There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Like the heroes of these labor corruption films, Robert Kennedy found himself in a fierce struggle with an intractable union boss, a man who seemed to operate with few morals beyond tribal fealty and who used the power he had attained to game and misuse the system. “[Hoffa] plainly regarded capitalism as a racket that the strong manipulated to their own advantage,” Kennedy’s biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., suggests, “a system in which everyone was on the take, morality was bullshit and no holds were barred.”105 Hoffa returned Kennedy’s deep enmity in full, referring to him as a friendless person, a bully, “a spoiled brat,” someone who “never had to work, wouldn’t know how to work,”106 a “curly-headed smart-aleck.”107

  Hoffa was ordinarily too slick an operator to be caught red-handed, but his curiosity about just what information Kennedy had on him led him to make a fateful stumble. In early 1957 he approached John C. Cheasty, a former member of the Secret Service, and offered him a “salary” of $2,000 per month if he could obtain a job with the McClellan Committee in order to tip Hoffa off about what witnesses the government had lined up, and to feed Kennedy information that would help doom Dave Beck, whom Hoffa was eager to succeed as Teamsters boss. Cheasty, whose character Hoffa had obviously misjudged, promptly reported the proposal to Kennedy. The FBI then managed to photograph Hoffa on March 13, 1957, appearing to hand a payoff to Cheasty in Washington’s Dupont Circle, leading to Hoffa’s arrest on bribery and conspiracy charges.

  When the case came to trial, Hoffa claimed that he thought he was paying Cheasty for legal services, not a bribe. Recognizing the vulnerability of that argument, Hoffa’s defense team pursued a bold secondary strategy—targeting the jury, which was two-thirds African American, by importing boxing legend Joe Louis, who knew Hoffa from Detroit, to show support for the defendant; they also added to the defense table Martha Jefferson, a black attorney. Hoffa already had substantial support in the African American community, as he was known for having opposed segregation in the IBT. In a flip, overconfident moment during the trial, Kennedy had told reporters that he would “jump off the Capitol” if Hoffa was acquitted. When the jury voted to do just that, Joe Louis, asked by an intermediary to give an autograph for one of Kennedy’s sons, replied, “I’ll give it to you for his son, but not for him. Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.”108

  In the McClellan Committee hearings it proved difficult to get Hoffa to admit to anything, as he feigned a lack of recall—what Senator Ives termed “the most convenient forgettery”—or made long, time-consuming responses that led nowhere and that were evidently meant to get television viewers to switch the channel. As in Dave Beck’s appearance, however, Kennedy’s airing of the government’s many suspicions about Hoffa on television was sufficient to raise questions about the union boss, the Teamsters, and organized labor as a whole. It didn’t hurt that Kennedy’s television presence contrasted favorably to Hoffa’s.109

  Of particular embarrassment for the leading Teamster was the interrogation’s exposure of his apparent use of union funds to back a crooked land development scheme in Florida, one that purported to benefit rank-and-file retirees. In the mid-1950s, Hoffa and other Teamster executives had pitched to members the prospect of buying plots of land in a retirement village known as Sun Valley outside Orlando. As part of what became an increasingly shady arrangement, Hoffa took half a million dollars from a Detroit IBT local and used it for collateral on a Florida bank loan to the “developer,” a Teamsters official named Henry Lower, who had had earlier entanglements with the law. In exchange, Lower, who had affixed the honorific “Colonel” to his own name, was to make almost half of the plots available to Hoffa privately at a steep discount.

  Brochures were created touting Sun Valley as the “Teamsters’ Model City of Tomorrow,” where union members and their families might retire in dignity and among friends. But Colonel Lower frittered the loan away without actually making Sun Valley habitable. Sewers, electricity, and other infrastructure were nonexistent; some lots remained submerged underwater. “Nothing had been done to put the property in shape,” reported a developer who saw the half-finished project. “There were a few houses built there, and a short road of about 2,000 feet. But there was no possibility for the purchasers to get to their property. There was nothing there.”110 Hoffa had delved into real estate speculation with funds not his own, cutting himself in for a handsome share of the profits; but when the developer proved inept and the deal went bad, the Florida bank kept the collateral, which was money that had belonged to the union members. The McClellan Committee’s condemnation of this subterfuge could not have been more sweeping, warning that “if Hoffa is unchecked he will successfully destroy the decent labor movement in the United States.”111

  Yet, even as the scrutiny of Hoffa and his “Hoodlum Empire” intensified, his personal popularity among the Teamsters swelled. In a speech to the membership, Hoffa compared himself to Samuel Gompers, William Green, and Philip Murray, leaders of workingmen who had also been denigrated by forces hostile to labor, but had never surrendered. Whether his listeners accepted such wayward comparisons, or simply admired their leader’s cocky spirit, most were satisfied with Hoffa and rallied around him. “He speaks the Teamsters language,” labor consultant Nathan Shefferman later recalled, explaining Hoffa’s unique stature:

  At Teamsters’ assemblies he moves about, throwing a stinging blow to the biceps of one, wrestling a headlock on another…. I think he would take a collect call from any rank and filer in the land…. John L. Lewis firmly believed that playing the role of craggy, lonely giant on the mountaintop was an asset. Dave Beck … was shy and ill at ease with other than intimates. Dan Tobin’s bellowing raised a storm in which he was nearly inaccessible. Walter Reuther is the cool intellectual…. Jimmy Hoffa is the single leader who appears to enjoy the mass as individuals.112

  As Hoffa assured his followers, “I have given 25 years of my life to fighting for this union. I have fought for what I believe is right and good against forces more vicious than you can imagine. I propose to continue that fight as long as I live.”113

  HOFFA’S BLUSTER HARDLY TYPIFIED the union movement’s overall reaction to the McClellan Committee’s revelations. Allegations of criminal behavior magnified by television and print media, hearings that spread over three years and 1,526 witnesses, and created 46,510 pages of testimony—this was a public besmirching that went well beyond the innuendo and even the arrests and deportations of the Red Scare years. Congress’s discoveries had been so extensive—rampant corruption, racketeering, bossism in union leadership, violence, alliances with known gangsters, as well as examples of pure theft like Hoffa’s Sun Valley fiasco–that even without the cooperation of many subpoenaed witnesses, the McClellan Committee hearings had rung down on the head of U.S. labor a most searing, and time would prove enduring, public arraignment.

  Robert Kennedy had managed to make the unholy nexus of organized crime and labor corruption loom very large, and he had been adamant about sharing his concern with the public. “Either we are going to be successful, or they are going to have the country,”114 he had warned in no uncertain terms, echoing the McClellan Committee’s own estimation that “because of the tremendous economic power of the Teamsters … the underworld [will be] in a position to dominate American economic life.”115 Both in his role as chief counsel to the Senate labor investigation, and later as attorney general, Kennedy would take the lead in not only pursuing organized crime but in framing the perception of it as a major danger akin to Communism. “The gangsters of today work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful now than at any time in the history of the country,” he wrote in The Enemy Within, his memoir of the era. “They control political figures and threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption and fear into industries both large and small. They grow stronger every day.”116

  The negative image that had long haunted labor was that it was radical or socialistic; now, iro
nically, even as the movement had struggled to defeat such impressions by publicly denuding itself of Communist influence, and striking at its manifestations elsewhere, it had been blindsided by attacks that linked it with something tawdrier, a sin even more offensive. Radicalism, after all, for all its perceived menace, was an external, alien threat; it involved foreign concepts of social and economic organization that idealistic labor activists at times might be foolish enough to embrace. The idea of corruption in labor unions, however, cut deeper because it was a homegrown failure, a violation of democracy and of Americans’ own virtuous self-image.

  Somewhat lost in all the statements of righteous denunciation about labor’s having lost its way was the fact that, despite the glaring examples of bad behavior, the labor movement as a whole was not corrupt. But the revelations of the McClellan Committee, perhaps because they had not disappointed Americans so much as confirmed what they already suspected about labor unions, were devastating to public opinion. Would people forgive, or instead lose faith altogether in organized labor? Certainly some forces would not hesitate to press for that conclusion. “American labor had better roll up its sleeves,” Walter Reuther advised.

  It had better get the stiffest broom and brush it can find, and the strongest disinfectant, and it had better take on the job of cleaning its own house from top to bottom and drive out every crook and gangster and racketeer we find. Because if we don’t clean our own house, then the reactionaries will clean it for us. They won’t use a broom, they’ll use an axe.117

  No one resisted the staining of labor’s reputation more fiercely than George Meany, who led his executive council in 1957 in booting the Teamsters out of the AFL-CIO along with two other suspect unions, the Bakery and Confectionery Workers and the Laundry Workers. Chasing the IBT, with its huge membership, out of the federation, was an enormous step; but there were political ramifications as well. The cooperation between Meany and Walter Reuther during the McClellan hearings, and their like response in pursuing corrective actions, served to bond both men to Robert Kennedy, thus deepening labor’s entrenchment with the Democratic Party and swinging its support behind John F. Kennedy’s run for president in 1960. The Teamsters would align with the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon.

  As a gesture to the Republican-faithful Teamsters, conservatives on the McClellan Committee set out to score some petty political points against Walter Reuther and the Kennedy brothers before the panel wrapped up its business. They had watched helplessly as Bobby Kennedy flayed Jimmy Hoffa’s reputation (the Teamsters leader would ultimately go to prison in 1967 on jury tampering and pension fraud convictions); now they sought a turn at sullying the name of the country’s leading labor do-gooder; they would make Walter Reuther their Hoffa. Hoffa himself assisted this effort by passing along potentially damaging information about the UAW, involving allegations that the autoworkers’ union had used underhanded tactics in a strike at Kohler, a plumbing supply manufacturer in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Republican senator Barry Goldwater of the committee, who had assured a Republican dinner in 1958 that “Walter Reuther and the UAW-CIO are a more dangerous menace than Sputnik,”118 was so pleased by the chance to “get” the Kennedys by exposing Reuther, he declared himself “as happy as a squirrel in a little cage.”119 Reuther, bracing for Goldwater’s inquiry, fired a preemptive shot by describing the Arizona conservative as America’s “number one political fanatic, its number one anti-labor baiter, its number one peddler of class hatred.”120

  When the McClellan Committee looked into the Kohler situation, it found a company with a long history of labor abuses and violence dating back to the 1930s, a poor record of plant safety, and a tradition of executive opposition to worker organization. In 1954, UAW pickets had closed the Sheboygan plant for two months, at which point the owner obtained an injunction under Taft-Hartley and imported scabs. The strike dragged on amid charges that scabs were being harassed by workers, and vice versa. The most serious accusation leveled against Reuther was that two auto unionists from Detroit had traveled to Wisconsin and, on instructions from the UAW local, had assaulted two replacement workers as well as the elderly father of one of them who attempted to intervene on his son’s behalf. The attacks were particularly savage; both scabs required hospitalization and the older man subsequently died.

  Reuther condemned the violence unequivocally and assured the committee the attacks had not been authorized or ordered by the UAW, nor could anyone produce evidence that they had. Goldwater and his allies then turned to red-baiting Reuther and his brother Victor, producing a letter sent home from Russia in 1934 by the youthful pair that only a zealous conservative like Goldwater could construe as urging the spread of Communism in America. It was a thin reed on which to indict the reputation of so popular a man as Walter Reuther.

  Content to have inflicted at least some damage by innuendo, and recognizing that their effort to besmirch Reuther had probably gone as far as it could, the Republicans moved quickly to pull the plug on the inquiry, but Robert Kennedy insisted Reuther be allowed to testify in order to clear his name. Reuther ably defended the UAW’s efforts in the protracted strike at Kohler, and at one point made the inquiring senator from Arizona look sheepish by reversing the questioning in such a way as to reveal Goldwater’s faulty comprehension of the Taft-Hartley Act. Kennedy’s investigator Carmine Bellino, having examined several years’ worth of Reuther’s income tax returns, then testified that the UAW boss was one of the most squeaky-clean senior executives in the country, meticulously managing his business expenses so that no personal costs were applied to his union and regularly contributing his speaking honoraria to charity.121 In the end the attempted ambush of Reuther fell flat; Kohler was chastised by the NLRB for unfair labor practices; while the McClellan Committee, as well as the American viewing public, was left with the only possible conclusion: “The Hoffas, who supported the business system, were, alas, crooked,” notes Schlesinger. “The Reuthers, who criticized it, were, alas, honest.”122

  Of course conservatives hardly came away empty-handed. The McClellan hearings had stirred a groundswell of support on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream press for new legislation to stem union corruption, especially the abuse of welfare and pension funds. Given what the country had seen and heard over the past three years, labor leaders had no choice but to sign on to the need for such legislation, while conservatives crowed at being presented a new mandate to restrict unions’ sphere of activity. Senator John F. Kennedy led Democrats in proposing a bill aimed at limiting the autocracy of union officers by standardizing the elections that placed them in power. Senator McClellan added provisions by which union members could, in cases of apparent operating malfeasance, sue union brass.

  But Goldwater demanded more. Eventually the milder Kennedy legislation was shunted aside in favor of a bill sponsored by Democrat Philip Landrum of Georgia and Republican Robert Griffin of Michigan, soon known as the Landrum-Griffin Act. It retained many features of the Kennedy proposal but included stronger safeguards for democratic procedures within unions and for the management of union treasuries, held out criminal prosecution for union officials who abused employee health and pension funds, and decreed that anyone leaving prison could not be a union official for five years. Landrum-Griffin also placed new restrictions on secondary boycotts and picketing—specifically, it closed a loophole in Taft-Hartley that had allowed the Teamsters to corner recalcitrant employers by refusing to carry their freight—and permitted some local labor disputes to be resolved by the states, not the NLRB. Warnings from labor-sympathetic newspapers that union rights and the ability to strike were at risk of being legislated away proved futile, for it was this tougher version of the bill that sailed to passage in Congress and went to the desk of President Eisenhower. As for organized labor, having been publicly examined, poked, probed, and diagnosed as ailing, it could, with the signing of the Landrum-Griffin Act in September 1959, do little but swallow its medicine.123

  CHAPTER TEN<
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  IF AMERICA’S SOUL BECOMES POISONED

  THE 1960s SUBJECTED NEARLY EVERY INSTITUTION and all that was conventional in American life to scrutiny and reevaluation; the labor movement was no exception. In the decade between the first Southern civil rights lunch-counter sit-in in 1960 to the defeat of peace candidate George McGovern in the election of 1972, the traditional workingman’s query—“Which side are you on?”—came to apply to more than the inevitable struggle between labor and capital, but to divisive issues of social justice, racism, patriotism, and foreign policy. Was organized labor a forward-looking movement anymore? Did it still stand with the forces of social change? And if not, what was it, and what was it to become?

  Unions could certainly take pride in what they had achieved, in having made a difference in the way all Americans lived. Yet along the way, particularly after the troublesome big coal, steel, and rail strikes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the congressional corruption inquiries, organized labor had begun to appear less a movement of workers agitating from below than another privileged interest maneuvering for advantage. The emergent civil rights movement, by setting a high bar for those who would consider themselves true spokesmen for the underrepresented, tacitly challenged the position of unions as the leading agents of social change. Workingmen and -women still filed through factory gates each morning, punched their time cards at stores, restaurants, and loading docks, or gathered in union meeting halls, but increasingly when people thought of organized labor, what came to mind were men in business suits who controlled vast sums of money and spent their days among other powerful elites. Perhaps the problem was that America’s workers weren’t “hungry” anymore; for decades they “fought for bread,” activist Saul Alinsky observed, but now “they too sat down and ate cake.”1 The perception was that unions had settled on protecting what they already had, and no longer pushed for the amelioration of broader social inequities. Such impressions were not entirely accurate or fair, but were reflected in public opinion polling. A Gallup Poll in February 1957 had found that 76 percent of Americans had positive feelings about labor unions; by the mid-1960s, the approval rate had fallen to 50 percent, an integer that would continue to decline in the coming years.2