ibid., pp. 433-35 67. Labor Herald, June 1922, p. 6

452-54; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years

68. Ibid., Sept. 1922, p. 7 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., p. 9

of Life and Labor, (New York, 1925), 518; Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers, A Biography, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1963, pp. 511-12; Labor Herald, May 1922, p. 14; Chicago Daily Tribune,

71. Ibid., pp. 9-10 72. Ibid., pp. 10-11

73. 7A, 75. 76.

Ibid., p. 11 Ibid., p. 12 Ibid., pp. 13-14 The Worker, Feb. 25, 1922; Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, pp. 175-76 77. Labor Herald, Sept. 1922, p. 15 78. Roger N. Baldwin to David J. Saposs, Dec. 22, 1922, Saposs Papers 79, David J. Saposs to Roger N. Baldwin, Dec. 24, 1922, Saposs Papers

May 1, 1922

7. Labor Herald, May 1922, p. 14 8. American Federationist, May 1922, pp. 337-45 9. New York Times, May 2, 1922; Labor Herald, June 1922 10. Labor Herald, June 1922, p. 15 11. Advance, May 9, 1922 12. Ibid., July 7, 14, 21, 1922 13. New York Times, July 11, 1922 14. Ibid., July 12, 1922; Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union, Copy in Saposs Papers, Local No. 12

CHAPTER 7. TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: ADVANCES f. During Woodrow Wilson’s second Industrial Congress, which met immediately after the steel strike, a number of labor leaders were asked by The Survey to propose solutions to the “labor problem.” Among the replies were “Equal Citizenship,” “Nationalization,” and “a National Labor Board.” Foster’s solution was “Organization.” For him, unionization would remedy the central problem in the steel industry: ”Property rights are supreme and human rights negligible. The representatives of property have complete control.” “The demand . for the right to organize,” he emphasized, “was at the bottom of most industrial-discontent. It is the heart of the American labor problem. The workers

must be conceded the right to organize

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

646 to Executive Council Advance, July 21, 1922 New York Times, July 12, 13, 1922 Advance, July 21, 1922 New York Times, July 12, 1922 Ibid., Sept. 26, 1922

20. Denver Post, Aug. 8, 1922; New York Times, Aug. 8, 1922 21. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21, 22, 1922; New York Times, Aug. 21, 22, 1922 22. Labor Herald, Sept. 1922, p. 17; Freedom of Information Act, 61-331-39, Department of Justice Archives, FBI, Washington, D.C.

23. Harvey Klehr, “The Bridgman Delegates,” Survey 22 (Spring, 1986): 91; R. M. Whitney, Reds in America, pp. 6, 30; Draper, Roots, pp. 452 n. 13.

24. Max Bedacht, “Memoirs,” Box 3, Folder 13, Tamiment Institute Library

385

NOTES 25. Recognition of Russia, p. 369 26. Whitney, pp. 131-34; Johanningsmeier, pp. 518-19

27. Labor Herald, May 1923, p. 4 28. Foster to Baldwin, Aug. 25, 1922, ACLU Papers, Princeton University Library. Hereinafter referred to as ACLU Papers

29. Eldridge F. Dowell, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States, Baltimore, 1939, pp. 18, 67, 135; New Republic, April 25, 1923, p. 232 30. William F. Kruse to Baldwin, Aug. 27, 1922, ACLU Papers 31. Baldwin to Kruse, Aug. 31, 1922, ACLU Papers

32. Minutes of the First Regular Meeting of the National Committee, Labor Defense

Council Held Sept. 26, 1922, ACLU Papers 33. C. E. Ruthenberg to F. P. Walsh, November 1, 1922, ACLU Papers; Frank P. Walsh Papers, “Michigan Legal Cases folder,” Box 68, New York Public Library 34. Baldwin to Foster, Oct. 17, 31, 1922, ACLU Papers 35. Foster to Baldwin, Nov. 2, 1922, ACLU Papers

36. Labor Defense Council letter and leaflet (ca. Sept 1922), Saposs Papers

37. Phil Bart, The Role of the Communists in the Chicago Federation of Labor, New York, 1975, reprinted in Highlights of A Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA, New York, 1979, pp. 18-21; New Majority, Sept. 16, 1922 38. Labor Defense Council Minutes, Sept. 9, 19, 1922, ACLU Papers; Johanningsmeier, pp. 521-22

39. New Republic, April 25, 1923, p. 232 40. Eight Questions and Seven Answers About the Michigan Raid Cases, Labor Defense Council (1923) 41. What William Z. Foster Means to the American Labor Movement, Labor Defense Council, n.d., ACLU Papers 42. Advance, Sept. 2, 1922 43. Ibid., Sept. 9, 1922 44, New York Times, March 13, 20, 30, April 1, 1923

45. Ibid., April 2, 1923 46. Time, April 12, 1923; New York Times, April 5-8, 1923; Arthur Zipser, “The Woman on the Jury,” Daily World, April

15, 1983 47. New York Times, April 7, 1923 48. Wm. Z. Foster to Dear Friend Saposs, April 9, 1923, Saposs Papers 49. New York Times, May 6, 1923 50. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 28, 1923; New

York Times, Aug. 28, 1923

51. Advance, Sept. 23, 1923 52. Foster to Baldwin, Aug. 11, 1922, ACLU Papers

A

53. Baldwin to “Our Friends in Denver,” Aug. 21, 1922, ACLU Papers 54. William E. Sweet to Baldwin, Aug. 28, 1922, ACLU Papers

55. Foster to Baldwin, Aug. 30, 1922; ACLU Papers 56. Denver Post, Nov. 8, 10, 1922 57. Denver Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1923, copy in ACLU Papers 58. Foster to Baldwin, Jan. 3, 1923, ACLU Papers

59. New York Times, Aug. 27, 1922 60. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 27, 1922; New York Times, Aug. 27, 1922 61. Labor Herald, June 1922, p. 15; Oct. 1922, pp. 13-14 62. Jay Fox, Amalgamation, Chicago, n.d.

63. A Program for the Building Trades, Chicago, 1922

64. Labor Herald, May 1923, p. 26; Aug. 1923, p. 14; Dec. 1923, p. 12 65. Advance, Sept. 2, 1922

66. Labor Herald, Aug. 1923, p. 14; New York Times, Feb. 11, 1923 67. Beckner,

pp. 418-19; Davis J. Saposs,

Left-Wing Unionism, New York, 1926, pp. 79-80; Bert Cochran, Labor and

Communism: The Conflict That Shaped

American

Unions, Princeton, N. J., pp.

24-25 68. “Some Recent Developments in the Labor Movement,” Advance, Oct. 20, 1922 69. Labor Herald, Oct. 1923, pp. 24, 25, 27,

28, 29-30; Feb. 1924, pp. 7-8 70. W. Z. Foster, “Organize the Unorgan-

ized,” Labor Herald, July 1923, pp. 1112 71. Ibid., Oct. 1923, p. 30; Johanningsmeier, p. 635

CHAPTER 8. TRADE UNION EDUCATIONAL LEAGUE: SETBACKS 1. Chicago Tribune, Sept. 1, 1923; New York Times, Sept. 6, 1923 2. New York Times, Sept. 6, 1923 g. Although Foster had the highest regard for Debs’s militancy, for his courageous opposition to the entrance of the U. S. into World War I (which landed him in federal prison) and for his open praise of the Soviet Union, he was critical of the role Debs had played in leaving the Railroad Brotherhoods and forming the American Railway Union in 1893, citing

it as “a striking example” of the damage done by dual unionism. In The Railroaders’ Next Step, published by the TUEL late in 1921, Foster pointed outthat

386

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA when Debs resigned his position as general secretary-treasurer and editor of the official journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen to form the American Railway Union, he was a great force for progress in the old union, and had he stayed with them, he would have been a major factor in their future devel-

opment. His leaving deprived them of his leadership, and Foster insisted that no unbiased observer could deny that they had suffered a great deal as a consequence. Foster maintained that the constant sucking of the best blood out of the craft unions was “one of the worst features of dual industrial unionism.”” (Chicago, 1921, pp. 14-17.)

Debs agreed with this criticism, for he wrote in the Labor Herald: “I should be the first one to oppose such a program [dual unionism]. The lessons of past experience warn against any such further attempt. The rank and file must insist upon getting together and must furnish the impetus for such concentration and combination as are necessary to unite all workers of a given industry within one compact and militant body.” (Reprinted in Jay Fox, Amalgamation, Chicago, n.d., p. 24.) 3. Jack W. Johnstone to John Fitzpatrick, November 8, 1922; John Fitzpatrick Papers, Chicago Historical Society; also reproduced in John W. Keiser, “An American Communist

Reports from Russia,”

Nov. 1922, Journal of the Illinois Historical Society 48 (Spring, 1979): 13744 4. Keiser, “John Fitzpatrick,” pp. 101-02; New Majority, May 12, 1923; Earl Rucker Beckman. “The Trade Union Educational League and the American Labor Movement,” MA thesis, University of Chicago, 1924, p. 98; Johanningsmeier, p. 540 h. In his article, “The AFL in the 1920’s: A Strategy of Defense,” James O. Morris points out (1) that “the AFL sought in the 1920’s to promote organizing through union-management cooperation, and (2) to convince businessmen, politicians, Legionnaires, other groups, and the public in general that organized la-

bor was a ‘respectable,’ ‘patriotic,’ and ‘American’ institution...”

“For the AFL leadership, the first attraction of cooperation was not that it would provide organized labor with some voice in matters of production, however, but that it would, through the employers’ voluntary grant of union rec ognition and collective bargaining, per-

mit the easy organization of the unorganized. In fact, the promise of greater efficiency was the only thing labor could offer in exchange for the uncontested right to organize. From the AFL standpoint, therefore, cooperation was a kind of ‘if you can’t lick ’em, join ‘em’ philosophy, but unfortunately for the AFL, most employers did not want to be Soined.” “For ten years after World War I, the AFL, through the writings and speeches of its leaders, endeavored to sell the industrial world on the merits of unionmanagement cooperation.”

Morris repeatedly proves that “the poiicies AFL leaders pursued to meet labor’s dilemma... failed totally to achieve their ultimate objective-membership expansion with the.consent of employers.” He concedes that “the AFL devised no alternative policies but continued to rely upon

union-management

cooperation

and ingratiating alignments and contacts through years of constant disappointment.” However, not once in his 28-page article does Morris mention the fact that the TUEL condemned the class-collaboration policy of the AFL officialdom. Morris believed that there was no real alternative to the AFL policy, partly because of “the substantial increase in real wages which workingmen enjoyed,” which, among other reasons, was responsible for the fact that “the AFL could not have evoked a _ response among its affiliated unions for a policy of militant organizing.” (Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11 July 1958 : 572-80). For an effective demolition of Morris’s position with respect to “the substantial increase in real wages which workingmen enjoyed,” see Frank Stricker, “Affluence For Whom?—Another Look at Prosperity and the Working Classes in the 1920’s,” Labor History 24 [Winter, 1983]: 5-33). 5. Claude O. Taylor to John Fitzpatrick, April 24, 1923, John Fitzpatrick Papers, Chicago Historical Society; Johanningsmeier, p. 540

6. Circular, Chicago Federation of Labor, Sept. 10, 1923, John Fitzpatrick Papers, Chicago Historical Society

7. New Majority, Sept. 1, 1923, p. 5; The Worker, Oct. 20, 1923; Johanningsmeier, pp. 571-72

8. New Majority, Aug. 25, 1923, p. 12; Johanningsmeier, p. 572

9. The diagram appears in Investigation of Communist Propaganda Hearings Be-

fore a Special Committee to Investigate

387

NOTES Communist Activities in the United States, Washington, D. C., 1930, Part 3, vol. 2, p. 505. It is reprinted in Johanningsmeier, pp. 565-66 10. Illinois State Federation of Labor, “Proceedings of Convention, 1923,” pp. 38081; Johanningsmeier, pp. 567-68 11. Illinois State Federation of Labor, “Proceedings of Convention, 1923,” pp. 346, 365-73, 380; Johanningsmeier, p. 565

12. New York Times, Sept. 12, 15, 1923; Eugene Staley, History of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, Chicago, 1930, pp. 399-403 13. Illinois State Federation of Labor, “Proceedings of Convention, 1923," p. 388; Johanningsmeier, p. 561

14. New Majority, Oct. 27, 1923, p. 10; The Worker, Oct. 20, 1923, p. 4 15. Johanningsmeier, pp. 574-75

16. The Worker, Oct. 20, 1923, p. 4 17. New Majority, Oct. 13, 1923, pp. 10-11;

Oct. 27, 1923, p. 10; The Worker, Oct. 20, 1923; Johanningsmeier, pp. 574-75

18. New York Times, Sept. 12, 1923; Staley, pp. 399-403 19. Johanningsmeier, pp. 579-80 20. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1922, pp. 363-64; Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1923, pp. 129-34, 255-57; Haessler, pp.

97-114 21. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1923, pp, 135-45; New York Times, Oct. 2, 1923

22. Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1923, pp. 180-90; Butte Bulletin, Oct. 12, 1923; Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1955, p. 516; Theodore Draper, American Communism

and Soviet Russia, New York, 1923, pp. 48-49 23. Labor Herald, Sept. 1923, p. 9; Johanningsmeier, p. 573 24. Advance, Oct. 12, 1923 25. New York Times, Oct. 14, 1923

26. Labor Herald, Sept. 1923, p. 9 27. Ben Legere, The Futility of Fosterism, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, One Big Union Bulletin, 1923, passim; Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle, New

York, 1970, p. 214 28. Labor Herald, Oct. 1923, reprinted in Legere, pp. 28-29 29. Minutes of the Red International Committee, Held in New York, Oct. 20, 1923, Earl Browder Papers, Series 2, Box 15, “Red International Folder,” George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University

CHAPTER 9. THE RAILROAD WORKERS 1. William Z. Foster, The Railroaders’ Next Step, Chicago, 1921; William Z. Foster, “Resolution for the Amalgamation of the

Sixteen Railroad Unions,” 1922, Warren G. Harding Papers, Ohio State Historical Society. 2. Advance, Jan. 6, 1922 3. Investigation of Communism, Propaganda Hearings Before a Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, Wash., D. C., 1930, Part 3, vol. 2, pp. 185-86

A. Ibid., p. 187 5. Johanningsmeier, pp. 453-55 6. Ibid., pp. 456-57 7. Ibid., pp. 456-57 8. Harry D. Wolf, The Railroad Labor Board, Chicago, 1927, pp. 230-33; Railway Age 70 (June 3, 1921): 1254; (Oct.

1921): 1935; Labor, June 22, 1921, Jan. 14, 21, 28, 1922 9. Edward Berman, Labor Disputes and the Presidents of the United States, New York, 1924, Zieger, “The

pp. 226-46; Robert H. Republicans and Labor: Politics and Policies, 1919-1929,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Maryland, 1965, Chapter 4; Robert H. Zieger, “Senator George Wharton Pepper and Labor Issues in the 1920’s,” Labor History 9 (Spring 1968): 166-72 10. Allen La Verne Shepherd, “Federal Railway Labor Policy, 1913-1926," Ph.D. dis-

sertation, Univ. of Nebraska, 1971, pp. 246, 250-51 11. New York Times, July 12, 1922 12. New York Times, Aug. 2, 1922; Shepherd, p. 252; Railway Age 73 (Aug. 19,

1922): 341-47; Labor, Aug. 19, 1922 13. Edward Berman, Labor and the Sherman Act, New York, 1930, pp. 140-46; Shepherd, pp. 262-63 14. Shepherd, pp. 284-85 15. Advance, Aug. 10, 1922 16. Ibid., Aug. 17, 1922 17. Labor Herald, Aug, 1922, pp. 122-23 18. Johanningsmeier, pp. 534-36 19. Ibid., p. 537

20. Recognition of Russia. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 68th Congress,

1st Session,

Wash.

D. C.,

1924, p. 351 21. Ibid., pp. 351-52 22. Advance, Sept. 8, 1922

23. Ibid. 24. The Worker, Sept. 3-5, 8, 1922; Labor Herald, Sept. 1922, pp. 121-22 25. Edward P. Johanningsmeier, “William Z. Foster: Labor Organizer and Communist,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Pa.,

1988, p. 482 26. Ibid., pp. 483-84 27. The Worker, Sept. 3-5, 1922; Labor Herald, Sept. 1922, pp. 114-15 28. Johanningsmeier, p. 482

388

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

29. Ibid., pp. 403-04 30. Samuel Gompers to Peter Blair, July 31, 1922, Gompers Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Ralph M. Easly to

New York Tribune, Sept. 9, 1922, in National Civic Federation Papers, New York Public Library, Box 60

31. New York Times, Sept. 9, 1922; Railway Age 73 (Sept. 16, 1922): 503-04; (Sept. 23, 1922): 548-49, 567-70 32. Conference between Willard and Gompers, Feb. 23, 1923, Gompers Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Otto S. Beyer, “Experiences with Coop-

eration Between Labor and Management in the Railway Industry,” Wertheim Lectures in Industrial Relations, 1928, Cambridge, 1929, pp. 10-11; Shepherd, pp. 291-92

33. Advance, Sept. 22, 1922 34. Note of John P. Frey, in John P. Frey Papers, Library of Congress

35. Louis A. Wood, Union-Management Cooperation on the Railroads, New Haven, 1931, pp. 79-84 36. Ibid., pp. 79-84, 86-95; Irving Bernstein,

The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933, Boston,

47. Ibid., pp. 15-16 48. Jack Leonard, “Trade Union Capitalism Undermines the Brotherhoods," Workers Monthly, June 1926, p. 354 49. “Labor Banking Movement in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, Dec.

1929, p. 1304 50. H. Bruce Throckmorton, “A Note on Labor Banks,” Labor History 20 (Fall 1979): 573 51. Monthly Labor Review, Dec., 1929, pp. 85-86 52. Railroad Engineers’ Journal, Jan.-April 1922, p. 367 53. Ibid., June 1922, p. 441 54. See for example, Locomotive Engineers Journal, Jan.-April 1922

55. Labor Herald, April 1922, pp. 123-24 56. Locomotive Engineers Journal, June 1922, p. 441 57. deal American Trade Unionism, pp. 58. Leonard, p. 353

59. New York Times, May 25-27, 1925 60. Locomotive Engineers Journal,

Oct)

1926, pp. 250-53

61. Workers Monthly, June 1927, pp. 110-11

1966, pp. 97-98; Milton J. Nadworny,

Scientific Management and the Unions, 1900-1932, Cambridge, 1955, pp. 122-28

37. Daniel Willard, “The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company’s Labor Relations,” Address at Golden Jubilee Celebration, Oct. 30, 1924, Copy in Otto S. Beyer Papers, Library of Congress; Radosh, p.

81 38. Samuel Gompers, “Result of Agreement

vs. Arbitration,” American Federationist 30 (July 1923): 577 39. American Trade Unionism: Selected Writings of William Z. Foster, New York, 1947, pp. 96-99; William Z. Foster,

“Company Unions,” Workers’ Monthly, Sept., 1925, p. 497 40. Otto S. Beyer, “Obstacles Which Are Blocking Progressive Cooperation on the Baltimore and Ohio,” Beyer Papers 41. Otto S. Beyer to Daniel Willard, Jan. 28, 1924, Beyer Papers

42. Quoted in Foster, American Trade Unionism, p. 98

43. James W. Kerley, “The Failure of Railway Labor Leadership, 1900-1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1959, pp. 200-04; Shepherd, pp. 293-95 44, Labor Herald, March 1923, p. 15 45. “Plan of Amalgamation issued by the Minnesota Shop Crafts Legislative Committee,” Copy in AFL Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin

A6. ees p.1

in Labor Herald, March 1923,

CHAPTER 10. MACHINISTS AND CARPENTERS

1. David M. Schneider, The Workers’ Party and American Trade Unions, Baltimore, 1925, pp. 15-16 2. Earl Rucker Bechner, “The Trade Union Educational Legue and the American Labor Movement," MA thesis, University of

eo

oe 1924, p. 50; Johanningsmeier

p. 4

3. AMALGAMATION or ANNIHILATION... Daniel Bell Papers, Box 4, Folder 12, Tamiment Institute Library, NYU 4. Schneider, pp. 9-10 5. Labor Herald, Nov., 1923, May, 1924,

6. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement...

2 (New York, 1955): 348-

50; Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, New York, 1982, pp. 70-71

7. Marc Perlman, Democracy in the International Association of Machinists, New York, 1978, p. 51

8. Ibid. 9. Schneider, p. 11

10. 11. 12. 13.

Ibid., Ibid, Ibid., Ibid.,

pp. 16-17 p. 18 p. 10 p. 20

14. Proceedings of the 17th Convention of the International Association of Machinists, 1924, pp. 127-30, 233, 238-39

389

NOTES 15. Machinists Monthly Journal, April 1925, pp. 214-15; Johanningsmeier, pp. 494-98 16. Scheider, p. 21 17. W. Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, New York, 1935, p. 65; Johanningsmeier, pp. 507-09

18. W. Z. Foster, Misleaders of Labor, New York,

1926,

pp.

163-81;

Johannings-

meier, pp. 498-99

19. Schneider, pp. 31-35; What is Wrong in

the Carpenters’ Union? New York, 1924; Walter Galenson, The United Brotherhood of Carpenters: The First Hundred Years, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 205-10 20. Schneider, pp. 30-31 21. Ibid., pp. 32-35

22. What is Wrong in the Carpenters’ Union?; Schneider, pp. 29-30 23. Schneider, p. 30

24. Proceedings of the 21st General Convention of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, pp. 1-21, Schneider, p. 36 25. Los Angeles Times, March 2-5, 1924; Schneider, p. 31 26. Schneider, p. 31

27. Ibid., p. 32 28. What is Wrong in the Carpenters’ Union?, The Carpenter, May 1924, pp. 3839; Proceedings of the 22nd Convention of the United Brotherhood Carpenters and Joiners of America, 1924, pp. 158, 257, 361; Robert A. Christie, “Empire in Wood: A History of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertacom Cornell University, 1954, pp. 47829. Schneider, pp. 34-35 30. The Carpenter, May, 1925, p. 34; Schneider, p. 35 31. Schneider, p. 35; American Labor Year

Book, 1925, p. 67

Unions, with Special Reference to the United Mine Workers of America and the United Automobile Workers of America,” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1974, pp. 30-61 7. Proceedings, UMWA Convention, 1920, p. 29; McAlister Coleman, Men and

Coal, New York, 1943, p. 126 8. Stanley Joshua Jacobs,, “Opposition to John L. Lewis Within the United Mine Workers,” unpublished MA thesis, Univ. of Calif. Berkeley, 1949, p. 64

9, Ibid., p. 22 10. Ibid., pp. 28-29

11. James A. Wechsler, Labor Baron, New York, 1944, p. 43 12. Jacobs, p. 28 13. Pollard, p. 68

14. Ibid., p. 61 15. Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History

of Labor in the United States, 18961932, New York, 1935, p. 471; United

Mine Workers Journal, Sept. 15, Nov. 1, 15, Dec. 15, 1919, April 1, 1920; Coleman, p. 98; Proceedings, UMWA Convention,

1920, pp. 44, 156-57;

Sylvia

Kopald, Rebellion in Labor Unions, New York, 1924, p. 123; John H. M. Laslett, “Swan Song or New Social Movement? Socialism and Illinois District 2, United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1926,” in Socialism in the Heart-

land: The Midwest Experience, 19001925, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1986, p. 181

1 > Eric Hans, John L. Lewis Exposed, New York, 1937, p. 32

1 ). John H. Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881-1924, New York, 1970, p. 224; Philip S. Foner, editor, Mother

Jones Speaks: Collected Speeches and

Writings, New York, 1983, p. 352 18. Pollard, pp. 137-39; United States An-

thracite Commission, The Minority Re-

CHAPTER 11. THE MINERS: I 1. Charles P. Anson, “A History of the Labor Movement in West Virginia,” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of No. Carolina, 1940, pp. 124-25

2. Morton S. Baratz, The Union and the Coal Industry, New Haven, 1955, pp. 122-35, 163-72 3. Workers Monthly, Dec., 1924, pp. 191 4. Melvyn Dubofsky & Warren Van Tine,

John L. Lewis: A Biography, New York, 1977, pp.23-24 5. John Hutchinson, “John L. Lewis: To the

Presidency of the UMWA,” Labor History 19 (Spring 1978): 213 6. Spencer D. Pollard, “Some Problems of Democracy in the Government of Labor

port, Wash., D. C., 1920, p. 46 19. New York Times, Aug. 3, Sept. 2, 1920 20. Ibid., Sept. 3, 4, 12, 21, 23, 1920 21. Pollard, p. 147; Perlman & Taft, p. 567 22. Jacobs, pp. 80-81

23. Lewis L. Lorwin, The American Federation of Labor: History, Policies, and Prospects, Wash., D. C., 1933, pp. 21415 24. Christian Madsen in New Majority, July 2, 1921 25. Proceedings, AFL Convention, pp. 401, 450, 456 26. Alan Jay Singer, “Which Side Are You On?’: Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1928,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University,

1983, p. 1

390

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

27, William E. Bohn, “Labor’s Answer to the Open-Shop Drive,” Socialist Review, April-May 1921, p. 43; Singer, pp. 13-16 28. Howard W. Perrigo, “Factional Strife in District No. 12, United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1933,” unpublished Ph.D.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

dissertation, Univ. of Wis., 1933, p. 106; Laslett, “Socialism,” p. 185 Clark Everling, “Tactics Over Strategy in the United Mine Workers of America Internal Politics and the Question of Nationalization of Mines, 1908-1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, Penn. State Univ., 1976, pp. 149-51; Singer, p. 19 Everling, p. 133; Singer, pp. 20-21 Dubofsky and Van Tine, p. 113 Coleman, p. 88 Advance, July 15, 1921 Ibid., Oct. 7, 1921 Thomas C. Menninger, “The Fight of Alexander Howat for the Right to Strike,” unpublished MA thesis, Kansas State Teachers College, 1946, pp. 13-25, 43-50;

36. 37.

38. 39.

New York Times, April 20, Aug. 5, 1920; United Mine Workers Journal, Aug. 15, 1920; Jacobs, p. 64 Laslett, “Socialism,” p. 186 Mary Heaton Vorse, “The Story of Alex Howat’s Fighting District,” Survey 49 (Dec. 15, 1922): 359 United Mine Workers Journal, Feb. 5, June 1, Aug. 15, Sept. 1, 1921; New York Times, Aug. 16, 1921 United Mine Workers Journal, Oct. 1, 1921; New York Times, Sept. 29, 1921;

Powers Hapgood, “The Miners Step Forward,” Labor Age, Nov. 1921, pp. 3-4 4 = . United Mine Workers Journal, Oct. 15,

Dec. 1, 1921; Industrial Worker, Dec. 31, 1921

4 — . Ibid., March 1, Nov. 1, 1922; New York Times, Feb. 16, 1922 42. Menninger, pp. 61-63 43. Undated, unnamed

clipping headed “Mother Jones for Howat at Meeting,” Mother Mary Harris Jones Papers, Dept. of Archives and Manuscripts, Catholic University of America

44. Minutes

of the Convention, United Mine Workers of America, 1922, pp. 8488; Philip S. Foner, editor, Mother Jones Speaks: 355-58 45. United Mine Workers Journal, March 1, 1922; New York Times, Feb. 16, 1922 46. Menninger, pp. 52-54; J. P. Cannon, “The Story of Alex Howat,” Liberator, April 1921, p. 28; Labor Herald, March 1922, p. 43; Minutes of Meeting of Red International Committee, New York City, Feb. 11, 1922, Earl Browder Papers, Series 2, Box 19, “TUEL Folder,” George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University

47. Labor Herald, Sept. 1922, p. 26 48. Charies P. Anson, “A History of the Labor Movement in West Virginia,” pp. 124-25; John M. Barb, “Strikes in the Southern West Virginia Coal Fields, 1919-1922, MA thesis, West Va. Univ., 1949, p. 31; Daniel P. Jordan, ”The Mingo War: Labor Violence in the Southern West Virginia Coal Fields, 1919-1922," in Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed, eds., Essays in Southern Labor History, Westport, Conn., 1977.

A more optimistic picture of conditions in West Virginia at the end of World War I is presented by Hoyt N. Wheeler, but his picture would hardly have been endorsed by the miners. See Hoyt N. Wheeler, “Mountainous Mine Wars: An Analysis of the West Virginia Mine Wars

of 1912-1913 and 1920-1921,” Business History Review 50 (Spring, 1976): 83-85

4 co. Barb, pp. 31-33; John J. Cornwell, A Mountain Trail, Philadelphia, 1939, pp. 59-60; Philip S. Foner, editor, Mother Jones Speaks: p. 330; United States, West Virginia Coal Fields, Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, 67th Congress, lst Session, Wash., D. C., 1922, 1: 231-69; Henry Lawrence Wilson, “West

Virginia and the Coal Strike of 1919,” MA thesis, Univ. of Wis., Madison, 1935, pp. 68-75

50. Evelyn L. K. Harris and Frank J. Krebs, From Humble Beginnings: West Virginia State Federation of Labor, 19031957, Charleston, W. Va., 1960, pp. 152-

53; Howard B. Lee, Bloodletting in Appalachia, Morgantown, W. Va., 1969, pp. 52-69; Advance, Sept. 6, 1921

5 —. Daily World, Sept. 4, 1969; Winthrop D. Lane, Civil War in West Virginia, New York, 1969, pp. 52-53; Fred Mooney,

Struggle in the Coal Fields, Edited by James W. Hess, Morgantown,

W. Va.,

1967, p. 89 5 nNLane, pp. 52-53; Mooney, p. 89; Daily World, Sept. 4, 1969. In January 1922, in Welch, West Virginia, a jury acquitted the Baldwin-Felt detectives charged with murdering “Sid” Hatfield (Industrial Worker, Jan. 7, 1922) 5 w . Industrial Worker, Sept. 17, 1924 (Report by Art Shields from West Virginia); Lane, pp. 52-53

5 > Lane, pp. 52-53; Foner, Mother Jones Speaks, p. 331; New York Times, Aug. 25, 1921 55. See Autobiography of Mother Jones, Chicago,

1925, and Dale Featherling,

Mother Jones—The Miners’ Angel, Carbondale, Ill., 1974

NOTES

391

56. Bart, pp. 110-13; Mooney, pp. 122-24; Foner, Mother Jones Speaks, pp. 630-32; Edward M. Steel, editor, The Correspon-

6. Canadian Mining Journal, Jan. 1, 1916,

dence of Mother Jones, Pittsburgh, Pa.,

July 1917, pp. 506-07 8. David A. Frank, “The Cape Breton Min-

pp. 6-8; July, 15, 1916, p. 340

7. Labour Gazette, June 1917 pp. 451-55,

1985, p. xxxvi

57. Industrial Worker, Sept. 17, 1924 (Report by Art Shields from West Virginia) 58. Advance, Sept. 9, 1921 59. David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners 1880-1922, Urbana, Ill, 1981, p. 282; Maureen Maurer and Calvin F. Senning, “Billy Mitchell, The Air Service and the Mingo

War,” West Virginia History 32 (October 1968): 34-43 60. Industrial Worker, Oct. 22, 1921 61. The Messenger, July 1921, p. 214 62. Art Shields, “The Battle of Logan County, 1921 ... And a Postscript, 50

Years Later,” Political Affairs 50 (Sept. 1971): 34-36 63. Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 76-79 64. Lane, pp. 87-88 65. Richard A. Straw, “The United Mine Workers of America and the 1920 Coal Strike in Alabama,” Alabama Review, April 1975, p. 109

66. Ibid., p. 113 67. Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, New York, 1982, pp. 82-100 68. Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, or Black Worker New York, 1931, p.

37.

69. Straw, p. 113

70. Ibid., pp. 114-16 71. Ibid., pp. 125-26 72. United Mine Workers Journal, April 15, 1921; Straw, pp. 126-27

Halifax, 1964, pp. 35-37 Sharon Reilly, “The Provincial Workmen’s Association of Nova Scotia, 18791898,” MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 1979, pp. 89-110 Ibid. pp. 157-85

. Robert aPw

Workers Journal,

Feb.,

H. Babcock, Gompers in Can-

ada: A Study in American Continentalism Before the First World War, Toronto,

1974,

p. 47; Joseph

294 9. Halifax Herald, Dec. 31, 1917; Frank, pp. 300-01

10. Frank, p. 317 11. United Mine Workers Journal, Nov. 15, 1920, pp. 97-102

12. Report of the Royal Commission in Coal Mining Industry in Nova Scotia (Duncan Report), Supplement to the Labour Gazette, Jan., 1916, pp. 17-18, 23; Frank, pp. 219-26 _

. Frank, pp. 229-30 James Bryson McLachlan, a Scotsman, was born in the countryside of Southern Scotland in 1869, and went to work in the Lanarkshire pits at ten years of age. A skilled miner, active in the Lanarkshire unions, widely read and self-educated, McLachlan came to the Sydney mines of Nova Scotia in 1902. A dynamic orator and atireless organizer,. McLachlan was active in the Socialist

OO me.

Party of Canada and from 1909 to 1915 he was secretary-treasurer of the AMWNS in 1917. He was a leader of District 26 of the union, a member of the TUEL, and of the (Workers) Communist Party of Canada. (David A. Frank, “The Cape Breton Miners, 1917-1926,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dalhousie University, 1979, p. 306

14. Ibid., pp. 236-39 15. Halifax Herald, July 8, 1918 16. David Frank, “Class Conflict in the Coal Industry of Cape Breton, 1922,” in Gre-

says in Canadian Working Class His-

1.C. B. Ferguson, The Labour Movement in Nova Scotia Before Confederation,

United Mine 1909, p. 122

sertation, Dalhousie University, 1979, p.

gory S. Kealy and Peter Warriman, Es-

CHAPTER 12. THE MINERS: II

be.

ers, 1917-1926,” unpublished Ph.D. dis-

Steele,

tory, Toronto, 1982, pp. 117-19 17. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 241 18. Halifax Herald, Aug. 26, 1918, Sydney Post, Aug. 2, 1920; Labour Gazette, August, 1920, p. 86, Sept. 1920, p. 861; Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” pp. 242-44

19. Sydney Post, Aug. 25, 1920; Maritime Labour Herald, Sept. 16, 1922; Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 245

20. Sydney Post, July 19,22,1924 21. Ibid., Oct. 28, 29, 1924 22. United Mine Workers Journal, Nov. 15, 1920 23. Sydney Post, Nov. 18-20, Dec. 1, 1920

“The Big Strike, 1909-1910,” MA thesis,

24. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 251

St. Francis Xavier University, Halifax, 1960; Dan Moore, “The 1909 Strike in the Nova Scotia Coal Fields," BA thesis, Carleton University, Halifax, 1977,

27. Labour Gazette, July, 1923, p. 729

25. Sydney Post, June 13-16, 1923 26. Montreal Star, June 15, 1923; Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” pp. 252-53

392

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

28. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4 (New York, 1965): 136-37

29.R. Pagernot, A History of the Scottish Miners from the Earliest Times, London, 1955, pp. 15-17

30. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” pp. 254-55

31. Halifax Globe, April 22, 1922 32. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” pp. 272-73

nia Magazine of History and Biography, April, 1975, p. 207 4. Walsh, p. 144 5. New York Times, Feb. 16-18, 1922 6. United Mine Workers Journal, Feb. 15, 22, 1922 7. Ibid., Feb. 22, 1922 8. Dubofsky & Van Tine, pp.76, 105-06

9. New York Times, March 1-2, 1922

33. Halifax Herald, Feb. 16, 1922

10. Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 84-85

34. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” pp. 287-89

11. Advance, April 21, 1922

35. Ibid., p. 291 36. Industrial Worker, April 5, 1922 37. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 337 38. Canadian Mining Journal, Aug. 25, 1922, p. 57; Sydney Post, Aug. 17, 1922;

Montreal Star, Aug. 18, 1922; Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 338 39. Sydney Post, July 23, 1922 40. Maritime Labor Herald, July 29, 1922 41. Sudney Post, Aug. 5, 1922 42. Frank, “Cape Breton Miners,” p. 338

43. Ibid., pp. 324-38 44. Ibid., pp. 340-41

45. A6. 47. A8. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Ibid., p. 342 Ibid., p. 343 Ibid. Ibid., p. 344 Ibid., pp. 345-46 Ibid., p. 346 Sydney Post, June 15-18, 1922 Ibid., July 18-19, 1922; Frank, pp. 350-51

12. Allan Kent Powell, “Utah and the Nationwide Coal Mineral Strike of 1922,”

Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Spring,

1977), 146-49; Allan Kent Powell, The

Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah Coal Fields, 1900-933, Logan, Utah, 1985, pp. 121-41 13. Powell, “Utah and the Nationwide Coal

Strike," p. 149, Salt Lake Tribune, June

19, 24, 1922; Salt Lake Telegram, June 19, 24, 1922

14. Powell, “Utah and the Nationwide Coal

Strike,” p. 150; Wyoming, Labor Journal, July 7, 1922 15. Powell, p. 150 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 152 18. Ibid., p. 157; Strong, pp. 154-61

19. Robert H. Murray, The Harding Era, Mpls., 1969, p. 243; Congressional Record, 67th Congress, 2nd Session, Part

53. Frank, pp. 350-51 54. Charles Lipton, The Trade Union Move-

6, p. 6219; Strong, p. 154 20. Advance, June 9, 16, 1922; Strong, p.

ment of Canada, 1827-1959, Montreal, 1967, p. 247 59. Workers Monthly, May, 1926, p. 328

21. Ibid., June 9, 1922, Strong, p. 161

56. Daniel Bell Papers, Tamiment Institute Library, NYU

CHAPTER 13. THE MINERS: III 1. The Rev. William J. Walsh, The United Mine Workers of America as an Economic and Social Force in the Anthracite Territory, Washington, D. C., 1931, pp. 140-42 2. Alan Jay Singer, “‘Which Side Are You

On?’ Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1928,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1982, pp. 122-23; Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Bi-

ography, New York, 1977, pp.7881; G. E. Lasker, “The Position of the Operators in the Coal Crisis,” Survey, April,

1922, pp. 1040-41; F. P. Tyron and W. F. McKinney, “The Broken Year of the Bituminous Miners,” ibid., March 22, 1922, pp. 1909-12 3. Harold K. Kanark, “The Pennsylvania

Anthracite Strike of 1922,” Pennsylva-

154

22. Advance, June 9, 16, 1922

23. Ibid., June 30, 1922 2A. Ibid., Aug. 18, 1922; Singer, p. 125 25. John H. Walker to Mother Jones, June 29, 1922, John Hunter Walker Collection, 1911-1953, Illinois Historical Survey,, University of Illinois Library; Philip S. Foner, editor, Mother Jones Speaks:

Collected Speeches & Writings, New York, 1983, p. 662 26. Advance, July 2, 1922 27. Art Shields, “The Martyred Miners of Cliftonville,” Daily World, Sept. 27, 1975, p. 11 28. Advance, July 2, 1922 29. Murray, p. 243; Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929, Lexington, Ky., 1969, pp. 114-15 30. New York Times, July 16, 17, 1922; Murray, pp. 245-48

31. New York Times, Sept. 1, 2, 3, 1922 32. Powell, p. 152 33. Robert H. Zieger, “George Wharton Pepper and Labor Issues in the 1920s,” La-

bor History 9 (Spring, 1968): 377-79 34. Kanarek, pp. 222-23

NOTES 35. Samuel

Gompers,

Miners,”

American

(Oct., 1922): 763

“All Hail Victorious

Federationist

29

36. Powell, p. 157 37. Saul D. Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography, N.Y. 1970, p. 72

38. Ibid., p. 74

39. Reprinted in Dubofsky & Van Tine, p. 107

40. New York Times, Aug. 16,1922

41. Singer, pp. 126-27 42. Advance, Aug. 18, 1922

43. Ibid.

393 Kansas State Teachers College, 1946, p. 58

72. Dubofsky

& Van Tine, p. 103; Anna

Rochester, Labor and Coal, New York, 1931, p. 219 73. Herbert Harris, American Labor, New

Haven, 1939, p. 137 74. Perlman and Taft, p. 564 75. Indianapolis Star, Jan. 27, 1924; Edward P. Johaningsmeier, pp. 614-15; UMW Journal, Jan. 15, 1924

76. Proceedings of the 29th Consecutive ...

4A. Singer, pp. 14648 45. Socialist Review, April-May 1921, p. 43;

Convention 1924, vol. I, p. 486 77. James A. Wechsler, Labor Baron, New York, 1944, p. 27

AG. Singer, p. 148-49 47. Dubofsky & Van Tine, pp. 122-23

78. David M. Schneider, The Workers (Communist) Party and American Trade Unions, Baltimore, 1928, p. 51; United Mine Workers Journal, Feb, 1, 1924

Feb., 1923, p. 12

48. McAllister Coleman, Men and Coal, New York, 1943, pp. 106-08 49. Labor Herald, July 1923, p. 28 50. Singer, pp. 152-54 51. Ibid., pp. 170-71

52. David M. Schneider, The Workers (Communist) Party and American Trade Unions, Baltimore, 1928, pp. 32-35; The Worker, July 12, 1922 53. The Worker, Sept. 15, 1922; Dubofsky & Van Tine, p. 88

54. The Worker, Feb. 11, 12, 13, 1923; Labor Herald, July, 1923, p. 28 55. Singer, pp. 169-71

56. Ibid., p. 171 57. Ibid. 58. Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History

of Labor in the United States, 18961932, New York, 1935, p. 563; The Worker, June 46, 1923; Labor Herald, July, 1923, pp. 3-6 59. Labor Herald, ibid. 60. John Brophy, A Miner’s Life, Madison, Wis., pp. 125-28; Singer, pp. 171-73; Johanningsmeier, p. 49 61. Labor Herald, Aug. 1923, p. 132; Dubofsky and Van Tine, p. 123; Edward M. Steel, editor, The Correspondence of Mother Jones, Pittsburgh, 1985, pp. 280-

81 62. Labor Herald, July 1923, p. 6; Singer, 187-89 63. Singer, pp. 187-89 64. Ibid. 65. Dubofsky & Van Tine, p. 123 66. Ibid., pp. 100-01 67. New York Times, Sept. 8, 1923 68. Advance, Sept. 14, 1923 69. Literary Digest, Sept. 29, 1923, p. 7; New York Times, Sept. 10-12, 1923; UMW Journal, Sept. 15, 1923, pp. 10-11 70. New York Times, Sept. 11, 1923 71. Singer, p. 225; Thomas C. Menninger, “The Fight of Alexander Howat for the Right to Strike,” unpublished MA thesis,

79. Stanley Joshua Jacobs, “Opposition to John L. Lewis Within the United Mine Workers,” unpublished MA thesis, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1949, p. 72; Schneider, p. 52

80. United Mine Workers, Proceedings of the 29th ... Convention, I: 224 81. Menninger, p. 68 82. Charles Evans Hughes to John L. Lewis, Feb. 10, 1924, John L. Lewis Paper, microfilm edition, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, Library 83. Johanningsmeter, p. 617 84. Laslett, “Socialism and Illinois District

12, UMWA,” pp. 191-92 85. Workers Monthly, Dec. 1924, p. 90; April 1925, p. 271 86. J. A. Hamilton to Dear Brother Gardin, May 7, 1923, Saposs Papers

CHAPTER 14. THE LADIES’ GARMENT WORKERS 1. Workers’ Monthly, Feb., 1926, p. 171 2. Quoted in David Gurowsky, “Factional Disputes Within the ILGWU, 19191928,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY at Binghamton, 1978, pp. 25, 53-

54

3. Bulletin of the United Shop Delegates’ League of the Ladies’ Garment Industry,

January 1922; Report and Proceedings

of the Fifteenth Convention of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 1922, p. 94; Gurowsky, pp. 55-56 4. Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, New York, 1926, p. 13; Justice, Oct. 15, 1920, p. 4; Gurowsky, p. 2 5. Justice, Oct. 2, 1923, Aug. 14, 1925,

Daily Worker, March 8, 1927; Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

394

Movement: From World War I to the Present, New York, 1980, pp. 154-55

6. Ohio Socialist, June 11, 1919 7. Justice, Oct. 1, 8, 1920; June 17, 1921; Proceedings of the ILGWU Convention, 1920, pp. 131-32; Gurowsky, pp. 5-6

8. Louis

Levine,

The

Women

Garment

Workers, New York, 1924, p. 354 9. Justice, April 29, 1921; Gurowsky, pp.

74-78 10. New York Call, Oct. 25, 1921 11. Quoted in Gurowsky, p. 71 12. Rose Wortis, “Shop Delegate League in Needle Trades,” Worker, May 13, 1922 13. Ibid. 14. Gurowsky, p. 76

15. Proceedings of the ILGWU Convention, 1922, pp. 181-83,

198-200; Gurowsky,

pp. 25-27, 38-41, 78, 93-94, 175-76; Stanley Nadel, “Reds versus Pinks: A Civil War in the International Ladies Garment

Workers Union,” New York History, Jan., 1985, p. 55 16. Jack Hardy, The Clothing Workers, New York, 1935, pp. 38-40 17. Rose Wortis, “Shop Delegate League in

Needle Trades,” Worker, May 13, 1922 18. Advance, Dec.10, 1920, June 12, Sept, 15, 1921 19. Worker, Nov. 28, Dec. 3, 1922 20. Labor Herald, Jan., 1923, pp. 12-13; June 1923, pp. 3-4; Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union, Newark, NJ., 1950, pp. 125

21. Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in USA, 1914-1952, New York, 1973, p. 130 22. Ibid., pp. 142-43 23. Justice, April 20, 27, June 13, 1923 24. Quoted in Nadel, p.56

25. Justice, July 13, 1923; “To All Locals and Joint Boards: A Statement by the

37. Louis Hyman, “Agreement and Reality in the Women’s Clothing Industry,” American Labor Monthly 1 (Oct., 1923): 53-58 38. Levine, pp. 422-25 39. Justice, Dec. 22, 1923 40. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 28, March 1, 2,

1924 41. Daily Worker, Feb. 11, 16; March 8, 1924 42. Ibid., March 12-21, 1924; New Leader, March 22, 1924

43. AA, 45. 46.

Daily Worker, March 21, 1924 Ibid., April 21, 1924 Ibid., May 23, 1924 Margaret Larkin, “The Left-Wing in the Garment Unions,” Daily Worker, May 27, 1927 47. Gurowsky, p. 127; Daily Worker, May 9, 1924; Proceedings of the ILGWU Convention, 1924, pp. 51-54

48. Proceedings of the 1924 ILGWU Convention, 1924, pp. 120, 136, 240-42

49. John M. Laslett, Labor and the Left... 1881-1924, New York, 1970, p. 129 50. Justice, Aug. 1, 28, 1924 51. New York Times, May 27, 1924; Women’s Wear, June 4, 1924; Justice, June 6, 1924

52. Paula Elliot, Governor Alfred E. Smith, The

Politician

and

Reformer,

New

York, 1983, p. 205; Justice, July 5, 12, 19, 1924; Gurowsky, p. 145

53. Leo Wolman, Ebb and Flow in Trade Unionism, New York, 1936, p. 178; Gurowsky, pp. 147-50; Nadel, p. 60

CHAPTER 15. THE FUR WORKERS 1. Monthly Labor Review, 23 (Dec., 1926): 1153-62; Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor Statistics No. 431 (Feb., 1927): 6-8

General Executive Board,” ibid, Aug, 24, 1923 Ibid., Aug. 31, Sept. 21, Oct. 19, 1923 Ibid., Oct. 19, Nov. 23, 1923 Worker, Nov. 15, 1923; Daily Worker, Feb. 10, 1924 Justice, Oct. 12, 1923 Ibid., Nov. 23, 1923

2. Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers’ Union: A Story of Dramatic

31. Meyer Perlstein, “The Trade Union Educational League: The Role It Plays and Its True Character,” Justice, Aug. 17,

4. Ibid., pp. 88-89; Jewish Daily Forward,

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

1928 32. See “The League Not a Dual Union,” and “The TUEL and the Independent Unions,” Labor Herald, April 1923, p. 231, and Oct, 1923, pp. 4-7; Gurowsky, pp. 112-13

33. 34. 35. 36.

Worker, Nov. 17, 1923 Ibid. Ibid. Gurowsky, p. 79

Struggles and Achievement,

Newark,

NJ., 1950, pp. 65-78, 85-87; David M.

Schneider, The Workers’ (Communist)

Party and American Trade Unions, Baltimore, 1928, pp. 73-74

3. Foner FLWU, pp. 85-86 Dec. 16, 1918; April 28, May 25, 1919 5. Foner, FLWU, p. 90 6. Ibid., 97-99; New York Call, May 18, July

28-30, Aug. 17, Sept. 19, 1920 7. The Fur Worker, March-July 1920 8. Foner, FLWU, pp. 99-100; Ben Goid, Memoirs, New York, n.d. pp. 13

9. Ibid, pp. 100-03; Jewish Daily Forward, Nov. 30, Dec. 22, 1920 10. Foner, FLWU, pp. 103-04 11. Ibid., pp. 114-15 12. Ibid., p. 116

NOTES 13. Labor Herald, March 1923, p. 20; Freiheit, Dec. 5, 1922

14. Freiheit, Jan. 11, 1923; Foner, FLWU, p. 126

15. Foner, FLWU, pp. 131-32; The Worker

March 31, 1923; Jewish Daily Forward, March 8, 18-19, Dec. 21-23, 1923

16. Foner, FLWU, pp. 136-37; Freiheit, April

16, May 26, 1924; Jewish Daily Forward, May 25, 1924

17. “Report of Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Convention of the International Fur Workers Union, held at the Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, May 12-17, 1924,” pp. 124-25, 148, copy in International Fur Workers Union Archives. Hereinafter cited as IFWU Archives. 18. Te pp. 155, 162-63; Foner, FLWU, p.

1 1 co. Ibid., p. 141; Jewish Daily Forward, May 25, 1924; Freiheit, May 26, 1924

20. “Testimony taken at Joint Meeting of the Special Committee of the International Fur Workers Union and a Special Committee of the Joint Board Furriers’ Union, April 15, 1925,” transcript in IFWU Archives; Foner, FLWU, pp. 142-52 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Foner, FLWU, pp. 152-54

24. Ibid., p. 154; The Fur Worker, April, May 1925 25. Foner, FLWU, pp. 155-62 26. Ibid., p. 160. 27. Ibid., pp. 160-62; Women’s Wear Daily, Nov. 3, 1925 28. Women’s Wear Daily, Nov. 5, 1925 29. Foner, pp. 162-63; Daily Worker, Nov. 5,

10, 13, 1925; Workers’ Monthly, Nov., 1925 30. “Proceedings of the International Fur Workers

Union, American

House, Bos-

ton, Mass., “ vol. I, pp. 30-36, typewritten copy in IFWU Archives; Foner, FLWU, pp. 168-70

3 — . “Proceedings of the International Fur Workers Union,” vol. I, pp. 121-24, 161-

72, 175-82, 197-99, IFWU Archives

3nh . “Supplementary Report of the General Board referring to the New York Situation,” copy in IFWU Archives; Foner, FLWU, pp. 169-71 33. Foner, FLWU, pp. 171-72 34. “Proceedings of the International Fur Workers Union,” vol. I, pp. 285-94; vol. II, pp. 565-68, 608-78

35. Daily Worker, Sept. 2, Nov. 14, 16, Dec. 16, 1925; Foner, FLWU pp. 173-74 36. “Proceedings of the International Fur Workers Union,” vol. II, pp. 681-90, 69496; Foner, FLWU, pp. 175-76

395

37. “Proceedings of the International Fur Workers Union,” vol. II, pp. 694-96; Foner, FLWU, pp. 176 38. Foner, FLWU, p. 176

39. Ibid., pp. 176-77

CHAPTER 16. THE MEN’S CLOTHING AND MILLINERY WORKERS 1. This membership figure was used by Jacob Potofsky in a 1925 memorandum to Sidney Hillman on the subject of a decline in the membership of the ACWA. (ACWA Correspondence Files, ACWA headquarters, New York City, hereafter cited as ACWA Files.)

2. Jack Hardy, The Clothing Workers, New York, 1935, p. 94 3. Survey 44 (May 22, 1920): 86

4. Philip S. Foner, The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor, New York, 1967, pp. 30, 38, 40, 45. For a detailed discussion of the Amalgamated’s work to help solve the problems of the young Soviet Republic, see Steve Fraser, “Sidney Hillman and the Origin of the ‘New Unionism,’ 1890-1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1983, pp. 141-73 5. Advance, July 15, Dec. 10, 1921; Sidney Nadel, “The Communists and the Needle Trades, 1920-1928,” MA thesis, Columbia University, 1973, p. 47 ° 6. Advance, Aug. 5, Sept. 9, 1921, Feb. 3, 1922; Nadel, p. 47 ~y.

Workers’ Challenge, Feb. 5, 1921 (copy

in ACWA Files) 8. Liberator, July 1920, p. 44

9. New York Call, May 18, 1918 10. Nadel, p. 48 11. Sherna Gluck, “The Changing Nature of Women’s Participation in the American

Labor

Movement,

1900-1940’s:

Case

Studies from Oral History," Paper deliv-

ered at the Southwest Labor History Conference, March 5, 1977), copy in possession of the present writer. The material is based on interviews with Sarah Rozner.

1nh. Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in USA, 1914-1952, (New York, 1953) vol. 2, p. 163; Nadel, p. 49 13. Fraser, pp. 92, 102

14. Charles E. Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America: Study in Progressive Trade Unionism, New York, 1934, pp. 250-51; Fretheit, June 8, July 24, 1923; Nadel, p. 49 15. Ibid., p. 50 16.ACWA Documentary History 19221924; Convention Proceedings, pp. 28285

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

396

17. Nadel, p. 51 18. Daily Worker, June 30, 1924; Zaretz, p. 252; William Z. Foster, History of the

Communist Party of the United States,

New York, 1952, pp. 218-19 19. Zaretz, p. 252; Foster, pp. 218-19 20. Fraser, pp. 83, 84 21. NC/TUEL, August 27, 1924, Daniel Bell Papers, Box 4, Tamiment Institute Library

22. American Labor Year Book, 1925 (New York, 1925, p. 7

23. Daily Worker, Dec. 28, 1924, Dec.29, 1925,

2A. Ibid., June 12, 14, 17, 1925; Oct. 13, 14, 1926 25. Ibid., Nov. 14, 1926, March 8, 1927 26. Ibid., Oct. 18, 20, 1926, April 22, 1927

27. Proceedings of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union, 1927, pp. 173-77; Daily Worker, May 13, 1927

28. Daily Worker, April 12920, Nov. 12, 1928, May 7, 1929; New York Times, April 20, 1929

29. Daily Worker, May 7, 1929 30. Donald B. Robinson, Spotlight on a Union, New York, 1948, pp. 89-97

31. Daily Worker, May 8, 1929

12. Anthony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-1930,

Stanford,

1928, pp. 232-4;

Anthony C. Sutton in Daily News Record, Nov. 6, 1922 13. Fraser, pp. 153-54

14. Sutton, Western Technology, p. 22, quoting Pravda, Aug. 6, 1922; The Liberator, December, 1923, pp. 16-17; Nation, Nov. 7, 1923

15. Advance, Aug. 8, 1924

16. Daily News Record, May 13, 1922; Gen-

eral Executive Board, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Minutes, December, 1921, Fraser, p. 149 17. New York World, Oct. 20, 1922; Daily News Record, Nov. 26, 1923 18. Advance, Feb. 3, 1922 19. Ibid., Feb. 15, 1924 20. Ibid., Jan. 16, 1925

21. Reprinted in Advance, Jan. 4, 1924 22. New York Call, Nov. 26, 1922 23. Daily News Record, Nov. 27, 1922 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.

1. Advance, June 2, 1922 2. Steve Fraser, “Sidney Hillman and the

Origins of the ‘New Unionism,’

1895-

1933,” unpublished doctoral dissertaae Rutgers University, 1983, pp.149-

5. 3. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor, New York, 1952, chapter 9; New York Call, Nov. 22, 1921

Record,

Fraser, pp. 151-52 11. The Nation, Nov. 7, 1923; Fraser, p. 153

24. Advance, Dec. 1, 1922 25. Daily News Record, Dec. 1, 1922

CHAPTER 17. THE RAIC

4. Daily News

10. Chicago Daily News, Nov. 11, 1925; Documentary History of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1922-1924, Chicago, 1925, pp. 120-32;

May

13, 1922;

Fraser, p. 149 5. Rainer Taub, “Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of Scientific Management in the (Early) Soviet Union,” Telos, no. 37 (Fall, 1978): 220-42; Judith Merkle, Man-

28. Advance, Dec. 1, 1922 29. New York Times, Nov. 25, 1922

30. Advance, Dec. 1, 1922 31. New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Nov. 24, 1922 32. Fraser, pp. 156-58

33. Advance, July 12, 1923 3A. Ibid., Jan. 16, 1925 35. Fraser, p. 173

36. Advance, Jan. 16, 1925 37. Ibid.

CHAPTER 18. BLACK WORKERS

agement and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Manage-

1. The Messenger, October 1921, p. 12 2. Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, New

ment Movement, Berkeley, 1980, pp. 107, 113, 115, 119 (Lenin is quoted on pp. 113, 114, 115, 119); Kendall E.

4. SOE BES: AFL Convention, 1921, p.

Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, Princeton,

York, 1981, pp. 165-67 3. Ibid., p. 167 5. Foner, pp. 167-68

7. Ibid.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

8. Ibid., July 7, 1922 9. Ibid., July 28, 1922

portunity, May 1924, p. 137 11. Foner, p. 169

ager pp. 37-38, 50, 59; Fraser, pp. 1550) 6. Advance, May 26, 1922

Ibid., p. 168 Ibid., p. 168 Ibid., pp. 168-69 Ibid., p. 169 Preston News Service, Pittsburgh, Op-

NOTES 12. Ibid., p. 198, 13. The Crisis, June 1919, p. 64 14. Miscellaneous Political Records, Political Prisoners, U.S. Department of Justice File, December 20, 1928, TAF/G2C1, National Archives

15. Foner, p. 160 16. The Messenger, June 19, 1921 17. Ibid., Feb. 10, 1922, p. 34

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Ibid., March 1922, p. 4 Foner, p. 160 The Messenger, July 1923, pp. 759-60 Foner, p. 160 The Messenger, July 1923, pp. 759-60 Foner, p. 160 The Crisis, September, 1921, p. 200, National Brotherhood Worker, May 1921, quoted in Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker; The Negro and the Labor Movement, New York, 1931. p. 119 26. The Messenger, April-May 1920, pp. 3-4 27. Foner, p. 161 28. Ibid., p. 162

29. Ibid., p. 162 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid.

33. The Messenger, December 1924, p. 12 34. Foner, p. 162 35. The Messenger, Dec., 1924, p. 12 36. Foner, p. 163 37. Mark Solomon, “Red and Black: Negroes and Communism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1972, pp. 79-84

38. See Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the

Age of Jackson to World War II, West-

port, Conn., 1977, especially pp. 114,

167, 343-44 39. Lenin on the United States: Selected Writings by V. I. Lenin, New York,

397

CHAPTER 19. INDEPENDENT POLITICAL ACTION 1. Nathan Fine, Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States, New York 1932, pp. 367-68, 375

2. Labor, Feb. 25, March 4, 1922 3. Fine, p. 400; The Nation 115 (Dec.27, 1922):

Leaves

707;

From

Morris

A

Hillquit,

Busy

Life,

Loose

New

York,1934, pp. 306-11; James Weinstein,

The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925, New York, 1967, pp. 275-76 4. Hillquit, pp. 301-02; Matthew Josephson,

Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor, Garden City, N.Y., 1952, p. 269

5. Erik Olssen, “The Making of a Political Machine: The Railroad Unions Enter Politics,” Labor History 19 (Summer 1978): 389; James H, Shideler, Farm Crisis, 1919-1923, Berkeley, Ca., 1957, pp. 122-25 6. Olssen, P. 391 7. Labor, July 15, Aug. 12, Sept. 12, 1922 8. Olssen, p. 391

9. Labor, Dec. 2, 22, 1922; Weinstein, p. 277 10. Olssen, p. 393

11. New York Times, Dec. 12, 1922 12. William Z. Foster, History of the Com-

munist Party in the United States, New York, 1952, pp. 214-18 13. The Liberator, January 1923, pp. 10-11; Labor, Dec. 22,1922 ° 14. William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, New York, 1937, pp. 212-14 15. Labor Herald, July 1923, pp. 4-5

16. “Build the Labor Party,” Labor Herald, July 1923, p. 8

1970, pp. 58-59 40. James S. Allen, “Lenin and the American

17. The Second Year of the Workers Party of America, Report of the Central Executive Committee of the Third National Convention. Held in Chicago, Illinois, December 30-31, 1923, and Janu-

Negro,” The Communist 13 (1934): 5361

18. American Federationist, July 1923, pp.

41. Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, editors, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History 1919-1929, Philadelphia, 1987, pp. 1-51 42. James W. Ford, “Foster and Negro-Labor Unity,” Masses and Mainstream, March, 1951, p. 21

43. 4A. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Labor Herald, July, 1924, P. 152 Ibid., July, 1924, p. 156 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 160-61, Ford, pp. 21-22 Opportunity, Oct. 1924, p. 300 The Crisis, Dec., 1921, P. 104

ary 1-2, 1924, Chicago, 1924, p. 17 332-33 19. Chicago Tribune, July 3-4, 1923

20. Philip S. Foner, editor, Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Writings and Speeches, New York, 1983, pp. 362, 364; Foster, History of the Communist Party, pp. 217-19; New Majority, July 4, 11, 1923; Oakley Johnson, The Day Is

Coming: Life and Work of Charles E. Ruheneeld, New York, 1957, pp. 171-

21. Labor Herald, Jan. 1924, p. 7 22. Foster, History of the Communist Party, pp. 229-30; Tom Foley, “The LaFollette Campaign of 1924,” Political Affairs 48 (Sept.-Oct., 1969): 36

TUEL: TO THE END OF THE GOMPERS ERA

398

21-24, 183, 197, 293; New York Times,

23. Millard L. Gieske, Minnesota Farmer-La-

borism: The Third Party Alternative, Minneapolis, 1979, pp. 81-82; The

Worker, Nov. 24, 1923 24. Gieske, pp. 92-94

28. New York Times, May 29, 1924 29. Gieske, pp. 92-95

New Republic, July 2, 1924 Ibid. New York Times, June 19,1924 Ibid., June 20, 1924 Foster, History of the Communist Party, p. 218

35. Ibid., p. 220 36. Daily Worker, July 11, 1924 37. Gieske, p. 87; Irving Howe and Lewis Closer, The American Communist Party, New York, 1962, pp. 133-38, 140 38. Kirk H. Porter, Compiler, National Party Platforms, New York, 1924, pp.

516-22 39. Ibid., pp. 525-30

64. 65. 66. 67.

Foner, Ibid., pp. 335-36 Shideler, pp. 444-51; Olssen, p. 395 Shideler, pp, 456-67 McKay, p. 249

68. See especially Arthur W. McMahon, “Record of Political Events from July 1, 1923 to December 31, 1924,” Political Science Quarterly 40 (March 1925): 3558 69. James H. Robinson, “The Presidential Vote in the Election of 1924,” Unpub-

lished M. A. thesis, Univ. of Washington,

1968, p. 40 70. David Montgomery, “The Farmer-Labor Party,” in Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley,

Present Day, Urbana and Chicago, 1985, p. 77

41. Ibid., July 5, 1924

42. Porter, pp. 532-35

43. McKay, p. 179; Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross..., New Brunswick, 1949, pp. 446-47. The exchange of letters between Debs and Foster was reproduced in the

Daily Worker, July 31, 1924, and Socialist World, Aug., 1924, pp. 6-7 44. The American Labor Yearbook, 1925, New York, 1925, p. 156

45. Jay Lovestone, The LaFollette Illusion, New York, 1924, pp. 3, 6-7 46. Mckay, p. 152

47. Ibid., p. 153 A8. Ibid., p. 154 49. American Federationist 1924): 242

25 63. The Messenger, Nov., 1924, pp. 339, 340; Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, p. 335

eds., Working For Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the

40. New York Times, July 4, 1924

31

(Sept,

50. McKay, p. 153

51. New York Times, Oct. 25, 1924 52. McKay, p. 180

53. Ibid., pp. 166, 182-83 54. Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans:.... Westport, CT 1977, p. 334; McKay, p. 218 55. New Leader, Sept. 27, 1924 56. McKay, p. 183

57. Ibid., pp. 184, 188 58. Ibid., p. 199

71. American Federationist, Dec. 24, 1924,

p. 990. See also Mollie R. Carroll, Labor and Politics: The Attitude of the American Federation of Labor and Politics, Boston, 1923

72. American Federationist 32 (Jan., 1925): 55; McKay, pp. 230-31

73. American Federationist 31 (Dec., 1924): 990; Proceedings, AFL Convention, 1924, p. 175 74. Fred E. Haynes, “The Collapse of the

Farmer-Labor Bloc,” Social Force 4 (Sept., 1925): 148-56 75. James H. Shideler, “The Disintegration of the Progressive Party Movement of 1924,” The Historian 13 (Spring 1951): 189-201 76. Labor, Feb. 21, 28, 1925 77. eu “The Disintegration...”, pp. 200-

1 78. Wm. Z. Foster, “The Significance of the Elections: Three Stages of Our Labor Party Policy,” Workers Monthly, Dec., 1924, pp. 52-54

59. Labor, Aug. 30, 1924 60. James H. Shideler, “The LaFollette Progressive Campaign of 1924,” Wisconsin

Magazine of History 33 (June 1950): 456; New York Times, Oct. 31, 1924;

James H. Robinson,

61. Advance, Nov. 3, 1924 62. Robert Zeiger, Republicans and Labor,

New York, 1972, p. 186; McKay, pp. 221-

25. Olssen, pp. 393-95 26. Labor, July 12, 1924 27. Kenneth C. McKay, The Progressive Movement of 1924, New York, 1947, pp. 84-85 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Nov. 5-7, 1924

The Presidential

Vote, 1896-1932, Palo Alto, 1934, pp.

79. Wm. Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party..., p. 220

80. Daily Worker, Sept. 7, 1926 81. “National Committee T.U.E.L. Meeting,” Jan. 17, 1927, Earl Browder Papers, George Arents Memorial Syracuse University

Library,

NOTES CHAPTER 20. END OF THE GOMPERS’ ERA 1. Philip Taft, The A. F. of L. From the Death of Gompers to the Merger, New York, 1959, p. 1 2. Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers: A Biography, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1963, p.

52:

3. Ibid, pp. 524-25; Frank “Samuel Gompers’ Last Survey 53 (Jan. 1, 1925): ceedings, AFL Convention, 4. Mandel, pp. 529

Tennenbaum, Convention,” 391-94; Pro1924, pp. 5-6

5. Ibid., p. 530 6. Benjamin Stolberg, “What Manner of Man Was Gompers?” Aflantic Monthly 135 (125): 404 7. Industrial Worker, Dec. 7, 1924 8. Ibid. 9. The discussion and analysis of the career of Samuel Gompers are based upon

Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States 8 vols. (1947-1988); The Papers of Samuel Gompers, edited by Stuart B. Kaufman

399 et. al. vols. 1-3 (Urbana and Chicago, 1986-1989); Friedrich A. Sorge, Labor

Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890, edited by Philip S. Foner and Brewster Chamber-

lain, Newport, Conn., 1977; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, 2 vols. (New York, 1925); Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers: A Biography, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1963; S. B. Kauf-

man. Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor,

1848-1896, New York, 1973; W. M. Dick,

Labor and Socialism in America—The

Gompers Era, New York, 1972; L. S.

Reed, The Labor Philosophy of Samuel

Gompers, New York, 1930; Philip Taft,

The A. F. of L. in the Time of Gompers,

New York, 1957 10. William Z. Foster, “The American Fed-

eration of Labor Convention,” Workers Monthly, Jan., 1925, pp. 103-07 11. New York Times, Jan. 27, 1920

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