There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  100 Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937, p. 152.

  101 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 304.

  102 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 85.

  103 Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 156.

  104 Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937, pp. 3–4. The confrontation would enter labor movement lore as “The Battle of the Running Bulls.”

  105 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and Story of UAW, p. 162.

  106 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, pp. 92–93.

  107 Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography, pp. 127–28; Dulles, Labor in America, p. 305.

  108 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 195.

  109 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 94.

  110 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and Story of UAW, pp. 170–71.

  111 New York Times, May 22, 1937.

  112 Harper’s, May 1937; Time quote in Melvyn Dubofsky, “Not So ‘Turbulent Years’: Another Look at the American 1930’s,” in The New Deal, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992). It was unclear at first if the sit-down would be used extensively. The AFL openly disavowed the tactic; the CIO never formally approved of it. Conservative congressmen denounced it as a dangerous form of labor radicalism and moved unsuccessfully in spring 1937 to legislate against it. The U.S. Senate approved a resolution citing sit-ins as a violation of private property rights, and courts showed themselves willing to look upon them as a form of criminal trespass. In 1939 the Supreme Court took up the matter in a case that had its origins in February 1937 at Fansteel, a Chicago manufacturer. Employees angry at the firm’s rejection of worker grievances and efforts to bargain collectively declared a sit-down strike and seized two factory buildings. The NLRB agreed with the workers that their labor rights had been violated, but the Supreme Court reversed the board’s decision, ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation that sit-ins were “an illegal seizure of buildings in order to prevent their use by their employers in a lawful manner.” Employees who “sat in” could be discharged; once discharged, they could be ousted as trespassers. Sit-ins soon became relatively obsolete, partly due to the expanded improvement of work conditions through the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, but beginning a decade later they would be revived by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and used to sensational effect in the early phases of the modern civil rights movement. See New York Times, Feb. 28, 1939, and May 11, 1970.

  113 Dulles, Labor in America, pp. 299–300.

  114 In 1938 President Roosevelt sent Taylor to France to an international conference regarding the fate of Jewish refugees from Europe, and in 1939 made him an envoy and later the ambassador to the Vatican. Taylor is often credited with convincing Spanish leader Francisco Franco to not bring Spain into the Second World War on the side of the Axis Powers.

  115 New York Times, June 1, 1937.

  116 Ibid.

  117 Ibid.

  118 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 82.

  119 Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography, p. 165.

  120 New York Times, June 30, 1937.

  121 Ibid., Sept. 4, 1937.

  122 Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography, pp. 161–62.

  123 Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? p. 45.

  124 See Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, pp. 237–39; Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, pp. 126–27.

  125 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 432.

  126 Ibid., p. 493.

  127 Ibid., p. 73.

  128 Ibid., p. 449.

  129 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, pp. 250–51.

  130 Ibid., pp. 244–45.

  131 Ibid., pp. 256–57.

  132 Ibid., pp. 257–58. Robert Wagner said publicly that he believed Willkie had promised Lewis the position of secretary of labor, a rich plum to Lewis, who was still smarting over Roosevelt’s selection of Sidney Hillman for wartime labor adviser to the administration. See Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 260.

  133 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 254.

  134 John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1983), p. 73.

  135 Melvyn Dubofsky, ed., The New Deal: Conflicting Interpretations and Shifting Perspectives (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), p. 140.

  136 Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 449.

  137 Ibid., p. 455.

  138 Ibid., p. 195.

  139 Ibid., pp. 197–98.

  140 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 102.

  141 Watts, People’s Tycoon, pp. 453–54.

  142 New York Times, May 28, 1937.

  143 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW, p. 204.

  144 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 112.

  145 Elias M. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1966), pp. 8–9.

  146 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 188.

  147 Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 227.

  148 The Nation, Dec. 14, 1940; Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 227; Eleanor Roosevelt’s column, “My Day,” was syndicated in many of the nation’s newspapers. See Harper’s, May 1937.

  149 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW, p. 200.

  150 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, pp. 228–29.

  151 New York Times, May 23, 1941.

  152 Ibid.

  153 Charles E. Sorensen and William Samuelson, My Forty Years with Ford (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1956), pp. 268–69; Watts, People’s Tycoon, p. 462.

  154 Sorensen and Samuelson, My Forty Years with Ford, pp. 268–71; Watts, People’s Tycoon, p. 462.

  CHAPTER NINE: SPIES, CROOKS, AND CONGRESSMEN

  1 Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 304–5.

  2 Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 329.

  3 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 207.

  4 New York Times, June 3, 1943.

  5 Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 502.

  6 Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, p. 323.

  7 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 462.

  8 New York Times, June 13, 1943.

  9 Ibid.

  10 New York Times, June 26, 1943.

  11 Ibid., June 13, 1943.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Quoted in Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 503.

  14 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 345.

  15 Ibid., pp. 345–46.

  16 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 525.

  17 New York Times, July 25, 1944.

  18 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 529.

  19 Ibid., p. 530.

  20 Hillman was further vilified by allegations that he was linked to the 1936 murder of a trucking company operator, Joseph Rosen, who was suspected of servicing nonunion businesses. Gangster Louis Lepke of the notorious Murder Incorporated was convicted and sentenced to death for the slaying. Like any labor leader of his day, Hillman no doubt dealt with racketeers at times, but contract murder seems uncharacteristic of a man who valued his personal reputation as much as Hillman did. However, the rumor that Hillman had paid for the hit was heard not only from such reactionary voices as columnist Westbrook Pegler, but even Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, who once observed, “I think that was very fortunate for Mr. Hillman that Mr. Lepke went to the electric chair without talki
ng more than he did.” See Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pp. 252–53.

  21 Novelist Philip Roth, quoted in Time magazine, July 6, 2009.

  22 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 347.

  23 Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg quoted in R. Alton Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), p. 23.

  24 R. Alton Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), p. 24.

  25 United States v. United Mine Workers, 330 U.S. 258 (1947).

  26 Newsweek, June 3, 1946; U.S. News & World Report, May 17, 1946.

  27 New York Times, May 26, 1946.

  28 New Republic, Feb. 11, 1946.

  29 New York Times, May 29, 1946.

  30 Ibid., May 31, 1946.

  31 William White, The Taft Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), p. 57.

  32 Sloan quoted in Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 107.

  33 White, Taft Story, p. 78.

  34 Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley, p. 63.

  35 Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 216.

  36 Ibid., p. 217; Irving Richter, Labor’s Struggles: 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. vii.

  37 New York Times, Oct. 2, 1949.

  38 Ibid., Oct. 9, 1949.

  39 Ibid., Oct. 17, 1949.

  40 Ibid., Oct. 12, 1949.

  41 Ibid., Nov. 1, 1949. The following year a federal court dealt Taft-Hartley a more direct blow when John L. Lewis grew concerned that his UMW miners were not receiving adequate benefits from the health and welfare fund administered by the mine operators. Cleverly avoiding a strike that might be termed illegal under Taft-Hartley, Lewis announced instead a series of “worker memorial days” to protest the mines’ poor records on workplace injuries and work-related illness. The Truman administration won an injunction against the UMW for these stoppages under Taft-Hartley. When the union duly ordered miners to return to work in compliance with the injunction, most simply refused. Stymied, the government pursued contempt charges against UMW leaders for not being forceful enough in getting miners back on the job, but a federal court spurned the government’s argument, thus rendering the injunctive power available in such circumstances ineffectual. When, in 1952, the steel unions struck again and 560,000 workers walked out, Truman—citing the needs of the Korean War—didn’t bother seeking an injunction; he seized the steel plants. The Supreme Court, however, ruled the seizure an unconstitutional act of executive power; the plants were returned to private operation and the strike resumed. Truman was criticized for not going the route of Taft-Hartley, but he may have resisted such a move after his experience with the UMW in 1950. Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, also tripped and stumbled over the new law. In 1953 the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the employers’ New York Shipping Association disputed wages and hiring on the New York waterfront. With shipping in the nation’s largest port at a standstill, the AFL expelled the ILA, accusing it of racketeering, and chartered a new longshoremen’s union. Eisenhower obtained an injunction under Taft-Hartley to ban all waterfront strikes, but the internecine complexities of the warring dockhands’ unions in New York, and a series of wildcat strikes, made the situation nearly impossible to manage. Then, to the embarrassment of the AFL, NLRB elections vindicated the original ILA, which managed to come to terms with the employers; the White House came off as fumbling and poorly informed. A more personal crisis for the president arose when it became known that he had withdrawn his support from twenty union-friendly amendments proposed to Taft-Hartley by his own secretary of labor, former union official Martin J. Durkin, who resigned over his boss’s change of heart, which appeared to have come about through the influence of business interests.

  42 Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 24–25.

  43 Lewis quoted in 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), p. 139.

  44 Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), pp. 127–28. These unions were Mine, Mill and Smelter; Fur and Leather Workers; Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers; Marine Cooks and Stewards’ Association; Fishermen’s Union; the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union; United Office and Professional Workers; the American Communications Association; National Furniture Workers; and the United Public Workers of America.

  45 Griffith, Crisis of American Labor, p. 38.

  46 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), pp. 51–52.

  47 New York Times, May 11, 1970.

  48 Harper’s Magazine, May 1942.

  49 Valentine Reuther had run unsuccessfully for the West Virginia state legislature as a Socialist.

  50 Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 21.

  51 Walter Reuther, “500 Planes a Day—A Program for the Utilization of the Automobile Industry for Mass Production of Defense Planes,” in Reuther, Selected Papers, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Pyramid, 1964; originally published 1961).

  52 New York Times, May 11, 1970.

  53 Bruce Catton, The War Lords of Washington (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969; originally published 1948), p. 93.

  54 Reuther made several other attention-getting proposals during the war—that the drive to collect scrap metal be publicized by scrapping the iron fence around the White House, that an armored suit called “the Portable Foxhole” be designed for infantrymen, and so on. More important, he saw to it that the UAW, except for a few localized walkouts, adhered to the wartime no-strike pledge.

  55 Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 315–16.

  56 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 374.

  57 Ibid., p. 379. By 1964 this number had fallen to 16.8 million, or 30 percent. Various forces contributed to this: the inability of even the combined AFL-CIO to act as a union powerful enough to draw new members; blacks, day laborers, many unskilled workers remained ununionized; white-collar and management jobs; 8 million unorganized farmworkers (ignored since the days of the Wobblies).

  58 Andy Stern, A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 89–90.

  59 Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 132–33.

  60 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, p. 556.

  61 America hesitated to join the ILO because of its League of Nations affiliation, but Frances Perkins led a successful effort in 1934 to win congressional approval of U.S. entry into the ILO as a gesture of support for European workers because Mussolini and Hitler had shut down their nations’ trade union movements. Because the Labor Department also oversaw immigration issues, Perkins was later involved in delicate negotiations to manipulate U.S. immigration quotas in order to make it possible to accept asylum requests from Jewish and other European trade unionists. This was opposed by both Congress and the U.S. State Department. In 1940 she was also active in arranging to relocate the ILO’s headquarters temporarily to Montreal, the ILO’s European staffers fleeing through Lisbon in a dramatic escape from the Nazis. All these efforts, as well as her support of the West Coast longshoreman Harry Bridges, would later be used by fierce anti-Communist forces in the United States to blacken Perkins’s reputation. See Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 187–96, for a discussion of U.S.-ILO relations, Perkins, and the refugee
issue.

  62 Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone—Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 236.

  63 Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History, vol. 39, no. 1 (1998).

  64 Parmet, Master of Seventh Avenue, p. 225.

  65 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and Story of UAW, p. 332.

  66 Parmet, Master of Seventh Avenue, pp. 229–30.

  67 Morgan, Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, p. 199.

  68 Ibid., pp. 197–98.

  69 Walter Reuther, “How to Beat the Communists,” Collier’s, Feb. 28, 1948.

  70 Parmet, Master of Seventh Avenue, p. 231.

  71 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 68.

  72 Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland.”

  73 Both the expulsion of the leftist CIO unions and the merger of the AFL and CIO were engineered with the help of former OSS officer and CIO general counsel Arthur Goldberg, who was later secretary of labor, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the American ambassador to the United Nations.

  74 John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1983), p. 134.

  75 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 141.

  76 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 322. Both Walter and Victor Reuther nearly paid with their lives for their independent ways. In April 1948 a shotgun was fired through the kitchen window of Walter’s Detroit home, wounding him badly in the right arm. Victor was attacked a year later, also in a home assault, a sniper’s bullet striking him in the face. Walter, his arm permanently disabled, moved his family out of Detroit to the suburbs and hired a bodyguard; Victor, who’d lost an eye to his would-be killer, relocated abroad, living in Paris for several years as an official with the CIO’s international affairs division. Police never determined whether the brothers’ would-be assassins were labor movement rivals, gangsters, or others. No one was ever prosecuted for either of the shootings.

  77 Victor G. Reuther, Brothers Reuther and Story of UAW, pp. 416–17.