The Tradition Reutherism
Sexton, Brendan
Brendan Sexton, who recently retired from his office as Educational Director of the United Automobile Workers Union, is a veteran trade unionist who participated as an organizer in the...
...In their local unions they prepared resolutions on issues for presentation to that convention...
...These were skills that could be used for good purposes and bad purposes...
...SEXTON: There are new people...
...I don't know who else would have slept as I did for many years, in hotels for $1.50 a night, away from my family, in towns where I didn't know anyone, where I was thrown in jail, where sometimes I did actually face danger...
...It's easy to forget now that the radical movement of the 1930s was a lot more significant than it is now...
...The aim that I had in education was to put workers in a situation in which they could learn that they really were competent human beings, that their ideas were worthwhile, that they could deal with ideas and that they could articulate them...
...HOWE: We also know that in the trade unions radicals did a hell of a lot of damage, and it wasn't only the "other kinds" of radicals, maybe some of our kind too...
...He never really lost touch with his roots...
...He cared about my approval, for example...
...Now, another question...
...Not that they ab sorbed any formal ideology, but they were independent, they couldn't just be pushed around or manipulated, and it was through them that the tradition you have been talk ing about really sustained itself through the years...
...They really sort of drifted away...
...I think you really understood what education as such is all about...
...GELTMAN: Let's turn to the race problem...
...And the only thing that kept me moving in those days was some kind of vision of what this movement meant...
...In the interview with him below, the questioners are two members of the Dissent board, Emanuel Geltman and Irving Howe...
...The radicals played a role...
...SEXTON: In '37, not too long after they began...
...The Communists were following a line which in trade union terms could only be called reactionary...
...Now later on, the Communists might have been again a so-called ginger group in the union movement, but certainly they were not then, and had their policies been adopted, it might have led to the destruction of the union at that period...
...The question arises, how far can educational work go in a union...
...GELTMAN: You mean there are younger guys that we don't know about...
...THE TRADITION OF REUTHERISM In your new book you and Pat found, here is a man in a shop who will go to great lengths to protect the rights of a black coworker, which by any definition seems to make him very progressive, yet in other respects, the same guy will do something that is pretty hard to take...
...The union in the plant, in the community, why we have strikes or don't, or is it democratic...
...SEXTON: In some cases, yes...
...About Black Lake, our family education center, I had a hell of a struggle in the union because the board members, including Walter, had a vision of a particular kind of curriculum...
...Brendan Sexton, who recently retired from his office as Educational Director of the United Automobile Workers Union, is a veteran trade unionist who participated as an organizer in the formation of the CIO...
...I knew there was no such thing...
...The regional director went with "B" to argue the grievance...
...Their formal politics might have changed, but they still maintained some of the values they came in with...
...I really did believe that workers should participate...
...Twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day —that kind of thing came out of our dedication...
...The people Walter Reuther chose to support are people that he could feel some confidence and some pride in...
...I first had a full-time assignment about four or five months after the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago...
...but I think of lawyers in steel towns, small Jewish merchants, and so on, who helped to organize the CIO...
...And they thought that you organize a curriculum, and people will come there and will get this and that...
...But my action came as the result of my feelings as a Socialist...
...I didn't have any doubts then about my belief that there was going to be a new world...
...And everywhere I went there were radicals who were helping to organize the CIO...
...As a result, your membership in the Socialist organization can't be much more than nominal...
...Of course, we have a continuing educational life in every region, there are always regional educational conferences and every region has at least one week of summer school, many of them two and three weeks...
...SEXTON: Well, that was interesting and difficult...
...HOWE: Our topic is the rise of "Reutherism" in the American trade union movement...
...I never asked a group of workers to go on strike...
...I don't know...
...It's hard to know in retrospect who was right about this, or wrong...
...They sort of drifted out, and it is interesting that they drifted out at different times...
...So when you hear this guy using that word you attribute to him all sorts of things which are not necessarily true...
...And so when I met "A" I said, "hey, what about this...
...I hoped I could get them to read...
...But the Communists espoused this openly...
...He was a much misunderstood guy...
...The people there were organized into makebelieve small local unions and they elected officers and committees to do things, and we had a mock convention at the end...
...Roy Reuther—I don't think Roy ever left the Socialist party...
...The radicals who lost faith were those who could not believe that...
...Now it didn't always work out, but many of those people are still there and the people whom they chose to work with also are the same kind...
...You're going to have a piece about Local 6 of the UAW in this issue of Dissent...
...How much can be achieved...
...These people would then get back to the local union...
...So we organized the curriculum in response to what people wanted to know about the union...
...Some of us then said that by and large this was done in a democratic way...
...SEXTON: There are one or two things that have to be said about this...
...Did it help or hinder...
...SEXTON: I suppose that the people who were ideologically committed were prepared to work hard...
...60 AN INTERVIEW WITH BRENDAN SEXTON...
...I was a young man who had gotten certain skills in the Socialist movement which Lewis found useful...
...SEXTON: I think that such a tradition is always carried on by people, and so the people that I chose to work with me in the education department of the UAW are people of like mind...
...The little union bulletin that was edited for years by Seymour Kahn looks almost the same as it did when Seymour was there...
...I mean, how you relate the achievement of a given moment to your larger aims...
...And "A" said to me, "you know, the word nigger with him—it doesn't mean all that much if he's willing to do what he did...
...Although all the radicals that participated in its organization have long since gone— Jack Conway, Ralph Showalter, Carl Shier, Hoagie Young—the local continues to be pretty much the same...
...HOWE: How did being a Socialist affect the work you began to do...
...Second, they were for extending the no-strike pledge for five years after the war...
...The movement gave us all a certain kind of training...
...The notion was put forward some years back that there developed in the UAW a stratum of rank -and-file militants, some of whom afterwards became local presidents and chief stewards, who were in some ways influenced by the ferment of the early days and who formed a core of union veterans...
...What happens a few years from now when he retires and some of the other older people, all of whom do share this rich experience, also leave...
...In retrospect, how did their political commitments affect their work as trade unionists...
...SEXTON: What is different about the UAW is that there is a real effort to involve people, and to emotionally enlist a man or a woman in the life of the union...
...Another friend of mine, "A," was elected a UAW regional director and he had told me beforehand he was going to fire "B" from his staff: "I am going to fire him because he is anti-Negro...
...SEXTON: In the '30s I did not often run across Socialist party members, just people here and there, a lot of small "s" socialists...
...SEXTON: The self-educated worker seems to be disappearing...
...One of the things that you have to understand about workers is that they are trained to be intimidated, they do not have the kind of confidence in their capacities that you would expect they should have...
...We also had some workshops that got to such things as collective bargaining...
...The only doubt was about when and how it would arrive...
...I don't know where the CIO would have found such people if they hadn't gone to the radical movement...
...I really did feel I had done something decent...
...I could not in honesty do this...
...One, you are not surprised that in the public school system there is a sequence of grades...
...One of the goals in worker education is to help people become autonomous, to persuade them that they really do have the capacity to deal with ideas and to articulate their own needs...
...I think a lot of other radicals didn't...
...Not just on the staff or in the union...
...HOWE: What is it that makes for a special quality or texture of a movement...
...The radicals who understood this about workers did not have any difficulty in settling for what they found, because they understood that many of the things the union was winning were in fact very significant, and that it was worthwhile participating in the struggle to win them...
...You go into a small town in Indiana and you find the UAW people playing a role in the local community, who have been enlisted in the local union and trained in it...
...I participated in many strikes in the Steelworkers Union and in the early days of the CIO, but to this day I have never asked a group of workers to go on strike...
...The UAW had struggled to end incentive pay and piece work in the big corporations—the setting of individual worker against individual worker...
...Those two, obviously, were anything but radical positions...
...Someone once wrote about intellectuals that they have their hidden capital, their education, and as a result they never really understand what motivates a man who has no education, who has no special talents, no special skills, who has to find at his job what he is going to get out of life...
...We did this the first night they came, and we set up a session so that wives would participate...
...In my experience organizing for the CIO, and most particularly for the Steelworkers...
...Since then there has arisen a school of historical "revisionism" which takes another view and feels that one of the reasons for what they regard as the stagnation of the trade unions has been the fact that the Communists, previously a ginger group, were smashed in the postwar years, the late 1940s...
...See p. 61.] Well, Local 6 illustrates this...
...And I think we produced some of them in the UAW...
...I don't know what to call them really, they were independent radicals who were critical of the society and who had some understanding of where they related to it...
...Several months later I saw that `B" was still on the staff...
...If you go to Michigan, to a state convention of the Democratic party, you will find that possibly one-third of the delegates will be UAW people, members or wives...
...If you become involved in a union and make it the kind of organization you think it should be, it takes up so much energy that you don't have much left for anything else...
...I felt I had no right to ask people to make sacrifices—it was something they had to decide themselves...
...Almost none of the people I know in the UAW decided to leave the Socialist party...
...Now I suppose one could look at the historical events and say that the CIO would have occurred anyway...
...HOWE: When were you organizing for the Steelworkers...
...I couldn't go with Norman's candidacy in the Steelworkers because there was enormous feeling about Roosevelt, an enormous feeling...
...Now, of course, the fact is that they had a sort of Socialist ideology and morality that led them to those positions...
...They really thought of that as their party...
...If you organize a good local, you can establish a tradition at the beginning...
...They were, for example, for incentive pay...
...We learned how to talk, we could all make speeches...
...I could not be a staff member of the union and . . . . GELTMAN: Which one, Brendan...
...And I have at least the hope that once they caught on to that, they could learn on their own...
...The best line ever written on this was by a guy who said, People leave the Communist party for the same reasons that they join it...
...Tradition doesn't survive on thin air, human beings carry it forward...
...But I would never urge the workers to go on strike...
...Only it was not imposed on them...
...SEXTON: The thing you are talking about I can best illustrate by telling you a story about a guy who was a friend of mine...
...This is precisely what in recent years has been derided by some intellectuals...
...What are the factors, other than the initiating role of Socialists in the early days...
...GELTMAN: You spoke earlier of the limited and noncompetitive aspirations of the average working guy, what he wants out of life, and the extent to which the union could satisfy him...
...Victor Reuther left many years before that, but he was a member of the Socialist party for many years after Walter left...
...So that even if the party had done everything it should have done, I don't think these people could have been more than nominal Socialists...
...You know, people say we have never had a class party in this country but for an awful lot of workers, the Democratic party was the class party...
...He was prepared to put his political life in the union on the line to defend the rights of this black man whom he nevertheless called a nigger...
...You would have a difficult time finding differences in the political outlook between myself and Bill Goode, who now has my job, and I think that the person who follows Bill Goode, chances are, will be like him...
...In what ways, as you see it now, did it help them with the organization of the UAW, in what ways did it hinder them...
...Alan Haywood, one of the leaders of the CIO, and I once had a long semi-drunken argument in which he talked about the Socialist caucus that operated throughout the CIO...
...HOWE: You're saying that being a Socialist gave a special edge, an intensity to being a unionist...
...GELTMAN: Other unions have an active democratic life which is structured into the union...
...If the party at that point had had a realistic sense of American politics, it might have been able to maintain a better relationship with these trade unionists...
...Let's call him `B...
...I do think that they would have stayed in the Socialist party, many of them, and I am fairly certain I would have, if the Socialist party had not put me in a position where I had to oppose the union's political choices...
...I guess I shouldn't be saying this, but it worked incredibly well...
...THE TRADITION OF REUTHERISM 59 I think, by the way, that you haven't said enough about Reuther, and since the man is dead I don't think I'll be accused of hero worship...
...It's important to keep in mind that the Communists in the CIO, most of them, were dedicated too...
...I never saw education in the UAW as ideological instruction, but maybe my goals were more limited than those of other radicals...
...And we mimeographed these questions and distributed them the next day...
...Do you have a sense that the tradition will continue, that the younger people in their own way will keep it going, or do you think it will slowly lapse...
...The UAW has a tradition of trying to involve people and trying to get them to use the local union as a vehicle for self-expression...
...Radicals generally played this kind of dedicated role and often it was difficult to face the kind of circumstances you had to face in organizing...
...HOWE: But how does a tradition perpetuate itself...
...Still, it may be that the separation was inevitable because the people in the UAW had the responsibility of running a tremendous organization which had its own needs, and this was a kind of responsibility very different from that of a tiny Socialist group in America...
...My experience has been that if you organize a local and it turns out to be, as we called it in the UAW, a bad local when you first organize it, it will always be a bad local...
...SEXTON: One of the things that has been overlooked is the enormous importance of the grievance procedure in the shop...
...I think most radicals have no sense of that...
...I'm not saying that the UAW is always or has always been 100 percent pure and democratic, obviously no institution is, but as unions go, it has a better record than most others...
...I think they are going to be heard from...
...In most cases, no...
...And we are especially interested, Brendan, in asking you some questions because you spent a good part of your life in this experience...
...Now the question is, how did these UAW people feel about their Socialist past...
...SEXTON: Well, I think that the people that stayed in the union were people who did not have too idealistic a conception of what workers were and what they wanted—and who were, therefore, prepared to accept the reality of more limited goals...
...You see, I had a great feeling of exultation when the union won pensions...
...Thirty years ago there were many more guys like myself than there 58 AN INTERVIEW WITH BRENDAN SEXTON are now...
...To an outsider, it sometimes seems as if it is always on the same level, that is, if you pick up the trade union paper it is the same as it was 20 years ago...
...I know that this problem is really bothersome to people who do educational work in the unions...
...The street-corner radical agitators were very often self-educated workers...
...That happens with many workers...
...This already, I think, gave a radical in a trade union an advantage over other guys...
...Which can, of course, be deceptive...
...I really felt that was worth struggling for...
...He made sure that at every convention Carl Shier was recognized to speak, and not only Carl but other dissenters like that, because he really did have some feeling about having a responsible radical opposition...
...SEXTON: Well, the Communists at that point were anything but a ginger group...
...Guilt or relief, or did the pressures of day-to-day union work make it impossible to spend much time thinking about it...
...Walter was a much different man at the age of 40 than he was at 25, but he still was in touch with his roots in the Socialist movement...
...GELTMAN: What about education on the local level...
...SEXTON: It was in 1940 that I decided not to vote for Norman Thomas...
...And I know that this had an effect on my work, and the way I approached working people and dealt with them, and the care I took that their rights were protected and that they were given opportunities to participate...
...And then the gratification that comes to a guy who is on the job, you know, and has some son of a bitch misuse him and then is able really to do something about it...
...SEXTON: Well, one special element in the UAW was Walter Reuther, an enormously important figure in creating the kind of atmosphere that existed in the union...
...HOWE: Let's see if we can sum some of this up...
...SEXTON: Except that Lewis did turn to the radicals...
...HOWE: You spent a good part of your life in educational work for the UAW...
...We learned how to make a motion, how to organize a caucus...
...I think Leonard Woodcock was a member for some time after Walter left...
...And my friend "A" says, "Suddenly I realized that to `B' the word nigger didn't mean what I thought it meant...
...He began to name people who I knew were not Socialist party members, along with people who were, and he was persuaded that there was a Socialist caucus because he traveled around the country and found that these people were always lined up on the same side of particular issues...
...We then got them to list all their questions...
...Suppose we had signed five-year contracts with Ford and General Motors and Chrysler pledging no-strikes for five years after the war...
...SEXTON: We shouldn't diminish the role of radicals in the great CIO organizing effort...
...GELTMAN: What about your Black Lake program...
...56 AN INTERVIEW WITH BRENDAN SEXTON SEXTON: The people I know have continued to feel that they had a special approach to trade unionism, a special mission...
...HOWE: Let me pull you back to one more historical question—remember there was the big fight in the UAW when Reuther destroyed the influence of the Communists...
...THE TRADITION OF REUTHERISM SEXTON: Difficult, but not impossible...
...Can you tell us how the process of change actually occurred...
...My sense of it is that the UAW did something remarkable on the national level, but were you able to achieve much in the ongoing life of the local...
...HOWE: No...
...And that's what I really devoted my life to...
...GELTMAN: Brendan, at a certain point, the people around Walter Reuther decided they had to leave the Socialist party...
...And I have to assume that other people felt as I did...
...He chose people like Leonard Woodcock and Doug Fraser and Jack Conway to work on his administrative staff...
...GELTMAN: But just as a historical fact, the great figure in the CIO was John L. Lewis, who could hardly be described as a radical, even though he was a bugaboo to the American establishment at that time...
...And he had an anxiety to appear morally acceptable to himself, so he cared about the acceptance of even the Socialists whom he sometimes put down...
...A great many workers in this country at that time had a real class feeling about the Democratic party...
...I said, No, we won't have any fixed curriculum...
...we cited it as an example of how to cope with the problem of Stalinism politically...
...Now, there is kind of a contradiction here...
...They lost the argument, and when they came out of the company's office `B" said to "A," "You know they wouldn't try to do that to that poor old son of a bitch except that he's a nigger...
...I should add that much of the CIO organizing was done by nonradical and nonpolitical unionists, many of them anonymous rank-and-filers who made great sacrifices...
...And of course you could have no decent radical society without such a procedure...
...They did have a vision of a new society, and not all were villains or blossoming totalitarians...
...He said, "let me tell you a story—I went to his home plant, his base in the union, and this guy was preparing to pull the workers out on strike...
...Not all, and no doubt only a minority, but an important number of them...
...People are sent from the local unions to attend summer schools...
...For many years he worked closely with the Reuther leadership of the UAW...
...I have said to them, here are the alternatives and here is what people in these circumstances do...
...HOWE: This seems to be of tremendous importance, not only for the UAW, but with regard to politics and intellectuals...
...sometimes when I was in volved in a grievance procedure, to get a guy his job back, a guy who really needed the job, there was enormous gratification in that...
...The Socialist party and the Communist party and other radical tendencies had many more members and supporters than they have now...
...The Printers Union has a unique kind of democratic life, yet it doesn't have the ambiance one associates with the UAW —that special tone...
...Now, that is not true of every Socialist and I don't mean it is true only for Socialists...
...Then we said, Now try to go over these things, and we took those questions they regarded as important...
...And you know that if you have an educational effort in the larger society you have to start with a primary level...
...Even though it has given just a limited kind of freedom, it brings enormous satisfactions to the union men who play a role in that procedure, the stewards and committeemen who argue cases and finally make that goddamned foreman backtrack after he has misused some human being...
...And so the workers struck, and they stayed out on strike for four or five days to get this black man his job back...
...It made him more glib, it made him faster on his feet...
...I had never seen people respond to anything like this...
...I had a real feeling when I was organizing for the CIO that I was helping to create a new world...
...I think, to use an old radical cliche, "it was not an accident" that I was hired by the CIO...
...For example, there is in all unions an increasing prominence of black leaders...
...I don't want to seem melodramatic, but I was shot at...
...Some of the early UAW leaders were Socialists or other kinds of radicals...
...SEXTON: Also in the kind of organization that we put together...
...I know that I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life since then...
...I fought with 54 AN INTERVIEW WITH BRENDAN SEXTON them but they were trying to build an organization pretty much for the same reasons I wanted to...
...There are guys that are members of the union now, 30 years of age and younger, local union presidents, men who write to me here, young black guys from Detroit who are sort of keeping in touch...
...And we got these people and organized them in small groups and we then said to them, what do you want to know about the union, what questions are you going to ask of the union...
...People were drifting away all over the country, and in the process the Socialist party changed...
...What makes for the special democratic tradition of the UAW...
...Even the teen-agers—they organized a teen-age local and they got into this thing and when it came time to debate the resulting resolutions— even resolutions on things like should marijuana be legalized, what should be the role of youth on Vietnam, whatever they were interested in, you know...
...If you are trying to get an education program in the union, you always have to keep in mind the fact that a large part of the interest in education is going to be manifested by guys who know nothing about these basic skills—how to make a motion, to handle a grievance, and so on...
...GELTMAN: But hasn't that become as difficult for the UAW as it has for many other unions because of changing times...
...And that is the tradition those radicals established in the local...
...So that even though he was conservative in many ways, he had to turn to the radicals...
...We have a number of reasons for the special character of the UAW: the role of the radicals in the formative period, Reuther's ethical cast, and then a whole group, not really organized, but people who came out of the political movement and devoted their lives to the UAW...
...SEXTON: Yes...
...How deeply can any educational aspect of the union penetrate...
...It was youth, too, of course, but also dedication to an ideal and some feeling that the creation of this union movement would bring us closer to that ideal...
...After all, Leonard Woodcock was part of the original Reuther group in the union...
...I was often quite critical of him, but it would be a mistake not to appreciate his enormous importance...
...And you have to keep on doing that every year, just as though you were opening up an educational system every year...
...That's important...
...HOWE: One problem radicals always seem to face when they get involved in trade unions is that they come in with certain preconceptions about workers...
...We know that very few people come to a local meeting, and it is hard to believe that many local meetings pay much attention to education...
...Gradually, as a result of their experience, these preconceptions have to be changed or modified...
...You told me that you would fire him because he was anti-Negro...
...Which of the earlier views still held and which not...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
