Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937)
Encyclopedia
The Communist Party
and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO
's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950.
Historians disagree why the union movement never formed a labor party and why American workers have never embraced socialist parties in any numbers in the last ninety years. Some have argued that a strain of American exceptionalism
made U.S. workers resistant to parties that emphasized class struggle
; others have attributed the left's failure to its own successes in building strong unions, but at the cost of downplaying its own political and social agendas for the sake of unity or short-term gains. Others take just the opposite position: that the left lost its power to lead the labor movement by its ideological zig-zags. The CP's history within the labor movement can support all of these theses.
when it refused to join the Comintern
. The original core of the CP believed that the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
meant that the revolution was at hand in the West as well.
The CP's initial attitude towards unions reflected that millenarian
view. At the time of its founding, according to a leader of the party, "it would have been difficult to gather a half dozen delegates who knew anything about the trade union movement." The Party also became a largely clandestine organization during the immediate post-war years, as the Palmer Raids
led to the arrest and deportation of thousands of Party members.
The CP at that time looked on the American Federation of Labor
as an enemy to be destroyed in order to eliminate the temptations of reformism rather than revolution. They also looked down on most trade union activities as insufficiently revolutionary: even though the labor movement was engaged in a great wave of strikes in 1919, including a general strike
in Seattle, Washington, the Party's members had no role in them. Instead they urged workers to put aside their short-term economic goals and to concentrate on overthrowing the state.
The Profintern
, or "Red International of Labor Unions," forced the CP to change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL in order to make it a revolutionary body – what an earlier generation of SP members referred to as "boring from within." In order to accomplish this, the Profintern recognized the Trade Union Educational League
, an organization founded by William Z. Foster
, as its U.S. affiliate.
Foster had been, prior to his agreement to bring the TUEL under the wing of the CP, a syndicalist, who believed that workers would seize power through workers' organizations, such as unions, rather than through political organizations, such as a communist party. He had led the AFL's failed 1919 strike in the steel industry and had established particularly close relations then with John Fitzpatrick
, the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor
.
TUEL functioned within existing unions, trying to organize support for industrial unionism
, a labor party
, organizing the unorganized and the Soviet Union
. TUEL strove to create alliances with leaders who shared some of its agenda, while trying to build a base for left unionism at the local level.
After some organizational successes, however, TUEL managed to alienate Fitzpatrick, leaving them without major allies when the AFL denounced TUEL as a "dual union
" and expelled TUEL members in 1924. The CPUSA lost more allies when, under orders from the Comintern, it withdrew its previous enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party
candidacy of Robert La Follette, Sr. for President in 1924.
The CP, on the other hand, had some short-lived successes in the labor movement without the TUEL's help. The CP had broad support in the early 1920s among the radical, largely immigrant, garment workers in New York City. A number of CP members won leadership positions in three major International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
(ILGWU) locals in New York City in 1924 and offices in other locals in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia
. They held on to those offices despite the attempts by the Socialist leadership of the ILGWU to oust them.
But in 1926 the left leadership in New York forfeited everything they had when they lost a strike of 40,000 cloakmakers. The local union leadership lost the strike in large part because of the internal factionalism within the CP: when the union had the opportunity to settle on terms that were less than what the union had demanded, the union's leaders went to the CP for approval of the deal. But the Party's fraction within the union was reluctant to accept it, afraid that this would open them up to charges of softness in intra-Party factional warfare. The strike dragged on another few months, at which point the locals accepted an inferior agreement.
That gave the International union the opportunity it needed: the Socialist
leadership of the ILGWU took over the exhausted locals after they settled and their supporters were too dispirited to resist. While the CP retained a strong base of support in the smaller Fur Workers Union, it never recovered from its defeat in the much larger garment industry; on the contrary, the ILGWU, led by David Dubinsky
for the next forty years, remained resolutely anti-communist thereafter.
The TUEL itself changed for brief period into the dual union that the AFL had accused it of being. The TUEL led a strike of woolen industry workers
in Passaic, New Jersey
in 1926 — until, that is, the Comintern
instructed the Party later that year to abandon any independent unions it had formed on the ground that these represented ultra-left adventurism. The strike, which would probably have been lost in any case, ended six months later in defeat after the AFL's United Textile Workers took over leadership of the strike.
's turn to the left as he moved against his former ally Nikolai Bukharin
. CP leaders, such as Foster, willing to make the switch, held on to their positions in the Party, while those who did not, such as Jay Lovestone
, were expelled.
The CP's Third Period
stance towards unions was nearly as ultra-left as its position in 1919 through 1921. While advocating a "united front from below," the Party attacked other socialist parties as "social fascists" and denounced the AFL as "an organ to suppress and disorganize the masses" which workers should join only to "overthrow the reformist bureaucracy
" that ran them. The CP instead focused on founding new revolutionary unions in the expectation that the collapse of capitalism was just around the corner.
These new dual unions were, in fact, often more like ginger groups than unions, with few members and even fewer long-term members. Nonetheless these groups did make some heroic efforts to organize the unorganized. In 1929 the National Textile Workers led a strike of thousands of textile workers in Gastonia, North Carolina
, who walked out, despite the NTW's attempts to hold them back, after management fired five union activists. That strike was crushed after mobs of citizens smashed up union offices and murdered a union activist.
While local authorities, preachers and newspapers played up the National Textile Workers' association with godless communism and its opposition to white supremacy
, it is unlikely that this made much difference in the final analysis. The authorities reacted just as violently when the much less radical AFL intervened after a spontaneous strike of textile workers erupted in other mill towns several months later. That strike likewise ended in mass arrests and the killing of three strikers, shot in the back by sheriffs.
The CP's efforts in mining were just as unsuccessful. The CP had once had a good deal of support in the internecine struggles within the United Mine Workers
in the 1920s, when John L. Lewis
used every weapon available to defeat his rivals for union leadership while wages and working conditions in the industry grew worse. The TUEL-supported candidate who ran for UMW President against Lewis in the 1924 election was credited with 66,000 votes in the official tally – nearly half what Lewis received. The CP later allied itself, for a time, with John Brophy
, whose "Save the Union" slate probably would have won election to national leadership in 1926 if the vote had been held democratically.
Lewis, however, effectively drove all of the TUEL and Brophy supporters from the union after his victory in 1926. The CP later burned its bridges with Brophy, denouncing him as a reformist.
The CP founded its own National Miners Union in 1928. It engaged in a fierce struggle to undo wage cuts when miners struck in Pennsylvania and Ohio mines in 1931, but lost the strike when mine operators chose to recognize the UMW – which had not been involved in the strike – rather than the NMU, then obtained an injunction to prevent the NMU from picketing.
The NMU also took on the leadership of a strike that the UMW had called in Harlan County, Kentucky
in 1931 with even more disastrous results, since the union was not prepared to provide the relief necessary to permit strikers to remain out for any length of time, particularly in the face of attacks by "gun thugs." The NMU's strong opposition to racial discrimination and wholehearted support for the Soviet Union also served to alienate it from the mostly fundamentalist and predominantly white miners in Harlan County. While the strike publicized the horrific conditions in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia
, it did not produce any concrete benefits for striking miners.
There were, however, some bright spots for the CP: their Food Workers Industrial Union successfully organized cafeteria and restaurant workers, particularly in New York, where many of the restaurant workers unions had been taken over by Dutch Schultz
as part of his labor rackets. Those CP-led unions not only fended off Schultz's gangsters, but thrived, and became dominant within the AFL
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union in New York when they affiliated with it several years later.
The Maritime Workers Industrial Union did not survive the Third Period, but it left its mark. Sailors and longshoremen had a tradition of radical politics and more or less spontaneous job actions; the IWW
had been particularly active in both east and west coast ports up through the 1920s. The MWIU organized occasional strikes, attacked the inadequate relief provided for unemployed workers by the YMCA and other groups, and distributed the MWIU's newspapers.These programs attracted a number of sailors and longshoremen, including Harry Bridges
, who subsequently led the west coast longshore strike of 1934.
The TUUL had similar limited success in the automobile industry, where it established shop nuclei that linked the Party with the campaign for industrial unionism. The CP was, however, more successful in organizing unemployed workers in Detroit and other auto centers than it was in recruiting or organizing auto workers.
and the Roosevelt administration as a form of fascism, because the National Industrial Recovery Act
provided for a form of corporativist rule, calling on industries to negotiate codes that would regulate prices, production, labor relations and other matters with only indirect government supervision. The government panels created under the NRA generally gave in to employer demands and appeared to be more concerned with preventing strikes than with protecting workers' rights or living standards.
But the NRA had a different impact than the Administration originally intended. Workers flocked to unions for representation, often in advance of any union organizing efforts, in the belief that Roosevelt and the NRA would protect them. Lewis and the UMWA capitalized on this sentiment in 1933 when his organizers told miners that "The President wants you to join the Union." While the UMWA organizers may have meant President Lewis, they did not correct the misimpression on the part of many miners who thought they meant President Roosevelt.
Workers engaged in a wave of strikes, the most since 1921, in 1934. The largest and most significant were three giant strikes for union recognition among longshoremen on the West Coast
, truck drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota
and automobile workers in Toledo, Ohio. In each case the strike became either a general strike
or something close to it.
In each case radicals, either associated with the CPUSA or other leftwing parties, played key leadership roles; the CP and its allies, such as Harry Bridges, played an important role in the west coast longshore strike
. The CP's influence depended, however, on the personal charisma of Harry Bridges and the hard work put in by its members and sympathizers on the docks, rather than on the MWIU itself, which largely disappeared when its radical cadres followed the membership into the newly revived west coast locals of the ILA. While Bridges was apparently never a member of the CP — something the government tried to prove, without success, in four different trials over more than a decade — he worked closely with Party activists and helped advance their careers within the union, while the union that grew out of the strike, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union
, espoused the party's politics for decades.
The Party's role in the founding of the Transport Workers Union of America
was even clearer: two TUUL organizers, John Santo and Austin Hogan, were instrumental in the founding of the union in 1934, and almost all of its original leaders, including Mike Quill
, were either Party members or close followers of Party policies. The TWU won the right to represent New York City's public transit workers after several years of clandestine organizing, a series of small strikes, a sitdown strike
in the BMT's Kent Avenue powerhouse in 1937 and an overwhelming victory among IRT
employees in an NLRB
election several months later.
Yet while the CP played a leading role in that organization, Party members, even those whose party membership had been open in the past, chose to downplay or conceal their membership. Hogan, a CP candidate for Congress
in 1934, kept his party affiliation private, to the extent that was possible, after he became President of TWU Local 100, the local of New York City subway workers. The party discontinued its shop papers, which went by names such as "Red Dynamo" and "Red Express", in 1935, when TWU organizers claimed that the party's overt role in the union was interfering with their efforts and when Popular Front
alliance-building replaced Third Period separatism. While the party remained influential — some said dominant — in the union until 1949, and the union closely followed party policies on issues such as civil rights
, public ownership of the subways and fare increases, the party took no credit for its contributions and party members vigorously rejected claims of employers, intra-union opponents and investigators that the party was, in fact, a major influence in the union.
The CP similarly gained influence at first in the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations
, or CIO, on the strength of individual members' work. Lee Pressman
, the General Counsel for the CIO and later the United Steelworkers of America, was a member of the CP and the underground Ware group
involved in espionage for the Soviet Union
. The first publicity director for the CIO, Len De Caux, was likewise a member of the CP throughout his years with the CIO as were many more organizers and rank-and-file activists within the unions affiliated with the CIO.
Individuals like Pressman and De Caux would not have considered working for the CIO if the CP had not shifted its position from sectarian purity to first a united front
and later a popular front
policy that favored alliances with other "progressive forces." At the same time the New Deal was turning to the left, in response to both the increasingly hostile response by employers and the wave of worker discontent that had replaced the apathetic resignation of the first years of the Great Depression
. The CP, having denounced Roosevelt as a fascist only a few years earlier, moved closer and closer to embracing him.
At the same time the CIO and other progressive organizations and individuals overcome many of their reservations about working with the CP. Of the two hundred or so organizers that Lewis hired for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
, sixty were CP members, with particular strength among the staff responsible for organizing foreign-born and African-American workers and in the Chicago area.
Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his organizers, so long as he controlled the organization. As he once famously remarked, "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets." He took the same line in private, when David Dubinsky of the ILGWU asked him about the communists on the SWOC staff; as he told Dubinsky, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?"
that represented the first test of the CIO's ability to turn mass discontent into union gains, a number of rank-and-file leaders were also CP members. The Party had a degree of presence, both at the local and international level, in the United Rubber Workers union formed after the strike.
The CP also exerted a great deal of influence within the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
(or UE), founded in 1936 by the merger of a number of federal union
s created by the AFL and small shop caucuses, largely made up of CP activists and other socialists and radicals, at General Electric
, Westinghouse Electric Company
and other unorganized companies. The CP grew even more powerful within the UE in 1937 when James Matles, former head of the CP's Metal Workers Industrial Union, brought in a number of locals after a brief affiliation with the International Association of Machinists. Matles and other CP members and allies held the bulk of the important positions within the UE for the next twelve years, until the CIO engineered a split within it in order to separate the Communist leaders from the CIO; they continued to hold power thereafter within that portion of the union that was not raided by the International Union of Electrical Workers.
The CP achieved even greater results, but less long-term success, working within the United Automobile Workers. Like the UE, the UAW was also formed in 1936 out of a number of federal union
s created by the AFL and locals from other unions in the industry. Of its 25,000 workers, almost all came from outside Michigan.
One of the most prominent UAW activists in the early years of the union was Wyndham Mortimer, who had led a strike against White Motors in Cleveland, Ohio
. Mortimer was elected Vice-President at the UAW's first convention and might have been elected President if not for concern about his Party membership.
Mortimer and the CP formed alliances at that first convention with George Addes
, then the secretary-treasurer of the UAW, later its President, and Walter Reuther
, who headed the UAW from 1947 until his death in 1970. The CP maintained its alliance with Addes, the center of the left-wing caucus within the UAW, for the next decade. Its alliance with Reuther proved much shorter.
When the UAW decided to organize the industry by going after General Motors, Mortimer was sent to Flint, Michigan
, where GM's production was centered. Even at that early stage factional infighting within the UAW, in particular between Mortimer and Homer Martin
, the first President of the UAW, threatened to derail the campaign. When Martin pulled Mortimer out of Flint, Mortimer arranged for Bob Travis, another union activist and CP member from Toledo, to replace him.
Travis played an active role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike
, aided by some veteran CP autoworkers inside Fisher Body Plant #1 – but also by other radical workers, some belonging to Trotskyist parties, the Socialist Party or the IWW. The same pattern applied outside the plants: Socialist Party members, such as Walter Reuther's brothers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther, and the Socialists and ex-Socialists working for the CIO cooperated with CP members, such as Henry Kraus, the UAW's publicity director, with a minimum of sectarian bickering.
The CP, in fact, played down its revolutionary politics during the sit-down strike. In part this was to avoid giving GM and its allies an issue to use against the strike; in part it was out of fear of distancing the Party from the strikers, who were, in the opinion of CP leadership, using revolutionary means to achieve traditional union goals. The Socialists, by contrast, had a much smaller base within the striking workers, but were much more inclined to attach revolutionary significance to the sit-down strikes and to magnify their own role in them.
The CP was even more circumspect in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. The CP was anxious not to scare off its partners and employers in the CIO: its members therefore made no effort to advertise their Party affiliation and even took steps not to pack SWOC conventions.
Nor did circumstances give them much opportunity to rise to leadership. Unlike the UAW, which was born out of tumultuous struggles in which CP activists and other radicals played leading parts, the SWOC conducted a much more top-down organizing campaign subject to close control. SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP played an important role in recruiting and organizing members, but rarely stayed in one area long enough to cultivate the sort of relations with local leaders that might have allowed them to recruit them into the Party, if they had tried to do so. They simply did not have the freedom of action that Mortimer, Travis and others within the UAW did.
Nor did they have the same power. As staff members, Pressman, de Caux and the SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP had, at most, only indirect influence on CIO or SWOC policy and no independent base to rally support or propagandize for other issues. Philip Murray
, a former UMWA associate whom Lewis installed as head of the SWOC, weeded out most of the Communists from the union over the years after the initial organizing drives as the SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America. By 1942 the purge was almost complete.
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950.
Historians disagree why the union movement never formed a labor party and why American workers have never embraced socialist parties in any numbers in the last ninety years. Some have argued that a strain of American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation," and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty,...
made U.S. workers resistant to parties that emphasized class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
; others have attributed the left's failure to its own successes in building strong unions, but at the cost of downplaying its own political and social agendas for the sake of unity or short-term gains. Others take just the opposite position: that the left lost its power to lead the labor movement by its ideological zig-zags. The CP's history within the labor movement can support all of these theses.
The CPUSA's founding and early years
The Communist Party of the USA was founded in 1919, out of two groups who broke from the Socialist Party of AmericaSocialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
when it refused to join the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
. The original core of the CP believed that the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
meant that the revolution was at hand in the West as well.
The CP's initial attitude towards unions reflected that millenarian
Millenarianism
Millenarianism is the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed, based on a one-thousand-year cycle. The term is more generically used to refer to any belief centered around 1000 year intervals...
view. At the time of its founding, according to a leader of the party, "it would have been difficult to gather a half dozen delegates who knew anything about the trade union movement." The Party also became a largely clandestine organization during the immediate post-war years, as the Palmer Raids
Palmer Raids
The Palmer Raids were attempts by the United States Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer...
led to the arrest and deportation of thousands of Party members.
The CP at that time looked on the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
as an enemy to be destroyed in order to eliminate the temptations of reformism rather than revolution. They also looked down on most trade union activities as insufficiently revolutionary: even though the labor movement was engaged in a great wave of strikes in 1919, including a general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
in Seattle, Washington, the Party's members had no role in them. Instead they urged workers to put aside their short-term economic goals and to concentrate on overthrowing the state.
The Profintern
Profintern
The Red International of Labor Unions , commonly known as the Profintern, was an international body established by the Communist International with the aim of coordinating Communist activities within trade unions...
, or "Red International of Labor Unions," forced the CP to change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL in order to make it a revolutionary body – what an earlier generation of SP members referred to as "boring from within." In order to accomplish this, the Profintern recognized the Trade Union Educational League
Trade Union Educational League
The Trade Union Educational League was established by William Z. Foster in 1920 as a means of uniting radicals within various trade unions for a common plan of action. The group was subsidized by the Communist International via the Communist Party of America from 1922...
, an organization founded by William Z. Foster
William Z. Foster
William Foster was a radical American labor organizer and Marxist politician, whose career included a lengthy stint as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA...
, as its U.S. affiliate.
Foster had been, prior to his agreement to bring the TUEL under the wing of the CP, a syndicalist, who believed that workers would seize power through workers' organizations, such as unions, rather than through political organizations, such as a communist party. He had led the AFL's failed 1919 strike in the steel industry and had established particularly close relations then with John Fitzpatrick
John Fitzpatrick (unionist)
John Fitzpatrick was an Irish-born American trade union leader. He is best remembered as the longtime head of the powerful Chicago Federation of Labor from 1906 until his death in 1946.-Early years:...
, the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor
Chicago Federation of Labor
The Chicago Federation of Labor is an umbrella organization for unions in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It is a subordinate body of the AFL-CIO, and as of 2011 has about 320 affiliated member unions representing half a million union members in Cook County....
.
TUEL functioned within existing unions, trying to organize support for industrial unionism
Industrial unionism
Industrial unionism is a labor union organizing method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union—regardless of skill or trade—thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations...
, a labor party
Farmer-Labor Party
The first modern Farmer–Labor Party in the United States emerged in Minnesota in 1918. Economic dislocation caused by American entry into World War I put agricultural prices and workers' wages into imbalance with rapidly escalating retail prices during the war years, and farmers and workers sought...
, organizing the unorganized and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. TUEL strove to create alliances with leaders who shared some of its agenda, while trying to build a base for left unionism at the local level.
After some organizational successes, however, TUEL managed to alienate Fitzpatrick, leaving them without major allies when the AFL denounced TUEL as a "dual union
Dual unionism
Dual unionism is the development of a union or political organization parallel to and within an existing labor union. In some cases, the term may refer to the situation where two unions claim the right to organize the same workers....
" and expelled TUEL members in 1924. The CPUSA lost more allies when, under orders from the Comintern, it withdrew its previous enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party
Progressive Party (United States, 1924)
The Progressive Party of 1924 was a new party created as a vehicle for Robert M. La Follette, Sr. to run for president in the 1924 election. It did not run candidates for other offices, and it disappeared after the election except in Wisconsin. Its name resembles the 1912 Progressive Party, which...
candidacy of Robert La Follette, Sr. for President in 1924.
The CP, on the other hand, had some short-lived successes in the labor movement without the TUEL's help. The CP had broad support in the early 1920s among the radical, largely immigrant, garment workers in New York City. A number of CP members won leadership positions in three major International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s...
(ILGWU) locals in New York City in 1924 and offices in other locals in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
. They held on to those offices despite the attempts by the Socialist leadership of the ILGWU to oust them.
But in 1926 the left leadership in New York forfeited everything they had when they lost a strike of 40,000 cloakmakers. The local union leadership lost the strike in large part because of the internal factionalism within the CP: when the union had the opportunity to settle on terms that were less than what the union had demanded, the union's leaders went to the CP for approval of the deal. But the Party's fraction within the union was reluctant to accept it, afraid that this would open them up to charges of softness in intra-Party factional warfare. The strike dragged on another few months, at which point the locals accepted an inferior agreement.
That gave the International union the opportunity it needed: the Socialist
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
leadership of the ILGWU took over the exhausted locals after they settled and their supporters were too dispirited to resist. While the CP retained a strong base of support in the smaller Fur Workers Union, it never recovered from its defeat in the much larger garment industry; on the contrary, the ILGWU, led by David Dubinsky
David Dubinsky
David Dubinsky was an American labor leader...
for the next forty years, remained resolutely anti-communist thereafter.
The TUEL itself changed for brief period into the dual union that the AFL had accused it of being. The TUEL led a strike of woolen industry workers
1926 Passaic Textile Strike
The 1926 Passaic Textile Strike was a work stoppage by over 15,000 woolen mill workers in and around Passaic, New Jersey over wage issues in several factories in the vicinity...
in Passaic, New Jersey
Passaic, New Jersey
Passaic is a city in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city had a total population of 69,781, maintaining its status as the 15th largest municipality in New Jersey with an increase of 1,920 residents from the 2000 Census population of 67,861...
in 1926 — until, that is, the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
instructed the Party later that year to abandon any independent unions it had formed on the ground that these represented ultra-left adventurism. The strike, which would probably have been lost in any case, ended six months later in defeat after the AFL's United Textile Workers took over leadership of the strike.
The CPUSA turns left: the Trade Union Unity League
The Comintern's repudiation of dual unionism in 1926 turned out, however, to be only a temporary change in policy; in 1928 the CP began establishing new CP-led unions in the coal, textile, food and garment industries and renamed the TUEL the Trade Union Unity League in 1929. This change in policy coincided with StalinJoseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's turn to the left as he moved against his former ally Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
. CP leaders, such as Foster, willing to make the switch, held on to their positions in the Party, while those who did not, such as Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
, were expelled.
The CP's Third Period
Third Period
The Third Period is a ideological concept adopted by the Communist International at its 6th World Congress, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928....
stance towards unions was nearly as ultra-left as its position in 1919 through 1921. While advocating a "united front from below," the Party attacked other socialist parties as "social fascists" and denounced the AFL as "an organ to suppress and disorganize the masses" which workers should join only to "overthrow the reformist bureaucracy
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...
" that ran them. The CP instead focused on founding new revolutionary unions in the expectation that the collapse of capitalism was just around the corner.
These new dual unions were, in fact, often more like ginger groups than unions, with few members and even fewer long-term members. Nonetheless these groups did make some heroic efforts to organize the unorganized. In 1929 the National Textile Workers led a strike of thousands of textile workers in Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina, United States. It is also the third largest suburb of the Charlotte Area, behind Concord and Rock Hill. The population was 71,226 as of Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina,...
, who walked out, despite the NTW's attempts to hold them back, after management fired five union activists. That strike was crushed after mobs of citizens smashed up union offices and murdered a union activist.
While local authorities, preachers and newspapers played up the National Textile Workers' association with godless communism and its opposition to white supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
, it is unlikely that this made much difference in the final analysis. The authorities reacted just as violently when the much less radical AFL intervened after a spontaneous strike of textile workers erupted in other mill towns several months later. That strike likewise ended in mass arrests and the killing of three strikers, shot in the back by sheriffs.
The CP's efforts in mining were just as unsuccessful. The CP had once had a good deal of support in the internecine struggles within the United Mine Workers
United Mine Workers
The United Mine Workers of America is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners and coal technicians. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada...
in the 1920s, when John L. Lewis
John L. Lewis
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960...
used every weapon available to defeat his rivals for union leadership while wages and working conditions in the industry grew worse. The TUEL-supported candidate who ran for UMW President against Lewis in the 1924 election was credited with 66,000 votes in the official tally – nearly half what Lewis received. The CP later allied itself, for a time, with John Brophy
John Brophy (labor)
John Brophy was an important figure in the United Mine Workers of America in the 1920s and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the last major challenger to John L...
, whose "Save the Union" slate probably would have won election to national leadership in 1926 if the vote had been held democratically.
Lewis, however, effectively drove all of the TUEL and Brophy supporters from the union after his victory in 1926. The CP later burned its bridges with Brophy, denouncing him as a reformist.
The CP founded its own National Miners Union in 1928. It engaged in a fierce struggle to undo wage cuts when miners struck in Pennsylvania and Ohio mines in 1931, but lost the strike when mine operators chose to recognize the UMW – which had not been involved in the strike – rather than the NMU, then obtained an injunction to prevent the NMU from picketing.
The NMU also took on the leadership of a strike that the UMW had called in Harlan County, Kentucky
Harlan County, Kentucky
Harlan County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It was formed in 1819. As of 2000, the population was 33,200. Its county seat is Harlan...
in 1931 with even more disastrous results, since the union was not prepared to provide the relief necessary to permit strikers to remain out for any length of time, particularly in the face of attacks by "gun thugs." The NMU's strong opposition to racial discrimination and wholehearted support for the Soviet Union also served to alienate it from the mostly fundamentalist and predominantly white miners in Harlan County. While the strike publicized the horrific conditions in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia
Appalachia
Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...
, it did not produce any concrete benefits for striking miners.
There were, however, some bright spots for the CP: their Food Workers Industrial Union successfully organized cafeteria and restaurant workers, particularly in New York, where many of the restaurant workers unions had been taken over by Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz was a New York City-area Jewish American gangster of the 1920s and 1930s who made his fortune in organized crime-related activities such as bootlegging alcohol and the numbers racket...
as part of his labor rackets. Those CP-led unions not only fended off Schultz's gangsters, but thrived, and became dominant within the AFL
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union in New York when they affiliated with it several years later.
The Maritime Workers Industrial Union did not survive the Third Period, but it left its mark. Sailors and longshoremen had a tradition of radical politics and more or less spontaneous job actions; the IWW
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
had been particularly active in both east and west coast ports up through the 1920s. The MWIU organized occasional strikes, attacked the inadequate relief provided for unemployed workers by the YMCA and other groups, and distributed the MWIU's newspapers.These programs attracted a number of sailors and longshoremen, including Harry Bridges
Harry Bridges
Harry Bridges was an Australian-American union leader, in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union , a longshore and warehouse workers' union on the West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska which he helped form and led for over 40 years...
, who subsequently led the west coast longshore strike of 1934.
The TUUL had similar limited success in the automobile industry, where it established shop nuclei that linked the Party with the campaign for industrial unionism. The CP was, however, more successful in organizing unemployed workers in Detroit and other auto centers than it was in recruiting or organizing auto workers.
The early years of the New Deal and the founding of the CIO
The CP initially looked on the New DealNew Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
and the Roosevelt administration as a form of fascism, because the National Industrial Recovery Act
National Industrial Recovery Act
The National Industrial Recovery Act , officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 (Ch. 90, 48 Stat. 195, formerly...
provided for a form of corporativist rule, calling on industries to negotiate codes that would regulate prices, production, labor relations and other matters with only indirect government supervision. The government panels created under the NRA generally gave in to employer demands and appeared to be more concerned with preventing strikes than with protecting workers' rights or living standards.
But the NRA had a different impact than the Administration originally intended. Workers flocked to unions for representation, often in advance of any union organizing efforts, in the belief that Roosevelt and the NRA would protect them. Lewis and the UMWA capitalized on this sentiment in 1933 when his organizers told miners that "The President wants you to join the Union." While the UMWA organizers may have meant President Lewis, they did not correct the misimpression on the part of many miners who thought they meant President Roosevelt.
Workers engaged in a wave of strikes, the most since 1921, in 1934. The largest and most significant were three giant strikes for union recognition among longshoremen on the West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
, truck drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 grew out of a strike by Teamsters against most of the trucking companies operating in Minneapolis, a major distribution center for the Upper Midwest. The strike began on May 16, 1934 in the Market District and ensuing violence lasted periodically throughout...
and automobile workers in Toledo, Ohio. In each case the strike became either a general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
or something close to it.
In each case radicals, either associated with the CPUSA or other leftwing parties, played key leadership roles; the CP and its allies, such as Harry Bridges, played an important role in the west coast longshore strike
1934 West Coast Longshore Strike
The 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike lasted eighty-three days, triggered by sailors and a four-day general strike in San Francisco, and led to the unionization of all of the West Coast ports of the United States...
. The CP's influence depended, however, on the personal charisma of Harry Bridges and the hard work put in by its members and sympathizers on the docks, rather than on the MWIU itself, which largely disappeared when its radical cadres followed the membership into the newly revived west coast locals of the ILA. While Bridges was apparently never a member of the CP — something the government tried to prove, without success, in four different trials over more than a decade — he worked closely with Party activists and helped advance their careers within the union, while the union that grew out of the strike, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii and Alaska, and in British Columbia, Canada. It also represents hotel workers in Hawaii, cannery workers in Alaska, warehouse workers throughout...
, espoused the party's politics for decades.
The Party's role in the founding of the Transport Workers Union of America
Transport Workers Union of America
Transport Workers Union of America is a United States labor union that was founded in 1934 by subway workers in New York City, then expanded to represent transit employees in other cities, primarily in the eastern U.S. This article discusses the parent union and its largest local, Local 100,...
was even clearer: two TUUL organizers, John Santo and Austin Hogan, were instrumental in the founding of the union in 1934, and almost all of its original leaders, including Mike Quill
Mike Quill
Michael J. Quill was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America , a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expanded to represent employees in other forms of transit, and the President of the TWU for most of the first thirty years of its existence...
, were either Party members or close followers of Party policies. The TWU won the right to represent New York City's public transit workers after several years of clandestine organizing, a series of small strikes, a sitdown strike
Sitdown strike
A sit-down strike is a form of civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers, usually employed at a factory or other centralized location, take possession of the workplace by "sitting down" at their stations, effectively preventing their employers from replacing them with strikebreakers...
in the BMT's Kent Avenue powerhouse in 1937 and an overwhelming victory among IRT
Interborough Rapid Transit Company
The Interborough Rapid Transit Company was the private operator of the original underground New York City Subway line that opened in 1904, as well as earlier elevated railways and additional rapid transit lines in New York City. The IRT was purchased by the City in June 1940...
employees in an NLRB
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...
election several months later.
Yet while the CP played a leading role in that organization, Party members, even those whose party membership had been open in the past, chose to downplay or conceal their membership. Hogan, a CP candidate for Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
in 1934, kept his party affiliation private, to the extent that was possible, after he became President of TWU Local 100, the local of New York City subway workers. The party discontinued its shop papers, which went by names such as "Red Dynamo" and "Red Express", in 1935, when TWU organizers claimed that the party's overt role in the union was interfering with their efforts and when Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
alliance-building replaced Third Period separatism. While the party remained influential — some said dominant — in the union until 1949, and the union closely followed party policies on issues such as civil rights
American Civil Rights Movement (1896-1954)
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans...
, public ownership of the subways and fare increases, the party took no credit for its contributions and party members vigorously rejected claims of employers, intra-union opponents and investigators that the party was, in fact, a major influence in the union.
The CP similarly gained influence at first in the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
, or CIO, on the strength of individual members' work. Lee Pressman
Lee Pressman
Lee Pressman was a labor attorney and a US government functionary publicly exposed in 1948 for having been a spy for the Soviet foreign intelligence network during the middle 1930s...
, the General Counsel for the CIO and later the United Steelworkers of America, was a member of the CP and the underground Ware group
Harold Ware
Harold Maskell "Hal" Ware was an American Marxist regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture....
involved in espionage for the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. The first publicity director for the CIO, Len De Caux, was likewise a member of the CP throughout his years with the CIO as were many more organizers and rank-and-file activists within the unions affiliated with the CIO.
Individuals like Pressman and De Caux would not have considered working for the CIO if the CP had not shifted its position from sectarian purity to first a united front
United front
The united front is a form of struggle that may be pursued by revolutionaries. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organisation created by revolutionaries in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.According to the theses of...
and later a popular front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
policy that favored alliances with other "progressive forces." At the same time the New Deal was turning to the left, in response to both the increasingly hostile response by employers and the wave of worker discontent that had replaced the apathetic resignation of the first years of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. The CP, having denounced Roosevelt as a fascist only a few years earlier, moved closer and closer to embracing him.
At the same time the CIO and other progressive organizations and individuals overcome many of their reservations about working with the CP. Of the two hundred or so organizers that Lewis hired for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
Steel Workers Organizing Committee
The Steel Workers Organizing Committee was one of two precursor labor organizations to the United Steelworkers. It was formed by the CIO in 1936. It disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America....
, sixty were CP members, with particular strength among the staff responsible for organizing foreign-born and African-American workers and in the Chicago area.
Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his organizers, so long as he controlled the organization. As he once famously remarked, "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets." He took the same line in private, when David Dubinsky of the ILGWU asked him about the communists on the SWOC staff; as he told Dubinsky, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?"
Organizing basic industry
The CP did not gain influence solely through seeking staff positions, however. In the rubber workers' strike in Akron, OhioAkron, Ohio
Akron , is the fifth largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Summit County. It is located in the Great Lakes region approximately south of Lake Erie along the Little Cuyahoga River. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 199,110. The Akron Metropolitan...
that represented the first test of the CIO's ability to turn mass discontent into union gains, a number of rank-and-file leaders were also CP members. The Party had a degree of presence, both at the local and international level, in the United Rubber Workers union formed after the strike.
The CP also exerted a great deal of influence within the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America , is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States....
(or UE), founded in 1936 by the merger of a number of federal union
Federal union
In politics, a federal union is any organization of states or other entities that unite under a federalist system. Usually a federal union will action jointly in matters of defense and foreign relations, with individual states having independence in local matters. Examples of federal unions include...
s created by the AFL and small shop caucuses, largely made up of CP activists and other socialists and radicals, at General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
, Westinghouse Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Company LLC is a nuclear power company, offering a wide range of nuclear products and services to utilities throughout the world, including nuclear fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation and control and advanced nuclear plant designs...
and other unorganized companies. The CP grew even more powerful within the UE in 1937 when James Matles, former head of the CP's Metal Workers Industrial Union, brought in a number of locals after a brief affiliation with the International Association of Machinists. Matles and other CP members and allies held the bulk of the important positions within the UE for the next twelve years, until the CIO engineered a split within it in order to separate the Communist leaders from the CIO; they continued to hold power thereafter within that portion of the union that was not raided by the International Union of Electrical Workers.
The CP achieved even greater results, but less long-term success, working within the United Automobile Workers. Like the UE, the UAW was also formed in 1936 out of a number of federal union
Federal union
In politics, a federal union is any organization of states or other entities that unite under a federalist system. Usually a federal union will action jointly in matters of defense and foreign relations, with individual states having independence in local matters. Examples of federal unions include...
s created by the AFL and locals from other unions in the industry. Of its 25,000 workers, almost all came from outside Michigan.
One of the most prominent UAW activists in the early years of the union was Wyndham Mortimer, who had led a strike against White Motors in Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
. Mortimer was elected Vice-President at the UAW's first convention and might have been elected President if not for concern about his Party membership.
Mortimer and the CP formed alliances at that first convention with George Addes
George Addes
George F. Addes was a founder of the United Automobile Workers union and its secretary-treasurer from 1936 until 1947....
, then the secretary-treasurer of the UAW, later its President, and Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther
Walter Philip Reuther was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century...
, who headed the UAW from 1947 until his death in 1970. The CP maintained its alliance with Addes, the center of the left-wing caucus within the UAW, for the next decade. Its alliance with Reuther proved much shorter.
When the UAW decided to organize the industry by going after General Motors, Mortimer was sent to Flint, Michigan
Flint, Michigan
Flint is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and is located along the Flint River, northwest of Detroit. The U.S. Census Bureau reports the 2010 population to be placed at 102,434, making Flint the seventh largest city in Michigan. It is the county seat of Genesee County which lies in the...
, where GM's production was centered. Even at that early stage factional infighting within the UAW, in particular between Mortimer and Homer Martin
Homer Martin
Homer Martin was American trade unionist and socialist.After high school he attended Hewing College and received his AB from William Jewel College...
, the first President of the UAW, threatened to derail the campaign. When Martin pulled Mortimer out of Flint, Mortimer arranged for Bob Travis, another union activist and CP member from Toledo, to replace him.
Travis played an active role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike
Flint Sit-Down Strike
The 1936–1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike changed the United Automobile Workers from a collection of isolated locals on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union and led to the unionization of the domestic United States automobile industry....
, aided by some veteran CP autoworkers inside Fisher Body Plant #1 – but also by other radical workers, some belonging to Trotskyist parties, the Socialist Party or the IWW. The same pattern applied outside the plants: Socialist Party members, such as Walter Reuther's brothers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther, and the Socialists and ex-Socialists working for the CIO cooperated with CP members, such as Henry Kraus, the UAW's publicity director, with a minimum of sectarian bickering.
The CP, in fact, played down its revolutionary politics during the sit-down strike. In part this was to avoid giving GM and its allies an issue to use against the strike; in part it was out of fear of distancing the Party from the strikers, who were, in the opinion of CP leadership, using revolutionary means to achieve traditional union goals. The Socialists, by contrast, had a much smaller base within the striking workers, but were much more inclined to attach revolutionary significance to the sit-down strikes and to magnify their own role in them.
The CP was even more circumspect in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. The CP was anxious not to scare off its partners and employers in the CIO: its members therefore made no effort to advertise their Party affiliation and even took steps not to pack SWOC conventions.
Nor did circumstances give them much opportunity to rise to leadership. Unlike the UAW, which was born out of tumultuous struggles in which CP activists and other radicals played leading parts, the SWOC conducted a much more top-down organizing campaign subject to close control. SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP played an important role in recruiting and organizing members, but rarely stayed in one area long enough to cultivate the sort of relations with local leaders that might have allowed them to recruit them into the Party, if they had tried to do so. They simply did not have the freedom of action that Mortimer, Travis and others within the UAW did.
Nor did they have the same power. As staff members, Pressman, de Caux and the SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP had, at most, only indirect influence on CIO or SWOC policy and no independent base to rally support or propagandize for other issues. Philip Murray
Philip Murray
Philip Murray was a Scottish born steelworker and an American labor leader. He was the first president of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee , the first president of the United Steelworkers of America , and the longest-serving president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations .-Early...
, a former UMWA associate whom Lewis installed as head of the SWOC, weeded out most of the Communists from the union over the years after the initial organizing drives as the SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America. By 1942 the purge was almost complete.
See also
- Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into...
- Industrial Workers of the WorldIndustrial Workers of the WorldThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
External links
- Trade Union Educational League (1921-1929). An organizational history and reference documents of the TUEL. Reprinted on line at the Early American Marxism Archive. Retrieved May 3, 2005.
- Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions, by Chris Knox