From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  This Cold War fostered the largest and longest red scare in U.S. history. Beginning in 1948, Communist Party leaders were indicted, convicted, and imprisoned for Smith Act violations. Under the 1950 Internal Security Act (“McCarran”), officers and members of 600 “Communist Action” organizations (most concerned with peace, civil rights, and labor) had to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board. Two Communists—Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel—were executed in 1953 for espionage (though authorities considered her innocent of direct participation). Party membership fell from its historic high of 80,000 in 1946 to about 3,000 in 1958, and its influence to just about zero.

  But the campaign went far beyond the Party. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published “Communist Infiltration in the United States” (1946), “Communists Within the Labor Movement,” and “Communists Within the Government” (both 1947), claiming to show how far the Soviet plot had advanced—communists already influenced if they did not actually run the NLRB and the Labor Department. Acting on the Chamber’s advice, Truman established a “Loyalty Program” in 1947. It eventually covered more than 15 million people employed in government or by companies with government contracts. Six Congressional committees investigated the loyalty of government employees in 1948—the best-known was headed by Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. By 1953–54, fifty-one different committees were in the hunt—the House Un-American Activities Committee alone held 147 hearings. By then nearly 30,000 people had been accused of disloyalty, and 10,000 had lost their jobs. Others lost the right to vote, as well as unemployment, disability, old age, and veteran’s benefits.

  The red scare touched every corner of American life. In 1952, Revlon Cosmetics changed the name of its “Russian Sable” face powder to “Dark Dark.” A city manager in Wheeling, West Virginia, noticed some vending machines that dispensed gum and trinkets representing the world’s nations. Finding some stamped USSR, he reported the vendors to the FBI. A passerby called New York City police when he spotted utility workers signalling surveyors with red flags. The Soviet development of a nuclear arsenal sparked a nationwide civil defense program, which taught millions of children to “duck and cover”—duck their heads under their desks and cover their eyes—in case of an atomic blast. Some building contractors specialized in home bomb shelters, from $20 “foxholes” to $5,000 “honeymoon” models.

  Some developments were less comical. A sexual panic accompanied the red scare and twenty-one states passed laws against “sexual psychopaths”—claiming homosexuals to be tainted with the same moral degeneracy as communists. A 1950 Congressional subcommittee declared them security risks, and homosexuals were barred from government service in 1953. Gay and lesbian activists started the Mattachine Society (1950) and Daughters of Bilitis (1955) to push for legal and civil rights. Mattachine founder (and onetime Department Store Workers organizer) Harry Hay recalled, “The first five . . . were all union members experienced in organizing underground.” Revels Cayton, a leader in the CIO Marine Cooks and Stewards, observed, “If you let them red bait, they’ll race bait. If you let them race bait, they’ll queen bait.”

  Cold War diplomatic considerations did encourage some government intervention in race relations. Though Congress cut off Fair Employment Practice Committee funding in 1946, in 1947 the President’s Committee on Civil Rights condemned wartime Japanese internment and warned that racist incidents (like the forty lynchings recorded in 1946) made “excellent propaganda ammunition for Communist agents.” In 1948, after A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights activists threatened to organize a boycott of the draft, Truman ordered the military to desegregate (the Pentagon reported the process complete in 1955). When the Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson and declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Voice of America overseas radio broadcast the text of the decision in thirty-four languages. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent troops to enforce a court order letting black students enroll at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then signed the first federal civil rights act since Reconstruction, letting the government seek injunctions against voting rights violations and creating a civil rights commission.

  Similar considerations shaped immigration and colonial policies. After 60,000 Puerto Ricans had been drafted or enlisted for Korea, the colony received “commonwealth status” in 1952, remaining under U.S. law though its citizens could not vote in federal elections nor its representatives vote in Congress. The 1952 McCarran-Walters Immigration Act voided the 1790 law restricting naturalization to “white persons,” and set new quotas—each Asian country got 100 a year. Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959 (though the status of their indigenous peoples remained unsettled). On State Department advice, Congress reformed quotas again in 1965, allowing up to 20,000 arrivals a year from every independent nation outside the Americas.

  The war against fascism never diminished labor anticommunism. After a California grassroots campaign directed by veteran UCAPAWA-FTA organizer Luisa Moreno took an NLRB election from them in October 1945, the Teamsters boycotted canneries with FTA contracts, signed a union shop agreement with the growers, attacked locked-out FTA pickets, and roused Catholic priests to tell parishioners to shun the communist-led FTA. The Teamsters won a new election in August 1946 (and the INS deported Moreno to Mexico in 1948). In Europe, the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee—run by renegade Communist Jay Lovestone—paid criminal syndicates to attack French Communist dockworkers, and Greek unions to sit out the insurrection.

  Anticommunism wrecked the CIO’s first major postwar drive. Philip Murray announced “Operation Dixie” in May 1946 as a “civil rights crusade.” CIO organizing director Allan Heywood elaborated: “Only with a united movement, based on equal rights, can we win our fight for economic security for all.” Over the summer and fall CIO unions established ten to twenty new southern locals a week, doing best with African Americans and women. The AFL launched a rival drive and relentlessly red-baited the CIO; so did employers, politicians, and the Klan. In fact, Operation Dixie excluded communists from staff, and—hoping to woo textile workers—fielded mostly white organizers (and no women). The textile drive foundered; CIO staff blamed the communists.

  No labor leader liked Taft-Hartley. The UAW shut down auto plants for five hours to support 200,000 people rallying against the “Slave Labor Act” in Detroit. Lewis proposed to the 1947 AFL convention that unions nullify the law by refusing to sign noncommunist affidavits, but only the International Typographical Union (whose members’ wartime wages had been frozen) backed the suggestion. Shortly afterwards he led the UMW out of the Federation.

  Murray saw Taft-Hartley as a call for more effective political action. In 1948, both Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey ran on Cold War platforms. AFL and most CIO leaders supported Truman. Communist-led unions backed Henry Wallace, running on a Progressive Party platform opposing the Cold War. Truman won by a very small margin. His labor backers were disappointed to find Taft-Hartley would not be repealed, but they staunchly supported his foreign policy. In 1949, the CIO followed Belgian union leaders (paid by Lovestone) out of the WFTU when it opposed the Marshall Plan. The CIO joined the AFL in founding the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Lovestone and associates spent Marshall Plan money to get German union leaders to drop an initiative for labor unity across occupation zones and to break a citywide strike in divided Berlin.

  Murray fired left-wing CIO staffers. CIO leaders like Mike Quill of the Transit Workers and Joe Curran of the National Maritime Union denounced their former allies. Industrial councils cut off left-led locals. In January 1949, United Furniture Workers Local 282 went on strike at the Memphis (Tennessee) Furniture Company. Police escorted scabs and visited local members at home late at night to ask questions, but the strikers—mostly black women—had strong backing from the community. The Memphis Industrial Council withdrew support, and the strike failed. (Memphis Furniture stayed nonunion until 1978.) />
  Taft-Hartley had changed the rules. Unions that refused to file affidavits were barred from NLRB ballots. UE refused, and the UAW won NLRB elections in UE shops in Hartford, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York. By 1949, the CIO’s Communications Workers and Steelworkers, and the AFL’s Machinists and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers were raiding UE locals. The UE convention that September voted to file the affidavits, but the raids continued. When UE withheld CIO dues in protest, the Congress expelled it and chartered the rival International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (IUE). Murray met with Westinghouse and General Electric executives to plan IUE takeovers of UE locals. Over 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled ten more unions: FTA; United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA);Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; Farm Equipment Workers; Fur and Leather Workers; International Longshoremen and Warehousemen (ILWU); United Public Workers (UPW); American Communications Association; National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards; and International Fishermen and Allied Workers.

  These were among the CIO unions most committed to racial and gender equity. FTA organized Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and African Americans, especially women. Marine Cooks and Stewards were exceptionally racially diverse and packed with gay men as well. Mine Mill was mostly African American in the Southeast and Mexican American in the Southwest. ILWU organized Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, and native Hawaiian field workers. UOPWA and UPW members were mostly white women, but UOPWA also organized Prudential Life Insurance salesmen, and UPW-organized black workers in federal cafeterias in Washington, and Afro-Antillean laborers in the Panama Canal Zone. Leftled unions helped the Party-supported National Negro Labor Council turn out 1,500 pickets to protest racist hiring policies at American Airlines in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 1952, and the Farm Equipment Workers local at International Harvester supported a 1953 campaign to get black workers hired at the new General Electric plant in Louisville, Kentucky.

  These unions actively built themselves on community support. In 1951, Empire Zinc got an injunction against an eight-month-old Mine Mill strike in Bayard, New Mexico. As miner’s wife Elvira Moreno wrote the local newspaper, “The order restrains our husbands . . . but it does not restrain us. . . . Women from all over the county have joined our ranks and the picket line is solid.” The line stayed solid against assaults and arrests for seven months and won the miners modest gains. The left-led unions also practiced militant solidarity. When Westinghouse fired two Socialist Workers Party members as security risks from its South Philadelphia plant, UE Local 107 stopped work until the company took them back. But as the local reported, “We haven’t been hearing much about this kind of thing lately, especially in the trade union movement.”

  Between 1951 and 1953, AFL and CIO unions conducted more than 1,200 raids on “red” locals, not always with the desired result. CIO leaders red- and race-baited FTA’s largest local, Local 22 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so badly its members decertified it, but never joined another union. In the end only UE and ILWU survived as national unions, the ILWU limited to the West Coast and Hawaii. Expulsions and AFL raids took a big toll on CIO membership. After claiming 6.3 million members in 1946, by 1954 the CIO could count only 4.6 million. Over the same period, the AFL grew to 10.2 million.

  In the new Cold War political climate, labor, management, and government gradually hammered out a new accord. UAW negotiations with General Motors set the pace. In the 1948 contract, the company gave a “cost-of-living adjustment” (COLA) and an automatic 2 percent annual raise for productivity improvements. The 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” included a COLA and pensions along with wage increases, and ran for an unprecedented five years. When Reuther demanded a re-opener in 1953, G.M. folded part of the COLAs into basic wage rates. During the 1950s, more than half of all major union contracts included some provision for COLAs. Where industries were mostly unionized, national or regional pattern contracts were the rule, and even nonunion companies like DuPont and Internal Business Machines adopted COLAs, benefits, and formal grievance procedures.

  Union workers’ pay outpaced inflation, but their unions paid a price in democracy and activism. Employers insisted on elaborate grievance procedures, which had to be exhausted before the union authorized a strike. Wildcats continued—the steel industry reported close to 800 during 1956–58—but were usually short and strictly local. Unions deferred to management on issues like work rules, output quotas, investment (and reinvestment) policies. They could only watch when companies like Alexander Smith Carpet left Yonkers, New York, for “right-to-work” Georgia. In 1949, Ford began moving production from its River Rouge plant—from a 1941 peak of 83,000, employment fell to 65,000 by 1950, and went under 30,000 during the 1960s. As a G.M. official put it, “give the union the money. . . . But don’t let them take the business away from us.” Reuther concurred: “We make collective bargaining agreements, not revolutions.” Dissent from this perspective in the UAW and other industrial unions like the Rubber Workers and Steel Workers was ruthlessly suppressed.

  The CIO joined the AFL in endorsing the Korean War. CIO leaders hoped to revive the wartime partnership with government and business, but the Truman administration never adopted more than partial measures to direct and control the economy. Murray negotiated a new steel settlement only after a protracted and unpopular strike.

  Organized labor’s cooperation with government was closer abroad. In 1954, a wave of strikes hit United Fruit plantations in Honduras. As the army arrested strike leaders, operatives rushed in from the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT), started in 1951 by the ICFTU, and funded by the U.S. government. They called off the strikes and set up a company union. In Puerto Rico, labor activists established a new federation in 1947—the Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT). When CGT unions refused to comply with Taft-Hartley, AFL and CIO affiliates sent in organizers. Labor activist Juan Saez Corales—who was arrested in 1954 on Smith Act charges—wrote in 1955: “The CIO and AF of L have been imported into Puerto Rico to colonize the labor movement. Those organizations serve the purpose of the Puerto Rican government and American employers who come to Puerto Rico to pile up more wealth.” Both AFL and CIO affiliates supported Puerto Rico’s exemption from the federal minimum wage, the key component (along with ten-year tax holidays) of “Operation Bootstrap,” the economic development program of the Partido Popular Democrático, which governed the island from 1941 to 1968.

  By 1955, the two federations differed mainly in the degree to which the AFL tolerated what Mike Quill called the “3 Rs”: “racism, racketeering, and raiding.”

  “BIG LABOR”

  AFL and CIO leaders might agree in principle, but Green and Murray did not trust one another, and several attempts at merger had failed. Raiding between the federations was constant: one report counted 1,245 raiding attempts affecting 350,000 union members. (Raiding was also a problem inside the AFL, especially between Carpenters and Machinists.)

  Both Green and Murray died unexpectedly in November 1952. Reuther took over the CIO after a fight. The AFL promoted George Meany, a onetime plumber’s apprentice turned business agent, who had climbed through the organization to become AFL Secretary-Treasurer in 1939, and who boasted he had never gone on strike or walked on a picket line. In June 1953, Meany and Reuther called for a moratorium on raiding and formed a Joint Unity Committee. The Committee announced an agreement in February 1955: affiliates would keep their jurisdictions and stop raiding one another; the new federation would adopt CIO policies on racial discrimination and labor racketeering, and the AFL position on “free” unions. Meany and AFL Secretary-Treasurer William Schnitzler from the Bakery and Confectionery Workers would keep their positions; Reuther would head a new Industrial Department including all CIO unions and thirty-five AFL unions, almost half of the new federations’ membership. Meeting separately in New York City in early December, each federation ratified the merger, the AFL without dissent, the CIO with just
three nays. They reconvened December 5 as the “American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations,” with 145 affiliated unions representing almost 16 million members—more than a third of the U.S. labor force outside agriculture. The merger statement heralded “unity of the labor movement at a time when the unity of all American people is most urgently needed in the face of the Communist threat to world peace and civilization.”

  Meany called for organizing the unorganized, repealing antilabor legislation, and expanding government aid to education, housing, medical care, and social security. As for labor’s role in society, he professed, “I believe in the free enterprise system completely. I believe in the return on capital investment. I believe in management’s right to manage.” The ILGWU’s David Dubinsky said it better: “Trade unionism needs capitalism like a fish needs water.” Reuther predicted union membership would double or triple.

  The AFL-CIO Executive Council set up a new political operation, the Committee on Political Education (COPE), and developed a five-point labor platform: improve national defense, increase wages to strengthen the economy, guarantee civil rights, overhaul Taft-Hartley, and regulate pension and welfare plans. The 1956 Democratic platform covered most of these demands, and the Council endorsed Democrat Adlai Stevenson almost unanimously. COPE worked on getting union members to register and vote. Eisenhower won reelection, but Democrats captured both houses of Congress, with 175 successful labor-backed candidates.

  The AFL-CIO’s 1956 membership of sixteen and a half million was its high point as a proportion of the labor force—nearly 24 percent. Membership stagnated for more than a decade, while the percent of workers in affiliated or independent unions slowly but steadily declined. By 1960, AFL-CIO unions represented less than 21 percent of the labor force, nineteen states had declared closed union shops illegal (violating the “right-to-work”), and Reuther admitted, “We are going backward.” Resistance by employers and state and local governments certainly hurt;so did union leaders’ lack of enthusiasm for organizing low-paid workers in highly competitive industries. Meanwhile, the industrial work force itself was shrinking as mechanization and automation eliminated manufacturing, transportation, and mining jobs.