Historians disagree why the union movement never formed a labor party and why American workers have never embraced socialist parties in any numbers in the last ninety years. Some have argued that a strain of [[American exceptionalism]] made U.S. workers resistant to parties that emphasized class struggle; others have attributed the left's failure to its own successes in building strong unions, but at the cost of downplaying its own political and social agendas for the sake of unity or short-term gains. Others take just the opposite position: that the left lost its power to lead the labor movement by its ideological zig-zags. The CP's history within the labor movement can support all of these theses.
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2 The CPUSA Turns Left: The Trade Union Unity League 3 The Early Years of the New Deal and the Founding of the CIO 4 Organizing Basic Industry |
The Communist Party of the USA was founded in 1919, out of two groups who
broke from the Socialist Party of America when it refused to join the
Comintern. The original core of the CP believed that the triumph of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia meant that the revolution was at hand
in the West as well.
The CP's initial attitude towards unions reflected that
millenarian view. At the time of its founding, according
to a leader of the party, "it would have been difficult to gather a half
dozen delegates who knew anything about the trade union movement." The Party
also became a largely clandestine organization during the immediate post-war
years, as the Palmer Raids led to the arrest and deportation of
thousands of Party members.
The CP at that time looked on the American Federation of Labor as an
enemy to be destroyed in order to eliminate the temptations of reformism
rather than revolution. They also looked down on most trade union activities
as insufficiently revolutionary: even though the labor movement was engaged
in a great wave of strikes in 1919, including a general strike in
Seattle, Washington, the Party's members had no role in them. Instead
they urged workers to put aside their short-term economic goals and to
concentrate on overthrowing the state.
The Profintern, or "Red International of Labor Unions," forced the CP to
change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL
in order to make it a revolutionary body æ what an earlier generation of SP
members referred to as "boring from within." In order to accomplish this,
the Profintern recognized the Trade Union Education League, an
organization founded by William Z. Foster, as its U.S. affiliate.
Foster had been, prior to his agreement to bring the TUEL under the wing of
the CP, a syndicalist, who believed that workers would seize power through
workers' organizations, such as unions, rather than through political
organizations, such as a communist party. He had led the AFL's failed
1919 strike in the steel industry and had established particularly close
relations then with John Fitzpatrick, the President of the Chicago
Federation of Labor.
TUEL functioned within existing unions, trying to organize support for
industrial unionism, a labor party, organizing the unorganized and the
Soviet Union. TUEL strove to create alliances with leaders who shared
some of its agenda, while trying to build a base for left unionism at the
local level.
After some organizational successes, however, TUEL managed to alienate
Fitzpatrick, leaving them without major allies when the AFL denounced TUEL
as a "dual union" and expelled TUEL members in 1924.
The CPUSA lost even more allies when, under orders from the Comintern, it
withdrew its previous enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party
candidacy of Robert La Follette, Sr for President in 1924.
The CP, on the other hand, had some short-lived successes in the labor
movement without the TUEL's help. The CP had broad support in the early
1920s among the radical, largely immigrant, garment workers in New York
City. A number of CP members won leadership positions in three major
International Ladies' Garment Workers Union locals in New York City in
1924 and offices in other locals in Boston,
Chicago and [[Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania|Philadephia]]. They held on to those offices despite the
attempts by the Socialist leadership of the International to oust them.
But in 1926 the left leadership in New York forfeited everything they
had when they lost a strike of 40,000 cloakmakers. The local union
leadership lost the strike in large part because of the internal
factionalism within the CP: when the union had the opportunity to settle on
terms that were less than what the union had demanded, the union's leaders
went to the CP for approval of the deal. But the Party's fraction within the
union was reluctant to accept it, afraid that this would open them up to
charges of softness in intra-Party factional warfare. The strike dragged on
another few months, at which point the locals accepted an inferior
agreement.
That gave the International union the opportunity it needed: the Socialist
leadership of the International took over the exhausted locals after they
settled and their supporters were too dispirited to resist. While the CP
retained a strong base of support in the smaller Fur Workers Union, it never
recovered from its defeat in the much larger garment industry; on the
contrary, the ILG, led by David Dubinsky for the next forty years,
remained resolutely anti-communist thereafter.
The TUEL itself changed for brief period into the dual union that the AFL
had accused it of being. The TUEL led a strike of woolen industry workers in
Passaic, New Jersey in 1926 æ until, that is, the Comintern
instructed the Party later that year to abandon any independent unions it
had formed on the ground that these represented ultraleft adventurism. The
strike, which would probably have been lost in any case, ended six months
later in defeat after the AFL's Textile Workers Union took over leadership
of the strike.
The Comintern's repudiation of dual unionism in 1926 turned out, however, to
be only a temporary change in policy; in 1928 the CP began establishing
new CP-led unions in the coal, textile, food and garment industries and
renamed the TUEL the Trade Union Unity League in 1929. This change in
policy coincided with Stalin's turn to the left as he
moved against his former ally Nikolai Bukharin. CP leaders, such as
Foster, willing to make the switch, held on to their positions in the Party,
while those who did not, such as Jay Lovestone, were expelled.
The CP's Third Period stance towards unions was nearly as ultraleft as
its position in 1919 through 1921. While advocating a "united front from
below," the Party attacked other socialist parties as "social fascists" and
denounced the AFL as "an organ to suppress and disorganize the masses" which
workers should join only to "overthrow the reformist bureaucracy" that ran
them. The CP instead focused on founding new revolutionary unions in the
expectation that the collapse of capitalism was just around the corner.
These new dual unions were, in fact, often more like ginger groups than
unions, with few members and even fewer long-term members. Nonetheless these
groups did make some heroic efforts to organize the unorganized. In 1929
the National Textile Workers led a strike of thousands of textile workers in
Gastonia, North Carolina, who walked out, despite the NTW's attempts to
hold them back, after management fired five union activists. That strike was
crushed after mobs of citizens smashed up union offices and murdered a union
activist.
While local authorities, preachers and newspapers played up the National
Textile Workers' association with godless communism and its opposition to
white supremacy, it is unlikely that this made much difference in the
final analysis. The authorities reacted just as violently when the much less
radical AFL intervened after a spontaneous strike of textile workers erupted
in other mill towns several months later. That strike likewise ended in mass
arrests and the killing of three strikers, shot in the back by sheriffs.
The CP's efforts in mining were just as unsuccessful. The CP had once had a
good deal of support in the internecine struggles within the [[United Mine
Workers]] in the 1920s, when John L. Lewis used every weapon available
to defeat his rivals for union leadership while wages and working conditions
in the industry grew worse. The TUEL-supported candidate who ran for UMW
President against Lewis in the 1924 election was credited with 66,000
votes in the official tally æ nearly half what Lewis received. The CP later
allied itself, for a time, with John Brophy, whose "Save the Union"
slate probably would have won election to national leadership in 1926 if
the vote had been held democratically.
Lewis, however, effectively drove all of the TUEL and Brophy supporters from
the union after his victory in 1926. The CP later burned its bridges with
Brophy, denouncing him as a reformist.
The CP founded its own National Miners Union in 1928. It engaged in a
fierce struggle to undo wage cuts when miners struck in Pennsylvania and
Ohio mines in 1931, but lost the strike when mine operators chose to
recognize the UMW æ which had not been involved in the strike æ rather than
the NMU, then obtained an injunction to prevent the NMU from picketing.
The NMU also took on the leadership of a strike that the UMW had called in
Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931 with even more disastrous results,
since the union was not prepared to provide the relief necessary to permit
strikers to remain out for any length of time, particularly in the face of
attacks by "gun thugs." The NMU's strong opposition to racial discrimination
and wholehearted support for the Soviet Union also served to alienate it
from the mostly fundamentalist and predominantly white miners in Harlan
County. While the strike publicized the horrific conditions in one of the
most isolated parts of Appalachia, it did not produce any concrete benefits
for striking miners.
There were, however, some bright spots for the CP: their Food Workers
Industrial Union successfully organized cafeteria and restaurant workers,
particularly in New York, where many of the restaurant workers unions had
been taken over by Dutch Schultz as part of his labor rackets. Those
CP-led unions not only fended off Schultz's gangsters, but thrived, and
became dominant within the AFL [[Hotel
Employees and Restaurant Employees]] union in New York when they affiliated
with it several years later.
The Maritime Workers Industrial Union did not survive the Third Period, but
it left its mark. Sailors and longshoremen had a tradition of radical
politics and more or less spontaneous job actions; the [[Industrial Workers
of the World|IWW]] had been particularly active in both east and west coast
ports in the 1920s. The MWIU organized occasional strikes, attacked the
inadequate relief provided for unemployed workers by the YMCA and other
groups, and distributed the MWIU's newspapers.These programs attracted a
number of sailors and longshoremen, including Harry Bridges, who
subsequently led the west coast longshore strike of 1934.
The TUUL had similar limited success in the automobile industry, where it
established shop nuclei that linked the Party with the campaign for
industrial unionism. The CP was, however, more successful in organizing
unemployed workers in Detroit and other auto centers than it was in
recruiting or organizing auto workers.
The CP initially looked on the New Deal and the [[Franklin Delano
Roosevelt|Roosevelt]] administration as a form of fascism. That is not as
outlandish as it might sound seventy years later: the early New Deal, and in
particular the National Industrial Recovery Act, provided for a form of
corporativist rule, calling on industries to negotiate codes that would
regulate prices, production, labor relations and other matters with only
indirect government supervision. The government panels created under the NRA
generally gave in to employer demands and appeared to be more concerned with
preventing strikes than with protecting workers' rights or living standards.
But the NRA had a different impact than the Administration originally
intended. Workers flocked to unions for representation, often in advance of
any union organizing efforts, in the belief that Roosevelt and the NRA would
protect them. Lewis and the UMWA capitalized on this sentiment in 1933
when his organizers told miners that "The President wants you to join the
Union." While the UMWA organizers may have meant President Lewis, they did
not correct the misimpression on the part of many miners who thought they
meant President Roosevelt.
Workers engaged in a wave of strikes, the most since 1921, in 1934.
The largest and most significant were three giant strikes for union
recognition among longshoremen on the west coast, truck drivers in
Minneapolis, Minnesota and automobile workers in Toledo, Ohio. In
each case the strike became either a general strike or something close
to it.
In each case radicals, either associated with the CPUSA or other leftwing
parties, played key leadership roles. The CP and its allies, such as Harry
Bridges, played an important role in the west coast longshore strike. The
CP's influence depended, moreover, on the personal charisma of Harry Bridges
and the hard work put in by its members and sympathizers on the docks,
rather than on the MWIU itself, which disappeared when the new radical
leadership won office in the west coast locals of the ILA. While Bridges was
apparently never a member of the CP æ something the government tried to
prove, without success, in four different trials over more than a decade æ
he worked closely with Party activists and helped advance their careers
within the union.
The CP similarly gained influence at first in the newly formed [[Congress of
Industrial Organizations]], or CIO, on the strength of individual members'
work. Lee Pressman, the General Counsel for the CIO and later the
United Steelworkers of America, was a member of the CP when he started
with the CIO and remained closely associated with it for years after he left
the Party in 1936. The first publicity director for the CIO, Len De
Caux, was likewise a member of the CP throughout his years with the CIO as
were many more organizers and rank-and-file activists within the unions
affiliated with the CIO.
Individuals like Pressman and De Caux would not have considered working for
the CIO if the CP had not shifted its position from sectarian purity to
first a united front and later a popular front policy that favored
alliances with other "progressive forces." At the same time the New Deal was
turning to the left, in response to both the increasingly hostile response
by employers and the wave of worker discontent that had replaced the
apathetic resignation of the first years of the Great Depression. The
CP, having denounced Roosevelt as a fascist only a few years earlier, moved
closer and closer to embracing him.
At the same time the CIO and other progressive organizations and individuals
overcome many of their reservations about working with the CP. Of the two
hundred or so organizers that Lewis hired for the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee, sixty were CP members, with particular strength among the staff
responsible for organizing foreign-born and African-American workers and in
the Chicago area.
Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his
organizers, so long as he controlled the organization. As he once famously
remarked, "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake
them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets." He took the
same line in private, when David Dubinsky of the ILGWU asked him about the
communists on the SWOC staff; as he told Dubinsky, "Who gets the bird? The
hunter or the dog?"
The CP did not gain influence solely through seeking staff positions,
however. In the rubber workers' strike in Akron, Ohio that represented
the first test of the CIO's ability to turn mass discontent into union
gains, a number of rank-and-file leaders were also CP members. The Party had
a degree of presence, both at the local and international level, in the
United Rubber Workers union formed after the strike.
The CP also exerted a great deal of influence within the [[United Electrical
Radio and Machine Workers]], founded in 1936 by the merger of a number of
federal unions created by the AFL and small shop caucuses, largely made
up of CP activists and other socialists and radicals, at [[General Electric
Corporation]], Westinghouse Electric Company and other unorganized
companies. The CP grew even more powerful within the UE in 1937 when James
Matles, former head of the CP's Metal Workers Industrial Union, brought in a
number of locals after a brief affiliation with the [[International
Association of Machinists]]. Matles and other CP members and allies held the
bulk of the important positions within the UE for the next twelve years,
until the CIO engineered a split within it in order to separate the
Communist leaders from the CIO; they continued to hold power thereafter
within that portion of the union that was not raided by the International
Union of Electrical Workers.
The CP achieved even greater results, but less long-term success, working
within the United Automobile Workers. Like the UE, the UAW was also
formed in 1936 out of a number of federal unions created by the AFL
and locals from other unions in the industry. Of its 25,000 workers, almost
all came from outside Michigan.
One of the most prominent UAW activists in the early years of the union was
Wyndham Mortimer, who had led a strike against White Motors in
Cleveland, Ohio. Mortimer was elected Vice-President at the UAW's first
convention and might have been elected President if not for concern about
his Party membership.
Mortimer and the CP formed alliances at that first convention with [[George
Addes]], then the secretary-treasurer of the UAW, later its President, and
Walter Reuther, who headed the UAW from 1947 until his death in
1970. The CP maintained its alliance with Addes, the center of the
left-wing caucus within the UAW, for the next decade. Its alliance with
Reuther proved much shorter.
When the UAW decided to organize the industry by going after [[General
Motors Corporation]], Mortimer was sent to Flint, Michigan, where GM's
production was centered. Even at that early stage factional infighting
within the UAW, in particular between Mortimer and Homer Martin, the
first President of the UAW, threatened to derail the campaign. When Martin
pulled Mortimer out of Flint, Mortimer arranged for Bob Travis, another
union activist and CP member from Toledo, to replace him.
Travis played an active role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike, aided by some
veteran CP autoworkers inside Fisher Body Plant #1 æ but also by other
radical workers, some belonging to Trotskyist parties, the Socialist
Party or the IWW. The same pattern applied outside the plants: Socialist Party members, such as Walter Reuther's brothers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther, and the Socialists and ex-Socialists working for the CIO cooperated with CP members, such as Henry Kraus, the UAW's publicity director, with a minimum of sectarian bickering.
The CP, in fact, played down its revolutionary politics during the sit-down
strike. In part this was to avoid giving GM and its allies an issue to use
against the strike; in part it was out of fear of distancing the Party from
the strikers, who were, in the opinion of CP leadership, using revolutionary
means to achieve traditional union goals. The Socialists, by contrast, had a
much smaller base within the striking workers, but were much more inclined
to attach revolutionary significance to the sit-down strikes and to magnify
their own role in them.
The CP was even more circumspect in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.
The CP was anxious not to scare off its partners and employers in the CIO: its members therefore made no effort to advertise their Party affiliation and even took steps not to pack SWOC conventions.
Nor did circumstances give them much opportunity to rise to leadership. Unlike the UAW, which was born out of tumultuous struggles in which CP activists and other radicals played leading parts, the SWOC conducted a much more top-down organizing campaign subject to close control. SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP played an important role in recruiting and organizing members, but rarely stayed in one area long enough to cultivate the sort of relations with local leaders that might have allowed them to recruit them into the Party, if they had tried to do so. They simply did not have the freedom of action that Mortimer, Travis and others within the UAW did.
Nor did they have the same power. As staff members, Pressman, de Caux and
the SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP had, at most, only indirect
influence on CIO or SWOC policy and no independent base to rally support or
propagandize for other issues. Philip Murray, a former UMWA associate
whom Lewis installed as head of the SWOC, weeded out most of the Communists
from the union over the years after the initial organizing drives as the
SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America. By 1942 the purge was almost complete.
See alsoThe CPUSA's Founding and Early Years
The CPUSA Turns Left: The Trade Union Unity League
The Early Years of the New Deal and the Founding of the CIO
Organizing Basic Industry