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Book
Review
The
Rise and Fall of a Radical Union
Rosemary
Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006).
When
the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) unleashed a great strike wave right after World War II, the United
Electrical Radio and Machine Workers (UE) was its third largest affiliate.
It had a half million members, contracts with corporate giants like General
Electric and Westinghouse, and considerable political influence within
the labor movement. Sixty years later, as battered as they are today,
the two largest surviving CIO unions – the United Auto Workers (UAW)
and United Steelworkers (USW) – still represent more than 500,000
workers each. In contrast, the UE is down to 17,000. Belonging to neither
the AFL-CIO nor its new rival, Change to Win, UE prefers to soldier on
as a feisty independent presence in a few states. Unfortunately, it has
little national impact or visibility.
Like manufacturing unions generally, the UE has fared badly in the era
of automation, globalization, and overseas out-sourcing of production.
Yet its decimation began long before capital flight weakened every industrial
union from the 1970s onward and free trade nearly finished them all off
in the last decade. Along with ten other unions representing more than
one million workers, the left-led UE was forced out of the CIO in 1949.
That purge – which pre-dated the full-blown McCarthyism of the 1950s
– became the opening shot in an internal war that left labor radicals
on the run and the UE a shadow of its former self.
The story of the UE’s rise in the 1930s, fall in the Fifties, and
struggle to survive ever since has long been a favorite of portside labor
history buffs. Two UE-friendly volumes – Labor’s Untold
Story by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais and Them and Us: Struggles
of a Rank-and-File Union, by UE national officer James Matles and
journalist James Higgins – were required reading among student radicals
who took a post-graduate plunge into blue-collar jobs and union politics
three decades ago. Both books were also promoted within the UE to educate
younger members about its distinctive heritage of struggle (and inoculate
them against charges of “communist-domination” that dogged
the union from its inception).
In Matles and Higgins’ account, the UE recognized – when few
others in the CIO did – that the emergence of a “cold war”
during the Truman Administration and the first calls for a domestic anti-communist
crusade were linked to big business plans for expansion abroad and weakening
of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) at home. Breaking ranks with
the CIO, UE leaders refused to endorse Truman’s re-election in 1948
and backed Henry Wallace’s ill-fated third-party candidacy instead.
They also tried to rally other union officials against signing affidavits
denying membership in the Communist Party, as required by the 1947 Taft-Hartley
Act, a crippling package of anti-union amendments to the NLRA.
The UE continued to resist the affidavit requirement and was punished
by losing access to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation
elections and enforcement proceedings. Meanwhile, the CIO caved in to
Taft-Hartley and then contributed to the growing anti-red hysteria. Both
its own affiliates and conservative craft unions from the American Federation
of Labor (AFL) exploited UE’s legal disability by raiding its membership.
Like vultures, the UAW, USW, Teamsters, Machinists, and International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers wrested many bargaining units away,
with the help of firms like GE who were only too happy to see their longtime
nemesis ousted. During these inter-union conflicts, UE officers, local
leaders, and active members were hauled before a variety of witch-hunting
committees. Many rank-and-file militants were fired and blacklisted, plus
burdensome criminal charges were lodged against UE officials. Due to the
combined efforts of hostile employers, media red-baiters, Congressional
investigators, the FBI, and the International Union of Electrical Workers
(IUE) – a right-wing replacement union chartered by the CIO –
UE membership plummeted to 90,000 by the mid-1950s.
Amazingly, the union survived – and even began to grow again, briefly,
in the 1960s – while clinging stubbornly to its independence. (All
the other CIO affiliates that were kicked out at that time ceased to exist,
were absorbed into larger unions by mergers, or, in the case of the west
coast Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU), eventually rejoined the “house
of labor” via affiliation with the AFL-CIO.) The UE continued to
exhibit an unusual degree of internal democracy, emphasizing membership
control over union finances and bargaining strategy. Until recently (when
the financial strain of annual conventions became too great), elections
for UE national officers were held every year – a rarity in the
labor movement. To this day, no union official or staff member is paid
more than the highest-paid workers in UE shops (to insure, as Matles and
Higgins explained, that full-time reps “feel like UE members”
and not simply “feel for them.”)
Thus, for many in the old left and (now aging) “new left,”
the much-admired UE has always been a case study in “what might
have been” – if America’s management-backed Red Scare
hadn’t been so successful in marginalizing militant, rank-and-file
oriented, politically-progressive unionism. In a typical academic tribute,
Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions, Judith
Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin bemoan the lost influence of the UE
(and other purged CIO unions) "that were most dynamic, egalitarian,
democratic, class conscious and advanced on issues of women's rights and
interracial solidarity."
Rosemary Feurer’s valuable new book, Radical Unionism in the
Midwest, 1900-1950, concentrates on an important slice of the UE’s
tragic history. Her sweeping (and somewhat misleading) title notwithstanding,
the focus of Feurer’s research and writing is the dramatic growth
and then rapid demise of the UE District 8, a vibrant part of the union
headed by William Sentner, an open member of the Communist Party. Openness
about the CP’s role in building and leading the UE was not a feature
of Them and Us – or the norm among its leading figures.
The 1973 official history by Matles and Higgins barely acknowledges the
role of past or present party members in the union or the UE’s complex
and sometimes strained relationship with the party itself. Instead, in
their account, the CP appears to be just one of many groups whose members
participated freely in the UE because the latter’s constitution
– unlike that of most other labor organizations – welcomed
everyone regardless of “political belief.”
The book’s only significant reference to a party line shift that
affected the UE is the authors’ unfavorable mention of CP enthusiasm
about the AFL-CIO merger in 1955. Following this burying of the hatchet
between craft and industrial unions, the CP wanted UE to rejoin the “mainstream
of American labor.” Matles and his fellow officers rejected the
party’s advice (because they viewed the merged federation to be
a “polluted river,” rife with racism, corruption, and conservative
politics). While they stood fast, however, the union suffered what Stepan-Norris
and Zeitlin describe as “grievous new wounds inflicted by its own
erstwhile comrades responding to party orders.” A large group of
UE district presidents, staff members, and local business agents declared
that the UE was “finished” and joined the exodus to other
AFL-CIO unions, taking 50,000 members with them.
As this near fatal blow and Feurer’s book on Sentner’s career
both show, there was a lot more to the story of CP-UE relations than meets
the eye in Them and Us. Sentner, for example, was never one to
kowtow to party headquarters in New York – like the union’s
mid-1950s defectors – yet he paid a high price for his CP membership,
during and after his ten years as president of UE District 8. In the middle
of difficult 1952 contract negotiations with an Illinois manufacturer,
he was arrested and charged under the Smith Act for “conspiracy
to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence.”
(“The charge is ridiculous,” Sentner responded. “The
only thing I have conspired in is to keep the Eagle Signal Corporation
from installing an incentive system” at its plant in Moline.) At
his St. Louis trial two years later, the UE leader “passionately
defended his belief in democratic socialism, the U.S. Constitution, and
non-violence,” Feurer notes. Nevertheless, he and his co-defendants
were quickly found guilty and sentenced to five years in jail. Sentner
remained free on appeal, but two months after the Supreme Court invalidated
these and other Smith Act convictions in 1958, he died of heart failure
at age 51, leaving his family penniless.
According to Feurer, Sentner had, by then, officially resigned from the
party, while remaining “deeply committed to the need for a working
class party dedicated to socialist principles, the very impetus that had
caused him to cast his lot with the CP more than twenty years before.”
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Sentner was born in New York but
grew up in St. Louis. After dropping out of college, he spent four years
at sea where he discovered Marx and “the radical syndicalist milieu
of the merchant seaman.” Back in Missouri at the start of the Depression,
he joined a CP-backed John Reed Club in St. Louis and, by 1935, was co-chair
of the local party. Sentner’s energetic organizing among the city’s
unemployed and low-wage factory workers led to a job with the CIO’s
Steel Workers Organizing Committee.
In 1936-37, the real action in St. Louis shifted to Emerson Electric and
other local electrical equipment manufacturers. CP “colonizers”
at Emerson combined with indigenous militants to stage a 53-day sit-down
strike (the second longest in U.S. labor history), coordinated by Sentner.
This victory for the UE’s fledgling mid-west organization led to
other successful union recognition battles in the state and region and
Sentner’s election as president of District 8, which covered Missouri,
Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. The “militant minority”
which built the CIO during this period was not afraid to tackle either
anti-union employers or worker attitudes that weakened the union. Sentner
was a critic of segregated practices in St. Louis and a key labor ally
of the March on Washington Movement, which protested discrimination against
blacks in the armed forces and industry during World War II. By the war’s
end, Sentner’s district had more than 50,000 members (25 percent
of them African-American). It was in the forefront of progressive initiatives
for labor-oriented regional economic planning and he had been profiled
in Fortune magazine “as a ‘Communist proud of his
political beliefs’ whose trade unionism was not controlled by party
interference and who ‘doesn’t talk party jargon.’”
Feurer concludes, however, that Sentner could “never fully confront
or resolve the paradox that the CP was an organization based on authoritarian
and hierarchical principles antithetical to democratic ideals.”
In her view, CP ties ultimately “tarnished the strongly democratic
radical vision the Left promoted” in District 8 – and gave
its myriad enemies a powerful weapon to use in dismantling the UE. Before
Sentner’s death, she notes, he “spoke somewhat wistfully of
workers having urged him to leave the party, noting their promise that,
if he did, they would support his right to discuss socialism – ‘but
as long as you are a Communist, we are afraid to take a chance.’”
Sentner did relinquish his elected union position in 1948 – and
became an appointed UE national representative – in a self-sacrificing
effort to make District 8 less of a political target. But the mounting
“focus on the Communist issue,” locally and nationally in
the 1950s, still “overwhelmed the Left’s efforts to continue
an ideological struggle that included commitment to militancy on the shop
floor, a challenge to corporate power in the community and the larger
political economy, the breaking down of racial divisions, and the right
of political radicals to have membership and leadership in unions.”
This unhappy ending notwithstanding, Radical Unionism contains
several important lessons for today’s labor left – which faces
far less red-baiting (since the fall of the Soviet Union) but also suffers
from the absence of any broad, non-sectarian socialist political organization
with working class and trade union adherents. Feurer’s book makes
a strong case for the enduring relevance of bottom-up organizing. It recounts,
for example, the critical role played by community-based worker organizations
in the early 1930s. Like the network of local Jobs with Justice coalitions
and immigrant “workers centers” that operate around the country
today, the CP-backed Trade Union Unity League and Unemployed Councils
provided critical support, in places like St. Louis, for workplace struggles
that paved the way for larger-scale union building later in the decade.
Some of these early fights – such as a 1931 strike by hundreds of
black and white women at an East St. Louis pecan packing plant –
involved workers in “submarginal industries” who were ignored
by AFL unions or excluded from them on the basis of race. Then, as now,
new forms of “community unionism” – utilizing innovative
tactics and grassroots mobilization – emerged to fill the void left
by the contraction and decline of “organized labor,” as traditionally
defined.
Feurer’s book also demonstrates the great power and potential of
worker solidarity, developed at the grassroots, through one-on-one recruitment
of activists and their subsequent experience of collective action on the
job and in the community. In contrast, the “union revitalization”
efforts promoted today by some supposedly “visionary leaders”
have relied primarily on bureaucratic consolidation, top-down control,
and greater reliance on full-time union officials and staff. The mid-20th
century UE contract campaign and strike case studies in Radical Unionism
illustrate how shop-floor initiatives, rank-and-file leadership development,
and “horizontal networking” among union stewards can strengthen
and politicize the labor movement at its base. As Feurer suggests, “this
history may be useful to keep in mind” because the “current
emphasis on the need for organizing at the national and global level may
cause us to lose sight of how important community-level organizing is
to the development and sustenance of new ideas and bonds of solidarity.”
Reviewed
by Steve Early
Boston area labor activist since 1972
lsupport@aol.com
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