Things Overheard on the First Day of College
1. “Dude, our dorm is, like, the loudest dorm on campus. We were playing Blink 182 really loud all night long.”
2. “Excuse me. Can you tell me where room L77 is?”
3. “So, my mom called me this morning at, like, a quarter to seven, and she’s like, ‘I just want to know how your first day of school was,’ and I was like, ‘Mom, give me some space.'” (Whining italicized.)
4. “Is room L77 in the basement?”
5. “They’re selling dorm posters by the bus stop. I got this cool ‘Scarface’ poster.” “Cool.”
6. “Are you looking for room L77, too?”
7. “Cute shoes. Are you a biology major?”
8. “If we can’t find room L77, does that mean that class is cancelled?”
Pages From a Worker’s Life
My studies have provoked in me a keen interest in the Trade Union Education League, and its founder, William Z. Foster. The T.U.E.L. was a rank and file movement in the 1920’s to organize millions of workers in the basic industries along industrial lines (that is, in “one big union”). Where this differed from the Industrial Workers of the World was a dogged insistence on working within the existing AFL craft unions and “amalgamating” them.
Foster seemed to be a tireless organizer as well as a savvy strategist, but his own beliefs eventually became muddled by the Stalinist party line so that the “real” Foster, in his later years, is something of an enigma.
I sought out Foster in his own words. The only book of his that remains “in print” is “Pages From a Worker’s Life,” from International Publishers. One of the great things about International is that the cover price remains the asking price no matter how old the printing is, so that this fine book can still be had for $3.25. (One of the other great things about International is that the adventurous reader can travel to that storied building on 23rd Street, up the rickety manually operated elevator, to their offices to shop.)
“Pages” does not contain much of Foster’s theoretical or polemical writing, nor much of a standard biography. This seems to be outtakes from his other books; delightful stories and anecdotes that fit nowhere else. It’s a brisk and enjoyable read that makes me sorely miss the lack of adventure in my own life. Much of it is hard to believe. His jobbing, hoboing, seafaring and organizing seem to constantly place him in positions where he narrowly escapes sudden death or tortured lynching. Still, it’s not that implausible.
Foster’s ability to reevaluate, correct and criticize his own decisions is refreshing, as is his ability to admit that he misjudged a man, generously providing space to acknowledge the goodness of John L. Lewis, as well as an obscure building trades business agent who turned out to be a dedicated organizer in the 1919 steel strike.
As early as 1912, Foster pioneered the notion that the last thing labor radicals should do is abandon the mainstream trade unions to the bureaucrats and conservatives. He spent many years in the political wilderness as the IWW absorbed much of the energy of the labor radicals of the era. However, when a triumphant Lenin endorsed Foster’s model of “boring from within,” his organization became a cause celibre among the new throngs of Communists. He joined the Communist Party, and joined his cause, and the cause of his organization, with that of the CP. The ranks of both the T.U.E.L. and the CP swelled and their campaigns laid the building blocks of the CIO that was to come.
Years later, Stalin led Foster out of the AFL and back into independent union organizing. Foster remained an apologist for Stalin to his dying day, which makes the search for the real William Z. Foster, much like the search for the real Michael J. Obermeier, that much more intriguing.
Searching for Comrade Obermeier
On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours.
The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work in support of the US war effort during World War II, and his repeated applications for U.S. citizenship, he was deemed to be an undesirable alien subversive shortly after the war.
The feds were likely alerted to Obermeier’s position, status and “threat” by the officers of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union who had welcomed Obermeier and his comrades into the unions only a decade earlier in an effort to drive the mafia out of the union and organize the thousands of workers who were crying out for the union but were suddenly shocked – SHOCKED – to find out that the officers of their largest local were COMMUNISTS!
It was a scenario that played itself out in countless CIO unions that were “bored from within” by Communist elementa, but the H&RE were an AFL union that had invited the Communists in before they spat them out. The officers of Local 6, and the Hotel Trades Council to which it was affiliated, were faced with the same choice of repudiating the Communist Party and their earlier politics, or being thrown overboard. Obermeier’s close partner, Jay Rubin, rejected him and their radical politics and claimed allegiance to the U.S. flag and the bureaucratic union regime, and he continued to lead the union for much of the rest of the century.
Obermeier took the fall for the New York local’s radicalism. He was found guilty of perjury for having denied past or present Communist affiliations when he had applied for U.S. citizenship, even though he had been a member of the party from 1930 until 1939. He was deported to Germany on December 11, 1952 and died in Spain on May 28, 1960.
Much remains obscure about Obermeier. Who was he? Where, exactly did he come from? How did he come to the independent syndicalist trade union movement? And how from there was he attracted to the Communist Party and the Trade Union Education League? Did he recruit Jay Rubin to the CP, or did Jay Rubin join first? What political beliefs did he have that were independent of the CP? What happened to him when he was repatriated to Germany? And what the fuck was a German Communist (and, I suspect, a Jew) doing in Fascist Spain?
I have been studying Obermeier, Local 6 and the movements that spawned it, for most of the year and I am not much closer to the answer. My research continues.
Living on in the Archives
History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.”
The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American sabotage and denounced all the strikers, who went back to the shops under unsatisfactory conditions.
The Wobblies brought controversy, but no organization to speak of, so the workers who remained reorganized themselves into an independent union that lasted for 17 years, organizing the kitchens and dining rooms of Manhattan’s fanciest hotels. The “Free Voice” is a fascinating document of the times, as radicalism remained even as the union took on bread and butter issues like hours and wages. Evident in those pages was a wide variety of Wobbly, Socialist and Communist sympathies with fraternal greetings from Soviet Russia, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood and William Z. Foster. This was a trade union that organized along amalgamated industrial lines, and strove to expand its ranks to include all the workers in their industry, regardless of race, sex or language (Each edition included German and Italian translations; Yiddish, Lithuanian and other languages were apparently available).
Eventually, the union was supplanted by a Communist-led, T.U.U.L. affiliated union, the Food Workers Industrial Union, which was led by men like Jay Rubin and Michael J. Obermeier who has previously been leaders of the Amalgamated. In 1935, the unions merged and Rubin and Obermeier pressed further to merge with the AFL-affiliated Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union. They wound up as leaders of the newly chartered Local 6, as well as the amalgamated New York Hotel Trades Council.
In its last issue, the “Free Voice” took stock of its legacy:
The organ of the Amalgamated Food Workers, the “Free Voice,” can now be incorporated into history as a vital organ of the Labor Movement and will live in its archives as a reminder of the fearless weapon that it was in furthering the struggle of the working class against the obstacles that beset it.
What’s sad is that this archive had been stored in a warehouse until specially requested, and the paper was so fragile and bitter that it crumbled to be touched. The New York Public Library is one of perhaps three archives left of the “Free Voice,” perhaps the last archive that is not microfiche, and is incomplete, missing many volumes and issues.
Although the union that they helped organize lives on as a powerful advocate of workers in the hotel industry, the names, thoughts and deeds of those radical pioneers is all but lost. I hope, in some small way, to correct that.