American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The lettuce and fruit-and-vegetable workers of California not only ran the bloody gamut that had now become endemic—terrorism, vigilantes, false arrests, kidnappings, clubs, shotguns, invocation of the red menace, calling in of the troops. In California the whole union effort was savaged— organization meetings, peaceful travel by organizers, union headquarters themselves. Employer intransigence played directly into the hands of the militant union leaders, many of whom were communists. The strikes in the Imperial Valley, in Irving Bernstein’s judgment, were less a labor dispute than a “proto-Fascist offensive” by the growers and shippers and business-dominated local officials. When the southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, seeing a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of American citizens, conducted a “Good Will” tour of the valley, the group was surrounded by an angry mob in Brawley and sent back to Los Angeles.

  America in 1934 was rife with upper-class hostility toward the poor. Was there to be class war? The vast majority of Americans in 1934, even those in deepest want, would have answered no. Most would have understood neither the question nor the very notion of class war. They thought in terms of their immediate boss or foreman, the bank that held their mortgage, the men who had hired them to dig potatoes or pick fruit, the minister they listened to on Sunday, their union leader if they had one. Most did not see themselves as belonging to a class. They simply knew where they stood in the distribution of food, shelter, and clothing.

  Two sets of Americans, however, did understand the idea of class war, and in varying degrees expected it. American capitalists, speaking through the Liberty League, increasingly warned of the Red Menace at home and abroad, of agitators, Moscow-trained or homegrown, subverting republican institutions, of a climactic attack of a proletariat of some kind against individual liberty and free enterprise. In general, though, capitalist action was more telling than capitalist oratory. In their refusal to recognize unions of the workers’ own choosing, their resistance to labor demands, their ready use of scabs, stool pigeons, police, sheriff’s deputies, and ultimately the National Guard, employers—whether great industrialists in Detroit and Pittsburgh or little operators of apple orchards—tended to foment the very class feeling, if not the class consciousness, that they deplored.

  If some capitalists practiced class conflict without preaching it, some anticapitalists preached the class struggle without practicing it. Forced to pitch their appeals to an enormous range of groups and situations—from Manhattan garment workers to Pittsburgh steelworkers to southern tenant farmers to Texas pecan pickers to California longshoremen—communists and other left radicals adapted their tactics to local possibilities. Even so, they were still banking on the doctrine that in the long run the bleak and needful conditions of existence for millions of workers and farmers would draw them inexorably into class attitudes and class politics.

  But how long the long run? Even by their own doctrine, the prologue to class war in America was not being written during the early New Deal. That doctrine assumed not only the objective conditions for lower-class solidarity but a sharpening consciousness of deprivation and need. Such consciousness could not develop spontaneously but required a heightened sense of conflict with social and economic elites. Such a sense of class conflict required in turn, as Lenin had practiced and preached, the kind of transcending and transforming leadership that could lift people out of their parochial day-to-day concerns to a vision of a better future in a new society. Radicals needed to persuade the working class that it had only two alternatives—staying with the “capitalistic-liberal-bourgeois-neofascist coalition presently running America,” as the jargon had it, or joining a radical movement or party dedicated to overthrowing the system and all its evils. There was no choice in between.

  American socialists, fundamentally pluralist, rejected this harsh class division. But some citizens endorsed it. During the early New Deal an eighteen-year-old youth on relief wrote a poem called “Prayer of Bitter Men”:

  We are the men who ride the swaying freights,

  We are the men whom Life has beaten down,

  Leaving for Death nought but the final pain

  Of degradation. Men who stand in line

  An hour for a bowl of watered soup,

  Grudgingly given, savagely received.

  We are the Ishmaels, outcasts of the earth,

  Who shrink before the sordidness of Life

  And cringe before the filthiness of Death.

  Will there not come a great, a glittering Man,

  A radiant leader with a heavier sword

  To crush to earth the enemies who crush

  Those who seek food and freedom on the roads?

  We care not if Thy flag be white or red,

  Come, ruthless Savior, messenger of God,

  Lenin or Christ, we follow Thy bright sword.

  “Lenin or Christ”—or a Path Between?

  Heightening the class consciousness of the masses, sharpening their sense of conflict with the capitalist elites, providing militant cadres to lead these great efforts—all this lay at the very heart of the Communist strategy in the United States. Under the eyes of Lenin himself, the Communist International in 1920 had proclaimed its aim “to fight by all available means, including armed struggle, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie.” In 1928, four years after Lenin’s death, the Sixth World Congress had called on communists everywhere to smash capitalism, if necessary by force. As always, Communist leaders in the United States danced to the international party tune.

  On the eve of the 1930s the Communist party in the United States listed around ten thousand members, many of them in the needle and building trades or jobless, with relatively few in basic industries like steel. The membership included only a scattering of blacks, farmers, and working women. The communist movement was broader than the party. Communist foreign-language newspapers had a readership of perhaps 200,000, though the circulation of the English-language Daily Worker was only a small fraction of this number. Through trade union, “Women’s Work,” Negro, and other apparatuses party members penetrated many other organizations. The movement had hosts of sympathizers, including a sprinkling of the very rich.

  The great depression should have been a boon to American communism. At last the mightiest industrial nation of them all appeared to be succumbing to the historical inevitability of boom and bust, working-class misery, and proletarian revolution. Party membership, indeed, almost doubled by the end of 1932. But then it shrank by more than three thousand during the next six months. What was wrong? Despite its much touted and feared internal discipline, the American Communist party was so rent with factionalism that Stalin himself dressed down its leaders in Moscow. Even more, the great mass of American workers, stirred though they might be by specific Communist charges and promises, were cool toward left-wing ideologies in general, communist dogma in particular, and an American Communist party that—as they correctly perceived—was always under the overt or covert control of the Kremlin. But these had long been obstacles for the Communists. How now to sharpen class consciousness under the continuing depression? The answer in the early New Deal years appeared to be to redouble the Communists’ tactic of the “united front from below”—the strategy of co-opting other organizations not by deals with their leaders (the “united front from above”) but by forging links with rank-and-file memberships and involving them in the communist movement. By the beginning of 1935 Communist leader Earl Browder—as aggressive in combat as he was bourgeois in appearance—could claim a mass following of over half a million, though signed-up members numbered around 30,000.

  The Communists wooed peace lovers and anti-Nazis with the American League Against War and Fascism, young people with the American Youth Congress, artists and authors with the American Writers’ Congress. But the main target was the working class—factory hands, farm laborers, semiskilled and some skilled workers. Here the vaunted leadership skills of the Communists failed them. In
the late 1920s, the party had tried to set up separate “red unions” to draw workers from established ones, but these failed miserably. They were quietly liquidated during 1934 and early 1935, while the leadership lamely called for organizing separately and at the same time infiltrating the merely “reformist” unions, working, for instance, “among the A.F. of L. workers wherever they are organized.” This stratagem failed too, for penetrating and dominating the Federation was like invading and capturing a guerrilla army in a swampland; Communists did eventually manage to establish footholds in key industrial unions.

  Determined never to be outflanked on the left, the American Communists could not ignore a competing force on their immediate right—the Socialist party. American socialists could look back to their days of glory— to the vibrant leadership of Eugene Debs, to the stunning election results of 1912, when hundreds of socialists were elected to state legislatures and city councils, to the 885,000 votes Norman Thomas won twenty years later. They could boast of able and experienced leadership, especially that of Thomas himself, the benign visionary and eloquent Presbyterian, product of both Princeton and East Harlem slums. “His humane and appealing version of Socialism,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted, won “many disciples in the churches and on the campuses: where Debs had Americanized Socialism for the working class, Thomas Americanized it for the middle class.”

  But the socialists, like the communists and most other radical movements, were divided, and at a time when a united effort was most needed. Seasoned but defanged older leaders jousted with young “Militants” whose clenched-fist salutes and socialist-left views appeared to some old-timers as smacking of communism. Young, college-educated socialists with middle-class backgrounds wanted to move more vigorously toward more radical goals than did the old guard, with its working-class and immigrant origins. Militants also fought with Militants. Socialist comrades battled over hard questions: how closely should they work with the labor movement, itself divided; should the party preach revolution or evolution, class war or class harmony; should socialists fight the New Deal or invade and reform it; how, specifically, could a radical, egalitarian socialist movement work with a conservative, craft-union-dominated AFL? Thomas, himself more sympathetic to the radical Militant wing, tried to hold the movement together.

  As reaction and fascism mobilized in Europe against a divided left, Thomas also tried to make peace with the Communists, but too many hatreds, ancient and current, stood in the way. Early in 1934 New York Socialists and unionists called a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden to protest the murderous suppression of Austrian Social Democrats by the clerical-fascist Dollfuss regime. Determined to take over the meeting from the “social fascists,” hundreds of communists broke into the Garden, drowned out David Dubinsky and other speakers, and tried to take over the podium. The meeting broke up in a melee of fistfights, bottle-throwing, and knifings. He was now convinced, Thomas wrote his fellow civil libertarian and friend Roger Baldwin, “that a united front with Communists is impossible.” But both sides went back to speaking to each other. They had to. In the Archey Road, Finley Peter Dunne’s philosophizing barkeep Mr. Dooley had observed, “when a man and a woman found they simply couldn’t go on living together, they went on livin’ together.” The two movements were bound to each other, if only out of shared political frustration and a common capitalist enemy.

  Both groups had failed to provide leadership to the great mass of industrial and farm workers. A new, far more dynamic leadership was already emerging out of the industrial grass roots of the nation. This leadership, bursting through the old confining structures of craft fiefdom and business unionism, moved American labor into the new era of corporate capitalism and shaped the labor movement for decades to come. It was leadership committed to a simple but bold idea—industrial unionism.

  The American Federation of Labor embraced industrial unions, such as the Mine Workers, as well as craft unions, but its dominant ideas and institutions were still vintage Gompers—limited political action; ad hoc, day-to-day tactics; fear even of benevolent government; the granting of exclusive territories to the big national unions that comprised the AFL; organization of workers on the basis of occupations and skills rather than whole industries, such as auto or steel. Suddenly, in late 1933 and in 1934, the Federation had a bonanza on its hands—hundreds of thousands of less skilled workers, historically the hardest to awaken but now, in the heady climate of the New Deal, eager to join unions in their plants or industries. How to exploit this bonanza, which the Federation had not earned but which had sprung out of partial recovery, Roosevelt’s inspirational leadership, NRA’s Section 7(a), and heightened hopes and expectations?

  The Federation’s answer was to dump the unorganized into “federal unions”—big catchall bodies, weak and short-lived—until these workers could be parceled out to existing unions and their locals. But now, amid the organizing fever of 1934, something was different. Taking on a life of their own, the federal unions generated their own leaders, who began insisting that the AFL authorize them to form broad-based industrial unions. Youthful, defiant, impatient, as Irving Bernstein has described them, those leaders knew that only workers united industry by industry, plant by plant, could prevail against unified corporate elites. They were supported, rather surprisingly, by such publications as Fortune and the Literary Digest, such notables as Walter Lippmann and General Johnson.

  But the decision would be made within the AFL, and the Federation was sorely divided. On one side of the issue sat the chiefs of the AFL’s great national craft unions, men like John Frey of the Metal Trades, obsessively protective of his machinists’ craft enclaves; William “Big Bill” Hutcheson, the big, burly, rough-spoken head of the Carpenters; Dan Tobin, the smooth, seasoned boss of the Teamsters. Hutcheson, an active Republican who had supported Hoover in 1932, and Tobin, an ally of Roosevelt’s, personified the vaunted “nonpartisanship” of the Federation. In the dead center of the contestants sat William Green, cautious, deliberate, his rounded face and form seemingly smoothed out by years of conciliation and compromise.

  On the left, preaching industrial unionism, were such leaders as George L. Berry, the veteran head of the pressmen, and two men who had emerged out of the tumultuous immigrant world of New York City, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. No one doubted who was their chieftain—John L. Lewis. With his huge miner’s torso, his shaggy eyebrows beneath a shock of hair, his face fixed in an almost perpetual scowl, his deep rumbling voice, he was a formidable figure both to mine owners and to his AFL rivals.

  And so the argument raged at numberless council and committee meetings between the November 1934 and October 1935 conventions of the Federation. The craft unionists evoked ancient dogma about labor unity and settled arrangements, raised the bogey of “dual unionism,” and deprecated mass-production workers as fair-weather members who would join the new union for higher wages and then pull out. Lewis & Co. urged that above all the Federation must take in the millions clamoring at its gates and organize them in mighty locals that could challenge General Motors and Ford and U.S. Steel. Neither side was monolithic; Green tried conciliation, and men like Dubinsky sought to restrain Lewis from moving too far ahead of his small group. In this fluid situation there was only one constant: the old guard had the votes.

  One short hard punch dramatized the final rupture. Hour after hour delegates to the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City had debated a minority report in favor of industrial unionism. Finally Lewis took the floor. “The labor movement,” he said, “is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.” Hence it was morally wrong for craft unions that stood on their own feet “like mighty oaks” not to help weak unions exposed to “the lightning and the gale.” If they rejected the minority report, “high wassail” would prevail at the banquet tables of the mighty. The convention voted it down. Two days later Lewis, trying to revive the issu
e, ran into Hutcheson’s parliamentary objection. “Small potatoes,” Lewis shouted, and Hutcheson responded in kind. As Lewis moved back to his seat he and Hutcheson had another exchange. Hearing the word “bastard,” Lewis sent Hutcheson to the floor with that one punch. He then straightened his collar and tie, relit his cigar, and sauntered casually to the podium.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, John,” said President Green. “He called me a foul name,” said Lewis. “Oh,” said Green, “I didn’t know that.”

  Three weeks later Lewis, Hillman, Dubinsky, and others set up a Committee for Industrial Organization, with Lewis as chairman. Despite the group’s promises to work within the Federation, labor was now headed toward civil war, as the craft unionists look an increasingly adamant stand, and pressure from aroused grass-roots leaders pushed Lewis & Co. toward a separate organization. Desperately Green tried to mediate. Not only had he risen through an industrial union, the Miners, but he had written eloquently in favor of industrial unionism as concentrating the strength of skilled and unskilled. Lewis played on this past in a letter to Green:

  “Why not return to your father’s house? You will be welcome. If you care to dissociate yourself from your present position, the Committee for Industrial Organization will be happy to make you its Chairman in my stead.” “I am in my father’s house,” Green replied. “It is my firm purpose to remain there.” In more than thirty years in the labor movement, he added pointedly, “I have never aligned myself with any … dual movement.”