THE ClO's LEFT-LED UNIONS edited by STEVE ROSSWURM A volume in the CLASS AND CULTURE series RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS Miiton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, series editors New Brunswicl^ New Jersey For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Antonio Cavorso (1901—1971), FE Rosswurm, Steven, The CIO's left-led unions / Steve Rosswurm. Thomas J. Fitzpatricic (1903-?). UE p. cm.—(Class and culture series) Includes bibliographical references and index. John W. Nelson (1917-1959), UE ISBN 0-8135-1769-9 (cloth)—ISBN 0-8135-1770-2 (pbk.) 1. Congress of Industrial Organizations (U.S.)—History. 2. Trade unions and communism—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. HD8055.C75R67 1992 331.88'33'0973—dc20 91-19467 ap Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind. British Cataloging-in-Publication information available Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what 1 create; for I aeate Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a deUght; I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people. No longer shall the Copyright © 1992 by Rutgers, The State University sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying; no longer AH Wghts Reserved shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or ^ old man Manufactured in the United States of America who does not round out his full lifetime; he dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years, and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed. , r They shall live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant; they shall not build houses for others to Uve m, or plant for others to eat. As the years of a tree, so the years of my people; and my chosen ones shall long enjoy the produce of their hands. (Isaiah 65:17-22) CONTENTS Preface ix Acronyms xvii Introduction: An Overview and Preliminary Assessment of the CIO's Expelled Unions 1 STEVE ROSSWITRM Class and Race in the Crescent City: The ILWU, from San Francisco to New Orleans 19 BRUCE NELSON Who Controls the Hiring Hall? The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU During World War II 47 NANCY QUAM-WICKHAM Black and White Together: Organizing in the South with the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied Workers Union (FTA-CIO), 1946-1952 69 KARL KORSTAD V William Sentner, the UE, and Civic Unionism in St. Louis ROSEMARY FEURER The Catholic Church and the Left-Led Unions: Lab9r Priests, Labor Schools, and the ACTU 119 STEVE ROSSWURM McCarthyism and the Labor Movement: The Role of the State 139 ELLEN W. SCHRECKER Fighting Left-Wing Unionism: PREFACE Voices from the Opposition to the IFLWU in Fulton County New York 159 GERALD ZAHAVI The Shop-Floor Dimension of Union Rivalry: The Case of Westinghouse in the 1950s 183 MARK MCCOLLOCH "An Old Soldier" 201 TOM JURAVICH "That is that/' pronounced Philip Murray, CIO president, after the Notes 203 1950 CIO convention officially expelled nine left-led unions, having ousted two others in 1949. Contributors 241 Murray meant this brief sentence, I think, in two ways. One is obvious: a drawn-out, bitter, and enervating controversy—the prob­ Index 243 lem of the "Communist-dominated" unions in the CIO—had ended. But he also meant that which is signified by our contemporary slang phrase "They're history"—so obscenely wrongheaded, but so indica­ tive of life in contemporary American society. Murray, however, was wrong. His literal meaning overstated the matter: the CIO's initial expul­ sion decision, taken at its 1949 convention, merely had established a precondition for the left-led unions' demise. The federation's leader­ ship then had to commit sizable resources to destrdy the expelled unions, which did not obligingly disappear. Several of them, includ­ ing the International Fur & Leather Workers Union (IFLWU), the Inter­ national Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers (lUMMSW), Preface Preface xi to be targets of CIO "raiding" into the into the South with tremendous courage, flush with the elan of suc­ mid-1950s and beyond. The IFLWU merged with the A^lgamated cessful struggles against obdurate employers and state and dty offi­ w "f® ^ Butcher Workmen in 1955, lUMMSW with the United cials up and down the west coast. Attitude and experience was not APT 1967, and the ILWU reaffiliated with enough: the ILWU was soundly defeated in a 1938 NLRB election. 'he CIO before being ejected, Nelson's analysis of .this defeat is appropriately complex. On the one still remains mdependent and, in Frank Emspak's words, "a moral beacon of the labor movement."i hand,^he stresses the massive violence, from virtually every conceiv­ able source, that greeted the ILWU's efforts. On the other, he empha­ And what about Murray's figurative meaning? That which has hap­ sizes the specificity of the black experience on the New Orleans docks pened m the past, history, is not dead, is not gone. It continues to shape during Jim Crow and the ILWU's lack of familiarity with that history. ur ives indeed, it establishes the boundaries of our existences—no Nelson's ultimate conclusion—that the ILWU's opponents simply matter how unaware we are of its influence. The record and experi- had too much state-sanctioned power—draws our attention to, the nces of the expelled unions speak to us, as working people and as Citizens, across the decades. "state's vital role in influencing the outcome of events." But he also points out that the defeat "demonstrates the complexity of working- They may reach us in many ways. Some of the men and women of class consciousness and the complicated ways in which race has af­ these unions, still aiive, can talk directly to us. We can listen to the fected the social relations of production and the development of ecorded words of others who were interviewed before their deaths .unionism." he expelled unions address our lives in still another way: not only Nancy Quam-Wickham, the first scholar to use the numerous oral re we still expenencing the long-range results of the expulsions, but histories done under joint ILWU-National Endowment for the Hu­ many of tl^ goals that the expeUed unions set for their members and tneir country have yet to be accomplished. manities sponsorship in the 1980s, takes up similar issues in her dis­ cussion of the ILWU's defense of the hiring haU during World War II. Perhaps, however, the expelled unions speak to us most pertinently Despite the class-collaboration rhetoric of some ILWU leaders, particu­ an abstract sense. They remind us that the collective struede larly Harry Bridges, job-control struggles continued on the docks. For gainst the boundaries of our existence—for they understood that various reasons, some patriotic, some self-interested, there was rela­ re boundanes out there—is the essence of a meaningful life tively little opposition to the no-strike pledge. Yet the " '34 men," in Ihey prod us to recall that in the effort, sometimes successful, often Howard Kimeldorf's evocative phrase, continued to defend jealously ot, to change the world—for they understood that the world could be their hard-won rights.^ One of those rights, however, was to work can be lowered and attitudes can be with men of their own choosing; during the war, that came to mean ered. Each struggle, moreover, helps create the conditions for the iicxt on©. other whites. In some cases, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sepa­ rate job control, ethnic identity, and racism; that the bosses histori­ This book of essays, none previously published and all based upon cally had used race to divide working people made the situation even exhaustive research, is a collective effort to listen to the expeUed more complicated. The general trend, however, is clear: The '34 men unions. What then, ever so briefly, do they tell us? Rather, what do I used job control to enforce their restricted vision of who constituted s editor, think they tell us? No contributor has seen this preface and the American working class. The ILWU leadership, although commit­ therefore, is in complicity in its viewpoints. ted to interracial unionism, seldom used their power to effectively My introduction provides an overview of the history of the expelled oppose such actions—partly because of their intense commitment to unions as well as a preliminary assessment of their significance. I job control and partly because of their egalitarian, but economistic, iscu^s the unions' social composition and leadership and their rela- reading of race relations. onship to the CIO. Both the immediate and long-run implications of Karl Korstad's essay, the reminiscences of a Southern, postwar or­ the expulsions are examined in the last section of the introduction. ganizer for the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied Workers (FTA), ITU/TF « Nelson's essay on the takes us into the next decade. Right from its origins, the FTA under­ cv, ^ ^ organize the predominantly African-American long- stood that a confrontation with racism and the institutions that subor­ horemen m New Orleans in the late 1930s. ILWU organizers went dinated and segregated people of color was essential to successful xii Preface Preface. xiii organizing. Sometimes explicitly, but more often through the adroit nist trade-union leader I know of, to come to grips with the "is"—the use of memorable anecdotes, Korstad shows the ways in which this realities of the capitalism he confronted—and the "ought"—the ulti­ fundamental insight became democratic practice in the South from mate goal of democratic socialism.