Strikes and Strikeouts: Building an Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Working Class Sports Culture from Below in the United States, 1918-1950

STRIKES AND STRIKEOUTS: BUILDING AN ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FASCIST WORKING CLASS SPORTS CULTURE FROM BELOW IN THE UNITED STATES, 1918-1950

A dissertation presented By

James WJ Robinson

To The Department of History

In Partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of History

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts March 2020

Table of Contents 1

Appendix 2

Acknowledgements 3

Introduction 9

Chapter 1: Playing for Power: the European Worker Sport movement and the seeds of the

American Labor Sports movement 1919-1940 31

Chapter 2: Shooting Hoops with Your Neighborhood Socialists: The International Ladies

Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the Socialist Party, and Social Unionism Sports Programs

1918-50 80

Chapter 3: The Autoworkers Slide Into Home: UAW Recreation Department’s Athletic

Programs 1935-50 and beyond 115

Chapter 4: A Complete Game: The Mass Labor Sports Movement in the CIO and Beyond 173

Chapter 5: The Big Red Machine: NYC Popular Front Communist Sports 1936-1948 225

Conclusion: The Potential of Labor Sports and Radicals in Grassroots Sports Culture 260

Bibliography 268

Appendix ACWA= Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America AFL= American Federation of Labor CIO= Committee/Congress of Industrial Organizations Comintern= Communist International CP or CPUSA= Communist Party of the United States of America ILA= International Longshoremen Association ILWU= International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union ILGWU= International Ladies Garment Workers Union IWO= International Workers’ Order IWW= Industrial Workers of the World LSF= Labor Sports Federation LSU= Labor Sports Union RSI= Red Sport International or Sportintern SASI= Sozialistische Arbeitersport Internationale or Socialist Workers' Sport International SP= Socialist Party of America SWOC/USA/USW= Steel Workers Organizing Committee/United Steelworkers of America TUAA= Trade Union Athletic Association TUUL= Trade Union Unity League UAW= United Auto Workers UE= United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America YCL= Young Communist League YPSL= Young Peoples’ Socialist League

Acknowledgements

This dissertation, like just about anything, is not solely by me. I was supported along the way by many people who gave me encouragement, engaged with my work, gave me helpful feedback, or just listened to me vent.

I’d like to thank my dissertation committee: Dr. Nicholas Brown, Dr. Timothy Brown, and Dr. Heather Streets-Salter of Northeastern University, as well as Dr. Rob Ruck of the

University of Pittsburgh. None of this work would ever have materialized without your guidance and mentorship. Dr. Streets-Salter, as my advisor, has immensely helped in my development as a teacher, a researcher, and a writer. Thank you especially for your work in editing my dissertation. There is a good reason you are considered a hero by all the PhD students in the

History Department and beyond.

I would like to thank the American Studies and History Departments, and the Liberal Art program of Temple University for helping craft my academic thinking. In particular, I thank Dr.

Lisa Rhodes and Dr. David Watt for putting up with my undergraduate annoying questions and encouraging me to understand my interests through deep historical dives. Michael Brody, an ex- labor lawyer who became an instructor at Temple, taught me all about the past radical movements, connected deeply with labor, from the 1870s-1930s. In my master’s work, I would like to thank Dr. Michael Szekely and Dr. Rebecca Alpert for guiding me in my initial project on the New York Communist Sports scene.

Also in Philadelphia, the independent historian Bob Helms in Philadelphia made me realize that historical research into the past lives of radicals was not only possible, but came alive

3 in his walking tours. Additionally, Philadelphia social justice movements, for better or for worse, sparked my activism of my 20s. For that, I became who I am today.

I would also like to thank the Northeastern University History Department for providing my academic historical training as both a World Historian and an American Historian, as well as funding my travels and development, in addition to giving me my cherished teaching and TAing professional work. I thought I knew a lot about history before I entered the PhD program, but how wrong I was. Now I understand the craft of the discipline. In addition to those mentioned on my Dissertation Committee, I would like thank members of my cohort: Matt Bowser, Jamie

Parker, and Thanasis Kinias, as well as other History PhD students who have reviewed my work and provided friendship, such as Allison Chapin, Bridget Keown, Colleen Nuget, Simon Purdue,

Luke Scallone, Will Whitworth and others.

Matt White, a fellow historian of labor, the left, and PhD candidate at Ohio State, and long time friend, provided valuable insights along the way. Dr. Brian Dolber, whom I knew in another time and place and through the weirdness of the world, we both became scholars of the history of the old left, also is the originator in conversation of the phrase “an anti-fascist, anti- racist working class counter-culture”. Elizabeth Pingree, as a PhD candidate Boston College doing her dissertation on labor, gave me good feedback and I hope I was able to do the same for her work. Sparky Taylor, a fellow traveler of the left, as it were, gave me the title of this work,

“Strikes and Strikeouts”. Heather Squire, a sometimes academic and fellow traveler and now a rising MMA star, encouraged me to see this through and suffer through the homesickness of my beloved Philadelphia. Nicola Errico Tenaglia helped me track down what happened to individuals I researched, which proved to be a rich source of information, since it led me to speak with individuals who knew John Gallo, the organizer of Local 600’s sports programs in the

1930s-40s before he was blacklisted during the Red Scare. John Gallo’s daughter, Theresa

Martin, and grandnephew Gary Dymski, were a fabulous source of information. Gabriel Kuhn, a historian of social movements, was an invaluable consultant as he has written extensively on

Worker Sport. Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer has encouraged me as a writer and researcher and encouraged me to develop ideas of leisure, recreation, and lifestyle choices as a plane of conflict.

Sharon McConnell-Sidorick offered me great insight into working class culture and life of labor militants in Philadelphia, which influenced how I conceived of the development of Labor Sports.

Harjit Singh Gill originally gave me the idea for research in a brainstorming session and has given me good feedback over the years, despite his mediocracy as a fantasy baseball player.

Additionally, I would like to thank members of my union, the Graduate Employees of

Northeastern University (GENU). You provided sanity and comradery in a sea of chaos in ways the high administration never would, and made a real difference. In particular, but not limited to,

Liz Polcha, Sam Moran, Alex Ahmed, Lauren Contorno, Ashakan Ghanbarzadeh, Tim LaRock,

Erin Cole (especially for formatting advice), and many more. Together, we will win.

On that note, I would like to thank the upper management and their union busting lawyers hired by Northeastern University for producing some of the most hilariously bad propagandistic misinformation I’ve ever read. The anti-union stance of the upper administration is short-sighted, and while their coziness with the Trump administration might do well by their pocketbooks, when history is written, they will not look good. As a historian, I get to write some of that history. I will remember those email blasts and police harassment you ordered on our activists as we tried to conduct research and teach classes. Our solidarity scared you. We all will remember that, in the years beyond these walls.

In order to research this work, I traveled to ten different archives, spread throughout the

United States, and indeed, the world. The staff at each archive were incredibly helpful and displayed genuine interest in helping this work come alive. I would like to thank each one of them to making my visit to their archive worth it, for I came away with more information and outlooks at each stop. In no particular order, I thank Danielle Nista, research associate at the

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, Daniel Necas, archivist at the Immigration History and Research Center at the University of Minnesota in

Minneapolis, Gavin Strassell the UAW archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and

Urban Affairs at Wayne State University in Detroit, Julie Herrada, Curator of Joseph

A. Labadie Collection at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Steven Calco, archivist of the

Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University, Zach

Brodt archivist of the UE Collection at University of Pittsburgh, Rachel Dreyer, head of

Research Services of the Special Collections at Penn State for their Steelworker and Mineworker records, Nina van den Berg and Andrea Galova and the rest of the staff at the International

Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Catherine Powell, the director of the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, and last but not least Robin Walker, the archivist and director of education services of the International Longshore and Warehouse

Union.

Speaking of the ILWU, as much as the staff and members at other unions were helpful, I found in that particular union a very lively set of activists committed to the tradition of militant anti-fascist anti-racist working class militancy who were both excited about my work and incredibly helpful without me really even asking them to be. In particular, I would like to thank

ILWU members Samantha Levens, Brian Skiffington, and Zack Pattin.

In my travels, I mostly lived on the helpfulness of my far-flung friends across the United

States, who gave me shelter and guided me in navigating the local cities. In particular, for that,

I’d like to thank Lindsay Keating, Colin Flory, Kate Potter, and Pierre Jauretche for that local support. Additionally, Chuck Munson made the timeline for me based on a very rough hand- drawn version.

I would like to thank the organizers of these organizations, who helped develop my ideas in front of a live crowd: the North American Society for Sports History (NASSH), the NINE

Baseball Conference, the Labor and Working Class History Association, the Philadelphia

Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research, the Northeastern University Graduate

History Conference, the World History Association, and the North American Labor History

Conference.

I thank my lovely dog, Summer, for keeping me company all these years.

I thank my partner, Kate Coppola, for putting up with all this. I love you very much no matter what.

Lastly, I thank my parents, Trish and Bill Robinson, for giving me my intellectual curiosity and my work ethic. I am, forever, your son.

Labor Sports in the United States timeline, parallel to Worker Sport in Europe timeline

Introduction

Sport is a combination of things - exercise, play catharsis, and more – that aren’t tied to any particular political brand or value system. Sport’s political meaning is created by the way it is exercised, and by the social place it occupies. This, however, challenges us to take sport seriously and create circumstances that bring out the best in it, not the worst. -Gabriel Kuhn1

Why does it Matter? Labor Sports 1918-1950 The Labor Sports movement in the United States is largely forgotten, a footnote in the histories of the New Deal, the labor movement, or the American Left. Only in recent years have historians begun to recover the rich culture of the interwar period, long overshadowed by the

World Wars and the Cold War. While some scholarship has been conducted on the Worker Sport movement in Europe that flourished and even dwarfed elitist sports in the interwar period, it has been assumed in that scholarship that the American wing of that movement was tiny and unimportant. While that may be true in an official sense, according to pure membership rolls, it overlooks the networks of left-wing sports clubs in immigrant communities in the 1920s.

Furthermore, it overlooks the story of the attempts at forming a larger American Worker Sport- modeled movement by both the Socialists and Communists. Finally, it ignores the Labor Sports movement affiliated with labor unions, often under the leadership of Socialists or Communists, that rose in the United States while Worker Sport was on the rapid decline in the wake of fascist attacks in the 1930s.

At its height, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the Labor Sports movement presented a real alternative to both apolitical and conservative sports and involved millions of working class

1 Gabriel Kuhn, Playing As If The World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Activism In Sports (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), Pg. 11-12.

9 people. It was a key part of improving the lives of average Americans and helped build an anti- racist, anti-fascist, working class counterculture that helped change the United States through a strong labor movement. This movement brought higher living standards for working class people and the end of racial segregation in sports, which in turn helped kickstart the Civil Rights movement.

This dissertation lays out the history of building the alternative leftist sports cultures, arguing that sports were key to the success of CIO organizing and maintaining a permanent union presence in the workplace. I argue that the building of this alternative sports culture was influenced and inspired by the European-based Worker Sport movement. At first, leftist sports organizers saw their mission as being one of building an American wing of that movement. As the Depression entered its eighth year, left-wing militants became part of the massive organizing upsurge and brought their experiences into the CIO, including left-wing sports organizing, which created a similar yet separate left-wing sports movement in Labor Sports. They built the Labor

Sports movement as the spearhead of the labor recreational programs movement, to win the battle over how workers would use their free time. Labor Sports were, of all the recreation programs built by unions during this period, easily the most popular and extensive of these programs.2

In this dissertation, I argue that the Labor Sports movement brought cheap or free recreation to working class people, often across racial lines, and that these bonds of comradery formed in stands and fields of Labor Sports is as important to understanding the potency of the 1930s-40s labor movement as strikes, sit-downs, wage gains, and general welfare. Sports helped breach the

2 Similarly to how Worker Sport was gutted in the 1930s, Labor Sports was dismantled or defanged in the 1950s by a sustained conservative attack, supported by anti-communist liberals, on radical led unions and locals, with the exception of the ILWU.

10 divide between traditional craft unionists and industrial unionists with social unionism leanings about the role of labor unions in American life. Were unions just entities to win wages and benefits for its members, or were they a larger force for change in the United States? Were unions to be conservative or apolitical actors, or fighting organizations for the improvement of the entire working class? Here, I show that sports were critical in helping unions become forces for larger cultural change.

In comparison, Europeans tended to use political parties rather than unions for larger social struggles, using unions instead as conduits for political parties. Political parties, sometimes through unions, organized social activities, formed paramilitary forces, often connecting activities like sports together with political action. European socialists and communists formed competing left-wing sports internationals (called Worker Sport) in order to engage with workers’ interests, build healthy recreational alternatives to alcohol consumption, and create bonds of camaraderie. I demonstrate that American radicals had continued contacts and participation with these European sports internationals throughout the 1920s, and initially sought to mirror the European leftists’ style of sports organizing. Thus they tried to form alternative sporting organizations as a way to recruit young members into their political organizations in the 1920s and to build a worker-run recreational culture. Their efforts met with mixed results, as their success was limited largely to communities with strong leftist presence.

I argue that it was only when the International Ladies Garment Workers Union

(ILGWU), inspired by Worker Sport in Europe, threw its weight into building a mass union recreation program in the early 1930s that what became the American Labor Sports movement really began to gain traction in the United States. I then demonstrate that the Labor Sports movement exploded with the labor organizing upsurge of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO) in 1935-41, as left-wing militants brought their experience and vision into building the labor movement as a more dynamic part of working class life. Unions like the

United Autoworkers (UAW) mobilized huge Labor Sports leagues and dramatically increased participation in recreational leagues across the nation. Additionally, the Labor Sports movement quickly spread throughout other CIO unions in the 1930s, such as the United Electrical and

Radio Workers (UE), International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU),

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), and into the 1940s, the United

Steelworkers of America (USW). Only the Red Scare of the late 1940s-early 1950s and a more general conservative backlash against leftist-led organizing in the 1950s largely destroyed Labor

Sports. Even then, one particular union which had successfully resisted the Red Scare attacks, the ILWU, saw its sports programs survive into the 1980s and 90s.

The Bigger Picture: Labor and Sports Historiography

I argue that sports are both a reflection of human power structures and contain the possibility of altering those structures. They help us understand how we arrived at our present-day world, and how they have been used as a strategy for people to challenge dominant paradigms. Modern sports such as soccer, rugby, baseball, cricket, and basketball--to name only the most popular team sports--largely arose during later industrialization as a result of efforts by middle-class reformers to impose values of order and teamwork upon working class men. Sports quickly became a popular institution as they passed out of the control of middle-class men and as working-class men and women won more leisure time. At that point, sports magnates had gained control over sports at elite levels, and sought to organize this newly popular entertainment business along the lines of other commercial industries. While there are variations on this narrative depending on the sport, this was the basic pattern of the 19th and 20th centuries,

12 particularly in the United States, Britain, and France. Sports, especially association-rules football

(soccer), cricket, and baseball, quickly exploded worldwide as a form of entertainment and recreation for all classes of people. That recreation included both playing the sports and consuming the games as fans, from lower amateur levels up to the elite levels. They became avenues both for ruling class people to show their dominance and for colonized people to beat the rulers at their own games.3 While no hard data exists for the number of people worldwide estimated to have played sports in any form in the 20th century, it is easily an event of global importance, as it consistently captivated global attention as much as music or film. Thus, sports in this period became a mass activity around the world.

Until the 1970s, serious academic work on sports was limited to popular literature.

Historians began examining then the existing historiography sports as either mere childish distractions or footnotes in the larger histories of modern human societies. One of the earliest scholarly attempts to write seriously about sports was CLR James’ Beyond A Boundary (1963), in which the Trinidadian revolutionary argued that although cricket was introduced to tame the colonized, they instead adopted cricket as a symbol of West Indian African self-determinism, with every passing advancement of black players as a metaphor for advancement of the black majority.4 James also noticed that cricket united immigrants of all kinds who were arriving in the

West Indies, even as they encountered racially exclusionary barriers in local cricket clubs.

Cricket helped slowly break those barriers down, though white elites had expected that they

3 The sole exception was the case of Irish nationalists, who preferred to build their own Irish sports institutions, namely the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Indeed, until the early 1970s, GAA club members could receive permanent bans from GAA activities simply for playing “English sports” like soccer, rugby, or cricket. For more, see Pat McDevitt, “Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity, and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884-1916” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

4 CLR James, Beyond A Boundary. (London: Yellow Jersey Press. 2005). Pg. xiii.

13 would dominate the games.5 At around the same time as James’ work, US scholars were beginning to examine the long prevailing foundational myths of the origins of baseball, including

Harold Seymour’s Baseball: The Early Years.6 These trends coincided with the beginnings of social history, marked especially by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working

Class7, which sought to move history away from the story of the elites to one of everyday people. But it was only with the rise of New Left intelligentsia in the late 1960s-70s that sport began to receive attention as a serious scholarly subject. In William Morgan’s Leftist Theories of

Sports (1995)8, he laid out the critiques of sport by New Left theorists, which centers on attacking sports as idealistic. What differentiates the New Left theorists from the Old Left theorists is that the New Left sought to lay out a structured and detailed condemnation of sports, while Old Left theorists simply ignored sports as unimportant. New Left works on sports included Beri Rigauer’s Sport and Work, Jean-Marie Brohm’s Sport: A Prison of Measured

Time, Rob Beamish’s various articles, Richard Lipsky’s How We Play the Game, and Paul

Hoch’s Rip Off of the Big Game.9 These critics argued that sports could only be a repressive force. Since society was structured around capitalism, they argued that sports would only lead the working class and other oppressed groups to false fantasies of hero worship.10

5 James, Pg. 63.

6 Harold Seymor, Baseball: The Early Years. (NYC: Oxford University Press. 1960.)

7 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. (NYC: Random House. 1966.)

8 William J. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Sport and Society). (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

9 Beri Rigauer, Sport and Work (NYC: Columbia University Press, 1981); Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport A Prison of Measured Time (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Paul Hoch, Rip Off of the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite. (New York: Anchor Books, 1972).

10 Morgan, Pg. 26.

Morgan pointed out that New Left scholars argued that sports could only be truly reformed when society was reformed, and some, such as Brohm, even predicted that they would disappear in a communist society. Morgan argued that much of the New Left criticism stemmed from the fact that the Left did not have as much success in gearing sports to its own sociopolitical agendas as the political right.11 One instantly thinks of popular music of the 1960s-

70s, but not mass participation in sports, as projects that captivated mass New Left thinking.

Instead of trying to engage with sports as a method of social transformation, the New Left criticized sports as the domain of conservatism. Furthermore, the New Left called for the destruction of sports without leaving anything in its wake that would fulfil some of the roles of belonging and mass entertainment clearly fulfilled by sports. While Morgan does not articulate this, one also thinks of the 1968 Olympic sprinters like Tommy Smith and John Carlos, along with the giant figure in Muhammed Ali or even the earlier Jackie Robinson as having a platform for amplifying voices for social change.

By the 1980s and 1990s, sport historians across regional and international lines were taking sports history more seriously. At this point, hegemony theory overtook the theories of

New Left historians. Rather than view sport as a waste of time that ultimately is defeating for social movements, hegemony theorists saw sport as a social practice, a part of a general hegemonic domination in capitalism and by the state. Therefore, hegemonists rejected the idea that sports can be reduced to a mere distraction by the New Left, or that sports should be raised above society’s realities by the idealists.12 In recent years, the popular work of journalist-activist

Dave Zirin has helped push the idea that sports can be used to either reinforce the dominant

11 Morgan, Pg. 47.

12 Morgan, Pg. 65.

15 values of society, or can be used to effect change both at grassroots levels and at the highest levels. While Zirin has mostly concentrated his popular writing on elite level sports, scholars like

Rob Ruck and Tony Collins have shown how sports have played out on world power structures in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.13 Between the hegemonists and the social justice scholars, I take the stance that sports are popular because they are largely unscripted and joyous. That unscripted joy of athletic beauty, relationships built, and sense of belonging, can indeed be used to enforce conservative understandings of society, but they can also be used to build and amplify popular movements. In recent years, as social justice politics have made their way from high school playing fields to the elite professional stadium lights, the possibilities of sports have become clear. The old lessons of Labor Sports have resurfaced, in that sports have the ability to apply social change politics to sports participants and their fans.

In this project, I show how left-wing organizers sought to use sports as a tool to organize workers in their leisure time. To understand the dynamic of how institutional sports are linked to the development of industrial capitalism on a global scale, I utilize Tony Collins’ Sport In

Capitalist Society: A Short History. Collins traces the development of sports from English folk games to the dominant international institutional sports of today. As a historian trained in a

World History PhD program, I take the view that people are not limited by borders and are not blank slates when they move between borders. This is especially true of the interactions between

European Worker Sport and American Labor Sports, which at points perceived themselves as the same movement. With each shift in the history of capitalism, from its dawn in the mercantilist

13 Tony Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History (New York: Routledge, 2013); Rob Ruck, Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Rob Ruck, Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL (New York City: The New Press, 2018).

16 societies and the weakening of the aristocracy, to the industrial growth of cities in the 19th century, to the Cold War’s communist-versus-capitalism division of the world, to the present day, sport has shifted and morphed. Collins focuses on why sports developed in England spread through much of the world, and how class domination and expression played out in sports like rugby, soccer, cricket, and in related American examples, especially baseball and gridiron football. Collins seizes upon why soccer spread quickly in the 20th century to become a global sport, ceasing to be an expression of English identity, and why rugby, cricket, and baseball, while certainly international, remained limited in their play. Finally, he links explicitly the development of nationalism, prestige, and sports play on the global level, and the booming of capitalism, as well as the possibilities of change through sport. These patterns help explain why the Worker Sport movement of Europe would eventually be replicated in the Labor Sports movement of the United States, though with differing characteristics once organizers ceased to simply try to mimic Worker Sport.

Frameworks

The theoretical frameworks I find useful come from the fields of social history and leisure studies. First, I look to Lisbeth Cohen’s Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago

1919-1939 to understand how working class communities changed over the interwar period, through Americanization and media technologies like radio and film that helped create a common experience for working class immigrants and white and black Americans.14 This cohesion was encouraged by corporate America, both by individual large corporations, especially in auto, steel, and machinery industries, and through their business organizations such

14 Lisbeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1939 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

17 as the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers. Americanism was favored by big capitalists because of their belief that radical labor agitation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the result of foreign ideas, like Anarchism or Socialism. Instead, Cohen demonstrated that in Chicago, the effect of Americanism so championed by big business instead helped build a more cohesive and united working class culture that made CIO union organizing much less difficult than prior larger labor organizing drives. I further her argument by noting that as the children of immigrants became diffused into a single culture, playing similar sports, it made mass sports organizing as part of the labor movement even more powerful. Cohen argued that unions flipped the old corporate strategy of using sports to build identification with the company on its head, instead using it to build identification with unions. That is certainly part of the story, but I argue that workers themselves were brought to the labor movement because they wanted cheap access to recreation and the ability to create their own workers’ institutions outside the supervision of company management. Cohen reinforces my argument that the Labor Sports movement helped solidify comradery and union identity that was as important as pure material gains. In short, Labor Sports made union work fun.

In formulating how bottom-up mass culture was formed from the interwar years to the beginning of the second Red Scare in the late 1940s, I look to Michael Denning’s The Cultural

Front- The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century.15 Denning argued that the Popular

Front movement of 1935-39 led to a cultural shift in the 1930s, where left-wing laborism took over popular imagination. While it has been popularly framed as either the Communist Party dominating the Popular Front and manipulating well-meaning liberals, or simply a result of New

15 Michael Denning: The Cultural Front- The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. (London: Verso Books, 1998).

Deal liberalism, Denning reorients the history as the “fellow traveler” being at the core of the

Popular Front, with the CPUSA sometimes leading and sometimes following. I take that concept and apply it to other left-wing groups involved in Labor Sports organizing, namely the Socialist

Party. Denning argued that the Communist Party was the most influential group during the

Popular Front era, but that it did not drive the Popular Front movement. Instead, the fellow traveler, or sympathetic leftist not attached to any one political sect, formed its core. Leftist groups comprised more than individual dues-paying members: they also created instead larger networks that extended to their affiliated groups and to people who supported them. Therefore, I take Denning’s concepts and extend it to the Socialist Party as well, arguing that the individuals involved maintained networks in unions well beyond the implosion of the Socialist Party in the late 1930s. Furthermore, the rise of the CIO helped bring about an organizational apparatus for building social democracy, or industrial unionism, where all workers would belong to unions in order to participate in larger society. Finally, Denning defined “Laboring” as the effort to bring about the proletarianization of American culture through mass entertainment. I take these concepts and apply them to larger sports organizing by radical groups and radicals within CIO unions in tracing the rise and fall of the Labor Sports movement.

These two “fellow traveler” circles, the communists and the socialists, are the focus of my study. Each group brought two their own Labor Sports organizing experiences into the CIO, where American Labor Sports then exploded in reach and visibility in a sometimes friendly and sometimes heated rivalry. While functionally very similar, the two Labor Sports traditions would eventually clash when the anti-Communist Red Scare drove out or isolated most of the

Communists and fellow travelers from the CIO. Therefore, the socialist circles, along with their expert-run, top-down version of Labor Sports, won out. Over time, I argue, this weakened the

19 vibrancy of Labor Sports, and its numbers dwindled. The sole union where the communist circles were able to fend off Red Scare attacks, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s

Union, saw their Labor Sports programs continue well beyond the Socialist circles’ Labor

Sports. How those dynamics played out on the ground are as important to understanding how

Labor Sports melded these rival institutional experiences, socialist and communist, to create a real alternative sports culture. The organizational differences between the rival factions would eventually play out in how Labor Sports ended. The communist factions of Labor Sports would mostly be forcefully crushed, while the socialists would generally slowly dwindle away.

This study is deeply informed by the field of leisure studies, particularly by the work of

Roy Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig argued that the leisure hours of individuals have historically been as important a terrain of struggle as the workplace and the home. In Eight Hours For What We

Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920, Rosenzweig explored the movement for the eight hour day in Worcester, Massachusetts.16 In Worcester in the later 19th and early

20th centuries, militant employer resistance meant there was little union activity in the city.

Instead, Rosenzweig argues, labor organizing took place over fights for immigrant social space such as saloons and churches, more days off for holidays, picnics, sports, and participation in parades like the 4th of July. Later, movie theaters began to move recreation towards a more centralized commercial approach. In the 1920s, these efforts and trends led the ethnic groups, especially the children of immigrants, to become Americanized. Taking Rosenzweig’s concept of Americanization and the fight by the working classes to have access to recreation, I argue that workers slowly began to use sports--a quintessential form of recreation--as a force for social

16 Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

20 change. Labor Sports was partly the result of militant organizers in unions building on what earlier activists had done to include their immigrant communities in American life. Indeed, many

Labor Sports organizers were the children of immigrant activists. In many ways, engaging with sports as a way of building solidarity and worker-run recreation was a continuation of that earlier struggle that Rosenzweig argued was key to Americanization. The next step was not just being accepted into American society, but to change it into something better.

I take the concepts of the struggle for access to leisure and apply it to struggles for access to sports. Labor-leftists advocated mass inclusion of working class people in what leisure could be. That meant organizing for the democratic right to sports organized in the most undemocratic of places: the workplace. To attain this, the militants argued, workers would need to build their own institutions, something made possible as the CIO unions gained strength. Places of leisure and recreation, after all, had long been battlegrounds of labor conflict, as Rosenzweig and

Elizabeth Blackmar demonstrate in The Park and the People- A History of Central Park. This history of New York City’s iconic public park frames it as a battle for space between social classes. The poor immigrant and black residents of the city were systematically excluded from participation in the park, through informal policies such as carriage access and formal running of the park by the better classes. The controlled manner that lower classes had access to the park’s recreational spaces extended to explicitly banning of large public gatherings or popular recreational activity such as picnics or sports by the poor. Finally, working class people were able to push for full inclusion to the park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This argument builds on Rosenzweig’s earlier work around how struggles for access to recreation is just as important as workplace struggles, and how space is harnessed for elites if not unchallenged, undermining a vibrant democratic society. Rosenzweig and Blackmar saw the struggle of the

Central Park as either serving mass working class immigrants, with playgrounds and playing fields for sports, or one to simply observe natural beauty and outside sculptures advocated by well to do City Beautiful advocates.17 The battle for sports, and who exactly was allowed to participate in them, followed similar ideological clashes between Company Sports and Labor

Sports. Thus, access to recreation was as important as winning the leisure hours in the first place.

Who controls recreation, management and their allies or labor and their allies?

To understand why the Labor Sports movement ended, I look to two somewhat different concepts. In my research, I conclude that both slow cultural decline and metaphorical sudden blunt force trauma, made possible by the Red Scare, are what largely ended the Labor Sports movement. I am informed by Robert Putnam’s influential and controversial Bowling Alone: The

Collapse and Revival of American Society. Putnam argued that the decline of civic engagement in the United States after the 1970s was the result of long-term suburbanization, social tension, the professionalization of organizations, and the collapse of social capital as generational volunteering habits declined. Still, in understanding the world in which Labor Sports thrived, and why they have largely been forgotten today and ignored in scholarly work, the mountain of systematic cultural changes in the post-war world described by Putnam is a useful tool in understanding why Labor Sports as a movement has remained dead for nearly three generations.

His argument about the slow decline of civic engagement certainly applies to some Labor Sports, particularly in the unions where socialist circles dominated.

While I think Putnam places too much emphasis on long-term systematic hyper- individualization that led to the decline of “bowling leagues” (including Labor Sports), I take the

17 Roy Rosenzweig & Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park And The People (New York City: Henry Holt and Company, 1993). Pg. 9.

22 side of Robert M. Zecker, who criticized Putnam in the history of the Communist fraternal organization the International Workers Order which included a larger sports program. 18 Zecker, instead argued that leftist social and mutual aid organizations did not just slowly decline but were repressed. Zecker’s arguments of the violent end of Communist Party organizations are well applied to Labor Sports run by communist circles, such as the UE or Local 600 of the

UAW. In unions where Communists were exiled or marginalized, such as the UAW, the move towards anti-radicalism effectively removed Labor Sports as a viable organizing tool, especially without the militants who had helped build it. But in other unions, like the UE, the death of

Labor Sports was much more rapid and forceful. While there were larger hegemonic trends that destroyed the appeal of the collective comradery in Labor Sports, in some cases they were assassinated with the weapons of the Red Scare of the late 1940s-50s.

Chapter Outlines

In Chapter 1, I discuss the rise and decline of the Europe-based Worker Sport movement in the 1920s and 30s, which hosted enormous Worker Olympic gatherings, and directly inspired the rise of the Labor Sports movement in the United States. The rival Socialist sport international and Communist sport international would compete for the loyalties of working class people and would be a base of anti-fascist self-defense fighting formations in Germany and Austria, peaking at the Worker Olympics in Red Vienna in 1931, which dwarfed the 1932 Los Angeles IOC

Olympics in both participation and attendance. Following the fall of both Germany, in 1933, and

Austria, in 1934, to fascist forces, Worker Sport organizations scrambled to unite against the threat of fascism in the mid-1930s, before largely being crushed and driven underground by the

18 Robert M. Zecker, “A Road To Peace And Freedom” The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).

23 war. I then move to the United States and look to early attempts at building an American wing of the Worker Sport movement in the 1920s-early 1930s. Despite its eventual destruction by fascist forces, I argue that American socialist and communist athletes had continued contacts and participation with the Worker Sport events in Europe, which planted the seeds of the eventual blooming of a similarly widespread alternative sports culture in the United States. As in Europe, these efforts were divided between rival Socialist and Communist militants and were concentrated in large cities, with the exception of rural Finnish communities who brought strong socialist politics to the table. By building up existing ethnic socialist sports clubs and integrating sports into newer youth wings comprised of the children of immigrants mixed in with both white and black Americans, socialists operated an informal network of sports clubs. Socialists also began experimenting with budding athletic programs in unions under socialist leadership which, along with the ethnic clubs, maintained links to European Worker Sport and were the source of delegations to European left-wing games. At the same time, highly sectarian “Third Period”

Communists built a variety of purely red sister organizations, and attempted to build a

Communist sports organization in the Labor Sports Union.19 The Labor Sports Union was most successful in urban soccer leagues, although it made little headway in engaging with the larger population outside of its base areas. Despite their limited success and reach, both Socialists and

Communists brought away from this period institutional experiences that helped build Labor

Sports with a specific anti-racist, anti-fascist working class ethos and militancy.

In Chapter 2, I move to the experience of the sports programs of the socialist-led

International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). I argue that the ILGWU was the bridge

19 The Third Period was a highly sectarian period for the Communist International, in which all non-Communist organizations were as bad as fascists or capitalists.

24 between Worker Sport in Europe and its American counterparts and the later United States-based

Labor Sports movement. The key aspect of this influential union was its long-standing industrial and social unionist position—meaning the idea that all workers should be included in unions and that unions should fight for improvement of conditions beyond just wages and benefits to include health, education, entertainment, and recreation. These values put the union in the perfect position to launch a meaningful and large athletic program. Its Education Department looked for ways to engage with its membership in a more radical sense, before the Civil War in the garment industry unions between the Communists and Socialists in the mid 1920s disrupted their work.

By the early 1930s, after years of contact between Socialist Party leadership and Worker Sport, and seeking to rebuild its former power, the ILGWU committed fully to building a mass athletic program as the flagship of its recreational programs, fielding mass basketball teams. With an influx of new members in the early years of the New Deal, many of whom were second- generation Americans, these programs proved to be enormously effective in building a Labor

Sports movement. As the first large union to embrace Labor Sports, it would transmit the basic organizational apparatus and ideas of Labor Sports to the larger labor movement through its early involvement in the CIO. Through its long-time connection to Socialist Party circles, the ILGWU maintained connections to the Socialist affiliated Worker Sport federation in the Sozialistische

Arbeitersport Internationale (SASI) or Socialist Workers’ Sport International. More directly, the union’s leadership was directly inspired by the 1931 Vienna Workers’ Olympics to launch its own sports programs. ILGWU Labor Sports quickly gained recognition as the largest labor athletics of its kind. That meant that it was well positioned to lend its advice and inspiration to other unions in the important early years of the CIO’s formation.

In Chapter 3, I move to discussing the enormously successful Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), to which the Labor Sports movement was by now attached, by opening with the most successful and dynamic of its member unions, the United Autoworkers (UAW).

Divided between Socialist, Communist, and Catholic unionist factions which battled for control of the union in the first dozen years of its existence, the left-wing militants brought their institutional memory of organizing into the UAW. The left-wing militants, with their separate institutional sports experiences and organizations, applied their sports-organizing theories and practice across locals of the union as it rapidly grew, especially in locals where Socialists or

Communists rose into the leadership. I argue that people on the ground were instrumental in developing Labor Sports as a real alternative to mainstream sports. Reflecting the competing leftist factions in the UAW, I focus on two militants—one from the Socialist camp and the other from the Communist faction. For the Communist unionists, I focus on the Communist Party member, boxer and recreational director John Gallo of the enormous UAW Local 600 at the Ford

River Rouge plant, who built a popular multi-league, multi-racial sports program, particularly in softball. For the Socialist circles within the union, I examine the life of softball catcher Olga

Madar, a Socialist fellow traveler who rose through the ranks as a physical educator and eventually became the director for the international UAW’s Recreation Department. I argue that the UAW’s Fairness in Bowling campaign (designed to desegregate bowling facilities) was a high point for the united Labor Sports movement in the latter 1940s. That moment came just as the Red Scare was beginning to target men like Gallo who had enabled Labor Sports to include millions of working class men and women of all races. Finally, in this chapter, I look at the attacks on Communist militant sports organizers and the slow decline of UAW Labor Sports as the Recreation Department switched its focus to more generalized recreation and parks services.

In Chapter 4, I move to the rest of the CIO-affiliated unions to look at the wider Labor

Sports movement in the United States. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a socialist-led garment workers union, had largely mimicked the ILGWU in its recreational sports programs and brought those programs into the CIO, but was quickly surpassed by the newer CIO unions in newly organized sectors. Unlike the ILGWU, it stayed in the CIO during the entirety of its two decade existence. The Communist-led and radically democratic United Electrical and

Radio Workers (UE) quickly developed sports leagues across its strongholds and embraced the vision of building a working class alternative to bourgeois sports, often directly referencing

Worker Sport. The UE seemed on the verge of building a larger left-wing sports counterculture in the UE-represented plants before being mostly destroyed in anti-Communist purges of the

CIO in the late 1940s-early 1950s. On the other hand, the highly centralized and conservative leadership of the United Steelworkers (SWOC/USA/USW) used socialists and communists as organizers, but quickly fired them once campaigns had been won, and its leadership was highly suspicious of rank and file democracy. But even they could not deny the effectiveness of Labor

Sports in building identification with labor unions. The Steelworkers union joined in the Labor

Sports movement late and largely mimicked other CIO programs, as opposed to letting its members build their Labor Sports teams and leagues organically to their own needs. Not surprisingly, the USW Labor Sports suffered a slow decline similar to the UAW’s after the

Autoworkers gutted their rank and file caucuses in the name of rooting out Communists. Lastly,

I move to the Communist-led Pacific Coast-centered International Longshoremen’s and

Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), which enthusiastically embraced Labor Sports early on in its existence. The ILWU was not only quicker to include more violent sports like boxing and football, but also operated softball and basketball teams across California and Northwest port

27 cities. The ILWU, I argue, is an example of the “what-could-have-been” nature of Labor Sports, because the union not only survived the Red Scare almost entirely intact and with its leftist leadership, but ILWU Labor Sports continued well into the 1980s and 90s.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I look to the world of the New York City-based Popular Front

Communist-led Labor Sports networks. Looking closely at the Communist NYC newspaper, the

Daily Worker, and sports page editor Lester Rodney, I explore how Communist-aligned Labor

Sports in the city fought for more access to gyms and parks for its growing Communist-led Trade

Union Athletic Association (TUAA), and how it supported the campaign to desegregate Major

League Baseball. The TUAA itself included 100 union locals representing 300,000 workers at its height in 1939-40. The Communist affiliated fraternal organization International Workers Order

(IWO) and the Party’s youth wing in the Communist Youth League often fielded teams and athletes that participated in the leagues and events of the TUAA. That synergy helped Labor

Sports thrive in New York from the late 1930s until the late 1940s. While suffering a setback during wartime mobilization, it was revived after the war through the Labor Sports Federation before the Red Scare destroyed the left-led organizations. Here again, I look to these subcultures and organizations to ask what if Labor Sports had been allowed to develop without the anti- leftist repression of the Red Scare? What could that vision of a left-wing sports culture have developed into? How would the institutions of Communist circles have evolved?

In my conclusion, I explore some of the reasons behind the rise and fall of the Labor

Sports movement. Why did it end? What were the possibilities? What did the left-wing militants involved in organizing Labor Sports from the bottom up envision? Why did it take as long as it did to gain traction, and why was it discarded in formerly socialist-led unions? What are the lessons for the 21st century? For a widespread grassroots movement like Labor Sports, the

28 limited amount of historical research has been a lost opportunity, which I hope to correct. While historians have treated sports mostly as a distraction or a conservative bastion in order to reinforce social mores, I focus on the concentrated efforts by workers and unions to transform sports culture and build an alternative anti-racist, anti-fascist, working-class centered sports culture in the 1920s-40s.

Archival Research

This project has brought me to archives across much of the American Midwest, East

Coast, and Pacific Coast, and across the ocean to Amsterdam. I visited ten labor and leftist social movement archives, reconstructing the story piece by piece. In reconstructing these grassroots left-wing working-class sporting cultures and connecting them to international movements to transform the reality of who sports were for, I realized just how fractured this “people’s history” had become. In order to reconstruct lost history, one must be willing to chase leads and snippets of information. It was not easy to bring this lost world back to the light given its fragmented past.

I travelled to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archive at NYU for its collection on

Communist and Socialist publications and records. I journeyed to the Immigrant History

Research Center at University of Minnesota to explore the connections between diaspora communities, sports, and labor organizing. Furthermore, I used the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at University of Michigan for connections between leftist organizers, sports, and the transition to

CIO organizing. In the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at

Cornell University, I was able to make the connections between the Socialists and the garment workers unions in the ILGWU and ACWA. I went to the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne

State University for its impressive collection on the UAW and the papers of Olga Madar. I researched the UE Records at University of Pittsburgh and the United Steelworkers Records at

Pennsylvania State University. Finally, my research took me across the Atlantic to the

International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam for its collection on the Worker Sport movement, along with corresponding American connections that I argue directly influenced how

Labor Sports developed. Despite these fragmented historical records, at the end of the day, I am glad that the flesh and blood people who participated in the Labor Sports movement, in all its forms, are finally seeing the light of day again. The story of Labor Sports is as much the story of individuals like Dot Tucker, John Gallo, Olga Madar, Claud Stotts, and Lester Rodney as it is about large social and political forces. Their faces and stories deserve to be remembered as building a new sort of sports in the shell of the old. So, let the games begin.

Chapter 1: Playing for Power: the European Worker Sport movement and the seeds of the

American Labor Sports movement 1919-1940

At Vienna, there was a mass spectacle in which thousands upon thousands of Austrian trade unionists took part. It was staged in a huge stadium, with at least a quarter million people watching. I could not get it out of my mind--the mood it created of unity and hope, the friendship it built. -David Dubinsky, long-time Socialist Party member and leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 1931, on why he decided to throw the union’s weight behind building Labor Sports.20

There is a broad sports movement. It depends very much on the help from public authorities. For instance, it is very expensive to maintain and establish gymnasiums. So it is natural within the sports movement, irrespective of politics and of economic and social connections of the sportlers, the demand for adequate free sports facilities would get mass support. It is surely much more valuable that our progressive sportlers are in the broad sports movement and bring thousands of other sportlers into political action for free municipal gymnasiums then it is to duplicate the actions of workers groups and other organizations.” -Max Bedacht, General Secretary to the Enlarged Meeting of the National Executive Committee, communist-aligned International Workers Order. Hotel Latham, New York City, October 2nd, 1937. Although this project is about the rise and fall of the Labor Sports movement in the

United States, the story begins with the Worker Sport movement in Europe. I argue that it is impossible to understand the Labor Sports movement outside of this wider global context, because Labor Sports in the United States were directly linked to Worker Sport via both individuals and organizations. Indeed, Americans with knowledge of Worker Sport sought to establish similar institutions in the United States, even though the results were ultimately quite different. Labor Sports was inspired by Worker Sport, and so to understand the American Labor

Sports, I will start with the European Worker Sport. American left-wing sports organizing prior

20 Gus Tyler, Look For The Union Label: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), Pg. 197.

31 to the rise of the CIO largely sought to create the American wing of Worker Sport, albeit with limited success.

I will begin the chapter with explaining exactly what Worker Sport was, as well as its rise and fall. Worker Sport in Europe was a project that sought to create a strong sports culture centered around socialist politics. The worker sports clubs that dotted Europe were either affiliated with the Socialists or the Communists through the 1920s and 30s, establishing a booming working class counterculture in opposition to bourgeois sports. The movements’ bases of support were in Central Europe in Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia (especially

Finland), but also France and the Low Countries, along with a similar state-run “physical culture” movement? in the Soviet Union. Worker Sport was divided into competing sports federations in the Socialist Worker Sport International (SASI) (affiliated with the

Socialists/Social Democrat Party) and the Communist affiliated Red Sport International (RSI), also called the Sportintern (officially called “The International Association of Red Sports and

Gymnastics Associations”). These two organizations worked in parallel to build socialist, anti- fascist working class sports federations. They did not cooperate, and instead worked independent of one another through the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Here, I explore the kind of clubs each established, how the larger SASI differed from the smaller RSI, and showcase the types of mass events they set up. I demonstrate how Worker Sport events began to eclipse mainstream

“bourgeois sports”, peaking at the massive Vienna Workers’ Olympics in 1931 before fascists began rising to power in the left-wing strongholds of Austria and Germany. One of the first targets for destruction was Worker Sport, which forced the two federations to re-align into an alliance over the next few years as part of the Popular Front. With the fall of Czechoslovakia and then the outbreak of war in 1939, Worker Sport was largely destroyed and disbanded. However,

32 the seeds of Worker Sport had already been planted in the United States during the interwar period and would bloom as Labor Sports just as Worker Sport was being trampled.

This chapter also demonstrates the continued direct links between Worker Sport in

Europe and American left-wing militants. It was not simply that American radicals were inspired by indirectly hearing about Worker Sport: more importantly, they experienced Worker Sport mass events themselves. Documentation shows that American athletic delegations were in attendance at every international SASI Worker Sport event from 1925 through at least 1936, as well as several large regional events. Though small in number, these delegations point to continued contact with international socialist-oriented events. The communist aligned athletics and socialist aligned athletics mostly worked separately, before coming into a shaky alliance during the Popular Front of the latter 1930s. Most importantly for my argument, in 1931 the

Socialist dominated International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) embraced the vision of Worker Sport after its leadership attended the Vienna Workers’ Olympics. I argue that this is the moment Labor Sports began as a distinctive movement in the United States. American left-wing sports activists would discover through trial and error that building affiliation with

Labor Sports through mass unions, as opposed to political party affiliated clubs, was much more effective in the United States.

Finally, this chapter charts the early efforts of American radicals to organize a left-wing sports culture through the inspiration of Worker Sport. Both in socialist circles and communist circles in the United States, attempts to emulate the Worker Sport movement proceeded with some limited success. Socialist Party members, Communist Party members and their respective fellow travelers organized delegations to travel to SASI and RSI events. As rivals, they generally organized their sports organizations separately and in competition with one another. Socialist

33 circles attempted to organically extend the reach of the SASI to socialist-aligned clubs, but mostly maintained the networks of ethnic athletic clubs and its youth organization, the Youth

People’s International League (YPSL). Separately, communist circles organized more forcefully and directly the Labor Sports Union from 1927-38 as a national umbrella organization for communist-aligned athletic clubs and leagues. Although communist athletics were limited to left- wing enclaves by the sharp rhetoric of the “Third Period” and its purity politics, they did help create institutional memory for Communist Party organizers on how to organize left-wing sports.

Those experiences made Communist-aligned militants the most effective militant sports organizers in the following Popular Front years as the CIO-affiliated unions and attached Labor

Sports gained ascendency.

By the end of the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of working class people would participate in American Labor Sports, organized mainly by Socialist and Communist athletic organizers. By the end of the 1940s, the number had risen into the millions. How did this happen? Leftist sports in the United States were very small from the late 1920s until the early

1930s, especially in comparison to Catholic athletic organizations, company sports, or just ordinary grassroots sports. For that answer, we need to go back to the Socialist Party strongholds in the needle trade unions. The biggest garment union was the International Ladies’ Garment

Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which was the first union to begin operating large athletic programs in the United States. This would prove to be the critical link between small leftist athletics and the larger mass working class sports participation that would enable militants to use sports to effect mass social change in the 1930s and 1940s, and build that truly anti-racist, anti-fascist working class sports culture. So how did the Americans build that bridge? To understand how the bridge was constructed, we must first turn to the popular Worker Sport movement in Europe

34 and then to how Worker Sport inspired American radicals to implement what they hoped to be the American wing of the movement.

Worker Sport in Europe

We begin not in the small leftist circles of the United States urban immigrant communities, but across the Atlantic Ocean in the heart of Europe with European Worker Sport.

While the term can be translated a few ways, I choose to go with “Worker Sport” in the style of the prominent current independent writer on the subject, Gabriel Kuhn, though it is a translation of various languages, such as German, Czech, French, Dutch, Russian, Latvian, and more. It could easily be translated as “Workers’ Sports”, “Proletarian Sports”, “Labor Sport”, or similar terms. Communists usually used “Physical Culture” to refer to sporting organizations in the

Soviet Union (and later in other Communist countries), and reserved Worker Sport for organizations that competed with the Socialists. English translations of the era used variations of

Worker Sport when talking about Europe, but generally referred to leftist sports in the United

States as “Labor Sports”, whether talking about specific leftist ethnic fraternal organizations, party affiliated front groups or leagues, or union affiliated sports. When referring to Worker

Sport, I am referring to the Socialist affiliated Socialist Worker Sport International (SASI) and the Communist affiliated Red Sport International (RSI, also nicknamed the Sportintern). They operated as two rival federations of Worker Sport in Europe until cooperation began in earnest during the Popular Front era in the latter half of the 1930s.

In this competitive atmosphere of vying for loyalties of working class men and women not only against the newly formed Communists but also against increasingly violent fascist movements, the Socialists proved to have an organizing edge in building counter-institutions.

The sports international was originally formed in 1913 just prior to the First World War in

Europe, Socialists re-established an international of leftist sports out of the older clubs for working class people. The goal was always to provide access to recreation for those with few resources. These socialist sports stood in opposition to mainstream amateur sports clubs that demanded high fees. In addition, in some places entire professions, such as factory workers, were barred from joining amateur clubs.21 The Socialist Worker Sport International (SASI) was formed by the Socialists to build upon existing socialist affiliated parties throughout Europe and proved to be much more successful at presenting a real working class counterculture to the existing elitist sports structures than the Communists in Europe.22 SASI exploded in growth very quickly, showing the potential of building a class conscious sports.23 The main reason was to bring the various socialist athletic clubs which had existed prior to the war into one social democratic aligned sports International to coordinate and build a larger international anti- capitalist sports culture. Partly in response to SASI and partly as an outgrowth of the Soviet

Union’s state sponsored sports societies, the Red Sport International (RSI) or Sportintern was established to build a separate Communist sports federation and compete with social democratic clubs for loyalties of working class people much as they did in unions and other popular organizations.

21 “Unter roten Fahnen! Vom Rekord- zum Massensport.” Under red flags! From record to mass sports. 1931. Inf 1159/65; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

22 “Sport und Politik.” Sports and Politics. Deutsch, Julius. 1928. Inf 1159/65; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

23 “Zpráva o vývoji, organisaci a působení svazu dělnických tělocvičných jednot československých ku III. mezinárodnímu sjezdu mez.” Report on the development, organization and operation of the Union of Workers' Gymnastics Units of Czechoslovakia to III. international congress. Published 1920. 45/267; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Chart on growth of the organization 1903-1919. Post war explosion by Socialist organizations.

Worker Sport was diverse and varied in strength across Europe. In Germany during the

Weimer years, for instance, SASI Worker Sport clubs had over a million members, dwarfing the

RSI worker sport clubs.24 Austrian

Worker Sport clubs were a basis of

political power in Vienna for the

Social Democrats in Vienna, along

with self-defense paramilitaries and

sobriety organizations.25 Czech

gymnastic worker sport groups Worker Sport gathering in Vienna, 1926. International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. Public Domain. became the basis of

abundant socialist clubs that helped propel the SASI to widespread popularity in Prague as early

as 1919.26 In Amsterdam, on the other hand, the rising “Water Friends” SASI swimming clubs

proved to be enormously popular for working class people who had previously been barred from

swimming clubs.27 At its height, the SASI and the RSI extended their reach from their Central

24 “V. Kongress der sozialistischen Arbeiter-Sportinternationale in Prag am 12., 13. und 14. Oktober 1929. Berichte und Verhandlu” V. Congress of the Socialist Workers' Sports International in Prague on 12, 13 and 14 October 1929. Reports and Negotiations. Int 1159/35; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

25 “Österreichische Arbeiter Turn- und Sport-Zeitung Organ des 1. u. 18. Kreisses des Arbeiter Turn- u. Sportbundes. Organ des - / Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund (Österreich)” Austrian workers gymnastic and sports newspaper organ of the 17. u. 18. Circle of the worker Turn- u. Sports Federation. Organ of the - ZK 1127 / Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Federation (Austria). ZK 1127. 1924-25, 1931, 1933, 1937. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

26 “Zpráva o vývoji, organisaci a působení svazu dělnických tělocvičných jednot československých ku III. mezinárodnímu sjezdu mez.” Report on the development, organization and operation of the Union of Workers' Gymnastics Units of Czechoslovakia to III. international congress. 1919. 45/265. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

27 “Zwembaden en hoe zij moeten zijn.” Swimming pools and how they should be. 1933. Bro 388/21. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

European strongholds to France, the Netherlands, Britain, Scandinavia, and into the Baltic

countries, with strong SASI-affiliated boxing clubs in Riga, Latvia during its interwar

independence.28 While one did not need to be a committed Socialist or Communist to join these

Worker Sport clubs, the participatory athletic clubs open to working class people did create a

real base of power from both social democratic and communist parties. That power was as much

an influence on class consciousness as labor unions, which helped swell left-wing strength

throughout Europe.29

Workers’ Olympics

The SASI, in addition to linking these proletarian

sports clubs across the continent and providing both a way to

participate in recreational sports and competition for workers

and regularly staging huge regional athletic meets, also

sponsored Workers’ Olympics in opposition to the IOC

directed official Olympics. Criticizing the IOC Olympics as

elitist, conservative in its adherence to national governments,

and slow to include women in its events, SASI convened

three alternative Workers’ Olympics in 1925, 1931, and

1937. These mass events were much more participatory and

Frankfurt Workers Olympics. International Institute inclusive than the IOC events, and two of the three of Social History, Amsterdam. Public Domain.

28 “SSS B-bas Stradnieku Sports un Sargs centralorgans. B-bas Stradnieku Sports un Sargs centralorgans.” SSS B-rs Workers' Sports and Watchman Centralorgans. B-bas Stradnieku Sports and Watchman Centralorgans. 1931. ZDK 46016. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Worker Sport organization based in Riga, Latvia.

29 “30 Protokoll des ordentlichen Bundestages des "ASKÖ" Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich” Protocol of the ordinary Bundestag of the "ASKÖ" workers' federation for sport and physical culture in Austria. 1928-30. ZO 49040. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

38 far outstripped the IOC Olympics that occurred during the same period in terms of both attendance and athletic participation. That was mostly because the point was not which nation could win the most medals, but instead how to encourage mass solidarity as a way of building international bonds of working-class unity and solidarity. After an unofficial athletic meeting in

Prague in 1921, the First Workers’ Olympics in Frankfurt Germany was a resounding success that helped propel the SASI as a legitimate answer to the IOC in building a more cooperative and accessible sports culture.30 The SASI organizers built more mass regional athletic gatherings, in

1926 in Cologne, and another in Prague in 1927.31

30 “Première Olympiade ouvrière. Prague 1921.” Protocol of the ordinary Bundestag of the "ASKÖ" workers' federation for sport and physical culture in Austria. 1928-30. 47/604; “Erste internationale Arbeiter-Olympiade zu Frankfurt-M, 24. bis 28. Juli 1925.” First International Workers' Olympiad at Frankfurt-M, July 24-28, 1925. Int 1159/5; Report of conference. Oct 10th-13th 1945. Int 1159/99. Invitation to support the Workers' Sports International to British Worker Sport organization. Good history of worker sport movement. Socialist Workers Sport International formed in 1913 and reformed in Luzerne Switzerland in 1920. Reformed again after WWII but with much less steam. reestablishment of a Worker Sport International after the war. On the provisional committee, 1 seat is reserved for the United States, as well as 1 seat for the Soviet Union. Neither ever took them. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

31 “Erstes Arbeiter- Turn und Sportfest Köln, 6. bis 9. August 1926.” First Workers' Turn and Sports Festival Cologne, 6 to 9 August 1926. Bro D 1290/2125; “Dělnická Olympiada Československá v Praze = II. Tschechoslowakische Arbeiter-Olympiade, Prag = IIe Olympiade Ouvrière Tch Workers' Olympiad of Czechoslovakia in Prague = II. Tschechoslowakische Arbeiter-Olympiade, Prag = IIe Olympiade Ouvriere Tch).” Workers' Olympiad of Czechoslovakia in Prague. 1927. L 11/231. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

The second official Worker Olympics occurred in 1931 in “Red” Vienna, the center of power of the Austro-Marxists.32 Vienna proved to be an excellent choice as a host city, for it was

a major center of working-class power in Central Europe, and

manifested itself into a feisty, anti-capitalist, radical mass

counterculture on the ground, with a multitude of workers’

clubs that wanted to create a new world of total equality and

democracy from a united working class movement.33 The

1931 Worker Olympics were the high water mark for Worker

Sport, attracting 100,000 participants and 250,000

spectators—much larger numbers than the 1932 Los Angeles

1931 Vienna Workers’ Olympics. International IOC Olympics with 1408 athletes and 100,000 Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Public Domain. spectators.34 Delegations from across Europe and beyond attended mass spectacles of handball, soccer, gymnastics, track, and more.35 To the casual

32 Characterized by Social Democrat leadership and militant from below working class counterculture in Vienna. The Austromarxists were a radical current that dominated Vienna organizing, and were much more direct action oriented than the Social Democrats they were affiliated with, organizing strikes, eviction defense, and building counter-institutions like sobriety, self-defense, and sports clubs for workers. They were also notably anti- authoritarian and therefore clashed repeatedly with the Communists. They would be suppressed and banned when the “Austrofascists”, a conservative Catholic coalition with Italian fascist influences, crushed the Social Democrats in the 1934 Austrian Civil War, and then in 1938 were themselves eliminated by Austrian Nazis when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. 33 “Wiener Arbeiter-Turnverein” Viennese workers turn club. 1927. ZO 49055.

34 Worker Sport internationals, both the SASI and the RSI, also hosted Winter Games, but they were much smaller and less popular in general, and usually were near the place of the summer games. For instance, see 1931 “Festführer. Zweite Arbeiter-Wintersport-Olympiade, Mürzzuschlag Feber” 1931. Festival leaders. Second Workers Winter Sports Olympiad, Muerzzuschlag Feber Germany. 1931. Int 1159/45. Roni Gechtman: Socialist Sports in Yiddish: The Bundist Sport Organization Morgnshtern in Interwar Poland. February 23rd, 2007 Outlook Magazine. https://web.archive.org/web/20070223020326/http://www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/library/articles/jewsontheleft/p05 SocialistSports.htm

35 “2. Arbeiter-Olympiade in Bild und Wort mit 187 Illustrationen Wien” 2nd Workers' Olympiad in Picture and Word with 187 Illustrations Vienna, July 19-26, 1931. Bro 133/14 fol. This was the Socialist Olympics in Vienna that Dubinsky attended. Soccer and handball and gymnasts. 80,000 from 21 nations in attendance according to British

40 observer, it seemed that Worker Sport and its Socialist affiliates, backed by a militant labor movement in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia would likely cement itself as the dominant social order and dismantle capitalist institutions of exclusion, particularly in recreational sports.36

A participatory socialist alternative to the Soviet Union was being realized on the ground because of events like these, pulling the social democratic leadership of affiliated parties along rather than being dictated from the top-down. With ten years of successful counter-institution building, Worker Sport seemed like the future to both leftists and intellectuals of sport.37

Of course, Worker Sport was not a united movement. Returning to the Communists for a moment, as mentioned, the RSI was set up as a rival to the SASI in 1921 by their rival leftists in the Communists. While at first not under close control from Moscow, within a few years the

Sportintern was closely tied to the Soviet Union and the Comintern. While never as large as the

SASI, the RSI did manage to build a sizeable presence outside the Soviet Union. In the Soviet

Union itself, a large sports infrastructure was erected on mass participation, with the famous

Dynamo physical sporting club being tied to the Soviet secret police. Elsewhere, Czech

Communists set up scouting organizations for youth, and French Communists set up bicycling

invitation from 1945. Antwerp in 1937 after Barcelona cancelled (claims USA and Soviet Union participated for first time but at least with USA that appears to be incorrect from the evidence I have seen.)

36 “Základy tělovýchovy pracujících. Účel, prostředky, metodika.” Basics of Workers' Physical Education. Purpose, means, methodology. 1926. 45/699.

37 “10 Jahre Sozialistische Arbeiter-Sportinternationale. Im Auftrag des Internationalen Büros zusammengest. von C. Gellert.” 10 years Socialist Workers Sport International. Commissioned by the International Bureau. by C. Gellert; 1931 Sport und Arbeitersport. Sports and Worker Sport. 1930. Int 1159/40. German-language book on capitalism and sports and the new socialist sports by Helmet Wolf.

41 clubs.38 Additionally, at the height of the Third Period (1927-34), two summer “Spartakiad”39 games were staged that welcomed Communists from across the world, the first in 1928 in

Moscow and the 2nd in the German Communist stronghold of Berlin in 1931.40 With the RSI, the idea was to build separate worker events from both the conservative IOC Olympics and the SASI

Workers’ Olympics.41 The literature of the RSI was translated in multiple languages across

Europe, and physical trainers were brought to Moscow to be taught how to build their version of

Worker Sport.

Repression of Worker Sport

38 “Organisační řád. Spartakovtych́ Skautů Práce.” Organization Rules. Of Spartak Scouts Work. 1924. 45/674.; La libre pensée, l'alcool et le sport. Rapport présenté au Congrès national de la libre pensée , l'alcool et le sport. Rapport présenté au Congrès national de la libre pensée. (Marseille, 15 et 16 Août 1924.”Free thinking, alcohol and sports. Report presented to the National Congress of Free Thought. (Marseille, 15th and 16th August, 1924) Bro An 100/1125.

39 Named after the Roman slave rebel, Spartacus was a common symbol of socialist organizations in the 1910s-30s.

40 “Programm Reichs-Arbeiter Sport Tag. 22 Juni 1930. Stadion Grunewild.” Program Reichs-workers sports day. 22 June 1930. Bro An 100/1125.. Grunewild Stadium was a large stadium in Berlin used by both socialists in the Weimar era and Nazis in the 3rd Reich.

41 “Mezinárodní závodní řád v boxu, přijatý na I. mezinárodní technicko-metodické konferenci RSI. v Moskvě.” . International Boxing Racing Rules, adopted at the 1st International Technical and Methodological Conference RSI. in Moscow. 45/701. Communist Czech boxing rules for worker sport.; “Mezinárodní pravidla volley-ballu a basket- ballu, přijatá na I. mezinárodní technicko-metodické konferenci RSI v Moskvě.” International Volley-Ball and Basketball-Ball Rules, adopted at the 1st International Technical Methodological Conference RSI in Moscow. 1928. 45/702.

Unfortunately, both leftist sporting federations were targeted by the fascists and Nazis in

Germany and Austria during the 1930s. Partly in

reaction to the rise of worker power and anti-

Communist sentiment by the rural middle class, fascist

movements often battled with both Social Democrats

and Communist paramilitaries based in the sports clubs.

But even though their members on the ground warned

as loudly as they could about the growing fascist

menace that sought to destroy all of the institutions they

had spent decades building, the Social Democrats were

slow to act, and the Communists refused to cooperate

with any non-communist leftists organizations.42 When Anti-fascist Austrian Worker Sport publication. International Institute of Social History, the Nazis rose to power in 1933 in Germany, one of their Amsterdam. Public Domain. first acts was to disband the SASI worker sport organizations, sending the leaders to concentration camps and banning most of the membership from joining athletic organizations.43 The Nazis believed that if there was going to be armed resistance to their rule, one of the centers of resistance would be the Worker Sport clubs, with its

42 “Rapp ort nopens den toestand en de verhoudingen der arbeiderssport in Duitschland, Tsjecho Slowakije en Oostenrijk. Met bijlag.” Report on the situation and relations of working-class sport in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria.. 1932. Bro N 1170/59 fol. Notes the imminent fascist threat and begs for emergency measures.

43 The Nazi sports authorities later relented because of the sheer number of former SASI members, but put restrictions that no Nazi athletic club could have more than 10% former SASI members, which effectively barred most of the membership from participation since there were no alternative athletics. Krüger, Arnd, and James Riordan. The Story Of Worker Sport. (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetic, 1996). Pg. 19.

43 nearly one million people on its membership rolls. To the Nazis, it was necessary to consolidate their rule by quickly moving against the German SASI and RSI clubs.44

The Nazis’ move against German Worker Sport was part of their efforts to defang their domestic opponents. As we can see in Austria, the militant SASI worker sport clubs indeed were intermeshed with sobriety clubs that explicitly encouraged the development of anti-fascist militias. Only in 1933, as the fascists and Nazis in Austria were emboldened by Italy to the south and Germany to the north, and streams of German political refugees streamed into Austria, did the danger become clear to SASI leadership in Red Vienna: the site only a few years prior to the mass celebration of Worker Sport counter-culture. The Austromarxist militias readied themselves for the coming battle over 1933, loudly proclaiming the need for the working class to unite against the fascist onslaught that had just enveloped Germany.45 In order to defend themselves, sports clubs now took to arms to defend the Socialism they had built in Red

Vienna.46

In 1934, as the Social Democratic leadership of Austria fell into crisis, the SASI militant clubs mobilized into a fighting formation. Led by Julius Deutsch, the longtime organizer and

President of the SASI, the Austrian anti-fascists fought bitterly for control of Austria before

44 “Sport, Politik und Presse der Sport als Mittel des politischen Kampfes und der parteipolitischen Propaganda in der Zeit des.” Sport, politics and the press sport as a means of political struggle and party political propaganda in the time of 1919-1933 Bro 3550/4. The author noted that all the German Worker Sport organizations were liquidated when the Nazis came to power, since the Nazis thought that any resistance would center there.

45 “Rot Sport Zeitung aller sporttreibenden Arbeiter und Werktätigen Zeitung aller sporttreibenden Arbeiter und Werktätigen.” Red sports newspaper of all sports workers and working people newspaper of all sports workers and working people. 1933. ZK 64896. Newspaper is a mix of reports on fascist paramilitary terror attacks and sports, and sometimes interchangeable.

46 “Der Kämpfer Zeitschrift des Arbeiterbundes für Sport und Körperkultur in Oesterreich (ASKÖ) und des Republikanischen Schutzb..” . The fighter magazine of the workers' federation for sport and physical culture in Austria (ASKÖ) and the republican Schutzb. 1933. ZO 1318. Newspaper contained many antifascist messages. It explicitly linked antifascism and self-defense through sports and sobriety.

44 being overwhelmed. As in Germany, in order to defang the Socialist labor movement of Red

Vienna and paint it with the new Austrofascist colors, leaders of the Social Democrats and

Communists were arrested. (In rural parts of the Austria, Austrian Nazis were also arrested, since they were opponents of even a fascist Austria as an independent nation.47) The Austrian and

German Worker Sport organizations continued to operate in exile, out of Prague, where they published German-language Worker Sport news tied explicitly to the anti-fascist struggle as a beacon of hope to their supporters now living under the fascist banners. Czech SASI comrades took in their exiled colleagues and together they continued organizing Worker Sport athletic events in Czechoslovakia.48 Julius Deutsch, the longtime intellectual organizer of the SASI, began his exile in Prague. But as a Jewish Austrian, he again fled before the Nazi takeover in

1938-39, first to France until its 1940 defeat in the Second World War, and then to the United

States for the duration of the war. Worker Sport continued even as it dwindled in strength in the late 1930s, giving the now-rising Labor Sports movement in the United States inspiration and models for organizing. Even in repression, the links between the differing movements were maintained in both the cancelled People’s Olympics in Barcelona in 1936,and the Worker

Olympics in Antwerp in 1937. Worker Sport in Europe would not die without inspiring the anti- racist, anti-fascist working class sports culture in the United States, both via official communications and exchange of athletes through the 2nd International and the Comintern.

47 In 1934, Germany and Italy had not yet entered into alliance. The Austrian Nazis sought to ultimately unify Austria with Germany, while the Austrofascists sought to build a catholic totalitarian dictatorship similar to Italy. When Italy entered into alliance with Nazi Germany in 1938, it withdrew its support for the Austrofascists in return for support for its Ethiopian conquest from Germany. Austria shortly was annexed afterwards and any former leftists still in Austria were deported to concentration camps.

48 “Proletářské sportovní slavnosti” Kladno Proletarian Sports Celebrations. 1934. 45/675. Active worker SASI even after fall of Austria and Germany, staged in Czechoslovakia.

Even as these catastrophes occurred, the Communists were slow to deviate from their

Third Period position against working with the Socialists and Social Democrats. There would be no popular mobilization even as Germany and Austria fell to the Nazis, both of which sentenced most social democratic and communist party members to concentration camps, summary execution, or exile. Even as this transpired, the Sportintern was busy writing manifestos condemning the SASI for the defeats in both countries and arguing that only the RSI could effectively mobilize workers to fight the fascists.49 By the end of 1934, however, the beginnings of the a massive Comintern party line reversal was beginning. In 1935, the new Popular Front line meant that Communists ceased their inflammatory attacks on most leftist rivals and began seeking alliances with leftists, liberals, and sometimes even conservatives as long as they were anti-fascist and did not mind working with Communists. Quickly, two Popular Front governments formed from leftist alliances came to power in France and in Spain where the

Worker Sport movement would find temporary refuge. The RSI followed the Comintern’s

Popular Front party line of 1935 and initiated efforts to cooperate with the SASI. Now, the remnants of the SASI and the RSI worked to build a third Workers’ Olympics together, though maintaining their separate organizations. They called in 1935 for the next Worker Sport mass gathering to be in Antwerp in 1937, as the remaining Worker Sport movement was now concentrated in France, Netherlands, and Scandinavia, though still with a strong Czech worker sport gymnasium presence. Before that occurred, however, the SASI and RSI tried to counter the now large stage that the Nazis had procured with the looming 1936 Berlin Olympics. At first concentrating on pressuring the IOC to cancel the Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany, when that

49 “Zwischen den Arbeiter-Olympiaden. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag deutscher Arbeitersportler zur Niederlage der deutschen Arbeiterbewe.” Between the Workers' Olympics. A discussion contribution of German worker athletes to the defeat of the German workers. 1933. Bro D 1290/3375.

46 failed the SASI and RSI called for a quickly-assembled protest People’s Olympics to be held in

Barcelona, Spain. The Worker Sport organizations were able to assemble an impressive array of anti-fascist athletes. Unfortunately, the opening day of the People’s Olympics in Barcelona were cancelled as fascists rose up to overthrow the government in the opening shots of the Spanish

Revolution and Civil War. Finally, when the 1937 Antwerp Workers’ Olympics arrived, the participation and audiences were down by almost half, a sign of the blows that Worker Sport had incurred in the previous six years.

Americans in Worker Sport

Despite the high cost of travel and the distance between North America and Europe,

American athletes regularly attended Worker Sport mass gatherings, which would be a key link to the later United States-based Labor Sports.50 American delegations appeared at nearly every

SASI mass event in the 1920s-30s. In addition, various diaspora communities in the United

States maintained their leftist contacts in Europe, exchanging ideas and people. Though the

United States government ended most legal European immigration in 1921, the contacts between radical communities on both sides of the Atlantic were maintained. The Socialist Party of

America regularly sent delegates to the 2nd International and its successors during the interwar period. Because party members also operated socialist ethnic athletic clubs throughout North

America, when the Worker Sport movement became solidified in Europe, the Socialist Party could draw on those diasporas to send athletes across the ocean.

The American athletic delegations were much smaller than other national delegations at

SASI mass events. The reasons for those small delegations basically came down to the cost and

47 long distance of traveling to Europe when airfare was still relatively inaccessible to working class people. Additionally, the simple fact that the American left in general was less organized and weaker than the European Left helps to account for this small presence. However, the fact that the Americans attended these monstrous gatherings of proletarian sports meant that not only did some American athletic organizers hear about the potentials of Worker Sport, but also experienced first-hand it for themselves. For the sports-obsessed United States, socialist organizers saw the boundless potential of Worker Sport in an American context, if the right organization could put it into practice there. And indeed, as Worker Sport was rapidly drowned by the rapidly rising fascist tide in Europe in the 1930s, Labor Sports—which had been inspired by Worker Sport—began to take off into a mass movement in the United States.

Because many of the American Socialists who traveled to Socialist International meetings in the 1920s were themselves immigrants, there was a certain comfort in returning to

Europe. Though the official SASI membership rolls always listed American total strength in the hundreds, as opposed to hundreds of thousands to millions in European countries, it is likely they were undercounting American involvement in micro Worker Sport movements in the United

States in the 1920s. That is, many of the ethnic socialist oriented athletic clubs in the United

States did not formally affiliate with the party or the international, but maintained a sort of

“fellow traveler” culture in either socialist or communist circles, which is more difficult to track than formal affiliation. Most of the SASI documents on the United States report simply on the

New York City socialist clubs, while outside the city the documents note the existence of workers’ athletics without any hard numbers. This was probably because their main point of contact with the United States was through individual New York Socialist Party immigrants, who themselves could not place an exact number on the total number of radical left athletic

48 organizations operating in the United States.51 When Labor Sports began rapidly growing with the growth of the labor movement in fits and starts in the early years of the New Deal around

1933-5, and then explosively beginning with the CIO organizing drives of 1936-40, it followed the same pattern. Instead of being affiliated with political parties or internationals like in Europe,

Labor Sports would instead identify with their particular union within the CIO’s hodgepodge of

Socialist, Communist, Catholic, and conservative trade unionists. That mixture often differed depending on the union and even the locals within CIO unions.

The international links between Communists are a bit easier to track than those of

Socialists, given the hierarchal nature of both Communist Party structures and the Comintern.

The Labor Sports Union, founded in 1927, was intended to be the RSI section in the United

States, with the project of building a Communist Worker Sport in the United States. It operated as the national umbrella organization for Communist sports clubs and leagues through the United

States, divided by districts. The organization was responsible for hosting regional and national gatherings and tournaments, and the districts would set up leagues of affiliated clubs in sports with enough clubs (most often soccer.) The LSU was limited in the United States by the bombastic Third Period rhetoric, though it did manage to build a fair number of communist- linked athletic and sports clubs.

The first documentation of American delegates in attendance at a Worker Sport event appears as early as the 1925 Frankfurt Worker Olympics, the first such event organized by the

SASI. Amongst images of various teams marching, some with club banners and some with flags, photographs depict Americans delegates carrying a flag and a banner that identified themselves.52 Next, in 1926, at the meet which took place at the leftist stronghold of Cologne, an

American team of gymnasts attended the event amongst a sea of their European comrades.53 A larger American delegation attended the SASI athletic meeting in Prague in 1927, carrying the

American Delegation at the Prague Worker Sport meeting. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Public Domain.

American flag as well as the banner of the Falcons, the Socialist Youth club.54 They participated in the opening ceremonies and appeared in a few foot races amongst the thousands of other participants.55

Lastly, another American delegation attended the massive Vienna Workers Olympics in

1931, participating in the games that outstripped the Los Angeles Olympics. Moreover, long time

Socialist and rising leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) David

Dubinsky was not only in attendance but came away impressed by the mass appeal of the games.

He ordered the ILGWU, long associated with the Socialist Party, to ramp up its athletic programs, which we revisit in Chapter 2. I argue this order constituted the direct pollination of

Worker Sport in Europe to Labor Sports in the United States, even though there were already small Socialist and Communist sports organizations in the United States. American delegations

also attended the 1936 Barcelona People’s

Olympics and the 1937 Antwerp Workers’

Olympics, sending both Communist and Socialist

athletes during the Popular Front years. Even

amid the death throes of Worker Sport in the late

1930s, Americans were bringing its vision across

the ocean. Given the existence of these mass American delegation to the to-be-cancelled People’s Olympics in Barcelona, June 1936. Bernard Danchik Papers, Tamiment Library. Fair Use. Workers’ Olympics and the regular participation of

Americans, it is not surprising that the idea of organizing an anti-fascist and anti-racist working class athletics took hold in the United States in the mid-1930s.

Imagining The Red Ball: The Interwar American Left and Sports As An Organizing Tool

Individuals and leaders involved in American Left by 1918 had trouble understanding the

American fascination with sports. This was a time when professional elite sports were about to explode, and corporations were implementing company sports leagues in order to build identification amongst its workforce with the company. Besides the radical Finns in the Upper

Midwest and the Pacific Northwest who operated gymnasiums, basketball courts, and boxing rings out of their numerous “Finn Halls” in order to keep youth involvement in the life of the hall, the left had more or less ignored sports as something worthy to engage with, writing it off as a mere distraction.56 By the 1920s, the American Left struggled to recover from the massive repression of the post-WWI Palmer Raids, the key repressions of the first Red Scare in the 20th century.57 But deep divisions fractured the left as the Socialist Party split over the question of the

Russian Revolution into three separate parties (which would solidify in the early 1920s into the

Socialist Party and the Communist Party). The once dynamic Industrial Workers of the World

56 The Finn Factor in American Labor, Culture, and Society” by Carl Ross. Transcript. IHRC625. Box 1. Erickson, Eva Helen Papers. Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN. Found in 53 athletic clubs. The Finn Hall was an obsession amongst Finnish immigrant communities in northwest and upper Midwest. The Finnish radical community was split by Communists and Socialists in 1920 with a few IWWs left. Athletics usually sponsored in order to keep the youth involved in the hall’s life.

57 The Palmer Raids would lead to the arrest of nearly 3,000 individuals, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, after a bomb exploded outside of the Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s house. It was part of the larger WWI and immediate aftermath repression of radical movements in the United States, which saw over 500 individuals deported, including famously, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Others, such as “Big Bill” Haywood, fled to Russia. The general repression was first as a result of wartime xenophobia, a reaction against anti-war organizing and speech, fear of the Russian Revolution and revolutionary conflicts in Europe, and post-war labor upheavals. 1919 also saw massive race riots by whites and the beginnings of the rise of the second KKK. Through the early 1920s, many Socialists, Communists, and IWW members remained in jail, so much of the energy of the larger Left went to freeing their comrades, or preventing the execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The 1920s were a decade in which the American Left was clearly on the defensive.

(IWW), a radical militant union, disintegrated into infighting and fighting off repression. As the

Communists at various points went underground or sought leadership in unions and the Socialist old guard largely fought to maintain their leadership of the left, both were blindsided by the cultural shifts of the 1920s. Popular entertainment in the form of movie theater and speakeasies simply lured many young working class people away from radicalism. Sports, always extremely popular, reached new heights of mass participation as elite athletes like Babe Ruth became celebrities. Sports had been written off by many on the left as something that distracted workers from real struggles, especially as corporate sports, American Legion, the Amateur Athletic

Union, and the YMCA all seemed to reinforce the impression that sports were for middle class people. But by the 1920s, sports, especially baseball, grew to something almost everyone could

enjoy, and leftists slowly began to realize that

they must engage with sports in a more

intentional way. From then on, left-wing

organizations made small and sporadic attempts

at real athletic programs that built upon fractured

ethnic athletic clubs, in attempts to attract youth

members and to stay relevant.58

While leftist organizations made some

headway in building sports organizations in

immigrant communities, they laid the seeds of

IWW Picnic Flyer, 1918. Labadie Collection, University of something much greater in the Labor Sports Michigan. Public Domain.

58 For example, see “Grand Picnic and Re-Union of all the radicals in the city of Chicago” IWW flyer. 1918. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

Union. Much like the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) organized small red unions aligned with Communist Party positions, these groups were limited to already radicalized workers in

“ethnic” American communities. But, also much like the TUUL, the LSU helped create a generation of Communist organizers who would be the vanguard of the mass CIO unions, bringing both personal and institutional organizing knowledge they had gained during the LSU period. The Labor Sports Union members and organizers, coupled with loosely aligned Socialist

Party networks of athletic clubs, combined with Socialist-led unions like the ILGWU in taking the lead on Labor Sports programs. With the ILGWU Labor Sports model, those differing elements blended together in the later Popular Front era. The combination would create the

Labor Sports movement as part of the general labor popular culture. Without that later period, these groups would be a simple footnote, but here, we see the ideas struggle to gain root before the sprouting that we will see in later chapters. To understand why Labor Sports flourished in both in unions and locals of unions with strong Socialist or Communist leadership, we must explore both groups’ experiences and links to larger world currents and sports.

Ethnic Clubs

Across East Coast and Midwest cities were Workers Gymnastics and Soccer clubs affiliated with the Socialist Party circles that had developed from the bottom-up through various immigrant communities. These clubs would provide many of the delegates to Worker Sport events in Europe. The Socialist Party did not coordinate these clubs or even set up any sort of sports organizations through the 1920s, however. The clubs seemed to operate mostly independently of each other in a fashion best described as a proletarian culture born through common ethnic identity and political ideology, whether they were German, Polis, Czechs,

French, Jewish or especially Finnish communities. Usually, the sports played were ones

54 associated with European sports popular at the time, such as gymnastics, wrestling, track, and soccer. These clubs existed independently in informal networks, which followed the pattern of

European athletic clubs prior to the formation of the SASI and RSI. That pattern continued in the

United States since the distance was so great from Europe, especially outside New York City, making continued contact with the SASI or RSI difficult. However, those obstacles were slowly overcome as the sheer numbers of people involved in Worker Sport continuously inspired

American left-wing sports organizers. First-hand experiences, photographs, and movies made their way back to left-wing circles in the United States of Worker Sport events, and so efforts to build an American version continued until finally Labor Sports began to rise.

Finnish communities in the United States were immersed in radical politics and athletic play, much like the large and vibrant Finnish Worker Sport section of the SASI. When Finns immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century, they brought with them a cultural obsession with sports clubs that operated out of “Finn Halls.” During the

Socialist-Communist split, the majority of Finnish radicals left the Socialist Party for communist circles. Those Finnish athletic clubs, therefore, would provide much of the support in the

Communist affiliated Labor Sports Union.59 In the 1920s, as the children of Finnish immigrants came of age, Finnish-Americans added baseball, basketball, and boxing to the Finnish sporting regimen.60 Indeed, the pattern of children of immigrants switching sports loyalties is very common, as Ruck has demonstrated in his explorations of Dominican baseball players of Lower

59 “History of Finns in Minnesota” transcript. IHRC625 Box 1. Erickson, Eva Helen Papers. Immigration History Research Center. P. 431. Finnish Socialist/Wobbly/Communist halls contained workers gymnastics as early as the 1900s, as well as wrestling. Sports were amongst most active programs of Finn Halls.

60 “Program for Brooklyn Labor Sports Union Meet” 1928. Printed Ephemera Collection on Organizations; PE 036 Box 111. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

Antilles descent.61 To the Finnish, immersing radical socialist politics with sports was as natural

as mustard on a hotdog. Understanding that connection makes it clear why the ideas of Worker

Sport transmitted not only across the ocean, but across a generation of immigrants to their

American children, even if it took nearly a decade and a half to germinate into the mass Labor

Sports movement.

Most of these clubs were associated with urban areas that contained large numbers of

immigrants and their children, though there were some in rural or small towns in the Upper

Midwest or mill-towns of New England,

New York, and Pennsylvania. While the

majority of Socialist-Party aligned sports

clubs in regular communication with

Worker Sport in Europe were in New York

City and its surrounding metropolitan area,

the SASI in Europe recorded a minuscule Americans at the Frankfurt Workers’ Olympics, 1925. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Public Domain. official membership of 529 athletes in New

York. It was hazier on the total American membership rolls of socialist aligned athletic clubs,

noting that other Socialist clubs existed in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Rochester, and

Cleveland and were not in direct communication with SASI Worker Sport organization.62While

not spending much energy organizing the far flung Socialist ethnic sporting clubs together into

61 Ruck, Rob. Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).

62 “V. Kongress der sozialistischen Arbeiter-Sportinternationale in Prag am 12., 13. und 14. Oktober 1929. Berichte und Verhandlu” V. Congress of the Socialist Workers' Sports International in Prague on 12, 13 and 14 October 1929. Reports and Negotiations. Int 1159/35; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. pg. 52 mentions Socialist Worker Sport in New York, plus Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit Rochester and Philadelphia, no total numbers of members. 539 total members so its small but significant in NY. Chart of membership after. Map at the end of total membership, based in central Europe and extending outwards.

56 national organizations or leagues in the 1920s, what the Socialist Party did do was coordinate

American participation overseas in the mass People’s Olympics and other meets of the Socialist

Worker Sport International (SASI), working through with the 2nd International of social democratic and socialist parties. The germination of those clubs and contacts with the booming

Worker Sport movement through the Socialist Party’s international affiliations would prove critical to spring-boarding a mass working class sports movement in the 1930s-40s.

Revival of the Socialist Party and its Embrace of Sports

The Socialist Party had done very little with sports until the 1920s. At the same time, its leadership understood the importance of social unionism, the idea that building unions needed to go beyond wages to fulfill larger needs of working-class people. The Wobblies, the nickname of members of the IWW, had used music and singing to spread a working class counterculture amongst immigrant communities in the East Coast mill towns and among migrants, timber workers, and miners of the Western States.63 By taking common church hymn tunes and substituting the lyrics for revolutionary working class ideas, usually with humor spliced in, their catchy tunes made for enduring anthems of the Wobbly counterculture. Many of those songs are still in use today amongst members of the labor movement, such as Solidarity Forever. Still, the

IWW never really engaged with sports in a systematic way during the height of its strength in the

1910s except at picnics here and there, though a much smaller IWW would field teams in the

Cleveland area in the 1930s in their small s socialist-oriented locals in the metal industry.64

63 For more on the migrant labor system in which IWW members operated in, see Elizabeth Pingree “The Footloose Labor System: Work and Migration in the Pacific Northwest 1870–1929” (Dissertation, Boston College. Estimated Defense 2021).

64 For more on the IWW in the 1930s and the split between their Socialist oriented metal workers and Syndicalist oriented sailors, see Matthew White, “’The Cause of the Workers Who Are Fighting In Spain Is Yours’: The Marine Transport Workers and the Spanish Civil War” in Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. Ed. Peter

The Socialist Party’s main expression of social unionism, on the other hand, was through unions in which it had strong leadership, mostly in the garment industry, to which I will return in

Chapter Two. Usually some sort of recreational athletics would be part of any public social event, especially picnics, which invited members of the Party and members of Socialist-led unions, often advertised as “Socialist Athletics”, which just meant that one could expect a ball game, races, or tug-of-wars.65 To put it simply, socialist leaders did not put much thought into organized sports.

In the mid-1920s, battles between the Socialists and Communists took their toll on both organizations, burning out members and leading to big defeats in labor, especially in New York

City. Even as the battles subsided as the Communists suddenly pulled out of the struggle for leadership of unions because of the Comintern switch to the Third Period party line, the

Socialists were left as a shell of their former selves, at points dipping to as low as 8,000 members by the late 1920s from a height of 100,000 members..66 But suddenly, the socialist? Norman

Thomas ran on the Presidential ticket for the 1928 Socialist Party Presidential candidate. His energetic campaign helped bring in droves of youth looking to build an authentically American socialist movement, especially as the Communists tended to be more rough-and-tumble sectarians in the late 1920s through 1930s that alienated many young people turned off by the

Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer. (London: Pluto Press); "Wobbly basketball team which participated in Cleveland's Industrial League. 1940” From Roy T. Wortman From Syndicalism to Trade Unionism: The IWW in Ohio, 1905-1950 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1985). Pg. 153.

65 Ticket for 1919 picnic that includes Socialist athletics. Ella "Mother" Reeve Bloor Papers. 1919. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

66 Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas: Encyclopedia of the American Left. (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Pg. 720.

58 attack-now mode of the Communist Party. The youth centered militant wing of the Socialists

Party would quickly embrace sports as a way to build relationships within the party.

Young People’s Socialist League

Similar to Bernie Sanders igniting the Democratic Socialists of America in 2016, the

Norman Thomas campaign in 1928 inspired rapid growth in the Socialist Party. However, by then the organization was divided between its old guard labor union leadership focused on electoralism and bread-and-butter issues, especially in the garment unions, and its youth wing in the Young People’s Socialist League, which favored militant direct action and organization building through social relationship building in theater, dances, singing groups, and sports. The

YPSLs (pronounced “YIP-SIL”), as they were nicknamed, grew rapidly along with the SP from the late 1920s through the late 1930s and incorporated sports into almost all their social functions

YPSL Gathering, 1931, Reading Pennsylvania. Tamiment Library, New York University. Fair Use.

59 and mass gatherings. Their literature recommended using sports to attract new members.67 As I will demonstrate when we look at the Socialist-dominated Education Department of the ILGWU in Chapter 3, the YPSLs realized that it was not enough to simply join pickets and hold lectures and reading groups, but that it was necessary to make being a member of a socialist organization fun. While the Socialists did organize sports within the party, its allied unions, ethnic clubs, and youth groups all used sports to build a fraternal comradery. The YPSLs developed their sports programs largely organically and would intermix their sports experiences with Worker Sport- inspired programs over the 1930s to help create Labor Sports.

The YPSLs gained an even larger following with the onset of the Great Depression. As the Socialist Party rebounded with its relatively moderate and thoroughly American organization

(as opposed to the sectarian Third Period Communists), the YPSLs organized chapters all over

Northern and Midwestern cities. Lacking facilities of their own, the YPSLs leaned on other organizations within Socialist Party circles, such as ethnic fraternal organizations or union halls, to host their dances or basketball games.68 In order to compete with the Boy Scouts, which they saw as reactionary, they began a Red Falcons organization, which was intended to be a socialist

Boy Scouts, with sports listed as one of their main activities.69 In their internal organization

67 The YPSLs were divided into a junior section of early teenagers and younger, and a senior section of late teenagers up to age 30.

68 “10th annual dance at Brownsville labor lyceum”, 1930. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library.

69 “Red Falcons- socialist cub scouts.” 1931. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Sports listed amongst activities. A group with the same name, also existed as the youth branch of the Austrian Socialists, so it is possible they were directly inspired. For more on the Austrian Red Falcons, see Deutsch, Julius, and Gabriel Kuhn. Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging A Militant Working-Class Culture. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017). Pg. 67.

60 memos, they regularly listed athletics as one of the main sources of interest amongst its membership.70

By 1931, the YPSLs had grown large enough to host national gatherings, including in the

Socialist Party-administered city of Reading, Pennsylvania.71 On July 12th-13th 1931, they hosted a national conference and “jamboree” in which they interspersed discussions and speakers on education, anti-war activism, and labor with recreation like dances, fish-fries, barbecues, singing, and athletics. In fact, on July 13th, the day reserved entirely for fun, two baseball games occurred on the diamonds built by the SP administration.72 The first matched the New York and

Milwaukee YPSL branches and the second was the Socialist Party of Reading’s baseball team, who were operating such a team in order to facilitate public use of athletic fields.73 Building on the success of the jamboree, later that year the YPSL hosted an International Socialist Youth Day in New York City, with specific clubs of the Workers Gymnastics from around the city.74 They further advertised Socialist-run youth camps.75 Even as late as 1940, when the Socialist Party as

70 “Internal memos”, 1930. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library. Internal memos lists athletics as one of 5 areas of circle interest.

71 Reading was one of two cities where Socialists elected Mayors to office in the Norman Thomas inspired resurgence of the SP, the other being Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They rode in on a platform of reform and providing good government to its citizens rather than any militant seizing of the means of production or insurrectionary revolution. These elected socialists were known as “sewer socialists” because they were known for bragging about the quality of their sewer system.

72 “Youth conference in Reading”; “YPSL Reading Annual Conference July 11-12”; “Schedule of Annual Meeting with Socialist Party Baseball” 1931. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Youth conference in Reading with athletic meet July 12-13 1931; YPSL Reading Annual Conference July 11-12 included athletics and dancing; Schedule of annual meeting lists Socialist Party Baseball 2:30-4:30pm. 10:30am-12noon New York Vs Milwaukee. Tamiment Library.

73 That team would later compete in a Socialist-run league in the Reading area.

74 “International socialist youth day with workers gymnastics” October 3rd 1931. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library.

75 “Camp Tamiment (in YPSL pamphlet.)” 1935. Young People’s Socialist League collection; PE 032 Box 10. Tamiment Library.

61 an organization was falling apart, the YPSL was still putting athletics as an organizational priority for basic recruitment and recreation:

The playgrounds and recreational centers represent a most important section for agitation and contact work – more so because of the closing of other channels. The sandlot leagues organized in such sports as baseball, basketball and football represent a large reservoir of militant youth. The formation of YPSL teams not only serves the purpose of intimate contact with large bodies of youth on the basis of common interests but also provides invaluable exercise for the health of our members. Such teams must be organized immediately so we may reap the benefits of such contact work in the short period left us.76 While the YPSLs never organized their own leagues and seemed to mainly play athletics in a pickup fashion without set teams (as opposed to their rivals in the Communist-led Labor

Sports Union), sports were a key part of the lexicon of youth organizing. Those experiences would aid in building the Labor Sports movement in the later years of the CIO, as many of the

YPSLs became involved as adult organizers. Thus, the experience of using sports as an organizing tool by Socialist organizers in the CIO was first used by as these organizers gained experience in the YSPL in their youth. Finally, they were not without adult support, as Socialist affiliated ethnic athletic clubs existed throughout the United States. These were the clubs who provided American delegations to Worker Sport events, meaning that indirectly, YPSL sports likely were inspired by Worker Sport. But, as mostly American-born young people, they gave their sports more of an American feel rather than trying to simply copy Worker Sport as their adult comrades did. As the YPSL generation and their Communist counterparts came of age, they helped create something related yet different than Worker Sport. When the ILGWU embraced creating a working-class centered athletic program, it was well situated to create something popular precisely because they were able to lean on Socialists like the YPSLs, whom

76 “National YPSL Convention Minutes.” July 5-7, 1940 pg. 5. Ted Tekla Papers. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

62 played baseball and basketball, the sports of choice for American-raised youth. The ideas of

Worker Sport influenced the YPSLs even as they sought to create something more appropriate for the working class of the United States.

However, the YPSLs and the larger Socialist Party was not alone in this organizing work.

Just as in Europe had the competing social democratic and communist sports internationals, in the United States, two separate left-wing sports organizing developed in fierce rivalry: the socialist circles and the communist circles. Let us now turn to the arch-rivals of the Socialists, the Communist Party and its main sporting front organization in the Labor Sports Union (LSU), which was much more organized and centralized. Just as socialist-aligned recreational athletics looked to the SASI, communist aligned sports looked to the RSI. Worker Sport of all varieties cast its light onto the development of the Labor Sports movement.

Communists

The Communist Party USA arrived on the American political scene in the wake of the

October Revolution and Russian Civil War that established the Soviet Union. Originally a hodgepodge of “orthodox Marxists, syndicalists, members of the Industrial Workers of the

World, and the Socialist party’s East European language federations,” the party militants had moved into the left-wing of labor by the mid-1920s, through a conscious strategy of “boring from within” epitomized in the “United Front” party line.77 Early on, the Communist Party USA

77 Generally speaking, the United Front was when party activists came out of the underground and actively started working in working class organizations, mainly unions, to take over those organizations in the mid-1920s. Somewhat confusingly, this same period is called the 1st Popular Front in the Chinese context, but since I am focusing on the United States, I will use the term that the American Communists used. In the United States, the Third Period followed the United Front, and the Third Period was followed by the Popular Front (called the 2nd Popular Front in China). I take the position that the Popular Front coalition continued without the Communists during the Nazi-Soviet pact, in which the Communists returned to its anti-war and condemnational rhetoric, though not as intense as the war situation remained fluid. They then returned to the Popular Front coalition after the invasion of the Soviet Union, termed “The People’s War”, reinforced once the United States entered the war,

63 looked to the Comintern for leadership, which as a condition of international Communist recognition, demanded obedience to its general advice.78 To much of the Socialist and

Revolutionary movements of the world, the Soviet Union seemed to have achieved a working- class controlled country, and the dissenters of the left who pointed out the brutality and repressive nature of the Soviet regime, such as Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander

Berkman or later on the rival Trotskyists, were largely marginalized or painted as sour grapes.

The Communist Party quickly became the main instrument of the organized left, as many who joined “were initially attracted to the CP rather than one of the other leftist groups because of its public aura of resolute self-confidence, reinforced as it was by ties with the original and only victorious socialist revolution.”79 Some Communist organizers saw sports as a way to win over regular Americans, as they had done with the foundation of the RSI in Europe. In 1924, the Party began the work to start an American wing of the RSI, noting the potential of Communist youth:

COMMUNIST SPORTS INTERNATIONAL

Another branch of the Communist International, closely connected with the Communist International of Youth, is the Communists' Sports International. The American branch of this organization was founded in New York on March 23, 1924. Its members have to do all they can to convert the youth to Communist doctrines. They have formed their own teams and leagues in various branches of sport, and issue a publication on workers' sports.

A CHALLENGE!

even rebranding from the Communist Party to the Communist Association. Almost immediately following the war, they returned to the confrontational rhetoric of earlier periods while maintaining their positions in labor and progressive organizations in the early Cold War, which they maintained for much of the Cold War even as they were destroyed as an effective organization. Though these party line switches are confusing and sometimes differ by country in the terminology, the periodization of the Comintern rhetoric and tactics across the globe remained consistent.

78 Frasier Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From The Depression to World War II. (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Pg. 9

79 Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During The Second World War. (Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Pg. 11.

S-S-S-SH! Be more careful! The American Legion's anti-red "secret service" is right at your heels.

And what discoveries? What an exposure?

This time they really have us against the wall.

They have discovered that Communists play baseball! That we hold picnics! That we go to summer camps! And, above all, that we are attracting the youth of the country!

In short, after months of strenuous labor and hair-raising escapes, the Legion's "secret service" has discovered that Communists are quite normal human beings interested in the same sports and social activities as the masses generally.

And they don't like it. They have decided to go in for baseball themselves to win the youth away from us.”80

However, the Communists had some built-in advantages over their rivals during this period and beyond. Communists had a sense of being on the right side of history and believed in the inevitability of a Soviet triumph around the world. Additionally, rank and file members of the party were generally ignorant of the horrors of Stalinist terror, which aided the party’s image as an organization of bold fighters for a better world. For those looking to do something about the failures of capitalism evident during the Great Depression, it was easy to plug into an organization which was active around housing eviction battles, labor unions, and at the forefront of early fights against Jim Crow in the United States. For many new recruits, that was the difference between being a victim and a fighter. In major urban environments like New York

City, Communists could achieve critical mass and affect social change, though as an organization at its height in the Popular Front it only claimed 100,000 members nationwide, and

80 Ibid.

65 another 200,000 in its fraternal International Workers’ Order organization, again largely concentrated in major cities.81

By 1927, at the beginning of the Third Period, the Communists had embraced the idea that recreation should be incorporated into their programs, expanding beyond the Wobbly songs to embrace sports as well. For instance, in July-August 1927 the Communist-affiliated Winlock

School for Young Workers in Washington state (for teenagers to young adults) featured athletics prominently in addition to theoretical study. As part of the training for activism in the Young

Workers League, the youth wing of the Communist Party, athletics were seen as a key terrain to be won over in order to bring youth into the party fold, initiated by orders from the Comintern to build an American section of the Sportintern. It was noted by the school organizers that the

Finnish Federation of the Pacific Northwest, who had largely come over into the Communist camp from the Socialists, included athletics and so too should the Communist youth organizations. It was understood that youth organizations of the Communists needed to always have athletic committees, which finally bloomed in the Popular Front era, as we will revisit in

Chapter 3-5.82 The Communists sought to bring both youth and adults into a specifically

Communist sports organization that would serve as the RSI representation in the United States, and thus began the Labor Sports Union in 1928.

81 Ottanelli, Pg. 128.

82 “Red Dawn Yearbook.” Winlock Young Workers School for teenagers. 6 weeks in July and August 1927 in Winlock Washington, Communist summer school. 1927. HM471n67 Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN. Included athletics as a main part of the program. Coupled them with songs for recreation. For Young Workers League of the Communists. Finnish Federation included in northwest. Baseball had been planned but scrapped because of narrow field so pole-vaulting and jumping instead. Boxing happened too. Included an athletic committee.

The Labor Sports Union

After its sudden turn away from the United Front strategy of fighting for leadership of the

American labor, the Communists turned their attention to building the pure red unions in the

Third Period, where they sought highly ideological working class people with confrontational rhetoric and action. In addition to the party-line turn, its activists turned towards building a host of Communist unions and front organizations. They were spurred on by the growth of the Soviet

Union’s “Physical Culture” of mass involvement in sports to train for future military service, as well as the Comintern’s Red Sport International of Worker Sport clubs across Europe. Building

upon the Finnish halls of the Upper Midwest, the

Germans of the Detroit and Chicago areas,

Communist youth sports clubs, the Jewish clubs and

other ethnic clubs of New York City, the Labor

Sports Union was formed in January 1927 as the

American section of the RSI. It was to be an

organization for recruiting youth into the party, and

was envisioned in explicit competition with

Socialist sports clubs, and mainstream sports

83 Labor Sports Union patch. Immigration History Research organizations. Center, University of Minnesota. Fair Use.

83 “Principles and Constitution of the Labor Sports Union- section of the Red Sports International” 1928. Printed Ephemera Collection on Organizations; PE 036 Box 111. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. LSU was launched in January 1927, after earlier efforts at putting Communist youth activists into sports had largely come to nothing. Detroit was first district organized. 8 clubs plus 12 sympathetic clubs. Regular speakers to meetings, topics include: “Labor Sports Movement and AAU, Health and Sports, The Miners’ Strike, Sports and Militarism. Sports Rays put out monthly. 6-12 team soccer league. 1928 meet advertised.

The long-term objective was to build a specific left-wing sports mass movement under

Communist direction, similar to Worker Sport in Europe. At a Brooklyn athletic gathering of the

LSU, the organizers laid out the task of building Worker Sport in America: “Organized labor in this country is far behind the European workers in understanding the value and the importance of having a workers athletic organization.”84 The LSU sought to change that, although it was limited by its extreme sectarianism. Though its reach was limited, its work provided individual and institutional knowledge in Communist circles for the later much larger work in the Labor

Sports movement in the CIO unions. By itself, the LSU would be nothing more than a footnote, but it provided Communist militants with the knowledge of what was possible and what did not work in organizing a left-wing sports movement in the United States. The Communist wing of

Worker Sport helped direct the Labor Sports Union, which would provide institutional memory

for later Communist sports organizers,

particularly in Communist strongholds like

UAW Local 600, the UE, and the ILWU.

Worker Sport loomed large over both left-

wing sports experiences.

The LSU’s work was characterized by

high levels of organization and pronounced

rhetorical and organizational sectarianism, as

were all Third Period Communist Brooklyn LSU athletic meet. Tamiment Library. Fair Use. organizations. Though it was commonly understood

84 “Brooklyn Meet advertisement” 1928. Printed Ephemera Collection on Organizations; PE 036 Box 111. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

68 that the organization was under the party’s direction, the high standards of involvement for Third

Period party-line Communist Party membership meant that if one basically agreed with the party’s reputation as fighters but did not want to or could not submit to the requirements of party membership, one would join an affiliated organization like the LSU or its various militant Red unions. To put it plainly, the Communist Party saw sports as having a specific mission, which was to attract workers into class-interested organizations. According to them, you were either with the Communists or with the bosses. In a 1928 pamphlet on the principles of building the

Labor Sports Union as an organization, one gets the sense of regular rhetoric of the Third Period and the Labor Sports union, where everyone not with the Communists were therefore for the capitalists:

At the present time sports and athletics in the United States are characterized by the fact that the bosses strive to destroy the workers sports movement and to put it in the services of their own class interests what, in a considerable extent, has already been achieved by them. In putting the sports under their control and domination the bosses strive to influence and control the minds of the workers in general and working youth in particular in the furtherance of their interests.85

85 “Principles and Constitution of the Labor Sports Union” 1928. Printed Ephemera Collection on Organizations; PE 036 Box 111. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Pg. 1.

Indeed, the LSU used bombastic and militant language, and all other existing sports

organizations were direct targets for rhetorical attacks.

In the same pamphlet put out by LSU organizers, the

Communist organizers wrote that the conservative

Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which ran

nonprofessional and collegiate sports in the period,

“have been bourgeois to the point that its sole interest

is to develop the ‘stars’, thus corrupting them from the

social life and class struggle.”86 The Industrial

Athletic League, a coordinating body for company

Labor Sports Union gathering, 1928. Immigration sports run as corporate welfare programs was History and Research Center, University of Minnesota. Fair Use. intended, likewise, “to keep the workers from organizing into their class organizations- into trade unions and sports clubs. Also to prepare them for bosses wars.”87 The YMCA/YWCA and their Jewish equivalent in the YMHA as well as the

American Legion sponsored sports, were written off as scab agencies, since during strikes these groups recruited for scabs, according to the Communists. Even church and neighborhood sports were mentioned as having the sole purpose to “serve the interests of the bosses against the interests of the working class.”88 Finally, their leftist rivals, the afore-mentioned Socialist Party- affiliated sports clubs, usually called the social democrats or more glaringly “social-fascists”89,

86 “Principles and Constitution of the Labor Sports Union” Pg. 4.

87 “Principles and Constitution of the Labor Sports Union” Pg. 5.

88 Ibid.

89 A play on the word socialist, to imply that the Socialists were just as bad as the rising fascist movement and were sellouts by misleading working class people away from the correct Communist line.

70 were so-called workers sports organizations who “through their radical words they tend to deceive certain sections of the workers into the hands of the bosses.”90 There would be no alliances, nor attempts to “bore from within” to take over larger existing sports organizations in the late 1920s through the early 1930s. It was the Labor Sports Union, the TUUL, the

Communist Party, the Comintern, and the Soviet Union, or be damned.

In what was supposed to be a show of force for the Labor Sports Union’s mobilization power, the organization staged the answer to the bourgeois 1932 Los Angeles Olympics with the

Counter-Olympics in Chicago. The Counter-Olympics, officially called the “International

Workers Olympics” staged street runs to draw crowds and ended up getting a fair amount of public notice, as the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) barred LSU affiliated athletes from participating in the event or else risk being banned from AAU events. Here they staged soccer games, races, gymnastic displays, and strength contests. While the LSU hoped to use the event to attract masses of working-class people to the organization, it ended up only growing to a total membership of 5000 from 4000 nationwide by the end of the year. While the 400 athletes in attendance (100 of them black) and nearly 5000 fans watching represented an impressive event, it was not nearly as large as the Communist organizers hoped it would be, and did not overshadow the Los Angeles Olympics.91 Nor did it mean that the LSU suddenly grew out its

Third Period isolation. While the LSU hoped it would become a force in American sports and by extension help the party’s influence grow in the labor movement and attain some semblance of power in the United States, the fact that the most popular sport in the LSU remained soccer in the

90 “Principles and Constitution of the Labor Sports Union” Pg. 6.

91 Though the Socialist affiliated SASI Workers’ Olympics in Vienna, did dwarf the Los Angeles Olympics.

71 early 1930s suggests that it was mostly gaining traction in the older immigrant communities as opposed to the masses of American workers.92

As the 1930s wore on, it became clear the Third Period party-line had been effective only in places where there was no potential for allies, such as with black sharecroppers in Alabama, where even white liberals were still segregationists. Elsewhere, local Communist militants had ignored the party line and built militant organizations through existing non-radical organizations, such as the longshoremen of San Francisco. Lastly, the Communists did have a presence in immigrant communities that had grown frustrated with the focus on electoralism of the Socialist

Party and had been willing to use the Third Period rhetoric. Beginning in 1935, the Popular Front party line began to take shape,93in which the strategy was to form alliances with anyone who opposed fascism, with some exceptions, as long as the Communist Party would ultimately be in control or have strong influence.94 Third Period organizations were either able to adapt to the

92 Mark Naison, “Lefties and Righties: The Communist Party and Sports during the Great Depression,” Radical America, 13 (July-August 1979), Pgs. 47-59.

93 In the United States and elsewhere, while the United Front of the mid 1920s and the Popular Front of the 1930s were similar, and in some places in the world even both called the Popular Front, they differ in a few aspects. In the United Front, the focus was on winning control of unions and other working class organizations, so it was more important that workers follow CP militants lead than actually be members. In the Popular Front, the focus was on building working class power and alliances in order to defeat fascism, so alliances with middle class liberals were specifically sought. In the Popular Front, any progressive would be sought to form alliances with or include in their organizations. Interestingly, Trotskyist organizations embrace the United Front strategy as a way to build true working class power and condemn the Popular Front as making too many compromises in order to defeat fascism. The Trotskyists would gain control of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934 during the strike there using a United Front strategy. It is important to emphasize, however, that though in places like China the two periods were functionally whether the Nationalists and Communists were in alliance, there are important differences between the two periods in the United States and Europe on the ground and in rhetoric. The United Front emphasized building working class power in order to eventually reach dual power, while the Popular Front sought to normalize Communists in the United States in order to defeat fascists and reactionaries, home and abroad.

94 For instance, though Communists were supposed to be organizing separate red unions, there are instances where they ignored party doctrine in order to do what made sense given local conditions, which was also true in other places internationally, such as Malaya. On the West Coast, Communist militants took over the West Coast division of the International Longshoremen Association, and led it during the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. They later led it out of the ILA to form the ILWU of the CIO. For more, see Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism of the 1930s. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

72 new party line, such as the International Workers Order, or in the case of the TUUL, ordered by the Communist Party leadership to disband and place its militant core of organizers in the rising

CIO unions. In the case of the Labor Sports Union, it briefly tried rebranding as the Workers’

Sports League of America, bringing some Socialist Party affiliated clubs in Popular Front fraternalism, before finally folding in 1938 and transferring its organizers into the Labor Sports organizing in CIO unions and leftist NYC unions.95 We will return to those organizers in later chapters.

The rhetoric shifted in the final years of the LSU, from the Third Period rough fighter image. From 1935-38, its rhetoric moved to a focus on liberation of the worker through health and activity rather than the wickedness of its rivals. Fred Pahlow, an organizer with the

LSU/WSLA, wrote of the squalor of the working class life in the Great Depression and the need for a better more active reactional culture:

There is only one means to counterbalance the damages of occupational disease and that is body culture. Body exercise among like-minded, the purpose of which is to develop the organs of the body, most of all the important organs heart and lung. Therefore, go out into the open, breathe plenty of fresh air while playing and exercising with other modern slaves of our so-called machine age. Experience the joy of living. Come to the Workers’ Sportsmen. We do not care for those [sporting trophies] honors. We want the free, handsome man. We want the man who realizes the value of body culture in a community, wherein realization of today’s problems will create a

95 “Sport call. Official organ of the Workers Sports League of America.” 1937. Printed Ephemera Collection on Organizations; PE 036 Box 111. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. The publication lists both friendly organizations and affiliated clubs. By this point, the Popular Front outreach was in full bloom, with some inroads. Workmen’s Circle and other Socialist Party affiliations along with the Communists. But lots of Popular Front stuff. Multiple athletic clubs on the east coast and some in the Midwest. Clearly the strength of socialist Listed party is there. Bergen County NJ Soccer Club, Workers Athletic Club of Queens. Carlstadt Soccer Club. Workers Gymnastic and Sport Association of Elizabeth NJ. Workers Sport Fichte. Workers Sport Club of Passaic. Labor Lyceum Turn Section of Rochester. Workers Gymnastic and Sport Association. YPSL Soccer Club “Vanguard”. Young Circle League of America (Manhattan). Youth Sporting and Social Club. Soccer League- eastern district soccer league. Midwestern District- Workers Gym and Sport Association (Chicago). Workers Sport Club Fichte (Chicago). Workers Gymnastic Association (Cicero IL), Sports Section of Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit Fund. DTJ Detroit. ABC Detroit. Reading PA, Pittsburgh PA, St. Louis Missouri.

73 desire for better conditions, worthy of human beings. THEN YOU WILL BECOME A HUMAN BEING!”96 Thus, even as the LSU wound down in intensity, the Communist Party still wanted to be able to use its experience and organizing staff in the new Popular Front. In the hope of creating a larger anti-fascist, anti-racist working class counterculture, the Labor Sports Union was thought of as potentially being able to transition into welcoming less politicized athletes. However, with the explosive growth of the CIO and the emergence of the Labor Sports movement brought into these new unions through the Socialist-led ILGWU, the Communists decided to cut their losses and add LSU organizers into the CIO instead of keeping it as a separate organization. The rhetoric in the quote above became standard working class empowerment rhetoric of Labor

Sports activists in the CIO, meaning that their work had moved into the new upstart labor organizing. Labor Sports was ready to bloom, but it was set up for fierce competition between circles of Communists and Socialists within the CIO.

Conclusion:

The Worker Sport movement rose in force and then wilted as fascist forces crushed and dismantled all left-wing institutions in much of Europe. It was truly a mass movement, based around anti-fascist self-defense and engaging with working class lack of access to organized sports, with the idea that left-wing parties could provide healthy recreation around political values. The SASI and to a lesser extent the RSI built a large network of left-wing athletic clubs which hosted a series of large athletic meets, culminating in the 1931 Workers’ Olympics. Even as it was hit by the blows of the destruction of their German and Austrian strongholds as the

Austrofascists and Nazis came to power, the Worker Sport activists fought on, eventually

96 Ibid.

74 coming into alliance to build the People’s Olympics in 1936 to oppose the Nazi Olympics in

Berlin.

In the United States, the ability of left-wing organizers to engage with sports as a field of struggle had been limited through the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Even after nearly a decade engaging with sports, through both immigrant communities and the youth wings aligned with the

Socialist Party, and the Third Period Communists’ front organization in the Labor Sports Union and its affiliated leagues and clubs had produced very mixed results. While the efforts were sometimes clumsy and seemed not to be able to grow beyond immigrant communities who were quickly becoming “Americanized”, these efforts would eventually bear fruit. The rise of fascist movements to power in both Germany and Austria shocked international Socialists and

Communists. The Comintern embraced what had already begun on the ground in much of

Europe and the United States by forming the Popular Front with most anti-fascists, which many

(but not all) Socialists embraced. Some Socialists became “small s” socialists and left the

Socialist Party instead of working with the Communists, but in the early years of the Popular

Front, the alliance held promise of a united left.

The second New Deal helped open up legal labor organizing that built off the often- bloody organizing of the unemployed and poorly paid workers in the first half of the 1930s.

Leftist militants had been formerly confined to the garment trades, small Communist unions, or remained outside of organized labor altogether. However, international events changed the outlook of Communist politics. After the fall of Austria to fascists and the squelching of Red

Vienna, the former center of the Worker Sport movement, a year after the rise of the Nazis in

Germany, the Communist International directed all affiliated parties to adopt a “Popular Front” strategy, in which the Communists would make alliance with most of the left (with the exception

75 of Trotskyists) and practically anyone who considered themselves an anti-fascist. This often included liberals and sometimes even conservatives.97 For sports organizers, this meant joint projects like the American delegation to Spain and attempting to meld their existing sports organizations. For Communist sports organizers, that meant first working with Socialists, and then dissolving entirely to work in the rising CIO unions. In the early days of the Popular Front, it seemed that Socialists and Communists might be able to work together, and it was not uncommon for cautious collaboration amongst some of the leftists.

The Labor Sports Union would soon be dissolved in favor of sports programs within the rising CIO unions that Communists became involved with as organizers. However, in 1936, in the early days of the Popular Front alliance, the old Third Period organizations still delivered organizers, much as their old red unions would provide organizers to the CIO unions (as well as the Socialists, Trotskyists, ex-Wobblies, and fellow travelers of all stripes.)98 Furthermore, the

Communist-led mutual aid and fraternal organization, the International Workers Order (IWO), with a membership of around 100,000, operated an extensive athletic program within its lodges.99 Activists organized the New York City based “Committee for Fair Play In Sports” as an early Popular Front organization containing both Communist Party activists of the Labor Sports

Union and Socialist Party activists in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) whom operated extensive sports programs. The two former bitter rivals were now cooperating temporarily to oppose those fascist winds that had blown over much of Central Europe and now

97 Chris Vials, Haunted By Hitler: Liberals, The Left, And The Fight Against Fascism In The United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

98 Judith Stepan-Norris, and Maurice Zeitlin. Left Out: Reds And America's Industrial Unions. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

99 Zecker, Robert. "A Road To Peace And Freedom": The International Workers Order And The Struggle For Economic Justice And Civil Rights, 1930-1954. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2018).

76 threatened Spain, China, and Ethiopia.100 The Committee for Fair Play’s main goal was to oppose the Nazi-hosted Berlin Olympics and, if possible, pressure the International Olympic

Committee (IOC) to move the Olympics elsewhere or cancel them altogether.101

As it became obvious by June 1936 that this goal would fail, the newly elected Popular

Front government in Spain offered an alternative, to be organized by what was left of the SASI and the RSI.102 Quickly, the other newly elected Popular Front government in France offered

1500 athletes and 500,000 francs, and endorsement from the Socialist Prime Minister Leon

Blum, and so the third “People’s Olympics” was announced. It was scheduled for July 19th-26th in Barcelona.103 When a request for an American delegation of athletes reached the Committee for Fair Play, a newly formed Popular Front NYC alliance of leftists, in May, there was some hesitation about its ability to field such a squad. After some debate, the Committee decided to recruit a team at a meeting on June 25th, 1936.104 A special Committee for the Barcelona

People’s Olympiad was formed and assembled a team of 8 athletes from both the Communist and Socialist athletic worlds, plus two sympathetic to the burgeoning Labor Sports movement

100 Tyler, Gus. Look For The Union Label: History Of The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995; James Robinson "Needles And Hoops Sports Programs In The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, The Socialist Party, And Their Communist Rivals". Process: A Blog For American History, 2018. http://www.processhistory.org/robinson-ilgwu-sports/.

101 "Committee On Fair Play In Sports Issues Rebuttal To Bingham's Position | News | The Harvard Crimson". The Harvard Crimson, 1935. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1935/11/26/committee-on-fair-play-in-sports/.

102 For more on the histories of the SASI and RSI, see Robert F. Wheeler, "Organized Sport And Organized Labour". Journal Of Contemporary History 13, no. 2 (1978): 191-210. doi:10.1177/002200947801300202. 103 “The Face of the People’s Olympiad”, June 25 1936, Scrapbook; Bernard R. Danchik Papers; ALBA.033; box 2, Tamiment Library.

104 Letter forwarded by Fair Sports Committee from Organizing Committee of the Barcelona People’s Olimpiad, May 21st, 1936; “Minutes Of Meeting To Discuss Sending A Delegation To The Barcelona Olimpiada Popular”, 1936, Clipping Scrapbook; Bernard R. Danchik Papers; ALBA.033; box 1; folder 3; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

77 and anti-Nazi organizing. They were able to assemble an array of athletes from both communist and socialist athletic circles. The American delegation traveled to Spain, where unfortunately the

People’s Olympics were cancelled because of the outbreak of uprising of fascists that began the

Spanish Civil War.105

One question remains: how did the Popular Front alliance produce such a cohesive model for Labor Sports so quickly, when it had been limited and sometimes clumsy in organizing what was supposed to be an American wing of Worker Sport? The answer is that one of the long-time strongholds of the Socialist Party, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, embraced

Labor Sports and built an envious recreation program with athletics as its signature program, along with theater. Emerging from brutal labor civil wars in the 1920s, leaders of the ILGWU attended the Worker’s Olympics in Vienna in 1931 through their Socialist International contacts.

They set about using the union’s resources to engage with sports just as mass labor organizing entered a new period of possibilities, to which their union’s Labor Sports program would provide the bridge between sectarian isolated left-wing sports and the mass Labor Sports movement of the CIO.

105 For more on the American delegation’s trip to the Barcelona People’s Olympics, see this author’s work on the journey to and back from the flashpoint. James Robinson, “Barcelona 1936: Fascist Uprising, People’s Olympics, American Athletes” Sport in American History, July 31st, 2019. https://ussporthistory.com/2019/07/31/barcelona- 1936-fascist-uprising-peoples-olympics-american-athletes/

Vienna Workers’ Olympics. Tamiment Library, New York University. Fair Use.

Chapter 2: Shooting Hoops with Your Neighborhood Socialists: The

International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the Socialist Party,

and Social Unionism Sports Programs 1918-50

The International Ladies Garment Workers

Union emerged as a fighting force for Jewish

sweatshop workers of the garment industry by the

1910s. Its leaders embraced a fully transformative

vision of their unionism that was wedded to Socialist

Party visions of creating a new world. The ILGWU

sought to provide for its members better lives than

those they were able to build in the Anglo-world of the

United States: good wages, education, healthcare, and

ILGWU Basketball game, circa late 1930s. Kheel recreation. By the 1920s, even as the union descended Center, Cornell University. into a brutal civil war between Socialists and

Communists, it was building up an Education Department that went beyond simple lectures. The

Education Department shifted its focus to building Unity House resorts, Health Centers, and

eventually thriving athletics to match its more famous labor theater that produced the iconic Pins

and Needles musical. In doing so, the ILGWU helped forge a path for Labor Sports that had

important ramifications well outside its own union. As a result of continuing contacts and

experiences with European Worker Sport, the union would the bridge the worlds of Worker

Sport and Labor Sports in the United States, combining the experiments of American Socialist

80 organizers with the inspiration of European Worker Sport. That meant the union would build on the experiences and synergies of American left-wing activists and the labor movement to create

ILGWU Labor Sports. The ILGWU was an important link between the experiments of American leftists in engaging with sports as an arena of social justice, and the larger growth of Labor

Sports linked to the rising CIO, with the UAW at the forefront. The union incubated the earlier sports organizing experiments of the American Left, developing models for successful and stable

Labor Sports. That ILGWU Labor Sports model would later find fertile ground when the CIO exploded the late 1930s. Without its decades of institutional traditions and experiences, it is questionable whether the larger anti-fascist, anti-racist working class counterculture epitomized by sports could have exploded as much as it did. Just as Worker Sport was on the defensive as fascist forces took down its strongholds one by one in 1930s Europe, American Labor Sports was beginning to ascend.

In this chapter, I argue the ILGWU served as the bridge between Worker Sport in Europe and the CIO-affiliated Labor Sports movement in the United States, making both movements a global story. The ILGWU and its Socialist Party leadership in the Education Department built a culture of worker empowerment through a larger commitment to building the infrastructure of recreation in the 1920s. That commitment helped plant the seeds of a popular culture rooted in social unionism, which included a Labor Sports program largely inspired by Worker Sport, moving away from the disjointed socialist athletic clubs. The ILGWU’s Labor Sports programs are key because the model and experience would be transmitted a few years later to the booming

CIO unions which quickly surpassed the ILGWU in total numbers and influence. By the 1930s, when the ILGWU rebuilt from the communist/socialist civil war, those seeds blossomed into a very large basketball league, as well as other athletic programs.

Background

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ union was founded in 1900 as an organization to bring together various skilled crafts into one industrial union in the ladies’ garment industry, which boomed as American women began to have more spending money. It exploded in membership after a series of mass strikes in reaction to conditions in the garment industry in 1909-12, most famously the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire on March 25th 1911, which killed 146 workers, most of them women. The union was led mainly by Jewish Socialists who read the Forward newspaper (a Yiddish language newspaper influential in the Jewish-American diaspora), and its mainly female membership were Jewish with a sizeable Italian minority. It endorsed a wide vision of unionism, believing the union was not just for improving wages and benefits, but for transforming the lives of workers through education, healthy living, and recreation. The union fought hard to abolish child labor, combatted sexual harassment, and formulated social justice programs for Jewish, Italian, and other immigrant groups.

Garment industry unions were often a reflection of the workers themselves, who very often came from socialist political backgrounds and the urban working class. Cultural networks built through neighborhood culture and action extended across workplaces and into the community, meaning that in order to build a larger culture of support for the union, it was important to engage with people beyond the workplace.106 Because most workers could never hope to play in the exclusive sports clubs of middle-class amateurs and were not talented enough to play professional sports, they often organized their own rag-tag neighborhood games of pickup ball, whether it was baseball, softball, basketball, tennis, boxing, or soccer (in

106 For an excellent example, see the history of the Philadelphia Hosiery workers’ union in the AFFFHW: Sharon McConnell-Sidorick, Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal. (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

82 communities with more recent immigrants). Because the garment industry required both skilled and unskilled laborers to mass produce clothing, participation in both the unions and Labor

Sports by both men (often in the skilled work) and women (often in the unskilled work) was common. Urban workers were often deeply alienated from capitalist America, and garment workers’ unions sought to build better lives, beyond issues of working hours and wages, for their members. Indeed, the cultural recreational activities of garment worker unions predated the larger working class counterculture of the Popular Front in the 1930s by more than a decade. As

Sharon McConnell-Sidorick has argued, garment workers unions often both engaged with families of members and the youth culture of the 1920s. Activities designed to promote socializing and camaraderie between different groups within the union and in the garment industry was the focus of recreation programs.107 In the American Federation of Labor (AFL), garment unions like the ILGWU operated much differently than the mostly conservative craft unions of the labor federation.

The Socialist Party was deeply influential in the ILGWU, to the point where if one wanted to rise into the leadership ranks, being a party member was an informal requirement. In an industry where sweatshop labor was the norm, the women who worked in it saw their lives transformed and became empowered by their experiences organizing. While the ILGWU was famous for its member-led “Labor Theater” that staged musicals about life as a garment industry worker, it was also important in the development of Labor Sports.108 Indeed, the ILGWU was a

107 McConnell-Sidorick, Pg. 95.

108 For more on the history of the ILGWU’s Labor Theater, see Joan M. Jenson and Sue Davidson, A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needleworkers in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Gary L. Smith, The International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union’s Labor Stage: A Propagandistic Venture. (Dissertation, Kent State University, 1975); Susan J. Ott, Raring to Go: The ILGWU: Its History and the Educational Experiences of the Women Who Participated 1916-1965 (Dissertation, University of Buffalo, 2004).

83 natural union for the development of sports programs, as it had extensive contacts with the

European-based and Socialist-affiliated Worker Sport movement which peaked in the 1920s and early 1930s. As media historian Brian Dolber has noted, the Jewish-dominated New York City

Socialist and Communist Parties were in fierce competition with one another through the 1920s.

Since they had both emerged from the Jewish Labor Bund, which saw culture ultimately as a political force, both Communists and Socialists sought creative and pragmatic strategies for dealing with a weak labor movement in the 1920s.109 Those efforts would be the seeds of a new national labor-focused culture that blossomed in the 1930s.110 And at the heart of that new culture were sports programs.

This devotion to a wider social justice unionism by Socialists (and later Communists) was not limited to the ILGWU in the garment and textiles industries, but also included the

Furriers’ union, the Hosiery workers union (AFFFHW), and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in the men’s garment industry.111 However, the ILGWU was the largest union in the industry and operated the most extensive programs, which made it the envy of unions across the United States. Its history in the first half of the 20th century can be divided into three eras: the 1910s, which saw it become influential in the garment industry, with membership around 100,000; the 1920s, which saw a slow decline until 1926 when the union was almost wiped out by a painful civil war between the Socialists and Communists in the garment industry;

109 The Jewish Labor Bund was a cross between a political party and a labor union, with the goal to organize Jewish workers into an international socialist secular political force.

110 Brian Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Pg. 3.

111 McConnell-Sidorick, Pg. 176.

84 and finally the flowering of the seeds of the ILGWU’s labor culture work in the 1930s, which saw the ILGWU’s membership surge to 300,000 and more.112

The Education Department

The ILGWU developed its Education Department in order to bring socialist politics into the lives of average workers in the union. Activists such as Fannia Cohn sought to bring socialist politics into the union’s cultural spheres through its Educational Department. Under that vision of social unionism, the ILGWU needed to organize educational services, cultural activities, healthcare, and recreation, so the Education Department was tasked with carrying out that wider mission.113 One of the Educational Department’s most enduring projects was its sports program, which encompassed baseball, gymnastics, basketball, swimming, bowling, and much more.114

Just as large corporations used sports to build identification with the factories where workers were employed, beginning in the 1920s the ILGWU used sports to build comradery and identification among rank and file workers. While other unions like the UAW would later separate their Education and Recreation Departments, the ILGWU always kept recreation programs under the purview of the Education Department.

The Education Department was established during the height of the ILGWU’s first era in the 1910s, when socialist ideology was more united and less sectarian than in later eras. The department was founded in 1917 in order to institutionalize the work of some locals to the larger union. The key to the development of the education department was its longtime organizing

112 Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement. (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

113 Dolber,Pg. 54.

114 Lizabeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pg. 177-179.

85 secretary, Fannia Cohn, who sought to encourage democratic impulses amongst its mainly female workers stifled by the union’s male leadership. At first, its programs concentrated mostly on providing labor education classes to workers who had been neglected by local school systems.

Quickly, however, it became clear that many workers wanted more than lectures.115

Recreation—including sports—became part of the Education Department’s mission by the early

1920s. Still, progress was slow, as the ILGWU leadership only gave the department piecemeal support. Even so, these sorts of programs tended to do a lot with very little: by 1919 over 10,000 workers had enrolled in education classes and another 7,000 in cultural productions.116 Labor musicals and plays helped entertain its working class base, build cultural solidarity and identification with social justice, and build a message that could reach middle class allies through presentation of workers’ issues in an entertaining way. “Pins and Needles” is today the best- remembered of these musicals, but the ILGWU staged dozens of other musicals and plays in this period. Thus, the ILGWU was already at the cutting edge of building working class countercultures to the dominant individualist middle class American culture.

One of the first issues affecting the lives of ILGWU members was the general poor health of garment workers. To address this, the ILGWU began operating a series of Unity Centers for access to healthcare and recreation, one of which eventually became a vacation resort for its members in the Poconos.117 The Unity House served as a place where union members could relax and enjoy time away from cities, providing relief from the daily grind. In the 1920s, the

115 “Workers’ Education In War And Peace,” pg 32. ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

116 Dolber, Pgs. 53-59.

117 “Our city, our union” 1940 convention pamphlet. IHRC479. Box 1. Crivello, Antonio Papers. Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN.

86 house was envisioned as a sort of summer camp, with local Unity Centers providing more immediate services to answer the needs of members. Recreation was beginning to be addressed through the construction of organizational infrastructure. Indeed, the opening of the Unity

Centers and Unity House would eventually help springboard the participation of ILGWU members into recreation. By 1939, the Unity House was hosting nearly 50,000 members a year from the ILGWU’s membership base in New York City.118 Since ethnic mutual aid societies often faltered in times of health crisis during the Depression from lack of funds, the union stepped in to build a strong health program in the form of access to doctors and labor gyms.

While not comprehensive, the union’s health and wellness efforts made significant differences in the lives of ordinary working-class people.

By the end of the 1920s, however, the ILGWU was in dire straits, a shell of its former self after it was almost totally destroyed by internal strife between Communists and Socialists, called the “civil war” by ILGWU veterans. Tensions had been simmering between the right-wing

(the Socialists) and the left-wing (the Communists) within unions in the garment industry in general.119 During the “United Front” period, Communists had slowly but surely built up their strength in the Garment industry unions of New York City. By 1926, Communists had taken over entire locals of the New York City base, though the cloakmakers and cutters of Local 10 proved to be a stronghold for Socialists. As the Communist Party was the result of the split from the Socialist Party only seven years prior, the causes of the civil war mostly boiled down to long- standing hatred between the two leftist parties from the events of the Communist-Socialist split of 1917-19. These tensions were certainly stoked by the Comintern during the “United Front”

118 Ibid.

119 Right-wing and left-wing in union terms usually are just relative to the union. They were both part of the larger American Left.

87 party line, which had Communists work with social democratic forces to gain leadership of working class organizations. In the United States, this generally translated to working in unions.

In New York, the civil war caused members to come to blows, figuratively and literally, while most the energy of the union was spent on the question of who would control the ILGWU.120 In the process, the Socialist leadership expelled entire locals in order to keep control of the union.121

On July 1st, 1926, the Communists suddenly called for a strike of the cloak makers (jacket makers) that ended in utter disaster for the ILGWU. With the union on the verge of obliteration, the Communists collectively left the union as the Communist Party began its Third Period party line of building purely Communist labor unions and refusing to work with other parties.122 With only 30,000 members left by 1932, the ILGWU struggled to survive as an organization. The victory of the Socialists, however, did mean that they would be free to reconstruct the union as they wanted it, while Communists were instead concentrating on building highly sectarian organizations of pure Communists. The Education Department organizers survived the civil war by largely keeping their heads down until it was safe to side with the Socialists.123

120 This battle played out in other unions in the garment industry. While the Socialists emerged victorious in most of the industry, the Fur Cutters, or Furriers, union would be led by Communists like Ben Gold until the Red Scare.

121 “The Left Wing in the Garment Unions” Issued by the Joint Board of Cloak, Skirt, Dress, And Reefer Makers’ Unions. May 1927. ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

122 The Third Period party line of the Communist Party was directive by the Third International (Comintern) to break off cooperation with non-Communist working class activists, with whom delicate alliances or rivalries for control of unions had been built. Instead, Communists were to build purely Communist organizations, from red unions to red front organizations and fraternal groups. The idea, on paper, was that capitalism was on the verge of a general collapse and revolution, and therefore it must be steered correctly. In practice, it was a move underscored by internal Soviet Union politics, as Stalin moved against the “right-wing” Bukharin faction by adopting positions Trotsky had earlier espoused. For American Communists, this meant leaving unions and other organizations in mass to form their own, which in practice isolated them while at the same time helped develop a hardcore cadre of militants who would be key later in the Popular Front era that followed.

123 Much of the histories written by ILGWU activists in the decades after the civil war wrote it from the point of view of the Socialists.

One labor leader to emerge from the fray was David Dubinsky. Dubinsky was a Russian

Jew who was active in Socialist circles in Russian-ruled Poland before he fled to the United

States following anti-Jewish pogroms in 1911. Dubinsky had become an anti-Communist after the Bolshevik suppression of rival socialist parties, and in the United States he led the Local 10

Socialist Party stronghold of the union, the influential Cloakmakers, during the Civil War. He deeply distrusted anything associated with Communists, whether it was the party or the Soviet

Union, front groups, or even just organizations that contained Communists. This strongly anti- communist orientation would have larger consequences on the history of how Labor Sports would develop, as both Dubinsky and ILGWU rank and file members endorsed a socialist- oriented ILGWU sports program in the 1930s

Dancing In The Dark: The Great Depression and the Rise of ILGWU Labor Sports

Despite the turbulence of the 1920s, the ILGWU began the 1930s with the seeds for a major transformation. During the long desperate years of the Great Depression that impoverished millions of workers, its vision of social unionism meant that the ILGWU was well positioned for the labor revival in the early years of the New Deal. It is doubtful it would have exploded in growth without that firm leadership and mix of pragmatists and visionaries with ranges of socialist sentimentalities. Furthermore, the factional fighting between Communists and Socialists had long been settled with the ILGWU, which had been the basis for driving away many members. In effect, there was a sort of Pax Socialās within the ILGWU that enabled it to push forward without internal feuding undermining its larger work.

The Education Department had largely survived the civil war by siding with the

Socialists or keeping their heads down until the dust settled, meaning people like Fannia Cohn did not become associated with the communist faction. The department’s capacity for work had

89 been greatly reduced along with the rest of the ILGWU’s resources, but the institutional experiences remained. Working class people desperately wanted a new world, which started with the idea that “Knowledge Is Power”, the motto of the Education Department that appeared on all of its publications. As the department’s activists emerged from the union civil war, European socialist organizing offered new visions of what was possible. Looking to their comrades across the Atlantic would set the stage for the dramatic expansion of the Education Department’s cultural and recreation programming in the 1930s.

Though the ILGWU had long maintained international contacts, both informally through its immigrant-based Jewish and Italian membership, and formally through the Socialist Party’s affiliation with the Socialist International, these grew more intense after the First World War. In

Europe, as the Worker Sport movement grew in the 1920s and early 1930s, American Socialists and Communists did not ignore the power of sports in the rapidly expanding radical movements.124 Worker Sport was a cornerstone of the European internationals, both Socialist and

Communist, in bringing new members into its movement, along with self-defense paramilitaries, cultural fronts, and political parties. In the case of the American Socialists involved in the

ILGWU, they had been exposed to the Worker Sport movement through delegations to the mass meetings and events hosted by Social Democrats and Socialist Parties of Europe, including SASI

Worker Sport (explored in chapter one). Indeed, American athletic delegations, including athletes from the ILGWU, attended at Socialist-affiliated international Worker Sport meets in

124 Map of Socialist Worker Sport International membership by country in Europe, 1929. V. Kongress der sozialistischen Arbeiter-Sportinternationale in Prag am 12., 13. und 14. Oktober 1929. Berichte und Verhandlu. Pg. 120. English: V. Congress of the Socialist Workers' Sports International in Prague on 12, 13 and 14 October 1929. Reports and Negotiations. Int 1159/35. International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, NL.

Prague in 1927, Vienna in 1931, and the protest Olympics in Barcelona in 1936.125 While the costs of sending delegations overseas meant that American delegations were small, their presence nevertheless points to regular communication and influences. Indeed, in 1936, when an

American delegation was hastily assembled for the protest Olympics in Barcelona, several of the athletes were veterans of ILGWU teams. The operating Socialist-affiliated Worker Sport clubs in the United States mingled in the same New York City Socialist Party circles that ILGWU activists did.126

In 1931, David Dubinsky decided that leftist experiments with building working class centered sports culture were worthwhile after witnessing the compelling and massive Worker

Sport movement for himself. By then the rising leader of the ILGWU, who consolidated his power in the wake of the Civil War as an anti-Communist social democrat, had traveled to “Red

Vienna” for the socialist-aligned Workers’ Olympics of 1931. There, amid a non-Leninist socialist movement, the Austro-Marxists had accumulated political power in the Austrian government and in urban areas through strong unions, sports clubs, sobriety clubs, and anti- fascist self-defense militias.127 Worker Sport grew to become a mass movement of egalitarian anti-fascist clubs, affiliated with social democratic or, in some cases, communist parties. The

125 “Památník II. Dělnické Olympiady československé v Praze. 1927. Uspořádal L. Vaverka.” English: Memorial II. Workers' Olympiad of Czechoslovakia in Prague. 1927. Organized by L. Vaverka. 10/47 A-D fol b. Presentation of American delegation at 1927 Prague Worker Olympics. International Institute of Social History.; VIème congrès de l'Internationale Sportive Ouvrière Socialiste à Liège les 8, 9 et 10 septembre 1932. Rapports et procès-verb. English: 6th Congress of the Socialist Workers' Social International in Liege on September 8th, 9th and 10th, 1932. Reports and Minutes. Report mentions American delegation at a Vienna 1931 Worker Sport meet, that Dubinsky is mentioned of having attended. Int 1159/73, International Institute of Social History; “U.S. Team Sails For New Labor Games in Spain” June 1936. Clipping Scrapbook, Bernard R. Danchik papers. ALBA.033 Box 2. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

126 See Chapter Two.

127 Gabriel Kuhn ed., Julius Deutsch: Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging A Militant Working-Class Culture (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2017).

91 highlight of the International Socialist Congress in Vienna, Dubinsky later remarked, was “a mass spectacle in which thousands upon thousands of Austrian trade unionists took part. It was staged in a huge stadium, with at least a quarter million people watching. I could not get it out of my mind--the mood it created of unity and hope, the friendship it built.” 128 He ordered his assistant Louis Schaffer to replicate the event and embark on putting a dynamic ILGWU recreational program based on what he saw—which included massive involvement of the many people in union-sponsored activities such as sports teams, bands, mandolin orchestras, choruses, dances, pageants, plays, tours, painting and sculptures, picnics and hikes, and travel to points of interest in the United States and abroad. Even as the Vienna Worker Olympics represented the high water mark of the Worker Sport movement and would rapidly by quashed by fascist forces over the next decade, it also represented the moment when Labor Sports would begin to expand into a real movement in the United States. The continued contact between social democrats

across continents made this exchange of ideas possible.

Dubinsky’s order to put a larger emphasis on sports

programs coincided with the rapid expansion of the ILGWU

after the National Recovery Act (NRA) was passed in the

United States in 1933. Because of mass unemployment,

cutbacks to corporate welfare programs including sports, and

general desperate conditions, by 1933 the ILGWU brought in

129 ILGWU Labor Theater, 1936. Kheel Center, tens of thousands of new members. By 1937 the union had Cornell University. Fair Use.

128 Gus Tyler, Look For The Union Label: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995) Pg. 197.

129 Parmet, Pgs. 94-95.

92 grown from 30,000 to 225,000 members. These new members were dubbed “NRA Babies”, as they needed to be brought quickly into the organizational culture of the Socialist-led ILGWU, and so educational programs and recreational programs were ramped up in order to rapidly build a strong sense of identification with the union. As such, in 1934, the Education Department created a Cultural and Recreational Division. Anti-fascist plays became common, as well as expanding the famous “Pins and Needles” musical. The ILGWU began a fund to combat the growing fascist menace, often financed through both Labor Sports events and labor theater.130 A

1947 pamphlet on the history of the Education Department reflected that a key demand of the period was that, “because they were young men and women brought up with the American love

of sports and recreation, they also

wanted recreation and social programs

to be made available to them.”131 In the

same pages as one would find quotes

from the Socialist Party leader Norman

Thomas, one could find photographs of

ILGWU members dunking basketballs

in heated contests.132 That realization of

ILGWU Basketball game, circa late 1930s. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use. the potential of using the resources of a

130 “Fight Nazism and Fascism” ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives, New York University, NYC, NY.

131 “And The Pursuit of Happiness” pamphlet. Education Department ILGWU. 1947. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

132 “Golden Jubilee 1919-1944” Local 89 pamphlet. IHRC479. Box 1. Crivello, Antonio Papers. Immigration History Research Center.

93 powerful union to back worker-run sports would be the basis for the later expansive CIO- affiliated Labor Sports movement.

The demand for a “people’s sports” mirrored that of European Worker Sport. Ironically, at the same time the ILGWU led the way in building the mature Labor Sports of the 1930s which would eventually find traction in the CIO unions, particularly the UAW, Worker Sport in Europe was largely crushed as fascists rose to power in Germany, Austria, and Spain. While Worker

Sport had been an influential force in the 1920s through 1930s, the Socialist-affiliated Worker

Sport leaders were jailed or forced underground because Worker Sport clubs were seen as a symbol of anti-fascist working class activity in both Austria and Germany.133 The less extensive

Communist Worker Sport continued to exist in the Soviet Union as part of the existing “physical culture.”134Only in Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian nations did SASI

Worker Sport continue in its vibrant anti-fascist form, and even then only until the winds of fascist wars of conquest extinguished its flame. During the same period of fascist suppression of

Worker Sport, Labor Sports in the United States rapidly expanded.135

133 “Zwischen den Arbeiter-Olympiaden. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag deutscher Arbeitersportler zur Niederlage der deutschen Arbeiterbewe.” English: “Between the workers' Olympics. A discussion contribution of German worker athletes to the defeat of the German workers.” Bro D 1290/3375, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

134 Physical Culture was the Soviet Union’s official sports policy, which used sports in a more classical totalitarian sense of subjugating sporting clubs to the interests of the State. Thus, sports were seen partly as a way to train for potential future military service as opposed to worker empowerment.

135 “Všemu na vzdory - hurá! Žijeme 1936! Scéna I. festivalu recitačních sborů M.S.D. konaného 26. a 27. září 1936 v Pražské Lucer” English: All for defiance - hooray! We live 1936! Scene of the I. recital choir festival M.S.D. September 27, 1936 at Prague Lucer.” 45/266; “10 Jahre Sozialistische Arbeiter-Sportinternationale. Im Auftrag des Internationalen Büros zusammengest. von C. Gellert.” English: “10 years Socialist Workers Sport International. Commissioned by the International Bureau. by C. Gellert.” “Der Kämpfer Zeitschrift des Arbeiterbundes für Sport und Körperkultur in Oesterreich (ASKÖ) und des Republikanischen Schutzb”. English: “The fighter magazine of the workers' federation for sport and physical culture in Austria (ASKÖ) and the republican Schutzb” ZO 1318; “Sport in the U.S.S.R. by A. Starostin” R 694/35; “Records of Dutch Worker Sport” Arch01375 Archive of Harry Stapel 10; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Although the ILGWU has been remembered for its labor theater, sports were just as popular a form of recreation. Over the course of the 1930s, athletic teams and labor gyms in the

ILGWU rapidly expanded. By 1935 their number had risen to 106 teams and gyms, and by 1940 that number had grown to 213 total athletic organizations within the union.136 The ILGWU vastly expanded its existing educational Unity Centers to include physical activities, especially sports. It established leagues whose teams consisted exclusively of ILGWU workers and affiliates. Dubinsky embraced sports, while his lieutenant in the Educational Department, Mark

Starr, personally steered the development of softball, baseball, and basketball leagues. Starr wrote in an ILGWU pamphlet, “We know that the comradeship developed on the playing fields will deepen and intensify the emotional tie-up of every member to his organization. We know that the spirit of emulation developed in our contests will lead to a strengthening of the Union to face critical problems which face us now and in the future.”137 In other words, sports helped foster the personal relationships critical to the union’s function.

Not surprisingly, in New York City, basketball was king of winter and baseball king of summer -- both highly urban games. In the 20th century, the “new immigrants” (Italians, Eastern

Europeans, and Jews) and their American children were slow to warm to baseball until the

1920s, when it exploded in popularity during the “Live Ball” era of home runs in Major League

Baseball.138 Basketball, on the other hand, was dominated by Jewish players in its early urban

136 Ibid.

137 “Athletics Activities Will Strengthen The Union” Mark Starr, Educational Department Director. 1935. The Tamiment Library/Robert Labor Archives.

138 The “Live Ball” era of Major League Baseball, in which home runs spiked to unprecedented levels because of a “livelier” ball. The home runs helped drive up fan interest in the game, as baseball became more of an offensive game.

95 days, along with the small but growing African-American urban communities, while boxing was the sport of choice by warring ethnic groups within cities as fighting prowess was highly valued.

Neighborhood parks, playgrounds, youth sports in public schools, accessible YMCA gyms, and playgrounds all became normal parts of American life by the end of the 1920s, including in New

York City.139 Because of its place as a game easily played in urban environments, and the

concentration of Jewish working-class people

in New York City, basketball proved to be a

popular sport in the ILGWU. Sport facilities

and fields were increasingly becoming facilities

that working class people had access to in ways

previously unimagined. By the early 1930s,

access to those facilities and fields--along with

ILGWU Baseball team, late 1930s. Kheel Center, Cornell a realization that working class people indeed University. Fair Use. would and did play sports when given the opportunity--meant that development of a phenomenon like Labor Sports was much easier. The

ILGWU’s leadership realized this at just at the right moment.

In 1935 the ILGWU launched both a basketball and soccer league in New York City. As the children of immigrants became more Americanized, they abandoned the soccer of their parents’ generation for basketball and baseball.140 On April 20th 1935, teams competed for the

139 Indeed, with the combination of celebrity athletes, cheap ticket prices, radio, the decline of Sunday blue laws, mass transit, and rising incomes, by the 1920s spectator sports and participation became a mass phenomenon at the core of American culture. It had been a global trend by the early twentieth century. See Steven A. Riess, Randy W. Roberts (Editor), Benjamin G. Rader: City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) Pg. 109.

140 Still, in the 1930s, there still was a somewhat sizeable following of soccer in those immigrant communities, with the United States placing third in the inaugural 1930 FIFA World Cup.

Morris Hillquit Trophy for men’s teams and the Meyer London Trophy for women’s teams, both trophies named after longtime socialist ILGWU leaders.141 Twelve teams participated in the inaugural season, representing the locals of the union. After the initial season, the union worked to acquire its own gymnasium to serve union swim groups. The Education Department remarked on how rapidly the leagues had come together, and how it laid a foundation for a future “Labor

Sport League in the United States”, which was a vision of a more organized worker-centered athletics similar to Worker Sport. Such a vision would occasionally find an echo on the sports pages of other union and radical publications in this period. Labor Sports writers wrote of the vision of mass participation in sports by all that would eventually replace professional sports in a future socialist society. As the saying goes, Labor Sports organizers would build a new world from the ashes of the old.142 As the CIO entered the picture and brought millions of workers into labor unions, these visions of a Labor Sports organization would pick up more traction and were mentioned with some regularity, as we will see in later chapters. The sense that ILGWU Labor

Sports organizers had created something exciting was evident. Education Department organizers wrote of that excitement in the late 1930s: “A vigorous environment, a realistic and idealistic drive runs through all our activities. This inspiring atmosphere can be found in our discussion groups, in our classrooms, in our lecture halls, in our dramatics studios, in our singing groups, on our hikes, outings, and ‘Visits to Points of Interest’, and, of course, in our gymnasiums, swimming and dance classes.”143 Labor Sports was taken for granted as the baseline for the recreational programs, that would shortly catch on with much of the CIO. The ILGWU realized

141 London being one of two Socialist Party congressmen elected in the 1910s and 20s.

142 Report of the Education Department, 1935. Tamiment ILGWU PE013 Box 1. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

143 “Social Educational Centers” ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

that exercising the body in fun ways was as

important as engaging with the hearts and

minds of its members.

As the ILGWU rolled out their leagues, they

tried to be racially inclusive and to field

women’s teams. In the 1930s, when sports

were usually segregated and women’s sports

were largely ignored or downplayed, the fact

that ILGWU made it a priority to organize Dot Tucker with the American delegation to the Barcelona People’s Olympics, June 1936. Bernard Danchik Papers, inclusive teams put it far ahead of other Tamiment Library, New York University. Fair Use. institutions. While there were some mixed results in actually producing racially inclusive teams, one athlete figured prominently in their programs: Dorothy “Dot” Tucker. Tucker was a young African-American resident of Harlem, and a member of Local 22 in Harlem in the Dressmakers division. Later, as aa member of the

American delegation, traveled to the anti-fascist People’s Olympics in Barcelona in June 1936.

She quickly became the captain of the Local 22 track team and the women’s basketball team, and was active in international causes, always lending her support to anti-fascist, anti-racist athletic events. She participated in anti-fascist protest Olympics and participated in track meets in

Central Europe of Worker Sport.144 She believed in the cause of opposing fascism at home and abroad and believed in the mission of the ILGWU. All the while, she was a common face to see in Local 22 athletics, being a go-to athlete of the ILGWU tournaments and events. She was

144 “People’s Olympiad Delegates To Tell Their Experiences”, August 1936, Clipping Scrapbook; Bernard R. Danchik Papers; ALBA.033; box 2; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

clearly a star, and in a different world would likely have risen further.145 While she experienced

the declining Worker Sport directly and talked openly about her European track meets in

Czechoslovakia and intended to attend the 1937 Worker Olympics in Antwerp, Tucker

disappeared from the historical record by 1939. Still, her experiences in both anti-fascist

organizing abroad and union work in the New York City garment industry shows that the

connections were continuous between Labor Sports and Worker Sport to be ongoing. Dot Tucker

also was amongst a new wave of African-American workers entering the garment industry in this

time period. Labor Sports was designed to break barriers between white and black workers, in

order to truly represent workers of all backgrounds.146 Tucker herself would continue to play and

captain for her Local’s teams until she disappeared from the record, as ILGWU Labor Sports

expanded rapidly.

In the last half of the

1930s, as the culture of the

Popular Front and the CIO

seemed to signal a larger cultural

shift towards ordinary people as

the heroes of society, the worker-

athletes of Labor Sports were a

natural fit in growing CIO

Local 22 Basketball team, circa 1937. Dot Tucker sits to the trophy holder’s left. unions. As the ILGWU lent its Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use.

145 Photograph collection. “Zimmerman, Charles Local 22 International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union”5780 N45 P, no. 24. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives. Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

146 Daniel Katz, All Together Now: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New York City: New York University Press, 2011).

99 help to other CIO unions, which helped Labor Sports flourish in other CIO unions, the ILGWU continued to build its own programs. The union launched baseball and softball leagues, with twenty teams each in 1935. Soccer, a favorite of the immigrant communities, eventually was cancelled after it was noted that there were too many injuries. By 1938, tennis and gym activities were run as much as competitive sports, but basketball never waned in popularity. In 1939, twenty-five teams operated in the New York ILGWU basketball league, with more leagues in operation in Philadelphia and Chicago (which also operated a large bowling league.) The

ILGWU influenced its companion union in the ACWA, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of

America,147 to put on a combined Labor Sports carnival in 1937. Out of the thirty-six participating teams, one-third were from the ILGWU. The Education Department largely replaced baseball with softball in 1939 to avoid hand injuries for workers who toiled in an industry that required skilled fingers, but both remained popular amongst members. Meanwhile,

ILGWU all-star teams played a Sing-Sing prison basketball team and sent a squad to play a game in Montreal to play against a local labor team.148

The vision of a larger worker culture claiming the playing fields and gymnasiums, which had been in full swing in Europe through Worker Sport, was now being realized in the United

States. The number of participants in ILGWU Labor Sports quickly passed socialist athletics or communist sports organizations even at their height, which swelled into the tens of thousands of participants as the NRA babies fueled the union’s growth. It would only continue to grow in the latter half of the 1930s, both in the ILGWU and in the larger growing anti-fascist, anti-racist, working class counterculture of the Popular Front and CIO. Those softball, baseball, and

147 The largest union in the men’s garment industry.

148 Report of Education Department, 1942. ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

100 basketball teams of garment workers demonstrated that the union was about more than strikes and contracts. Instead, the ILGWU had built an alternative to commercial or company sports.

In order to facilitate these leagues, gym classes, and swimming groups, the ILGWU put together a series of Social and Education Centers, free of charge to its membership. In a fictional exchange, the Education Department relationship-forming potential of sports as part of a larger recreational program:

‘Believe it or not- we go for calisthenics, basketball, dancing, singing and swimming, with expert instructors teaching all those things, in case one doesn’t know how. We get a real understanding of the labor movement in an interesting manner. We discuss the topics of the day, hear topics on literature and health, even improve our knowledge of English. The teachers are marvelous.’ ‘Say that’s interesting.’ ‘But that’s not all. We have fun. And how! Join in one of our Get-Togethers on a social evening, and before the program ends, you’ll have dozens of new friends!’149 Here is the idea of Labor Sports at its core. Joining a union was not just for trouble- making, hitting the picket lines, singing traditional labor songs, or only talking about class struggle. It could also be an organization where one made friends, had fun, and developed skills that larger society had failed at giving to working class people. And Labor Sports were not only fun, but also led to better health through exercise and enabled workers to meet others who worked in the same community as them. This would not only benefit the individual worker and their families, but also solidify a sense of all for one, and one for all. In order to win any improvement in conditions, a union had to have a united membership, and Labor Sports was one such tool to develop that sense of true togetherness. In meeting the interests of workers, Labor

Sports would make the union an organization one identified with rather than a distant third party.

149 “Social Educational Centers” ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library/Robert Labor Archives.

101

The ILGWU often framed their advertising of the Education Department activities as a place to learn, but also made sure to mention recreational activities quickly after the educational programs. That strategy seemed to be to dispel any notion that the Education Department was purely for intellectual pursuits and was, in fact, more participatory and responsive to the new

NRA Babies’ needs. As a generation that was thoroughly American born and raised, unlike most of the founding generation of the union, the newer members had a deep passion for sports.

Therefore, Labor Sports met a real interest of these new members beyond the lecture-heavy prior focus of the Education Department. Unlike the immigrant generation, where sports were perceived to be a diversion from class struggle, second generation Americans tended to see

American sports as vehicles for

establishing their own identities as full

and equal citizens. In a working class

and socialist atmosphere like the

ILGWU, that demand for equality

translated into a desire to be able to

play the games instead of just

consuming them. The Education ILGWU Baseball game, circa 1940. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use. Department emphasized that the union vision was a participatory one, where members were encouraged to spend their recreational free time within the union as much as possible. That often meant sports. The ILGWU answered its members’ interest by beginning its Labor Sports programs.

The ILGWU framed sports specifically as a means for union members to enjoy their lives, which was only possible after winning the right to control the number of hours they

102 worked per day. As other unions would discover, it was not enough to win concessions for shorter hours and higher pay. Union leaders realized that establishing recreational programs reinforced workers’ commitment to the union and its ideals even as it encouraged greater solidarity between union members. In addition, union leaders believed that if they did not provide sports recreation and other cultural activities for members, then they would find outlets for their social needs either in company sports provided by factory owners, or in bars and other less productive amusements. The Education Department, in a pamphlet entitled “Enjoy Life With

Your Union,” implored ILGWU members to “Fill your union-won leisure with union-given gaiety, contacts and culture.” In addition to worker education, labor theater and music, Labor

Sports were at the forefront of a well-rounded member experience, according to Education

Department recreation organizers.:

Become a mermaid in the cool swimming pool during the torrid dog days. Take gym work to build healthy bodies for the clear brains of trade union workers building a better world. Get the thrill of team work and contest in basketball, soccer, tennis and baseball. Revel in the joy of the sunlight, the moon and the stars, the wind on the heath on hikes in the summer; the visits and trips to new sights and scenes in the winter… men and women together.150 Images of ILGWU athletics showed that teams were not only organized rapidly and enthusiastically by members desperate for free or inexpensive recreation, but that workers and their families came out to cheer on the players as well. Team pictures showed women’s and men’s basketball teams enthusiastically posing in basketball moves, from passes to dunks to dribbles. Labor basketball, as radical sportswriter Lester Rodney would later comment, was

“some pretty good basketball,” and flourished in the New York City garment trades dominated by Jewish members and Italians in New Jersey. Labor teams also meant that coworkers and their

150 “Enjoy Life With Your Union” pamphlet. ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library and Robert Labor Archives.

103 families could feel a part of the game action in a way that was more connected than professional sports.151 College sports were also off limits, which most members could not aspire to attend higher education. The union was, to its members, not only the way forward in securing decent wages and hours, but also the way forward in terms of education, recreation, social life, and local sports interests.152153

By the end of the 1930s, sports had become a regular part of the ILGWU and other

rapidly growing

unions. In cities with

more than one local,

teams were organized

into leagues, which

often saw large crowds

watch their games.

Finally, a New York

championship, which

NYC teams usually

dominated, was staged

to make the league ILGWU Basketball league, New York City. Tamiment Library, New York University. Fair Use.

151 In the 1930s, professional basketball was in its infancy.

152 Although most members also had personal sporting loyalties like the Yankees, Dodgers, or Giants.

153 ILGWU 4x5 Negatives of Photographs, 1885-1973- Dancing, Gym, Stretching. Local 22 (dressmakers), Local 10 (cloakmakers), Local 35 dressmakers in NYC. Baseball, basketball. Jefferson Park 114th and 1st Ave. (One game score was Local 91 vs Bat Harvey Hefter Institute 13-0). 5780 014 P; Photograph collection. “Zimmerman, Charles Local 22 International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union”5780 N45 P. Kheel Center.

104 something for all members to follow. Renaming the trophies after the union’s leaders, the

Dubinsky cup went to the women’s basketball champions, while the Hochman cup went to the men’s champions. In a 1939 pamphlet entitled, “We play together”, it noted ILGWU leagues existed not only in the largest base of New York City, but also in Philadelphia, Harrisburg PA, the Socialist Party bastions of Reading PA and Milwaukee, Atlanta, Fall River MA, Easton MA,

Boston, Cleveland, Portland, Los Angeles, Montreal and Chicago. In some leagues, the

Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish socialist cultural and educational organization, also fielded teams to play against ILGWU squads, pointing to how intertwined the union was with socialist politics.

ILGWU leagues often partnered with local YMCAs and high school facilities for pool and gym classes, but also operated bowling, tennis, and track and field teams. ILGWU summertime picnics often included softball games and races. In Philadelphia, the union operated a riding club, noting specifically the class dimensions of working people riding horses: “Horseback riding was

‘too good for the common people’ but the ILGWU feels that nothing is too good for the worker.”154

The ILGWU’s influence on American Labor Sports

In the mid-1930s, frustrated by the slow and cautious leadership of the American

Federation of Labor (AFL), David Dubinsky of the ILGWU joined with the United Mine

Workers’ John Lewis, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s Sidney Hillman to launch the Committee of Industrial Organizations. This helped buoy a larger workers’ movement that had been going through fits and starts since the Depression began, highlighted by massive

154 Report of the Education Department, 1942. ILGWU PE013 Box 3. The Tamiment Library/Robert Labor Archives.

105 labor battles, particularly in 1934. The CIO was an organization formed to capitalize on a growing belief that working people would not be rescued by corporate management. The

ILGWU was always a sort of mixture of industrial union and craft union, set apart by its social emphasis on fighting for advancement of all workers within the ladies’ garment industry.155

Because of the ILGWU’s participation in the formation of the CIO, it provided influence and partnership that lasted well beyond its actual inclusion in the CIO. The ILGWU provided organizers and funding to help build unions in the auto industry, electrical equipment, with an eye on taking on steel corporations and textile companies. It also lent its organizers to the CIO project of building a large scale and permanent union presence in the southern United States. In order to accomplish all of this, the larger vision of transforming the lives of workers so integral to social unionism of the ILGWU would go a long way in building the later industrial unions in the United States. That vision continued even after the ILGWU withdrew from the CIO in 1938 after Lewis decided to transform the CIO into a separate labor federation. After a short stint as an independent union, the ILGWU rejoined the AFL in 1940. Dubinsky charged that his main goal in the years after 1940 was to reunite the AFL and CIO, and so worked to form relationships with rising AFL plumber’s union boss George Meany and fellow former Socialist Party member

Walter Reuther. Therefore, the ILGWU stayed in contact with the highest levels of leadership in both labor federations. Even as it worked outside the CIO, it still lent its support to the rebel federation in the hopes of reuniting all of labor under one roof. That effort helped give the

ILGWU a much more sustained impact on the CIO than its actual membership in the organization would suggest.

155 Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement. (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

106

Indeed, although the ILGWU’s time in the CIO was short, it left a lasting influence. Even though the ILGWU helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Dubinsky held on to his deep distrust of Communists, who were at the forefront of organizing the CIO during its formative years in the late 1930s. Dolber noted that Dubinsky had built his ILGWU leadership to fend off the challenges of the Communists over the previous 15 years, and to cooperate now with other unions led by Communists was not something that Dubinsky and the ILGWU leadership could stomach.156 In spite of this ideological disagreement, though, CIO unions embraced Labor

Sports pioneered in the United States by the ILGWU and built their own labor teams and leagues. The slogan of the ILGWU Education Department, “Knowledge is Power,” would become commonplace as the slogan of CIO union newspapers, and many of the sports programs that would boom in CIO unions were modeled off the ILGWU leagues which operated in the same period. As Lisabeth Cohen observes, “[T]he pages of all CIO newspapers were filled with reports of dances, picnics, summer camps, softball teams--the new game of the thirties that

‘everyone could play’--and bowling leagues, the old game of the twenties that welfare capitalists had favored for the same reason.” Union members bowled together; workers from different plants battled in baseball games and then picnicked with each other.157 The ILGWU programs themselves had been a synthesis of years of exposure to the enormous Worker Sport movement in Europe, which the Socialists sent ILGWU athletes, to the international meetings, and local groups of workers who wanted access to cheap and accessible recreation.158 Dot Tucker, for

156 Dolber, Pg. 144.

157 Cohen, Pgs. 340-342.

158 Dominque Daniel: “Books For Education: The UAW’s Education Program and the Printed Word in the 1930s and 1940s” paper presentation at Labor and Working Class Association Conference June 1st, 2019.

107 instance, was sent to Antwerp in 1937 for a Worker Sport sponsored People’s Olympiad, and she remarked on the growing movement: “Labor sports are a great thing… You know, it’s a wonderful thing, the way thousands of people come out to watch these trade union runners.

Athletics are certainly making the public ‘worker conscious.”159 For Tucker, that link between the workers’ movement, social justice (especially as a black woman), and Labor Sports was clear.160

By the late 1930s, the Socialist Party in the United States had fractured. Much of its membership went to the Communists, was co-opted into the left-wing of the New Deal

Coalition-era Democratic Party, or got involved in various organizing drives like the CIO. It is important to note, however, that even though the Socialist Party ceased to be a functioning organization, many of its former members continued to be in the leadership of unions like the

ILGWU, as well as major factions within the larger CIO unions. Dubinsky, for instance, left the

Socialists during the Popular Front because he could not stand the thought of working with

Communists. Various former Socialist Party members, especially ILGWU activists, in the late

1930s first worked at building the American Labor Party, and later the American Liberal Party, both of which endorsed labor-friendly political figures independently of the Democratic Party.

The Socialist Party was ultimately weakened by intergenerational factional fighting and an inability to deal with the rising New Deal coalition reforms. The New Deal program neutered their short-term vision of what a gradualist social democracy would look like, and many members eventually believed the Socialist Party had run its course. However, activists who had

159 “Union Winners Laud CIO Sports” origin unknown, 1937 est, Clipping Scrapbook; Bernard R. Danchik Papers; ALBA.033; box 2; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

160 Her experiences as part of the American delegation to the Anti-Nazi Olympics in Spain, in which she saw and participated in the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

108 gained their education, relationships with other militants, and networks of leftist circles continued their involvement in American labor well beyond the Party’s demise. In the ILGWU, former members of the socialist party tended to drift towards social democracy and New Deal liberalism over the years, instead of their earlier advocacy for a complete replacement of capitalism.

World War II

The ILGWU had consistently maintained an anti-fascist position, epitomized in labor plays that lampooned Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. When war in Europe came, opinions in socialist circles in the ILGWU were divided between anti-war sentiment and the need to oppose the ever-expanding Nazi conquests. As the United States geared up for the conflict, much of the membership of the union was drafted into the military or went to work in war industries, which included making military clothing and materials. Because many of its members were away fighting, the ILGWU pared down its recreational programs.161 The number of athletics and gym programs across the entire union had peaked in 1941 with 284. In 1942-43, the total number of programs dropped to 178, and by 1943-44, they bottomed out at 146. These numbers would not grow again until after the war, when the military demobilized, and the garment industry returned to producing consumer goods.

Unlike electrical equipment manufacturing, steel, or automobile/plane manufacturing, which were deemed essential industries and converted to meet the needs of winning a total war against the Axis, much of the garment industry workers whose shops had not converted to the war effort found themselves drafted into the military. Even for the ILGWU male members who

161 Report of Education Department ILGWU June 1st 1942 – May 31 1944 pg 7. Joseph A. Labadie Collection.

109 were not drafted into the military because they worked in wartime industries like the manufacture of military clothing, overtime and alternating shifts cut down on education and recreation of all kinds, not just sports. In a pattern that would play out in other industries, even as

men’s athletics dwindled, women’s sports

began to grow as more women worked in

war industries. While softball, baseball,

and basketball leagues shrank to very

small numbers in comparison to past

years, bowling grew during the war years

in New York City, particularly fueled by

the expansion of women’s bowling Harlem Local 22 Basketball team. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use. teams.162

Still, the growth of ILGWU women’s sports was limited in the war years compared to the

UAW and other manufacturing unions, who saw a rapid shift in the gender makeup of its membership to becoming more than half women. As opposed to the Rosie the Riveter image of manufacturing unions, in the garment industry the working class women were already there. The

ILGWU’s membership was already majority female and would remain so, and while women certainly served in the military during the war, there was not a huge demographic shift in its membership.163 The fact that there was a large women’s sports program already in operation showed that women’s sports were nearly as popular as men’s sports, because there was a demand

162 Report of Education Department ILGWU June 1st 1942 – May 31 1944 pg 10. 163 Local 89ers “like sports”. Basketball depicted by men and women’s. Direct connections with Italian Socialist Party. “Golden Jubilee 1919-1944” HRC479 Local 89 pamphlet. Crivello, Antonio Papers. Immigration History Research Center.

110 for it by the membership. In a union that was majority women but with a male leadership, women’s teams demonstrated that the ILGWU responded to the recreational and participatory needs of its membership. The abundance of women’s teams showed that, though women who were not typically expected to play sports in larger society, in fact they did and would play sports when given the chance.

After the War

In the years after the war, the mainstream American labor movement largely emulated the

ILGWU: American unions became increasingly

diverse and widespread. They were led by former

Socialist Party leaders committed to expanding the

New Deal to transform the United States into a

social democracy By this time, most CIO unions

had large functioning recreational programs that

included sports. The ILGWU avoided much of the

turmoil in the CIO because it had no oppositional

left-wing Communists (and had not in over twenty

years). Dubinsky’s administration, with his small

clique of former Socialist Jewish men, more or less

ran the union like a dictatorship. With the postwar

strikes that swept the United States, the issue of

leisure returned to the forefront, as the 1947 “Enjoy Life With Your Union” ILGWU Education Department Pamphlet. Tamiment Library, New York pamphlet “The Union Way To The Good Life” University. Fair Use. explained:

111

Every hour cut from the work-week by organized garment workers has meant an hour more for the enjoyment of that happiness, the pursuit of which is guaranteed by our nation’s constitution. Leisure time is thus the other side of the picture of shop life. When rewards of work are greater, the enjoyment of leisure is enhanced. When hours spent at machines are decreased, opportunities for play, self-education, rest and participation in the social and political aspects of community life are multiplied. The end of the war has marked a revival of educational programs encompassing sports, classroom projects and the arts.164 The ILGWU sports teams, though, ran into the same problem that Labor Sports did in

other unions as rank and file worker action was squelched. Much of the original Jewish and

Italian base left the garment industry in the years after the war, and the ILGWU Labor Sports

teams, particularly in basketball, began to include more African-American players. While that in

itself was not an issue for most white members, the leadership of the ILGWU had a tight grip

over the union that increasingly did not reflect its actual membership in many ways. [The rank

and file membership differed from leadership both

generationally and racially by and large. Those

differences exasperated the long existing gendered

differences between membership and leadership.165 In

addition, the ILGWU failed to effectively meet the crisis

that it would face beginning in the 1960s: outsourcing.

The ILGWU had begun to combat sweatshop conditions

in New York City, and as a result the garment industry

corporations increasingly looked overseas to sweatshop

labor. Due to outsourcing, the ILGWU was largely ILGWU Basketball game, late 1940s. Used with Permission, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use.

164 “And The Pursuit of Happiness” pamphlet. Education Department ILGWU. 1947. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

165 5780 P N45. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives. Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

112 decimated by the 1980s. Though the old vestiges of ILGWU Labor Sports continued for some time, they fell by the wayside as the union was weakened by corporate pursuit of cheap labor.

Membership numbers began to fall, and leadership could not effectively combat work leaving the

United States. Labor Sports in the ILGWU slowly died off in the 1960s.

Conclusion: The Fate of ILGWU Labor Sports, Bridge To CIO Labor Sports

Like Worker Sport in

Europe, Labor Sports

symbolized the possibilities of

interwar organization from

below. Worker Sport emerged

from the Second World War a

shell of its former self, after

much of its leadership had

ILGWU Basketball team, circa 1930s. Used with Permission, Kheel Center, Cornell been killed in the war. The University. Fair Use. ILGWU recreational programs, spearheaded by athletics and theater, slowly faded as the union failed to meet the challenges of its industry. The seeds of a working class sports movement had been fueled by contacts with Europe and regular communication and exchanges with Worker Sport. While

Worker Sport federations had always hoped to build a presence in North America, and American leftists tried to carry those visions out, it was largely after Worker Sport was crushed by fascism in large parts of Europe that American Labor Sports begin to take off in the mid-1930s. In the

United States, efforts at building a mass and sustainable Labor Sports program was first successfully accomplished by the ILGWU. The ILGWU’s example of putting athletics at the

113 core of its recreational program, which proved to be as popular as its better-known labor theater, became a central part of the rapid growth of the CIO unions. Labor Sports, as nurtured by the

ILGWU, would take the ideas of Worker Sport and put them into practice through unions instead of coordination by weak political sects. In the CIO, ILGWU-inspired Labor Sports would combine with smaller communist and socialist athletic organizing experiences to create a much larger and widespread Labor Sports, far beyond these leftist circles and the ILGWU itself. The largest Labor Sports programs would reach their height in the dynamic United Autoworkers

(UAW) in the late 1930s-40s, and it is to this that we now turn.

ILGWU Local 89 Bronx Basketball team, circa 1940s. Used with Permission, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use.

114

Chapter 4: The Autoworkers Slide Into home: UAW Recreation

Department’s Athletic Programs 1935-50 and beyond

PLAY BALL WITH THE UAW-CIO. There is more than just recreation in union athletics. Employers use recreation as part of their company-union schemes. In some parts of country, bosses still reply to demands for wage raises and shorter hours by donating uniforms or laying out a diamond.

A true union like the UAW-CIO tries to give its members recreation in an atmosphere of solidarity and unionism. Our union has done that through baseball and bowling, motion pictures, and phonograph lessons, education, and women’s auxiliaries.

Unionism has as its chief aim the economic improvement of its members. Close by is the second aim – to get workers in the habit of working, singing and playing together in labor solidarity. The UAW-CIO performs both functions.166 -United Autoworker, May 20th, 1939

In the eyes of many, recreation is still considered a ‘frill’ and unimportant in the union program. But what is consistently overlooked is that a good program has immeasurable value in helping activate the organized and make members more conscious of the UAW. A good recreation program also has immeasurable merits in establishing good public and community relationships, which in turn helps make our job of community wide support in PAC, Co-ops, etc. much easier.167-Report of the UAW Recreation Department, November 1947 Introduction

In this chapter, I will explore how the UAW built into its organizing program one of the largest Labor Sports programs in the United States. I begin in the 1930s, and will demonstrate that recreational programs (which included sports) were used by poverty-stricken workers based around the auto industry to build a powerful union. I do this by starting with the biography of

Olga Madar, who would go on to become an influential labor feminist, and how she got her start

166 United Auto Worker. May 20th, 1939. V. 9. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan.

167 “Report of the Recreation Department. November, 1947 - October, 1948”. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2. 1946-1950. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

115 in the labor movement as an elite softball player on a company team as a fellow traveler of the

Socialist Party. She believed in the power of sports to build relationships and camaraderie, and would work to create a wider conception of recreation, being firmly rooted in the Labor Sports movement as both an athlete and organizer. I will demonstrate how sports helped build worker identification with the union, including integrated teams and women’s teams, before, during, and after World War II. I will chart the history, the goals, and struggles of the UAW’s Recreation

Department, and how its programs shifted between the Addes-Thomas-Leonard (ATL) administration of the so-called Center-Left liberal/Communist alliance, grounded in syndicalism, to the Socialist-Catholic alliance of Walter Reuther’s administration, centered around ideas of social democracy, specifically embracing the Fairness In Bowling campaign. Walter Reuther, a pragmatic socialist whose social democratic leanings far outlived his actual membership in the

Socialist Party, would begin shifting Labor Sports towards a more diluted general recreation. I then follow the story of John Gallo, a Communist boxer who ran the sprawling Local 600 Labor

Sports programs in the 1930s-40s. The Socialists and Communists both shared values of improving the lot of workers and building an anti-fascist, anti-racist working class counterculture, and continued their earlier Labor Sports work in the UAW, bringing Labor

Sports to a new height in the United States. I demonstrate throughout how Labor Sports battled with Company Sports as corporate welfare was in full retreat during these years.

While not all of its Locals developed sports programs, the most successful and largest all built large athletics programs as keystones of their recreational programs, with the short term goal of building loyalty and identification with the local UAW, and the long term goal of building a strong working class movement that could challenge the capitalist status quo. Indeed, although the UAW initially mimicked the ILGWU’s Labor Sports programs, it far surpassed

116 their garment worker comrades in scale. Labor Sports was the glue that held the UAW together, as the largest of CIO unions. It was here that Labor Sports would approach the levels that had been seen with Worker Sport in Europe. Many were keen to engage with accessible recreation in order to build loyalty and identification with the union.

I build upon the work of Michael Denning’s fellow traveler cultural analysis of the

Popular Front, who argued that fellow traveler, independent leftists, made up the bulk of the

Popular Front movement, and influenced the coalition as much as the inner Communist Party leadership. I take the same concept and apply it to the Socialist Party and its circles.168 I also build upon Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin's 2002 study of the participation of

Communists in the history of the CIO, which shows the Communists generally had a strong commitment to worker democracy, important concepts for both this chapter and the next two.169

Nelson Lichtenstein has also argued that Communist activists continued to be militants even during the no-strike pledge of WWII.170 This chapter expands on Jonathan Cutler’s 2004 work which looked at the late history of the movement for a shorter work week, the 30 hour for 40 hours of pay (30-40) demand amongst militant rank and file workers in the UAW at the height of its power in the 1940s-50s.171 He argues that while the Socialists centered around Walter Reuther there was a deeper question of philosophies between the Socialists and Communist militants:

168 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front- The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. (London: Verso Books, 1998).

169 Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

170 Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War At Home: The CIO In World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

171 Jonathan Cutler, Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, The UAW, And The Struggle For American Unionism. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

117 corporatism vs syndicalism. Reuther's social democratic leanings embraced corporatism, with its emphasis on labor-management harmony when possible and mediation and bargaining when necessary. Syndicalism of the rank and file militants (who slowly drifted from the CP as it became less relevant) sought worker control over not only their workplace (decision making, election of managers) but also over their lives through more leisure time without loss of pay. The

“30-40 demand”, or thirty hours of work for forty hours of wages, was enormously popular with auto workers and UAW membership, yet it was only used as a motto by Reuther to position himself to the left of the CP on his rise to power, only to abandon and red-bait its proponents endlessly. Much of the story is about Reuther's battles after he came to power with the 30-40 syndicalists during the 1950s. My intervention in this chapter is looking at the entire story of how that power was built, beyond just the shop floor and into the community, which included the playing fields and gyms of working class communities.

Olga Madar, Softball Ringer and Labor Feminist

118

Olga Madar (1915-1996) was the long-time director of the United Auto Workers (UAW)

recreational programs from the late 1940s-70s,

which had a particular focus on labor union sports.

She would go on to be the first woman on the

executive board of the UAW, and later served as a

member of the Conservation Commission of

Michigan in the 1960s through the 1980s, a founder

and first president of Coalition of Labor Union

Women (CLUW), and with a host of environmental

groups. She was active throughout her life in

workers’ rights, women's empowerment, and Olga Madar in Auto Worker, 1947. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne environmental causes, and when she passed away in State University. Used with permission. 1996, she was planning on supporting a Detroit newspaper strike.172 Throughout her career, she combined her athletic background with physical education science to further the labor movement. Madar emerged from the Labor Sports culture to advocate for working class people to have access to parks and other recreation.

Ironically, given her dedication to labor unions throughout her life, Madar got her start in the auto industry as a ringer for the Chrysler softball team in 1933. She played on a series of softball teams as a star catcher, and was so good that gamblers would make their choices based on whatever team she was on.173 After her parents and their ten children moved to Detroit when

172 “In Memory of Olga M. Madar” Detroit Free Journal, Sunday September 8th, 1996, pg. 5: Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 22. Reuther Library.

173 “He-Man UAW Has a Girl Sports Director” Jerry Hartford. The Wage-Earner. Friday, December 6th, 1946. Pg. 9: Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 17. Reuther Library.

119 the Great Depression bankrupted their butcher shop in Pittsburgh, Madar became a crack athlete with a reputation for terrorizing other teams in athletics. In her high school yearbook she noted to herself as a teenage girl that she had “an ability to get something for nothing. (usually trouble).”174 After starring in basketball and field hockey teams at Northeastern High School and graduating in 1933, she became a sought-after softball catcher in Detroit. After a season playing for the Kelly Cleaner’s team, Madar spent two years, 1934-35, playing for the Chrysler team.

She would later remark that she learned about the need for a union there: “There was no union in the plant then, and the fact that they would hire me when other workers were laid off, just because I could play softball – was incredible.”175 While there is no evidence that she received the job for anything but her athletic prowess, it should be noted that her entire family worked in the same industry in Detroit, as 9 brothers and 2 sisters were involved in the Detroit auto industry, all of whom became involved in the rising UAW. That fact most likely helped Madar navigate the Detroit auto industry, as she would go on to play on the Bower Roller Bearing team

(a plant owned by Chrysler) for the 1936-37 seasons, as well as the Rayl company team for the

1936-38 seasons.176 During this time, she also played on softball teams representing Detroit in

American Softball Association national tournaments. Both unionism and athletics seemed to be in her blood.

174 Northeastern High School May 1933 Yearbook The Review. “Class Will” page 5. Detroit MI. Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 21. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

175 “Biographical Sketch of President – Coalition of Labor Union Women” 1974. Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 2. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

176 “New Director of the Recreation Department” Ford Facts, newspaper of UAW Local 600. January 30th, 1947. United Automobile Worker, v. 52; Letter to John of Michigan Amateur Sports Hall of Fame. 1974 Inductee. Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 15. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

120

Throughout the 1930s, Madar attended college during the summer, slowly accumulating credit, until receiving her Bachelor’s Degree in Physical Education from Michigan Normal

College (now Eastern Michigan University) in 1938. She was the first of her family to earn a college degree, juggling softball, factory work, and her education. Around 1938 or 1939, Madar became active in organizing and playing on union teams, catching for the UAW Local 400 Ford

team, as well as playing for the Roman

Cleanser team in the 1939 and 1940

seasons. She also taught recreational

therapy at Ypsilanti State Hospital and in

Flat Rock before arriving to work at Ford’s

Willow Run plant in West Detroit in Madar’s softball exploits. Olga Madar Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. 1941.178 There, she became involved in Used with permission. UAW Local 50, and came in contact with the nearby West-side Local 174 with its strong Socialist Party leadership headed by Walter

Reuther. She quickly was hired to become Local 50’s Recreational Director, where she also played catcher for the union team (the Bomberettes) during the 1941-43 seasons. Additionally, she strove to build a thriving sports program for men and women workers, alongside a host of other recreational activities like theater and music. Madar noted later of her experience organizing Labor Sports in the 1930s that few people had money to go to baseball games, so they made their own teams and leagues. Madar herself turned to the Local 400 and later Local 50 after

178 Ibid.

121

Ford refused to sponsor a softball team for its workers. She remembered later of her experience with both company sports and Labor Sports:

Before the UAW was organized, managements used to try to kid the workers they were doing something for them by having semi-pros represent the plant in sports. This got good advertising for the plant but didn’t mean much for the workers. When the union came into being, it soon found out the pros weren’t very popular and cost a lot of money besides. So now we are out for recreation in which the majority of our people can join and have fun.179 Madar was an elite athlete and a fiery organizer to be sure, but what enabled her climb into the leadership of the mostly male-led UAW was her degree and work in physical education.

American male physical educators a generation earlier, after the First World War, had worked with nurses to rehabilitate wounded and disabled veterans, particularly in drills and sports.180

That helped to normalize women as sports organizers and athletes in mainstream life, which set the groundwork for the explosion in women’s athletics, especially softball and basketball, in the

1930s. Madar used that scientific approach to bridge the gap for working class women, whom faced the obstacles in the sports sphere of women’s perceived physical inferiority and working class people’s lack of access to collegiate or exclusive clubs. Madar herself was a perfect example of why working class women not only could and should participate in Labor Sports, but also how they could rise into leadership positions as well. Madar understood that potential and advocated for women’s teams.

179 “He-Man UAW Has a Girl Sports Director” Jerry Hartford. The Wage-Earner. Friday, December 6th, 1946. Pg. 9: Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 17. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

180 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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Most women physical educators argued that working class women and men should have a healthy body and a healthy mind. They also took a middle view between two theories prevalent at the time: 1) that men and women were total polar opposites and 2) that men and women were more similar than different in their physical needs and demands.181 Madar, like many others, generally took a middle view, though she moved more towards the second view over the course of her life. Ultimately, Madar used her knowledge of the science of the human body gained by her athletic career and her physical education degree to build a more cohesive and organized union. She also used that science background to argue for physical recreation that would be

accessible to working class people, especially women.

Local 50’s leadership was largely composed of Socialist

Party and former Socialist Party members by the time of Reuther’s

rise to the top of the UAW. While there is no evidence that Madar

was herself ever a member of the Socialist Party, she was at least a

“fellow traveler” and friendly to their ideas of social democracy.182

Madar remained close to Walter Reuther during his rise to

becoming the long-time President of the UAW in the 1940s.

Reuther tended to surround himself with Socialist Party and former Madar when she assumed leadership of Local 50’s recreation programs. Auto Worker. Walter P. Reuther Socialist Party people, who tended to have ideas of mass Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used participation in everyday life by working class people. These with permission.

181 Martha Verbrugge, Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America. (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2012).

182 For more on how Fellow Travelers were at the core of the Popular Front coalition, see Denning, The Cultural Front The Laboring Of American Culture In The Twentieth Century. While his work focuses on Fellow Travelers of the Communist Party, I apply the same concept to Madar as a fellow traveler of the Socialist Party, of whom would its ex-members would long dominate the leadership of the UAW.

123

Socialist Party fellow travelers evolved over the course of the 20th century to embrace European style corporatist social democracy, or the idea that unions should have a seat at the table when making policy about workplace life.183 Madar was always one of Reuther’s loyalists. When he was elected as the President of the UAW in 1946, Madar was elevated to Director of the

International Union’s Recreation Department the following year, where she used her experience to guide the burgeoning sports programs through the union, which by the late 1940s was largest union in the United States.184 While it has been noted that women used Home Economics degrees to gain entry into masculine dominated professions, Madar used her experience as an athlete and her background as a physical educator to gain an influential position in the UAW’s leadership.

Madar is frequently remembered for her work as a pioneering labor feminist in the 1950s through the 1970s, especially for her commitment to elevating working class women working in labor through her involvement with the Coalition of Labor Union Women. She is also remembered for her work building access to recreation and parks for all working class people in

Michigan, her involvement in Civil Rights, and her early environmental activism.185 She remarked quite often that working people needed to have access to recreation. Unions had fought for the 40-hour work week without losing pay, so recreation needed to be provided by labor or else Corporate America would grab the opportunity to set the recreational agenda. She also remarked that recreation was a much larger project than just trivial games of amusement:

183 Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Pgs. 123-128, 155, 192.

184 John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During The Reuther Years, 1935-1970. (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2005). Pg. 259.

185 “Salute to Women Who Work In Detroit: 1962 Top Ten Women” Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 1, Folder 2. Reuther Library.

124

Recreation, with but rare exceptions, is not an isolated endeavor. Quite the contrary, it usually involves many persons in shared interests and feelings. Its characteristics of togetherness, fun, and relaxation are common to the goals sought by other agencies and groups. Community-union relations, born of necessity, have become real cooperation ventures. UAW members play basketball in the neighborhood gymnasium, hold Christmas parties in the school auditorium, play golf on the municipal courses.186

Of the UAW’s 1,350,000 members, 600,000 were involved in Labor Sports programs, which involved half of its Locals by 1950. Those numbers by themselves would make the UAW

Labor Sports programs one of the largest single athletic organizations of its day.187 Labor Sports as a whole were rising to change how athletics were conceived, even beyond the UAW and CIO, as they shaped recreational facilities and community relations.

At one point, the demand of the 30 hour work week was a key part of the UAW’s program, coupled with more recreation for workers.188 Reuther’s UAW, however, slowly moved away from the demand of fewer work hours and more recreation to focus on winning middle- class wages and benefits for its members. While Labor Sports slowly declined after the 1930s and 40s, Madar shifted her work in the Recreation Department to building family-oriented access for members to parks and camping, which makes sense since many of the UAW’s members now had children. Softball, baseball, and basketball labor leagues were largely gone by 1960, though bowling and golf lasted much longer (indeed, the UAW still owns a public golf course at its recreational complex at Black Lake, Michigan.) Madar would go on to be involved in advocacy for the elderly after she retired from the UAW in 1974 and CLUW in 1976.

186 “UAW Recreation” pamphlet, circa 1950. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications S-Z.

187 “Recreation – The Artful Use of Leisure Time” fold-out. circa 1950. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Recreation Roundup 1947-1950.

188 For a full discussion on the corporatist vs syndicalist debates and battles within the UAW in the 1940s-50s, see Jonathan Cutler, Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, The UAW, And The Struggle For American Unionism. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

125

Olga Madar’s involvement in sports set her up for a long career fighting for a better world. Corporate America regularly used company unions and corporate welfare to buy worker loyalty, but in cases like hers it gave a social space for recognizing why a union was necessary.

Madar’s experience, along with many others, also spoke to the real demand for access to cheap or free recreation, especially sports. From her thirties until her death at age 80 in 1996 (while preparing to be arrested in a wheelchair in support of striking newspaper workers), she never

forgot the power of both sport and unions to

transform the lives of working people. That career

had its beginning in both being a product of Labor

Sports and a creative force behind it. As she was a

product of the Labor Sports movement, I now turn

to the background of the UAW Labor Sports

programs in order to understand how they became

so successful. Indeed, the UAW Labor Sports

proved to be the catalyst for the massive growth of

the CIO centered Labor Sports movement. Madar in 1962. Olga Madar Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

Labor Sports Begins To Explode (1935-40)

One of the things workers wanted during the Great Depression was cheap or free access to recreation, especially sports. In the heyday of the Popular Front’s antifascist, antiracist, working-class counterculture, Labor Sports organized by unions blossomed, particularly in the

International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union as it leant its operations and experience to the early formation of the CIO-affiliated unions. The United Autoworkers developed quickly from a

126 collection of tiny Communist unions and craft unions in the mid-1930s to the largest and most powerful union in the United States. The UAW was largely built from a mixture of Communist

Party labor activists who had been active organizing in the auto industry during the “Third

Period” of building red unions through the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), Socialist Party activists who disdained the Communists but were active anti-capitalists, and independent “fellow traveler” working class leftists who had been shaped by the desperate conditions and inequalities of the Great Depression. As such, the UAW, more than any union, became a hotbed of competing leftist sects and approaches, but which all pushed a similar vision of working class power. Locals of the union would elect slates of Communists, Socialists, or conservative

Catholic laborists based on who the workers thought could best transform their lives.189 Thus, even though the UAW in the 1930s and 40s is remembered for its sectarian fights, its internal ideological differences in fact pushed each group to fight harder and better in a (mostly) democratic manner. By the 1930s, the UAW became a powerful working class movement, and was the most powerful of the three big CIO unions, which included the largely Communist-led

United Electrical and Radio Workers of America (UE) and the Steel Workers Organizing

Committee (SWOC)—later to become the United Steelworkers of America (USW). From their foundations in 1935 until the Red Scare in 1947, these three unions were a key part of the

Popular Front, representing the left-wing of the New Deal coalition which reached millions of ordinary workers.

189 As I have noted elsewhere, right vs left, or conservative vs radical is to be understood within the labor union sense. They would all be considered liberal to leftist in the general American political spectrum. So, for instance, while Catholic trade unionists would be considered the conservative wing of the UAW, they still believed in building a strong union movement with social justice undertones, rooted in left-wing Catholic traditions.

127

By the mid-1930s, left-wing union activists engaged in sports organizing, through both the Communist-dominated Labor Sports Union and Socialist dominated unions like the

ILGWU’s sports programs, as well as having experienced company-sponsored Corporate

Welfare teams. The UAW brought both of these leftist Labor Sports movements into its ranks.

Sports like bowling, baseball, softball, basketball, boxing, and a few instances of soccer, hockey, and others became enormously popular, quickly dwarfing company teams for loyalty. For those who could not afford to belong to a private sports club or attend a professional sports event, these entertainment options met essential needs of how to fill down time, outside of bars, for working class people. Workers could play or watch their team play, all the while building relationships

and shared experiences. Union activists

essentially flipped the script on old

industrial sports, in which they used

sports organizing to build identification

with the UAW rather than companies.

By the late 1930s, almost all local

versions of the union newspaper, the

Auto Worker, contained extensive sports

sections which covered the Labor Sports

UAW Softball League champions, 1937. Walter P. Reuther Library, provided by each local. Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

128

From 1937 through the 1950s, the UAW fielded the most extensive Labor Sports programs in the United States. The largest, not surprisingly, centered on their two largest locals in the Detroit area, which also served as the centers of power struggle between the “left” and

“right” of the UAW. Local 600, representing 100,000 workers at the Ford company’s Dearborn

Rouge complex (the largest single

unionized facility in the world at its

height), was led by Communist Party

unionists. Local 50, representing

workers at the General Motors

facilities on the West Side of Detroit,

came to be dominated by Walter

Reuther’s Socialist Party circles.

Local 600 Softball team, 1939. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. Battles for control of the International, or the central union apparatus, which was a bulwark of the UAW’s authority, were fought between these right and left factions.

The Socialist-led and the Communist-led factions would develop different approaches to how to win better lives for its members. Yet during the two factions’ long Popular Front alliance from 1936 to 1947, the work of the Communists and Socialist labor unionists was remarkably similar: commitment to anti-fascism, anti-racism, and worker power.190 Their sports programs reflected those organizing values. For example, accounts in the sports sections of Auto Workers

190 Even with the nearly two year absence of the Communists in 1939-41, the Popular Front continued during this period. The alliance between the Reuther Socialists and the Communists in the UAW showed major fissures in the late stages of the war. It begun to collapse as Reuther openly sought the leadership of the UAW after the war, fresh off the major strike leadership against GM in the immediate post-war strike wave.

129 made a concerted effort to highlight racial inclusion and women’s teams, especially Local 600 and Local 50. The union always contained a strongly anti-fascist message in all of its literature, and further exposed large numbers of workers to those messages in its social spaces. Finally, the sports programs emphasized those rank and filers who played the games, highlighting spectacular play, team photos, and involvement by regular people instead of elite athletes. These were literally amateur working class people who played because they had little other access to

“fun,” except each other. Radicals brought their organizing experience and vision to deliver that access to fun and comradery on the playing fields and gyms, with an eye toward building a more participatory culture.

The Story of the Recreation Department

Almost from its foundation, recreation for workers was a part of the mission of the UAW.

With its creation from a mishmash of former Communist TUUL unions, Socialist Party activists centered around ethnic fraternal orders, and money poured in through the CIO project (funded largely by the United Mineworkers, the ILGWU, and the ACWA in its early days), the union would bring many parallel yet competing organizations together for command of what shortly would become the CIO’s largest union. The Recreation Department was originally established in

August 1935, a mere three months after the foundation of the UAW, as a sub-department of the

Education Department to produce labor dramatics, chorus and orchestra, dances, and sports. The

Department operated on the model of the recreational programs of the Socialist-led ILGWU

Education Department, having gained access to its organizing programs through the larger CIO.

In fact, it even used the ILGWU’s slogan “Knowledge is Power” in its publications. After the

UAW exploded in membership because of being in the national spotlight during the Flint Sit- down Strike against General Motors in December 1936 to February 1937, UAW leadership

130 decided they needed to adopt the ILGWU recreational model to assimilate new members by developing a permanent and dedicated recreation operation, which began with the most popular form of recreation: athletics and sports. In April 1937, Melvin West was hired as the first director of recreation within the Education Department. From its beginning, UAW Labor Sports were supposed to provide an alternative to fading company sports. Company sports, as part of corporate welfare programs, had receded drastically during the Great Depression and had generally focused on producing a few all-star teams on which most workers could not participate. Concentrating on their new-found strength in the Detroit metropolitan area, UAW

Labor Sports became official with the launch of a city-wide athletic program on May 5th, 1937 with 24 hardball teams, 18 men’s softball, 6 girls teams, classes in calisthenics, a city-wide recreation committee, a bowling tournament, and even a short-lived semi-pro football team.191

Initially set up with a budget of 2.5 cents of every union dues dollar, the debate between traditional trade unionists and advocates of social unionism centered on whether to even include recreation in the union program. But it became clear from the beginning that organizing a purely education program (lectures and literature) without also offering recreation would make it difficult to attract workers. Mirroring the debates in the ILGWU and even leftist parties, it was often argued from its critics that recreation, sports at the forefront, should not be union business at all, as late at 1948. Yet its proponents pushed back: “In the eyes of many, recreation is still considered a ‘frill’ and unimportant in the union program. But what is consistently overlooked is that a good program has immeasurable value in helping activate the organized and make members more conscious of the UAW. A good recreation program also has immeasurable merits in establishing good public and community relationships, which in turn helps make our job of

191 During this era, women’s sports were almost entirely referred to as “girls teams.”

131 community wide support in PAC, Co-ops, etc. much easier.”192 Perhaps the lessons of the

ILGWU or the Labor Sports Union were present in the minds of the Education Department, for the organizers quickly compromised that 2 cents would go to education and half a cent to recreation, which was mostly spent on offering training, support, and potential programming for locals. The benefits of mass union-operated recreation, with Labor Sports at the forefront, seemed obvious to its advocates, and indeed, there was only token opposition within the union to recreational spending for members.

While in the ILGWU theater was as popular as sports, in the UAW, Labor Sports in the early years of the recreation department far outstripped any other form of entertainment and recreation. By 1941, sports were so successful in the UAW that the Recreation Department had become independent of the Education Department. Labor Sports, the most popular of recreation, quickly moved wherever the UAW was built, as the union quickly expanded to battle GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The program was designed to copycat the ILGWU’s recreational Labor Sports, embracing social unionism of fighting for betterment of workers, beyond the traditional trade unionism of pure economic benefit to its members, which was part of that glue that helped the

UAW grow. Indeed, athletics, which in the early years included softball, baseball, bowling, and some basketball, were supposed to not only challenge company teams for worker loyalty, but to operate in a non-elitist manner. In this period, union sports replaced company teams, which had receded in the Depression. But in places where management ran robust company teams, union teams had a hard time competing, with their main advantage in their ability to provide more accessible sports to a wider variety of workers than the winning-obsessed company teams. The larger locals would easily overcome those obstacles, however.

192 “Report of the Recreation Department. November, 1947 - October, 1948”. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2. 1946-1950.

132

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, larger locals like the Communist-led Local 600 in

Dearborn or the Socialist-led Local 174 in West Side Detroit, fielded several levels of athletics.

First, they operated a few leagues for all shifts, which operated anywhere from 12-24 teams per league, of which the teams generally representing a department or shop within a company of the

Local. Second, they fielded teams in local amateur leagues. This was especially common in smaller locals that didn’t have enough workers to support a league, though larger locals often also placed teams in local amateur leagues. Third, they put together all-star teams from across the locals that would play at picnics, dances, or wider union events such as tournaments, and in union leagues. For instance, in 1938 the UAW baseball league in Detroit featured team representatives from 38 different locals.193

Baseball and softball were king of summer.194 Locals

with sizeable Socialist or Communist leadership tended to

operate integrated baseball and softball teams, like Local 174

or Local 600 in the Detroit area, while locals without a

sizeable militant leadership tended to operate segregated

teams, which were more common in rural areas. Until the

1940s the most popular wintertime sport was bowling, which

John Gallo presenting a trophy to a Local was entirely segregated because of Jim Crow rules in bowling 600 wrestling tournament champion, 1941. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives facilities and the American Bowling Congress. Before World of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. War II, women’s athletics were almost entirely composed of

193 United Auto Worker. February 26th, 1938. V. 7. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

194 Male softball players choosing the sport if they worked in jobs that required use of hands since baseball often resulted in jammed or broken fingers, while women almost exclusively played softball.

133 women’s auxiliary members supporting their employee husbands, boyfriends, and family members, and operated mainly in larger locals. It should be noted that up to this point, anti- discrimination practices in UAW sports leagues had mixed results. Most leaders, particularly the

Socialist, Communist, and even Catholic trade unionists were anti-racist, but the rank and file workers were mixed in their participation in anti-racist campaigns. Usually, union halls that had athletic facilities were better at following through on anti-racist practices than Locals that were using private facilities where integration was less common. Indeed, segregation patterns had been replicated in private recreational facilities as cities like Detroit grew in the early 20th century.

In 1938, an alliance of liberals and Communists came to power in the UAW’s central administration and would run the union until 1946, in a “center-left” alliance. While still highly factionalized, this leadership generally balanced power between the locals and central leadership.

During the leadership of what was termed the Addes-Thomas-Leonard administration, locals could develop Labor Sports as they saw fit, and Communist and Socialist activists and fellow travelers routinely fought for a larger sense of what the union was. After all, militants argued that when unions won reduced hours with more pay, the union should provide recreation rather than the company. The reason was that union sports would help build a stronger cohesion between workers of all backgrounds. As the ex-boxer, Communist Party member, and Recreation Director

John Gallo put it, when he was organizing teams originally at the extensive Ford River Rouge complex, the players built strong bonds by the simple act of defiance of wearing the union uniforms in the face of Ford opposition:

Many good ball players would not take the chance of playing for Local 600 for fear of losing their jobs [in 1938]… I was proud to manage a team composed of Italian, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Irish, Finnish, Roumanian, Croatian, Syrian, and Hungarian descendants and it made me so happy to see so much unity among the ball players, because only

134 through UNITY is there strength… I was glad to see Negro and white brothers playing on the same team and against other teams in the plant, especially.195 Furthermore, the Recreation Department would provide workers with access to cheap fitness culture as the union grew its core of athletic instructors. Indeed, access to joining teams was easy, since it was either free or very inexpensive to participate. Finally, building sports programs for workers across all communities also helped build support for the union in those communities, as they sought access to local facilities. The union became more present in the usage and advocacy for those facilities, like gyms, playing fields, and bowling alleys. More to the point, pooling money together to provide workers their own recreation was cheaper than buying recreation from commercial facilities—a fact that was important to working class people.196 In effect, militants argued that building sports programs would not only bring workers within the union together through access to inexpensive (or free) recreational sports, but that it would also build community support for the UAW by fighting for better access for all workers.

Gallo continued with an example of how Labor Sports of Local 600 helped end discrimination in the Dearborn basketball courts:

The only gyms I could get was in Dearborn and they did not allow Negroes to play in Dearborn courts. I put pressure on certain individuals in Dearborn responsible for this discrimination and told them that Ford Local 600 would expose them. I told our Negro brothers to practice and play in the Dearborn gym. There was real unity on the basketball court. It was a big victory because for the first time our Negro brothers played in Dearborn and discrimination was broken for the first time in basketball.197

195 United Auto Worker. October 15th, 1943. V. 26.

196 “Recreation Handbook” pamphlet, circa 1944. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications I-R. 197 United Auto Worker. May 15th, 1942. V. 23.

135

The Recreation Department, which had been set up to aid and coordinate recreational programs of locals, had several objectives. The first was to provide anti-discriminatory recreation, meaning that whenever possible teams were to be integrated. The second was to unite the union through a common understanding thought to be inherent in leisure time activities, meaning that they would build comradery on the playing fields and in the stands. The third was to provide an alternative to management-sponsored sports and other recreation. The fourth was to build relationships with the community by using facilities in cooperation with the organizations

that ran them. The fifth was to provide

benefits to workers and their families

through professional instructors and other

physical educators. The sixth was to

provide cheap access to recreation. Finally,

the seventh objective was to work toward

providing cooperative and participatory

union-led recreation in all industries.198 In

order to carry out these goals, Recreation

Department staff helped with equipment

and training clinics, but the actual

organizing tended to rest with regional

Local 600 Basketball. 1943. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

198 Ruth March, “Recreation In A Labor Setting.” 1949. Masters Thesis. Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, Box 4, Folder 39.

136

steering committees, meaning ordinary worker-activists, particularly in cities.199

Quickly, it became apparent that the popularity of Labor Sports in the UAW meant that

local editions of the union paper, the Auto Worker, should contain sports sections in locals that

ran active sports programs. Around half of the papers featured a dedicated sports section, from

Ford Facts Sports of Local 600 or West Side Sports of Local 174 to Briggs to Dodge Local 3 and

beyond, to capture the excitement and encourage support of union teams. Since average workers

had little to no money to spend on watching professional sports (which had to be done in person

at the time), watching their coworkers in the factories and following their teams’ exploits in the

union newspaper was the next best thing. The demand for Labor Sports only grew in the first

fifteen years of the UAW’s existence, necessitating dedicated sports sections in many Locals’

union newspapers, including large print-run newspapers (10,000+ in the case of Local 600).200

Because of a strong history and tradition of anti-racist activism in the Communist Party,

and a realization that black and white workers divided against each other would lead to defeat as

had occurred in past labor upheavals,

local Communist activists like John

Gallo of Local 600 committed the

union to building explicitly integrated

teams for all workers, not just the

white ones. In early 1938, Gallo

organized the very first integrated

1941 Local 600 Men’s Softball team. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

199 “Annual Report”. November 1945. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2. 1946-1950.

200 Ford Facts edition of United Auto Worker. July 1st, 1941. V. 23.

137

UAW ball team, and sought to include all workers in sports regardless of color or creed, even if some other white workers were suspicious of integration.201 At a time when being a Communist in a union meant one was a labor militant, plain and simple, that commitment to anti-racist work was a strong part of the organizing program.202 Gallo became enormously popular in Local 600 because of his commitment to building an enormous and inclusive athletic program, which became the envy of the UAW.203 Black workers had previously been somewhat hostile to union organizing because of the long history of racism in labor unions, and the Ford corporation, unlike other companies, hired large numbers of African-Americans to capitalize on that distrust by having a large reserve of potential replacement workers and to sow division amongst the workforce.204 However, the strong commitment to including Black workers in recreational programs along with fighting discrimination in the Rouge complex led Black workers to become one of the strongest bases of support for Communists in Local 600.205

201 “Communism in Detroit Area Part 2- Hearings Before The Committee On Un-American Activities House of Representatives Eighty-Second Congress Second Session.” March 10-12 & April 29-30, 1952. Archive.org https://archive.org/stream/communismindetro02unit/communismindetro02unit_djvu.txt Accessed January 15th, 2019.

202 During the Popular Front, where the ideological rhetoric was much milder than the Third Period, many militants joined the Communist Party or an affiliated organization simply because it seemed to be the best game in town. Being a hardened Stalinist was not a requirement to become a member, and many joined because of the credentials of the Party as one willing to fight for a better world. When the CP moved away from the Popular Front rhetoric during the Nazi-Soviet pact, it lost members, and again as its actions and rhetoric sharpened in the early years of the Cold War. But during the Popular Front, being a labor militant was enough to become a Communist. Similarly, the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, organized by the Communists to fight in the Spanish Civil War, were not tested for ideological purity. All one needed to want to do was fight. Interestingly, this looseness of party purity came at the time of increasing paranoia in Moscow, with the Great Purge in full swing, which caused many Americans who had immigrated to the Soviet Union during the Third Period to disappear into gulags, with very few survivors.

203 Interview with Gary Dymski, grandnephew of John Gallo. Conducted January 25th, 2019.

204 See August Meier & Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York City: Oxford University Press USA, 1981.)

205 Indeed, years later in the 1960s, after Gallo was reinstated into the union after a 12 year suspension related to the Red Scare expulsions of Communists, he immediately was re-elected into union office of 600.

138

In the meantime, Local 600 built the most dynamic sports programs in the UAW, which by the early 1940s was massive and inclusive, with hundreds of teams and activities spawning entire leagues to build real working class culture on the ground. John Gallo said in 1942:

Recreation has played a big part in the organization of the Ford workers. The Ford Motor Company did not want its workers to participate in Recreation for the simple reason, that it did not want workers to get acquainted with each other. We had close to 200 Softball Teams last year. For the first time in years these ball players began to smile and enjoy working. They found out about the fellow next to him in the past by the Company and no more. It made these thousands of boys appreciate the union for the first time and it made these boys fight harder for a better union. Recreation builds up the body and the mind. 206

He went on to say how the teams were integrated and how integration broke down racial divides, how Jim Crowism in bowling needed to be smashed. By 1941, the Local 600 all-star softball team featured 5 black players out of 18, more than a quarter of the team, an important symbolic move in both the segregated River Rouge plant and in the racially divided Detroit area.207

206 United Auto Worker. May 15th, 1942. V. 23.

207 Ford Facts edition of United Auto Worker. July 1st, 1941. V. 23.

139

In Detroit tournaments, Local 600 teams often faced off against their future rivals for control of the union. This was particularly the case with Local 174, which was led by Walter P.

Reuther and his Socialist Party fellow travelers. Though Local 600 often triumphed in these

contests, Local 174 boasted a near

equally impressive sports program, with

some integrated teams. Socialist-

dominated locals tended to employ

almost the same rhetoric in their

newspapers, except when it came to the

Soviet Union, toward which it was

geneally hostile. Otherwise, their papers

argued for the same commitment to

building a larger working class counter-

Local 174 women’s softball team, 1942. Walter P. Reuther Library, culture, arguing that sports were an easy Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. way to bring in workers to play and work together. 208

Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis UAW locals all had multiple sports in many leagues, which included racially integrated teams and women’s teams by the end of the 1930s.

The rapid growth led international representative Lawrence Winn to predict, after Local 25 dominated the CIO baseball league in 1939, “The success of the CIO ball league in St. Louis and the slow death of the old Municipal league indicates that in a few years union baseball will be the

208 United Auto Worker. September 20th, 1939. V. 9. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan.

140 strongest setup and the largest drawing card in amateur baseball [for fans].”209 Sometimes teams faced off against local Socialist-oriented ethnic halls, such as when the Plymouth local women’s team played the Slovak Hall in Detroit.210 The teams often carried names to signify their labor militancy, such as the 1937 Girls Softball championship team, Timken Axle in Local 174, who were nicknamed “the Wildcats”, in reference to wildcat striking.211.212 Men’s baseball teams

Local Dodge 3 won the championship of Detroit UAW league in 1938,213 followed the next year by Chevy Gear & Axle Local 235.214 Elsewhere in the Midwest, Local 93 in Kansas City hosted large boxing and wrestling tournaments in early 1939. Locals as isolated as Local 371 in New

Castle, Indiana competed in the county league by 1939.215 As the Great Depression neared its close and as the Second World War drew near, the UAW was extending its power as it gained new loyalties in communities and factories through strong organizing, a key part of which included recreational sports.

The War Years, 1941-45: Winning the Game At Home

During World War Two, as the UAW boomed through federally enforced labor peace –

Labor Sports became a permanent fixture on the home-front.216 The union stressed that Labor

209 United Auto Worker. August 2nd, 1939. V. 9.

210 United Auto Worker. January 29th, 1939. V. 9.

211 United Auto Worker. May 21st, 1938. V. 7.

212 United Auto Worker. January 7th, 1939. V. 9.

213 United Auto Worker. October 15th, 1938. V. 7.

214 United Auto Worker. October 25th, 1939. V. 9.

215 United Auto Worker. July 29th, 1939. V. 9.

216 During World War II, the federal government mandated labor peace by forcing management to cooperate with labor in labor-management committees. Contracts were forced on management and the UAW was given automatic representation rights to new military production plants and old auto plants converted into war production.

141

Sports were important to both keep up morale and keep both men and women in shape for potential military service and to keep up long hours in war production industries. Socialists and

Communists, nominally allied during these years, played out their simmering rivalries on UAW playing fields. In 1941, as the nation mobilized for the coming war and supplied many of the

Allied nations already fighting the Axis, production at home would prove to be key. Factories that had produced civilian automobiles turned to producing planes, jeeps, and tanks, as well as armaments. That industrial edge helped beat back the tide of fascism, arming not only the United

States, but also Britain and the Soviet Union (which would do most of the fighting against the

Nazis.) Back at home in the United States, the total war effort meant that millions of men who had worked in the factories entered the military. This, in turn, meant that women replaced many men who left for war. The previously male-dominated auto factories became nearly equal in the numbers of men and women working in factories, as more and more plants opened, such as the

Willow Run bomber plant run by Ford. While in other parts of the country, like New York City

[see Chapter Six], Labor Sports withered, in the Midwestern UAW strongholds Labor Sports boomed to new heights as workers sought relief from long hours.217 The UAW’s leftist factions largely supported the no-strike pledge because they wanted to defeat fascism, though the Reuther

Socialists waivered in their support of that pledge in the last year of the war because of the artificial suppression of wages and benefits by management. Reuther would use that late opposition to the no-strike pledge as a talking point during his rise to the UAW presidency.

In the meantime, wartime pressures on workers increased greatly on the homefront. The desire for labor recreation and shop-floor militancy to support workers under immense pressure

217 Correspondence. June 1st, 1941. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

142 to mass produce jeeps, tanks, fighters, bombers, etc. was even more pronounced. Recreation relieved that pressure, and the Socialists and Communists, the labor militants, were the best at organizing recreation. This period saw more integrated teams and, for the first time in

abundance, women worker teams in softball,

basketball, and bowling as opposed to the old

women’s auxiliaries teams. Labor recreation,

militants argued, would be key to keeping

morale up during the war against fascism.218

By the early 1940s, the Recreation

Department’s budget saw half of its money

earmarked for regional directors for

equipment, trophies, and transport funds. The

other half went to the International, in order

to increase the ranks of staff who could travel

to help organize and train players where

requested.219 Still, much of the actual power

Local 174 sports, 1942. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of of the recreational programs rested with the Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. locals. As the International stated, “While recreation is a universal activity, it assumes different patterns in every city and no two communities run their programs in a like manner.”220

218 “A Handbook for UAW-CIO Recreation Leaders.” 1944. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

219 Annual Report. February 18th, 1946. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2. 8

220 Annual Report. May 1945. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

143

Both men’s and women’s teams received attention from union members and supporters in this period, with crowds ranging from dozens to hundreds and even into the thousands for some games.221 By the summer of 1941 in Detroit alone, there existed 30 baseball teams in the all-star

UAW league, 24 softball teams, 26 bowling teams, and regular boxing matches.222 In the mighty

Local 600, John Gallo noted that over 200 softball teams operated by 1941, pointing to a massive union-led worker counter-culture within the walls of the River Rouge complex. Not only were these teams operating in large numbers and at high skill levels, but they were operating Labor

Sports that were inclusive during the war years to women and people of color. The 1940s represented the peak of Labor Sports, with the largest programs in the UAW, especially in locals led by Socialist and Communist circles, which is not surprising given the two groups’ long experimentation with left-wing sports and contacts with the fallen Worker Sport movement.

While this focus on sports would come under criticism by some of the Socialist militants in the

1950s, at this point participatory sports were the most popular recreation.

The desirability of providing war production workers with entertainment was embraced by the UAW in its core areas. Local 174 produced a baseball team that was good enough to represent Detroit in a state-wide tournament during the summer of 1942.223 That year alone, 28 softball teams operated out of the West Side 174.224 In winter 1942-43, the West Side local also began operating a basketball league of its own,225 and participated in the larger city-wide

221 One example is a game of the Baby Ruths softball team of Local 203 a West Side Detroit local in United Auto Worker.

222 United Auto Worker. August 15th, 1941. V. 10.

223 United Auto Worker. June 1st, 1942. V. 23.

224 United Auto Worker. February 15th, 1943. V. 25.

225 United Auto Worker. November 15th, 1942. V. 24.

144 bowling tournament (and segregated) bowling tournament. West side 174 teams appeared all over amateur baseball federations in Detroit,226 continuing their reach into local communities.

During the war, Locals 174 and 600’s rivalry boiled, which usually saw 600 emerge victorious, whether in softball, basketball, or bowling.227 When Local 174 and 600 played each other, it was a battle. A symbolic clash, one built from the comradery of rank-and-filers as their leaders poised to battle it out for control of the UAW after the war.228 These battles mirrored the rivalry within the union between the Socialist Party core and its allies and the Communist Party and its allies, using the sports arena to metaphorically fight it out.

Local 600 rapidly expanded as Ford built aircraft for the war effort. It became the largest single unionized workplace in the world, with 100,000 members at its height during the war. The

Communist-led Local similarly rapidly expanded

its sporting programs. John Gallo, who had been

continuously re-elected and remained central to

planning the union’s athletic programs even as an

outspoken Communist, presented an award to

world-renowned champion boxer Joe Louis as a

symbol of how sports could be mobilized to John Gallo presenting a plaque to Joe Louis, 1943. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne 229 State University. Used with permission. defeat the Nazis. Indeed, the endorsement of a

226 United Auto Worker. March 1st, 1942. V. 23.

227 United Auto Worker. November 1st, 1943. V. 26.

228 United Auto Worker. September 1, 1942. V. 24.

229 United Auto Worker. February 1st, 1943. V. 25. Accessed June 28th, 2018; “Communism in Detroit Area Part 2- Hearings Before The Committee On Un-American Activities House of Representatives Eighty-Second Congress Second Session.” March 10-12 & April 29-30, 1952. Archive.org https://archive.org/stream/communismindetro02unit/communismindetro02unit_djvu.txt (Accessed January 15th, 2019.); United Auto Worker. June 15th, 1943. V. 25.

145 black athlete in Louis was not limited to ceremonial awards, but in action as well in Local 600.

By 1942, all-black union teams became a regular part of the Local’s sports section and continued to feature integrated teams.230 John Gallo became a celebrated figure in the Rouge as an open

Communist who fought hard to include black workers in recreational activities, as well as an enemy of the Ford corporation after he successfully fought their attempts to suspend him for his union activities.231 By the middle of the war, Gallo’s efforts were so successful that Local 600 was operating softball teams in every unit and building at the sprawling River Rouge complex,232 and women’s softball all-stars, on a hot streak of victories and who won the Detroit amateur league, were nicknamed “Gallo’s Galloping Gals.”233 Local 600 also hosted regular boxing tournaments and wrestling meets.234 Anyone who wanted to play sports in their hard-won recreation time had the opportunity in the 600, whether it was tennis, softball, baseball, bowling, boxing, basketball, rifle clubs, or something else.

As the war progressed, women’s teams became front and center news in UAW sports sections as opposed to their previous role as side shows. In fact, the UAW tennis men’s league in the summer of ’42 was won by a woman, much to the amusement of the labor journalists, who teased the loser of the finals.235 Local 600 and 174 saw the rapid ascension of women’s sports as

230 United Auto Worker. April 1st, 1942. V. 23.

231 Steve Babson,,David Elsila, and Dave Riddle, The Color of Law: Ernie Goodman, Detroit, and the Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). p.96.

232 United Auto Worker. May 1st, 1943. V. 25

233 United Auto Worker. November 1st, 1942. V. 24.

234 Ibid.

235 United Auto Worker. August 1st, 1942. V. 24.

146 a cornerstone of Labor Sports programs, though other locals had mixed results, such as Packard

Local 190, which cancelled women’s bowling because of “spotty attendance.”236In this atmosphere of growing recognition of women’s sports, Local 50 of the Willow Run Ford plant, which constructed bombers, produced a more regimented sports program, crafted by a specific program. The athletics leader and coordinator was Olga Madar, to whom we have already been

introduced. Madar was a player-coach

and director of the sports programs at

Willow Run’s Local 50. Using her

background as an elite athlete from

Detroit amateur and company teams in

the 1930s, as well as a physical

educator, Madar built up a regular

schedule of sports, giving both men’s

and women’s sports equal time in the

schedule.237 She was also a participant,

leading the basketball team to victory

in the national UAW tournament of

1943.238 Local 50 also sent Madar to play catcher on a Detroit all-star team.239 Madar received attention for her work in key athletic

236 United Auto Worker. February 1st, 1944. V. 35.

237 United Auto Worker. February 1st, 1943. V. 25.

238 United Auto Worker. March 15th, 1943. V. 25.

239 United Auto Worker. October 1st, 1943. V. 26.

147 and recreational programs within Local 50, which had a largely socialist leadership. Later, when

Reuther’s socialists came to the Presidency of the UAW, they brought college-educated unionists into key positions, of which Madar would be one. By April 1945, Local 50 declared that women would receive the same access and priorities as men to form teams.240 The Recreation

Department manual however, reflecting general gender views of the era despite the rising women’s athletics, argued that women would not be as interested in sports as social dances, but should push them anyway. It argued women should coach when possible and train with female players instead of men, in order to encourage togetherness amongst women workers.241Sports gained traction even in smaller locals during the war, which produced less widespread newspapers than larger locals. For instance, on April 1st, 1945 Newark NJ Local 365 lost a basketball game to the Communist-led Furriers union in a Communist organized sports league

[see Chapter 5 for more on these leagues.].242 Local 731 in Buffalo NY staged a baseball game on October 1st 1943 against an army team, which was common as a way of building comradery between war workers and soldiers before they shipped off.243 In one long-standing campaign, the

Budd plant in Philadelphia, which had struggled to gain union recognition until the early 1940s,

Local 918 UAW formed an 8 team softball league by department, meaning that even in a small

Local, the idea of Labor Sports as one of the first order of business was firmly in place in wider

Local 50 basketball team. Olga Madar is on far right, back row. 1943. CIO culture.244 In Ohio, because most Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

240 United Auto Worker. April 1st, 1945. V. 38.

241 “A Handbook for UAW-CIO Recreation Leaders.” 1944. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

242 United Auto Worker. February 8th, 1943. V. 25.

243 United Auto Worker. October 1st, 1943. V. 25.

244 “Budd News” United Auto Worker. April 27, 1945. V. 38.

148 of the locals were fairly small, they often combined their recreational programs. In places like

Columbus, the local had a hard time establishing labor teams even as the union tried to work with management. The issue became a point of conflict between the union and management, after management in Columbus refused to give up control of recreational sports. Chicago operated a similar Labor Sports culture, such as bowling tournaments and both men and women’s softball leagues, while Milwaukee had an 8 team softball league.245 Detroit had city- wide committees to run men’s golf, men’s baseball, men’s softball, women’s softball, and general women’s sports. UAW Recreation Department staff tended to work in municipal committees which focused on city planning around recreation and parks.246

By the end of the war, corporations tried to resurrect corporate welfare sports as they recognized unions had seized the initiative in recreation. Therefore, upper management in the manufacturing created the Industrial Recreation Association, to put company recreation programs in competition with Labor Sports. The Recreation Department of the UAW international recognized that company sports, left unchallenged, divided the workers’ loyalties and gave management more access to workers than the union. Companies organized teams to push out union sports, with mixed success.247 In its annual 1947 report, the Recreation

245 Quarterly Report. May 24th 1945. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

246 Quarterly Report. November 1945. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

247 Quarterly Report. February 18th 1946. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

149

Department noted: “Management often uses recreation as a substitute for wages. It excludes families and discriminates on race. Workers have no voice and it is used to drive a wedge

between worker and union.”248 It described

the superior potential of Labor Sports, as

community recreation did not reach as far

as a union could nor was it always easy to

access, while commercial recreation was

limited because often workers could not

afford to spend much at those facilities.

Company sports’ greatest limitation was

that it was run by management and had

largely disappeared during the Depression.

When workers did play company sports,

they tended to be racially segregated

instead of inclusive. Workers by Local 600 Sports, 1947. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. themselves could not easily organize their own teams, but with a union pooling resources of both dues and members, the sky was the limit.

Because the union saw their members as people and not just numbers, recreation became an important goal unto itself, in addition to being important in supporting strikes and union power by keeping morale high.249 The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) pushed for a resurgence of company sports in the post-war era. The UAW responded that company sports

248 Quarterly Report. 1947. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

249 Ibid.

150 were not necessarily all bad if individual companies built the programs in cooperation with local unions, though it recognized that NAM only saw sports as a way to improve overall corporate relations.250 Largely, the union was able to head off this challenge in the immediate post-war years.

By late 1945, the UAW saw recreation programs take a hit in total numbers of teams and leagues, and their coverage in union newspapers temporarily dwindled from their wartime highs.

Reasons included demobilization of war industries and the end of government-enforced labor peace. Members were laid off or shifted towards strike activity as the situation moved towards the post-war confrontation after the war years of suppressed wages and the no-strike pledge taking their most potent weapon off the table. After the massive post-war strikes helped catch wages up with inflation, many of the programs resumed, such as basketball in Indiana locals.251

The UAW began to see more influence by experts in physical education, like Olga Madar in

Local 50. That more scientific focus caused a shift in the Recreation Department toward a focus on building recreation for a wider age group, though this would not go into high gear until

Reuther’s rise to the leadership of the UAW in 1946-47.252 The Recreation Department’s budget was low in terms of total budget set by the International, which meant that Locals had still had more direct control over the programs. In December 1946, the Recreation budget of the

International was only $4,240 (or $42,000 in today’s money), or one one-hundredth of the overall UAW budget.253

250 “Recreation Roundup”. December 1949. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

251 Quarterly Report. February 18th 1946. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

252 Annual Report. 1948. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

253 Quarterly Report. December 1946. Melvin West. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

151

1946-50: Post-war Restructuring

As the war ended and the no-strike pledge broke down, massive strike waves bigger than the United States had ever seen swept the country. Workers sought to gain wages and benefits hard won by their dedication to the war effort, even as corporate profits soared. Walter

Reuther’s militancy in taking on General Motors gained him a reputation as a fighter, while the

Communists and their liberal allies were sunk with baggage of the war-time no-strike pledge.

Reuther’s Unity Caucus, consisting of the Socialist faction allied with the Catholic trade unionists (the so-called “Right Wing” of the UAW) swept Reuther into a narrow victory over the previous President, RJ Thomas.254 Quickly, Reuther moved to purge the Communists from the union, with mixed results, since Communists were popular in many locals and could not be removed easily. In their place, he put his people in key positions, particularly former and current

Socialist Party members and college-educated men (and eventually women.)255 In an effort to root out Communists from Locals and put an end to UAW infighting that had plagued the union in its first decade of existence, Reuther began centralizing control of the union, bringing up allies from Local 174 and Local 50 in particular.

The Recreation Department was no exception to putting his allies into offices, and in

1947, Reuther placed Local 50’s Olga Madar as head of the Department after Melvin West retired. UAW Labor Sports programs gradually were altered to reflect wider changes in the union leadership and structure over the next ten years, slowly but surely moving them away from

254 Thomas had headed the coalition between liberals and Communists that ran the UAW International.

255 For more on Walter Reuther’s career, including his drift from the Socialist Party to social democracy, as a player in the New Deal Coalition, his technocratic tendencies including his faith in experts, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man In Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York City: BasicBooks 1995) and Kevin Boyle: The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 1945-1968 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)

152 worker-run athletics. Madar, being one of the few women remaining in the auto industry after the UAW largely was unable to stop layoffs after the war, was also a Reuther loyalist. While the

Recreation Department had previously been more of an advisory to sprawling locals, under the

Reuther Presidency it took a much more active role in running programs, leagues, and teams.

The new Recreation Department line criticized the past efforts of their Department predecessors as being too focused on all-star teams (which ignored the expansive Local 174 and 600 internal union leagues.) The Recreation Department internal memos looked back at its history and criticized the previous leadership. These revisionist histories stated that local unions, in the beginning, actually imitated management style sports, in which they would recruit all-star teams to advertise their product and represent the company:

In the past management advocated the organization of all-star teams for the purpose of publicizing their product. Local unions attempted to compete by setting up parallel product. This type of program was weak in that it catered to only a few of the local union members who were skilled in team sports. In addition, the recreation funds of the locals were inadequate to outfit the athletes in the style they were accustomed.256 Those funds, the memos by Madar stated, could not always keep up, and only a few members who were skilled at team sports could participate as players instead of audience members, which caused recreation to be seen as insignificant and caused resentment.257 It argued for family-friendly activities with more union family camps as well as sports and parties for children, maintaining the line that “it is inconsistent to fight to work and fight for better living conditions and for more leisure time for our members while disregarding the activities that must fill the leisure hours.” Madar wrote, “The lighted union hall is as important as the ‘lighted school house’,” meaning that union halls should be kept busy in order to keep them vibrant and

256 Annual Report. February 1948. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2. Pg 1.

257 Ibid. pg 2.

153 active.258 Given the baby boom in the post-war years, this strategy lined up well with new priorities of the membership. It also moved the union away from the worker-run sports leagues to a more corporatist expert-run recreation, centralized from the International to the Locals instead of the other way around. Still, sports remained at the top of popularity for recreation, and as late as 1948, 400 men were playing in a 24-team UAW Detroit softball league.259 The Recreation

Department was training its activists at places like the Recreation Institute at FDR Labor Center, in order to standardize the training Locals would receive. By 1948, 36 chairmen of recreation councils participated in these organizer trainings.260 These standardization efforts helped get sports back on track in the immediate post-war post-strike years: Detroit had a 22 team UAW basketball league, and Locals in Detroit had their own leagues, such as Local 600’s 20 team league, 174’s 15 team league, or Local 7’s 16 league.261

258 Ibid pg 3.

259 Ibid. pg 8.

260 Ibid pg. 10 261 “Recreation Roundup”. December 1949. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

154

By 1948, UAW Labor Sports under the

new leadership were once again blossoming. The

Detroit Area UAW recreation council hosted 20

softball teams in an afternoon league and 11

softball teams in a morning league. One thousand

members bowled in city UAW tournaments.

There were 14 city-wide baseball teams. Madar

reported that 100 people participated in an ice

skating meet, and that 8 city-wide basketball

teams played that year. The UAW also hosted

newer programs in archery, golf, horseshoes, and

gun clubs. By 1948, it was standard operating Local 174 men’s softball teams, 1947. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State procedure for cheap entry leagues to make the University. Used with permission. programs self-sustaining, with the International

Recreation Department stepping in to cover any deficits, a benefit of a more active central department. Softball remained the largest and most popular sport, as it “didn’t cause broken windows”, perhaps a reference to baseball’s livelier balls.

155

Bowling, Madar noted, was one of the older sports programs and because of its segregated nature at a moment when segregation in sports was coming under fire, it had a very political nature. The UAW would soon direct its attention to ending that injustice by using the power built through Labor Sports.262 The sport had always been notably segregated, as local bowling alleys had separate lanes for black and white people, which defeated the solidarity across racial lines that was one of the purposes of Labor Sports. The UAW would throw its

weight behind ending Jim Crow in Bowling, a

cause that was popular amongst the Socialist

and Communist factions that temporarily

drew them back together.

The Fairness in Bowling campaign

One of the first initiatives Madar’s

Recreation Department undertook was when

the Reuther decided to throw the UAW’s

weight into desegregating bowling leagues

and facilities in the spring of 1947. The

Fairness in Bowling campaign both helped

Local 174 bowlers, all white men. 1942. Walter P. Reuther build interracial cohesion in the UAW and Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. demonstrated a wider commitment to the civil

262 “Detroit Metropolitan Report” 1948. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

156

rights in recreation.263 The UAW had successfully pressured the American Bowling Congress to

allow some black teams in their tournaments,

despite the ABC’s commitment to reserving

bowling as a white sport. But, after building nearly

1200 men’s teams and 140 women’s teams (3-5

people each), the UAW was gaining clout that

could eventually be used to challenge the ABC’s

policies. However, until then, there were sometimes

tense moments, such as when the Detroit

Recreation Center tried to cancel a Local 600

bowling tournament because of the inclusion of

Fairness in Bowling poster. Recreation Department Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, black bowlers: “All hell broke loose. Some of the Wayne State University. Used with permission. white guys wants to tear the joint up they were so

upset. The owners called the police, and we decided against that… But we threw up a picket line

of about 1,000 workers outside the bowling alley and then we got ahold of our lawyers.”264

After Reuther came to power, there was a general sense in the larger Popular Front

culture that the defeat of fascism delegitimized segregation and the denial of civil rights, and so

the time was right to move the politics of anti-fascism to defeating Jim Crowism at home, and

thus challenge policies of the ABC.265 He argued that if Labor Sports were supposed to bring

263 Ryan S. Pettengill “Fair Play in Bowling”: Sport, Civil Rights, and the UAW Culture of Inclusion, 1936– 1950. Journal of Social History, (2017), 51(4), pp.953-979.

264 “Back When A-B-C Meant Abolish the Bowling Colorline”, UAW Solidarity, January/February 1994, pp. 17-18

265 For more on post-war anti-fascism, see Denning, Pg 374-386 as well as Chris Vials, Haunted By Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States. (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press: 2014)

157 working class people together and build trust, the official segregation of the American Bowling

Congress (ABC) really put a damper on that. While Communist and Socialist UAW activists had long worked to include black rank and file workers, which saw integrated baseball, softball, and basketball teams as the norm rather than the rule, bowling remained white. Indeed, the Ford corporation actively recruited to company bowling teams that would operate under segregated

ABC rules in competition for workers with interracial UAW Local 600 teams which formed in response to the campaign.266

It should be noted that the “Fairness in

Bowling” campaign occurred against a

backdrop of the growing Red Scare in the

UAW. As the Red Scare heated up, the Taft-

Hartley Act rolled back many of the gains of

the Wagner Act a decade earlier, and

specifically targeted Communists.267 While

Reuther did publicly oppose the bill, he also

used it to push his Communist opponents out

of the union. By 1948, in the Communist

stronghold of Local 600, several union

officers were forced out of office after they Walter Reuther opening the UAW bowling tournament for the Fair Play in Bowling campaign. 1948. Walter P. Reuther Library, refused to sign Taft-Hartley anti-Communist Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

266 Correspondence. September, 1948. Joe Rivers. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

267 After the 1946 Midterm elections, which saw Republicans gain control of Congress for the first time since 1932, it passed the Taft-Hartley Act over the veto of President Truman. Taft-Hartley greatly curtailed legal labor activity, and specifically required all union officers to sign affidavits that they were not Communist Party members.

158 affidavits. While Local 600 was targeted for anti-Communist purges during the 1950s by the

Reuther caucus, anti-Communists never really were able to gain complete control of the local before the Red Scare cooled off. Still, at that moment, John Gallo was forced out of office and was eventually temporarily expelled from the union. 268 Reuther decided at that point to take an issue that both Communists and Socialists could get behind, and one that would hopefully increase his caucus’s standing with black workers. The UAW would push to finally integrate the last segregated sport in Detroit.

In Detroit in the 1940s, still reeling from the 1943 Race Riot, racial divisions were a real problem amongst rank and file workers. Especially in auto plants with sizeable numbers of black workers like GM and Ford, Labor Sports organizers encountered bowling alleys which refused to have white and black workers bowl together. Madar was tasked by Reuther with directing the

“End Jim Crow In Bowling” campaign in order to build on some of the momentum of Jackie

Robinson breaking the color barrier in professional baseball to crack bowling’s access for black workers. Madar handled the logistics, setting up a potential rival UAW Bowling League and an

End Discrimination National Tournament. She wrote, in the Recreation Department newsletter:

It is a plea to all good Americans and all good union men and women to live by the philosophy that has made our country and union strong. The time has come when we cannot afford to pay lip service to democracy. We must practice and live it! No one can claim to be a good American and a good union member while subscribing to the policy of the ABC, an organization that restricts its membership to “white males”. Competitive sports cannot be truely [sic] competitive or representative if a man’s athletic ability is to be judged by the color of his skin or nationality.269

268 Gallo would be reinstated and immediately re-elected overwhelmingly to union office in the early 1960s, a post he maintained until his death in 1972; “Death Notices- Gallo” Detroit Free Press. October 2nd, 1972. 6-B. Accessed through newspapers.com. January 24th, 2019.

269 “UAW Recreation Department Newsletter” October 7th, 1947. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications S-Z.

159

In 1947, the UAW declared that it would henceforth stage its own tournaments and

leagues. It declared in its newsletter to all recreation directors, “The American Bowling Congress

is still singing that white supremacy song. The ‘Caucasians Only’ sign is still tacked on their

door. And the UAW-CIO says, ‘Until all Americans can bowl, we will sponsor no team under

Bowling Congress sanction.”270 Instead, the UAW-CIO Fairness in Bowling tournaments were

launched. The largest of these tournaments were held in Detroit, but others in locals across where

bowling teams had been established. A national “All-American Bowling Tournament” was

organized and by UAW teams from locals across the Midwest, with ten local alleys agreeing to

host an integrated union tournament. Eventually, as tournaments continued into 1948, other civil

rights groups got involved, and following legal action, the ABC dropped its segregation clauses

in 1950. 271 Pettengill points out that

many of the UAW activists who had

helped desegregate bowling were

expelled just a few years later for being

Communists.272 The UAW though, had

flexed its large Labor Sports muscles

and helped affect real change. It put into

practice outside the union what it had

built within the union, and helped bring Madar awarding a check to the winner of a UAW bowling tournament, from Local 600. 1948. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. about an “End to Jim Crow in Bowling.”

270 “Recreation Roundup”. Circa 1948. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

271 Michael Jackman, "A Lane Of Their Own". Detroit Metro Times, May 27th, 2014. https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/a-lane-of-their-own/Content?oid=2201876.

272 Pettengill, Pg. 964

160

The campaign demonstrated the potential power of Labor Sports to dismantle racial segregation, even in cities like Detroit that simmered with racial tension. Institutions that did not fit with the political values Labor Sport could be bent to more racially progressive stances, instead of the union having to work around racist practices when its members bowled together. Labor Sports had that potential of helping create a new world from the shell of the old.

Madar’s Department

Though the campaign helped ultimately bring down Jim

Crowism in bowling, it continued to diversify into even more

creative endeavors as the UAW increased its overall strength.

Internally, leaders of the UAW recognized that recreation was

a key part of their organizing efforts. Madar noted, in an

internal memo, that “organized recreation is the most effective

means of building a solid wall of education, understanding,

and brotherhood and materially assists and supplements the

other necessary activities of the union.” In 1947, the

Recreation Department finally raised its budget from one-half

cent to one cent of every dues dollar. Sports were certainly still

Madar becomes head of Recreation Department, 1947. Walter P. Reuther the most popular recreation, but it was rapidly diversifying. Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with The activities the UAW listed as recreation by 1947 had permission. become extremely varied, and included badminton, baseball, basketball, bowling, camping, chess

& checkers, children’s activities, choral groups, dancing, dramatics, golf, gun clubs, gymnastics, hiking, ice skating, leadership training, social recreation, swimming, tennis, volleyball, and

161 skills-building workshops.273 Under Madar’s direction, regular “Recreation Roundup” newsletters were published, which were aimed at recreational directors, council members, and activists. When Madar took over, there were two staffers: Madar and one assistant director, tasked with providing recreation for all 17 UAW regions and 4 million members. That meant the goal of organizing Labor Sports and similar recreational programs fell on the locals and regional organizing directors. Seven of the 17 regions had recreation councils and leisure programs. In places without those structures, recreation programs of any sort were irregular, meaning money set aside for recreation sometimes went towards other priorities and sometimes it went to stocking up just one ballclub to compete in local leagues, which mirrored company sports’

emphasis on winning with highly talented players instead of a wider

participatory recreational sports.274 Madar’s Recreation Department

sought to expand its reach across the entirety of the union, to both

bring recreation to all locals and to centralize the programs, with

considerable success. Madar quickly decided to encourage locals to

form recreation councils which answered to the Recreation

Department, with the incentive that only locals with recreation

councils would receive money from the International Union. She

expanded the sort of recreation embraced by the UAW, creating

funds to include Christmas parties, dancing, and choral groups in

Olga Madar, 1951. Walter P. addition to the traditional sports. Madar continued to actively Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with promote sports through encouraging locals to submit scores and permission.

273 “Memo” circa 1947, Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

274 “Recreation Roundup”. October 1947. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

162 names of worker athletes.275 By 1950, Madar reported that 600,000 people were involved as participants in the UAW’s recreation programs.276 By 1952, 900 locals contained at least one community or union team, while two hundred and fifty locals sponsored inter-department softball and basketball leagues, which ranged generally from 6 to 20 teams.277

The UAW also put pressure on local golf courses to open options for working class people, no matter their color, after the war. Golf, which was universally considered a rich man’s game before the war. Company golf outings would often exclude black workers, in the rare events where workers were invited to play in country clubs that corporate upper management belonged. Because of years of UAW recreation activism, particularly in the Detroit area, integrated public golf courses became a regular part of the landscape, so UAW members could play together in outings.278 Labor Golf, along with bowling, would survive to the present, in the form of small sporadic tournaments, long after labor softball, basketball, and baseball had died by the end of the 1950s. One gets the impression that working class people who had previously been excluded from golf courses were giddy at the prospect of experiencing golf, and eventually it became to be associated with middle class activities. That was coupled with the average UAW member gained a middle class existence after the Treaty of Detroit, and some argued to the detriment of labor militancy.279 Today, the UAW operates recreational facilities at the Black

275 “Annual Report” pg 3. 1948. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2. 1946-1950.

276 “Annual Report”. 1950. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2. 1946-1950.

277 “UAW-CIO Recreation Program” pamphlet, circa 1952. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications S-Z.

278 “Recreation Roundup”, “Golf Used To Be A Rich Man’s Game” May 1947. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

279 The Treaty of Detroit brought labor peace to the auto industry, as a pact between GM and the UAW. Chrysler and Ford followed suit. The agreement brought middle class wages, pensions, healthcare and other benefits to

163

Lake center in the Michigan northern Lower Peninsula, which includes a 9 hole golf course as well as camping grounds and other recreational activities, with some criticism to how accessible the facility is to most UAW members.

Madar took a strong interest in local union sports, writing furiously with input and advice, as well as putting together conferences to bring all labor recreation activists onto the same page. For instance, the long standing tradition of “the fat man’s race” as part of picnics,

Madar wrote personally a note asking them to stop: "Now we're not against fat men getting in on the picnic fun. But we do have to point out the local unions must take safety precautions in their recreation that they would take in their shop. And ask any doctor about the dangers of a guy nudging 40 and racking up an over-225 on the scales takes off on a 50-yard sprint. A heart attack as a result of picnic frolicking doesn't come under the heading of recreation."280 It is unknown if the fat men’s races stopped, but it served as a marked departure from the earlier hands-off approach of Melvin West. Elsewhere, locals continued to be creative. Local 749, located in

Bantam Connecticut, saw a softball game of Glamour Boys (men in skirts) vs the Bloomer Boys

(men in bloomers), which must have been interesting to see.281 Madar would bring together leaders in conferences to standardize the recreation programs using her scientific physical education background. The February 18-19 1950 Michigan and Ontario UAW-CIO Recreation

Conference, divided recreation into spring-summer sports, like softball, golf, horseback riding, and horseshoe tournaments (curiously, baseball was not mentioned), and fall-winter sports, like

auto workers but gave up the right to have say over management in auto manufacturing. It became a standard for labor-management contracts and brought millions of blue collar workers into the middle class, though sapped the militant spirit of the UAW.

280 “Recreation Roundup”. August 1947. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

281 “Recreation Roundup”. September 1947. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

164 basketball, bowling, hockey, and poker. Sports were followed by social recreation like picnics, moonlight cruises, and father/son days, and finally cultural events, listing further summer activities like gardening projects and children’s outdoor movie nights.282

Madar wrote regular columns in the Recreation Roundups, which put into words the practice of the Recreation Department over the previous 10 years. She made an argument that called for an expanded view of the value of leisure activities:

Most you probably think of work as loafing or playing. You think of recreation as playing golf, bowling, reading a mystery story, having some beers with the boys from the local, or lying on a river bank on a summer afternoon, looking at the sky. But the real definition of recreation goes beyond that.” Anything you do without expectation of pay because you want to (hunting gardening).

Madar continued that the union’s

mission was to transform the lives of its

working class members. The Recreation

Department had to show why the fight for

leisure was important and lead the way in

filling that hard-won leisure time:

None of us, no matter how many hours a day we work, can avoid recreating. But not all of us have the best opportunities. That’s why the UAW Recreation Department was organized – Madar in the Fairness in Bowling campaign, 1948. Walter P. to work through the recreation chairman to the Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne members, and show everyone how he can make State University. Used with permission. the best use of his leisure.

282 Minutes. Feb 18-19 1950 Michigan & Ontario CIO & UAW Recreation Conference. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

165

Finally, Madar connected the fight for shorter hours with the need to fill those hours with a larger union community outside the workplace, a far-reaching vision of unionism that reflected that radical vision of the possibilities of a union of workers, and that of Labor Sports:

Labor has fought long and hard for those leisure hours. Now the union member is holding them in the palm of his hand. It’s up to the recreation leadership to help him spend them wisely, and spend them enjoyably.283 The Recreation Department consistently stated that sports were by far the most popular programs yet could be used as a way to bring any hobbies under the banner of the union, like camera clubs or even embroidery. They argued that the union, much like other Labor Sports activists had realized in the prior two decades, that if unions or leftist organizations did not meet the needs of all aspects of workers’ lives, commercial entities would fill those needs.. Sports were the base of the recreation programs. Left alone they would revert to just sports, and

Madar’s Recreation Department believed it had to prod local recreation programs to move beyond that.284 Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s and 60s, more family-focused recreation became the standard in the UAW Recreation Department. The Recreation Department set up the FDR camping program for children and advocated for more access to parks for the general public. These endeavors would naturally place Madar to appointments to parks commissions across Michigan. That switch in focus from Labor Sports to family- focused recreation seemed to coincide with the fall of internal militancy within the union as Reuther sought to minimize opposition to his presidency. Interestingly, this trend away from rank and file democracy and militancy occurred even as Reuther began to place the UAW on the side of civil rights and student struggles by providing financial support and meeting spaces like in Port

283 “Recreation Roundup” Director’s Corner. Olga Madar. Circa 1948. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 3.

284 Annual Report. 1948. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2.

166

Huron.285 Specifically, one of the primary aims was to improve the quality of living for working class people and their families. The Recreation Department noted that improving recreational facilities used by working class families was paramount: “A delegate spoke on behalf of the one- half cent for recreation, and his argument, and his arguments were that Detroit was overcrowded and needed recreation facilities. He mentioned his own local had established play-areas for children that were very successful. He stated that, ‘the children influenced the parents – the parents played baseball while the children played games, and it was considered a great step

forward.’”286

Still, the larger locals continued to value their

autonomy. Local 600 remained a thorn in Reuther’s

side as it was one of the few locals which maintained

a strong Communist presence even at the height of

the Red Scare. Even as it lost members as Ford

began decentralizing its operations out of the Rouge

facilities, the number of athletic programs remained

impressive. By late 1947, Local 600 operated soccer

teams which played its Canadian neighbor in Local

200 across the border.287 In the winter of 1947-48 Local 600 All-Filipino Bowling team, 1948. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission. and again in 1949, the Loc al placed hockey teams

285 Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man In Detroit. Pg. 368.

286 “Origin of the Recreation Department of the UAW” 1959. UAW Recreation Department Records, LP000188, Box 2.

287 United Auto Worker, Ford Facts. November 1st, 1947. V. 53.

167 in local Amateur Athletic Union leagues, and to do its part for the Fairness in Bowling campaign, placed an all Filipino immigrant bowling team in a UAW tournament.288 In the late 40s, Local

600 was operating sports as diverse as bocci and cricket for its members in addition to its long standing baseball, softball, bowling, and basketball programs, which points to a large engagement for a diverse workforce.289 Local 600, the behemoth of UAW Labor Sports, continued to be a beacon for the possibilities of rank and file run sports.

This was John Gallo’s legacy as a committed and militant union activist, which most of the Communists in labor during this period were (as opposed to being ideological Stalinists).

Gallo, much like most of the Communist Party membership outside the inner leadership, saw the party as a vehicle for labor militants, no matter the international politics. Indeed, the party would shed members once the news of Stalin’s massive crimes began to be admitted by the Soviet

Union’s new leadership under Khrushchev. The final nail in the coffin of the Party was the

Hungarian invasion by the Soviet Union in response to revolution there, which seemed to drive home the imperial nature of the so-called socialist state. But, during the Red Scare, Gallo being an open Communist left him as a target, and he abruptly and with little fanfare stepped down from his union offices in September 1948 to be replaced by Joe Rivers.290 Gallo continued as the chairman of the Recreation Board of Local 600, until he came under a focused House of Un-

American Activities Committee (HUAC) attack in 1952. He was even denounced in a church service by a clergyman that he attended, only for his niece to stand up and defend him as an easy

288 United Auto Worker, Ford Facts. January 3rd, 1948. V. 51. Accessed June 29th, 2018; Annual Report. 1949. Olga Madar. UAW Recreation Department Records. LR000188. Box 2. Accessed June 26th, 2018; United Auto Worker, Ford Facts. March 27th, 1948. V. 51.

289 United Auto Worker, Ford Facts. July 1st, 1948. V. 51.

290 United Auto Worker, Ford Facts. September 1st, 1948. V. 51.

168 target because of his politics.291 John Gallo was a product of Labor Sports as much as Olga

Madar, and defended its potential, but was on the losing communist factional side, while Madar belonged to the increasingly dominant and social democratically leaning Socialist circle that would come to rule the UAW in the decades following, in the process slowly losing whatever radical politics it had left.

Conclusion

By the 1950s, as Reuther’s UAW consolidated labor peace by trading middle class salaries to its members in return for giving up demands for more leisure time, recreation was put on the backburner. Labor Sports largely began to die off: union members abandoned softball, baseball, and basketball, while the average age of members increased and individuals stopped playing sports in order to concentrate on family life. Television and suburbanization changed the relationship between sports fans and sports themselves, as workers became consumers rather than participants in sports. Seeing the need to evolve their programs, the Recreation Department argued that creative, adventurous, social and competitive satisfactions could make for a richer life, which extended the union’s reach into schools, playgrounds, facilities, parks, and museums.

By 1959, recreation councils were standing committees within all locals of the union.292 The

UAW continued to fund camping, children’s groups, and less intensive sports like bowling and golf into the 1980s, but that earlier push by locals for working class sports seemed to decline as members got comfortable and as union leadership discouraged local autonomy and action. They did not completely abandon it, but instead toned it down, recognizing the gains they had made

291 Interview with Gary Dymski, grandnephew of John Gallo. Conducted January 25th, 2019.

292 “What the UAW is Doing About Recreation” pamphlet, circa 1959. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications S-Z.

169 for their members. A 1959 pamphlet noted that recreation “plays an important role in satisfying human needs which exist in our present society.293 In 1961, Walter Reuther himself invoked a larger non-secular aesthetic which had become a part of the UAW’s language during the height of the Cold War:

As we work across the bargaining table to secure higher living standards and leisure, we must use the full resources of our union so that ample opportunities are provided by both the union and the community to permit individuals to use their leisure hours in the pursuit of non-economic activities that will give them opportunity for growth as people, as societal beings, as spiritual beings. The sentiment echoed much of the earlier rhetoric about the need to build a larger anti- racist, anti-fascist working class counter culture, but without the meat of militancy.294

Ultimately, the Reuther-Socialist faction won out over the Addes-Thomas left-center alliance. Budding former softball “ringer” Olga Madar was promoted from director of Local 50’s recreation programs to the director of the UAW’s entire recreational programs after the victory of the Reuther-Socialist faction. While Madar was an energetic activist who dedicated her life to making a better life for workers, the sports aspect of the UAW, with the exception of bowling and golf, began to whither by the late 1950s, and had largely shifted to picnics and less involved affairs than the earlier baseball, softball, and basketball teams. Leagues disappeared by the

1960s, as rank and file militancy in the UAW was also largely crushed and oppositional forces to

Reuther’s Administration Caucus marginalized. It is no coincidence that the UAW sports height was also during the most radical period of union activity, nor a coincidence that it declined as the union became more and more centralized.

293 Ibid.

294 “Your Local Union Recreation Committee” pamphlet, circa 1961. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications S-Z.

170

The UAW would be criticized for advocating for national civil rights while ignoring its own black members, which eventually exploded by the late 1960s in the DRUM movement , as the leadership around Reuther mainly continued to consist of his circle of former Socialist Party members.295 This included Olga Madar, who continued as the head of the recreation department until her retirement in 1971 after becoming the first woman Vice-President of the UAW. After her retirement, she remained active in the parks and recreation organizations across the city. The

Recreation Department’s mission was somewhat ambiguous: “As we have assumed the leadership through collective bargaining of increasing the compensated number of hours off the job, we must now be prepared to offer the leadership which will ensure the availability of a wider variety of quality recreational activities.”296 In practice this meant support for family and retired members, instead of the previous militancy of young working class members shifting the balance. During the next upsurge of youth movements, sports culture at large had shifted, with the larger working class no longer being a driving force in challenging dominant sports culture.

However, at its height, Labor Sports extended beyond the UAW. While UAW Labor

Sports was the largest, with large socialist and communist aligned Locals pushing athletic programs, Labor Sports extended to most of the rest of the CIO. During this same period, the vibrant programs of the UAW were duplicated in other CIO unions, which varied by experience but had in common that the more militant and democratic the union, the more ambitious and far- reaching their Labor Sports programs. Much like the UAW, other CIO unions used sports to

295 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) was an oppositional organization of African-American workers at the Dodge plant which challenged UAW leadership, and spread throughout the unionized auto industry. It was rooted in Black Power and petered out by 1975. For more, see Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit I Do Mind Dying: A Study In Urban Revolution (New York City: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

296 “Recreation” pamphlet, circa 1965. UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Box 1, Misc Publications I-R.

171 organize accessible recreation for their members, to build comradery, and to reach into the community. We now turn to the entirety of the CIO to examine the rest of the Labor Sports movement at its height.

Local 600 men’s softball catcher, 1947. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

172

Chapter 4: A Complete Game: The Mass Labor Sports Movement in the CIO and Beyond

The future of sport has scheduled on it the rise of a mighty union sports movement coming from the great industrial unions throughout America. Who can say the unions themselves may not have their own Yale-Harvard football classic and their own World Series championship? -UE News, February 10th, 1945297

Introduction

The CIO was a widespread mass movement that energized the lives of working class people struggling in the Great Depression. While it differed depending on the union how many left-wing militants were able to make it into leadership, all of the CIO unions used mass sports programs to win over workers. Victory did not come simply because of better wages and benefits, but building working class institutions that went beyond traditional trade unionism. CIO union organizers used Labor Sports to build identification with labor, build relationships, and to answer the demand for accessible recreation in leisure time won by the CIO. In this chapter, I argue that deep commitment to rank and file worker-led democracy led to robust sports programs at the head of recreational departments across CIO unions. Since working class people wanted access to cheap or free recreation, Labor Sports leagues across the upstart labor federation were an easy model to replicate. Radicals worked hard to make sure that all workers were included in

Labor Sports even if meant knocking down the walls of racial segregation and white supremacy.

While sometimes AFL union-affiliated locals fielded sports teams in the 1930s-40s, it was fairly rare within the older labor federation to embrace social unionism. Therefore, CIO teams very

297 UE News, February 10th, 1945, pg 2. United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) Records, University of Pittsburgh.

173 rarely faced off against AFL teams, pointing to a general lack of the existence of AFL teams.

The exception was smaller AFL locals that were led by leftists but chose not to leave the AFL when the CIO became a separate entity, but again, this was rare.298 As we saw in chapter three, although the CIO Labor Sports movement reached its greatest extent in the UAW, they existed in all CIO-affiliated unions, with particular twists in each that reflected individual unions’ organizational culture. While many small CIO unions participated in labor sports, I will concentrate on largest after the UAW: the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

(ACWA), the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), United

Steelworker (USW), International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). The

Labor Sports movement, which had swelled into a widespread program in the ILGWU and reached its zenith in the UAW, extended far beyond those two unions and was a widespread phenomenon that signified a legitimate left-wing sports culture in the United States. The socialist-aligned ACWU launched Labor Sports programs not long after the ILGWU, and its continued presence during the 20 years of existence in the CIO, as opposed to the much shorter affiliation in the CIO of the ILGWU, helped provide a funnel for experiences with social unionism into many of the new CIO mass unions, including Labor Sports.299

Background

Though the UAW was the largest of the CIO-affiliated unions, the other unions in the

CIO proved to be just as effective at transforming the conditions and culture of the United States for working class people. The CIO began in 1935 as the Committee of Industrial Organizations

298 Warehousemen News 8/7/1939. larc.ms.0413, carton 129. Labor Archives and Research Center, ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

299 For more on the history of the ACWA, see Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. (New York: Free Press, 1991).

174 within the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL had long clung to craft unionism, or narrow membership limited to particular skilled work, and had largely tolerated discrimination against workers of color and women in its member unions. AFL unions had traditionally been vehemently anti-radical and firings of organizers for left-wing political beliefs was common. The AFL had been resistant to organizing large swaths of unskilled workers in industrial plants, limiting itself to small groups of skilled workers like the Plumbers or

Carpenters unions. After a wave of mass strikes led by radicals in 1934, the following year the leadership of the United Mine Workers and the ILGWU and others formed the CIO in order to begin large scale industrial organizing. The AFL leadership moved to suspend unions involved in the project in 1936. The CIO grew rapidly as it began organizing new massive industrial unions, and by 1938 had officially split off to become its own labor federation. Workers responded enthusiastically and strike waves swept the United States in 1937-40, highlighted by the famous

Flint Sit-down Strike late 1936-37, when workers at a GM plant took over a factory and held it until emerging victorious. As Robert Zeiger wrote in his history of the CIO, the new organization stood for something much greater than simple labor strife:

During the first year of its existence, the CIO simultaneously exhibited both the pageantry and idealism of a great liberation movement and the determination to foster responsible, contractual unionism in the mass production sector. These two aspects of the early CIO were complementary for the ability of American workers both to endure the hardship of raw confrontation and to create and sustain vehicles for the regular conduct of ordinary life in a complex corporate order were equally vital. The success of the CIO depended in large part on its ability to fire workers’ imagination, dramatize its goals through public epics, and maneuver through the maze of changing legal and political boundaries to build an organization that would embrace a great diversity of workers while surviving in a hostile environment.300

300 Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Pg. 22.

175

In addition to the auto industry, the steel and electronics industries went from being composed of exploitative sweatshops to being composed of well-paying jobs that improved the living conditions of many working class people. These unions quickly eclipsed the unions that pushed their weight behind the CIO, the United Mineworkers and the International Ladies

Garment Workers Union. CIO unions became a sort of identifying mark of a new working class which was not afraid to come to blows with capitalists. Quickly, in addition to the UAW, three large unions sprung up in the CIO’s early transformative years, each unique in its own ways but bearing the CIO’s working-class oriented culture: the United Steelworkers of America (USA),

United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), and the International

Longshoremen’s and Warehouse Union’s (ILWU). Additionally, the Amalgamated Clothing

Workers of America (ACWA), representing men’s garment workers, was an existing union that had joined the CIO with the ILGWU and was like the ILGWU in its vision of social unionism, but was less anti-Communist. The ACWA, also unlike the ILGWU, would stay in the CIO for the duration of that labor federation’s existence from 1935 to 1955.

Much like the UAW, the other CIO unions welcomed militants of all backgrounds in the

1930s and 40s, which included Communists and Socialists. These radical militants varied in their organizational background. Socialists came into organizing provided by connections to the

ACWA, ILGWU, or were simply young people energized by the Norman Thomas campaigns, as discussed in Chapter 1. Communists cut their teeth with experience in organizing the Trade

Union Unity League red unions or other Communist organizations during the Third Period and directed by the Popular Front party-line to engage in mass organizing. Often, militants were simply fellow traveler independent leftists who soon fell into socialist or communist radical circles and became active in the CIO mass organizing drives of the late 1930s. The Popular Front

176 became a phenomenon that well surpassed actual membership in these organizations in order to build a more popular general culture, with the average militant being a fellow traveler of one radical circle or another. In ways, the Popular Front and the CIO was like social justice movements of the 1960s or the Occupy movement of 2011-12. In its twenty years of existence, the CIO came to be identified by working class people, especially young workers, as a force for change and one that helped lift millions of working class people out of poverty. Unlike the cautious craft unions, CIO unions took on issues outside the workplace, including housing and evictions, racial discrimination, childcare centers, and more. In this, the CIO was much like the earlier ILGWU efforts to build access to healthcare centers, and therefore the ILGWU was a natural fit to bring into the labor federation.301 Unions affiliated with the CIO often would include it in the union’s title to drive home the point of a larger and different type of labor movement, such as the UAW-CIO, UE-CIO, or USA-CIO, even if it was largely unnecessary.

Being a member of a CIO-affiliated union was a point of pride. But early on, in its early organizing years between 1935 and 1940, left-wing radicals of all stripes were welcomed into the

CIO organizing efforts. David Dubinsky famously expressed concern to John Lewis about the number of Communists being hired as organizers, to which Lewis replied, “Who gets the bird?

The hunter or the dog?”302 In other words, while Communists would be hired because they had the skills and drive, Lewis remained confident they could be controlled as organizers.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA)

301 Photographs: Childcare centers, antiblack market, wages, health services, price controls; Anti-eviction before and during the war, working with NLG, 1930s-1943. ILGWU Communications Department Photographs, 1909-1995. 5780 176 P, 10. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives. Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

302 Judith Stepan-Norris & Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Pg. 41

177

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was an older union, originally born in the upheaval of the 1910s in the garment industry of New York. Considered the sister union of the ILGWU in that it operated in the men’s clothing industries, the ACWA was also led by older socialists but managed to avoid the hard sectarianism of the ILGWU’s socialists, partly by avoiding the destructive civil wars of the 1920s. Led by Sidney Hillman, who pragmatically led the union through civil strife, it was another of the garment worker unions that embraced social unionism, or the idea that unions must be about more than just wages and benefits, and should function as a transformational force in the lives of working class people. Like the

ILGWU, the ACWA was a sort of cross between a craft union and an industrial union, and it embraced the CIO project early on. It was slower than the ILGWU to build Labor Sports, but

over time it became an enthusiastic

participant in teams and leagues. The

ACWA also stayed true to its less

sectarian orientation and was the only

one of the original pre-existing CIO

founding unions to remain in the

alternative labor federation for the

entirety of its twenty year affair. While ACWA Baseball team, New York City, 1935. Used with Permission, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use. its social unionism mirrored the

ILGWU’s, it was somewhat less bold in what it was willing to do, as Hillman became a key advisor to the Roosevelt administration and largely sought to build the union’s fortunes through involving labor in the New Deal.

178

As was the case with the ILGWU, from its beginnings “the Amalgamated” -- as the

ACWA was popularly called-- believed in the vision of social unionism. As such, it operated health and recreation centers in most big cities where the union had a presence, such as the

Amalgamated Centre in Chicago, which opened on May Day (May 1) 1928. It contained a gymnasium with a basketball court, a favorite sport amongst its largely Jewish membership, and framed its devotion to making sports accessible to workers as an issue of worker health, according to the Chicago ACWA’s health advisor, Dr. Harold Hammet.303 It also operated vacation retreats for its members, known as Union Centers, similar to the Unity Centers of the

ILGWU.304 Inspired by the ILGWU’s launch of concentrated Labor Sports and recreational programs, the Amalgamated followed suit in 1934 and revamped its union-wide worker education programs. The programs were redesigned to include a wider and bigger range of what members were interested in, including sports. In Philadelphia, a city in which employers were hard-nosed anti-unionists in the 1920s, the Amalgamated and other unions’ embrace of the larger culture helped fuel the breakthrough that transformed Philadelphia into a union city in the 1930s.

As noted in a history of the ACWA’s efforts in Philadelphia, written in 1940 by the union local, the transformation included a much closer engagement with what the union was designed to accomplish for its members, including having fun together:

The old concept of workers’ education as dreary, lagging classes in difficult subjects has been replaced in the Amalgamated by a program which is designed to reach the great mass of the members. Recreation comes near the top of the list, and by recreation is meant anything which the members enjoy doing together, from piecing quilts to taking candid-camera shots. Organizing such activities under union auspices, first enables

303 Clemente, Egidio Papers. 5/1/1928. Amalgamated Centre in Chicago. Contains gymnasium with basketball court and others. It was intended to build upon the social unionism. Dr. Harold Hammett framed it as worker health. IHRC460. Immigration History and Research Center, University of Minnesota.

304 Photographs: Union Center in Pennsylvania Joint Board, 1930s. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America records, 1914-1980, 1920-1950 (bulk). 5619, 207. Kheel Center.

179

members to obtain facilities for enjoying themselves that they otherwise could not afford; second, it draws them together and brings them closer to the union. This is especially true of such forms of recreation as dancing, singing, and dramatic work. The emphasis on mass activities does not take the backbone out of a training program; rather it draws more people into the general scope of influence of the union point of view. Study of union problems has not been ignored; rather it has been pepped up and made dramatic and exciting by such devices as weekend officers’ institutes.305 While this passage does not mention sports specifically, the idea was that accessible recreation would be paired with workers’ education. In practice, popular recreation often meant sports, along with an array of other recreational programs. These programs filled the calendar of the ACWA locals. By 1940, in Philadelphia, these programs were so popular that the

Amalgamated headquarters for the city was booked constantly with activities like dramatics, basketball and bowling, camera club, parental education, bands, and dramatics. The national

Amalgamated set up a Department of Cultural Activities, to work with its longstanding

Department of Education.306 The success of the ACWA was partly due to the fact that its programs tapped into the cultural trends of working class people, whose needs had were not met by company welfare programs. Instead, the ACWA enabled men’s clothing workers to create their own working class institutions to meet their recreational needs. When in 1935 the

Amalgamated became a founding union of the new CIO, the ACWA and the ILGWU brought their recreational programming experience with them, with Socialist Party oriented Labor Sports at the forefront. The Socialist Labor Sports combined with some of the Communist Labor Sports organizers in the CIO to create a mass Labor Sports movement. That said, the ACWA would

305 Philadelphia Clothing Workers: Their Struggles for Union and Security. 1929-1940. Published by the ACWA, 1940. On Philadelphia employers’ history of anti-unionism, pg 25. On recreational programs launch in 1934, pg 73. Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

306 Philadelphia Clothing Workers: Their Struggles for Union and Security. 1929-1940. Pg. 202-207

180 eventually become minor in pure numbers in comparison to other CIO unions as the new industrial unions exploded in growth.

Amalgamated labor teams commonly played against ILGWU teams, though the interplay between the two unions’ labor teams eventually soured after the ILGWU left the CIO and

rejoined the AFL in 1940.

On July 23rd, 1937, in

Kingston NY, the ACWA

co-organized a labor festival

with the ILGWU, the

Butchers’ union, and the

Textiles Workers Organizing

Committee (TWOC)307,

which included softball NYC area ACWA baseball fans watching their team lose badly, 1940. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use. games between teams of the

ILGWU and ACWA.308 From that point on, especially once the ILGWU left the CIO, the

ACWA was largely overshadowed by the newer unions within the CIO, both in terms of the ambition of their recreational programs and in total membership. Still, it was a part of the CIO

307 Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) organized in textiles industry, and was largely supported by the CIO with ACWA organizers. It later became a key part of the CIO’s postwar organizing drive in the South, dubbed Operation Dixie, which met with limited success. TWOC eventually became the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), and merged with the ACWA in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). ACTWU then merged in 1995 with the ILGWU to form UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). UNITE then merged in 2004 with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) to form UNITE-HERE. Many of the former garment and textile locals of UNITE-HERE seceded in 2009 to form Workers United, which affiliated with SEIU.

308 Photographs: ILGWU/ACWA/Butchers/Textiles Organizing Committee hold labor festival in Kingston NY July 23th 1937. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) Photographs, 1890-2002. 5743 P, 57. Kheel Center.

181 culture, as ACWA Labor Sports teams routinely appeared as part of CIO leagues. Like other smaller Labor Sports teams, the Amalgamated also placed teams placed in recreational leagues, as well as a few ACWA-specific leagues, mostly bowling and basketball larger locals. The

ACWA did hold annual softball tournaments in cities like Rochester NY, as well as in New York

City.309 Much like the ILGWU, women made up a majority of workers in the ACWA, and thus women’s sports were part of its Labor Sports from the beginning. It fielded women’s and men’s softball and bowling leagues, and New York City ACWA teams were often racially integrated.310

Additionally, as Socialists and Communists continued to run youth summer camps from the

1920s to the 1950s, which became

regular operations of CIO unions,

the ACWA operated youth camps,

such as Raccoon Creek Camp

outside Pittsburgh, which included

daily sports.311

New York City area ACWA basketball team, circa late 1930s. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Fair Use.

309 Photographs: Cleaners and Dyers Baseball. Rochester ACWA Softball team won the tournament of acwa teams. NYC tournaments. Cleaners ACWA. Wall Street Clothes co vs Amalgamated Insurance CO. 1938. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) Photographs, 1890-2002. 5743 P, 8. Kheel Center.

310 Photographs: Kheel Los Angeles ACWA baseball team comes in 2nd in citywide tournament. Cleveland Joint Board. 1947.; ACWA baseball team in Red Bank NJ baseball league wins it all.; Women’s softball team local 293. Local 302 women’s basketball team. 1939 cincinatti bowling; ACWA women’s bowling 1940-42.; ACWA 1948-51 women’s teams. Minnesota. Troy NY.; ACWA bowling tournament in Chicago May 1941; NYC bowling teams. Interracial; Buffalo ACWA bowling. April 6th, 1940 Buffalo 1949; Progress through Pioneering. Union Center in Pennsylvania Joint Board. Educational and sportings recreation; ACWA youth camps. Photographs. Cleaners and Dyers Baseball. Rochester ACWA Softball team won the tournament of acwa teams. NYC tournaments. Cleaners ACWA. Wall Street Clothes co vs Amalgamated Insurance CO. 1938. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) Photographs, 1890-2002. 5743 P, 43. Kheel Center.

311 Photographs: Raccoon Creak Camp outside Pittsburgh. Circa 1940s. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) Photographs, 1890-2002. 5743 P, 8. Kheel Center.

182

While the ACWA brought its experience with social unionism and socialist politics into the CIO along with the ILGWU, and long-time President Sidney Hillman was a key figure in the

CIO’s participation in the New Deal Coalition, it ended up playing a minor role in the day to day organizing of the CIO beyond the initial burst of organizing energy. Still, the ACWA did provide

continuing experience and vision. Though not as

ambitious as the ILGWU, the Amalgamated

provided a steady conduit for Socialist politics

and organizers— within both the CIO and the

larger New Deal coalition. That pathway became

important at the national level as former Socialist

Party leaders became more involved in

Democratic Party politics, outside of the South.

The idea of Labor Sports was only strengthened

by the ACWA’s participation in the CIO, and it

ACWA Bowling Tournament, Buffalo NY, 1940. Kheel Center, participated in CIO Labor Sports play long after Cornell University. Fair Use. the stronger ILGWU had left.

The United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE)

The UE was created out a combination of older Third Period Communist Party’s Trade

Union Unity League (TUUL) unions and organizers and the newer CIO mass organizing efforts in 1936, and became the CIO’s first officially chartered union in 1938. Out of its militant struggles, a union with very strong commitments to worker democracy emerged. A large number of Communists and Socialists rose to its leadership, especially in the District 8 St Louis section,

183 epitomized by open CPUSA member and organizing director William Sentner.312 The UE emerged victorious in battles with big electronics producers like General Electric, RCA,

Westinghouse, and by the end of a successful 1946 strike wave, it had over 600,000 members across the nation. While Communists rose to lead much of the union nationally, strong ideological debates and factions existed in each local. The UE was more decentralized than other

CIO unions, putting more power with various districts and locals in organizing drives and culture. The UE existed as a vibrant, large union with high levels of participation and empowerment. It also operated large recreational Labor Sports leagues, in patterns similar to the

UAW prior to the triumph of the Reuther social democrats (see chapter 4). While its vibrancy

and unwillingness to expel its

Communist leadership made it a target

for raids by other unions in the late

1940s and 1950s (which nearly

destroyed it), the UE still survives today

with a commitment to progressive

unionism and democracy.

Because of the high degree of UE basketball team of Emerson Radio, circa 1946. UE Records, University of Pittsburgh. Fair Use. autonomy accorded to regional districts and locals within its districts, recreational programs in the UE tended to be organized from the ground up, fitting the pattern of vibrant sports culture in unions with active rank and file democracy. UE teams often played in local recreational leagues or specific CIO leagues in

312 For more on the UE’s radical organizing by District 8 and Sentner, see Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006)

184 places of high labor activity. In the largest districts, UE-specific sports leagues were set up, particularly in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. UE teams also participated in Communist- affiliated labor leagues, particularly in the Trade Union Athletic Association (TUAA) in New

York City, as well as a smaller version of the TUAA in North New Jersey.313 UE teams in New

York City furthermore helped carve out the post-war successor to the TUAA in the Labor Sports

Federation, which we will explore in the next chapter.314

By 1940, nearly every UE local had an athletic committee, often under the direction of the district Education Departments.315 As argued in an early 1944 pamphlet on the history of the union to that point, UE locals paired educational and recreational activities, arguing that

“recreation is necessary to keep healthy.”316 The UE Education Department considered recreation a key part of education, arguing that shorter workdays needed to be filled with union activities in order to keep up morale and fighting shape, especially during the war.317 Clearly, the vision of the earlier Worker Sport was still present in Labor Sports, that fighting for shorter work

313 General Office Files Related to District 1. Pitt. Local 1225 puts together softball teams to compete in TUAA. 3/1939; 8 UE locals in north jersey compete in the NJ version of the TUAA. Both mens and womens. 6/22/1940.. UE4.1.4., 6-1207. \ UE Records, University of Pittsburgh. 314 Improvement of Health District 4: Recreation Resolution Brooklyn “Sports Meeting Membership Activities Department”; Union School by UE offered Fall basketball; UE Local 1225 won the A Division of TUAA in 3/8/1938; UE Local 430 Basketball team (Emerson plant) is undefeated) 2/28/1948. Won first place in the CIO-AFL Labor Sports Federation (the successor to the TUAA). General Office Files Related to District 1. UE4.1.4., 1-16, 3-10 (111), 4-208, 6-1207. UE Records.

315 UE News 3/23/1940 Ruth Young director of UE District 6 education department. Notes that the TUAA has big UE support and fields softball and bowling teams. Notes that just about every local has a sports committee so its pretty much expected. Local 1225 gets early jump on softball teams. UE Records, online. Accessed December 16th, 2018.; The ILGWU was set up in a similar way and it is likely the ACWA largely copied the ladies garment workers.

316 Pamphlet on history of UE 1936-44 shows Bowling and Softball teams “UE locals started educational and recreational activities.” Local 901 sent its team to compete in the American Bowling Congress in New York City. Recreation is necessary to keep healthy. Softball team of Local 734. UE Publications. UE8.1.1.1. UE Records.

317 “A History of the Shorter Workday” pamphlet. 1942. UE Publications. UE8.1.1.1. UE Records, Box 1, Folder 25. UE Records.

185 days must be coupled with union-provided recreation that was healthy and popular. To ignore recreation was to risk workers succumbing to commercial recreation, subjected to pro- commercial messages instead of pro-union messages. In the February 10th issue of their national publication, the UE News, an article was written that argued someday Labor Sports would replace the dominant capitalist-oriented elite sports. The unidentified writer exclaimed about one day the symbolic “big games” in the United States would be Labor Sports events: "The future of sport has scheduled on it the rise of a mighty union sports movement coming from the great industrial unions throughout America. Who can say the unions themselves may not have their own Yale-Harvard football classic and their own World Series championship?"318 Not surprisingly, amongst its educational materials circulated amongst recreational programs were guides to sports in the Soviet Union, along with other pro-Soviet materials in the years before the

Red Scare.319 They routinely touted the physical culture of mass participation in the Soviet

Union, and its very structured organization for sports participation. In these years before the totalitarianism of Stalinism was better understood, it appeared that Communists in the UE envisioned building a Worker Sport movement through labor in the United States, noting that even during war, Soviet citizens played soccer for recreation. UE militants embraced that vision of Labor Sports because it proved to be enormously popular amongst its working class members.

The UE leadership organized its membership through UE Labor Sports specifically to larger anti-fascist causes, such as in 1941 when it helped organize a mass rally with other CIO unions in Pittsburgh against Hitler. The UE promoted the rally at its Labor Sports events to publicize

318 UE News, February 10th, 1945, pg 2. UE Records. Accessed December 12th, 2018.

319 “Soviet Sports” pamphlet by Eric A. Starbuck. 1945. Box 1, Folder 49. UE Publications. UE8.1.1.1. UE Records.

186 it.320 Ultimately, the organizers of UE Labor Sports knew it was important to have an by-all- means-necessary approach to bringing members into the union. As one organizer was quoted in the UE News, “By coming together in competitive sports activities with other locals they learn that the UE is a large and powerful organization, and that it does not only consist of the members of the particular shop they work in. As a result they develop a greater respect for the confidence in the local to which they belong.”321 That cohesion enabled the union to fight hard for shorter hours and bigger paychecks.

Philadelphia’s UE locals, which the UE designated as District 1, contained many former

Industrial Workers of the World members as well as Communists, Socialists, and Catholic trade unionists, who had emerged victorious from long battles against both Philco and RCA corporations as a few of the UE’s first victories. Not surprisingly, given the UE’s highly

democratic and boisterous culture, the

athletics were very lively.322 At the Philco

plant in South Philadelphia, Local 102

operated a competitive UE softball

league, basketball league, and bowling

league, noting in Plant 6 that the goal was

323 Athletics Committee, UE District 1, Philadelphia. Circa 1941. UE to whip its members into shape. The Records, University of Pittsburgh. Fair Use.

320 UE News, October 25th, 1941. Anti-fascist gymnists flash v for victory. UE and CIO rallying against Hitler. UE Records. 321 UE News, April 6th 1946. “Find Sports Help Build Phila UE.” UE Records.

322 For more on the history of Philadelphia and South Jersey UE organizing, see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 1999). Pgs. 12-40.

323 UE News, April 29th, 1939. District 1 Philco softball league in Local 102. Plant 6 selected team rapidly and says a goal is to whip people into shape. UE Records.

187

UE News recorded inter-union friendly rivalries within the Local 102’s Philco plant between the

Platers and the Press Shop, with barbs that the Platers should seek real talent from the Press Shop for its softball team. Much in the style of sports fan trash talk, reporter-worker “J.C.” declared in the pages of the Local’s newspaper: “With the introduction of Press Shop President Mike

Toohey into the lineup last week we can’t hope for that certain continued team work unless our worthy president gets into that old training grind and sheds that excess avoirdupois. Your observer encountered Bill Bender in the Platting Mill and was asked if we would insert a ‘For

Sale’ ad for a reasonably used softball team, apply to Pat Sylvester, Plating Mill.”324 By writing the coverage of Labor Sports as a fun back and forth rivalry, the UE Philadelphia Local drove up interest in the competition. By 1939, District 1 planned extensive sports programs during its winter months, including sports like basketball, bowling, rifle range squads, and ping-pong.

Local 102 stated that the key to organizing success was for each UE district across the nation to build centers for its members that would cater to recreational and social needs, noting that the

UE athletic association at Plant 6 of Philco was hosting bigger and better parties. A high degree of loyalty to the teams was expected, to the point that in one instance a team member was kicked off the team for missing a playoff game to work overtime at the plant.325

Indeed, by 1941, after the inaugural 1940-41 basketball season of the Philadelphia UE

League ended, District 1 organizers noted that UE teams played during the week, attended professional games on Fridays for pointers, and then attended the dances on the court after the

324 UE News, “Local 102 Ramblings” by J. C. May 27th, 1939. UE Records, Accessed December 12th, 2018; UE News, July 8th, 1939. Local 102 softball rivalry trash talk, challenging the Platers to go the Press Shop for real talent. Bloomfield NJ Local 410 team beats Newark. UE Records.

325 UE News, June 17th, 1939. Local 102 Philco press shop softball team kicks frank off team for working an overtime shift instead of going to a playoff game. UE Records.

188 games.326 The Philadelphia UE athletes noted that basketball teams were a good place to make friends, who would then attend union meeting together. Sports were a powerful way to form relationships while cementing loyalty to the union, said Local 155 basketball captain Charlie

Cobb.327 The UE had a good record of material improvement for its members, and its thriving sports programs built even stronger loyalty.328 Additional softball and bowling leagues only furthered these bonds. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, UE Local 332 began a bowling league in

Lancaster, and Williamsport Local 628 members started a basketball team.329

In St. Louis, communists had won clear leadership of the District 8. The most famous of these leaders was William Sentner, who had long been involved in the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations, including TUUL unions and the Unemployed Movement during the

Third Period of the Communist Party. He quickly helped organize District 8 of the UE, which developed a reputation as being a bastion of labor strength. Quickly, like most other CIO unions with large numbers of socialists or communists or other leftists, District 8 established a strong presence in CIO Labor Sports league participation. Often playing UAW teams in the late 1930s in CIO leagues, as well as ACWA squads, by 1940 it began operating its own leagues.330 In

326 A common practice in the era. For more, see Gena Caponi-Tabery, Jump For Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

327 UE News, October 7th, 1939. Philly Labor Sports Local 113 plans extensive winter sports program (basketball, bowling, rifle range, ping pong); March 16th, 1940, building a center for recreation and social center in each district brought up in Philly; April 30th, 1940. Local 102 plant 6 at philco athletic association is having bigger and bigger parties. UE Records.

328 UE News, April 5th, 1941. Philly UE first season basketball league ends. Teams often went to pro games on Fridays which were followed by dancing on the court. Basketball was good was to make friends, who then would go to the meetings together. Charlie Cobb local 155 basketball captain. UE Records.

329 UE News, October 12th, 1940. Local 332 of Lancaster PA starts bowling league. UE Records.

330 UE News, September 23rd, 1939. St. Louis CIO Softball League UE vs UAW. Rest of league forms an allstar team at the end. UE Records.

189

1940, UE District 8 set up four bowling leagues: two for general membership (mostly white), one for women, and one for black members (the desegregation of bowling alleys was not accomplished until after the war, something the UE enthusiastically supported). The union followed suit with basketball, establishing desegregated leagues for men and women in St.

Louis.331 UE softball tournaments to raise money for strikers in St. Louis became commonplace in the 1940s.332 Sentner himself helped passed a resolution on September 21st, 1940 for the UE

District 8 to begin coordinated basketball, softball, baseball, bowling, and other leagues, along with dances and choirs, stating:

It is a proven fact that such activities play a leading part in the program to strengthen Local Unions… Many employees, who are not now members of the UE, could be brought into Local Unions on the basis of an active sports and social programs… We believe it would be to the great benefit to the welfare of UE members to break down the existing barriers because of the needs for fraternization, therefore be it resolved: That the District #8 Council go on record as approving the immediate establishment of a sports and social committee with equal representation from all St. Louis UE Locals.333 Cleveland also proved to be a hotbed of UE Labor Sports. It began small, with basketball fives and softball nines, as teams were commonly called in this period, placed in local recreational leagues in 1939.334 By 1946, District 7 operated its own 10-team softball league, noting that despite the recreation program, it was able to increase its strike fund. Of dues, the district noted that only 3.8 cents of each union dues dollar went to recreation. The impact, the

331 UE News, September 27th, 1940 St. louis has 2 bowling leagues along with one for women and one for black members (segregation was still a big problem in bowling); November 3rd, 1940 St. Louis organizes basketball and bowling leagues of all genders. UE Records.

332 UE News, August 10th, 1940. Big picnic by St Louis locals, large softball tournament to raise money for strikers. UE Records.

333 “Report of General Vice President William Sentner to Quarterly Meeting of Executive Board, District 8” Sept 21, 1940. General Office Files Related to District 1. Series 4-1-8, Box 1, Folder 36. UE Records.

334 UE News, March 11th, 1939. Local 715 in Cleveland basketball team; August 17th 1940 big picnic in district 7 of Cleveland. UE Records.

190 union organizers argued, was well worth the small costs, especially as 41.6 cents went to the larger UE and CIO.335 District 7 locals worked extensively with the city to form baseball leagues for its members, carving out recreational space and helping improve local facilities.336 One of the few labor football teams operated out of Cleveland in the 1940s as well.337 Local 735 was recognized at an annual recreational league banquet in Cleveland for being one of the best amateur softball teams in the city, after beating a liquor store team.338 On the eve of the rapid destruction of the UE in the 1950s, the fourth season of UE Local 735 softball league came and went, a point of pride for its organizers.339 As recreational sports boomed in the immediate post- war years, Labor Sports was rapidly expanding.

Ohio was very popular for UE Labor Sports. As occurred elsewhere, labor sports had to contend with company sports, often directly breaking from company leagues. In Barberton,

Ohio, a small town outside of Akron and not far from the UE stronghold of Cleveland, union organizers set up a UE Labor Sports league in protest against being forced to bowl with scabs and management. As the dispatch to the UE News read: “For years, the company has sponsored a bowling league but foreman and the few stooges who worked during the 16-week strike

335 Annual Report for 1946. General Office Files Related to District 1. Series 4-1-8, Box 8, Folder 60. UE Records.

336 UE 735 News “Baseball Season Opens Up” April 1947; July-August 1947, 735 softball league works with city to make up rained out games. General Office Files Related to District 1. Series 4-1-8, Box 1, Folder 36. UE Records.

337 UE News, November 16th, 1940. Local 701 football team General Office Files Related to District 1. Series 4-1-8, Box 1, Folder 36. UE Records.; Football teams were rare in Labor Sports because of the high rates of injuries which could cause workers to miss work. Only the especially tough participated in full football games, and furthermore, during this era, football was generally associated with college rich kids. Still, labor football teams certainly did exist and from all accounts, were quite good.

338 CBF Fetes Softballers (UE 735 champs in American Monorail) Dec 1948. Bill Veeck of Cleveland Indians is guest speaker. 100 champs of various municipal leagues of which Local 735 is one. General Office Files Related to District 1. Series 4-1-8, Box 8, Folder 57. UE Records.

339 UE News April 1949. 4th consecutive softball season. Local set for big picnic after successful bowling and baseball. UE Records.

191 participate. Members of the union, unwilling to bowl with them, decided to set up an all-union league and funds were solicited from the local’s ranks for sanctioning and entry fees. Only members in good standing may bowl.”340 Meanwhile, Dayton Ohio saw Local 809 emerge as champions in 1939 of the local Gem City Softball League.341 Lima Ohio fielded a regular softball nine.342

Other cities throughout the country also hosted UE teams and leagues. In Buffalo, Local

501 operated a softball team in a CIO league, which raised money for other recreational

programs like a UE local drum

corps.343 In New England, the UE was

instrumental in establishing a

Connecticut CIO softball league

through the 1940s, in which 12 teams

UE Baseball team, Indianapolis area. 1942. UE Records, University of participated and hosted tournaments Pittsburgh. Fair Use. and state field days for members, including Bridgeport Local 203 and Hartford Local 251.344 In Massachusetts, the Lynn General

Electric plant’s UE Labor Sports ended up producing one player who had a brief career as a

340 UE News, September 22nd, 1941. ”Strike Brings Strikes On The Bowling Alley”. UE Records.

341 UE News. September 9th, 1939. Local 809 UE team champions of Gem City Softball League (Dayton). UE Records.

342 UE News May 18th, 1940. Lima OH puts together new teams local 724. UE Records.

343 UE News, July 1st, 1939. CIO League, Buffalo , local 501 has a softball team; May 27th, 1939 teams have been good Buffalo charity game raises money for drum corps. UE Records. 8

344 UE News, June 1st, 1940. Connecticut CIO Softball League local 251 of Hartford enters it. Formed at a conference in New Haven. 12 teams compete and a State Field Day with a tournament staged later in the summer; April 6th, 1946. GE Local 203 in Bridgeport challenges all softball. UE Records.

192 professional in the Red Sox farm system.345 Elsewhere in the Midwest, Local 1001 won the

Indianapolis Amateur Baseball Series. On the West Coast, UE Local 1421 basketball five won the CIO title in 1939 over the heavily favored warehouse union dribblers,346 while in the Upper

Midwest, Minneapolis UE Local 1126 won the local union sports league there.

Unfortunately, UE Labor Sports, along with the rest of the union, crumbled under the

Red Scare attacks during the late 1940s and 1950s. The UE generally refused to obey the Taft-

Hartley demand that union members sign affidavits that they were not Communists, partially because many of the militants of the union were Communists or at least fellow travelers, but also partially because it recognized that it was an attempt by industrialists and their conservative allies to defang labor. The UAW and the larger CIO were taken over by anti-Communist former

Socialists and traditional trade unionists, who expelled or forced out unions that refused to shed their Communist members. The UE was targeted by the CIO for membership raids, first by the

UAW and then a new union that was formed to replace it within the CIO. This new union, the

International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), promptly took with it several large locals, including most of Philadelphia in 1949. In the 1950s the UE declined from its height of 600,000

members in 1950 to 10,000 members

by the end of the decade, largely

replaced by the IUE and UAW. While

it recovered in the 1960s as a result of

its progressive politics and militant UE Member holding up a UE basketball coat for Local 506. Circa 1945. UE Records, University of Pittsburgh. Fair Use.

345 UE News. Lynne UE members send a member to the Red Sox “Lynn UE Members Will Have A Special Stake in the Red Sox”. UE Records.

346 UE News, April 1st, 1939. Local 1421 Los Angeles basketball team, champion of the CIO league. UE Records.

193 leadership, as well as its superior organizing over the UAW and IUE, the UE never regained the national power it once held. UE Labor Sports did not undergo a slow decline like the UAW’s programs, but was instead, unceremoniously destroyed by the Red Scare.

The Steelworkers (Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC)/United Steelworkers of

America (USW))

The Steel Worker Organizing Committee (SWOC) and its successor union, the United

Steelworkers of America (USW), were projects of the United Mineworkers, whose goal was to protect its flank in the steel industry. The union was founded on a similar autocratic, centralized trade-unionist model as the United Mineworkers.347 Indeed, SWOC/USW’s leadership was transferred directly from the Mineworkers, and though it hired socialists and communists as organizers, it promptly fired them after achieving victories in order to prevent the rise of any internal union opposition to the leadership.348 Those victories came either through intimidation without even a strike, in the case of US Steel in 1937, or by the federal government forcing labor peace on Little Steel (the nickname of smaller steel firms), after long and bloody labor struggles, on the eve of war in 1941.349 The Steelworkers, therefore, though it made a difference in the lives of workers engaged in hellish steel work, was born less from below and more from top-down imposition. To be sure, there was a popular yearning for union representation in the steel

347 SWOC was the initial name of the union, signifying that it was the foundation of a union, which the United Steelworkers (USW) technically was a merger of SWOC and an earlier craft union that was hardly functional by the Great Depression. Functionally, SWOC and USW were the same organization.

348 USWA and Labor Oral History Collection. 1967. James Gallagher said Mineworkers kept communists out and that communists were good organizers. HCLA1684. Box 26, Folder 4. United Steelworkers of America Records. Historical Collections and Labor Archives. Eberly Family Special Collections Library. Pennsylvania State University.

349 Unlike US Steel, “Little Steel” resorted to violence in resisting the CIO union drive to make SWOC the union of steel workers. Most famously, the “Memorial Day Massacre” outside the Republic Steel plant in Chicago, when Chicago police opened fire on strikers, killing 10, epitomized the street wars of organizing the steel industry.

194 industry, made clear by the fact that when steel workers were allowed to vote for a union, they voted for SWOC with large majorities. However, the combination of its centralized leadership from the beginning to the manner of its birth meant that the Steelworkers were the most cautious in allowing rank and file participation in its SWOC incarnation, and no radicals, Socialists nor

Communists, ever made it into leadership during its CIO years. Not surprisingly, its recreational

Labor Sports started later than other CIO unions and lacked a certain vibrancy, due to the lack of internal union democracy and rank and file worker involvement in union affairs. Still, when the

USW threw its weight behind Labor Sports, it became as widespread as other CIO Labor Sports amongst its locals.350 I argue that, unlike other unions where radicals often organized the sports in response to rank and file demand, the Steelworkers instead mimicked their CIO comrades’ recreational sports accomplishments after seeing the success of other CIO Labor Sports in building loyalty and camaraderie amongst workers. Their Labor Sports programs lasted into the

1970s, since there were few radical organizers or leaders to purge during the labor civil wars of the Red Scare. Nevertheless, despite the lack of rank and file democracy in the USW during this period, Labor Sports Still were a popular recreational program even from its early days.

Since its strongholds were generally in western Pennsylvania (particularly Pittsburgh) and Ohio, most local labor teams were formed in those locations. Unlike other unions that generally favored softball over baseball because of the lesser rate of injuries to its workers, the steel workers seemed to have no such qualms, and baseball teams seemed to be at least as popular as softball as a summer sport. Unlike other CIO Labor Sports, there was not much of an effort to create women’s teams, even by the girlfriends or wives of male workers, nor was there

350 During the 1940s, the United Steelworkers were usually referred to as “USA-CIO” for United Steelworkers of America. That naming was probably an effort at wrapping the union in the flag, especially during the WWII years.

195 much effort to include African-American workers in sports teams, with a few exceptions.351

Therefore, Labor Sports in the United Steelworkers was largely a working class white men’s affair. Still, even in the conservative USW, Labor Sports were a key part of establishing the legitimacy of the USW in the eyes of workers, as much as the wages and benefits won in its collective bargaining agreements. Recreation made the union permanent in the steel industry as much as wages and benefits won in its collective bargaining agreements, because it made the union normal. While the sports pages of Steel Labor mostly just listed scores and team pictures as opposed to quotes from worker-players as common in other union newspapers, the sheer amount of teams featured point to enthusiastic participation once the union offered Labor Sports.

Although the establishment of Labor Sports in the USW came later than the rest of the

CIO big unions in the auto and electrical industries, it followed a similar pattern. The first reference to a SWOC team occurred in June 1939, when SWOC Lodge 1200 of Canton OH fielded a baseball team that challenged any other labor team within 200 miles of them to games.

Accepting their challenge was a baseball nine formed from the SWOC lodges in New

Kensington, PA. These teams were placed in local recreational leagues, and played other CIO teams when possible.352 In some cases, SWOC even co-sponsored Labor Sports with companies to create a joint management-labor team of semi-pro steel workers.353 SWOC teams in these years seemed to be limited to the initiative of local lodges, with the idea that they could inspire

351 Some of the lack of integrated teams may stem from the fact that many steel mills operated in small company towns outside Pittsburgh, where the local population was mostly white “ethnics”.

352 Steel Labor. June 23rd, 1939. SWOC Lodge 1200 of Canton OH fields a baseball team that challenges any other labor team within 200 miles of them. New Kensington PA forms softball team. V. 1-4. United Steelworkers of America Records.

353 Meyer Bernstein Papers. HCLA1440 Box 5, Folder 24. History of USWA with baseball teams. United Steelworkers of America Records.

196 other lodges to form teams. When possible they played each other or other CIO teams, such as the challenge of SWOC Lodge 1469 put out in the Pittsburgh area in June 1940 to other CIO teams.354 These teams were inspired by Labor Sports in other CIO unions and sought to copy their success even if the SWOC/USW as a national union was uninterested in a coordinated recreational program or other social unionism, by and large.355 These teams were put together by rank and file steelworkers instead, and fielded entirely by local efforts. In Canton, SWOC locals put together an all-star softball team that went 36-11-4 in local recreational league play, and declared that it would play for any union picnic or celebrations. By 1940, this sort of program was a regular feature in the UAW and UE, but was not yet as widespread in SWOC as it struggled to become established in the steel industry. Additionally, it was slow to embrace these programs because of its leadership’s suspicions about bottom-up organizing.

Despite these limitations, as SWOC/USW achieved victories from above, Steelworker

Labor Sports began to slowly germinate in places where it was established by other CIO unions as rank and file steel workers formed their own teams, piecemeal. This was partly because of the continued exposure to other CIO unions’ Labor Sports programs, and because of the demand by working class people for recreational programs. Slowly, the USW realized the wisdom that had been realized years earlier in the ILGWU, UAW, UE, and other unions: that Labor Sports would increase loyalty to the union and that they were a good way to fill increased leisure time by its members, even during the war years. While USW squads tended to be less progressive and had

354 Steel Labor. June 26th, 1940. SWOC Lodge 1469 challenges Pittsburgh teams, especially other SWOC or CIO teams. United Steelworkers of America Records.

355 Steel Labor. August 30th, 1940. SWOC locals all near Canton OH put together a all-star softball team in 1940 that goes 36-11-4. Challenge other union teams and will play at union picnics and celebrations. United Steelworkers of America Records.

197 less contentious relationships with management than UAW or UE teams, they spread slowly but surely beyond SWOC Lodge 1147, which expanded by 1941 to include softball and basketball teams and the Canton OH Labor Sports strongholds.356 Teams were established in the symbolic

Homestead, the site of the 1892 steel strike, not long after union recognition was established by

SWOC, as well as in the Youngstown OH plants.357 The massive plant at Bethlehem Steel in the

Lehigh Valley, after USW won victory as the federal government forced the company to the bargaining table, saw a Labor Sports program put into effect by the local.358 Similarly, in

Williamsport PA, Local 2499 formed baseball teams, and in the Pittsburgh suburb of Hazelwood, a bowling league was organized in the fall of 1942.359 By the end of the war, sports were not uncommon across USW locals. However, these efforts were not coordinated in any sense nationally, beyond the piecemeal efforts of local workers. Still, they were common enough that locals as far away from the USW core in Pennsylvania and Ohio had Labor Sports programs.

Locals as far away as as Duluth MN or Denver CO, operated their own teams in local recreational leagues, though they were too small and isolated to form their own leagues.360

356 Steel Labor. January 30th, 1941. SWOC 1147 of Pittsburgh has softball, Local 1147 puts together basketball team. United Steelworkers of America Records.

357 Steel Labor. July 1945. Homestead was the sight of the 1892 strike which ended in utter defeat by the union and had remained totally union free in the decades since; Local 1397 Homestead PA basketball team battles for league lead; Local 1331 of Mahoning County Softball League OH of Youngstown OH. United Steelworkers of America Records.

358 Steel Labor. September 25th, 1942. Bethlehem Steel forms sports program. United Steelworkers of America Records.

359 Steel Labor. October 23rd, 1942. Local 2499 Williamsport PA Steel Plant Local 2499 baseball team. South side Hazelwood in Pittsburgh forms bowling league district 16. United Steelworkers of America Records.

360 Steel Labor. September 23rd, 1943. Local 1069 winners of baseball league in Duluth Minn; September 1945. Denver CO Local 3029 sept 1944’ District 16 USA-CIO team went 30-7-3. United Steelworkers of America Records.

198

When the war ended, the Steelworkers were swept up in the post-war strike wave that called for massive mobilization. Out of those strikes, which required a high degree of coordination with other CIO unions, the national USW offices finally seemed to understand the

need to embrace at least some limited social

unionism. From there, the leaders of the

national union made a new commitment to

Labor Sports, which continued for the next

two decades. As the CIO (and USW

especially) opened new organizing drives in

the American South, it strove to win

loyalties in ways it had not done prior. One

of the first steps in the massive organizing

drive in Alabama was to encourage

recreational programs, such as the baseball

team of the Steelworkers in Birmingham

Steelworker Labor Sports and other recreation, 1947. USW AL.361 For the first time, a USW-specific Records, Pennsylvania State University. Fair Use. basketball league was launched in Pittsburgh in January 1947, in which all districts were asked to field teams of steel workers. Of these teams, though most were all white, the district 16 hoopsters had two black members. The eight team league proved very popular and expanded through the years.362 These teams were talented

361 Steel Labor. August 1946. USA in CIO drive in Alabama fields teams in Birmingham AL. CIO director stands with them there. United Steelworkers of America Records.

362 Steel Labor. January 1947. Launches basketball league in Pittsburgh. All districts field teams in the area. 8 teams fielded. All steelworkers. Some are former high school and college players. District 19 is integrated team with two black players. The rest look all white. United Steelworkers of America Records.

199 enough to attract former high school and college stars, and one player who had been active in

USW basketball and baseball teams in Pittsburgh, Al Kozar, went on to play on the Washington

Senators and Chicago White Sox.363 Labor Sports in the USW were partly approved because of the popularity of CIO Labor Sports in other unions and partly because rank and file steelworkers wanted these labor specific athletics, in order to compete with company sports for the attention of workers.

Much like the UAW, the

USW exerted pressure on local

communities to open swimming

pools for children, and to expand

facilities for baseball, basketball,

and bowling for its working class

members. By 1947, it expanded to

form baseball leagues, softball

tournaments, and even hockey

leagues in its Canadian branches.364

It began hosting annual eight-team

baseball tournaments on Labor Day USW Basketball League, 1947. USW Records, Pennsylvania State University. Fair Use. of steelworker lineups from across

363 Steel Labor. March 1947. Al Kozar plays on basketball and baseball teams in USA. Becomes a professional and plays at Class A Scranton. United Steelworkers of America Records. Kozar’s professional statistics: https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kozar-001alb.

364 USWA Local 302 Herr Stadium baseball scorebook, 1947 season. Aluminum Workers of America. HRG 1.701. Box 17, Folder 5. United Steelworkers of America Records.

200 its districts.365 By that point, the advantages of the CIO Labor Sports model were apparent in making their presence felt in the free time of its membership and in the larger community, and the USW declared it was committing to building real Labor Sports. The union wrote in the pages of Steel Labor, its national newspaper, in advance of a new baseball tournament: “While USA basketball, softball, baseball, bowling and hockey teams have been operating in the past in both union-sponsored and community leagues, the current baseball tournaments represent the first major step by the United Steelworkers to promote sports for its membership on a nation-wide, inter-district basis.”366 The national office declared plans, which it quickly carried out, to create softball leagues in each of the 12 Steelworker districts. Some Districts, such as Buffalo, (perhaps seeing how well the UE Labor Sports were functioning), announced plans to begin softball nines in each of its 87 locals. The Steel Labor newspaper, knowing the value of a good plotline, wrote extensively of the budding rivalry between Pennsylvania and Ohio Steelworker baseball teams in these new leagues and tournaments.367 Finally, the USW even started a semi-pro football team in the Pittsburgh area, calling them the real “Steelers”, a barb at the professional NFL Pittsburgh

Steelers.368

Indeed, by the end of the decade, all districts understood how Labor Sports could help bring new members into greater union involvement, involve their immediate friends and family,

365 Steel Labor. Tony Zale middleweight champion 1940 also a USA member; Pressuring local communities to open swimming pools for kids. Baseball, basketball, bowling; May 1947 Galt Canada Hockey Team Local 2899 and 2890; Bowling District 23 of Ohio-West Virginia; Homestead champions of USA basketball team’ Indiana USA baseball team to play eastern USA team like in Johnston PA. United Steelworkers of America Records.

366 Steel Labor. August 1947 8 team baseball tournament. Labor Day tournament. United Steelworkers of America Records.

367 Steel Labor, Summer of 1940. Rivalries between Ohio and PA Steelworker baseball squads. United Steelworkers of America Records.

368 Steel Labor. November 1948. Sponsored a “Steelers” semi-pro team. United Steelworkers of America Records.

201 and also win over people who remained suspicious of the union. In an internal memo of District

13, which included Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, a key area in the CIO’s drive to organize in the South, the district organizers laid out the necessity of building a coordinated USW Labor

Sports program:

In line with the policy advocated by the International Union that we participate in community affairs and activities beyond our union work, many local unions have sponsored various athletic programs. The thought behind this is twofold. Union activity is serious business and requires much concentration and application and an addition of recreation brings relief and variety, not only to the participants, but to the spectators as well. Furthermore many of the less-enlightened citizenry persist in regarding us a group of grimy-faced trouble makers who are continually embarrassing management by demanding more money with a loud voice. Seeing us take on other roles, and mingling with other groups under different circumstances under union sponsorship and local union designation, goes far in changing that feeling and in raising our status in the public. So we take a great deal of pride in the record of sports activities promoted by local unions in District 13. Baseball, duck-pins, softball, bowling and basketball has flourished. While championships are not as important as the participation itself, several trophies and prizes have been won by teams from the district. We feel these endeavors are very much worthwhile and have paid dividends in health, recreation and public recognition; and hope our sports participation will be expanded in the future.369 Despite the initial reluctance by the national union, organizers throughout the union were bringing their locals and districts into the Labor Sports fold. They realized that they were behind unions like the UAW, UE, and ILWU, let alone the ILGWU or ACWA, because of the long insistence that the union was to only concentrate on wages and benefits and leveling power on the shop floor, and not the wider version of social unionism. But local organizers, like the ones who wrote the statement above, realized the spirit of Labor Sports: that winning was fine and good, but just the simple acts of fun and accessible recreation were important to building the long-term relevance and loyalties of its members, beyond wages and benefits. Therefore, the

369 District 13 records. (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas). 1949. Meyer Bernstein Papers. HCLA1440 Box 22. United Steelworkers of America Records.

202 national union set aside resources throw the union’s weight behind in order to build a

Steelworker Labor Sports.

By the end of the decade and into the 1950s, when much of the rest of Labor Sports was either destroyed in the Red Scare-inspired expulsions and interunion raids (as in the case of the

UE), or suffered a slow decline in vibrancy as rank and file action was gutted (as in the case of the UAW), USW Labor Sports continued for another two decades. However, USW Labor Sports was slashed during the plant closures in the 1970s and 1980s across much of the steel industry.

USW Labor Sports were largely

apolitical in comparison to other CIO

originated Labor Sports, seeking to

simply create an outlet for good

publicity rather than to provide

recreation and outlets for rank and file

democracy. Until the rise of rank and

file caucuses in the Steelworkers union Steelworker softball, Local 1219, circa 1950. USW Records, Pennsylvania State University. Fair Use. in the 1970s, USW Labor Sports lacked potency for creating bonds of solidarity, and by the time they began to show signs of real democratic prowess, American labor was on the retreat.370

370 United Steelworkers of America District 30 records. District 30 started a sports program in 1956, as others were winding down or transitioning to golf and occasional bowling. Other districts continued their programs until the USW was hallowed out by plant closures in the 1970s-80s. HCLA 1921. Box 19. United Steelworkers of America Records.

203

The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) and the West

Coast Communists

No doubt there are a few among the general public of San Francisco present here at this, the San Francisco Warehousemen’s Third Annual Ball, who think only in terms of picket lines, strikes, and lockouts when word is mentioned of the C.I.O. Warehousemen. But, in the words of a commenter on one of the radio programs, ‘Don’t YOU believe it,’ for the San Francisco Warehouse Union has one of the most varied recreational programs of any Union organization in the country. For instance, there is a crack men’s basketball team, and an equally good women’s cage squad. There are softball teams, hard ball teams, golf, volley ball, band, bowling squads.371 The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) was certainly not just about strikes and picket lines. From its very beginning, its leadership believed in transforming the hard life of not only maritime industry workers but creating larger institutions to create a better world for working class people in general. Thus, it is not surprising that their militant leadership embraced Labor Sports. The ILWU rose in an unusual fashion compared to the other CIO unions, which may have helped it weather the anti-Communist storm of the 1950s.

Because the union survived that decade with its values and membership largely intact, ILWU

Labor Sports programs lasted the longest of any North American union in its original dynamic character. Ignoring the Third Period call to build red unions, Communists in the Bay Area, most prominently the Australian-born former Wobbly Harry Bridges, took over the Pacific Coast chapter of the corrupt International Longshoremen Association (ILA).372 They transformed it into a militant union that led a general strike in 1934 in San Francisco. Seceding from the national ILA in 1937 and joining the CIO federation, it quickly dominated the docks across the

371 “Third Annual Ball and Floorshow” April 22nd, 1939. pg 5. larc.ms.0413 carton 128. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

372 The ILA continued its prescense largely on the East Coast and Gulf Coast, with a reputation for being mob connections, and doing little for its membership. The 1954 class movie On The Waterfront was largely centered on the ILA in Hoboken NJ, though the union was not named.

204

Pacific Coast. The organizers moved inland to establish a warehouse division (Local 6) along with its longshoremen roots (Local 10) as the International Longshoremen’s and

Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).373 Both the longshore and warehouse locals of the ILWU embraced labor sports early on in a loud ideological fashion, with—like the UE-- a strong commitment to rank and file democracy. I argue that the ILWU was and is an example of the potential of the American labor movement, particularly as it related to Labor Sports. It was unabashedly determined to build a better life for rough-and-tumble dock workers, and readily embraced Labor Sports. Not surprisingly, since many of its leaders were Communists or fellow- traveler militants, their teams and leagues became a favorite of the People’s World, the newspaper of the Pacific coast Communist Party. In fact, former boxers and football players for the union often ended up being the brawlers with strike-breakers on the docks, such as Claude

Stotts Sr., who made short work of any scabs who attempted to fight him with their fists.374

As the West-coast ILA transformed into the ILWU under the leadership of the

Australian-born Communist Harry Bridges and his militant allies, the union was determined to build a large Maritime union that would organize the entire industry, from ships to docks to warehouses.375 By 1938, after two years of organizing, the warehouse union section of the

373 For the formation of the ILWU, see Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seaman, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Harvey Schwartz, The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938 (Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, 1978); Today, the ILWU stands for International Longshore and Warehouse Union, removing the “men” from its title to be more inclusive in 1997. 374 Claude Stotts Sr. interview. Conducted May 24th, 1984 by Harvey Schwartz. Picket captain. Tell boys to be at a certain place at a certain time. Watch out for the police and fight off any scabs. Despite being a boxer, the scabs didn’t usually fight with their fists. Stotts, a former professional boxer, later participated in a boxing tournament to raise money for the longshoremen’s union during a 1936 strike. ILWU Union Historical Archive, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, San Francisco CA.

375 Harry Bridges always denied being a Communist but nevertheless up until the end of World War Two mostly took CPUSA party-line positions except when it came to labor organizing, when he mostly pragmatically fought for the best possible conditions for longshore and warehouse workers. For instance, he and his radical clique [insert

205

ILWU, local 6, spanning the entirety of the West Coast and was the largest single union local of that region, with 8,000 total members.376 Its rapid growth soon eclipsed its longshoremen comrades, and was aided by taking a dynamic social unionism approach from its very founding.

Local 6 activists almost immediately set about creating a Labor Sports program within the

ILWU, taking the opportunity to note that company sports were a disgrace because management ran them for their own benefit and not for the workers’ interests.377 Instead, Local 6 worked to join the growing Labor Sports movement that would be for everyone, an echo of earlier radical efforts to make a more egalitarian sports. Indeed, they proclaimed that “With this sports program we will join a sports movement that is open to all.”378 Since funds were always short, they began an annual ball and floor show to fund the recreation program with sports as its most popular feature—a program that continued for decades.

Almost from the beginning in the ILWU, Labor Sports were not without controversy.

Sports organizers addressed these head on. In a letter published in support of the ball and floorshow, more traditional unionists critiqued the Labor Sport movement: “When the

Warehouse Union first launched its broad sports and activities program there were many “pure

exact term here for his followers] ignored the isolating Third Period partyline and instead of building TUUL unions, they took over the existing ILA and led it into the San Francisco 1934 general strike, which fit well in the soon- coming Popular Front line. Comintern files opened in the 1990s proved that, not surprisingly, Bridges was a Communist Party member, though he never let that get in the way of being a good union leader.

376 “Second Annual Ball and Floorshow” April 22nd, 1938. Program: Warehouse union Local 6 was largest union on west coast with 8,800 members, in san fran. Organized in 1936-7 from the ILA (shortly becoming the ILWU). Pg 3. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

377 Photographs: May 10th, 1937. Baseball League forms- Owl Drug, Woolsworth, McKessons, Bone Coal, Extra Board. May 23rd 1938 Getting the warehouse league off the ground takes a bit to get going. Condemns company sports as a disgrace. ILWU Historical Archives.

378 People’s World. February 7th, 1938. 2/7/1938 “With this sports program we will join a sports movement that is open to all.” Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

206 and simple” trade unionists who argued that sports had no place in the trade union movement, and that it was a waste of time and money to promote this type of activity.”379 Yet, they noted the danger of totally ignoring sports while the conservative forces embraced them. As one Local 6

Labor Sports organizer who argued in favor of robust Labor Sports programs noted, to ignore sports was to open up their members to anti-union forces who did not mind using sports to make their point:

Yet most trade unionists have observed, one time or another, that their strikes and labor disputes can be wiped out of the headlines by such sporting events as the Joe Louis-Max Schleming [SIC] bout. They have witnessed the development of sports programs in hundreds of other organizations such as Y’s, young people’s church groups, social and fraternal groups, and the Mantle Club, which has a definite anti-union bias. They have witnessed the building of recreation parks that have become centers of life for thousands of young people in cities all over the nation. Indeed, 1/7th of the entire national income has in the past years been spent on recreation and amusement.” 380

The Warehouse organizers noted that although employers had fought tooth and nail against the shortening of the workday, they had also moved to fill the new free time of workers with company sponsored sports. They then used company sports, the organizers argued, to avoid paying better wages. The union’s Labor Sports, on the other hand, not only did not substitute sports for material gains, but used sports to argue for better wages. ILWU Labor Sports helped win over workers who previously had no interest in union activities and helped pry away workers from company sports. Sports and recreation sponsored by the union greatly aided in consolidation of the union as an institution to which workers felt they belonged.381

379 ILWU internal memo, March 1941. larc.ms.0413 carton 40. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

380 Ibid.

381 Ibid.

207

ILWU Labor Sports proved to be a very active program up and down the west coast.

Befitting the pattern of Labor Sports by the 1930s and 40s, the most popular sports were baseball, softball, basketball, and bowling, with some boxing and football mixed in. Baseball was so popular that teams operated even in the offseason winter months of the Bay area’s temperate climate, with 40 players showing up to an off season practice of the longshoremen’s baseball squad in San Francisco.382 Women’s teams were also mixed in from both female workers and girlfriends or wives of male workers. Much like we will see in the next chapter in

New York communist-oriented unions during the same period, the ILWU often played other

leftist-oriented teams, like other CIO unions or IWO

teams, routinely meeting either UE or UAW teams

for the state CIO title game.383 In addition to playing

in recreational leagues and CIO leagues, it also

formed ILWU-specific leagues, especially in larger

shops and metropolitan areas.384 Most importantly,

labor publications put out by both the International of

the ILWU and locals publications, along with the

Communists’ Peoples’ World publication, contained ILWU Blue Tide football team. 1939. Curtesy of ILWU retiree Mike Hurlock. sports pages that delighted in covering the exploits of

ILWU teams, mainly in the Bay area and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. To the delight of

382 People’s World. January 26th, 1938. “The Batter Is Up!” longshore first baseball practice 40 show up. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

383 People’s World. February 17th, 1938. ILWU vs UAW for CIO crown. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

384 People’s World. January 17th, 1938. “San Diego ILWU Sets Up Hoop League” management actually cooperates and gives some uniforms. 7 team warehouse worker league; January 18th, 1938. “Five Team Circuit Is Founded” in Oakland. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

208 communist organizers, Local 13 in Los Angeles formed a traveling football team in 1936 called the Blue Tide, which was talented enough to have defeated the USC and UCLA football teams in

1939.385 According to long time militant ILWU member Frank Sundtedt in an interview in 1981, the Blue Tides also defeated a professional team named the Los Angeles Rams in 1936.386 The

Blue Tide developed a reputation as “one hell of a team”, and was composed entirely of longshoremen. In the spirit of the union, where solidarity was very much a code members lived by, the player-workers of the Blue Tide had their coworkers cover for them during shifts so they could play their games.387

In an article on Local 6’s talented women’s basketball team, which appeared in the local’s fourth annual Ball and Floor Show in 1941, the spirit of the militant ILWU Labor Sports was summed up nicely: “A trade union promotes the general welfare of its members and ‘general welfare’ means in all fields, including sports.”388 The ILWU, like the UE, UAW, and ILGWU, believed in the larger power of the union to engage in the lives of working class people, and cut to the root: sports were extremely popular amongst workers and it was important to engage with their interests. Up and down the West Coast, ILWU teams operated both teams in local recreation leagues and leagues of their own locals, as seen in other CIO unions. As was the case

385 Blue Tide Local 13 football team program, 1939. defeated USC and UCLA. Quite talented. Los Angeles based. Hurlock recalled attending softball tournaments to commemorate Bloody Thursday in the 1980s-90s. Courtesy of Mike Hurlock, retired longshoreman of 42 years. Received October 26th, 2019.

386 Though it was either a professional team that went by the name Los Angeles Rams but not the same NFL team that exists today, which moved to LA in 1946, or the date is incorrect.

387 Frank Sundstedt interview, March 26th, 1984. Conducted by Harvey Schwartz. ILWU Union Historical Archive, International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

388 “Fifth Annual Ball and Floorshow” April 26th, 1941. Program: contains showcase of women’s basketball. Pg 4. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

209 with the UAW and UE, and to a lesser extent the SWOC/USW, the teams were quite popular with their membership and were a way to not only make inroads into the community through use of fields and competition with apolitical teams, but also to provide inexpensive or free fun for members. The ILWU soon won a reputation for rank and file democratic participation in the affairs of the union, and being able to pursue member interests like sports proved to be a huge organizing boon. Young working class people were particularly interested in participating.

In the Popular Front era, one of the projects of labor militants was to present themselves as ordinary people who wanted a fair shake, as a means of encouraging more members to join the unions. Union publications and friendly newspapers commonly reminded members to form teams that the ILWU would then support. Participation was just as good as being athletically talented at the sports, the publications proclaimed.389 Shops would form teams and elect their coaches, and would offer free prizes and banquets at the end of the season for those shop teams.

The locals also called for members to show up to support union games in an effort to normalize

ILWU members as regular people

fighting for a better world for

workers. John Schomaker, a business

agent for the ILWU San Francisco

longshoremen’s local, argued for the

bottom up nature of ILWU sports: “I

think the best way is for the union

members who are interested in sports ILWU Basketball team, 1938. ILWU Archive. Used With Permission.

389 People’s World. January 12th, 1938 “ILWU Official Boosts Labor Sports League”. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

210 to go about it themselves. Then once they get started the union will probably be glad to contribute to their support. I know the ILWU helps out its basketball and baseball teams.”390 The

ILWU sports organizers involved themselves in the politics of San Francisco in order to carve out more recreational space for working class people, developing a reputation as the young radical hotheads of recreational sports. It was noted as a positive development in the Communist newspaper People’s World: “Declared City Recreational Director Lyons, in nominating the

ILWU representative: ‘While we want old timers on this advisory board, we certainly should not overlook the young, up-and-coming and colorful ILWU bunch. Without them, we wouldn’t have a fair cross-section of opinion.”391

Teams of locals would show up to each others’ games to help create a larger community.392 By 1941, on the eve of the US entry to the war, ILWU locals and shops across its strongholds in the Bay Area and Los Angeles almost always had sports committees that produced men’s and women’s teams, and where possible, fielded integrated teams.393 Indeed, radical militants took pride in fielding teams that included workers of all racial backgrounds.394

Through the ILWU, both longshoremen and warehousemen were at the forefront of fielding

390 Ibid. 391 People’s World. February 17th, 1938. “S.F. Baseballers Hit Recreation Shortage” calls for better recreational facilities by 2000 players. 1 of 5 on committee is ILWU local 6, the other is another union team for 2 of 5. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

392 Warehousemens’ News. September 11th, 1939. men are impressed by women’s softball teams, hitting home run after home run. Asks members to show up to union games in support in order to help normalize the ILWU as American and normal as anyone else so new members will join or support the ILWU. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

393 Warehousemens’ News. May 6th, 1940. calls for people to show up to support union teams or form more ones. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

394 Warehousemens’ News. April 7th, 1941. vibrant Oakland, san fran, san jose sports programs in local 6. Men and womens teams. Softball basketball, bowling. ILWU Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

211

Labor Sports on the West Coast. They helped build a larger CIO sports, with plans before the war began to build a CIO Labor Sports Center in San Francisco.395 They also tried to stage games against local colleges, such as St. Mary’s in 1938, confident that their teams could beat regular college teams (they won by a point, 35-34).396 Additionally, a friendly rivalry developed within the union between the longshoremen and warehousemen in Labor Sports play, highlighted by well-meaning trash talk between the two. In the 1937-38 basketball season, Oakland warehouse union basketball center-forward Orville Peterson claimed that the Dockers were avoiding playing their team out of fear, though the reader gets the impression that it was written as a light-hearted jab and not out of malice between the two teams.397 The teams of the two branches would continue this good-natured rivalry into other sports, like softball.398

Not surprisingly, given its communist leadership and its long investment in the Labor

Sports movement, ILWU teams operated in the world of leftist sports culture. It often dipped into those larger networks of fellow travelers of the Popular Front to help build a stronger anti-racist, anti-fascist labor movement: one that included Labor Sports.399 For instance, during a lock-out by the company over wages, longshoremen in 1938 wrote to the Communist-affiliated fraternal

International Workers’ Order to set up a game against their team in order to entertain its

395 Warehousemens’ News. January 16th, 1941. winter baseball team played in a gym despite rain. Crocket unit san jose. Pg 6 CIO Center to be established in San Fran. ILWU Local 6 Records.

396 Letter Correspondence: writes letter asking for games vs St Mary’s college teams vs warehouse union team. 12/27/1937, ILWU Local 6 Records, Accessed August 5th, 2019; People’s World 2/23/1938 ILWU Oakland squad beats st mary’s 35-34.

397 People’s World. March 11th, 1938 Rivalry between Oakland warehousers and San Fran Dockers. Oakland center- forward Orville Peterson claims SF is ducking them. .

398 People’s World. June 21st, 1938. Warehouse vs Longshore baseball teams.

399 People’s World. June 12th, 1938. Anti-fascist picnic in Oakland. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

212 members and to raise money during the lockout.400 In 1940, the warehouse local 6 staged a benefit baseball game to raise money for the People’s World newspaper, and the People’s World routinely advertised in ILWU publications.401 Most interestingly, the People’s World, founded in

January 1938 as a West Coast version of the NYC centered Daily Worker, contained an extensive sports section from its very beginning. In that section, in addition to covering Pacific

League local professional baseball teams and social justice campaigns to integrate baseball, or the triumphs of boxer Joe Louis as a blow to segregation,402 it extensively covered leftist sports on the West Coast, with ILWU teams by far receiving the most coverage. Additionally, the newspaper covered CIO leagues and teams in general, noting its growing influence in 1939 in

Los Angeles:

Virtually every important CIO union in the area surrounding Los Angeles has had a team in the conference play, either in the Class A league – in which Local 1421 captured the title – or in the Class B league, composed of smaller players or weaker teams. ‘Sports among the CIO unions in Los Angeles have been a definite success,’ according to District Representative Verne Kennedy. ‘It not only provides the players themselves with a lot of healthy fun, but brings various unions into contact with one another and with non-union teams, such as our team has played.’ He said it was a good way of bringing the families of the union members into the union’s activities.”403 The People’s World sports section often made connections with what was left of the

European Worker Sport movement in the 1930s, where Communists and Socialists cooperated where they could. For instance, in early 1938 it printed an article from the French Athletic

400 Letter Correspondence: 10/8/1938 Locked out SF warehouseman writes to IWO in SF to provide recreation to men and women locked out and hopes they can help with kickstarting bigger recreation program. Local 6 Records. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

401 Warehousemens’ News December 12th, 1940. Raffles off to benefit People’s World. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

402 People’s World. January. 1938 Also covers Joe Louis’s rise as blow against Jim Crowism “A King Wins His Crown”.

403 People’s World. March 31st, 1939. “State Title At Stake in LA Sunday” championship between UE Local 1421 and ILWU Longshoremen (10).

213

Congress which asked for more international Labor Sports, pointing out that Labor Sports in the

United States were a continuation of Worker Sport.404 Furthermore, the article stated that English labor soccer teams were operating at a high level during the Popular Front, and argued that

American labor teams should be as well.405 It covered the still-existing Czech Worker Sport meetings for links to the possibilities of left-wing sports organizing, though the Czech leagues themselves would soon be squelched by Hitler’s armies.406 Of course, Communists rarely acknowledged previous party-lines, and left out mention of the Labor Sports Union from the

Third Period. They instead concentrated on the current, much more effective, Popular Front

Labor Sports movement, which involved a synergy of multiple leftist popular movements. All that mattered to communist labor unionist organizers was that these teams drew large crowds, like the May Day 1938 ILWU in San Francisco, which drew 2000 spectators to see the

Horseshoe Tavern nine beat the Dockers team, 16-5.407

The People’s World covered the CIO Labor Sports of the West Coast much as the Daily

Worker covered the East Coast Communist sports federations, which I will explore in Chapter 6.

This meant daily scores and stories.408 Early in its existence, the People’s World called for submissions of team stories, especially those about more popular games like softball, declaring:

Other soft ball teams in Metropolitan Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are invited to get in touch with their local PEOPLE’S WORLD representative to secure similar news stories on their teams. If a sports department may have a program, the

404 People’s World. January 13th, 1938. 1/13/1938 French Athletic Congress Asks More Labor Sports.

405 People’s World. January 25th, 1938. “Soccer Official Asks Union Participation” says that in England unions always enter teams into leagues.

406 People’s World. June 28th, 1938. Picture of women’s worker sport in Czechoslovakia in Prague.

407 People’s World. May 3rd 1938. “Dockers Take 16-5 Shellacking” 2000 people came to see May Day game vs Horseshoe Tavern.

408 People’s World January 4th, 1938. “CIO Basketball League Set for California” ILWU cagers team at lead.

214

PEOPLE’S WORLD stands for “Sports For All The People”, and will do its best to aid and publicize such sports as invite mass participation. Because soft ball is a game which encourages mass participation and gives every union member a chance to play, the PEOPLE’S WORLD will carry full box scores on league play.409 The ILWU teams and the IWO teams, especially the crack Los Angeles Vanguards, were favorite subjects to cover.410 The games covered, in addition to mass participation by both athletes and Labor Sports fans,, also brought attention to social causes of the day, especially anti- fascist and anti-racist causes. For example, a Local 10 longshoremen basketball team boasted

African-American players, such as former UC college players Duncan Copeland and Al

Matulich, as well as former all-American winning Oklahoma State University player Ben Gower.

The Local 10 basketball team played

a benefit game against the IWO Los

Angeles Vanguards to raise money

for anti-fascist forces in China and

Spain.411 Speaking to the influence of

the Communists, as well as to the

appreciation of its Labor Sports

coverage, CIO unions and left-wing

AFL unions staged the boxing

International Workers’ Order Los Angeles Vanguards, 1940. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission. tournament the “United Labor Sports

409 People’s World. April 12th, 1938. “Sports For All The People!”

410 People’s World. January 12th, 1938. “ILWU Official Boosts Labor Sports League” “The prospects look bright for a regular Northern California labor sports league”, declared John Schomaker, business agent for San Francisco dockers local of the International Longshoremens and Warehousemens Union.

411 People’s World. January 24th, 1938. “ILWU Quint To Play Gael Cage Experts”. ; The Second United Front of Nationals and Communists in China was under attack by fascist-aligned Japan, and so Japanese silk boycotts were in effect. The Spanish Civil War continued. Both were seen as important causes in the fight to contain global fascism.

215

Spectacle” to raise money for the People’s World.412 Later in 1938, a San Francisco Dockers413

basketball squad played a local leftist athletic club, a leftover of ethnic socialist athletics, to

benefit Spanish Republicans, winning 44-32. In leftist athletics, a growing call to boycott the

scheduled 1940 Tokyo Olympic Games in these union benefits echoed the earlier effort to

boycott the Berlin Olympics, but with the hope that stronger Labor Sports organizing could pull

it off. It became a moot point when World War Two caused the International Olympic

Committee to cancel the games.414

By 1939, the growing ILWU

Labor Sports movement was

cause for real excitement,

especially in the warehouse

section of the union. It was

rapidly expanding at a pace that

put it on par with the nationally

recognized and highly

developed ILGWU [see Chapter

ILWU Men’s Softball team, Local 10. Circa 1947. ILWU Historical Archive. Used With Permission. 3] recreational programs of the 1930s. The president of Local 6, Eugene Patton, was enthusiastic about the power of Labor

412 People’s World. January 31st, 1939. “Around The Ring” notes that afl and cio unions doing fundraiser United Labor Sports Spectacle to benefit People’s World; February 1st, 1939. Fight On Labor Card two fighters for benefit; February 4th 1939 “Los Angeles’ Best Amateurs Appear On Car” United Labor’s First Boxing Show.

413 Nickname of longshore workers.

414 People’s World. April 14th, 1938. “CIO Unionists To Meet Game For Spain Saturday” also calls for 1940 olympic boycott of Tokyo games; April 15th, 1938. “Prelims for Spain Game ILWU Oaks vs Doloreans” (two games, ilwu vs local leftist athletic club and then warehouse vs longshore); April 19th, 1938. “Dockers Win Spain Game 44-32”

216

Sports to engage union members to believe in its mission: “‘A union’s strength is in its rank and file. And if you have that rank and file interested in union activities, then your union can’t be licked.’ The scope of the union’s recreation program is unequalled anywhere on the Coast and, given another year or two, Paton believes, it will rival the program offered by the International

Ladies Garment Workers Union in the East.”415 These programs operated in vast world of working class oriented athletics, which inspired, influenced, and in regular interaction with other political tendencies, other unions’ Labor Sports like the ILGWU, and the Worker Sport movement in Europe.

Women’s teams were very active in the ILWU, as both as auxiliaries and as workers.

Though in this time period, leftists and unionists offered very little gender analysis, almost never speaking to the issues faced specifically by female workers specifically, the acknowledgement of women’s labor teams was in itself a political act of empowerment.416 The union billed these

teams, mainly basketball, softball, and

bowling, as worthy of attention, willing to

prove themselves on the courts, alleys, and

diamonds. Women’s ILWU teams, the

union newspapers wrote, showed that they

too could “throw a mean basketball.”417

During the 1940-41 basketball season, one

ILWU Softball team, Local 6. 1946. ILWU Historical Archive. Used warehouse workers women’s basketball With Permission.

415 People’s World. February 7th, 1939. “ILWU 1-6 – Union That Knows How, Sets The Pace in Labor Recreation”.

416 Photograph: June 30th, 1947. Softball wives and girlfriends of warehousemen. ILWU Historical Archives.

417 People’s World. March 2nd, 1938. Women’s warehouse team basketball “They Throw A Mean Basketball Too.”

217 team complained that other teams kept cancelling games against them because of intimidation.418

Meanwhile, the Local 6 women’s softball team won the championship of the San Francisco

Recreational League in 1942.419 Women’s bowling leagues only continued to grow, especially as the war years caused many men to be drafted into the military.

While the war years caused the ILWU to scale back its Labor Sports, symbolically sports were still a major part of the union’s activities. Local 6’s men’s softball team, which was created in 1936, routinely defeated local semi-pro teams, speaking to the depth of talent in the union.

Harry Bridges himself posed for a photograph with the team.420 That centrality of recreational programs points to the ILWU’s understanding of the potential of labor unions engaged with its members’ interests. That concept was common in CIO unions in the 1930s-40s, but was

especially potent in the ILWU.

In the post-war militant strike

wave, which the ILWU

participated in, the union’s

Labor Sports continued strong. It

participated much as it had

before the war in local leagues,

teams in recreational leagues, Harry Bridges poses with Local 6 baseball team, 1943. ILWU Historical Archive. Used with Permission. and connecting Labor Sports to

418 Warehousemens’ News 3/16/1941 Women’s basketball complains people keep cancelling games vs them because they’re intimidated. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

419 Photograph: 1942 women’s team holding trophy local 6. ILWU Historical Archives.

420 Photograph: “In There Pitching” July 2nd, 1943. Harry Bridges and Local 10 of San Fran. ILWU Historical Archives.

218 political action and membership/community engagement.421 By 1948, Local 6 records show that recreation spending went far beyond the money put in. Of a $244,000 budget, just $2500 went to recreation, yet ILWU Labor Sports remained vibrant, with a standing sports council meeting once a month in 1950.422

Labor Sports in much of the CIO was either destroyed by Red Scare government attacks or anti-Communist raids, such as in the UE. Labor Sports was fairly haphazard and mostly apolitical to begin with in the USW. The athletics by workers in the UAW and ILGWU were slowly phased out towards less active and sporadic sports as militant leftists were isolated or expelled. Yet the ILWU’s Labor Sports program survived well into the 1970s, when automation began cutting back its membership. Still, remnants of ILWU Labor Sports lasted into the

1990s.423

Why was the ILWU able to weather the storm while the dynamic Labor Sports movement in the east and Midwest did not survive the conservative backlash of the 1950s? For one, it had

421 Photographs: Local 6 McKesson Softball Team 1946; Local 10 baseball team 1942 played San Quintin all-stars; 6/15/1945 Local 10 baseball team; Local 6 softball team 8/1938; Late 1940s-50s: Local 13 Dockers softball team Los Angeles.; San Diego basketball team; Local 13 basketball team; Local 6 sports basketball action; Local 6 in a softball league sponsored by bay area ILWU; Coffin and Redington softball team 5/31/1946; 7/17/1946 local 6 men’s bowling; Local 6 bowling league 1946 women’s sports (integrated?); Local 6 bowling picture cutouts. Extensive!; Local 6 basketball league, mostly black players; 7/22/1947 Local 6 softball team; Warehouse local had extensive leagues; Three feathers bowling team women’s; 1946 pictures bowling league; Orva Scofield was chairman of local 6 bowling league 1947; Game action. People sitting in seats watching; Bowling team enroute to national bowling tournament in LA 1947; Meu local 6 in 1938; 7 teams in softball league of ILWU Local 6 division of in the Rec Commission League. 4/19/1946; Local 6 team won trophy to advance to tourney; 4/24/1947 Woolworth vs Butler Bro softball game. Black player at bat; 1946 integrated softball teams. ILWU Historical Archives.

422 Internal Documents: Local 6 finances- of 244,000 budget, $2500 goes to recreation; 3/1950: calendar shows that sports council of local 6 meets once a month. Local 6 Records Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

423 Photographs: Local 13 football team 1955. Has a former Cleveland browns player in Armis Danday; Howard Terminal 9 softball team founded in 1949. Picture taken in 1957; Teams go into the 1960s: Local 21 out of Longview Washington basketball team; Local 6 basketball team; Local 63 Marine Clerks softball team. 20 perfect games. 11/26/1954; Basketball team in 1961. ILWU Historical Archives.; It should be noted that the ILWU it still exists as a militant progressive union today.

219 the advantage of being regionally concentrated on the West Coast. That enabled the union strategically to be better able to fight off attacks by the raiding Teamsters in the 1950s, as opposed to defending itself from attacks across a larger geographic region. Speaking simply in strategic terms, that regional concentration set it apart from the equally progressive UE, which was more spread out across the Midwest and East Coast and thus had a harder time defending itself against union raids. Perhaps more importantly, it had successfully engaged its membership so there was a deep loyalty to the union that made Red Scare attacks largely ineffective, while other unions or locals with Communist leadership either were blind-sided by the attacks or were swept into cycles of anti-Communist fear that made unions like the UE vulnerable to raids.

Despite many attempts by the federal government to deport Harry Bridges, they never were successful and the membership continually re-elected him into the 1970s. Even as the

Communist Party disappeared from political power and influence in American labor, the militant leadership of the ILWU never altered its commitment to solidarity unionism. They remained as

comrades to each other even without being CP

members. Additionally, Bridges never really

softened his politics, remaining pragmatic yet

radical in his unionism. That bled into the

recreational sports programs of the union, which

still proudly fielded softball, baseball, basketball,

football, and boxers of actual longshore and

warehouse workers into the 1990s. Though the

ILWU at times was isolated as a union from the

ILWU softball player, circa 1939. ILWU Historical rest of American labor, this also meant that it was Archive. Used With Permission.

220 able to chart its own course. While the ILWU continues to face struggles today, especially because of automation, it operates as an example of what could have been in American Labor

Sports.

Other Labor Sports

Labor Sports had become an enormous and influential movement within CIO unions at their height, especially in the UAW and ILGWU but also in the USW, the UE, and the ILWU.

Additionally, union-affiliated athletics extended to other smaller CIO unions. United Rubber

Workers of America organized in similar ways to the UAW, including its Labor Sports teams that participated in CIO leagues, for example, as did teams from the radical Farm Equipment

Workers Union (FE) which existed until it became a target for anti-leftist raids by the UAW and eventually merged with the UE during the Red Scare. Even the Cleveland branch of the IWW, representing metalworkers, fielded basketball teams that participated in CIO labor leagues in the late 1930s-early 1940s.424

As we have already seen, for most of the 1930s and 40s the conservative American

Federation of Labor disdained social unionism, concentrating on mostly skilled, white, male craft unions, which emphasized anti-radical politics and wages and little else. AFL Labor Sports were very rare, and usually were undertaken only by initiative of small locals where left-wingers had come into leadership. If AFL union members played sports, they sought opportunities outside of

424 Though the IWW had been mostly destroyed by government repression and infighting in the 1920s, it continued to exist in the 1930s on the fringes of labor organizing, its militants often providing the initial spark for organizing drives that larger CIO unions picked up, such as RCA in Camden NJ, or steel plants in western PA. It was split between anarchist oriented sailors, many of whom were killed fighting in Spain, and the socialist oriented metal workers of Cleveland. Eventually the metal workers left the IWW and joined the IUE in the 1950s. The IWW became largely a leftist sect from then on, and still exists today as a leftist group with high turnover. For more on the IWW organizing in the 1930s, see Matthew White, “’The Cause of the Workers Who Are Fighting In Spain Is Yours’: The Marine Transport Workers and the Spanish Civil War” in Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. Ed. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer.

221 the union, since a hallmark of AFL unions in general was a lack of concern for unskilled workers--especially workers of color and women. Still, as mentioned in Chapter 2, when the

ILGWU, a union with moderate socialist traditions, re-entered the AFL, the ILGWU President

David Dubinsky worked to reunite the CIO with the AFL for fifteen years, taking special aim at eventually driving the Communists out of labor. By the late 1940s, as the AFL slowly let go of its hostility towards industrial unionism in an effort to compete with the CIO, small AFL labor teams began to appear. Though Labor Sports was already on the decline, especially after the large-scale expulsion of radicals from the CIO, by the time the AFL and CIO reunited in 1955

AFL labor teams were not unusual, though they were usually apolitical and unconnected with the larger Labor Sports movement. The quickly rising Teamsters union of the AFL, on the other hand, hardly mentioned the possibility of the Labor Sports. Indeed, communist unionists themselves, while under sustained attack during the Red Scare, also declined as a organization where labor militants congregated. For example, the Transport Workers Union of New York

City’s President, “Red Mike” Quill, was ordered by the Central Committee of the Communist

Party, to support a position he thought foolish for his union. He responded after the Committee insisted he obey their directives: “To hell with you and your Central Committee.”425 The story of communists in labor was never as simple as the notion that they were following the party-line as directed from Moscow. Militants saw the Party as a tool to fight for a better life in their present and in the future. Not surprisingly, with that in mind, as the crimes of Stalin became publicly acknowledged by the Soviet Union, the Communists lost whatever influence they had left in labor and militants largely continued forward without the party.

425 Stepan-Norris & Zeitlin, Pg. 293

222

The United Mine Workers too, under John L. Lewis, also left the CIO in 1940 over its foreign policy alliance with the Roosevelt administration, and rejoined the AFL in 1942. While the UMW -- with its largely rural miner base and autocratic leadership -- never put much energy into creating recreational programs for its members, local UMW unions founded baseball teams on their own by the late 1940s. At one such game, in 1949, Baseball Hall of Fame former shortstop Honus Wagner was managing a team of professionals against the UMW District 6

team, in Bridgeport Ohio.

Wagner proudly noted before

the game, that as a miner

youth before becoming a

professional baseball player,

he had been a member of the

Knights of Labor.426 He was

happy to see labor playing his

game.427 UMW Baseball team, Bridgeport, OH. 1949. UMW Records, Pennsylvania State University. Fair Use. Conclusion

The Labor Sports movement in the United States reached its most expansive point in the

CIO years. Any place that had a large CIO union in the United States had Labor Sports. While

426 19th century mass labor union which was radical in some ways and conservative in others, especially depending on its highly autonomous locals. At its height, its membership contained 1 in 5 American workers. It was largely destroyed after the events of the 1886 Haymarket Affair. Many of its ideas became radical visions of unionism.

427 This is the first confirmed evidence I know of that Wagner was a member of the Knights of Labor. He was also rumored at various points to have been a member of the IWW and the Socialist Party at points during his playing career. UMWA Journal Office Photographs and cartoons 6591 39 14. August 20th, 1949. Bridgeport OH at Ohio Mine Safety Meet. Published Sept 1st, 1949. Historical Collections and Labor Archives. Eberly Family Special Collections Library. Pennsylvania State University.

223 the flavor of Labor Sports ranged from lively and militant in the ILWU to cautious and apolitical in the USW, with shades of gray depending on the local in the UE and UAW, working class sports from below helped build real relationships between union members. These most popular of recreation programs promoted the union as a normal phenomenon of flesh and blood people to the larger community and engaged in working class people’s desire to play sports in an accessible way. Unlike amateur community sports, labor teams were explicitly political in that they represented working class organizations. The CIO teams and leagues were most vibrant and democratically participatory in unions or locals of unions that had socialist or communist leadership. In those locals, usually the organizers of Labor Sports made commitments to include people of color and women in athletic activities. Labor Sports generally followed the fate of parent unions and was either smashed, suffered slow decline as unions grew more suspicious of rank and file participation, or became isolated from the larger labor movement. With the merger of the CIO with the AFL in 1955, the prospects for Labor Sports was largely sealed. With the end of the CIO, which was already reeling from its expulsion of its radicals, a mass inclusive working class focused grassroots sports culture with antiracist and antifascist values was dashed.

Much like the Worker Sport movement in Europe, reactionary forces sought to muzzle radical forces within labor, and a left-wing sports project was permanently shelved.

However, before we close the history of Labor Sports, we turn to the possibilities of what it could have looked like. While history provides a snapshot and one can only guess the roads not taken, we can get a general idea of what a thriving urban Labor Sports would have looked like.

Anti-racist and anti-fascist athletics and fan culture eventually would push against how sports in the United States were run. We now turn to New York City to examine the Labor Sports of communist-aligned unions, youth groups, and fraternal orders to look at how these sports

224 organizations made their mark on the city and helped challenge the racial order of the elite levels of professional baseball.

ILWU Baseball player, circa 1950. ILWU Historical Archive. Used With Permission.

225

Chapter 5: The Big Red Machine: NYC Popular Front Communist Sports 1936-1948

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore the Communists of New York City and their Labor Sports networks during the Popular Front era.428 Centering on the sports column of the party newspaper, the Daily Worker, I follow the development and achievement of a communist Labor Sports in the city. Using Lester Rodney’s dedicated left-wing sports writing in 1936 as a lens, I begin by showing that Communist-affiliated unions were able to build a party-specific Labor Sports which enabled it to mobilize around working class gyms, anti-war and pro-war organizing, and most impactfully, around ending segregation in Major League Baseball. I then look at the NYC Labor

Sports movement, which was developed mostly by left-wing unions led by Communist militants, but was also supplemented by Communist youth athletics, and the fraternal mutual aid organization International Workers Order teams. I trace their rise during the Popular Front era, their continued organization in the Nazi-Soviet pact years, and then follow them as they dwindled during the war, temporarily strengthened in the immediate post-war years, and then were destroyed by the Red Scare. I look at the connections between Labor Sports and the mobilization to end segregation in Major League Baseball. Along the way, I will demonstrate the vibrancy and involved work by militants on the ground, supported by Daily Worker sports

428 In using the term Popular Front, I am using the “long” Popular Front, which goes from 1935-1947 before breaking down in the Red Scare. As mentioned in prior chapters, the Popular Front ran from 1935-39, when it ended with signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. However, the Popular Front culture had grown beyond the party, and continued without it until the invasion of the Soviet Union effectively brought it back into the alliance. The “long” Popular Front effectively ended with the anti-Communist Red Scare in 1947.

226 writers, who consistently stayed true to building a mass anti-fascist, anti-racist working class sports culture.

This dissertation purposefully ends with a chapter on the networks of Labor Sports built in a left-wing stronghold like New York City. While Labor Sports elsewhere were focused on particular unions or in general CIO networks, New York was large enough to develop left-wing sports networks along particular political tendencies. This time period shows the potential of what a thriving Labor Sports movement could have looked like had the Red Scare not destroyed or defanged most of it. The Communist Labor Sports in this period made explicit political connections to athletic practices as they were applied to popular sports. Nowhere else in the country did the networks bring about as many differing athletic teams under one banner. While these grassroots networks ended suddenly as the attacks on Communists and fellow travelers ramped up, at one point it seemed like a strong left-wing sports culture could be a permanent fixture in American life. In New York, teams were open about their communist aligned connections. They considered themselves part of a larger mass movement that was creating left- wing counter-institutions on the ground. And that was true for over a decade. Almost everywhere else, Labor Sports tried to shape existing sports culture instead of creating their own culture as a real alternative.

By 1939, two undertakings had led the Communist Party to be a force for social change in the United States: the CIO and the Popular Front. When John Lewis of the United Mine

Workers brought about the split from the AFL and called for the foundation of a new labor federation to organize mass industry in anti-union strongholds like the Steel industry and Auto industry, many of the key organizers who flocked to this new initiative were veterans of the

Trade Union Unity League and active Communist Party members. Lewis knew that they were

227 best suited for the job of “shock troops” for organizing hundreds of thousands of workers in the late 1930s (and millions when all was said and done.) They quickly became influential union members in organizations such as the UAW, and sometimes they outright controlled some unions or were allied with left-wing unions which they had helped to build. At times, in fact,

Communist Party leaders worried that activists were neglecting their Party duties in order to build the CIO.429 The Popular Front line came from the Comintern in Moscow, which instructed the Party leadership to enact organizations and efforts to counter the growth of Fascism and

Nazism in the mid- and late 1930s, even if it meant allying with bourgeois organizations and progressive capitalists. As a result, the Communist Party toned down its revolutionary rhetoric from the Third Period Comintern directives of 1927-1934, and instead focused on building anti- fascist coalitions. As an organization, the Party stressed the need to root itself in “American- ness” to build this common cause. The rhetoric of Marxist ideology moved towards populism, similar to Huey Long’s anti-elitism, with the goal of building alliances within unions and in popular culture in order to break out of isolation.430 Moreover, the move away from isolation coincided with a generational shift within the Party, as many of the foreign-born activists were replaced by 2nd generation Americans, especially the children of Jewish immigrants, who by the late 1930s and early 40s made up around half of the Party’s numbers, especially on the Eastern seaboard.431

429 Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982). Pg. 10

430 In the 1930s, the Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long ran as an anti-elitist populist, focusing on class-based rage. Long was a product of Louisiana rural poor, and planned to challenge FDR in the 1936 Presidential race to redistribute the wealth of the wealthy to the common people. FDR’s second New Deal, which included Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, rural electrification, Works Progress Administration, and bank regulations, was an effort to head off the challenges of populists like Long and others.

431 Ibid.

228

Because of the Communist Party’s work in the CIO and the Popular Front strategy, by the start of 1939 they had built strong influence in key parts of the labor movement. They effectively controlled or strongly influenced the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America

(UE), the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), the National

Maritime Union (NMU), the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the American Newspaper Guild, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), and the Fur and Leather Workers Union

(usually called “Furriers” or “Fur Boys”), and others. They also influenced the American

Federation of Teachers, the New York locals of the Painters Union, and the Hotel and Restaurant

Employees Union. By far, their largest membership both in pure numbers and in proportion to the rest of the population, was in New York City.

During the Popular Front of 1935-39, the Communists built several front organizations that were not explicitly revolutionary in rhetoric, often with progressive reformists playing key roles. Amongst these organizations was the anti-war, anti-fascist American League for Peace and

Democracy, with 20,000 dues payers and the claimed ability to reach seven million. The

Communist Party’s youth organization was a key part of the influential American Youth

Congress. The National Negro Congress, with which it was allied, played a key role in bringing

Black workers into the CIO. The League of American Writers, which included John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, helped produce much of the literature that influenced the rise of Popular

Front Culture. Finally, the International Workers Order, originally formed during the Third

Period in 1930 as a fraternal organization founded on breakaway Jewish language federations that offered inexpensive life and medical insurance as well as social activities, was entirely led by Communists.432 The IWO had an effective membership of 140,000, and contained specific

432 To remind the reader, the Third Period of hyper sectarian Communist Party and Comintern lasted from 1928-34.

229 youth wings that hosted athletics as well as adult sports.433 It should be noted in all of these unions and organizations that the vast majority of the members were not Communists and were only vaguely aware of the leadership’s party orientation. Indeed, in this period the Communist

Party did not force its ideology upon rank and file members, but rather used these organizations to support progressive causes and exposed members to progressive and radical ideas.434 Thus, the

Communist Party, during the first few years of the Popular Front era, had positioned itself as a key and influential organization for social change, even while blunting its revolutionary rhetoric.

To the American children of immigrants who rapidly became the Party’s membership in the

1930s, slogans like “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism”, was something to wholeheartedly embrace.

The Communist Party, the Daily Worker, and Sports Coverage

As a part of the Popular Front and the effort to paint the Communist Party as an organization rooted in popular culture of the working class, the Party embraced mass sports instead of party-specific sports. Enter Lester Rodney and the sports page of the Daily Worker, the major New York-based Communist Party newspaper. As a student at NYU, Lester Rodney was exposed to the Daily Worker and took an interest in it. By 1936, a weekend edition of the

Daily Worker, the Sunday Worker, featured all sorts of cultural articles, including sports, as it transitioned in the Popular Front away from the rhetoric of the Third Period. However, they were not written by true sports fans, a fact that bothered Rodney. He wrote a letter to the editors, who invited him to talk about how he would do it:

433 “Report of Max Bedacht, General Secretary to the Enlarged Meeting of the National Executive Committee, International Workers Order.” October 2nd, 1937. 5276, Box 2. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Pg. 43: IWO sports, youth and general.

434 Isserman, Pg. 19-22.

230

You guys are focusing on the things that are wrong in sports. And there’s plenty that’s wrong. But you wind up painting a picture of professional athletes being wage slaves with no joy, no elan- and that’s just as wrong. Of course there’s exploitation, but the professional athlete, the professional baseball player, still swells with joy when his team wins. They hug each other. That’s not put on. That’s not fake. That’s beyond all the social analysis of the game. The idea of people coming together, blending their skills into a team, getting the best out of each other- and winning. That’s a remarkable feeling. That’s a wonderful human thing. And you must never forget that. The way I would write about sports if I were writing for the Daily Worker, that would never be absent. Along with social criticism. They’re not contradictory.435 Rodney convinced the editors that a legitimate sports column, not just a condemnation of mainstream sports and embracing of Labor Sports Union sports, would be a good hook to get people to read the Daily Worker and become interested in what the Communist Party had to offer. Rodney was hired to write a weekly column, which quickly turned into a daily sports page in the Worker. Columns in the Daily Worker’s sports page could have appeared in any newspaper, except it took this social critique of sports along with a true love that only a sports fan could bring to the writing. Coinciding with the appearance of a sports page was the generational change within the party of attracting the children of immigrants, who were claiming

“Americanness” by embracing sports like baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball. Quickly, while designing what the sports page would focus on, a debate erupted between the old guard who believed their constituency was European immigrants who played soccer, such in the mass

LSU-affiliated soccer leagues, and younger people like Rodney who wanted to cover sports like baseball, the quintessential American sport. Rodney argued that the main focus should be the coverage of popular American sports, which were baseball, boxing, college basketball, college football and, after the Daily Worker gained access, hockey.436 Coverage of the Labor Sports

435 Irwin Silber and Lester Rodney, Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.) Pg. 9.

436 The New York Rangers hockey team denied the Daily Worker reporters until 1945 without any explanation, though the Daily Worker staff believed the denial had to do with their newspaper’s Communist politics.

231 movement was secondary, both in unions and Communist-affiliated sports in the International

Workers’ Order and youth organizations. The sports writers of the Daily Worker had much autonomy, partly because many of the higher ups of the Communist Party were not avid sports fans, and partly because the writers were so effective in connecting sports with social justice.

They certainly contributed in helping bring about the end of segregation in Major League

Baseball through a long campaign of agitation and coverage of the issue. The nearly eight year campaign coordinated by Lester Rodney, Nat Low, and Bill Mardo deserves credit for putting pressure on baseball owners and making it politically permissible for Brooklyn Dodgers

President Branch Rickey to make the move to sign Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers farm system on October 23rd, 1945.437

Labor Sports were part of general social justice focus on sports by the Daily Worker’s sports writers. The Communists had a major role in the campaign to end segregation in professional baseball in the United States. Most of the historiography of the Communist Party’s role in sports focuses on its contribution to the end of Jim Crow in MLB, as they organized as mostly white radical allies of Civil Rights causes. Because of being able to receive press credentials, party members gained access to locker rooms and asked tough questions of managers and players that the mainstream white press had avoided for decades. Today, Branch Rickey gets most of the credit for being the first in the 20th century to sign an African-American player to a

Major League club in 1947, when in fact the Black Press and the Daily Worker had been agitating for it for years by that time. The campaign survived many party-line changes, as a semiautonomous section of the paper. “End Jim Crow in Baseball” survived the Popular Front

437 Jackie Robinson would play the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals before being promoted and playing his first game with the Brookyln Dodgers on April 15th, 1947.

232

when the line changed to opposition to the US entering WWII after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The

campaign continued when the party line changed to demanding the US help the Soviet Union

after the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941. “End Jim Crow in Baseball” also was one of the

few critiques of the elites of the US during World War Two, as the Communist Party became one

of the US government’s biggest cheerleaders. Even as the sports section shrank as much of the

party’s membership, and much of the Daily Worker staff, entered the armed services (perhaps up

to a third of the membership), the campaign was never abandoned.438 Finally, the campaign

continued as the dawn of the Cold War brought a return to anti-communism in the U.S. Through

all this, “End Jim Crow in Baseball” was the only consistent campaign that the Daily Worker and

the Communist Party never pulled the plug on, whatever the political instructions for the party-

line from Moscow may have been. The campaign showed how Labor Sports could be harnessed

to effect larger change, as the Party

mobilized its worker-athletes to

demonstrations. Labor Sports were

explicitly connected to the anti-

segregation campaign, as both sought

to create a different sort of sports,

from grassroots to the professional

level. While I will focus on the

Communist-led Labor Sports of New

York City here, it is important to Warehouse Workers Local 65 baseball and basketball team members mobilized in support of labor gyms and ending the color barrier in Major understand that in the minds of League Baseball. Circa 1938. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission.

438 Isserman, Pg. 148.

233

Communist Labor Sports organizers, the two were explicitly connected and thus, appeared side by side in the Daily Worker sports sections. Right up to the moment that the Brooklyn Dodgers brought up Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball, the campaign to end segregation in baseball was carried forth like a torch by the Communists.

Certainly, the Daily Worker’s sports page brought humanity to the Daily Worker’s readers away from grim struggle through its connection to a very popular interest. It was meant to be read like any normal sports page, interlacing humor and general commentary with actual in-depth analysis of sports, especially baseball. Moreover, unlike much of the rest of the paper with its ever shifting party lines, the sports pages were enjoyable to read, something which must have been an immense help in dispelling notions about Communists being joyless people.

Rodney commented that it could not have been possible for the Communists to be effective organizers in the guts of the ground-level CIO drives, to maintain such that joyless image.439 As the Daily Worker was published in New York City and was centered on the city, a good chunk of its coverage went to New York teams and colleges, especially in baseball. Thus, the New York

Yankees, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers received the lion’s share of coverage.

Most of the writers were unabashed Dodgers fans, the team of the downtrodden, though occasionally Communist Giants fans would write letters in to defend their team. Curiously, there did not seem to be any Communist Yankees fans who wrote in, perhaps a hint at how radicals thought of the “US Steel of Baseball”, though certainly the Daily Worker praised the team’s incredible dominance.440 They simply did not root for the Bronx Bombers, nor did Yankees fans

439 Silber, Pg. 13.

440 With the muted exception of the hardened Stalinist in William Z. Foster, who never wrote on sports, but regularly attended Yankees games and supported Rodney’s work, without interference. Foster, despite his stone- cold reputation, actually quite enjoyed baseball and encouraged Rodney’s work during the Popular Front. Foster,

234 write letters of support to the Daily Worker. (Rodney personally would be careful to differentiate picking the Yankees to win games versus rooting for them when letters from his readers would arrive about his phantom Yankee bias.)

During his twenty year tenure as the sports editor of the Daily Worker from 1936-56,

Rodney ran a column on the connection between sports and social change. The campaign to end

Jim Crow was at the forefront. The sports page also discussed unions for players, pay for college players, and coverage of Negro League games and women’s sports. Common letters to the sports page detailed why the readers were happy to see a sports column, and how it made them feel satisfied to be both a radical and a sports fan, as opposed to keeping it a secret as a “guilty pleasure.” The Daily Worker sports columnists seemed to be conscious of the Communist Party’s earlier sectarian treatment of sports and wanted to pre-empt any return to that stance. In response to a column in the People’s Daily World, which, as discussed in the previous chapter was the

Communist Party publication on the West Coast, that sports writers were merely historians of trivia. The Daily Worker argued that the People’s Daily World column implied that there were much better more important things in life. Instead of defending the need to organize the masses, they reframed the argument that Communist sports writers were of the masses, and just happened to like sports:

Of course sport isn’t the most important thing in man’s life.441 We ‘left wing sports writers’ have never imagined the way to a better, more scientific and civilized way of life for our country was going to be placed by the power of a left hook or the fury of a downfield tackle. Hardly. The big difference seems to be that our Coast pal doesn’t seem to like sports and we do. We think there by all accounts, disliked working with middle class intellectuals or rival leftists, but did approve of the Communist Party’s mass work in the CIO. The mass appeal of working in sports culture most likely appealed to him.

441 It is worth mentioning that standard talk of “man” as a standard speak for all humans, no matter their gender, was typical of the time period’s language. While the gendered aspect and usually calling women’s teams “girls’ teams” is striking to the reader today, at the time, it was the way people spoke. A general lack of gender analysis was not unusual in left-wing publications. That would begin to shift in the 1960s.

235 ought to be more and better sports, and that more people ought to get in on them. That’s why we’re writing articles about the booming growth of sports for trade union workers here in New York, something the other sports sections carefully ignore. Rodney would often include some socialist utopianism in his thoughts on what sports would look like in his vision of Soviet America:

You wouldn’t have a few rich teams like the Yanks and Red Sox gobbling up the best players because they have more dough to offer. You wouldn’t have the weaker teams like the Phillies and the Browns forced to sell a good young ballplayer as soon as they develop one… There’d be farm teams, but REAL farms. Not only minor leagues but the mines and farms (wheat and corn kind), factories, cities and states would have their leagues. There’d be more competition, and in places where the game doesn’t even touch now…There’d be more played from the actual localities of the cities they represent… With socialism there’ll be more baseball and more fields being built- more and more and more and more! Just as many as the people can use and it’s humanly possible to build. That’s the idea of the whole thing you see- not the profit of the few but the welfare of all- and that welfare is unlimited under socialism.”442 That future vision of what Labor Sports would look like was occurring on the ground throughout the CIO. It was an expansion of the narrow focus of the earlier Labor Sports Union, and envisioned sports instead organized to be truly for all working class people. Rodney probably took some inspiration from the Soviet Union, given the literature on sports in the Soviet

Union that commonly ended up in communist-aligned organizations’ archives, but the actual organizing met real needs for accessible recreation and health through athletics for working class people of all genders and races. While the Communist sports writers and Labor Sports organizers did not seek to destroy professional elite level sports, they did seek to engage with the fans and ultimately restructure the sports to make them more participatory and less consumer-based.

Communist Sports- Labor Sports Season 1939-40

There were three main areas of sports play organizing by the Communist Party and their allied organizations: the left-wing union sports as manifested by the pre-war Trade Union

442 Daily Worker: March 18th, 1940.

236

Athletic Association (TUAA) and (later) the post-war Labor Sports Federation (LSF), the teams of the Young Communist League (YCL) and its successor organization in the American Youth for Democracy (AYD), and the fraternal teams of the International Workers Order (IWO). By the

Popular Front era of late 1930s and continuing up until the war, the Communist Party’s engagement with mainstream sports functioned as an important part of their organizing and recruitment. Sports were their connection to “regular” (nonpoliticized) working class people, who they believed would be friendlier toward their program if they expressed interest in the same things that most Americans took interest in. For example, the Brownsville Branch of the

Communist Party rebroadcasted the World Series games via loudspeaker on October 7th, 1939, at their offices at 1701 Pikin Avenue and distributed Communist Party recruitment literature. They built an audience of around two hundred, according to the Daily Worker account.

The biggest area of access to nonpolitical workers and nonparty members was in the unions over which they had control. Communist Party member Mannie Widderoff had helped organize the Metropolitan Labor Athletic Association, which folded the Labor Sports Union experiences into a broader organization in New York City.443 That organization was reframed into the Trade Union Athletic Association by 1937. By May 1st 1939, the TUAA had grown to

24 unions with plans for 60 baseball teams, and both men and women’s softball teams, for the summer season. Nearly 100 union locals had signed on by the end of the summer of ‘39.444 In the winter, basketball was the sport of choice as it continued to be immensely popular in the Jewish neighborhoods of NYC. As a result, it was the springboard from which the TUAA really took

443 Widderoff would later be key to organizing the Labor Sports Federation in New York City after the war. Daily Worker, March 23rd, 1939.

444 Mardo Bill. Daily Worker, November 7th, 1946.

237 off. The total membership of unions in the TUAA was regularly cited by the Daily Worker at

300,000, which made the TUAA a large force in NYC.445

The TUAA was an ambitious program, and the New York Communist Party was deeply involved with it. On October 20th, 1939, a new Labor Sports Center opened at Grand and Essex

Streets. Based at Seward Park High, the organizers immediately used the center to launch the

1939 basketball season of the TUAA. The participating unions with basketball teams were all ones known to have strong leftwing/Communist Party influences.446 The Office Workers were the 1938 basketball champions and were heavily favored to repeat, though the Furriers, the 1939

champions,447 and Warehouse workers were

rising basketball powers. However, by the

end of the season in March 1940 the original

predictions rang true as the Office Workers

repeated their championship. At the Labor

Sports Center, five games were played each

Saturday in two gyms, with seating for

hundreds of people.448. Each game was

covered by the Daily Worker, which also ran

Warehouse Workers Local 65. Daily Worker, August 1940. a summary of the contests the following Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission.

445 Rodney, Lester. Daily Worker, April 16th, 1940.

446 The initial locals involved were: Furrier Machinists Local 64, Furriers Joint Council, UOPWA Local 16 (Office Workers), UWWE Local 65 (Warehouse Workers), Cafeteria Workers Local 302, Building Service Local 32B, United Electrical (UE), Transport Workers, Brooklyn and Manhattan, Bloomingdales of Department Store Employees Local 13, Cleaners and Dyers, Federal Workers, and Cooks and Pastry Workers.

447 People’s World, 2/7/1938 Furriers in NYC crowned champions.

448 Daily Worker, October 23rd, 1940.

238

Tuesdays. The schedule for 1939-1940 ran until March and actually received a fair amount of coverage from the Daily Worker, even more than labor baseball; perhaps because pro basketball was in its infancy at the time and no sport could approach the popularity of Major League

Baseball. For organization, there was an “A” League, a “B” League, and a “Retail” League, which the champions of said Leagues met in the TUAA playoffs. Following the season, both the champion Office Workers and the Furriers JC played a local Army team, and won.449

At the end of basketball season, spring and summer brought the nation’s biggest past- time in Labor Baseball, organized into three leagues of descending skill levels, the ‘A’ Saturday

League, the ‘B’ Sunday League, and finally the ‘Twilight’ League. Like Labor Basketball, the leagues featured teams that were dominated or heavily influenced by the Communist Party:

Cleaners, Cafeteria, Laundry, Shoe, Wholesale and Warehouse, Furriers, and Telephone workers. The Warehouse Local 65 emerged as victors of the ‘A’ League at the end of baseball season in mid-September 1940.450 Along the way, the Laundry workers won an elimination tournament and traveled south to Mexico to face a labor league champion team there. But, much like labor basketball, the Daily Worker never ceased to hype labor baseball. The writers waxed poetic about the thrills and comradery one would find by either playing in or attending a TUAA game:

Speaking of Labor ball, if you’ve never seen a game you’re missing a great big thrill. If you like spirit and enthusiasm, where the diamond star may be the guy working at the table next to you in some shop, these are the games to see. There is a spirit of kinship prevalent that draws you into the mood of the thing despite yourself. If you like to sit among two thousand silent people in a park with a capacity of 80,000 these games aren’t for you. If, however, you like your sport with a tangy flavor, with a dash and verve on the field that will amaze you, you will like these scraps. No, The [sic] caliber of these games aren’t as high as you’d find it in the Yankee Stadium, or for that matter in any big league or class AA park, but the zip will more than make up for that and

449 Daily Worker, March 26rd, 1940.

450 Daily Worker, April 26th, 1940; September 17th, 1940.

239 they’ll have you on the edge of your seat from the first inning to the last out. All this in addition to the privilege of fighting hand in hand with other decent sports lovers to end the Jim Crow unwritten law in a sport purported to be our national pastime. Yes, indeed. You’re lucky to have an organization like the T.U.A.A. Support it!451 The activists of the TUAA were proud of putting their politics into practice. They highlighted the fact that their teams were racially integrated, and were sure to mention when their teams had black players, such as the star forward Haul Washington of the Cleaners and Dyers.

They tried to have as many people participate as possible, and held regular sports lectures and clinics for union members to build their skills, such as the future legend and Long Island

University head coach Clair Bee, who was a frequent guest instructor of TUAA clinics.452 The

TUAA lent its support for the campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball, sending its members to petition drives and rallies. Furthermore, the Communist Party would use games, whether baseball, softball, or basketball, on a regular basis to raise money for causes they supported.

Most typically, benefit games raised money for unions during strikes, such as a baseball game in late May 1940 for Transport Workers Union members.. Games were also used to raise money for

Spanish refugees after the Fascist victory, for party members in distress, or the 1940’s “The

Yanks Are Not Coming” campaign to keep the United States out of the Second World War,” (a fairly unpopular position amongst other leftwing groups, which made it more obvious that the unions had heavy Communist leadership.) 453 The TUAA would continue this anti-war position with demonstrations against the draft, releasing statements against conscription as “An End To

Sports Culture” and “Regimentation of Youth.”454 At its official May 1940 Convention, the

451 Stillman. Daily Worker, May 27th, 1940.

452 Daily Worker, December 5th, 1939.

453 Daily Worker, August 14th, 1940.

454 Ibid.

240

TUAA adopted anti-war positions and a demand to end Jim Crow in all sports. Finally, on gender, the TUAA and the Daily Worker seemed to be aware that they were falling short on providing women’s sports, and said they had much further to go, stating “Women in our society have never received an even break as far as sports- or anything else- is concerned.”455

One of their proudest accomplishments, a huge Labor Sports Fair in 1940, highlights some of the problems of the two years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the peculiar position of

Communist Party and allied sports activists. The first day of the fair was organized around the theme of World Peace, a position that a year later the Communist Party would label as fifth- columnist and Un-American as the party line returned to defeating Fascism and defending the

Soviet Union. The second day of the fair was on the theme of ending Jim Crow in sports, a position on which the Communist Party never changed its rhetoric despite the many party line changes. Attendance at the fair numbered about 250,000, with a grand softball tournament which highlighted the fight to end Jim Crow. Even a year later, the TUAA continued its basketball and baseball seasons into 1941. With war looming and the draft sapping working men away from sports, the TUAA produced a pamphlet entitled “How to Organize Labor Sports,” building upon their five years of experience. Unfortunately, the changing global situation would force the organizers to other priorities.456 Labor Sports in much of New York would take a back seat to other priorities during the war years, as many workers and even party members participated in the military fighting in the global war against fascism.

455 Newton. Daily Worker, July 24th, 1940.

456 Daily Worker, April 22th, 1941.

241

Communist Sports Teams- International Workers Order

In organizing party social life, social services, and mutual aid to Communist Party members and nonmembers alike, the International Workers Order was the key organization. The

IWO was originally the left wing of a Jewish fraternal organization, the Workman’s Circle. After many internal battles in the 1920s, it finally split in the early 1930s. Though officially a separate organization from the Communist Party, the organization overlapped on positions and almost all the officers of the organization were Party members, as a front organization dedicated to cheap insurance, mutual aid, and fraternal social life.457 By the later 1930s, moving into a more ideologically relaxed Popular Front affiliation, the IWO contained 15 different language sections and offered, above all, cheap life and medical insurance for members.458 Similarly to how members of the Communist-dominated unions were not necessarily Communists themselves,

IWO members were not asked much of a commitment. Therefore, the IWO was a useful tool to mobilize Communist Party supporters around social participation in activities like dances, advocacy campaigns, and recreational programs such as sports teams and children’s camps.459 In the pages of the Daily Worker, the programs of the IWO were a common source of advertisement, which usually toed the Communist Party’s political lines of the time. In other words, it emphasized that the organization was for union members and working people, and that it was called international because it was for immigrants of all kinds and Americans of all races.

457 Silber, Pg. 11.

458 Daily Worker, July 8th, 1944.

459 The IWO specifically recommended sports as a base fraternal program. “Manual of the International Workers’ Order.” May 1936. International Workers Order (IWO) Records #5276. Kheel Center, Cornell University.

242

Through this blurring of organizations, the Communist Party used IWO sports to build its programs. Youth boxing matches involving IWO members were advertised sporadically in the

Daily Worker, for instance, as were IWO volleyball matches.460 A letter from the Chicago IWO on February 1st, 1941 spoke highly of a successful bowling tournament for men and women involving hundreds of members, and bowling in general was a common interest for Midwest

IWO members. The two main sports of choice in IWO circles were baseball and basketball.

There were three IWO teams which received wide coverage in the Daily Worker: for basketball, the Los Angeles Vanguards basketball team, which was covered more closely by the West Coast

People’s World, the Brooklyn Blue Sox baseball team, and the Tom Mooney softball club. In addition, IWO sports teams existed all over the city, and indeed the country, beyond those three squads.

In both the 1939-40 and 1940-41 basketball seasons, the IWO held national basketball tournaments, with regional playoffs in California, the Lake Michigan Region, the Central

Region, and the Eastern Region. New York hosted an elimination tournament on March 3rd, 1940 of three teams, two of which were from New York City. The teams wore their politics on their sleeves. For example, there was the Lincoln Brigadiers of Lodge 239 in Brooklyn (after the

Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was a Communist-sponsored group of American volunteers who fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War); the Tom Mooney 5 of Lodge

817(after the labor activist Tom Mooney, who spent over twenty years in prison). These two teams played each other to face the coal mining town of Hazleton PA Lodge 935’s

Mountaineers team, who had won the Eastern title in 1939.461 The Lincoln Brigadiers, who were

460 Daily Worker, May 26th, 1939; December 20th, 1939.

461 Daily Worker, March 2nd, 1940.

243 an interracial squad (a fact that left-wing sports teams never failed to mention in this time of Jim

Crow), defeated both the Tom Mooneys and Hazleton to advance to the national 1940 IWO

Championship Finals in Detroit. From the IWO’s Central Region a team of “Negro lads” named the Spartans came to the tournament from Lodge 866 of Rankin, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

From Gary, Indiana, representing Lake Michigan came Club Vida of 316. Finally, representing pride of IWO sports was the Los Angeles Vanguards, whose name was a clear reference to “the vanguard of the proletariat”, a phrase used by Marxist-Leninist organizations to signify their qualifications to lead the revolution. Clearly, the IWO operated a large basketball program across the nation, and the politics embodied in the team names spoke loudly of the political stances the teams took. Even in a time of increasing social isolation during the Nazi-Soviet pact, communist- affiliated organizations wore their politics on their sleeves.462For local fans who came to watch the contest of left-wing basketball players at the finals in Detroit, the cost of admission was merely a quarter, as opposed to college basketball games like those in Madison Square Garden where, according to the Daily Worker, “you get soaked 75c to $1.10.”463 The Vanguards would go on to defeat the Spartans in a high scoring contest (for the time) at 60-44, with the Lincoln

Brigadiers falling to the Spartans in the semifinals. The IWO took the opportunity to tout its integrated teams, in contrast to the segregated American Bowling Congress tournament which occurred at the same time in Detroit.464 The convergence of these two events could hardly have been a coincidence, as the end of Jim Crow was a campaign the Communist Party proudly supported. The IWO most likely scheduled its national basketball championship at the same

462 Daily Worker, March 14th, 1940.

463 Newman. Daily Worker, April 2nd, 1944.

464 The American Bowling Congress specified in its constitution, as mentioned in Chapter 4, that only white men could participate in its sanctioned activities.

244 time as the ABC tournament as a political statement against racial segregation. Indeed, the Daily

Worker commonly reported on actions and demonstrations against racially segregated bowling alleys.465 The Vanguards seemed to be a perfect example of the possibility of integrated sports years before most elite professional sports began integrating. The TUAA’s Labor Basketball season of 1940-41 brought the IWO Lincoln Brigadiers in its league. The Lincoln Brigadiers would continue on to repeat as Eastern champions, and would fall again to the Los Angeles

Vanguards (who also won the California Amateur Athletic Union title in 1941). IWO teams operated as a part of communist-aligned Labor Sports, competing with union squads.466

To return to the afore-mentioned TUAA 1940 Labor Baseball Season, the team touted by the Daily Worker was the IWO’s Brooklyn-based Blue Sox and, for Labor Softball, the Tom

Mooney Club. The IWO were members of the TUAA from its inception, and as such, the Blue

Sox received special attention from the Daily Worker in 1936-40. When a call went out for an anti-war baseball game around the Communist Party’s campaign of “The Yanks Are Not

Coming”, the Blue Sox were the first to volunteer.467 The Blue Sox manager Irv Levitt wrote in to volunteer his squad for the game, and they ended up playing the Cleaners, Laundry, Office and Shoe Workers’ baseball teams in the “Games For Peace”, with the theme of “Bats Not

Bayonets.”468 Along with the regular labor games, the Daily Worker mentioned the Blue Sox

465 Leftists, both Socialists and Communists, spoke out against the ABC in the years before the UAW finally threw its weight behind the campaign to end the segregationist practice.

466 Daily Worker, March 18th, 1941.

467 Daily Worker, April 26th, 1940.

468 Bernard. Daily Worker, May 24th, 1940.

245 specifically each week, along with other brief mentions of Labor games, meaning that they were well integrated into the NYC Labor Sports scene, much like the Vanguards on the Pacific Coast.

The Young Communist League

The Young Communist League (YCL), the youth wing of the Communist Party, served as a sort of secondary training school for up-and-coming radicals. Founded in 1922, it had begun as an English-speaking organization of American young radicals. It would lay the groundwork for the generational change within the Party in the 1930s by bringing in American-raised militants into the Communist Party, similar to the YPSLs in the Socialist Party. Members of the

YCL were active in getting their feet wet as activists with involvement in trade union organizing, student movements, and the Communist-run Unemployed Projects of the early 1930s.469 The

YCL Field Day. Daily Worker, September 9th, 1939. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission. organization further functioned to provide social outlets for young people, including an annual

YCL prom. During the early parts of the End Jim Crow in Baseball campaign, the YCL was at the forefront of gathering petitions outside of baseball games in New York City. Its members

469 Isserman, Pg. 178; The Unemployed Projects were the Third Period Communists’ answer to the Great Depression, organizing masses of unemployed people to demand food, housing, and jobs.

246 even marched to baseball offices to present the signatures, and reaffirmed the dedication to the campaign at their convention (calling for the YCL to “Strike Jim Crow Out!”).470 As such, playing sports came naturally to youth members of the YCL, and the Daily Worker would report on their activities in order to show that it was possible to be a young radical and have fun as well.

The YCL in 1939 ran a special weekly column in the Daily Worker’s sports page on the growth of its sporting activities. They hosted softball and volleyball tournaments for boys and girls in June 1939, which they used to recruit members.471 At the softball tournament, for instance, the YCL reported that they recruited a man to the party during a game, as they noted that “we could elaborate on this most powerful first line we’ve used to date into many, many columns”, meaning it was a common occurrence. The youthful Communists labeled their brand of sports “Sports With A Purpose.”472 Beginning in July 1939, the YCL organized a field and track day for its members at Pelham Bay Park. The event came off on Sunday, September 17th with 267 participants and 1200 spectators, and featured track meets, baseball, softball, and more.

The day was dedicated to Communist Party candidates running for city council: Israel Amter,

Isador Begun, Peter Cacchione, and Paul Crosble, who all gave speeches. The Bronx County

YCL teams ended up taking home the most points and were thus awarded the title, though the title itself was not as important as pulling the event together and giving the young militants organizing experience, according to the YCL organizers.473

470 Daily Worker, March 3rd & June 18th 1940.

471 Daily Worker, June 12th, 1939.

472 Daily Worker, June 20th, 1939. 473 Monroe. Daily Worker, September 21st, 1939.

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Collapse and Rebirth of New York Communist Sports

The course of the Second World War changed everything. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, what had been rallies against the “imperialist war” quickly became

“smash Hitler” rallies. As conscription brought more young men into the armed services, the ability of labor and left-wing organizations to field men on sports teams diminished. While the

United States had been building toward war

for nearly a year when Germany invaded the

Soviet Union, after Operation Barbosa began

and the people of the Soviet Union fought

for their existence against the genocidal

invaders, the American Communists seemed

almost relieved to resume seeing the Nazis

as mortal enemies. The Communist Party

dropped its opposition to the draft and began

advocating for the federal government to do

Furriers Union basketball team vs Army team in enefit for Armed Forces. Daily Worker, January 22nd, 1942. Tamiment Library, New everything it could to help the Allies, York University. Used With Permission. including entering the war. At the same time, the Labor Sports of New York City fell into a death spiral. Though they never announced that the organization was in trouble, the TUAA proclaimed on July 10th, 1941, in the middle of a baseball season, that it was reorganizing, and possibly downsizing. Instead of the blaming the draft, though, they instead shifted it to a more positive reason, and cited newly won vacations by union activists. In the late summer through fall, the TUAA launched a campaign for worker fitness and health “to smash Hitlerism”, with the hope of launching two new Labor Sports

248 centers.474 By December, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war, with the Communist Party as enthusiastic cheerleaders, the Labor Basketball teams, specifically the Furriers, played fundraiser games for the military versus the Army’s Camp

Upton basketball teams. The Fur Boys

won the last TUAA tournament 51-41,

which would be the last of the

Communist-led New York Labor Sports

federation until after the war.475 Indeed,

during the war, the Communist Party used

its influence within the CIO to help

Warehouse Workers Local 65 baseball team. September 11th, 1943. suppress strikes across the nation. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission.

The IWO’s sports programs continued in this period but shifted focus. Like the TUAA, they revolved around fitness for the war effort, with the assumption that much of its membership would soon be soldiers. It launched a “Bowling For Fitness And National Defense” program in

January of 1942, with 40 men’s teams of 4 players and 32 women’s teams of 3 players. 476 This continued into a springtime IWO “Bowl Over the Axis” tournament in April 17th-24th, 1942. The last mention of IWO basketball also appeared that spring, with an Eastern tournament featuring the Brooklyn Lincoln Brigadiers, the Passaic NJ Cadets, the Massachusetts Comets, and “a mystery team from Western Pennsylvania.”477 The New York IWO marched with the Amateur

474 Daily Worker, September 22nd, 1941.

475 Daily Worker, December 2nd, 1941.

476 Daily Worker, January 30th, 1942.

477 Daily Worker, April 6th, 1942.

249

Athletic Union, a normally conservative athletic organization that predates the NCAA, to promote wartime fitness in June of 1942. As with the rest of the party, one of the few instances of critiques of national institutions during the war was of Jim Crow, especially in sports. The

IWO leafleted the screening of the Lou Gehrig biography film “Pride of the Yankees” on opening night with handbills which called on the Majors to end segregation. Otherwise, the sports program of the IWO in NYC died during the war.

Like much of the Communist Party, the YCL’s membership largely left for the armed forces during the war. At the September 1943 convention, the YCL reconstituted itself as

American Youth for Democracy (AYD), removing all Marxist and Revolutionary rhetoric from its literature and program and instead presenting itself as an anti-fascist organization in order to better build wartime coalitions. During the convention, the outgoing YCL produced a pamphlet on organizing youth sports in order to combat Jim Crow and to help the war effort. The new

AYD had high hopes for incorporating sports into its program, but this would have to wait until after the war.478 Nat Low reported on this change and why it was so important to incorporate sports into an organization program, arguing that sports were an important part of everyday people’s lives and insisting that failure to do so would open up sports to fascist organizing opportunities. Indeed, Low reflected, Worker Sport had been smashed, in the 1930s and at the beginning of the war, in fascist occupied countries because it represented resistance to fascism.

Additionally, he argued that left-wing sports were important for worker health, self-expression and to move politics from theory into practice. Low argued for how sports helped downtrodden people prove themselves as good as any business leader:

478 Daily Worker, September 18th, 1943.

250

A boy who has been unable to find a niche for himself in industry or business will regain some of his self respect by being able to knock a ball 400 feet or run 100 yards in ten seconds or tear down a football field for a touchdown. In doing these things he will not only accomplish a mechanical, a physical act but will also be proving his ability to himself and his friends. He will be saying to himself “See, I’m not a failure, I’m as good as the next guy. I can hold my own with anyone.” 479

While the political rhetoric was toned down almost to the point of being apolitical, the idea was still there: sports had powerful potential and should be a part of any movement. Still, in the spirit of winning the war, the Party emphasized that confrontation between classes would need to wait until after the destruction of fascism. Less than a year later, in 1944, the Communist

Party itself rebranded itself as the Communist Political Association for the remainder of the war, as a way to smooth over any fear of wartime uncooperativeness from the Communists and emphasize that the Communists had any aspirations to topple the capitalist system during the war.

With the end of the war, politics again shifted rapidly. The Western allies competed with the Soviet Union to divide the world into “capitalist” and “communist” spheres of domination and influence, and the Communist Party leadership would again be brought back into an anti- capitalist party line. Following the war, though many of its alliances had been shaken by its ever changing lines, the party was in a good position and had significant influence in powerful CIO unions. Indeed, by January 1946, 1,750,000 workers were on strike across the nation. After a few years of dormancy, the Communist Party began to push for a revival of left-wing sporting culture in order to help with this quickly escalating class war. Rumblings of a revived left-wing sports

479 Low. Daily Worker, September 22nd, 1943.

251 organization in New York City began as the need to mobilize solidarity with the millions of people on strike became apparent.

On January 2nd, 1946, sports editor Nat Low wrote a column that contained a list of sports wishes for the New Year. One stands out months before its fruition, suggesting that plans had started long before its announcement: “A labor sports federation which would involve thousands of trade unions in inter and intra-union sports of all kinds. This is sadly needed as the titans of industry pull the throttle wide open in the nationwide drive to smash the trade union movement and reestablish the tyranny of the open shop.”480 Reconstituted union basketball teams were organized again through unions by Labor Sports militants as they returned from the military. The

Daily Worker again began to report on Labor Sports games, such as the Furriers vs. UE game, to raise funds for the striking GM workers on January 10th, 1946. Still, it would be months before the grand announcement of the Labor Sports Federation on October 9th, 1946, with its headquarters at the Central Needle Trades and Textile Gym at 305 West 44th Street.481 The LSF had a similar structure to the TUAA, with mostly Communist-influenced unions as its members and with stated progressive politics. A month later, the Labor Sports Federation’s founding conference attracted 500 union locals and commitments from 5 gymnasiums.482 One of the original organizers of the TUAA, Manny Wideroff, was featured in an article in the Daily

Worker, which contained his backstory and the history of the rise and fall of the TUAA:

MANNIE WIDEROFF is walking around with stars in his eyes these days. He’s got a dream, he and other organizers of LABOR SPORTS FEDERATION. A dream of a terrific recreation program in this city for its thousands upon thousands of trade unionists and other progressives. Negro and white, guys and gals, old and young playing together, building their bodies together,

480 Daily Worker, January 2nd, 1946.

481 Mardo. Daily Worker, October 9th, 1946.

482 Daily Worker, November 11th, 1946.

252 competing in lively softball and basketball tourneys, closing ranks together in the great unifier that is sports, paving the pathway from mere spectator sports in this country to one of mass participation. The article continues with Wideroff’s long participation in left-wing unions. He had long been friendly with the Daily Worker staff, casually stopping into their offices:: “Mannie picked up his hat and coat, moved toward the door, turned and smiled. ‘This thing is gonna grow, Bill.

Just watch our smoke. Some day soon we’ll even have our own Labor Sports Center. Our own building. What do you think of that? Our own bowling alleys and everything.’ I think it’s just fine, Mannie.”483 Bringing back the organizers of the New York Labor Sports movement was key to rekindling its fire, and demonstrates that this vision was an important part of both a radical labor movement and for building an anti-racist working class centered sports culture.

The Labor Sports Federation blossomed quickly to fill the void of the old TUAA. Just like the pre-war Communist aligned leagues, the organizers set up a thriving basketball league.

The Fur Unions dominated in play, picking up where they left off, even if practically all of its members had been overseas during the war.484 Just like the old IWO Lincoln Brigadiers and Blue

Sox, the Daily Worker picked a closely affiliated team to root for in the AYD basketball team.

The two fur unions in the Furriers Joint

Council and the Furriers Joint Board

dominated the winter basketball

leagues. The Fur Floor Five of the “A”

team consisting of Herbie Robinson, a

Furriers Basketball team, 1947. Tamiment Library, New York University. 28 year old black forward (as the teams Used With Permission.

483 Mardo. Daily Worker, November 7th, 1946.

484 Daily Worker, December 5th, 1946.

253

were again proudly integrated), Jerry Rerenson, Honey King, who was slightly deaf from his

experience in the army, Herbie Wiles (a black point guard), and Charles Davidson, who also was

black. The Daily Worker highlighted the team’s diversity and made the point that it stood in

contrast to most professional and college ranks.485 During the winter 1946-47, the AYD team

caught the imagination of the Daily Worker, upsetting the Shoe union 34-21, defeating the Air

Transport union, and finally being beaten 49-46 by the Fur Joint Board. At the end of the season,

the AYD made a run at the championship before finally losing to the Fur Joint Board again. In

the post-war period, the sports page saw the return to the writing of the pre-war sports page. The

writers treated Labor Sports as a rooting interest as one would treat elite professional sports:

It sounded for all the world like Madison Square Garden and “Cmmonnn City!” as the spirited chant of “Cmmonn AYD!” shivered the smoky air of the Central Needle Trades High School Saturday night. (Could it have been some of the same young men in both places?) But the cheers and fine efforts of the AYD Cinderella team weren’t quite enough to offset the smooth savvy of the Furriers Joint Board, as the latter wound up a sensational unbeaten season by winning the Labor Sports Federation playoff title and the big, handsome CIO trophy…486 Indeed, both the pageantry and sports-

writing language of the pre-war TUAA returned

in the post-war LSF. Labor Sports Federation

leagues would include their youth organizations, Labor Sports Federation basketball game, circa 1947-48. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With the fraternal IWO teams, as well as the standard Permission. union-affiliated Labor Sports teams The big tent concept of Labor Sports seems particularly

485 Daily Worker, January 21st, 1947.

486 Daily Worker, April 6th, 1947.

254

unique in New York City, while elsewhere radical militants tended to work within unions

exclusively. Thus, youth teams and fraternal teams were apart of communist-aligned Labor

Sports in New York, supplementing the union teams with various leagues.

Just as left-wing labor baseball had proven immensely popular at Central Park, the LSF

baseball season quickly gained the support of the unions of Hotel, Chain Restaurants,

Department Stores, United Shoe, Furriers Joint Board, Furriers Joint Council, and the Building

Service Employees.487 The 1947 LSF Baseball Season was a back and forth between the Furriers

Joint Council and Joint Board, and the Local

65 Warehouse Workers (the powerhouse in

the early 1940s TUAA baseball.) The

Furriers Joint Council was undefeated, and

at one point was called the “Yankees of

Labor Baseball” by the Daily Worker sports

writers. The Communists writers rooted for

Warehouse Workers Local 65 softball game at a picnic. 1947. the team openly, and published a full article Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission. profiling the integrated baseball team

appeared on August 9th 1947, before the Furriers were finally upset 9-3 versus the Joint Board.

The Furrier JC took the title in September.

By 1947, the Labor Sports League was well established. Unfortunately for the

Communist Party USA, its many party line changes over the years by its top-down leadership

would finally catch up to it in the later 1940s as the Cold War started to heat up. The passage of

487 Daily Worker, April 8th, 1947; The Building Service Employees baseball team had one of Yogi Berra’s younger brothers as a member, who was nicknamed by his teammates as “Kid Yogi” Daily Worker: May 6th, 1947.

255 the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which restricted the activities of unions, also specifically called on unions to swear their officers were not members of the Communist Party. Quickly, the enemies of the Communists in the CIO used this provision to expel individuals and entire unions, such as the UE, which were known to be influenced by communism. Hundreds of Communist Party members were jailed, and many were blacklisted from employment by both the government, corporations, and their enemies in unions. The final blow to the Communist Party was in 1956, when Khrushchev released documents detailing Stalin’s crimes, which shocked the base of the party and finally destroyed whatever credibility the Communist Party had left. After the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, the party was decimated, including the entire staff of the Daily

Worker who resigned in mass. The only remaining members were those who were truly hardline

Stalinists. The perception of the Communist Party as a legitimate force within the American left was over. Likewise, Communist Labor Sports was forced out of labor unions or isolated in New

York City. The IWO as a mass fraternal organization was liquidated as an organization in 1954 by the state of New York, drawing to a close a once vibrant and huge left-wing fraternal organization. The conservative backlash against the left-wing of the New Deal coalition was in full force, and was devastating to communist-aligned Labor Sports.

Conclusion

The Communists had struggled to gain traction nationally in the Third Period from 1927-

1934, but in New York City they saw their vision of anti-racist, anti-fascist working class sports realized during the Popular Front years. Through militants in unions, supplemented by

Communist youth sports and IWO fraternal sports, they built a thriving sports culture. While the work of the Communists was largely undone in the Red Scare backlash, it presents another example of the large appeal and potential of organizing through the Labor Sports movement.

256

New York was unique in that it largely was coordinated through Communist militants rather than

through labor unions, as we saw with the rest of the Labor Sports movement in the United States.

They helped build racially progressive leagues involving hundreds of thousands of people as

potential audiences and participants, which helped the activists mobilize for causes such as

ending segregation in Major League Baseball. While the Communists were vulnerable to attack

because of the upper levels of the Party clearly following orders from Moscow, the ground-level

organizers were dedicated to building a different sort of sports than had existed: for everyone.

Nearly three decades after the fall of most of the Labor Sports movement and the

Communist Party as a viable engine for social change in the United States, Lester Rodney sat

down for an interview with historian Paul Buhle for an oral history project on the history of

radicalism. On December 28th, 1981, Rodney talked extensively about his involvement in the

Daily Worker. While most of the

interview spoke of his time as a

journalist advocating for social justice in

sports, especially ending segregation in

Major League Baseball, near the end of

the interview, Rodney reflected on Labor

Sports: Furriers basketball team, 1948. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission. I tell you, for a while, we began to cover, quite extensively, a left wing trade unionist sports movement. You know, at its height, you'd get like 700 between the Transport Workers and the Fur Floor Boys. Good basketball sometimes! On like at least the high school level! We began to run box scores and articles... And then the question came, how much more should I give to that? And finally I had to sort of hold it down so it didn't eat up the Yankees and Dodgers and Joe

257

Louis and CCNY because, I had to make a decision. It had no more promise than the whole concept of left unionism had to begin with.488 Rodney had long moved on from the wreckage of the Communist Party by that point. As expressed by many ex-Communists, while he kept in perspective the role he and his fellow radical sports writers had played in bringing down Jim Crow in professional baseball, he had grown cynical about the institutions the Communist Party had constructed. Even in that cynicism about radicalism, the Communist Party, left-wing unionism, and left-wing sports, he remembered that there was a real movement that inspired people to become more involved in building a better world. The Communist Labor Sports in New York City, much like the authoritarian party it was connected with, had some real shortcomings that it never had a chance to outgrow. If it had been left alone, chances are it would have resembled something more like the Labor Sports of the

International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) on the Pacific Coast: a vibrant and militant left-wing sports culture that sought to include everyone and responded to rank and file democracy of its members. Rodney had a touch of sadness in his voice, as he must have realized that this different sort of sports in a place like New York City had to be stamped out so the post-war conservative suburban vision of the United States could take root instead.

Like Worker Sport before it, Labor Sports with its radical left-wing tinge would become a threat if it was allowed to continue. Much like Worker Sport as well, it was caught between geopolitical forces, in this case the Cold War, that ultimately forced its end, like so many other left-wing organizations in this era.

488 “Lester Rodney,” interview by Paul Buhle, Communist Party Oral Histories, part of the Oral History of the American Left Collection. December 28th, 1981. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, OH.002, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/lester-rodney/

258

Warehouse Workers Local 65 baseball game. September, 1948. Tamiment Library, New York University. Used With Permission.

259

Conclusion: The Potential of Labor Sports and Radicals in Grassroots Sports

Culture.

The Labor Sports movement in the United States, much like its cousin in the Worker

Sport movement in Europe, rose to the point of challenging how working class people interacted with sports. The hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) of people who participated in it began to break down racial separation in its strongholds, such as when the UAW, with the larger

CIO in tow, threw its might into desegregating bowling facilities throughout the Northeast,

Midwest, and Pacific Coast. That sort of concentrated effort was only possible by the building of enormous influence and grassroots organizing through labor. The commitment to building a larger working class centered sports culture, with commitment to anti-racism and women’s institutions, was largely because of the institutional experiences of both the Socialists and

Communists who had discovered what worked and what did not work in the previous few decades. Labor Sports clearly succeeded at building a larger comradery, even if the larger labor movement produced mixed results in combating racism or hate strikes and riots in its strongholds. Increasing wages and benefits while reducing work hours clearly was important, but filling those hard-fought leisure hours is what helped the long-term labor movement succeed.

It was a long road to get to that peak of Labor Sports in the late 1940s, before it began to crumble in the face of labor purges of radicals and the conservative backlash against the Popular

Front institutions of the 1930s. While small, ethnically-based clubs associated with socialist politics had existed in immigrant communities, especially but not limited to Finnish Upper

Midwest or Jewish New York City communities, by the mid-1920s steps were being taken to engage with mass sports that the American children of immigrants were interested in. Whether in the loose socialist athletic club networks, the fledgling recreational programs of the ILGWU, or

260 the Third Period communist sports organization in the Labor Sports Union, real efforts were made to connect with the sports interests of the United States. Radicals looked to Europe, which during this same time, were building an enormous Worker Sport movement based around socialist and communist international affiliations that built both worker empowerment, anti- fascist self-defense, and sobriety clubs through sports. Socialist-affiliated Worker Sport at its height in the early 1930s overshadowed even the official international Olympics in its counter- event of the Worker Olympics, with a smaller regular communist-affiliated Worker Sport staging games of its own. Worker Sport then went into sharp decline after the loss of both Germany and

Austria to fascist forces.

Radical sports organizers maintained contact with Worker Sport organizations, who routinely spoke of the network of American Socialist ethnic clubs that were hard to quantify.

While the Communists built extensive but relatively small clubs and leagues through the Labor

Sports Union, both factions of the Socialist Party embraced athletics, such as the International

Ladies Garment Workers Union and its companion in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of

America along with Socialist administrations in Milwaukee and Reading, while the more radical youth wing in the YPSLs made athletics a key part of their social program. The ILGWU, however, succeeded in building a larger recreational program with basketball and softball at its forefront that became the envy of socially minded unionists. When the ILGWU lent its support to the CIO project to build industrial unions, it brought that larger sense of what a union was supposed to be, as opposed to the simple wages and benefits of the Mineworkers. Soon, CIO affiliated unions carried their motto of “Knowledge Is Power,” and used the ILGWU model to build recreational programs, with athletics as the spearpoint program. The rapidly expanding

UAW, with competing Socialist, Communist, and Catholic factions wrestling for control of both

261 locals and the larger union, built impressive athletic programs that soon outpaced the ILGWU’s by the early 1940s. Communist-led locals such as the River Rouge Local 600 constructed large dynamic and racially inclusive leagues and teams that fielded talented athletes, while Socialist- led athletics in locals like Reuther’s Local 174 across West Side Detroit largely did the same, though without the Soviet sympathy in its rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the rest of the CIO athletic programs spread unevenly. Radical-led CIO unions like the UE or ILWU were quick to embrace Labor Sports, for example. In contrast, the more conservative and centralized unions, namely the Steelworkers operating under the

Mineworkers model, were much slower to embrace Labor Sports. Even when they did, their version was more depoliticized. In New York City, Communist-led Labor Sports operations in the city CIO and leftist unions like the Furriers, coupled with its fraternal IWO and youth wings, was a center piece of political causes, building both the ground level working class anti-racist and anti-fascist sports culture while pressuring the high level elite-talent MLB to desegregate its ranks. On the Pacific Coast, the Communist-led ILWU with local IWOs operated similar leagues and teams and provided a similar energy and politics to CIO Labor Sports circuits. Labor Sports by the late 1940s, led by the UAW, UE, and ILWU in the CIO, seemed poised to displace the dominant conservative or apolitical sports and to transform the relationship of average people with sports play. Then, much as Worker Sport had under fascist assault and hardened divisions, in the 1950s the Labor Sports movement was largely destroyed, isolated, or transitioned to less militant recreational programs.

Labor Sports is as much the story of individuals who used their talents to effect change and win real gains for working people, as much as organizational institutional stories. Dot

Tucker of the ILGWU, one of the first black women in the leadership of a local union, used her

262 position as a great track runner and basketball captain to become involved in the workings of the

ILGWU in Harlem, and would travel all the way to Barcelona and travel the barricades against fascist rebels as a result of Labor Sports. Claude Stotts fought scabs using his boxing skills on the picket lines of San Francisco docks, and would raise money for the Communist-led union in boxing tournaments. John Gallo, another boxer, was a member of the Communist Party and would organize the vast sports leagues in UAW Local 600, which he insisted be integrated and inclusive of black workers. Olga Madar used her softball skills and physical education to rise into the leadership of the UAW and become a pioneering labor feminist, environmentalist, and tireless advocate for inclusive recreation for working people. Lester Rodney, the head of the

Communist newspaper Daily Worker sports section, in addition to helping end segregation in

MLB, always covered Labor Sports on the page, because he believed in its promise.

What Happened?

While the intended consequences of the purge of the Communists from the CIO protected the organization from McCarthyist and HUAC attacks during the early Cold War and consolidated the power in the CIO alliance between Reuther-type social democrats and conservative trade unionists, it ended up having long-term consequences in the ability of much of the labor movement to fight for working class power. After the Socialist Party as an organization largely imploded in the late 1930s, many of its former members, maintaining informal circles and networks throughout the labor movement, continued their drift away from Socialism into advocating for Social Democracies of Europe, thus becoming the left-wing of the New Deal coalition Democratic Party. The CIO reunited with the AFL in 1955, merging those now- moderate unions into federation with the largely traditional trade unionists, such as the Teamsters or Carpenters unions. The Communist Party, never as top-down as either it or its enemies

263 imagined it to be, mostly failed to defend itself, as it moved toward more doctrinaire Stalinism in the Cold War atmosphere. The CP shed members rapidly as more news of the crimes of Stalin came out, before mostly splintering in 1956 in the wake of the Secret Speech and then the invasion of Hungary. Had the CIO not moved to purge the Communists, it is likely that those radicals would have continued being militants and left the party on their own when it ceased to be a useful organization. With that in mind, it is likely that Labor Sports would have continued as a real movement had the CIO not moved to destroy unions and locals within unions with

Communist leadership. One can simply look to the ILWU for inspiration on what could have been, both as a union and for Labor Sports.

The other part of the story is the slow erasure of collective movements towards individualization, which accelerated in the 1970s. Labor Sports, in this regard, was not alone in its decimation. Amateur leagues, semi-pro sports, and minor league professional sports also experienced steep decline in the 1950s, as television provided recreation, and many white, working class people moved into suburban developments just as the Great Migration brought more black residents into cities. Additionally, the post-war Baby Boom made many of the former rank and file workers into parents who had less time for Labor Sports. Thus, the relationship with sports became one of consumption and fandom instead of as participants in the war period. This did not happen overnight, but by the 1960s--when many of the babies born during the boom grew into young adults and became active in the New Left and other youth subcultures—most workers did not seek to form their own sports leagues and teams. Rather, those with an interest in the transformative potential of sports tended instead to support politically outspoken elite athletes like Muhammad Ali, the Miracle Mets, or the New York Jets’ Joe Namath. While that had been also true of the Old Left, the missing element was the on-the-ground Labor Sports movement.

264

The Labor Sports that continued in the Socialist/Social Democrat-led UAW, ILGWU, and ACWA generally declined in militancy and scope. Baseball, softball and basketball eventually vanished and were replaced by bowling and golf. The UAW’s engagement with recreation transitioned into advocacy for parks and vacation retreats, building a series of vacation facilities which ended up being used more by union leadership than rank-and-file workers, since the facilities were often hours away from urban centers. While bowling tournaments continued to be a regular part of both unions, these unions began to fall into the patterns of conservative unions and leave recreation interests to commercial entities instead of the union providing them.

Golf also continued, perhaps to the detriment of labor, since the image of the union boss playing golf with CEOs whom they were supposed to be antagonists with became a lasting image just as the labor movement came under assault in the 1970s-80s. Unfortunately, labor leadership had destroyed the rank and file institutions, like Labor Sports. Those rank and file institutions may have been able to successfully resist the end of the social contract in the 1980s, which had been forged through struggle between workers and corporations in the pre and post-war years.

Removing the militants and destroying or isolating highly democratic and energetic unions like the UE or ILWU laid the ground work for such an assault on labor unions.

Legacies of Labor Sports

As noted, Labor Sports have largely been ignored or dismissed as an experiment that went nowhere. Here, I show instead the blooming of an energetic culture that had the power to redefine what sports could look like from the bottom up. While today sports play (if it occurs at all) usually ends at the conclusion of high school, the possibility of access to not only highly social and comradely sports for adults of all ages who wanted to play defined Labor Sports.

Anyone could join a team, root for their coworkers, and build relationships. Amateur recreational

265 leagues or even pickup sports certainly still exist, but they tend to be apolitical. While the interest in sports remains high in the United States (as in much of the rest of the world), it tends to be focused on the exceptionally talented. In the end, the legacy of Labor Sports is a lesson in what could have been had the destruction of leftist cultural institutions not commenced in the early

Cold War, breaking the links to later generations. Labor Sports, with the exception of the ILWU, has largely faded to obscurity.

Still, while history does not repeat itself exactly, it does often echo. In the 1970s onward, gay and lesbian amateur sports leagues, especially in softball, rose as an expression of empowerment. Those leagues were created in a similar manner to workers flocked to the Labor sports leagues in the 1930s, where people alienated from society seeking a better life and access to friendly, healthy sports play. Queer sports leagues are another under-researched but key cornerstone of social movements, where everyday but marginalized people get a chance to prove themselves on playing fields. With no direct connection to Labor Sports, these leagues replicated much of what the earlier movement set out to do: form relationships and provide cheap recreation, community, identification, and empowerment.

Elsewhere in the world, political sports clubs continue the legacy of both Worker Sport and

Labor Sports by doing political solidarity work through sports play. For instance, the Easton

Cowboys and Cowgirls in Brighton, UK, founded in 1992, run a full program of sports run through the model of social justice activism, embarking on international solidarity work and committing to anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobic principles. St. Pauli FC in Germany became a left-wing based club mostly because fans encouraged the club to adopt anti-racist policies. In the United States, a small baseball league called the Dock Ellis League is largely based around punk-rock rebel culture. In the face of a rising neo-fascist movement, anti-fascist

266 gyms have begun to appear across the United States and Europe. While all of these are small comparatively, they are a reminder that there is always potential for something new, if people want to build it. The potential and lessons of Labor Sports is a good example for what worked and what another such movement could do differently to avoid its destruction. With the rebirth of elite professional activism in recent years, anything is possible.

War Worker, 1943. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Used with permission.

267

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"Committee On Fair Play In Sports Issues Rebuttal To Bingham's Position | News | The Harvard Crimson". The Harvard Crimson, 1935. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1935/11/26/committee-on-fair-play-in-sports/.

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