From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Big business despised the second New Deal, and the Wagner Act most of all. The National Association of Manufacturers fought its passage with the biggest campaign in the history of corporate lobbying. When Wagner became law, the American Liberty League challenged it in court, and many employers vowed to ignore it while they waited for it to be declared unconstitutional.

  Workers struggling to unionize mass production were cautiously optimistic. They had made gains without much help from the NIRA; more seemed possible now. But the AFL remained an obstacle, most of its leaders split between those who preferred to ignore mass-production workers entirely, and those who were willing to take in new dues-paying members as long as their own prerogatives and power remained intact. Both groups doubted mass-production workers could really be organized.

  Actually, mass-production federal unions were on the move. They founded a national auto union in August 1935 and a rubber union the following month. They fought to keep their skilled members when craft poachers came around. More was at stake than jurisdiction or industrial versus craft structure: movement confronted paralysis. As Federated Press labor reporter Len De Caux put it, “the will to organize” was the issue. “The Old Guard,” he observed, “was acting dog-in-the-manger over members nobody had.” Labor activists intended to build unions large and militant enough to beat the open shop: if craft conservatives blocked the way, industrial union insurgents would have to shove them aside.

  Easier said than done—AFL leaders had beaten back many rank-and-file insurgencies. But this time around, union leaders were not of one mind. John L. Lewis—president of the United Mine Workers, the nation’s largest union—sided with the insurgents and was ready to lead an assault on the old guard at the AFL convention. When delegates gathered in Atlantic City in October 1935, the stage was set for a fight that would split the Federation.

  THE RISE OF THE CIO

  The 1935 debates between industrial and craft unionists were more acrimonious than ever. Lewis and a few like-minded union chiefs sponsored a resolution calling for unrestricted industrial union charters for mass-production industries. After hours of speeches pro and con, the convention voted the resolution down, 18,024 to 10,933, and the issue seemed settled. But delegates from the federal unions and the new auto and rubber unions kept rising to make their case, while President Green tried to silence them from the podium. When Carpenters’ president William Hutcheson interrupted a rubber worker, Lewis loudly objected. Hutcheson called Lewis a “big bastard,” and Lewis decked him with a right-cross to the jaw. That blow—later called “the punch heard round the world”—announced that the dissidents would not be held in check.

  On November 9, 1935, Lewis and seven other AFL leaders met to found the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) “for the purpose of encouraging and promoting the organization of unorganized workers . . . on an industrial basis.” These men represented long-established unions—the United Mine Workers, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Ladies’ Garment Workers, Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, United Textile Workers, International Typographical Union, * Cap and Millinery Workers, and Oil and Gas Workers. But the catalyst for the CIO was the new labor movement. The grassroots uprisings that persuaded Congress to pass the Wagner Act also convinced these men that industrial organizing would pay off. Dues from more than a half-million new members so enriched the UMW and garment unions that the CIO could fund organizing campaigns without help from AFL headquarters.

  The CIO started as eight unions with a million members total. Two years later, thirty-two CIO unions had 3.7 million members, the vast majority covered by collective bargaining agreements. Most newcomers were mass-production workers in industrial unions, though other kinds of workers and organizations climbed aboard too. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (later the United Steel Workers of America) had 550,000 members and contracts with all U.S. Steel subsidiaries. The United Mine Workers had 600,000 members. The United Auto Workers and United Rubber Workers—previously AFL federal unions—had respectively 375,000 members and contracts with General Motors, Chrysler, and several smaller auto companies; and 75,000 members and contracts with Goodyear, Goodrich, and General Tire and Rubber. Other CIO forces included 400,000 textile workers; close to 500,000 members of various garment unions; 140,000 workers in electrical manufacturing; 130,000 in transportation and maritime unions; 120,000 in white-collar unions of retail workers, office workers, public employees, newspaper reporters, architects, engineers, and other professionals; 100,000 woodworkers, from loggers to furniture factory workers.

  Rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, first put the CIO on the map. In the middle of February 1936, several hundred members of the United Rubber Workers (URW) threw up a picket line at the giant Goodyear tire plant after layoffs were announced. Within days, more than 14,000 Goodyear workers were out on strike. Their tactics were typical of new labor. Thousands of pickets—rubber workers from Goodyear and other companies, along with their families and neighbors—encircled the plant’s eleven-mile perimeter day and night, even in blizzards. When Goodyear got an injunction, the URW and Akron’s central labor council promised a general strike if the National Guard enforced the injunction. The Guardsmen did not intervene. When police tried to tear down tents set up along the picket line, General Tire Company workers left their shop to help beat back the police. When the rubber barons organized a vigilante “Law and Order League,” the union organized a counterforce of workers who had served in the Great War.

  The strike was not just a local effort. CIO headquarters donated to the strike fund and sent staff to help the strikers. CIO researchers provided facts about Goodyear’s profits and stock manipulations for publicity. CIO leaders let Goodyear and its customers know they risked national boycotts if violence broke the picket line. After a month, the company offered to shelve the layoff plan and bargain with the union. The strikers debated the offer at mass meetings and agreed to go back to work.

  Both of the forces at work in the Akron victory contributed to CIO growth. Rank-and-file activists carried grassroots mobilization to new levels. CIO headquarters dedicated a large staff to organizing the unorganized. Bottom-up and top-down efforts were powerful in combination, but not a real partnership: local activists and headquarters men often built different kinds of unions.

  The difference showed in CIO political action. President Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936. John L. Lewis knew his defeat would be disastrous for labor and vigorously campaigned for him; in return, Roosevelt promised to support a CIO drive in steel. The AFL also endorsed the president, and Sidney Hillman of the CIO’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers helped start Labor’s Non-Partisan League to funnel union support to the president’s campaign. But Lewis and Hillman faced a grassroots movement for an independent labor party, supported by five state federations, scores of central councils, and hundreds of locals in industrial unions in rubber, auto, textiles, and garments, even Lewis’s Mine Workers and Hillman’s Clothing Workers. Lewis gave the United Auto Workers $100,000 for organizing, contingent on a Roosevelt endorsement. Hillman converted the New York City chapter of the Non-Partisan League into the American Labor Party, suggesting the League should become the nucleus for a national labor party once Roosevelt was reelected. (After the election, the idea was dropped.)

  Roosevelt won millions of working-class votes because of the second New Deal and its contrast with the relentlessly probusiness platform of his Republican opponent. The President got over 60 percent of the popular vote, carrying every state but Maine and Vermont. Urban working-class voters—migrants from rural America as well as immigrants—came to identify themselves as Democrats. African American support for the Republican Party—steadfast since the Civil War—evaporated as federal programs brought relief to communities, and black votes went to Roosevelt even though he failed to endorse a federal antilynching law opposed by southern Democrats.

  The movement for independent political action survived in third-party initiatives in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Califo
rnia, and Washington. New York’s American Labor Party became the majority party among East Harlem’s Italian, Puerto Rican, and African American voters. But national spokesmen for the CIO and its member unions remained firmly wedded to the two-party system.

  As Lewis and Hillman stumped for the Non-Partisan League on Roosevelt’s behalf, the CIO launched an organizing drive aimed at U.S. Steel. Lewis appointed the United Mine Workers’ Philip Murray chairman of the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC), and armed it with a war chest of $750,000. SWOC announced it would keep “centralized and responsible control of the organizing campaign” and “insist that local policies conform to the national plan of action.” A staff of lawyers, researchers, publicity agents, and salaried organizers—few of them steelworkers—conducted a campaign mainly outside the mills. These tactics were designed, in Murray’s words, “to banish fear from the steel workers’ minds.” They could join SWOC without paying initiation fees (or even dues after October 1936) and were not expected to talk up the union. Instead, SWOC staged national meetings where the CIO was endorsed by New Deal politicians and leading spokesmen for the various racial and ethnic groups represented in the mills. By the end of 1936, SWOC claimed more than 100,000 members, though the union was close to invisible on the job.

  On March 2, 1937, U.S. Steel reached an agreement with SWOC, after secret meetings with Lewis (so secret not even Murray knew about them). Workers flocked into SWOC, but it remained highly centralized. Murray appointed all regional and district directors and field organizers. The national office set local dues policies, prohibited strikes without permission, and reserved the right to expel anyone breaking that rule. Murray’s directors—not local officers elected by members—negotiated and signed contracts.

  SWOC probably owed its victory to the autoworkers at General Motors—the world’s largest corporation and bitterly antiunion. The United Auto Workers had planned to begin a campaign in Cleveland and Detroit in the new year; after Roosevelt’s reelection a series of spontaneous strikes quickened the pace. In November and early December, when workers struck in G.M. plants in Atlanta and Kansas City, UAW leaders had discouraged the actions as premature. Then a department at the Cleveland plant sat down on December 28, and the rest of the 7,000 workers soon joined in, vowing to stay until G.M. signed a national contract. On December 30, workers occupied Detroit’s G.M. Fisher Plant No. 2. The next day, workers from Fisher No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, met on lunch break; several hundred returned to the plant, escorted guards and managers out, and settled in to stay. On January 3, 1937, with sit-downs rapidly spreading, UAW delegates met in Flint, composed formal demands, and declared a company-wide strike.

  The Flint occupation was well disciplined. The shop committee patrolled to make sure no one damaged cars or equipment; drinking and gambling were forbidden. The UAW Women’s Auxiliary—wives, sisters, mothers, daughters of the strikers—formed with fifty members on the second day of the strike and quickly grew to many hundreds. They raised money, provided food and childcare for strikers’ families, and stood on picket lines. Genora Johnson, wife of local union leader Kermit Johnson and a member of the Socialist Party, organized a Women’s Emergency Brigade, which wore red berets and carried hammers, crowbars, and two-by-fours to demonstrations and pickets. Veterans joined union groups pledging to defend the community from strike-breaking thugs and “not become a stool pigeon of the Capitalists and give them any information of our order.” The strikers got outside support; even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to the strike fund. As one striker recalled, “It started out kinda ugly because the guys were afraid they put their foot in it and all they was gonna do is lose their jobs. But as time went on, they began to realize they could win this darn thing, ’cause we had a lot of outside people comin’ in showin’ sympathy.” The pickets in front of the plant grew to ten thousand strong. By mid-January seventeen plants and well over half the G.M. workforce were on strike.

  The company refused to negotiate unless the plants were vacated. Stalemated, the union made plans to take Chevrolet Plant No. 9. Spies reported the plan; G.M. security shifted in anticipation. As union members and the Women’s Emergency Brigade stormed Chevy No. 9, other union militants walked into Chevrolet No. 4, which made all the engines for the Chevrolet line. Half the 4,000 workers joined them, and the rest left. On February 3, after the governor refused to order troops to evict the strikers, G.M. agreed to negotiate. A week later the company recognized the UAW at the striking plants, dropped charges and lawsuits against the strikers, and agreed to submit other demands to a labor-management conference.

  The victory snowballed: Chrysler Corporation signed with the union in April, and by the end of the year the UAW had recruited 400,000 members, established a general union (Local 156) in Flint, and taken over the city’s government. The sit-down tactic was widely copied. In the first two weeks after the Flint victory there were eighty-seven sit-down strikes in Detroit alone—in auto parts plants, cigar factories, bakeries, and other workplaces. Over the course of 1937, about 300,000 workers staged a total of 477 sit-down strikes. The Flint victory also proved the strength of what Len De Caux, now editor of the CIO News, called “tumultuous democracy”: UAW locals were virtually autonomous; all officers were elected by the membership; and the radical Unity Caucus fought with the moderate Progressive Caucus for a decade.

  Whatever their internal dynamics, all CIO unions fostered workplace democracy. General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan, Jr., later recalled the fury of businessmen forced to bargain with the CIO: “Our rights to determine production schedules, to set work standards, and to discipline workers were all suddenly called into question.” Unions restricted employer prerogatives.

  Unions could also impose restrictions on workers. Following the Goodyear victory, officers of the United Rubber Workers squared off against the many rank and filers who staged departmental sitdowns to protest unsatisfactory conditions. However effective on the shop floor, these “wildcat” strikes—called without union authorization—undercut URW negotiations with Goodyear. To gain concessions from management, union officials had to be able to deliver labor peace. Union after union clamped down on wildcats once employers agreed to negotiate.

  The Wagner Act also cut both ways. NLRB elections played a big part in the CIO’s growth. Unions counted on Board rulings to enforce Wagner protections. But employers broke the law more efficiently than the government enforced it. Even after the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in April 1937, the NLRB was so swamped by complaints about employer violations that unions could not get rulings for months, or years if the dispute went to the courts. Moreover, government help came at a price. No union could call on the NLRB—even for an election—without accepting its rules for union conduct, which prohibited strikes and boycotts in support of other unions.

  Reliance on the NLRB also turned the CIO away from workers not protected by Wagner. Local and regional unions of sharecroppers, farmhands, fishermen, and food processors started the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) in July 1937, bringing together 110,000 members, unprotected field workers and protected plant workers alike. But UCAPAWA’s central office supported farm organizing less and less, suspending it entirely in 1939. Domestic workers fared worse—the CIO did not even try to organize them.

  Still, the CIO advanced working-class solidarity in important ways. CIO unions welcomed men and women of every color, creed, and nationality. This solidarity had limits. Women workers did not hold leadership positions in proportion to their numbers in CIO unions;the same was true for men of color. CIO contracts left hiring decisions to employers, and seniority clauses perpetuated the effects of discrimination. Though mass-production unions claimed jurisdiction over everyone working in their industries, they rarely reached out to the legions of women who staffed company offices.

  Nevertheless, women’s ranks in U.S. unions expanded from about 200,000 in 1935 to 800,000 in 1940. The CIO and its National Coordina
ting Committee of CIO Auxiliaries created a large and vital network of local and national women’s auxiliaries, in the UAW and other unions, including the Rubber Workers, SWOC, Mine Mill, and the National Maritime Union. The auxiliaries were active in many strikes. Violet Baggett, married to a Cadillac worker, joined a UAW auxiliary when her husband went on strike. In a letter to the UAW newspaper, she wrote: “I’m living for the first time with a definite goal. I want a decent living for not only my family but for everyone. Just being a woman isn’t enough any more. I want to be a human being.” In Detroit and some other cities, women’s auxiliaries also took on tenant and consumer issues.

  CIO unions adopted constitutions outlawing exclusion, discrimination, and segregation. Their members took a CIO pledge, promising (among other things) “never to discriminate against a fellow worker on account of creed, color or nationality.” They fielded organizers from diverse backgrounds and published union literature in many languages. They reached out to working-class churches and community organizations. They worked with civil rights and civic groups like A. Philip Randolph’s National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (based in colleges and universities), the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights, and the Japanese American Democratic Clubs in several California cities. They supported community groups like El Congreso de los Pueblos de Habla Español, founded under the leadership of Guatemalan-born UCAPAWA organizer Luisa Moreno. El Congreso brought together more than a hundred Mexican American and Mexican groups to fight “against discrimination and deportation, for economic liberty, for equal representation in government, for the building of a better world for our youth” (to quote its eighteen-year-old executive secretary Josefina Fierro de Bright). CIO unions also cultivated connections with the radical ethnic associations affiliated with the International Workers Order, like the Slovak Workers’ Society, the Garibaldi-American Fraternity Society, and the Cervantes Fraternal Society.