Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950
by Rosemary Feurer Champaign-Urbana,
University of Illinois Press, 2006.
When I told a colleague, a brilliant progressive historian of Africa and a mid Westerner, that I was reviewing an excellent book on militant unionism in the Midwest, he said that he was both happy and surprised that labor history was still being written. He then asked hopefully if the book dealt with labor in Milwaukee, where he had grown up.
I had to tell him that Rosemary Feurer’s Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950, deals with St. Louis rather than Milwaukee, but that it is a beautifully written and well researched application of recent labor history approaches to a major American city, albeit one that, unlike Detroit, Chicago or New York, has not been studied extensively.
The old craft union oriented conservative labor history taught in the first half of the 20th century was essentially narrow political history of trade unions separate from social struggles and the larger political context. Philip S. Foner and others pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s the development of an anti-capitalist history of American labor, which related the labor movement directly to ongoing social movements and struggles and, in a more sophisticated way, to the larger political context.
In the early Cold War era, a variety of anti-Communist, anti-left scholars actually appropriated much of Foner’s approach while denouncing him and the left generally. They tended to celebrate labor’s alliance with the Democratic Party only, and either omitted or distorted the role of Communist trade unionists, making claims that often went unsupported by even their own research.
Out of the 1960s came a new labor history as social history. This new field served as an attempt to look at communities and influences on workers, outside of both traditional labor political history and the relationship of labor to politics and government. Influenced by both this labor history and the larger upsurge of social movements in the country, some historians began to explore radical unionism and to rewrite the history of Communist activists in labor and other areas of life. They challenged the “conventional wisdom” of professional anti-Communist writers like Theodore Draper, who had left the Communist Party shortly before World War II. Draper and a handful of anti-Communist writers typically portrayed the Communist Party as a narrow, one dimensional organization controlled and directed by the Soviet Union and placed its activities outside of the larger social and political context. They expressed little interest, much less empathy for the struggles of workers or the achievements of Communist Party activists.
An intense backlash against this new labor history of the Communist movement and the labor left has occurred since the 1980s, a backlash which focused primarily on espionage and conspiracies. The work of Harvey Klehr, for example, mimicked the House Un-American Activities Committee, and ex-New Left historian Ronald Radosh burlesqued the tirades of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Still, the new, more honest labor history of the Communist movement has continued to advance, as scholars have come to discredit the questionable research of the Klehr-Radosh group and seek out interviews with activists, taking off the once mandatory blindfolds of the Cold War.
Rosemary Feurer’s work continues this labor history in the best sense and advances it in important ways. First she looks at labor in St. Louis, specifically at industrial labor in the electrical industry in its adversarial relationship to capital. St. Louis electrical appliance industry capitalists, “independents,” from the early 20th century on, “competing with GE and Westinghouse, worked with capitalists in other industries to develop a low wage regional labor market that would “protect” them from absorption by the much larger national firms.
These capitalists understood the necessity of gaining community support and formed organizations like the Citizens Industrial Alliance (with the prophetic acronym CIA) to advance “open shop campaigns.” They also used conventional espionage and blacklisting strategies, established a legal department to coordinate anti-strike injunctions and other actions against unions, and even a created technical training school and employment agency to undermine craft union apprenticeship programs and remove any influence that unions had over who would work.
The CIA ideology and policy of making St. Louis into a cheap labor capitalists “paradise” accelerated during the Great Depression, as local capitalists joined with the political power structure to advertise St. Louis as an ideal place for investment, where already low wages were cut in half between 1929 and 1933.
But labor, led by a remarkable cadre of Communist Party militants and allies, challenged this dictatorial corporate rule with a militant vision of class conscious “civic” unionism. This vision, as Feurer shows, without being explicitly socialist, was anti-monopoly and helped to develop both an anti-capitalist consciousness among workers. Even after they were able to ally themselves with both local and national anti-Communist labor factions and local and national governments to isolate and purge left unions in the Cold War era, St. Louis capitalist experienced great difficulty in eliminating the practical expressions of that consciousness in labor contracts, Feurer reveals.
Here, Feurer is really at her very best in telling the story of worker’s struggles. She introduces us to labor activists like William Sentner, an open CPUSA member and local U.E. leader, and Herschel Walker, an African American worker from Arkansas who joined the CPUSA-led Unemployed Council movement in the early 1930s and went on to play as a CPUSA member an important role in labor and anti-racist struggles in the decades to come.
Just as maintaining at least passive community support for their activities was essential to the factory owners of the CIA, developing active community involvement with and support for labor was essential to the successful campaigns that Sentner, Walker and others would lead in developing the U.E in St. Louis.
Feurer helps to dispel a great many myths propagated by both traditional anti-Communist labor historians and also left-influenced writers. First, the accusation that Communists were always “hiding” their political affiliations breaks down in the St. Louis context where William Sentner was an open Communist, even though it led to many difficulties for him throughout the period.
The simple divisions outlined by Draper and others between a radical “Soviet America” third period in the early 1930s and a Popular Front period where Communists “infiltrated” organizations also breaks down in St. Louis as Feurer shows a great deal of continuity between the militancy of the early 1930s and the late 1930s. In the early years, for example, Unemployed Council members carried American flags along with Red flags. And in the late 1930, during the Emerson Electric sit-down strike, Sentner both defended his Communist commitments and his union’s support for advancing inclusive democratic unionism as part of a larger inclusive democratic community. Feurer also shows the continuity of the capitalists' commitment to create and control their own mass organizations and use political power to maintain cheap labor, even though their specific tactics change.
This militancy and commitment to workers rights and human rights enabled the St. Louis labor movement to fight back against the anti-labor backlash that began with the Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel in 1937. That backlash intensified as the recession of that year saw a large rise in unemployment, and, as the decade drew to a close, by the complex global dynamics, such as the rise of Hitler and the coming war.
It is also important to remember, as Feurer’s narrative displays, those NLRB examiners, who supported labor against the corporate lawyers, significantly advanced labor’s rights, a reality which capital understood and largely reversed through both the Taft-Hartley Act (1947). In the Maytag sit-down strike of 1938, the NLRB held hearings on worker grievances against Maytag, and the NLRB trial examiner denied Maytag attorneys attempts to focus on Sentner’s Communist political affiliations. In what stands out as a truly bizarre moment, Feurer writes, “Fred Maytag was alarmed especially at the testimony from the strikers wives, saying that ‘it reminded him of Madame Lefarge and the women of the French Revolution.’' Although Feurer doesn’t really comment on this, one should note that Maytag had somehow converted Madame DeFarge, the fictional villain in Charles Dickens novel of the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, into “Madame Lefarge,” a real historical figure standing behind the sit-down strikers in 1938, preparing to send industrialists to the guillotine. But history and literature probably weren’t so big in the Maytag family.
Feurer helps us to further understand the positive effects of World War II – if war could be said to have positive effects – in advancing democratic “civic” unionism. She ably contrasts democratic 'civic' unionism with the older conventional historian's belief that the no-strike pledge and maintenance of membership policies of the War Labor Board produced automatic paper increases in union membership and disguised the conservative nature of its leadership.
In the process, Feurer also demythologizes Harold Gibbons, an anti-Communist unionist who is often portrayed as a hero in labor histories across the political spectrum. Gibbons, who opposed the no-strike pledge during the war, allied himself with right-wing unionists after the war and supported conservative Republicans against labor-supported Democrats in local elections during the war.
Feurer also develops a sophisticated analysis of Stuart Symington, the smooth executive who took over Emerson Electric. Symington both worked with and against Sentner and the UE, and eventually become a prominent “Cold War liberal” Democratic Senator from Missouri, closely allied to the military industrial complex nationally. Her treatment of Symington as an executive helps to clarify both his business and later national political career.
In explaining the postwar repression against the Communist and allied left Feurer agrees with Sentner (whose wife Toni was threatened with deportation to Yugoslavia) that it was the CPUSA’s “Soviet connections,” not the policies that he represented as an open Communist and trade union leader, that workers rejected. She summarizes brilliantly what those policies were: “the use of sit-downs to gain more workplace power; the attempt to make the union a cardinal part of transforming their communities; the assertion that workers should have more democratic control over shop floor regimes, from pay systems to group grievances; the advocacy of democratic worker role in economic planning, the idea of using the strongest link within the union to build power. Other issues, including racial and gender justice demands over time and through activism became a part of the landscape of the possible in the district.... It is worthwhile to point to workers such as Otto Maschoff(U.E, militant) who from local labor activism became a leading advocate in the District of an internationalist, anti-racist, gender conscious rights agenda without moving more than fifty miles from his birthplace.” Historians are hard-pressed to find such a broad and global understanding of democracy held by working-class people in that period outside of the context of a Communist-led or influenced labor movement.
In the postwar era, those who purged Communists and their allies did great damage to this democratic, worker-community based trade unionism. By depoliticizing large numbers of workers, unions became less and less effective at defending their rights. Eventually, anti-Communist union leaders both undermined union democracy and failed to protect their members jobs as capital was exported to first to low wage regions within the U.S.(which the postwar anti-union shop Taft-Hartley law helped to set up) and eventually, abroad. Such policies of creating low wage regions to make firms “competitive” were reminiscent of the strategies and campaigns that the St. Louis Citizens Industrial Alliance (CIA) had developed in the early 20th century and constituted major defeats for St. Louis labor.
Both the practical anti-capitalist legacy of the labor movement in St. Louis continues, a legacy that workers and trade unionists everywhere can learn from and revive, because it combines rather than separates questions of workers control and rights with “bread and butter” questions of wages and benefits. As the history of postwar labor shows, those who in effect abandoned the former to advance the later undermined both.
In conclusion Rosemary Feurer has written a book that contributes to demystifying the history of labor, its conflicts with capital, and the tactics and strategies it employed when it won its greatest victories. As such Radical Unionism in the Midwest, holds great value for those who see the past as a guide to understanding the present and building the future.
