THE POLITICS OF PATRIOTISM: AMERICANIZATION AND THE FORMATION OF THE CIO
Gerstle, Gary
Patriotism, in conservative periods like our own, is a tool used by the right to bludgeon labor and the left. In the 1980s, corporations are said to represent the essence of...
...At the founding convention of the National Unemployed League, Muste and his allies put their "American approach" into action...
...any nation so deceived and so dedicated to rugged individualism can long endure...
...Many workers first experienced Americanization during World War I. Political and cultural authorities, worried about the huge number of European immigrants and their children in the nation's cities, began demanding that all ethnic minorities demonstrate their unswerving devotion to America and its "War for Democracy...
...The Americanizers intensified their efforts...
...Thomas evidently felt compelled to invest the term industrial democracy with a world of socialist meaning...
...1 Why did so much activity result from so weak a piece of legislation...
...The scarcity of working-class protest during the first four years of the Great Depression, 1929-33, reveals how deeply conservative Americanism had sunk its roots into workingclass consciousness...
...Such activity did not require repudiation of their civic consciousness, only a reinterpretation...
...and the triumph of a conservative Americanism induced many radicals and labor organizers to redefine their politics in ways that fit American political discourse...
...In Congress, although a Republican, he regularly perched himself to the left of FDR...
...None achieved the credibility that Debsian socialism, with its deep roots in such republican traditions as citizenship, independence, virtue, and commonwealth, had once enjoyed...
...From the textile cities of New England to the refinery towns of the mid-Atlantic states to the steel towns of western Pennsylvania and Ohio, alliances of employers and middle-class ethnics conducted Americanization campaigns to win working-class allegiance to conservative political values...
...John Brophy, longtime radical unionist appointed by Lewis in 1936 to direct the CIO, told the jubilant sit-downers that their victory meant "the coming of industrial democracy to the men in these great plants...
...The act produced a mild (if brief) economic recovery that generated jobs and made workers more aggressive in voicing grievances...
...What they have overlooked is the degree to which Americanizers, by 1924, had institutionalized their programs...
...They, too, wrote a new Declaration, declaring independence from " 'the profit system of business, industry, and finance,' which had 'enthroned economic and financial kings . . . more powerful, more irresponsible, and more dangerous to human rights than the political kings whom the fathers overthrew.' " 9 A series of resolutions 89 were passed that were patterned after the Socialist party program and called for the abolition of America's capitalist system and its replacement with a cooperative commonwealth...
...This interpretation, however, overlooks the fact that for four long years of Depression, 1929-33, unions—whether craft, industrial, or radical—made little progress...
...Many scholars have mistakenly viewed the virtual closing of immigration gates in 1924 as the termination of the Americanization movement...
...He emphasized that employees must purchase stock collectively and that it should be common stock, which would give them representation on the Board of Directors...
...A CPLA Statement of Principles, in May 1932, declared: "We hold that the labor movement in America must grow up out of the American soil...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Walter dropped out of school at 16 in 1924 and apprenticed himself as a toolmaker, in part to pursue his interest in industrial arts and in part to help support the family and permit his two younger brothers to stay in school...
...The voices of trade unionists and radicals insisting on the insurgent character of American patriotism remained marginal throughout the 1920s and early '30s...
...They modeled their central document, "The Declaration of Workers' and Farmers' Rights," on the Declaration of Independence...
...Such symbols, language, and music reveal the success of the unionists and radicals in transforming the conservative Americanism of the 1920s into the insurgent Americanism of the 1930s...
...In a strike against Toledo Auto-Lite in early 1934, the first of the decade's full-scale battles between labor and capital, Louis Budenz and other organizers for the American Worker's party inspired thousands of Toledo workers with banners that proclaimed "17761865-1934...
...By 1922 the Federal Bureau of Education was distributing the Federal Textbook on Citizenship Training to more than 3,500 communities to aid local efforts in Americanization...
...But in the working-class world of Wheeling, West Virginia, high school was something of a luxury...
...A consequent steep 1920s' rise in the percentage of naturalized citizens among Eastern and Southern European immigrants—from approximately a quarter to a half of all Poles, Yugoslays, Italians, and Hungarians, for example—points to the rapid progress of Americanization...
...Yet the work of important members of Lewis's brain trust, such as W. Jett Lauck, an academic economist who wrote speeches for Lewis from the 1920s through the formative years of the CIO, suggests the development in the upper UMW echelons of a far more creative interpretation of the first principles of the Republic...
...From 1917 to 1927, each of the nation's 48 states passed laws requiring the teaching of the essentials of citizenship to all schoolchildren...
...These two historical processes—the spread of a single, political culture and the efforts of labor and the left to appropriate American values and symbols for their own cause—would contribute significantly to the massive working-class insurgency that was embodied in the rise of the CIO...
...Rather than accept the equation of Americanism with political conservatism, they began to point out that poverty and inequality violated the promise of American life, and they found in American political traditions the ideals and language to legitimate liberal and radical politics...
...A Senate committee investigating the 1919 steel strike ascribed the unruly and radical sentiments of so many workers to their foreign character and called for renewed emphasis on Americanization...
...it must face the realities of American life...
...When Norman Thomas attempted to define what he meant by industrial democracy in 1925, he found himself laying out not a specific plan for the reconstruction of industry but a complete program for the transformation of society—unionization, nationalization, farmer cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, a workers' party, democratic control of the machinery of finance and credit, and so on...
...After graduation, Marcantonio served an apprenticeship with Fiorello 86 La Guardia and eventually replaced him as U.S...
...The left is not only numerically weaker but far less certain of its mission...
...Boy Scouts went door to door in many immigrant communities distributing invitations to Americanization classes...
...On July 6,1936, over a nationwide network, Lewis threw down the gauntlet to all who would oppose "the great movement for industrial democracy" embodied in the CIO: 90 Let him who will, be he economic tyrant or sordid mercenary, put his strength against this mighty upsurge of human sentiment now being crystallized in the hearts of 30 millions of workers who clamor for the establishment of industrial democracy and for participation in its tangible fruits...
...Still, when Walter left for Detroit in 1927 to find work, he carried with him a determination to complete his high-school education...
...in 1921 The Socialist Review was renamed Labor Age...
...But as the Depression magnified the distance between the claims of American capitalism and the performance of the economy, these voices spoke with greater authority...
...Such a shift in schooling could easily trigger an assault on cultural pluralism in the society at large...
...In the fall of 1928, at age 21, he enrolled in the Fordson High School in Dearborn while working an afternoon-to-midnight shift as a die leader at Ford Highland Park...
...85 Citizenship training was hardly impartial...
...Lauck set forth a six-part program that he felt would establish an industrial democratic society...
...Lewis tried hard to convince his public that his union, if allowed to prosper, would strengthen American capitalism and the conservative Republican party of Harding and Coolidge...
...Marcantonio and the Reuthers would trigger no mass conversions to communism or socialism among their constituencies, but they would mobilize large numbers of workers to support the new industrial unions and the emerging social welfare state...
...They read works by American and English radicals, fought to block the introduction of ROTC on campus, set up a housing cooperative, sponsored public meetings and, in 1932, campaigned for Norman Thomas...
...On the one hand, this earlier generation of dissenters accepted the power of American political culture as an accomplished fact...
...Trade-union membership plummeted throughout the 1920s...
...Charles Merriam, The Making of Citizens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 119...
...Soon after, the two men joined to build an American radical movement, first in the Conference on Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) set up in 1929 and then in the American Workers' party they founded in 1933...
...Employers from around the country gathered in Massachusetts in 1919 to accelerate the Americanization of their employees...
...3 WALTER AND VICTOR REUTHER, leaders of the CIO drive in the automobile industry, also found inspiration for their radical political ideas in American history...
...Muste viewed his radicalism as little more than an attempt to make American society correspond to the American dream...
...It enlarged the ideological ground that they shared with moderate trade unionists who had spent the conservative '20s trying to demonstrate the close links between unionism and Americanism...
...Now we are engaged in a great economic struggle, testing whether...
...After 1936 he developed close ties to the Communist party...
...on the other hand, they sought to appropriate the symbols, values, and traditions of American political culture for their own causes...
...Victor Reuther later recalled — those who doubted the morality of the sit-down in 1937 were fewer than the doubters among the population in 1775, when American indepenTo Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Some youths became more self-consciously political...
...Muste, who spent the 1920s as educational director of Brookwood Labor College, the leading workers' education program in the country, had been enamored of the American dream, especially as embodied in Abraham Lincoln, since his days as an immigrant youth in Michigan...
...The "American approach" stressed by Budenz, Muste, Thomas, and others had brought many radicals closer to the majority of American workers, native-born and foreign-born alike...
...To preserve those achievements, democracy had to be extended from the realm of politics to the realm of the workplace...
...Democracy," Thomas wrote, "means, in Lincoln's phrase, government of the people, by the people, and for the people...
...And it spread throughout unionist ranks the conviction that American workers, not American capitalists, represented the essence of American civilization—and that the future of the Republic rested squarely on the success of organized labor in reaching its goals...
...They took their American civics lessons truly to heart and sought to reinterpret them in light of their own social experience...
...Conservatives have used American patriotic culture to legitimate attacks on all those they view as impediments to capitalist enterprise...
...Henry Ford employed spies from the American Protective League, a private espionage organization endorsed by the Justice Department, to uncover unionists and radicals within the ranks of his foreign-born workers...
...the contradiction between the party's democratic front and its authoritarian and subservient interior did much to discredit the efforts of other radicals who genuinely desired to root their radicalism in American soil...
...And the determination to root their radicalism in American political culture would later enable them to convince many moderate, even conservative workers to reinterpret American political traditions in ways that validated their own experience...
...The internationalization of capital (and thus the pressure of international competition on American workers) is far more prevalent today than it was in the 1920s...
...A concerted campaign to strip America's burgeoning immigrant population of traditional ethnic cultures has not yet occurred on a scale like that of the Americanization crusade of the 1910s and 1920s...
...The Reuther brothers, like Vito Marcantonio, had found in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln the spur to radical political action...
...Many youths rebelled against their education, usually not against specific elements of civics instruction but against the disciplinary function of schooling itself...
...In his book The Miners' Fight for American Standards (1925), John L. Lewis, then president of the United Mine Workers, offered a remarkably candid statement on his search for political legitimacy...
...Numerous patriotic groups, ranging from the well-established DAR to the newly established American Legion, concentrated on Americanization...
...The failure of the American Communist party during its Popular Front period to free itself from its subservience to Moscow and to introduce democracy into its own ranks rendered its Americanization campaign superficial...
...When employers embarked on a parallel campaign to break the power of unions, radical or not, they, too, draped themselves in the American flag...
...Rosenzweig, "Radicals and Mass Movements," p. 68...
...New York: LID pamphlet, 1925), p. 7; reprinted in The League for Industrial Democracy: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980), vol 1, p. 395...
...Such a compulsion was politically unfortunate, since it prevented Thomas and other socialists from offering an alternative conception of industrial democracy with sufficient specificity to compete with Lauck's plan, or Sidney Hillman's plan, or the plans being put forth by liberal employers such as Edward Filene...
...It then proceeded to the more ambitious goals of participation of employees in corporate management through joint management-labor committees and stock ownership...
...representative from New York's 18th Congressional District...
...This program began with independent labor organization, and adequate wages and conditions of employment...
...Socialists, such as Harry Laidler and Norman Thomas, who guided the LID, had difficulty translating the concept of industrial democracy into a specific political program...
...In 1919, for example, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID...
...The surge of unionism and radicalism in the war's immediate aftermath—especially the nationwide steel strike and the Seattle general strike of 1919—reveals how such efforts to shape a compliant work force failed...
...Some have argued that his plan for industrial democracy —a broad sharing of powers between management and labor within a capitalist framework —really signaled the start of his journey away from socialism...
...The popularity of the phrase "industrial democracy" among socialists in the 1920s reveals how much they, too, participated in the construction of an alternative civic consciousness...
...In 1926 Lauck published Political and Industrial Democracy: 1776-1926, in which he argued that over the 150 years since the American Revolution the huge corporations had developed beyond the control of the nation's democratic institutions...
...Yet the very success of this Americanization campaign produced unanticipated consequences...
...Members of 4C carried out the obligatory civic obligations—" selling candy and drinks at games in order to raise money for disadvantaged students...
...52-77...
...budding cells of unionists were infiltrated...
...Government organizations such as George Creel's Committee on Public Information and Frances Kellor's National Americanization Committee orchestrated the "crusade...
...1-11,53-129...
...The government cracked down on the civil liberties of radicals, destroying radical and "un-American" organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during the Palmer raids of 1919...
...But such a conclusion ignores the key to the Communists' success...
...The decisive feature of that culture was a reverence for the country's political heritage, values, and institutions...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...NOT ALL RADICALS, Of course, subscribed to this kind of American approach...
...I]ndustrial democracy is the application of that same idea to our economic life...
...Not only did the word socialist drop out of the ISS's name, it also disappeared from the name of its chief 88 publication...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes.O dence was won by challenging the tyrannical laws . . . of the British Crown...
...The favorite song of the strikers, as of CIO unionists everywhere, was Solidarity Forever, sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...Lauck made it clear that the point of stock ownership was not to enrich employees but to give them power...
...His "American approach" profoundly influenced A. J. Muste, the pacifist minister radicalized during the bitter 1919 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts...
...In part the answer 84 lies in the skill of such labor leaders as John L. Lewis in getting across the powerful message, "The President Wants You to Join a Union...
...This change reflected fears that socialism, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, had become a dirty word in American discourse...
...But these individuals shared with ever-increasing segments of the American working class a deeply felt civic consciousness...
...it must be built and controlled by the workers of America...
...s Roy Rosenzweig, "Radicals and Mass Movements: The Musteites and the Unemployed Leagues, 19321936" (unpublished paper, Cambridge University, 1972), pp...
...And it helped fashion an insurgent Americanism that would help workers rebel against their poverty and powerlessness...
...but its real purpose, Victor Reuther wrote, was to bring together older people who had returned to school while holding full-time jobs...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...But the fact that the party attracted hundreds of thousands through its Popular Front years reveals a depth of yearning for an Americanized radicalism...
...Lenin, not Lincoln, provided their blueprint...
...When Walter and Victor produced a brochure in the Depression's early years exposing the great disparity between the rich and the poor, they introduced it with a parody of the Gettysburg Address dramatizing the gulf between American ideals and American realities: Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new economic system conceived of the policies of "laissez faire" and dedicated to the proposition that private profit is the sole incentive to progress...
...ONE OF THESE POLITICAL YOUTHS was Vito Marcantonio of Dewitt Clinton High School in Manhattan...
...The political ambiguity of the CIO's Americanism should not be allowed to obscure its unambiguous accomplishments: it allowed workers of sharply divergent political, ethnic, and religious backgrounds to come together in a single movement for industrial unionism...
...A three-year surge in organizing ensued, bringing more than 3 million massproduction workers into the ranks of organized labor...
...179-80...
...Carl Sandburg's life of Lincoln," he added, "would give her a thorough idea of the traditions and lives of the American people...
...The unitary political culture fostered by the Americanizers brought the heterogeneous groups in the American working class together...
...Reuther, The Brothers Reuther, p. 148...
...By adopting the phrase industrial democracy as a substitute for socialism, Thomas could invoke the name of Abraham Lincoln...
...These actions, in turn, generated momentum for the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and for the founding of the CIO that same year...
...Yet to hundreds of thousands of American workers, this clause became hard and fast evidence that the federal government had placed its authority on the side of the nation's downtrodden...
...12 Both Victor and Roy Reuther, deeply involved in the Flint sit-downs, likened the ensuing celebration of Flint workers to that of a country achieving independence...
...A service and high-tech economy full of smaller, scattered firms will shape a different American working 91 class than the 1920s' heavy manufacturing economy of giant, clustered corporations...
...Throughout 1932, Socialists had been organizing workers, farmers, and the unemployed across the country into "committees of correspondence...
...Nevertheless, the ideological climate of the 1980s is strikingly similar to that of the 1920s...
...The clause was not meant to trigger the mobilization of America's working class, and the machinery set up to enforce it could never have succeeded in compelling employers to bargain with unions...
...W. Jett Lauck, Political and Industrial Democracy, 1776-1926 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1926), pp...
...Their father, an immigrant German committed to socialism, stressed the importance of education...
...For a condensed published version of this paper, see Rosenzweig's "Radicals and the Jobless: Musteites and the Unemployed Leagues, 1932-1936," Labor History 16 (Winter 1975), pp...
...These Americanization drives of the 1910s and 1920s deeply influenced the culture and politics of American workers...
...The CIO's rise in the 1930s is often regarded as a natural response to the hard times of Depression America...
...It did not take long for that message to travel by radio throughout the land...
...Workers began joining unions in large numbers...
...Progressive social movements in America, he reflected, rarely called for drastic changes...
...2 Bessie L. Pierce, Civic Attitudes in American School Textbooks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), pp...
...Such ideological attacks on the labor movement and its social-welfare programs have contributed to a steep decline of labor's power and influence...
...He responded enthusiastically to the "American approach" that Budenz laid out to a Brookwood audience in 1928...
...Many workers could not shake loose the belief that their unemployment was the result of a personal failure, not of a massive failure of the American system...
...Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1929), p. 198 Alan Schaffer, Vito Marcantonio, Radical in Congress (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), p. 194...
...229-30...
...Cultural conformity-100 percent Americanism—rapidly became a test of political loyalty...
...16-17, 50-51...
...This Americanism encouraged conformity and promised economic success to all those willing to work for it...
...Convention organizers had chosen the July 4th weekend to demonstrate the affinity between the unemployed of 1932 and the revolutionaries of 1776...
...7 THE DESIRE TO DEFINE a radicalism that might fit American political discourse is also apparent in the work of Louis Budenz and A. J. Muste...
...The fears generated by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution made tests of political loyalty far more stringent...
...Norman Thomas, "What Is Industrial Democracy...
...THE QUALITY of interwar radical attempts to integrate socialism with American political traditions can be debated at length...
...Many radicals were summarily fired...
...The scholar Charles Merriam charged that civics training often was being used to legitimate the existing political and social order by defending "the ideology of the propertied group against that of the Communist or other radical propaganda...
...While still a student in the early 1920s, he took charge of citizenship classes at La Casa del Popolo, a community center in East Harlem, and imparted his radical understanding of American history to the Italian workingmen enrolled in his courses...
...When employers refused to bargain, workers took their protests to the streets...
...The talents of Marcantonio and the Reuther brothers were not, of course, typical of secondgeneration Americans...
...To the extent that a conservative Americanism gathers force, the lessons of 1920s' radicals and trade unionists carry a message of special urgency...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Throughout the decade radicals were treated as outlaws...
...The dissatisfaction that these autocratic institutions engendered in their employees, Lauck wrote, triggered widespread and often violent protest, which would eventually undermine the political achievements of 1776...
...The emergence of the Communists as the dominant organization of the American left in the late 1930s has led many to conclude that internationalism structured radical discourse much more than nationalism...
...The NIRA contained a clause, 7 (a), that guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively...
...10 As John L. Lewis increasingly took his advocacy of the CIO to the air in the spring and summer of 1936, he spread a version of the idea of industrial democracy...
...By 1921 most universities and teachers' colleges had placed Americanization training in their curricula...
...The lonely work of trade unionists and radicals in the 1920s in building a civics culture that was an alternative to the dominant conservative Americanism aided in crucial ways the 1930s' efforts of American workers to reclaim the American Republic as their own...
...Their appeal rested on their ability to make themselves into the most "American" of the radical parties...
...An avid student of American history, Marcantonio began using the political principles of the Founding Fathers to support a critique of the poverty and insecurity that burdened the lives of Italian working men and women in his East Harlem community...
...That same year 400,000 textile workers from Alabama to Maine walked off their jobs in the largest industrial action in American history...
...Lauck envisioned employees accumulating enough stock to acquire majority control of their corporation—a democratization of capitalist enterprise.' One might dismiss Lauck's plan as impractical...
...The central concepts of the CIO's Americanism were compatible with a variety of political alternatives, ranging from socialism to corporatism to business unionism...
...Conservative Americanism, however, did not claim all Americans...
...Even conservative labor leaders like John L. Lewis found themselves snubbed by industrialists and politicians...
...Yet the compulsion is historically significant, since it reveals the pressures operating on socialists to redefine their radicalism in ways that would make it acceptable in American political discourse...
...But a more important part of the answer lies in the character of a political culture that made workers receptive to patriotic appeals...
...It encouraged these divergent groups to connect their fight for union representation to the revered American struggle to guarantee constitutional rights...
...Budenz, a radical labor organizer and editor of Labor Age from 1921 through the early 1930s, began arguing that American radicals had to free themselves from all the "isms" that so pervaded European radical movements and talk to American farmers and workers in the language of the Founding Fathers...
...Private citizens joined the campaign against subversion...
...More important still was the political inspiration workers derived from this legislation...
...The "American Plan" entered the vocabulary of industrial relations in the early 1920s as a term describing employers' efforts to eliminate unions...
...After unanimously adopting this document, the 800 delegates burst into "America, the Beautiful...
...When GM conceded the United Auto Workers' demand for union recognition in early 1937, the workers who made it happen—the sit-downers who had occupied GM plants in Flint, Michigan, for six weeks—emerged from the plants proudly waving American flags...
...Robert and Helen Lynd, authors of the sociological classic Middletown, discovered a long section in Indiana's 1921 Manual for Elementary Schools explaining to teachers why the right of revolution no longer existed in America.' Americanization as a device to legitimate the conservative order remained as pervasive in capital-labor relations as in education...
...I n the 1920s, many trade unionists desperately sought to evade the stigma of "un-Americanism," even trying to prove their organizations' 87 devotion to "God and Country" by denouncing radical unions and political parties...
...54-55,61-62...
...Notes Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), p. 236...
...But despite the limitations on the larger socialist project, the socialist determination to talk to American workers in a context and a language to which they could respond still yielded ample results...
...Woodrow Wilson's administration secured the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts that permitted the government to prosecute individuals or organizations whose language was said to profane the Constitution, the flag, or the military...
...John L. Lewis, The Miners' Fight for American Standards (Indianapolis: Bell, 1925), pp...
...Yet his work contributed to a larger ideological project: the elaboration of an alternative civic consciousness, challenging the conservative Americanism that dominated political discourse...
...When Victor arrived in Detroit in 1930, he and Walter enrolled in the College of the City of Detroit (now Wayne State University) and immediately organized a Social Problems Club, which they affiliated with the socialistic League for Industrial Democracy...
...David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp...
...Americanization activities commonly involved courses in English, civics, and American history, vigorous promotion of naturalization, and extravagant celebrations of patriotic holidays...
...But this charge cannot be leveled at many other socialists who increasingly turned to the concept as a way of promoting their vision in an extremely conservative age...
...A significant number of ethnic Americans still retained a degree of insularity within their ghetto existence...
...Local public and private institutions—such as elementary schools and adult education programs, patriotic hereditary societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), fraternal organizations like the Knights of Columbus, plus Chambers of Commerce, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the prowar National Security League, and employers like Henry Ford—they all put Americanization at the top of their agenda...
...In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Communists and Trotskyists denounced the Americanizing tendencies they encountered among Socialists and labor radicals...
...The past can never be regarded as anything but an imperfect guide to the present and future...
...The Communists' great period of growth came after 1935 when, upon order of the Cornintern, they abandoned the ultrarevolutionary politics of the Third Period and sought alliances with a broad range of progressive forces in American society...
...In May 1933, 4,000 delegates from these committees convened a Continental Congress for Economic Reconstruction in Washington...
...CIO leadership and shop-floor militants of various political persuasions would fight each other for 15 years to define the political character of the CIO...
...Such differences led to incessant squabbling among radical groups that severely hampered the development of the left in the early 1930s...
...The 1980s are similar in many respects to the 1920s, when a conservative Americanization campaign, designed to weed out cultural dissenters and political radicals from American life, decisively weakened the power of labor and the left...
...trade unions declined even in those industries, such as coal and textiles, that had no share in the decade's prosperity...
...In the 1910s Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers became one of the first socialists to trumpet this concept...
...They understood that the future success of labor and radicals in shaping American society would likely depend on their ability to demonstrate that they, not capitalists, were the true heirs of 1776, and that the welfare of the American Republic depended on the realization of their democratic vision...
...Somehow he found time to organize a 4C Club (standing for cooperation, confidence, comradeship, and citizenship), an organization the local Chamber of Commerce held in high esteem...
...Walter and fellow club members like Merlin Bishop, later active in the UAW, moved easily from civics and self-help to radical politics...
...9 NORMAN THOMAS'S SOCIALIST PARTY tried a similar American approach...
...The symbols and language of an insurgent Americanism pervaded the most important CIO victory of the decade—the triumph over General Motors in early 1937...
...In a 1947 response to a constituent's query about how to introduce his Czechoslovak bride to "American life and letters," Marcantonio recommended "the writings of Jefferson, Paine, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...instead they demanded only — a return to first principles—a reassertion in practice of the rules laid down by the Fathers of the Republic...
...To regain their legitimacy, socialists began to define their aims in Americanist discourse...
...Only the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 moved American workers from quiescence to rebellion...
...Arguably, American radicalism never fully recovered from the events of 1917 to 1919—political repression at home and Bolshevik triumph abroad—which wrenched American socialism from its indigenous roots...
...Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp...
...The sevenyear ordeal of Sacco and Vanzetti, culminating in their 1927 execution, symbolized the ostracizing of radicals from American society...
...As employers entered the Americanization campaign, Americanization also began to aim at making immigrants into productive and compliant workers...
...This insurgent patriotism should not be equated with radicalism...
...An exuberant New York Post journalist, Edward Levinson, would exclaim in 1938 that "labor was on the march as it has never been before in the history of the Republic...
...Occasionally these fearful conservative unionists admitted that knee-jerk antiradicalism could not solve labor's problems...
...Americanizers began demanding that immigrants give unqualified support to "quintessentially American" political beliefs, such as the sanctity of private property and free enterprise, and that immigrants renounce any affinity for "un-American" ideologies such as socialism...
...They also sought to demonstrate that "Communism was TwentiethCentury Americanism" and that Earl Browder, who traced his familial roots to 18th-century revolutionary Virginia, was a latterday Founding Father...
...but the conservative campaign to restore a more traditional form of education in American schools may soon lead to the abandonment of biculturalism and the restoration of American civics and citizenship courses as the centerpiece of high-school curricula...
...Citizenship training spread a conservative Americanism throughout the land...
...So broad, sound, and foresighted [was] the government structure of the Republic [he explained] that at most periods of our history a revival of those principles or adaptation of them to current conditions has been all that the most ardent champion of popular rights or proponent of public welfare need ask.' This, Lewis emphasized, was all that his United Mine Workers of America intended to accomplish in the 1920s...
...There are no simple answers to labor's dilemma, but history does suggest a model for recovery...
...In 1934, general strikes erupted in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco...
...They looked to the Bolshevik Revolution, not the American Revolution...
...He is a mad man or a fool who believes that this river of human sentiment, flowing as it does from the hearts of these 30 millions, who with dependents constitute two-thirds of the population of the United States of America, can be dammed or impounded by the erection of arbitrary barriers of restraint...
...In the 1980s, corporations are said to represent the essence of American civilization—unions its denial...
...The 1980s are not a replica of the 1920s...
...227-28...
...The state has lost much of its luster for radicals and liberals as agency of social transformation...
...John L. Lewis, "Industrial Democracy in Steel," United Mine Workers Journal 47 (July 1936), p. 3. 12 Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 312...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
