There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The breakthrough was a signal achievement for the CIO and for the labor movement generally, reversing almost five decades of antiunion fervor by the large steel interests. By offering a firm handshake across the labor-capital divide, the steel industry indicated its acceptance of the profound changes in workers’ status in American life.114 Several other large firms followed U.S. Steel’s conciliatory lead.

  Resistance to the Taylor formula, unfortunately, cropped up at smaller steel companies such as Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland Steel, and Bethlehem Steel, entities known collectively as “Little Steel.” As a result, in May 1937, seventy-five thousand workers walked off their jobs. Led by Republic’s tough antiunion negotiator, Tom Girdler, Little Steel owners at first tried a clever subterfuge, offering to make verbal but not written pacts with unions, since the Wagner Act did not specifically require written collective bargaining agreements. They also reacted to the strike with more time-tested measures such as hired enforcers, intimidation of union leaders, and police to protect replacement workers.

  On the south side of Chicago on the warm Sunday afternoon of May 30, several hundred strikers, their families and supporters, had gathered at a former dance hall adjacent to a Republic Steel plant to hear a series of speeches from SWOC leaders. Leaving the rally, they began a spirited march toward the gates of the plant, chanting “C.I.O.! C.I.O.! C.I.O.!” Two young men led the way holding aloft American flags. Many were oblivious to the squad of city police waiting just ahead, and the protestors may have pressed in uncomfortably close to the cops; police claimed that rocks were thrown. Witnesses, however, agreed the shooting began before the full contingent of marchers had even reached the plant’s gates—a sudden pop, then another, then another—suggesting it was the police who instigated the assault. The lead marchers turned around to flee, stumbling into their comrades still headed toward the gates; those who hadn’t heard the gunshots did not understand at first the reason for the sudden retreat. The cops gave chase, shooting at the protestors as they attempted to run across a “prairie-like field.” Many people threw themselves on the ground; others who turned to fend off the police were savagely beaten down with truncheons. When it was over, ten marchers lay dead or dying in the grass, and more than one hundred were wounded, including two children.

  “The people cried and hollered like sheep and they scattered in all directions,” worker Peter Mrkonjich recalled of the police charge. “Women, children, and men were running and falling and screaming like madmen. I turned and ran, too, but when I went just a few feet a bullet hit me in the arm.”115

  Wounded striker Joseph Hickey told a reporter from his hospital bed:

  I went out with the rest of them and started to walk over to the plant. I was about 100 yards behind the head of the line when the uproar began. They were like trapped rats, panic-stricken, terrified. I saw a woman fall as she was being clubbed by the policeman. She was bleeding and looked like she was dying. I ran over to help her and leaned down to pick her up, when the police hit me over the head. I was out after that.116

  Conservative Chicago papers sought to convince readers that the marchers had been the aggressors. A “Mexican” in the crowd had fired the first shot, said one police officer. Another claimed to have fired his gun only in self-defense after the crowd knocked him to the ground and kicked him.117 But graphic news photos refuted all such falsehoods. It had been a police riot, frenzied cops clubbing and shooting unarmed men and women, then chasing them down as in a massacre to inflict more damage where they lay. The images captured that day remain among the most iconic in American labor history.

  The violence at Republic Steel and the making of yet more labor martyrs did not prove cathartic or ease the way to peace in the Little Steel strike. Little Steel proved as intractable as Big Steel had been accommodating, and the strike eventually petered out without attaining the desired concessions. It was a setback for the CIO, but only a momentary one.

  WITH THE WAGNER ACT’S VALIDITY AFFIRMED by the Supreme Court and the CIO riding high after victories in automobiles and steel, it was understandable that most Americans saw John L. Lewis and President Roosevelt as partners in the effort to ameliorate economic injustice. This widely held perception made the ensuing break between the two men especially disappointing.

  The signs of a rupture had been visible as early as 1933 when Lewis, to Roosevelt’s chagrin, channeled the enthusiasm surrounding the NIRA’s Section 7(a) into the much-publicized admonishment to laborers, “The president wants you to join the union!” Trumpeting the president’s support for labor by putting words in his mouth was not merely rude, it left Roosevelt on the spot, since he wasn’t about to disown the claim Lewis had made for him. And this was not an isolated incident. Lewis on numerous occasions seemed to push Roosevelt to identify with expressions of policy that would have been more carefully nuanced had they originated with the president himself. A characteristic ruse was pulled by Lewis in January 1937 when he met with Edward McGrady, assistant secretary of labor, at the Willard Hotel in Washington to discuss the Flint sit-down strike. Unbeknownst to McGrady, Lewis had tipped off the press about their meeting, so that a group of reporters was waiting when Lewis and a startled McGrady emerged from the hotel lobby; neither had any progress to report, but Lewis, in staging the scene, had succeeded at broadcasting that the president had dispatched a high-level representative to huddle with the CIO.118 The president, by now familiar with such methods, cautioned Michigan’s Governor Murphy at one point to “disregard whatever Mr. Lewis tells you.” Lewis somehow learned of the comment and was furious. “It was during the winter of 1937, when we were gripped in fatal conflict with [GM],” he later said, “that I discovered the depths of deceit, the rank dishonesty, and the double-crossing character of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”119

  The president seemed almost determined to get Lewis’s goat that spring, when the CIO was in its fight with Little Steel. Having grown impatient with what he termed “extremists on both sides of the controversy,” Roosevelt observed to reporters that the whole country would likely conclude of the CIO–Little Steel impasse, “A plague on both your houses.” The remark appeared in the New York Times under the headline “Roosevelt Quotes Shakespeare,” a not-so-subtle dig at Lewis, the former thespian who was well known for doing so.120 Lewis used a nationwide Labor Day radio address on September 3, 1937, to hit back. After accusing Roosevelt of showing ingratitude for labor’s massive support in the 1936 election, he turned his attention to the “plague on both your houses” quip. “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house,” Lewis said, “to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace…. [Labor] feels that its cause is just and that its friends should not view its struggles with neutral detachment or intone constant criticism of its activities.”121

  According to Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer and theorist who wrote a biography of the UMW chief, Lewis saw Roosevelt as “an aristocrat with an intellectual sympathy for labor but [one] incapable, by virtue of his background, of grasping the real needs, feelings, and the solidarity of labor, born of common travail.”122 On a deeper level, of course, Lewis struggled as any close ally might with the inability to compete with the aura of the presidency. Although he received abundant recognition for his efforts, he was too much of an egoist not to resent the degree to which many Americans, working people in particular, had come to worship Roosevelt, and the fact that labor’s fortunes, and his own, had become so utterly entwined with this deity. For his part, Roosevelt saw Lewis as a wild card, but also as a brilliant, headstrong man who was, for all his arrogance, the most powerful labor leader in the country. He had revived organized labor with his creation of the CIO, secured a role for industrial unions, grappled successfully with automotives and steel, and had influenced New Deal legislation and the nation’s energy policy. “He was not a nice man, no Eugene Debs,
” writes Thomas Geoghegan, “but in a more complicated way, Lewis was also on the side of Good.”123 The president had made special efforts to bring Lewis into his confidence, meeting with him privately at the White House in June 1936 to read him parts of the Democratic platform, with its lofty words of commitment to the cause of organized labor and the significance of labor’s role in bolstering American democracy.

  Frances Perkins claimed that the source of the final Lewis-Roosevelt split involved Lewis offering himself as a running mate on the 1940 ticket, an offer that Roosevelt rejected out of hand. Lewis aide Lee Pressman also remembered the scene, recounting that Lewis told Roosevelt, “Mr. President, I think if you run for a third term, you may be defeated, unless you have a representative of labor on the ticket, and unless that representative is myself,” to which the president was said to have replied, “That’s very interesting, John, but which place on the ticket are you reserving for me?” The Rooseveltian gibe sounds authentic, but the story itself is dubious; as scholar Melvyn Dubofsky points out, by 1940 the rift between the two men was fairly substantial, and it seems improbable Lewis would leave himself vulnerable by approaching Roosevelt with a proposal so likely to be spurned.124

  A more nagging bother, from Lewis’s perspective, was Roosevelt’s friendship with Sidney Hillman. The president, without consulting Lewis, had named Hillman as labor’s representative to an advisory group on war production needs. Hillman told Lewis how flattered he was by the honor, how much it meant to him as an immigrant to this country to be invited to the White House and have the president address him by his first name. According to Frances Perkins, Lewis likely had somewhat anti-Semitic feelings toward Hillman, as well as contempt for his link with the Chicago settlement house movement and the genteel Progressive Era thinking associated with it. The “cerebral-looking rabbi of industrial concord,”125 as one writer has described Hillman, remained in Lewis’s eyes “Hilkie,” a Yiddish-speaking arriviste so pleased and impressed to be included in Roosevelt’s inner circle, Lewis feared he might prostrate himself and labor’s cause to ensure his continued acceptability.126 Mary Dreier of the WTUL had early in Hillman’s career dubbed him “one of the leading labor statesmen of this generation.” To the vexation of Hillman’s critics the moniker stuck,127 and was even immortalized in 1939 with the publication of the highly flattering Sidney Hillman: Labor Statesman by George Soule. The title alone was enough to give John Lewis fits.128 Lewis was convinced that industry, once stuffed with fat defense contracts and charged with stepped-up war production, would find ways to run roughshod over labor unions; a tough, independent-minded laborite—like John L. Lewis—was the man needed on the high councils of war and peace, not Sidney Hillman.

  Soon more substantive issues roiled the Roosevelt-Lewis relationship. Lewis was an ardent isolationist, who “remembered World War I [as] a time when a reform president, Woodrow Wilson, had misled the nation into an unnecessary foreign war and then allowed reactionary businessmen and politicians to repress labor and persecute radicals in the guise of national security.”129 He thought he saw Roosevelt headed down the same path in response to the war brewing in Europe, and feared that U.S. involvement would not only subject Americans to great horror and carnage, but make America into an imperialist nation, strengthening the powers of the large money interests. “Europe is on the brink of disaster and it must be our care that she does not drag us into the abyss after her,” Lewis warned Jewish trade unionists at an anti-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1937; two years later, as German troops were invading Poland, he assured the nation in his annual Labor Day radio talk, “Labor in America wants no war nor any part of war. Labor wants the right to work and live—not the privilege of dying by gunshot or poison gas to sustain the mental errors of current statesmen.”130

  Lewis’s eagerness to distance himself from the war may well have been an expression of his anxiety about the closeness that labor had developed with the Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, and the Democratic Party in general since the election of 1936. Because there was no Labor Party in America, unions historically had learned to steer clear of fixed associations with political parties, no matter how attractive their platforms appeared in the near term, wishing to preserve their independence of thought and action. Becoming overly confident that one set of politicians or policies would consistently deliver for labor was naive, a reliance that could only rob the movement of initiative and leave it vulnerable. If such fears darkened Lewis’s outlook, they were prescient.

  Roosevelt and his advisers tried to patch things up with Lewis as the 1940 fall election loomed, but a meeting between the two men at the White House on October 17 went sour almost from the start. The president tried to strike a cordial, relaxed tone; Lewis went on the attack, accusing Roosevelt of having ordered the FBI to spy on him and listen in on his telephone conversations—an allegation Roosevelt didn’t confirm or deny.131 A week later Lewis lowered the boom, lambasting Roosevelt’s eagerness for war in a live radio address over all three networks that was heard by as many as 30 million Americans. He accused the president of aspiring to lead an all-powerful, imperial presidency. “America wants no royal family,” Lewis warned, adding that the country could no longer afford at its head “the economic and political experiments of an amateur, ill-equipped practitioner in the realm of political science.” Lewis’s remarks became more outlandish throughout the broadcast, culminating when he endorsed Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie. “I think the re-election of President Roosevelt for a third term would be a national evil of the first magnitude,” he averred. “He no longer hears the cries of the people.” Finally, he offered the nation a bizarre wager, vowing that were America’s workingmen and -women to go against his advice and grant Roosevelt a third term, it would signal that they had tired of his (Lewis’s) leadership, and he would immediately resign as head of the CIO. “Through the years of struggle, you have been content that I should be in the forefront of your battles,” Lewis told his listeners. “I am still the same man. Sustain me now, or repudiate me.”132

  What was America to make of such a performance, and of such a request? Was Lewis worried on labor’s behalf about the deepening Democratic-labor partnership? Had he really detected shallowness and poor judgment in his old ally? Did the president’s thinking suggest “a mind in full intellectual retreat,” as Lewis alleged?133 Or were his strange words the result of some more personal belligerence?

  Labor, respecting John L. Lewis mightily, nonetheless did not choose to honor his grudge against the occupant of the White House. “The personal spite or the hatred of one man will not switch labor’s votes from Mr. Roosevelt,” observed the UAW’s Walter Reuther. “American labor will take Roosevelt!”134 Labor did as Reuther, not Lewis, predicted, and voted overwhelmingly for the president, helping to sweep him to an historic third term. Lewis in turn honored the ultimatum he had issued, and forfeited his leadership of the CIO.

  While his melodramatic self-destruction may have suggested to some an imminent break in labor’s alliance with the Democratic Party, what more truly rankled Lewis was the opposite: that no such division was likely. “The Party of Roosevelt” had become “the political expression of America’s working class.” The president’s popularity with workers, and with much of the American public, was by now thoroughly associated with the New Deal’s restorative gift to the nation—the legislation and relief efforts, certainly, but moreover a buoyancy and optimism, a sense of collective recovery managed by a caring government.135

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the Flint sit-down conflict had been resolved, in April 1937, a small airplane appeared in the sky above the Ford Motor Company’s massive River Rouge plant in Detroit, the largest industrial complex in the world, covering twelve hundred acres and employing more than eighty thousand workers. Inside the cockpit Victor and Walter Reuther of the UAW held a microphone and shouted a message of UAW solidarity down to the employees below, who were in the midst of a shift change, their words a
mplified by loudspeakers the brothers had strapped to the underside of the airplane’s wings. The flight, while remembered as one of the more dramatic efforts at union organizing in American labor history, was technically a flop, as the plane could not fly low or slow enough for its occupants’ voices to be heard on the ground. What the Reuthers’ mission had demonstrated, however, was the UAW’s powerful resolve to unionize Ford autoworkers.

  Under the autocratic leadership of founder Henry Ford, the company had been a pioneer of automobile mass production as well as a leader in the field of welfare capitalism. For years Ford’s sprawling operation in Detroit offered steady wages and benefits, and retained a relatively stable workforce; it also made inroads into the hiring of black workers. But the flip side of Henry Ford’s benevolence was his adamant refusal to surrender control of any aspect of his vast operation to labor unions. To help keep busybodies like the Reuthers at bay, Ford had hired former boxer Harry Bennett to oversee the euphemistically named Ford “Service Department,” a collection of toughs and ex-hoodlums loyal only to Bennett, who in turn was devoted to Mr. Ford. “A combination of Dracula and J. Edgar Hoover,” one Ford executive would later describe Bennett,136 whose private army and extensive spy network allowed him to track virtually everything that went on in the plant. So omniscient were his powers and so total the trust placed in him by Henry Ford, Bennett and his men were feared equally by assembly-line workers and senior management.