There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  78 Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Massacre (Austin, Tex.: Workplace Publishing, 1971; originally published 1924), p. 33.

  79 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), p. 253.

  80 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, p. 164.

  81 See Friedheim, Seattle General Strike, p. 173.

  82 Chaplin, Centralia Massacre, p. 59.

  83 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, p. 165; Grimm, Hubbard, and two other American Legion men killed in the day’s fighting were eulogized as the true heroes of Centralia’s “Armistice Day Massacre,” ambushed by cowardly reds as they marched in a patriotic parade. Words of praise were spoken on the floor of Congress and in the press for those who had defied the IWW’s infiltration of the Northwest’s lumber country, with little mention made of the Legion’s possible precipitating role in the assault or the horrific death of Wesley Everest. No official inquiry was ever made into Everest’s lynching, but ten Wobblies who had defended the IWW hall were put on trial for murder; seven were convicted and sent away for sentences of between twenty-five and forty years; two others were acquitted and one was declared insane. After the Federal Council of Churches looked into the Centralia affair in the 1930s (and even some American Legion men spoke out about the case’s injustice), the IWW men were pardoned in 1936, having spent seventeen years in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla.

  84 Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), pp. 250–51; Robert Sobel, Coolidge: An American Enigma (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1998), p. 122.

  85 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 1st sess., p. 7063; see Murray, Red Scare, pp. 195–96.

  86 Athan G. Theoharis and John S. Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 59–61. The authors report that Hoover claimed to have engaged in conversations with both Goldman and Berkman after their arrests, and to have come away from the experience even more astounded at the depth of the anarchists’ communistic fervor. No transcripts of these meetings exist, unfortunately. What is clear is that Hoover’s “pursuit of (Goldman and Berkman’s) enforced exile was remorseless right up to the moment of their departure.”

  87 Murray, Red Scare, pp. 193–94.

  88 New York Times, Nov. 8, 1919.

  89 New York Call, Jan. 1, 1929.

  90 Unattributed in Robert W. Dunn, “The Palmer Raids” [booklet] (New York: International Publishers, 1948).

  91 Murray, Red Scare, p. 206.

  92 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 78.

  93 New York Times, Dec. 22, 1919.

  94 Powers, Secrecy and Power, pp. 82–83. Before their departure Berkman and Goldman had been feted at a farewell banquet in Chicago on December 2. Henry Clay Frick had died of a heart attack earlier that day. Berkman noted that Frick had been “deported by God. I’m glad he left the country before me.”

  95 New York Times, Dec. 22, 1919.

  96 Ibid.

  97 Ibid.

  98 Quoted in Theoharis and Cox, Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, p. 63.

  99 Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 88.

  100 Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of 1920 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1923), p. 94.

  101 New York Times, April 14, 1920.

  102 Ibid.

  103 New York Times, April 1, 1920.

  104 Schenectady Citizen quoted in Literary Digest, Jan. 24, 1920.

  105 Murray, Red Scare, p. 209.

  106 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 98.

  107 Murray, Red Scare, p. 208.

  108 In that same March 1919 session the court upheld the conviction of Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, for violation of the Espionage Act. Debs had received a ten-year sentence for a wartime speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he criticized the government for its assaults on Socialists opposed to the war.

  109 Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919) and Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); see also Murray, Red Scare, pp. 224–25.

  110 Murray, Red Scare, p. 248. Of the nearly 10,000 people picked up in the Palmer raids, only 591 were ultimately deported. See Murray, Red Scare, pp. 248–51; Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 101.

  111 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 100.

  112 Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 114.

  113 Post, Deportations Delirium of 1920, pp. 308–9.

  114 Ibid., p. 311.

  115 Powers, Secrecy and Power, pp. 116–17.

  116 Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 1920; Murray, Red Scare, p. 251.

  117 New York Times, May 1, 1920.

  118 Murray, Red Scare, p. 253.

  119 Brown, Report Upon the Illegal Practices, p. 58.

  120 Ibid., p. 3.

  121 Walsh quoted in Theoharis and Cox, Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, pp. 69–70.

  122 Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 123. Transcripts of the Walsh hearings were kept by forces friendly to Palmer from appearing in the Congressional Record until 1923.

  123 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 101.

  124 Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 1–3.

  125 Atlantic Monthly, July 1920.

  126 William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (New York: B. W. Huebsch Inc., 1920), pp. 256–65.

  127 De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, p. 10.

  128 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 261.

  129 Ibid., p. 262.

  130 Ibid. The Soviets made an attempt to arrange work for Haywood, and he married a Russian woman, but the rebel from the western silver mines was never entirely at home in the Russian system. He retired to his room at a Moscow hotel where he received visitors, many old colleagues, to drink and reminisce. Never in good health, he was in and out of the hospital and died there in May 1928. On December 15, 1923, President Coolidge had commuted the sentences of all remaining IWW prisoners.

  131 Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 125.

  132 Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1972; originally published 1955), pp. 225–26.

  133 Bartolomeo Vanzetti to E. G. Flynn, Dec. 21, 1922, in Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography: My First Life (1906–1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 304; see also Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 107.

  134 Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), p. 244.

  135 Murray, Red Scare, pp. 266–67.

  136 Adamic, Dynamite! pp. 314–15.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: LET US HAVE PEACE AND MAKE CARS

  1 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 242.

  2 David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 50.

  3 Charles Schwab quoted in David Brody, Workers in Industrial America, p. 53.

  4 See George Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrialized Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

  5 U.S. Steel Corporation Stockholders Meeting, April 16, 1923, quoted in David Brody, Workers in Industrial America, p. 55.

  6 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 256.

  7 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 385.

  8 Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 152.

  9 Raymond B. Fostick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), pp. 177–78.

  10 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Sources of the New Deal,” in The New Deal: The Critical Issues, ed. Otis Graham Jr. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971).

  11 David Brody, Workers in Industrial America, pp. 76–78.

  12 Ibid., p. 73.


  13 Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 2.

  14 Quoted in Zinn, “The Conservative New Deal,” in The New Deal: The Critical Issues, ed. Otis Graham Jr. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971).

  15 Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 4–5.

  16 Schlesinger, “Sources of the New Deal.”

  17 Zinn, “The Conservative New Deal,” p. 144.

  18 Perkins quoted in Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 32.

  19 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 25.

  20 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), pp. 217–20.

  21 Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, pp. 203–4. For an account of the Homestead visit, see also Washington Post, Aug. 1, 1933.

  22 Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 14.

  23 Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, p. 137.

  24 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 237.

  25 Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 131–32; Section 7(a) read: (1) That employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercions of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection; (2) That no employee and no one seeking employment shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.”

  26 Joseph P. Lash, Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 424.

  27 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 267.

  28 Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, pp. 138–39.

  29 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 268.

  30 Louis Stark quoted in Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, p. 207.

  31 Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp. 300, 319.

  32 Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 27–28.

  33 Ibid., p. 28.

  34 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 58.

  35 Len De Caux, The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (New York: International Publishers, 1978), pp. 162–63.

  36 New York Times, March 7, 1930.

  37 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 212.

  38 Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, p. 35.

  39 Muste, a war resister during the First World War, had served as dean of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, founded in 1921 by William and Helen Fincke of the pacifistic Fellowship of Reconciliation; it was the first, but eventually one of several, labor training schools that appeared in the war years and early 1920s. The philosophy behind Brookwood was the “idea of surrounding the state apparatus with a counter-hegemony, a hegemony created by mass organization of the working class and by developing working class institutions and culture.” The goal was not “a frontal attack on the state but … the foundation of a new culture” imbued with “the norms and values of a new, proletarian society.” Muste also busied himself with his Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), a reaction to both the Communist Party and the strict craft unionism of the AFL. CPLA members, known as Musteites, sought organizing along industrial lines; many went on to serve the CIO, or followed Muste into action in the Southern textile strike of 1929 and the Toledo Auto-Lite struggle of 1934, and helped organize branches of the Unemployed League. See Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 3–15 and 71–75; see also the article on Brookwood in New York Times, June 16, 1921.

  40 New York Times, July 5, 1934.

  41 Ibid., July 6, 1934.

  42 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, pp. 313–14.

  43 Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, p. 215.

  44 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, p. 316; see also Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, pp. 216–17.

  45 Minneapolis Tribune, May 17, 1934.

  46 Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, p. 386.

  47 See Lois Quam and Peter J. Rachleff, “Keeping Minneapolis an Open-Shop Town: The Citizens’ Alliance in the 1930’s,” Minnesota History, vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall 1986).

  48 Eric Sevareid quoted in Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Monad Press, 1972), p. 12.

  49 Charles R. Walker, American City: A Rank and File History of Minneapolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005; originally published 1937), p. 108.

  50 Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion, p. 83.

  51 New York Times, May 23, 1934; Walker, American City, pp. 116–21.

  52 Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 230.

  53 Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion, pp. 127–29.

  54 New York Times, July 21, 1934.

  55 Quam and Rachleff, “Keeping Minneapolis an Open-Shop Town.” The labor triumph in Minneapolis would be short-lived. Within five years the Trotskyists alarmed many by opposing intervention in the war in Europe, and a series of strikes by WPA workers in Minnesota angered the local federal prosecutor, Victor Anderson, who warned, “Minneapolis is not going to become the Moscow of America,” as he indicted more than one hundred WPA strikers. The Dunne brothers and Carl Skoglund, as leaders of Minneapolis’s “red” labor cause, were pursued under the terms of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (known as the Smith Act after Congressman Howard W. Smith). Accused of fomenting a conspiracy to overthrow the government, eighteen defendants including Skoglund, Vincent Dunne, and Miles Dunne (brother Grant Dunne took his own life during the trial) went to federal prison in 1943. See Walker, American City, pp. 126–27.

  56 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 151–52.

  57 Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1933–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 25.

  58 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 155.

  59 Lewis quoted in David Brody, Workers in Industrial America, p. 93.

  60 Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, p. 412.

  61 The Nation, Oct. 28, 1944.

  62 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 161.

  63 Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, p. 414.

  64 Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (New York: New Press, 2004; originally published 1991), p. 48.

  65 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 208.

  66 Ibid., p. 267.

  67 Quoted in Lichtenstein, State of the Union, p. 46.

  68 Schechter Poultry Corp v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).

  69 Senator Robert Wagner quoted in New York Times, Feb. 16, 1936.

  70 The Nation, Oct. 28, 1944.

  71 Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 15. Wagner responded to criticisms that the act was harder on employers than workers by saying, “No one would assail the traffic laws because they regulate the speed at which automobiles travel, and not the speed at which pedestrians walk.” See New York Times, July 25, 1937; J. Joseph Huttmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 234.

  72 Congressional Record, U.S. Senate, 1st sess., May 15, 1935, p. 7569.

  73 Ibid., p. 7570.

  74 Lichtenstein, State of the Union, p. 32.

  75 Fraser, Labor W
ill Rule, p. 331.

  76 Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, p. 219.

  77 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, pp. 243–44.

  78 Lash, Dealers and Dreamers, pp. 427–28.

  79 Congressional Record, U.S. Senate, 74th Cong., 1st sess., May 15, 1936, p. 7573; see also New York Times, May 16, 1935.

  80 New York Times, May 19, 1935.

  81 Ibid.

  82 Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? p. 50.

  83 New York Times, June 26, 1936.

  84 Ibid.

  85 William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 99.

  86 National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937).

  87 Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, pp. 264–65.

  88 Ibid., pp. 234–36.

  89 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 282.

  90 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, pp. 253–55. Wagner was not the sponsor of the Fair Labor bill, but with his backing of so many of the New Deal’s innovations and the survival of the Wagner Act at the Supreme Court in 1937, resentful conservative voices increasingly targeted him, and he was red-baited in his own successful reelection campaign in New York during the summer and fall of 1938. See Huttmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism, pp. 249–55.

  91 Saul D. Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1970; originally published 1949), p. 106.

  92 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 190.

  93 Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 56.

  94 Herbert Harris, American Labor (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 271.

  95 Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1939), pp. 261–62.

  96 Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937, p. 131.

  97 New York Times, Jan. 2, 1937.

  98 Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography, p. 108.

  99 Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 79.