On Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg's Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers' Union, Local 1199

...It should be remembered that it was the same Harry Van Arsdale, and the building trades that made up the core of the Central Labor Council, who were the objects of summer-long demonstrations in 1963 that at their peak involved more than 1,200 arrests daily at a Brooklyn construction site, protesting the continued city-wide, systematic exclusion of minority workers from the trades...

...The result is that the authors cannot recognize that this specific culture carries with it attitudes toward religion, types of educational experience, and patterns of political and institutional loyalty that differ sharply from the cultural experiences of many of the members...

...A second meaning raises the question of the union's relationship with the American Communist party in light of 1199's image as a democratic institution...

...Davis's frankness is refreshing, even if the problem demands a more searching analysis...

...indeed, these events overtook Fink and Greenberg as they wrote their book...

...Perhaps, one wishes the authors had replied, a dented steel drum...

...At root the problem is that the authors treat that leadership culture in a moralistic manner that places it beyond historical analysis...

...A black activist for more than two decades by the time she assumed the presidency in 1982, Turner had worked her way up the union ladder and won the fierce loyalty of many black and Hispanic workers...

...As the first book-length treatment of 1199, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone does contribute to our understanding...

...Did no one ever acknowledge that her "stupidity" may have masked a profound cultural chasm...

...Fink and Greenberg stress the larger political arena as central to collective bargaining for these workers...

...Far more important was their belief in a new cosmopolitan identity, their belief that through intellect and politics they had transcended their particular ethnic origins...

...On the one hand, the reader is frequently told that the key to 1199's organizing success lay in its ability to achieve, as in the 1959 strike in New York, the "effective integration of union organizers with indigenous work group leaders...

...In this context claims for a "labor-based vision of social reform" are but rhetorical and wistful...

...Turner's religious beliefs, unfortunately noted only in limited footnotes, perplex them...

...Unbeknown to these activists there was another structure within the union whose presence was widespread but whose scope of influence remains unclear...

...Without reflection on the cultural world he helped create within the union, Davis could only blame the "victim" for the problem...

...The authors justly praise 1199 for its commitment to interracial unionism, for its celebration of cultural diversity among its members, and for its embrace, long before it became politically fashionable, of a rainbow-coalition approach...

...But they seem genuinely confused, as undoubtedly many of the leaders themselves were, as to how and why Doris Turner turned out as she did...

...Unable to see that rank-and-file members and activists were able to maintain, simultaneously, public and private identities, Fink and Greenberg have written a study of a leadership largely as it saw itself...

...I'm not saying they're going to become inveterate theater goers, but like Jewish mothers say about chicken soup, 'It ain't going to hurt.' " This theme of secularization, and perhaps even Americanization, filtered through the union, although not everyone embraced all aspects of the idea...

...Fink and Greenberg pay some attention to the explosive racial aspect of the dispute...

...Even in its benign form it had more than a touch of condescension...

...Important improvements in wages and working conditions went hand in hand with the union's presence in the political world...

...Questions that might have been raised by the Bronxville experience might also have helped to comprehend organizing failures in Durham, Baltimore, Dayton, and Pittsburgh...

...So traditional was their selfperception, moreover, that union leaders refused, in order to protect jobs, to advocate closing municipal hospitals—even though they recognized the value in fiscal and medical terms of so doing...

...To their credit the authors do recognize that the union's governing structure, centralized in the person of Leon Davis, "verged" on a benevolent despotism...

...Given the leftist world view, with its belief in the power of "an exploitative and corrupt corporate and SPRING • 1990 • 269 Books political world" to influence working people, the culture of workers qua workers was also suspect...

...In a relatively short period, Local 1199 has achieved notable successes in improving the wages and working conditions of its members...

...The image of 1199 was now called into question...

...As late as the early 1980s, the authors reveal in a footnote, "[A] party-based network, a kind of 'club within a club,' probably did reassert itself...

...and they comment that Davis and other top leaders kept a "permanent public silence" concerning their own past affiliations...

...Is it possible that there were other ingredients than "Militant Minorities," available dollars, and a sympathetic governor that were essential to success, especially during the early years of hospital organizing...

...They also note that the leaders operated out of a quite different cultural matrix than did the majority of members...

...Without the guidance and direction of the union elite, the union's very success might lead workers astray...

...But the viciousness of the factional fighting suggested that even more powerful, disruptive issues were at stake...

...As Leon Davis said most bluntly: "We took backward people and elevated them...

...With a minor exception they received no funding from the union and were never obligated to submit their work for approval...

...Believing as they do that "it is the duty of historians to try to reconstruct big events with an eye to the contributing force of many smaller ones," they argue that a community wide political engagement emerged from hospital organizing, proved central to 1199's success, and reasserted "a labor-based vision of social reform...

...Catholic workers, one Hispanic organizer commented in the 1960s, were terribly difficult to organize because "when they see a nun, [they] think it's something high...

...In these areas, the authors' uncritical embrace of the SPRING • 1990 • 267 Books progressive image of the union largely prevents them from developing a critical analysis of the more troublesome complexity their own research revealed...

...I would note three: the problem of union democracy, the analysis of the union as a bargaining agent, and the interpretation of the internal politics and culture of the union...

...Just the opposite...

...Nor were these "habits" simply a memory of things past...

...How do you teach a world view...

...To us it was like breathing...

...The authors provide detailed information on both the growing membership and the important improvements in wages and work conditions achieved during the 1960s and 1970s...

...In the authors' inability to understand the relationship of these two traditions is revealed the central weakness of their analysis...

...The question of the union's democratic structure has at least two related meanings...

...Try as the original leadership group might to infuse their breath into Turner, she resisted, and was considered lazy and stubborn by her "teachers...

...The authors repeatedly note that party ties were irrelevant, if only because the party itself had such a small political meaning...

...This is doubly surprising in that the authors are vocal advocates of the new labor history, with its emphasis on the experience of the inarticulate masses as a key to historical understanding...

...Further, no evidence is provided that elected officials saw a threat to their position if they did not accede to 1199's demands, nor did the authors examine the papers of mayors (especially Robert F. Wagner and John Lindsay) or governors (Nelson Rockefeller) to uncover what did motivate them regarding 1199...

...The union recognized its limited power, understood its need for allies, and quietly appreciated the convergence of forces that included, at the least, a sustained economic growth and a resurgent liberalism that helped their organizing drives in the 1960s and early 1970s...

...Moe Foner once asked of these potential leaders...

...Neither Van Arsdale nor Wagner, Lindsay, Rockefeller had difficulty in operating on two or more levels simultaneously...

...They do not recognize that, for all its urban sophistication, that culture is also a manifestation of a specific ethnic experience: that the very claim to have transcended such limiting parochial tendencies is itself a variant of considerable standing within Jewish and other ethnic experiences...

...On assuming office, Turner distributed a religious newspaper to the staff, allowed Bible meetings and prayer groups at union headquarters, and delivered to the staff religiously justified arguments in behalf of capital punishment and prayer in the schools and against abortion...

...But there was also a darker side to this cosmopolitan perspective, about which the available evidence suggests the leadership group possibly remained unconscious...

...Sketches of leaders and activist members, extensive interviews, and the first gleanings from the archive of union documents are useful, as is testimony from such an insightful hospital administrator as Norman Metzger...

...The first concerns the union's image as a democratic institution assuring that the rank and file is heard and heeded...

...The final concern, and perhaps the most important, focuses on Fink and Greenberg's discussion of the internal politics and culture of the union...

...This question of internal democracy assumes greater importance when tied to the question of Communist party influence...

...SPRING • 1990 • 271...

...In part they lacked higher education and exposure to a sophisticated intellectual world...

...But Catholic workers were not the only ones whose culture seemed an obstacle...

...I am beginning to appreciate some of the older conservative unions," he intoned, "who expect the worker to stand up for his rights and on his own...

...Whatever demonstrations did occur "in the community" were far less significant than the repeated workings of traditional politics that demanded that 1199 leaders find "a path from Van Arsdale to Rockefeller," that is, from the head of New York's Central Labor Council to the governor...

...A second area of concern centers on the union's role in collective bargaining...

...Adherents, through Marx, of "rational enlightenment," they valued—after a "bow to ethnic and racial particularism" among the members— "an appreciation of high culture" as a goal for individual union members...

...The authors provide an intelligible narrative of the evolution of the union's jurisdictional structure, which raises some interesting questions about the meaning of industrial unionism in the late twentieth-century service sector...

...Despite the authors' repeated denial, it remains possible that an ethnic component— specifically a secular, liberal Jewish identity shared by labor, management, and critical segments of the New York public—remained central...

...It should be the "duty" of historians, at the least, to understand that...

...Both were found lacking, the authors suggest, "in some vague yet vital way" by the leadership...

...In the 1199 context, then, one need not be Jewish to adhere to these professed cosmopolitan values...

...In the midst of 1199's civil war David Livingston, president of District 65-UAW, asked with great sadness, "What could be worse than a busted Stradivarius...

...Rarely was there a demonstration to protest civil rights abuses, to oppose the Vietnam War, or to reverse the nation's nuclear policy that did not have its 1199 contingent— visible, vocal, vibrant...

...With a certain insight Fink and Greenberg discuss the culture of the leaders...

...Although quite sympathetic supporters of the traditional union leadership, the authors were not writing a sponsored history...

...For almost two generations Local 1199, a militant union of poor and minority hospital workers, has been extolled both as a force for change in its members' lives and as an advocate for progressive policies in urban and union politics...

...Only in Philadelphia has 1199 been able to transport, to a degree, its New York success, but in the absence of an extended discussion we have no context for understanding these different experiences...

...The union played the game well and never once questioned its role within the health care industry: its job was to win increases and to leave the management of hospitals to management...

...Unfortunately, the book provides us with very little information about that expansion or its effect upon the union, Further, while claims for worker militancy awkwardly rub shoulders with the recognition of a fortunate convergence of outside forces, there is little discussion of why 1199 was largely unable to transport its victories beyond New York City...

...That, in a union with a large proportion of minority women, the defining figures were white Jewish men, some with quite intense youthful religious experiences—the leaders themselves thought this to be of little import...

...The proposed transition of power from Leon Davis, 1199's longtime president, to Doris Turner, a former dietary clerk at Lenox Hill Hospital, coupled with the possible merger between 1199 and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), caused serious tension...

...These men were self-professed cosmopolitans who inhabited a world of ideas freed from the religious rituals that had bound past generations...

...The secularized world of left politics and intellectual discussion was the model against which others in the union were judged—and many found deficient...

...If any party influence remained, Fink and Greenberg tell us, it was essentially an informal set of personal characteristics: "habits of mind, a disciplined behavior, and a network of associations based on 'the old days.' " Instead, the driving force within the union remained those "indigenous work group leaders," the rankandfile activists they refer to as the "Militant Minority," many of whom became elected stewards...

...There was certainly a party cell within the stewards assembly during the 1950s and perhaps later as well...

...With a big union and power, what do you do...

...How depressing, then, was the news of the early 1980s that told, first as rumor and then as painful fact, of profound internal factionalism, of bitter and deep-rooted racial antagonism, and of crude redbaiting by one side counterbalanced by equally crude attacks on opponents' cultural and intellectual abilities by the other...

...It was with such concerns in mind, I think, that Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg wrote Upheaval in the Quiet Zone...

...More explicitly, and without a trace of vagueness, the leaders felt these two "indigenous work group leaders" lacked the experience that had been provided by membership in the Communist party...

...The progressive image needs to be appreciated, but it also must be 270 • DISSENT Books critically understood in relation to the actual political and cultural world of the union...

...The failure of Fink and Greenberg is that they are unable to distance themselves from the perspective of the union leaders and thus, after the rhetorical dust has settled, show little understanding of the rank and file as it actually is...

...They also recognize that, as Norman Metzger put it, negotiations during the 1960s and early 1970s were "a game," marked less by adversarial bargaining than by the reliance of both sides on the ultimate intervention of the city and state governments with their large infusions of dollars...

...Fink and Greenberg argue that 1199's success must be seen as part of the expansion of collective bargaining in the public sector...

...Nor do they possess the needed critical distance to evaluate the culture of the leaders...

...There was nothing wrong with 1199 for taking any of these positions...

...But the real disappointment is that, in not asking those questions about Turner, the authors lost the opportunity for a serious exploration of the complex habits of mind and culture of such union members...

...Habits of mind," coupled with a disciplined network that survived for more than three decades within a small union dominated by a president who shared those "habits" — this simply demands a more sustained analysis...

...Despite an occasional nod in the direction of this complexity, the authors are clearly sympathetic to the traditional union leadership and the politics they represented...

...The book's origins were in the 1970s, before the recent upheavals...

...This, in turn, blunted their ability to analyze these recent tensions or to understand these tensions in a broader social and cultural context...

...Although she was often pitted, in private discussions by the leaders, against Henry Nicholas in the competition for succession, in reality neither potential candidate received a clean bill of political health...

...These assertions, however, rest on thin evidence...

...What we want to do," Moe Foner once explained, "is to open up new horizons to our members...

...Difficulties in organizing Charleston may be evi268 • DISSENT Books dent, but the 1965-66 failure at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, just outside New York City, is harder to fathom...

...This is unfortunate, because serious discussion of Turner's religious beliefs might have led the authors to ask the single most important question about the leadership, the politics, and the culture of Local 1199: Did no one, among the leaders and the staff, over a period of more than twenty years of intimate and exhausting activism, ever sense the deep roots of Turner's religiosity...

...Their discussion of how the union transformed what was a defeat in the 1959 strike into victory by 1962 is quite insightful...

...Yet precisely because of this joint role, a thorough and searching study of 1199 is needed...

...Yet Leon Davis himself questioned that image when he noted that "there are no clear answers about how to run a democratic union, unless it's a very small union like the old AF of L craft unions, towns in Vermont, or building trades locals...

...The 1199 staff also reflected those "habits of mind...

...Yet even closely held reins of guidance had consequences, as Leon Davis dimly perceived in 1979 when he complained about the dependence of the members in relation to the staff...

...One longtime organizer recalled with approval that the staff "was always a very good staff . . . we went along with everything" the leadership requested...

...Yet little effort is made to relate these points to the larger theme that stresses, in different language, the militant democratic nature of this union's governance...

...That it has done so while also working for social justice is a fact both members and leaders can proudly proclaim...

...Nowhere is this tension more obvious, and nowhere is the authors' analysis more brittle, than in the discussion of Doris Turner's succession to the 1199 presidency following Davis's retirement...

...they also recognize that the delegate assemblies became, as the union grew, unwieldy instruments of democracy in the absence of smaller, work-related councils...

...During the last two decades especially the example of this union (whose membership never grew significantly above 100,000) served as a model to those attracted to the ideal of a dynamic interracial union whose institutional politics engaged yet transcended the narrow "porkchop" approach dominant in the labor movement...

...The authors present this material without comment, in a context that assumes no sympathy with Turner—perhaps much as the leaders and staff themselves did in 1982...

...The untroubled vision with which the book began proved inadequate for analyzing a more complex reality...

...I am beginning to think that we . . . overservice the members...

...But there are also serious problems with the authors' discussion of crucial aspects of 1199 history...

...Had the authors raised these and related questions, they might have discovered that Turner and other 1199 members, like other humans, can and do lead multiple lives, appreciating the value of a union and yet remaining committed to their own "parochial" ethnic and religious beliefs...

...But it is perhaps this very juxtaposition that accounts for an odd interpretative structure...