There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  78 Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America (San Jose, Calif.: Self-published, 1974), pp. 42–43.

  79 New York Times, Sept. 4, 1964.

  80 Ibid., Sept. 1, 1964.

  81 Similar revelations followed a few years later concerning the CIA’s use of the National Student Association, a respected bastion of liberal idealism whose international programs were shown to have been used as a CIA front. Lovestone, working closely with CIA counterintelligence man James J. Angleton, carried on his work for three decades, until he was dropped by the AFL-CIO in 1974 when his deep CIA links became known.

  82 A. H. Raskin, “New Issue: Labor as Big Business,” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 22, 1959.

  83 Barnard, Walter Reuther and Rise of Auto Workers, p. 156.

  84 John Hutchinson, The Imperfect Union: A History of Corruption in American Trade Unions (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), p. 382.

  85 Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 27.

  86 Malcolm Johnson, On the Waterfront: The Pulitzer Prize–Winning Article That Inspired the Classic Movie and Transformed the New York Waterfront (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), pp. vii, 6.

  87 T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba … and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 2008), p. 190.

  88 Ibid., p. 76.

  89 U.S. Congress, Senate, Third Interim Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office, 1951); see also Thaddeus Russell, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 172.

  90 Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994; originally published 1960), p. 251. After proving an uncooperative witness, Gallo nonetheless assured Kennedy, “I’ll line up my people for your brother in 1960.” See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 164.

  91 English, Havana Nocturne, p. 85.

  92 Quoted in Russell, Out of the Jungle, p. 180.

  93 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 137–38.

  94 Russell, Out of the Jungle, p. 202.

  95 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 141. Robert Kennedy’s zealous pursuit of union leaders did not sit altogether well with his father, Joseph Kennedy, who had had dealings with the Teamsters and worried that organized labor might take revenge by withholding support from John Kennedy if he chose to run for president.

  96 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 138.

  97 Kennedy, Enemy Within, p. 5.

  98 Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 233.

  99 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 143.

  100 A. H. Raskin, “The Moral Issue That Confronts Labor,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1957.

  101 Dave Beck was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1975.

  102 Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 255.

  103 Kennedy, Enemy Within, p. 76.

  104 Russell, Out of the Jungle, p. 178. The Father Barry character was based on a real-life “waterfront priest,” Father John Corridan, who had worked among the toughs on the New York docks and been a source for Malcolm Johnson’s series in the Sun. Johnson’s exposé and the information provided by Corridan helped prompt the states of New York and New Jersey to investigate and then coordinate reforms in the federal Waterfront Commission Act of 1953, which targeted the shape-up, the payoffs, and the added expense to consumers that stemmed from entrenched dockside corruption. See New York Times, July 3, 1984.

  105 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 140. Teamsters vice president Harold Gibbons, questioned as to why so many ex-cons and gangsters gravitated toward the Teamsters, explained: “There is no mystery. We happen to be in a heavily or largely unskilled area. One does not have to have too many talents to drive a truck. So it is easy to place them, and we probably have an undue amount of calls from parole agents, from priests, from ministers, who are working with people trying to rehabilitate them…. I am very happy that unions are cooperating in this kind of work, otherwise we would be turning loose on society an awful lot of people who could only make their living by a gun.” Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 248.

  106 Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 268.

  107 New York Times, June 7, 1968.

  108 Kennedy, Enemy Within, p. 61.

  109 Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 258.

  110 Ibid., p. 259.

  111 Ibid., p. 267.

  112 Nathan W. Shefferman, The Man in the Middle (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 50.

  113 Acceptance Speech by James Hoffa, Folder 15, Box 353, Walter P. Reuther Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; in Russell, Out of the Jungle, p. 196.

  114 Kennedy, Enemy Within, p. x.

  115 Hutchinson, Imperfect Union, p. 267.

  116 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 168. Robert Kennedy would be key in convincing J. Edgar Hoover to commit the FBI to take the threat seriously, and in cooperating with other government agencies to suppress organized crime generally. One of the key breaks resulting from a ramped-up federal policy was the cooperation of Joseph M. Valachi, a thirty-three-year veteran Mafia soldier linked to the Genovese crime family, the first major mob figure to defy the tradition of noncooperation. Valachi’s revelation of the workings of the major crime families changed thinking forever about the extensive reach of underworld crime.

  117 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 342.

  118 Ibid., p. 344.

  119 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 174.

  120 Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, p. 344.

  121 Ibid., pp. 347–48.

  122 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 181.

  123 Robert Kennedy resigned as counsel to the McClellan Committee after the passage of Landrum-Griffin, but reinvigorated his crusade against organized crime soon after as attorney general. Within the Teamsters Hoffa’s reputation only seemed enhanced by the government’s efforts, but eventually his luck ran out; Kennedy’s Justice Department found evidence that Hoffa had tried to bribe jurors in a trial in Tennessee. A trucking firm, Commercial Carriers, had set up a company named Test Fleet Corporation to lease trucks. Commercial gave the ownership of Test Fleet to Hoffa’s wife and the wife of another labor leader. The women made an initial profit of $125,000 on an investment of $4,000, and the money continued to roll in. As Hoffa himself was alleged to profit from his wife’s earnings, this violated a law against labor union leaders benefiting from financial dealings with employers. The Test Fleet trial ended in a hung jury, but on March 4, 1964, he was convicted of jury tampering in the case and sentenced to eight years in prison; at Kennedy’s insistence, Hoffa was also made to stand trial in Chicago over the Sun Valley land scam, and Hoffa and several other Teamster chieftains were convicted of mail and wire fraud; Hoffa got five years, which, added to his eight, put him away for thirteen years. In 1967, having exhausted his appeals, Hoffa began his thirteen-year term at a federal penitentiary. He was pardoned by President Nixon in December 1971.

  CHAPTER TEN: IF AMERICA’S SOUL BECOMES POISONED

  1 Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; originally published 1946), p. 29.

  2 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 164.

  3 Ibid., pp. 119–21.

  4 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 403.

  5 There have long been competing claims for Henry’s existence; various legends have him toiling for the railroads in Virginia, West Virginia, and Alabama. See Guy B. Johnson, John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), and Sco
tt Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  6 Franklin M. Fisher and Gerald Kraft, “The Effect of the Removal of the Firemen on Railroad Accidents, 1962–1967,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, vol. 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1971). Their study found that when a November 1963 arbitration board created by Congress allowed U.S. railroads to start removing firemen—a 20 percent decrease by 1964, 50 percent by 1967—the rate of railway accidents increased 50 percent.

  7 Dulles, Labor in America, pp. 409–10.

  8 John Gregory Dunne, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008; originally published 1967), p. 16.

  9 The phrase “factories in the fields” is from the book of that title by Carey McWilliams.

  10 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 36.

  11 Dan La Botz, César Chávez and La Causa (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), pp. 39–41. Ford and Suhr each served twelve years for their role in the Wheatland Riot.

  12 San Diego Tribune quoted in Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 41.

  13 Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 201–2.

  14 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 50.

  15 Ibid., p. 51.

  16 Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 193.

  17 La Botz, César Chávez and La Causa, p. 25.

  18 Ibid., p. 61.

  19 Ibid., p. 60.

  20 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 128.

  21 Joseph C. Goulden, Meany (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 337.

  22 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War (New York: International Publishers, 1989), p. 14.

  23 Goulden, Meany, p. 383.

  24 Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 392.

  25 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 23.

  26 New York Times, April 18, 1965.

  27 Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones, Peace Now!: American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 184. The author reports that a Veterans Administration study later confirmed that nearly 70 percent of GIs in Vietnam were working-class or low-income.

  28 AFL-CIO News, May 8, 1965.

  29 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 29.

  30 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

  31 Mazey was among five hundred union members from thirty-eight states who met in Chicago in fall 1967 to found the Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace. They had to appear as individuals, for their unions still backed the war. “Some still treasured the idea that the labor movement could and would become a catalyst for peace,” note Albert V. Lannon and Marvin Rogoff, witnesses to the Chicago meeting, and the LLAP gathered momentum in some places, but “it was marginalized, and could not break the Cold War consensus in the AFL-CIO.” See Lannon and Rogoff, “We Shall Not Remain Silent: Building the Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the House of Labor.”

  32 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 12.

  33 Ibid., p. 111.

  34 Ibid., p. 112.

  35 Ibid., p. 104.

  36 La Botz, César Chávez and La Causa, p. 76.

  37 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 136.

  38 New York Times, April 9, 1966.

  39 Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 153. Saul Alinsky later told Dunne that he thought an alliance between Hoffa and the Chávez forces might have been mutually beneficial. “I would have gone to Hoffa. I would have said, ‘Listen, everyone thinks you’re nothing but a goddam hoodlum. You need to pretty yourself up. And the way to do it is to help the poor migrant Mexican. You do it and people won’t call you Hoodlum Hoffa any more. They’ll be calling you Huelga Hoffa.’ ” See Dunne, Delano: Story of California Grape Strike, p. 171.

  40 Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 210–11.

  41 Ibid., p. 207.

  42 In response to Victor’s outburst, former CIA man Thomas Braden reported that he had once given Walter Reuther $50,000 for distribution to U.S.-friendly German auto unions.

  43 Paul Potter of SDS quoted by Boyle, UAW and Heyday of American Liberalism, p. 211. In addition, the “passion for respectability” that drove unions to support anti-Communist subterfuges abroad and purge left-leaning members at home was reinforced by the labor legislation from Congress, all of which, from the benevolence of the Wagner Act of 1935 to its harsh revisions in Taft-Hartley (1947) and Landrum-Griffin (1959), had the cumulative effect of bureaucratizing unionism. “By holding union leaders (and union treasurers) accountable for violations, the latter two measures, in particular, nurtured carefully defined, legalistic, centralized decision making,” suggests economist Neil Chamberlain. See Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 183.

  44 Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 33.

  45 Goulden, Meany, p. 353.

  46 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 109.

  47 Goulden, Meany, pp. 356–57.

  48 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 65.

  49 Goulden, Meany, p. 361.

  50 New York Times, July 12, 1967.

  51 Coxey had been arrested, while the fifteen thousand Bonus marchers had been driven from the capital’s streets by U.S. Army troops.

  52 New York Times, April 5, 1967.

  53 David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 576–77.

  54 Ibid., p. 582.

  55 Other members of the commission included Mayor John Lindsay of New York City, presidential aide Cyrus Vance, and Attorney General Ramsey Clark; the board’s two black members were Senator Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP.

  56 New York Times, Feb. 25, 1968, and March 1, 1968.

  57 Ibid., March 14, 1968.

  58 Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 389.

  59 Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, p. xiii.

  60 Newsweek, April 22, 1968.

  61 Memphis Commercial Appeal, Feb. 16, 1968.

  62 New York Times, March 31, 1968.

  63 Ibid., March 30, 1968.

  64 Ibid.

  65 David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978; originally published 1970), pp. 386–87.

  66 Ibid., pp. 376–77. On April 8 the march in support of the strike went ahead as planned, King’s widow, Coretta, along with Walter Reuther and other dignitaries, led more than forty thousand people in support of the sanitation workers. President Johnson, meanwhile, had dispatched Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to Memphis to resolve the strike. Mayor Loeb continued his obstinacy but in the wake of the King assassination he had lost the support of the white business community and was forced to settle with the union by April 16, granting formal recognition to the union and satisfying several other demands. For analysis of the Memphis strike see Millie Allen Beik, Labor Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005), pp. 223–48.

  67 Goulden, Meany, pp. 389–90, 395–96.

  68 Boyle, UAW and Heyday of American Liberalism, p. 237.

  69 Goulden, Meany, pp. 389–90, 395–96.

  70 See New York Times, May 12, 14, 17, and 18, 1968.

  71 New York Times, Nov. 20, 1969.

  72 Ibid., Nov. 22, 1969.

  73 Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2007), p. 275.

  74 Nixon’s address of April 30, 1970, quoted in New York Times, May 1, 1970.

  75 Philip S. Foner, U
.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, pp. 112–13. One of the signatures was that of Warren K. Billings, who had been convicted along with Tom Mooney of bombing a San Francisco Preparedness Day parade in 1915, a conviction later overturned.

  76 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 101. The accident was blamed on a faulty altimeter as the plane attempted to land in the rain at a small airfield at Pellston, Michigan. Three days later, as Reuther was memorialized in Detroit, the nation’s auto assembly lines fell silent for three minutes in tribute.

  77 New York Times, Jan. 2, 1966.

  78 Lindsay’s predecessor, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., son of the famous New Deal solon, had issued an executive order in 1958 that allowed municipal unions the right of collective bargaining, although a state law forbade them from striking and Wagner had managed to keep labor peace with the TWU by befriending Quill and making a point to meet with him on a frequent basis. Wagner, upon relinquishing his office to Lindsay, however, had immediately left town for a vacation in Mexico, seemingly eager to put as much distance between him and the TWU walkout as possible. For further background on the 1966 New York City transit strike see Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 78–93.

  79 Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York Magazine, April 1969.

  80 Cannato, Ungovernable City, p. 396.

  81 New York Times, May 9, 1970.

  82 Ibid.

  83 Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War, p. 104.

  84 New York Times, May 12, 1970.

  85 Jeffrey-Jones, Peace Now! p. 200.

  86 Ray M. Elling, The Struggle for Workers’ Health (Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing Co., 1986), p. 25.

  87 New York Times, Jan. 23, 1936; see also People’s Press, Dec. 7, 1935, at historymatters.gmu. edu/d/5089.

  88 People’s News, pp. 127–35, National Archives Record Group 174, Department of Labor website, http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/osha.htm.

  89 Eric Arneson, ed., Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1032–33.