Can American Labor Defeat the Communists?

VOLUME 179

NUMBER 3

MARCH, 1947

90th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by MERLYN S. PITZELE

HISTORY confers high honor upon the radical in the American labor movement. Indeed, he founded it. His active discontent with exploitation, his quest for social justice, and his familiarity with the European working-class organizations which were expressions of the radical tradition led directly to the establishment of American unions.

Having created the unions, he applied himself to keeping them dynamic. Like all other institutions, labor organizations develop strong tendencies to settle down into well-worn grooves. Under the direction of men to whom labor leadership is nothing more than a reasonably soft job and a measure of personal power, the process of stagnation is accelerated. Over the years, the most potent foe of such swivel-chair officials has been the radical who has had a vision of unionism as a movement — something which had to play its role in the evolution of new social and economic forms, something which had to move toward a goal. The radical has ever been the yeast in the labor leaven; and frequently it was only his competition or criticism which got the union business agent out of his swivel chair and into battle for the interests of his constituents. To many union officials, the greatest threat to their own security was represented by some Cassius who wore a red necktie.

The radical composite which exerted so considerable an influence on American labor organizations was a polyglot mixture of motivations and ideologies. It was made up of types which ranged from the conscious seekers after power, who used a radical program only for the purpose of attracting support, to those driven by the desire for martyrdom to sacrifice themselves unsparingly in the service of some theory. The policies which they supported varied just as widely, from reformism of the mildest sort to flaming, revolutionary nihilism.

The labor movement was a magnet to which they were all drawn as steel filings because, bitterly as they might contest other doctrine among themselves, they accepted as their original premise the Marxian assertion that real human progress could be incubated only within the working class. Increasing their attraction to the labor movement was the incontestable empirical evidence that unionism per se, even the narrowest kind of bread-andbutter unionism, was by its nature anti-capitalistic. It challenged the absolutism of private property by seeking to curb the right of ownership to offer employment on its own terms. At a later day, when government became the adversary of the absolutism of capital, the radical concerned with abetting social change did not have to rely solely on the labor movement for a career consistent with his principles.

Naturally enough under the circumstances, the only indigenous radicalism developed, which survives as such in America, is trade-unionism. It stayed indigenous because the American worker never had his opportunity-consciousness converted into classconsciousness. It stayed radical because it never called a truce in its war with the status quo. Although its aspirations may seem modest when compared with those of its counterparts in other lands, which look to some form of the coöperative commonwealth or workers’ state as their objective, the drive for “more, always more” which is the object of American unionism is fundamentally more radical, though unconsciously so, than the realizable goals which can be precisely blueprinted.

Copyright 1947, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

To attain “more, always more” our unionism has employed clubs, shotguns, and dynamite. It is the hardest-hitting, most violent unionism in all the world. Its fighting character has been shaped by the American frontier tradition, by the opposition of employers, and by the necessity of operating as a minority group in a hostile environment where every battle could easily turn into a fight for naked survival. The European mind has real difficulty in understanding that blood will be shed for the trifling object of putting a few more cents per hour into the pay envelope, that ten workers will be killed in a contest with a steel company over simple union recognition, that over a million workers will be on strike at the same time, causing a creeping paralysis to spread over the economy, without these strikers being the advance guard of revolution. To the radical whose mind runs in the European pattern, it looks very much as if someone is missing a great opportunity.

2

OVER the years, the radical has worked assiduously to gain control of the American labor movement, to shape it into something conforming to his idea of what a labor movement should be, to use it as a force which would carry him to power. He has been uniformly unsuccessful. The labor movement has remained firmly in the hands of those whose philosophy was originally formulated by Sam Gompers; those who, though not impervious to radical thinking, have rejected all the blueprints for a new society; those who are business unionists working for the unattainable “more, always more.” But while labor leadership on the highest level has eluded capture by radicals, it has not always been unthreatened. And the threat of such capture has never been greater than it is at the present time.

Today, more than a dozen national unions and a much larger but indeterminate number of local unions in America are under Communist control. Not only have the Communists achieved a position in the labor movement which no “outsiders” have ever come close to reaching before, but by virtue of the strategic location of Communist-held unions in our economy — in communications industries, transportation, manufacturing, and metal mining —they make up a power bloc within the nation which has much wider implications than their numbers may suggest.

Now the Socialist, the Anarchist, and others on the left will, with considerable cogency, object to calling Communists radicals. It can be demonstrated to any reasonable man that the only determinant of Communist policy is Russia’s interests. No example exists of American Communist criticism of the Soviet Union. No example exists of American Communist policy or activity which, upon full analysis, is not revealed as being designed to help the Stalin regime. This ranges from the Communist Party’s position on what to do about the atom bomb, to ruthless suppression of strikes during the period when American industry was helping produce arms for the Red Army. Non-Communists and anti-Communists may find themselves in sympathy with what Communists do in Harlem, but the Communist leadership gets these things done only because they make some contribution to Russia’s interests.

Thus it may be persuasively argued that the Communists are nothing more than foreign agents, and the radical’s objection to having them dropped into his category is easily understandable. But the fact remains that the foreign government for which they operate has its interests best served in this period of history by having its agents espouse radicalism. And in America those agents, by being zealous, shrewd, and unscrupulous, have achieved a near-monopoly over the traditional symbols and accouterment of radicalism.

The Communist Party, which was founded here on its present basis following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, did not start serious trade-union work until 1920. Its effort to build cadres in the unions and capture organizational control coincided with a period of decline in union membership which lasted from the end of the First World War to 1933. From 1920 to 1929, years of expanding prosperity, the American worker reached by the established trade-unions showed less and less appetite for what unionism could offer. He was particularly deaf to appeals for support of left-wing candidates for union office and support of radical programs. Up until John L. Lewis started the CIO in 1935, the success of the Communists in the labor movement was nothing momentous.

Finding little to harvest in the established unions, the Communists set out to organize a labor movement of their own, called the Trade Union Unity League. Internal fights over whether they should or should not launch a dual movement to the American Federation of Labor almost wrecked the Party. Similar fights over policy and tactics have splintered into ineffectuality every other radical group that has functioned in America. But the Communists were different, and their difference is the main reason for their success.

A doctrinal fight in the Socialist Party, for example, would be decided by majority vote. The losing faction could either stay in or get out and start a new party, always claiming that the new organization was the genuine Socialist article. The losers who stayed in the original party would be subjected to only the loosest sort of discipline. Believing in democratic decision, like all the other radical groups except the Communists, the Socialist Party would allow the dissenters from the official line to keep agitating for their point of view. Thus the Socialists were in constant turmoil. Not only did they have to compete with heretical groups which they themselves had spawned, but their membership was divided into factions which gave considerably more attention to quibbling among themselves than to “reaching the masses,” which is every radical group’s target.

3

AFTER skirting once on the edge of such disaster, the Communist Party insured itself against ever having to face that hazard again. It was able to do so because of its Moscow connection. Being the official representative in America of a Moscowcreated and controlled organization called the Third International — to distinguish it from the Second (Socialist) International —— it provided that its doctrinal disputes would, in effect, be resolved by Moscow authorities and not by the membership. The Moscow connection being the Party’s most important capital asset, it could exercise an iron discipline over its members by removing Moscow recognition from any faction which deviated from the official line. Any brand of communism which had no connection with Russia, the going concern, was fated for the desuetude which has been the destiny of all other radical parties in America.

The Communist Party calls its method of making decisions at the top, exclusive level of leadership “democratic centralism,” and it ruthlessly expels anyone who challenges those decisions. Members accept this totalitarian thought-control because they have accepted the previous premise which underlies the whole Communist rationale, that the end justifies the means. It can be demonstrated beyond cavil that “bourgeois democratic practices” will run a movement into the ground — look at the Socialists. Ergo, intellectual freedom is sacrificed for effectiveness — look at Russia.

Such a structure and philosophy give the Communist Party a cohesion and a single-mindedness which equip it with strength out of all proportion to its numerical support. But even this was not enough to achieve great successes on the labor front in the free and easy twenties. The Trade Union Unity League unions which the Communists organized made a lot of noise — because the Communists have always been expert propagandists — but failed to take root. It was not until the Great Depression that the Communists really found their opportunity to plant themselves deep on the labor front.

With a political, propaganda, and organizational apparatus which no other group in America could come close to equaling, the Communists went to work among the unemployed. They had no competition worthy of the name. Their success in organizing the unemployed for higher relief standards, anti-landlord activities, better medical care, improved conditions and increased wages on CWA and WPA jobs was truly phenomenal. The “Hoovervilles” in most American cities were miniature soviets. The Communists recruited on an unprecedented scale among the Negroes, the foreign-born, the veterans, and jobless industrial workers of all types. A proliferation of organizations which they founded and guided as transmission belts to Communist Party membership spoke for and acerbated every form of discontent on every social and occupational level in a period when discontent was the national temper.

The leadership of the Party, which knew very well what it was about, had two tactical objectives. They were out to demonstrate to the masses that capitalism was the great enemy, and they were out to sharpen the economic crisis into a revolutionary situation. These were the tactics which they hoped would contribute to the grand strategy of bringing the Communist Party to state power in America.

In this period, when the Communist Party could stand on the claim of being the only organization with an unremitting interest in the plight of the unemployed and when Russophilia became the vogue among liberals and intellectuals, the Party attracted some of its most able talent. When John L. Lewis, in 1936, proclaimed his intention of organizing the unorganized, many of whom had been reached by one or another Communist front organization during an all too recent experience with unemployment, the Party was a formidable national organization which anyone thinking of a broadscale campaign on the labor front could not ignore.

Thus, for obvious mutual advantages, it was possible for Lewis — who hated everything for which the Communist Party stood and who had drumheaded every radical out of his own United Mine Workers — to operate in close conjunction with the Communists, who fully reciprocated his hatred. The advantages of the alliance to Lewis were obvious. He would have the support of a disciplined, fanatical organization with widespread labor contacts and with an intellectual front of considerable influence. He would get a reservoir of volunteers experienced in labor agitation who would gladly face grave personal danger to carry the gospel of industrial unionism to the proletariat. No other instrument existed, in fact, for getting the message of the CIO into many company towns which had been closed to union organizers for a generation. These were the bastions of the open shop, where not even a lodge of the Odd Fellows or a branch of the Slavic fraternal benefit societies had been allowed a hall to meet in lest the meetings lead to union talk. Only the Communists, operating in these locales as a conspiratorial underground, had channels of communication into them from a central headquarters. They were in a unique position to provide the CIO with entree into areas it had to penetrate if it was to succeed. There can be no doubt that at all times Mr. Lewis believed he could head off or subordinate any Communist combine that might arise.

The advantage of the alliance to the Communists was equally apparent. Social clashes were inevitable and the Party could contribute to their intensity. There were jobs — and patronage is no less important to the Communist Party than to any other political organization — and disguises for loyal members who could be trusted to see their loyally to the CIO as second to their loyalty to the Party. But most of all, labor organizations were going to be built and the Communists had a golden opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

When the Communist deals were made, seasoned opponents of the Party like David Dubinsky of the Socialist-oriented International Ladies Garment Workers Union were appalled at what had happened. Every letterhead organization the Communists controlled in an occupational or industrial field was given a CIO charter and, in most cases, money with which to finance organizing campaigns. Harry Bridges was made CIO director for the whole West Coast. The national office, particularly the strategic publicity and legal departments, was larded with Communists. And, as a not unusual example of what was being done out in the field, in the vital Calumet steel district a clear majority of a large organizing crew were hired through Party contacts.

Dubinsky tried to point out to Lewis the danger of being so surrounded. But Lewis, stalking his own intoxicating vision, brushed him off with a rhetorical question. “Who gets the bird, Dave,”Lewis asked archly, “the hunter or the dog?” Two years ago in a reminiscent mood, Lewis reminded Dubinsky of the exchange. “You were right then, Dave,” he said; and unable to admit so monumental an error without some classical allusion, he concluded the confession with a quotation from Mrs. Shelley.

From their accepted entree into a “respectable” organizing campaign in 1936, the Communists have built their own movement within the labor movement. After long investigation undertaken last year, the Research Institute of America concluded that sixteen national unions, all CIO, had consistently followed the Party line. The most important of them operate in maritime trades, metal mining and manufacturing, white-collar crafts, communication, transport, and government employment.

Strong Communist cells, many of which control important local branches, and which are striving to extend their control, operate in every single national CIO organization and in many AFL bodies as well. They are especially important in the entertainment trades across the country, in Hollywood, and in such traditionally conservative trades as painters, machinists, food service, and building service on the East and West Coasts. Local unions of AFL teachers and CIO newspapermen are in some places completely Communist-managed, and to a large degree, because they maintain an independence of their unions’ national offices, are autonomous Communist labor organizations.

Highly ostentatious efforts which have been made by the CIO top leadership to disassociate their organization in the public mind from Communism have been notably unsuccessful in rooting the Party members out of their positions of control in the constituent unions. This includes the recent and well-publicized attempt to hold the CIO state and city central labor bodies from providing support for all Communist causes. It has put a checkrein on endorsements of this or that Communist-sponsored organization, but it has not pried Communists from power in the unions they control.

4

THERE are many reasons which explain why the Communists have reached their present eminence in the labor movement. First, and most important perhaps, is the fact that they have run for office and presented their programs not as Communists but as militant trade-unionists. It is clear to everyone, including the Communist Party, that if the American rank-and-file worker is aware that he is making a choice between a Communist and a nonCommunist, he will choose the non-Communist almost every time. The Communists, therefore, with very few exceptions, have operated under some form of disguise. They have frequently presented themselves as progressives, anti-fascists, anti-militarists, patriots, international coöperators, and, always, as simple direct-actionists whose only loyalty is to the workers. Their disguise has been made most effective by their opponents in and out of the labor movement and by opponents of trade-unionism.

During the 1937 steel strike, for example, antiunion elements widely charged that the strike was a Communist operation. It was not, although some Communists were involved in it. The leaders of that strike were categorized as “reds.” They were not. On that occasion, and on many similar occasions before and since, promiscuous red-baiting has served the Communist purpose admirably. Workers, who know full well that Philip Murray is not a Communist, are made to feel that all red-baiting is unfounded and is motivated solely by anti-union sentiments, when they hear the Murrays charged with Communist affiliations. There have been so many phony cries of “Wolf! Wolf!” when there was no wolf, that union members, who must themselves do most of the job on Communists if it is ever to be done, have an understandable difficulty in getting excited about it. Thus, between assuming a protective coloration of their own and by having everything new or forceful in the labor movement blanketed as “red,” the Communists acquire the invaluable asset of near-immunity from identification.

With it they work like beavers. They distinguish themselves as laborers in the union vineyard. They never miss a meeting, never fail to speak on a question, never shirk an unpleasant or onerous task, never exhibit timidity on a picket line or in a conference with management. In short, they appear to be the most active, most interested people in the union. When they are in opposition to the union officialdom, they use every process of democracy to embarrass, weaken, and discredit the leadership. When they are in control, they use every device of totalitarianism to suppress all vestiges of opposition. The fully Communist-run unions are the most undemocratic in the labor movement. They have taught the old-line union bosses many a new trick.

Only in extraordinary periods of crisis do substantially more than 10 per cent of union members have a sufficiently active interest in union affairs to appear regularly at meetings. In such circumstances, a small Communist fraction, expert in parliamentary procedure, highly disciplined, aware of where it is going, can exercise tremendous and disproportionate influence. Many a union meeting has made vital policy decisions late at night after most of the people who attended have been worn out by protracted debate and gone home. And the decisions have been the decisions the Communists wanted because their group stayed on, deferring adjournment by one device or another for the very purpose of thinning the house until they could dominate it.

This is the problem that Roger Baldwin, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, was concerned with when he suggested that one of the ways for handling Communists in the labor movement might be for unions to make a rule to end all meetings by nine o’clock and to decide all policy questions and elections by referendum vote of the entire membership.

That would certainly cramp the Communists’ style, but it would hardly be enough to confine them to the limited place in the labor movement to which workers would themselves relegate them if these workers had the facts. The first requisite for fighting Communism, therefore, is facts. As long as the Communist Party is a legal organization in the United States, those who feel that it must be combated have no stronger weapon than information. What is called for first is an end of indiscriminate red-baiting, especially in the series of Congressional committees which have sought to make political capital out of calling everybody with whose views they have disagreed a Communist. Such haphazard and vicious name-calling, raised to the level of persecution by the sponsorship of government, has hurt two non-Communists for every Communist it has affected. But more to the point, it has discredited and debased, in the eyes of decent people in and out of the labor movement, the very necessary work of identifying Communists. Not much can be done, presumably, about non-governmental committees and organizations which make a profitable business of confusing genuine liberals and Communists. But they can be exposed for what they are, rackets for the most part, collecting contributions and dues from innocents on whose fears they play. Such organizations only make harder the job of honest, and persuasive, Communist identification.

5

WHAT is needed is a careful, continuing piece of research by a non-political institution, the high accuracy and objectivity of which is beyond question. During the war, Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, and a skilled staff of political and propaganda analysts, devised foolproof techniques for identifying every Nazi and Nazi sympathizer who was active in the United States. The Lasswell techniques, or their equivalents, can be adapted to Communist identification. Let Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, or some other such institution where substantial sums are expended on research into labor problems take up the work of following and identifying Communists and Communist activity. It may, indeed, prove to be the most important labor problem of all.

Give the anti-Communists within the labor movement — of whom there are a large but mostly futile number — an arsenal of provable facts with which to work, and the job of fighting Communists can be put on an effective basis.

What is called for next is a democratization of the unions in which the Communist leadership suppresses all opposition. In safeguarding the rights of individual members to democratic dissent, to free elections, and to true majority rule, it will be impossible to distinguish — and hardly desirable — between unions totalitarianized by Communists and unions throttled by other types of bosses. Public policy must guarantee the full rights of citizenship in and out of labor unions. The American Civil Liberties Union, sensitive to the rights of individuals and to the rights of the organizations which individuals join for their mutual benefit, has carefully drafted a bill which would amend the Wagner Act to provide for union democracy. The passage of that measure, or one which would achieve the same purpose, would be a powerful blow to the Communist forces. For, while the Communists use the freedoms of democracy to win control of unions, nothing threatens their retention of that control so much as the democratic practices which they immediately seek to extirpate once they have the power.

It is possible to list a large number of internal union changes which would react against the Communists. Some unions, for example, have a constitutional provision barring Communists, along with fascists and Ku Klux Klansmen, from holding office. But in many cases this has been a legalism impossible to implement because inconclusive and distorted data — all that may be available — are widely recognized as being inadequate proof.

Whatever fundamental internal union changes are developed to aid the fight against Communists will have to come from within the labor movement and can be little influenced from the outside. Make the battle equal and let each man be tagged for what he is, and the outcome will not long remain in doubt.

There is one very great, contribution which employers can make to the elimination of Communist influence in the unions with which they deal. It will require a basic change in their attitude toward unionism. They have long looked with disfavor— and that disfavor has been easily communicated to their work force — upon the employee who has seemed to take a too active interest in unionism. This has encouraged the natural apathy in most workers toward internal union affairs. The worker has paid his dues, heeded his union’s strike calls, followed its orders, but stayed away from monthly meetings. His employer, consciously or unconsciously, has abetted this indifference. That same employer often fails to see his own inconsistency when he later complains that the union with which he deals is run by a minority of his employees who are likely to be Communists. Employers must recognize the connection between the Communist problem and their hostile attitude toward any active unionist. When they do, they can help a great deal toward getting the wider member participation in union affairs which is necessary if trade-unionism in the United States is to reflect the anti-Communist sentiments of the overwhelming mass of American workers.

If the growing tide of Communist power in the labor movement is to be turned and if it is not to become renascent, the public has two great responsibilities. It must first see that the unions are not broken by hasty, ill-considered, or dubiously motivated legislation passed in a mood of hysteria engendered by strikes. Breaking established union institutions would drive the American labor movement underground and deliver it lock, stock, and barrel to the Communist Party. Only the Communists have the competence for running conspiratorial organizations in America today, and when the labor movement did come up again from underground, it would be brought up by them as a fullfledged revolutionary vanguard prepared to fight for state power.

Finally, most important of all, there exists the public obligation, which no citizen can escape, to prevent another depression. With their present resources, give the Communists national unemployment on anything like the scale of the early thirties and they will use it to seize more than part of the labor movement. Nothing that could happen in this country or in the world would better serve their power drive or the interests of their masters in Moscow.