The music came first. The great thing was to see a big band in person, but you could often hear good live music on college campuses—from the University of North Carolina’s student band, led by Hal Kemp, or from Les Brown’s Blue Devils of Duke. In obscure halls and bars were unknown entertainers whose time would one day come: Alvino Rey, who played (an omen) an electric guitar, the first amplified instrument most Americans had ever heard, or young Frankie Sinatra. Between 1933 and 1937 Sinatra was one of the worst-paid entertainers in the country. He entered amateur contests, filled in on local radio stations, and sang at lodge meetings for carfare, seventy cents. The great Sinatra constituency was still too young to support him in the manner to which he would become accustomed, still distracted by Big Little Books, Shirley Temple hairdos, G-Man underwear, Yale-bred Flash Gordon, bike foxtails, and scooters fashioned from orange crates and roller skates.
Meanwhile their older brothers and sisters were evolving the first youthful life style since the jazzy Twenties. It had its own language (such as “keen,” “gas,” “copacetic”), its arcane humor (“Confucius say,” “Knock, knock”), its virility symbols (jalopies), and its special uniforms. Both sexes wore rubber-soled brown-and-white saddle shoes, beer jackets autographed by their friends, and reversible raincoats, preferably dirty. Girls’ daytime wear also prescribed twin-sweater sets (cashmere or angora cardigans for the affluent), mid-calf plaid dirndl skirts, ankle socks (later to be known as bobby sox), and babushkas. Sport coats and slacks were essential for boys; saddle shoes could be replaced by heavy brogues shod with V cleats of steel, so that the wearer could click as he walked; and it was rather a good thing to have an argyle sweater knitted by a heavy steady. At formal dances—one a year in high school, at least four a year in colleges—all this changed. Under a gym ceiling transformed by crepe paper, girls glided across the waxed floor in long swirling tulle gowns, an orchid or gardenia corsage pinned on the left shoulder strap, with boys wearing rented tuxedos or dark suits and white bucks.
If the dancers limited themselves to fox-trot shuffles or the sedate Carioca, it could all be incredibly dull, but if the band was swinging the steps became much more athletic. By the mid-Thirties the jitterbug was known all over the country. The legitimate descendant of the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and a dance called the Texas Tommy—which went all the way back to the Darktown Follies of 1913—jitterbugging became as diversified as events in a track meet, which it sometimes resembled. There was the Charleston Swing, Truckin’, Peckin’, the Shag, the Suzy-Q, the Circle Swing, the Praise Allah, and Kickin’ the Mule, in which boys and girls leapfrogged one another. Because of its suggestiveness, and because spirited girls sometimes revealed their pants, jitterbugging was unpopular among chaperones; as late as 1942 it was banned at all Duke dances.
The continuing repression of sex may be seen as a reflection of apprehension that all customs might vanish in what was, by any standard, a turbulent decade. Pregnancy was treated as a disgrace, often even among married women; maternity clothes were advertised as designed to “keep your secret.” Everything about sex was secretive. The closest thing to a girlie magazine was The Stocking Parade, which published photographs of fully clothed young women whose skirts were hoisted five or six inches above the knee. Pornographers were midgets in those days. A puritanical society held them in check for the same reason that it recoiled from the jitterbugging coeds—or, to turn to another face of the prism, with the same motivation as the radio station manager who cut Tommy Dorsey off the air for swinging “Loch Lomond.” The manager felt that too many traditions were being challenged as it was. Conventions honored for generations were vanishing. Most conspicuously, the nation’s workmen, too weak to protest in Hoover’s last months, were now on the march. The thunder of their boots frightened white-collar, middle-class America, but Labor’s time had come. The unions were organizing, there was fighting on the barricades, blood was being spilled on the streets outside the mines and mills, and the worst was yet to come.
***
In many ways John Llewellyn Lewis was a preposterous figure. A barrel-chested, beetle-browed, six-foot three-inch goliath of a man, he relaxed by reading Shakespeare, the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Oswald Spengler, and the Panchatantra, an Oriental book of fables. The son of a blacklisted Welsh miner, he had become president of the United Mine Workers at the age of forty, but under his leadership the UMW had dwindled to half its pre-Lewis size; in 1930 a miners’ group said of him, “He killed more than the leaders of our union. He killed its very soul.” During the 1930s he was to become loved and despised as the symbol of militant unionism. Yet he had entered the decade as a Hoover Republican, an apostle of free enterprise, and the sworn enemy of progressive union policies.
In private John L. Lewis was a brilliant and engaging conversationalist, the grand strategist and champion of oppressed working men. To the public he seemed to be a peculiar combination of evangelist, thespian, and hamfatter. He said incredible things. Of his own propensity for self-aggrandizement he observed, “He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.” At the opening of a labor convention he said, “Heed this cry from Macedonia that comes from the hearts of men! Methinks that upon this decision of this convention may rest the future of the American Federation of Labor.” Of his opponent William Green, president of the AFL, he cried, “Alas, poor Green! I knew him well. He wishes to join in fluttering procrastination, the while intoning, ‘O tempora, O mores!’” And after he had split organized labor in half he crowed, “They smote me hip and thigh, and right merrily did I return their blows.”
Few laughed; liberals saw him as a man of vision, while to his critics he was evil incarnate. In certain circles he had a capacity for arousing hatred matched only by President Roosevelt. Once former Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, appearing at a hearing as a coal owners’ attorney, boasted that while a young man he had belonged to the UMW. Lewis gathered his million muscles, rose, and said sonorously, “It is a matter of pride to a member of the United Mine Workers to see a man of that organization go out into the highways and byways of national politics and make a name for himself that is recognized throughout the country.” He paused heavily. “But it is a matter of sorrow and regret to see a man betray the union of his youth”—he paused again—“for thirty lousy pieces of silver.” Hurley flew at him and had to be restrained. Lewis said carelessly, “Strike out ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ Let it stand ‘betray the union of his youth.’”
That was pure ham. It was also courageous. When the President’s Commission on Violence reported in 1969 that the United States “has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world,” it alluded specifically to the 1930s. Organizers of industrial unions were being murdered. Governors were calling out the National Guard to suppress unruly workers. In Georgia, Eugene Talmadge built a concentration camp for pickets. Mine owners in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a typical coal town, invested $17,000 in munitions during one year, bombed miners’ homes, and burned crosses on hillsides. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the mayor of a company town told reporters that “A world without policemen”—he made it clear that he meant company policemen—“would be like a world without music.” His district attorney added, “Give me two hundred good, tough armed men and I’ll clean up them sons-of-bitches on the picket line.” When unrest spread among women in the textile sweatshops, the trade journal Fibre and Fabric declared editorially, “A few hundred funerals will have a quieting influence.”
The wonder is that the unions survived the onslaughts against them. When Roosevelt entered the White House they had been very weak. Lewis’s UMW membership had fallen to less than 100,000 members. The American Federation of Labor as a whole had dropped to 6 percent of the work force; it was losing seven thousand dues-paying members each week, and was so servile to management that in 1932 it had opposed unemployment insurance. Aggressive industrialists were convinced that in confronting organizers they were battling the d
evil himself. They didn’t mean to lose. As the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee was to discover in December 1934, over 2,500 American employers employed strikebreaking companies, the largest of which were Pearl Bergoff Services and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Bergoff was a multimillion-dollar heavy; the Pinkertons, favored by Detroit’s automobile industry, earned nearly two million dollars between 1933 and 1936. Each of them maintained a small standing army which was ready to move into struck jobs carrying machine pistols, gas guns, and clubs. Both also infiltrated workmen’s ranks as undercover agents. When a senator asked Herman L. Weckler, vice president of the Chrysler Corporation, why he hired spies, he replied, “We must do it to obtain the information we need in dealing with our employees.” Thousands of men were literally working at gunpoint; the Pittsburgh Coal Company, for example, kept machine guns trained on employees in its coal pits. A congressional committee asked why. Chairman Richard B. Mellon answered, “You cannot run the mines without them.”
Under these circumstances, the eagerness of workers to organize was really a measure of their desperation. The frightened miners, the sweated garment workers in Manhattan, the dime-an-hour laborers at Briggs Manufacturing in Detroit, and the nickel-an-hour clerks in Detroit knew that nothing else worked. State laws had been tried. In Pennsylvania employers systematically checked off 33 cents a week from the pay of each child to indemnify themselves for $100 fines imposed upon them for working the children ninety hours a week. The average steelworker’s clothes caught fire at least once each week. Rather than invest in safety devices, the Pittsburgh mills lost over 20,000 workers a year maimed by industrial accidents. Girls working in five-and-ten-cent stores at five-and-ten wages read of the various aristocratic marriages contracted in Europe by Babs Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, and sang bitterly:
Barbara Hutton has the dough, parlez-vous
Where she gets it sure we know, parlez-vous
We slave at Woolworth’s five and dime
The pay we get is sure a crime
Hinkey-dinkey parlez-vous.
Potbellied Bill Green—“Sitting Bill,” Lewis called him—had been indirectly responsible for the National Recovery Act’s section 7(a). He had been among those nervous labor men who had complained to Hugh Johnson that NRA’s industrywide agreements might be used to throttle unions, so the impulsive cavalryman had scribbled in the collective bargaining guarantee. But Green didn’t see the possibilities in the clause. It was, in fact, quite vague; employers were not obliged to recognize unions, they could deal with company unions if they wished, and the method by which workers might choose their bargainers was not spelled out. Lewis, however, realized that details could wait. What was important was 7(a)’s propaganda value. It was a declaration of intention by the federal government. He compared it with Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves and sent his brawny lieutenants into the coal fields with sound trucks and leaflets: “The President wants you to unionize. It is unpatriotic to refuse to unionize. Here is your union. Never mind about the dues now. Just join up!”
The alacrity with which the miners responded startled even Lewis. The NRA, which was supposed to revive business, was stimulating industrial unions instead. Within three weeks after FDR’s signing of the act, 135,000 former UMW workers had taken up their cards again; by early 1934 Lewis had nearly 400,000 men on its books. Then Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky brought the sound trucks and leaflets into New York. In less than a year their International Ladies Garment Workers Union had tripled its membership, to 200,000; by the end of the decade it would stand at over 400,000.
Franklin Roosevelt missed few political cues, but he was slow picking up this one. Nothing in the President’s background had prepared him for a role as confederate of organized labor. He regarded himself as a succorer, a Good Samaritan to exploited workmen, which was not the same thing as a trade union ally. While he wanted higher wages, shorter hours, and better safety precautions, he was not at all sure that Lewis’s way was the best, or even the right, way to do it. If labor became a powerful new economic force, the President might be unable to stand aloof, as he wished, from industrial conflict. Therefore in these first years he hesitated. “Labor’s public enemy number one is Franklin D. Roosevelt!” Heywood Broun cried at a mass meeting. That was absurd. Nevertheless, the President did believe that Frances Perkins and Francis Biddle were too prolabor, and the only labor advocate on the Hill whom FDR admired was Senator Robert Wagner of New York. Wagner, pressing for fresh labor legislation, was slowly bringing the President around. Unfortunately the situation was too volatile. There was no time for persuasion.
As Lewis signed up more and more workmen—watched uneasily by Green, who kept warning, “Now John, take it easy”—the inevitability of crippling strikes drew nearer. Industry was preparing to man the barricades, and sometimes even preparing the barricades. The domestic market for munitions had never been so great. During eight weeks in the summer of 1933, policemen in the tiny Kentucky town of Lynch bought 41 rifles, 21 revolvers, 500 cartridges, and a supply of tear gas canisters. When federal marshals pointed out that instigators of violence might face federal charges, the company towns hotly replied that they were private property; Washington had no power over them. In Muncie, Indiana, the research team of Robert and Helen Lynd found that General Motors was subsidizing an expanded police force to jail suspected organizers. The A & P shut down its Cleveland stores for several days and docked its bewildered employees for the lost time—just to show them what they might expect if they joined a union. When Lewis opened the labor wars of the Thirties by taking out 70,000 Pennsylvania miners in 1934, and the strike spread across the Allegheny valley, the mayor of Duquesne talked as though the strikers were Indians he intended to head off at the pass: “We’re going to meet ’em at the bridge and break their goddam heads.”
In all, there were 1,856 strikes in 1934, most of them for union recognition. It was a time of martyrdom; terrorism colored that year of labor history like one vast bloodstain. Outside the Frick mines hired guns shot union miners emerging from the shafts. In the company town of Kohler, Wisconsin, strikebreakers opened fire on an AFL picket line, killing two men and wounding thirty-five. At Toledo’s Electric Auto-Lite Company, where the newly organized United Auto Workers were trying to bargain with an intransigent management, National Guardsmen shot twenty-seven workmen. Striking longshoremen were murdered in San Francisco, striking teamsters in Minneapolis, and striking textile workers—fifteen of them—in New England and the South. In Minneapolis two special deputies were also killed, one a businessman. Eric Sevareid covered that strike for the Minneapolis Star. He watched, horrified, as vengeful policemen delivered a fusillade of shotgun fire into an unarmed, unwarned crowd, shooting sixty-seven people, two of them fatally. “Suddenly I knew,” he wrote afterward; “I understood deep in my bones and blood what Fascism was.” John L. Lewis said, “Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep their fallen and lament for the future of the race.”
Labor’s sorrows were deeper, and the laments greater, because so many seemed to have died in vain. Local unions won recognition in Toledo, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, but in the big industries—steel, textiles, automobiles, rubber—anti-union employers were triumphant. When Congress established a National Labor Relations Board, the National Association of Manufacturers pressed its members to ignore it, and in a test case one firm did; what happened was that the company’s right to fly the blue eagle was withdrawn. The administration was still vacillating. Late in February 1935 a federal district court found NRA section 7(a) unconstitutional. Immediately Senator Wagner and Congressman William P. Connery Jr. of Massachusetts introduced legislation creating a National Labor Relations Board, establishing the right of workers to bargain collectively with management through unions chosen in federally supervised elections, and defining unfair labor practices. Roosevelt signed it on July 5, won over by Wagner’s argument that the Depression could not end until workmen’s wages were high enough t
o make them consumers of the goods they produced. Businessmen were unswayed. The Liberty League circulated a statement signed by fifty-eight eminent members of the bar declaring that the Wagner Act was just as unconstitutional as 7(a). Clearly the labor movement still had far to go. Employer resistance remained high; thirty-two more strikers and strike sympathizers were killed in 1935, and National Guardsmen were called out in South Dakota, Illinois, Nebraska, Kentucky, Georgia, and Ohio. Progress was still measured in inches, with miles of assembly lines unorganized, underpaid, and sweated.
For all anyone could tell, Bill Green had never read the Wagner Act. But John L. Lewis had. He had studied it while it was in committee, and realized that under its canopy of government protection a new House of Labor could be built. The defects in the old house were obvious. The American Federation of Labor was a loose alliance of jealous little barons, mostly descended from early immigrants to America. Except for miners and textile workers, its members were divided into craft unions: boiler-makers, carpenters, machinists, upholsterers, punch machine operators, painters, etc. Ohio rubber workers, attempting to organize themselves, were visited by an AFL representative who quickly separated them out into nineteen locals because that many skills were required to make rubber. To Green the United Auto Workers was a temporary abomination; in time its members would be sundered into a hundred craft chapters.
It was at the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City that Lewis voiced his cry from Macedonia. It was a call for industrial unionism, in which mass production workers would be bound together by the nature of their products. Steelworkers would have one union, for example; the building trades another. It was, he argued, the only way big business could be successfully struck. The cry went unheeded. The convention voted him down. In the parliamentary maneuvering which followed, Big Bill Hutcheson, the rajah of the carpenters, called Lewis a “bastard.” It was a mistake; in full view of Green and the thousands of delegates, Lewis slugged his tormentor so hard that the carpenter, streaming blood, had to be carried off the stage. Lewis adjusted his clothes, lit a cigar and sauntered out of the hall and, as it developed, out of the AFL. He wrote a one-line resignation to Green and told the press, “The American Federation of Labor is standing still, with its face toward the dead past.” Then he announced the formation of a rival union complex, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), later reorganized as the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 20
