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.
Bill O’Reilly’s Flying Circus
Four years ago, I was a guest on the “O’Reilly Factor,” part of a panel discussion on the income gap. It was a wonderfully surreal moment that, alas, I have yet to repeat. I just stumbled upon a transcript of the show. Below is a pretty funny bit that I believe is short enough that I can legally quote it.
Missing here is O’Reilly’s assertion that Cornell University is a socialist plot, “Parade” editor and DNC Treasurer Andrew Tobias inviting me to join the Democratic party, and, finally, Mr. O’Reilly brusquely ending the segment and announcing that Mel Gibson would be next after the commercials.
O’REILLY: OK, but here’s the deal. And you ought to know this, too, Shaun, is that for many years, I didn’t make any money. OK? And I lived in my younger time in a very frugal environment. OK? So I don’t believe that the government has the right, now that I’m successful, due to hard work and some luck, to come into my house and take my money and give it to other people, and they don’t even know what these people are going to do with it. That’s wrong, morally wrong.
…
RICHMAN: Are you living in poverty as a result of this 50 percent [tax rate]?
O’REILLY: Am I living in poverty? No, but what right do you or anybody else have, even in France, to take other peoples’ money and give it to somebody you don’t know? What right do you have, morally?
RICHMAN: It’s a basic system of fairness. Now when you weren’t making that money…
O’REILLY: Yes.
RICHMAN: When you were living in dire straits, wouldn’t it have been nicer to have a system where…
O’REILLY: No, I wouldn’t have taken a dime.
RICHMAN: You wouldn’t have taken a dime?
O’REILLY: No. Absolutely not.
RICHMAN: You would have died of tuberculosis?
O’REILLY: That’s right. And I wouldn’t have kids unless I could support them. That’s right, because I don’t believe in taking other peoples’ stuff and giving it to me. I won’t even take Social Security when I’m older. I’ll give it back or I’ll give it to charity. You see? That’s where you guys are wrong. You’re taking stuff, you’re making value judgments. You’re giving it to other people and you don’t know what those other people are going to do. That’s wrong. Am I wrong?
Why did they never invite me back?
Paul Avrich, Anarchist and Historian 1931 – 2006
Paul Avrich died last week, aged 74. He was a respected anarchist, and a historian of anarchism (particularly Haymarket and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial) and the Russian Revolution. He was a Professor Emeritus at Queens College. I was fortunate enough to have been a student in the last regular undergraduate course that Dr. Avrich taught at Queens College. It was an invaluable experience to learn about the Russian Revolution from a talented and diligent scholar, who was sympathetic to the utopian goals of the revolution, while critical of the undemocratic nature of the Bolsheviks.
There will be a service tomorrow at 12:45 pm at the Riverside Chapel (Amsterdam and 78th).