There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The Communist Party USA’s emphasis on democracy and New Deal reforms in America anticipated a formal recognition from the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, which met in Moscow in summer 1935, of the party’s failure to adequately see the rise of Fascism as the moment’s most severe threat to the working class. From the world congress was heard the call for what became known as the Popular Front, an anti-Fascist alliance of Socialists, Communists, and Progressive forces in the United States, including the labor movement. Seizing at last the opportunity to testify before a House Subcommittee on Labor, CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder and other Communists described the plight of the unemployed in stark terms. Browder reassured Congress that a federal legislative cure granting security to the jobless was fundamentally American, “the front-line trench today in the battle for preserving a measure of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this country. It is the essential foundation for preservation of a measure of civil liberties, for resistance to fascism and war. It is a fight for all those good things in life, which the masses of the people, as distinguished from the professional patriots, mean when they speak of ‘Americanism.’ ”38 Browder’s words epitomized one of the Communists’ most significant contributions to the New Deal, the belief that the remedy for the unfavorable circumstances that befell a worker or any citizen in America did not lie with him or her alone, but could and should be alleviated with the help of the national government.

  EMPLOYERS HAD THEIR OWN REASONS to welcome the passage of the NIRA, although they were less enchanted by the reports of the massive union membership growth the document had inspired. Where they could, some began to exploit the vagueness of the new law. Questions that Section 7(a) left unresolved included the job status of older workers, how employees’ representatives were to be chosen, and whether a union elected by workers had to be recognized by an employer. The company union, or “employee representation plan,” proved a nifty subterfuge, a means to frustrate Section 7(a) by appearing to meet its mandate for collective bargaining, yet without actually offering true bargaining power to the employees. As the NIRA allowed for proportional representation in any collective bargaining scenario, a company union could still be heard from even if a legitimate union had enrolled a majority of workers, hopelessly complicating the negotiating process.

  A National Labor Board created by the administration to sort out disputes under the NIRA and urge employer compliance with the law proved inadequate to deal with the numerous employer challenges; when some employers turned to the courts to challenge the board’s right to oversee union representation elections, Roosevelt was forced to issue an executive order guaranteeing that right. But the board remained weak and ineffectual against employers’ mounting resentment; it possessed no actual powers of enforcement beyond punishing uncooperative firms by referring incidents to a Compliance Board that could remove a company’s Blue Eagle insignia, a symbol of its participation in the NRA economic recovery campaign, or in more serious instances recommending an inquiry by the Justice Department. Employers knew that these chastisements were largely meaningless.

  Starting in 1934, misunderstandings over the government’s underdefined labor reforms were blamed for labor violence in several U.S. cities, leaving the administration no choice but to rethink how to enshrine labor’s basic rights in law. Major strikes erupted in three cities—Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco—that throughout the 1920s had enjoyed relatively calm labor-industrial relations. In Minneapolis and San Francisco this was largely due to the presence of patriotic business alliances that had effectively suppressed union activity. Unfortunately, but predictably, this employer domination left local industry and labor with no functioning tradition of engagement or communication when serious problems arose.

  Toledo’s Electric Auto-Lite was one of the nation’s largest makers of automobile parts in a city that was home to many independent parts suppliers. These firms mass-produced items for pennies less than could the Detroit automakers; fiercely competitive with one another and with their own bottom line, they were always desperate to trim costs in order to realize marginal profits. As a result of the Depression and the attendant drop-off in automobile manufacturing, the Toledo factories had entered a steep retrenchment, bringing layoffs and a cutback in hours and wages for those who did retain their jobs. When an AFL union struck Electric Auto-Lite in April 1934 over union recognition and unsatisfactory wages, no more than half the plant’s workers stopped work, allowing the company to continue operation with its loyal employees and some replacement workers. In sympathy, employees at two neighboring factories—the Logan Gear Company and the Bingham Stamping Company—had joined the strike, but the real boost along the picket line came from the Lucas County Unemployed League, a counterpart to the CPUSA’s Unemployed Councils.

  The Lucas League was affiliated with the Marxist-leaning American Workers Party (AWP) led by A. J. Muste, a Christian pacifist minister who had founded the Unemployed League in Seattle in 1931.39 Less ideological than the Communist councils, the league chapters served initially as self-help groups focused on survival tactics for the out-of-work, but as the hardships of the Depression deepened, their efforts expanded into rent strikes, “bread marches,” and other demonstrations seeking jobs or relief. Based on the AWP philosophy that employed and unemployed workers’ interests were one and the same, indeed that everyone, employed or not, was part of the labor struggle, the Unemployed Leaguers fought courageously on behalf of striking workers; this had the dual benefit of giving labor a veritable army of ready protestors while denying employers a source of replacement workers.

  Electric Auto-Lite had obtained an injunction to restrict picketing, but with the help of the Unemployed League the strike was able to put as many as six thousand protestors before the plant’s gates, rendering impossible any attempt to enforce the court’s order, especially since many local police were sympathetic to the strikers. In fear of the crowd and to protect the scabs it had brought in, the company arranged for special deputies to be sworn in by the county sheriff. When one of the deputies beat an elderly man to the ground in view of the crowd of protestors, thousands of angry strikers and their unemployed allies surged toward the plant, threatening the fifteen hundred scabs inside. The untrained deputies fell back as the protestors, who had maneuvered a wagonload of bricks into position so as to have a steady supply of ammunition, smashed the plant’s windows and caused other damage. A federal labor mediator who’d arrived at the site was seen running for safety. Three times the crowd stormed the factory grounds, fighting hand to hand with the deputies, as cars were overturned and set afire and random gunshots were heard. Hundreds of Ohio National Guardsmen were rushed to the scene, but although they were able to free the scabs trapped in the plant, they themselves were then surrounded and stoned by the protestors. The Guardsmen tried to escape using their bayonets, and when that failed they opened fire, killing two protestors.

  The operators of Electric Auto-Lite, in the wake of more than two days of carnage, made the judicious decision to simply shutter the plant until tensions abated. When it eventually reopened, management had agreed to recognize the AFL local as the employees’ collective bargaining agent, introduced a slight wage hike, and rehired most of those who had gone out with the strikers.

  Local employers and authorities were stunned by what had taken place: here was a new fighting spirit and determination among the working class—striking workers allied with militant unemployed—winning with strategy, bravado, and sheer strength of numbers. They had defied the entire arsenal of weapons that had historically ensured employer domination in such disputes—the courts, police, hired thugs, the militia, even the use of tear gas and bayonets.

  A similarly bold labor campaign was soon under way in San Francisco. The ranks of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) had grown substantially since summer and fall 1933 in response to the passage of Section 7(a), a spurt that alarmed the local Industrial Association, crea
ted by businessmen in the 1920s to rid the town of labor radicals. The waterfront workers were tired of the employers’ use of the “shape-up,” the early morning hiring call in which foremen picked that day’s workers, a method prone to bribery and corruption. The system fostered nasty competition among individual longshoremen and inhibited their willingness to complain for fear of falling out of favor with those who ruled the daily selections. In addition, of course, it denied dockhands steady employment and reliable wages.

  The ILA leadership was hesitant at first to challenge so long-standing an institution as the shape-up, but a breakaway group of rank-and-file members, many of whom were Communists, fell in behind an enigmatic Australian organizer named Harry Bridges; they demanded that the shape-up be replaced with a hiring hall to be operated by the union. In late spring 1934, after attempts at negotiation proved useless, and a last-ditch effort by ILA president Joseph P. Ryan produced a lackluster management offer that was spurned by the ILA members, longshoremen went out from Seattle to San Diego, hitting dozens of West Coast shipping interests. When ship and warehouse owners in San Francisco, the strike’s epicenter, attempted to import scabs, the local Teamsters, siding with the ILA, refused to haul any goods to and from the docks. Several thousand crewmen from cargo ships also voluntarily went idle in support of the longshoremen.

  In early July San Francisco’s Industrial Association, working with local police, tried to reopen the docks using guarded convoys of trucks. A daylong battle broke out, as strikers overpowered police escorts, seized trucks, and dumped cargo into the streets. Cops fired tear gas and drenched strikers with fire hoses, to which the rioters replied with bricks, stones, and railroad spikes; these latter objects, six inches long and weighing about a pound, were handy projectiles and did maximum harm when making contact with a policeman’s head. But the police had a unique new tool of their own—vomiting gas, which was designed to sicken its victims and incapacitate them for as long as forty-eight hours; one official described it as “the most effective non-fatal gas known to military science.”40

  At a time when participants on both sides recalled the use of gas as a weapon in the First World War, its appearance here was disturbing; some strikers duly arrived at the “front” wearing the gas masks the army had issued them in 1917. The street fighting did resemble lethal warfare—“the Embarcadero ran blood,” reported the New York Times—as two strikers were killed and dozens of men wounded on both sides before National Guard troops arrived to restore calm, the first time the militia had been called into the streets of San Francisco since the great earthquake of 1906. Vowed a determined Colonel R. E. Mittelstaedt, who led the mobilization of troops to the waterfront, “We have 4,000 additional men to back us up if necessary, and if that is not enough we will call the national army, the navy and the Marine Corps.”41

  Taking Mittelstaedt at his word, Bridges cautioned his followers against further combat with the authorities, be they police or soldiers. He did, however, announce a general strike. The Teamsters spread their sympathy stoppage from the docks to the whole city, and other unions joined as well, creating by mid-July the first general strike since the 1919 Seattle shutdown. This coordinated action by an estimated 125,000 workers essentially closed the city of San Francisco, bringing vicious reprisals by local vigilantes and calls for federal troops to resolve what West Coast papers termed a “civil war” and a “Communist-led insurrection.”

  With President Roosevelt away at sea aboard a naval vessel, Attorney General Homer Cummings and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were inclined to honor the request by California officials for U.S. forces, but Labor Secretary Perkins said she believed the cries of distress from the state were overwrought. “There was quite a tie-up in San Francisco,” she later recalled, “but it never had a generalized purpose, plan, or leadership, and could not, therefore, be regarded as a general strike…. I thought it unwise to begin the Roosevelt administration by shooting it out with working people who were only exercising their rights … to organize and demand collective bargaining.”42 When Cummings said he thought Perkins was not taking the situation seriously enough, she replied:

  Mr. Cummings, I think I do see it seriously. I see the military moving in there from the Presidio…. It will create the most terrible resentment and all the trade unions who are not out now will go out…. They’ll gather in crowds to hoot and jeer at the soldiers driving a bakery wagon through the streets. You know what will happen. The soldiers will fire. Somebody will get hurt. The mob will attack … and a lot of people will drop in the streets. I call THAT very serious.43

  Roosevelt, when apprised of the situation, concurred with the need for restraint. Perkins’s decision may have been influenced in part by her having met Harry Bridges once before, “a small, thin, somewhat haggard man in a much-worn overcoat”; as she remembered him, self-effacing in manner and appearance, “just an inexplicable man who had appeared from the mist.” She later learned that he was married with one child, had been with the same shipping line for a dozen years, and for relaxation after work liked to strum on a mandolin. Rather than a rabble-rouser or fierce ideologue, she chose to see him as primarily a person with natural leadership qualities, inspired by the possibilities of the NIRA, whose style compelled his fellow workers.44

  Her judgments about Bridges and his movement proved correct: the San Francisco general strike collapsed after four days, and the ILA and the employers agreed to arbitration. The longshoremen were forced to give up their demand for union-run hiring halls and accept a system of employer-operated halls that retained some of the original weaknesses of the shape-up, but the dockside straw boss selections were done away with. Bridges actually argued against the settlement but was overruled; the Teamsters also voted to return to work. The ILA, ironically, which had been dragged into the strike against its will, emerged a more respected voice in West Coast labor precisely for its rank and file’s show of militancy and fighting spirit. For years afterward, the empowered veterans of the general strike continued to keep local shipping concerns honest with spontaneous, small, but costly work stoppages.

  A HEADSTRONG LOCAL BUCKING a union’s national leadership was also the key to a major confrontation in late spring and summer 1934 in Minneapolis, where a daring Teamsters local took on unified employers, a powerful business association, vigilantes, and the police. Teamsters Local 574 leadership—the brothers Vincent, Grant, Ray, and Miles Dunne, along with Farrell Dobbs and Carl Skoglund—were Trotskyists, Communists who identified with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 for criticizing Stalinist Russia’s loss of political fervency. Their first act of rebellion was to ignore the attempts at restraint by International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Daniel J. Tobin. An Irish immigrant and Boston coal-wagon driver who had helped found the Teamsters in 1907, Tobin was a tough old-time union leader, a favorite of President Roosevelt’s, who demanded and usually received deference from his rank and file.

  In fact, the Teamsters’ demands were hardly radical. Local 574 asked Minneapolis employers to abide by the NIRA Section 7(a)’s collective bargaining guarantee and honor worker seniority in hiring and layoffs; they sought the creation of an arbitration board to resolve disputes between drivers and management, and insisted there be no employer discrimination against union members. But employers stated in a prominent newspaper advertisement that

  the real issue involved in this strike is the closed union shop—complete unionization of all truck drivers in Minneapolis…. A great many of our employees do not now belong to [574] and have expressed themselves as being unwilling to join. It is our intention to protect these employees in their right to exercise freedom of choice, as provided in Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act.45

  Here of course was one of the key weaknesses of Section 7(a)—it was open to “interpretation” by employers fearful of the closed shop.

  Also taking aim at the Teamsters was the Citizens Alliance, a national employers as
sociation whose Minneapolis chapter had been particularly effective at quashing local unionism. Formed in 1908, it had come into its own during a 1917–1918 trolley car strike and had held considerable sway ever since. Led by retailer George Dayton and industrialists O. P. Briggs and A. W. “Bert” Strong, the Citizens Alliance was one of “Constitutional” opposition to the “un-American” closed shop mixed with warmed-over Social Darwinist rhetoric about each man being allowed to make his own way free of the restricting influence of workers’ organizations. The alliance had for almost two decades broken every major strike in the city, making Minneapolis, in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase, “a citadel of the open shop.”46 At its most benign the alliance served as an employment agency for local workers, but its activities also included secret surveillance of union meetings and boycotts of businesses sympathetic to organized labor.47 Local 574’s determination to unionize the city’s truckers appeared to the alliance an effort to take control of the flow of commerce in and out of Minneapolis, and thus nothing short of a declaration of war. The alliance established a strike headquarters on Hennepin Avenue, the city’s main artery, and put out the call for citizens to form an antistrike army to neutralize the Teamsters’ pickets.