Labor’s Cold Warriors: Meany, Dubinsky and Shanker
I’d prefer a better term for it, but I think of myself and my peers as being a part of the “Sweeney Generation” of the labor movement. We’re the kids who were recruited to beleaguered labor unions to organize greater numbers of workers as part of a grand movement for social justice (That was the idea, at least). It is hard to believe that if I had come of age thirty years earlier, I’d likely have viewed the AFL-CIO as the AFL-CIA – a pale, male and stale dinosaur that was to the right of most presidents of the U.S.A. in prosecuting the Cold War. Thanks to some inherited books, and Richard Kahlenberg’s new biography of Al Shanker, I’ve recently subjected myself to a history lesson on some of labor’s biggest Cold Warriors.
As head of the AFL-CIO from the time of the merger in 1955 until 1979, George Meany earned the enmity of the left as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the official labor movement: a cigar-chomping bureaucrat who planned Executive Committee meetings around golf games at Miami Beach, a sexist, homophobic coward who enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War but had to be dragged into the civil rights movement. Archie Robinson’s “George Meany and His Times” is a hagiography that might as well be a ghost-written memoir, fleshed out as it is with extensive quotes from public speeches and hundreds of hours of interviews that Robinson conducted with Meany. It is, as Robinson promises, “the real Meany,” so if the man comes off as repugnant as his negative reputation on the left, it’s his own fault, his own words. Take, for instance, Meany’s account of the 1972 Democratic national convention, the most liberal convention the party ever had:
“We listened to the gay lib people – you know, the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and legalize marriages between girls and girls…We heard from the abortionists and we heard from the people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odors of johns about them.”
Meany was a business unionist through and through. To him, it never seemed more than a job. On his first job as a Plumber’s union staffer: “there was a financial attraction there because the business agent’s pay was maybe twenty percent higher than a journeyman’s pay, and it was a year-round job.” On becoming President of the NYS AFL: “It was very tiring and all that, but, hell, I was a really young man and had no idea of going any other place. After one year in the job, they doubled my salary.” On being elected Secretary-Treasurer of the national AFL: “I was not looking for a change, but I got to thinking it over: After all, this is what I am doing. I am in the labor movement. This is my life, more or less, and this is definitely a big promotion.” On succeeding William Green as president: “I had been pretty much in charge of running the AFL from 1947 on. Green was perfectly content to let me handle it. So, when he died I felt that I was entitled to the job.”
Meany did not report any great revelation that caused him to oppose Communism. It was simply a matter of seeing that Communists were effective organizers and seemed determined to take over trade unions that made young Meany an anti-communist out of a sense of self-preservation for his well-paying jobs. In later years, he gave his anti-communism the intellectual veneer of preserving freedom, noting that Communist regimes turned independent trade unions into puppets of the state – a charge that is mostly true but which seems like a rationalization that he borrowed from others in order to cover for his own lack of ideological convictions.
David Dubinsky, at least, had an ideology, a core set of beliefs that guided his actions. Dubinsky’s autobiography, “A Life With Labor,” contains some welcome insight into how CP-front Trade Union Education League activists operated inside and outside of the ILGWU, and even provides space for “the other side,” in the form of Charles Zimmerman, an ILG Vice President who had started out as an opponent of Dubinsky’s in the 1920’s. Zimmerman describes the discomfort of following CP policy, as dictated from Moscow, which led party activists to embark on a dangerous strike policy that nearly decimated the union so that one Party faction could score points over another, and how Stalin and Bill Foster led Communists into the ILGWU to “bore from within” and then back out to form a “revolutionary” dual union and back inside the ILGWU again in the space of a few short years at the expense of a good deal of credibility and goodwill.
Dubinsky came out of the heavily-Jewish socialist movement on the Lower East Side that had as its pillars the Socialist Party, Jewish Daily Forward newspaper and the Amalgamated Clothing and the Ladies Garment Workers unions. For him, the battle with the Communists was ideological and stemmed from the very split of the CP from the Sp in 1919, over whether to follow directions from Moscow. Dubinsky’s anti-communism made him an inveterate splitter. After taking the ILGWU out of the AFL to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Dubinsky’s was the first union to split from the CIO, partly over the role of Communist organizers, and back into the AFL after CIO resources helped him rebuild his union. In New York State, he split from our splendid American Labor Party because he felt Communists had too much influence. The ALP was a “fusion” party, created to provide a second ballot line for liberal Democrats (indeed, the party was created in order to entice all those Lower East Side Socialists to vote for Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936, without having to cast ballots for Tammany Hall’s Democratic line), but the party also ran a good number of leftist independents – Socialists, Laborites and a few Communists – who won offices ranging from City Council to US Congress. The Liberal Party that Dubinsky created and which replaced the ALP became much more narrowly a Democratic pressure group, and steadily moved to the right along with the Democrats over the ensuing decades. In the end, after Dubinsky died, it became the power base for Rudy Giuliani.
Nobody carried the ideological load of anti-communism as defense of freedom as much as Al Shanker, who is given a glowing portrait in Richard Kahlenberg’s “Tough Liberal.” it is an excellent biography that is marred by Kahlenberg’s clumsy title refrain and enthusiastic party-line reporting on an obscure sect of the socialist movement, called Social Democrats USA, who influenced much of Shanker’s thinking (and who comprised much of his staff). SDUSA started out as the old Socialist Party of America, until, after a series of splits, “it finally got down to this small group that sort of agreed with each other,” in the words of Sandra Feldman. What they agreed with each other about was that it was more important to be against communism than to be for socialism.
Shanker is the father of teachers unionism, organizing the United Federation of Teachers union in New York City and leading the union to strike for collective bargaining rights and higher salaries in the early 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, he led the union on a series of divisive strikes against community control of schools, when a black-led community group took control of the public schools in the ghetto neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn. The strike left Shanker with a lasting reputation as a racist and as a man who, in Woody Allen’s satirical estimation, would use a tactical nuclear warhead in a contract negotiation. Kahlenberg successfully rehabilitates Shanker’s role in the dispute, documenting the community control group’s hard-line refusal to compromise and the simmering anti-Semitism of the group that fired and barred white, Jewish teachers from working in schools where the majority of students were black. Kahlenberg does a slight disservice in this account by not seeking to represent “the other side,” but otherwise makes a persuasive case that Shanker did the best that he could for his members under difficult circumstances, and that failure to protect unionized teachers from racially motivated terminations would have fundamentally weakened the movement towards teachers union organizing.
Kahlenberg points to Shanker’s example and finds a model for “tough liberalism” the Democratic party to emulate in order to recapture the votes of the white working class. Kahlenberg (and Shanker) emphasize a central focus on economic and class issues, and have no quarrel from me on that score. Furthermore, the author points to Shanker’s role in the education reform movement and finds in professionalism, shared governance and white collar unionism a prescription for a revitalized labor movement, and again I find room for agreement. However, when Kahlenberg lauds Shanker’s color blind emphasis on civil rights and promotion, he misses the special role of racism in this country that has reduced black Americans to a caste, a role that requires affirmative action to address. And, finally, when Kahlenberg praises Shanker’s “muscular anti-Commmunism” and calls for the left to return to a vigorous internationalism in moving other nation’s towards “democracy,” I see a history of imperialism and the folly of the kind of adventurism that leaves US Armed Forces stuck in quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq. Al Shanker left a proud legacy at the American Federation of Teachers. The last vestiges of anti-communism, however, are one part of the legacy that has to go.
Prudish Socialists
Steadily making my way through Si Gerson’s books, I’m surprised (although I’m not sure why) by instances of prudishness of our revolutionary heroes. In his “History of the Three Internationals,” William Z. Foster spends a hundred pages after the end of the Third International to ruminate on then-contemporary issues. This material is all, essentially, Party-line, what with the impending crisis of capitalism (in 1954), the imperialist Social Democrats and so on. Within it, this passage manages to stand out as uniquely wrong-headed:
In the field of culture there is likewise a general retrogression throughout the capitalist world, above all in the United States, with its cultural mess of pragmatism, psychoanalysis, neo-Malthusianism…with its swamp of “comic” books, oceans of sex, crime and horror stories, printed and on the radio and television.
Foster was 73 when he wrote this, and he sounds like a nagging grandpa. But, sadly, this is Party line stuff and it is thinking like this that results in reigns of terror like the Cultural Revolution, that makes Beatles records contraband, etc. And let’s not forget, as David McReynolds reminds in an e-mail forum earlier today, the Soviet Union, like many Communist countries, outlawed homosexuality at one time as a “sexual deviation” brought on by capitalism.
Not that social democrats can’t be fuddy duddies too. Reading Norman Thomas’ “Socialism Re-examined,” I was struck by a similar passage:
I know modern novels mostly through their reviews, but if I thought they portrayed the true state of mankind, I should doubt our capability of achieving a social order worth saving…It is a sick humanity which revels in sexuality, on the screen, and in the books of Henry Miller, William Burroughs and that ilk.
All politicians, revolutionary and bourgeois, would do well to stay out of the field of literary criticism. With apologies to Emma Goldman, if I can’t read pulp novels, I don’t want your revolution!
The Human Being Inside Bill Foster
Still poring through Si Gerson’s books, I’m having fun playing labor historian, although I’m not sure who’s benefiting (a young comrade in another forum complained, “this post seems like a big name drop…I don’t really need to read the words of dead men to know how I think society ought to be structured.”). I came across a fascinating observation about William Z. Foster in Nat Hentoff’s lamentably brief biography of A.J. Muste.
Muste is best known as a pacifist, a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, who mentored Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds and scores of other activists committed to nonviolent resistance and was a leading light of the opposition to nuclear armaments and the early stages of the Vietnam War (he died in 1967). He had quite the interesting biography before all that. A protestant minister who quit his congregation to resist the first World War, he became a labor activist and leader of the failed Amalgamated Textile Workers union following the second Lawrence strike, headed up the radical Brookwood Labor College in the 1920’s and became a leading Trotskyite in the 1930’s. Here is where the Muste story gets particularly juicy and weird. Apparently, in 1936 Muste set sail for Europe to meet with the exiled Russian revolutionary. When he returned, he spoke little of the meeting but was no longer a Trotskyite and instead had returned to Christian pacifism.
Hentoff unfortunately skims over the details of Muste’s labor activism. That’s a great disappointment because while I am familiar with Muste’s pacifist work, I was shocked to find venomous denunciation of “the Musteites” in so many Communist Party-related publication starting around the mid-1920’s while researching Michael J. Obermeier, Foster and others. That’s why this observation from Muste about Foster’s visit to Brookwood in 1923 is so tantalizing and frustrating:
“One of the questions in the minds of all labor activists at that time was whether Bill had joined the Communist Party. He sought to create the impression that he had not. I have carried with me all through the years a vivid recollection of that day nearly forty years ago. I have lived it over again at fairly frequent intervals since. It was a feeling of uneasiness, certainly not of hostility in the personal sense. I felt there was a human being inside him, but that it was under restraint, hidden somewhere. The element of straightforwardness was now lacking. There he was, over there, and here I was. It would remain so.”
William Z. Foster also had an interesting biography. He was a brilliant union organizer and tactician. It is on the one hand incredibly impressive and, on the other, terribly pathetic, that articles and plans that the man wrote in the 1910’s are still directly relevant and prescient today. Foster started out as a syndicalist who was expelled from the Socialist Party during the days of dynamite and gravitated towards the IWW. Sent by the Wobblies to European labor confabs, Foster witnessed firsthand huge and impressive union demonstrations in France and came to appreciate the C.G.T.’s policy of boring from within the traditional craft unions to turn them into revolutionary organizations and returned to the U.S. to advocate that the I.W.W. abandon its “dual unionism” and commit to transforming the American Federation of Labor into a militant and radical movement. His proposal was seriously considered and rejected, and Foster set out on his own.
Foster set out on his own to spearhead two huge organizing campaigns during the Great War under AFL auspices and his own, brilliant “amalgamated” formula (i.e. working through an umbrella organizing committee of the various craft unions). One, the Chicago stockyards, was an unqualified success. The other, the steel industry, was a fiasco of historical proportions. Following the October Revolution, Lenin endorsed Foster’s program of boring from within the conservative craft unions, and the free-thinking boy genius of the labor movement married his fortunes to the new Communist movement. At first, as Muste wrote, Foster kept his affiliation secret. By 1924, he was the presidential candidate of the party’s legal expression, the Workers Party. Shortly thereafter, he became the chairman of the Communist Party USA and pawn and apologist for Stalinism.
It was only years later, near death, that Foster allowed any hint of “human being inside him” to be glimpsed in his delightful memoir, “Pages From a Worker’s Life.” One wonders what would have become of the brilliant tactician if he hadn’t cast his lot in with the Communists. His biography and writings indicate that he was developing a pragmatic syndicalism that I’d like to think would have nudged labor in a more radical and independent direction. But we’ll never know. We can only lament what could have been, if Foster could have been the “human being inside” that summer at Brookwood.
Wisdom in Old Books
Shortly after writing about Sophie Gerson’s passing a few weeks ago, I was contacted by her grand-daughter Frieda and daughter Deborah. They’re cleaning out the family house in Bensonhurst and thought I might be interested in some of Si Gerson’s books. Would I! Si had a voluminous book collection on topics like socialism, the labor movement, election law and policy and New York City politics that stretched back decades.
There was an impressive diversity to Si’s collection, as it was not limited, like too many young leftists’ today, to those writers with whom he agreed. Si’s habit of underlining sections and scribbling exclamation points in the margin suggest his opinion of the material. My favorite so-far being the prominent question mark beside Norman Thomas’ preposterous claim, in “Socialism Re-Examined,” that Marx’s theory of surplus labor value could not account for automation (Marx, of course, devotes several chapters of “Capital Vol. 1” to the topic, and Thomas’ claim reveals the Socialist Party’s standard bearer as one who read Marx in order to claim that he read Marx and disagreed with him).
My selection’s from Si’s library suggest my own narrowness. I declined, for example a handsome, multi-volume set of Stalin’s writings, clearly preferring books on or by A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas and Morris Hillquit – heroes from “my” corner of “our” left. I was delighted to find five rare books from my favorite tragic hero, William Z. Foster, all inscribed “To Si Gerson, With Comradely greetings, from Bill Foster” (or something like it).
So, now I am the owner of a big box of historical socialist and labor books, and seeking “time enough at last” to read it all. Today I am reading Morris Hillquit’s “Loose Leaves From a Busy Life” and want to share a pearl of wisdom from it with you. Hillquit, for your possible edification, was a Jewish immigrant who was a leader of the strong socialist movement in the Lower East Side, centered around the garment unions, “The Daily Forward” and the Socialist Party from the 1890’s well into the 1930’s. A National Chairman of the Party and frequent candidate for political office, he lived long enough to become the leader of the “Old Guard” that was challenged by Norman Thomas.
In 1917, Hillquit was the Socialist Party’s candidate for Mayor of New York, running on an anti-war platform. The election was the first since the United States entered the World War and a Socialist victory, Hillquit challenged, would show that the people of the largest city in America wanted an immediate end to the war. The campaign attracted national attention and at one point Hillquit was ahead in the polls. In the end, Hillquit polled about 21% in a four-way contest, losing to Tammany Hall’s candidate, John F. Hylan. (Hillquit notes that he added about 110,000 votes to the previous election’s Socialist tally, and that a constitutional amendment extending voting rights to women – which had failed two years prior – passed by 100,000 votes – mostly from the Lower East Side.)
The Socialist Party, then a major force in U.S. politics, with a quarter million members and hundreds of elected Mayors, city councilmen, state assemblymen and even a Congressman, was opposed to the war and to U.S. entry into it, and huge demonstrations – not unlike the demonstrations that put millions of people in the streets marching against the current war back in 2002 and 2003 – were held across the country. Once the United States entered the war, Hillquit believed it was the role of Socialists to press for an immediate negotiated peace. And, here, from a stump speech in 1917, is your pearl of wisdom:
“A victory in arms would mean terms of peace imposed upon the vanquished. It would lead to rancor and striving for vengeance. It would not be a peace on firm foundation but one founded on quicksand and would lead to more war.”
It’s as fine a statement of pragmatic pacifism as I have ever read. Hillquit’s words were, regrettably, all too prophetic. The terms of the Versailles treaty were imposed upon Germany and did lead to a striving for vengeance that was harnessed by Hitler and the Nazi movement and led to more war. A typical challenge put to pacifists is what we would do about a Hitler. A pacifist position on the “good” war is not an easy or obvious one, but a continuation of the cycle of militarism should be obviously unwise. The history of the bloody 20th century should show what a vicious cycle it is.
As for our modern case, when public opinion has swung decidedly and emphatically against the war in Iraq and the presidential contenders hem and haw over a withdrawal of forces “with honor” and with our chosen government in place, heed Hillquit’s 90-year-old words. What each of the Democratic and Republican candidates for President propose are terms of “peace” to be imposed upon the Iraqi people. Such a peace could not last. Anything less than an unconditional withdrawal and offer to pay reparations to a government of their choosing will result in a dark day of reckoning for us in the future.