From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  CIO rank and file united across racial and ethnic lines. When 200 black women from the Tobacco Stemmers’ and Laborers’ Industrial Union struck the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company in Richmond, Virginia, the same number of white women from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers joined the picket line. The Maritime Workers Industrial Union (predecessor to the National Maritime Union) signed up three thousand Chinese sailors after agreeing to support their demands for equal pay and the right to go ashore in U.S. ports. When Chinese American members of the Ladies’ Garment Workers struck a San Francisco factory owned by National Dollar Stores, white salesclerks honored picket lines in front of the stores. Mexican and Russian-Jewish women at the California Sanitary Canning Company in Los Angeles joined to win a UCAPAWA strike. Filipino and Japanese workers together built strong UCAPAWA locals on Hawaiian sugar plantations. In Chicago, black, white, and Mexican workers joined SWOC and the Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee. Journalist Ruth McKenney described white rubber workers: “Men from the southern mountains, once fair bait for the savage program of the Ku Klux Klan, applauded the speeches of Jewish garment workers, cheered the advance of Irish Catholic transport workers, sat side by side in union meetings with Negro workers.”

  This culture of solidarity owed a great deal to left-wing radicals, especially Communists. Though John L. Lewis had ruthlessly attacked “Reds” in the past, he hired many as CIO organizers, recognizing their militancy, discipline, and success at building interracial cooperation in the TUUL. When colleagues objected, Lewis responded, “Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?” Communists and their allies were elected to lead many locals and some national unions, and solidarity made the greatest advances in these settings.

  Corporations had their own brand of solidarity. The “Little Steel” companies—Republic, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland, and Bethlehem—planned in concert to block the union, and handed the CIO its first major defeat. Once U.S. Steel had recognized the union, SWOC turned to the industry’s second tier, and called a strike against Little Steel in May 1937. Republic Steel’s chief executive officer Tom Girdler organized the joint resistance along the lines of 1919. Strikers were gassed, clubbed, and shot; thousands of workers were jailed following confrontations with police or National Guardsmen. In South Chicago on Memorial Day (May 30), police attacked a gathering of Republic strikers and their families, beating and shooting more than fifty men, women, and children—ten men died, one clubbed to death. Eight more workers were killed before the strike ended in defeat.

  Little Steel strike violence was neither spontaneous nor accidental. The companies spent nearly $500,000 on weapons for strike use. Youngstown Sheet and Tube bought 8 machine guns, 369 rifles, 190 shotguns, 450 revolvers, 109 gas launchers—plus 10,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 tear gas canisters. Republic Steel bought more military supplies than any state or local police department in the country. So found the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, chaired by Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette Jr. (son of the 1924 Progressive presidential candidate), which began hearings in 1936. The La Follette Committee investigated corporate efforts to sabotage union organizing, and documented the “Mohawk Valley Formula,” a strike strategy promoted by the National Association of Manufacturers that combined violence with elaborate propaganda campaigns.

  A faltering economy compounded the CIO’s trials. In 1937, following a year of recovery, Roosevelt cut government spending to balance the federal budget, with disastrous results. Recovery halted in mid-1937; by 1938 the depression was back in full force. Mexican American pecan shellers in San Antonio won a bitter strike (over a thousand strikers jailed) in early 1938, only to find themselves replaced by machines a few months later—several thousand shellers lost their jobs. Heavy industry was hit especially hard. The UAW lost three-quarters of its members. SWOC and the Rubber Workers were badly weakened. Though many CIO unions held steady, and some even grew, at the end of 1939 the CIO claimed 200,000 fewer members than two years earlier.

  AFL competition also helped shrink the CIO. The Federation suspended CIO unions in 1936, and expelled them in 1937. In May 1938, the Committee for Industrial Organization became the Congress of Industrial Organizations, an independent and momentarily larger rival federation.* The AFL started organizing. Conservative union leaders hired radicals to get things rolling. Teamster president Tobin hired communists from Minneapolis, who organized 200,000 long-haul truckers in eleven states. Craft unions developed industrial divisions. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (an electricians’ union) started organizing production workers in electrical equipment factories. Cautious unions grew bold. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) used a sit-down strike to win recognition and a contract with increased wages and paid vacations for lunch-counter waitresses and salesclerks at Woolworth “five and dime” stores in Detroit—the workers even got half-pay for the time they had been on strike. Some unions organizing among multiracial workforces dropped color bars. The AFL gave a charter to Field Workers Union Local 30326 in California, which had Filipino and Mexican American members. The AFL Alaska Packers Union’s first, second and third vice-presidents were Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican American in 1937.

  CIO and AFL unions could cooperate at the local level. Detroit HERE formed an alliance with the UAW. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, CIO locals belonged to the AFL Trades and Labor Council. But mostly the two federations fought over members and contracts in a host of industries and trades—woodworking, lumber and paper mills, packinghouses, machine tools, hauling and warehousing, public employment. The AFL promoted itself as the conservative alternative to the CIO. Machinists’ president A. O. Wharton described the CIO in a letter to locals as a “gang of sluggers, communists, radicals and soapbox artists, professional bums, expelled members of labor unions, outright scabs and the Jewish organizations with all their red affiliates.” As CIO ranks dwindled, the AFL’s grew, from 3.4 million in late 1937 to over 4 million in late 1939, surpassing the CIO by more than half a million by the end of 1940.

  Beset on all sides, the CIO abandoned militant tactics like the sit-down strike after 1937. More and more it relied on NLRB procedures and rulings to win contracts. In response, the AFL joined employers pressing Congress to restrain the Board’s powers.

  WHOSE AMERICA?

  The government proved an unreliable ally. Businessmen and other conservatives called the economic downturn the “Roosevelt depression,” arguing that the second New Deal undermined business confidence by legislating restraints on profitability. Roosevelt himself blamed the downturn on a “strike of capital,” and John L. Lewis agreed. Both charged that businessmen had cut back investment to induce a depression they hoped would undo the Wagner Act and the rest of the New Deal.

  The renewed depression put Roosevelt and his political allies on the defensive. Only one major reform made it through Congress after the economy slumped, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of June 1938. The Act put a floor on wages and a ceiling on hours—25 cents an hour and 44 hours per week, with time and a half for overtime—and provided for improvement to 40 cents an hour and 40 hours a week two years later.* It also outlawed the employment of children under sixteen in most occupations, under eighteen in hazardous occupations. As enacted, the FLSA was weaker than the President had proposed. Congressional amendments limited its coverage to workers engaged in interstate distribution or production, and exempted many groups, including farm workers and agricultural processers, fishermen, domestic workers, and professionals.

  In the 1938 Democratic primaries, Roosevelt campaigned for New Dealers against conservative opponents (mostly southern incumbents), with little success. In the general election, Democrats retained the majority in both the House and Senate, but New Dealers did not. Southern “Dixiecrats” joined Republicans to bring the New Deal to an end.

  Ultraright sentiment surged among businessmen in 1938–40, especially sympathy for the fascist experiments in Germany and Italy. Henry Ford and International Bu
siness Machines president Thomas J. Watson accepted Nazi medals. A former president of the National Association of Manufacturers declared, “American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised Fascist dictatorship.” In 1940, midwestern businessmen from Sears Roebuck, Quaker Oats, Hormel, and other companies helped form the American First Committee to oppose intervention against Hitler.

  The CIO drew fire from every part of the conservative spectrum. A Ku Klux Klan newspaper warned “CIO WANTS WHITES AND BLACKS ON SAME LEVEL.” The National Association of Manufacturers distributed two million copies of the pamphlet “Join the CIO and Help Build A Soviet America.” Father Charles Coughlin (the “Radio Priest”) blended praise for the AFL with attacks on the CIO, communists, and the “international Jewish conspiracy” in weekly broadcasts carried nationwide. The Labor Advocate, newspaper of the AFL’s central labor council in Birmingham, Alabama, attacked “America’s Public Enemy No. 1 . . . The CIO under its Communist leaders.”

  In May 1938, the U.S. House of Representatives established the Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies, who called a steady parade of conservative expert witnesses.* In August 1938, the AFL’s John Frey named 284 CIO organizers as Communists waiting for “the signal for revolution.” The next Sunday’s New York Times read, “COMMUNISTS RULE THE C.I.O.” Then National Republic editor Walter Steele detailed Communist outreach from the CIO to 640 organizations, from church councils and civil rights groups to the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. In May 1939, the Committee heard from Dudley Pierrepont Gilbert, socialite spokesman for American Nationalists Incorporated, about the 150,000 foreigners mustering in Mexico to sneak across the border and seize Army arsenals, while the CIO launched a strike wave and Jewish financiers crashed the stock market. “PLOT TO SEIZE NATION BARED BY DIES,” reported the Baltimore Sun. The Committee found that WPA writers and theater projects harbored anti-American agitators—prounion, antifascist, and critical of racial discrimination; the Federal Theatre Project closed in 1939. The Committee also investigated charges that communists controlled the La Follette Committee, which the Senate shut down in 1940.

  Immigrants were especially suspect. In 1939, the House of Representatives passed the Alien Registration Act, commonly called the Smith Act. It required that all aliens (noncitizen immigrants) be fingerprinted, register with the U.S. Justice Department, and keep the government informed of their whereabouts. The Act also made it a federal crime to advocate, advise, or teach the necessity or desirability of overthrowing local, state, or national governments by force, or to belong to an organization holding such a doctrine. In effect, it was a federal antisyndicalist law. The Senate approved the Smith Act in 1940, and Roosevelt signed it into law.

  If it was a crime to have revolutionary goals, many members of the CIO and its allies were guilty. They aimed to reconstruct American life from bottom to top. Len De Caux observed, “Now we’re a movement, many workers asked, why can’t we move on to more and more? . . . Why can’t we go on to create a new society with the workers on top, to end age-old injustices, to banish poverty and war?”

  Radical ambitions went hand in hand with a militant patriotism. Strikers celebrated victories by singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Portraits of Abraham Lincoln adorned the pages of union newspapers and union office walls. Labor activists were routinely compared to the patriots of 1776 and abolitionists like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. The Communist Party called on all opponents of fascism and war to defend the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the American people” and the “sacred guarantees of our Bill of Rights.”

  CIO-style patriotism included an active recognition of injustice and a strong sense of obligation to correct it. In his memoir America Is in the Heart, Filipino immigrant and activist Carlos Bulosan declared: “We must interpret history in terms of liberty. We must advocate democratic ideas and fight all forces that would abort our culture. . . . We . . . understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find happiness.”

  Unity required respect for the diversity among working people, a sentiment perhaps best articulated in “Ballad for Americans,” written by radical composer Earl Robinson and poet John LaTouche for the Federal Theatre Project’s 1939 musical production Sing for Your Supper, and turned into a hit recording by world-famous singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson. In this cantata, the chorus sings about American history as the soloist comments and—in response to questions from the chorus—slowly reveals his identity:

  I represent the WHOLE . . . I’m the everybody who’s nobody . . . I’m an engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher . . . I am the et ceteras. And the so forths that do the work . . . I’m just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk, and Czech and double Czech American. And that ain’t all. I was baptized Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker, Christian Scientist—and lots more! . . . You know who I am . . . AMERICA!

  For most CIO activists, this was patriotism—fighting for equal rights for every racial and ethnic group, respect for their distinct cultures and contributions, and unity on democratic grounds. Working people had a special claim because their labor built the nation. As Bulosan put it, “America is not a land of one race or one class of men . . . We are all Americans who have toiled and suffered . . . All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America!”

  Commitment to democracy also fostered international solidarity. The National Maritime Union honored picket lines in foreign ports, during a 1938 strike by Puerto Rican dockworkers, for example. East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party defended Puerto Rican nationalists prosecuted by the colonial government. New York City’s Transport Workers Union had ties to the Irish Republican Army. CIO Communists promoted American-Soviet friendship.

  The gravest international issue was the spread of fascism. Under the increasing influence of militarists, the imperial Japanese government imposed direct military rule on its Korean colony in 1931; the Japanese Army occupied Manchuria the same year, and embarked on the conquest of China in 1937. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Albania in 1939. Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, annexed Austria in 1938, Czechoslovakia the next spring, then invaded Poland in September 1939, provoking war with Britain and France. By the end of 1940, German troops occupied most of western Europe, and Italy and Japan had joined Germany in an alliance of mutual defense against any attack. The CIO opposed fascism and aggression. Its unions joined churches, women’s associations, and civil rights groups in the American League Against War and Fascism, which lobbied against trade with fascist nations. The CIO worked with Chinese American groups and the National Negro Congress to boycott Japanese goods. Communists spear-headed a “Hands Off Ethiopia” campaign.

  Spain got the most attention. In 1936, the fascist General Francisco Franco rebelled against the Republican government, with German and Italian aid. Labor activists were among 2,800 Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism, most as members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy supplied the republicans with hundreds of tons of food, clothes, and medical supplies. (General Motors and Texaco sent trucks and fuel to the fascists.) The CIO denounced the U.S. embargo on arms shipments to Spain, and opposed Roosevelt’s recognition of the Franco regime in 1939.

  The CIO also opposed domestic fascism. Its 1938 convention condemned the poll taxes used to deny African-American voting rights. CIO officers and member unions joined with the American Committee to Protect the Foreign Born to urge repeal of the Smith Act. As honorary member Paul Robeson declared at the 1941
National Maritime Union convention, “. . . we stand for mankind wherever it may suffer and wherever it may be oppressed . . . As long as we are struggling for a better life, we have one cause.”

  By 1940, the depression was ending, the recovery based on government spending on military procurement. Roosevelt promised to keep the U.S. out of the war, but his administration supported both an expansion of the U.S. arsenal and equipping Britain. Congress appropriated $16 billion for airplanes, warships, and other munitions. The CIO picked up momentum, growing to 4 million by the end of the year.

  Roosevelt was elected to a third term in 1940, but by a narrower margin, beating Republican Wendell Wilkie by 5 million votes. John L. Lewis broke with other CIO leaders to oppose Roosevelt’s nomination and endorse Wilkie in the election. If the President was reelected, he declared, he would know the CIO’s rank and file backed Roosevelt, take it as a vote of no confidence in his own leadership, and resign. He kept his word; SWOC’s Philip Murray took his place. The New Deal finished, Lewis gone, the nation beginning to prosper but moving toward a new world war: the labor movement headed into a new and uncertain era.