John Hoerr's Harry, Tom, and Father Rice

...Smith Goes to Washington...

...Hoerr, like everybody from the Pittsburgh area, knew Monsignor Charles Owen Rice as an iconic, anticommunist "labor priest" who had battled for social justice in the labor, civil rights, and anti-shutdown movements across five decades...

...uNCLE HARRY MAKES a better victim, but surely he lived an exaggerated shame...

...Hoerr's Pittsburgh of the 1940s seems an ancient world, full of characters and institutions now nearly unimaginable—sturdy, rooted people living amid such epic dirt and grime that it would send parents and children to hospital emergency rooms today, yet cocky in its industrial might, which had slain fascism in Europe and Asia and tamed U.S...

...the United States, which expanded the constitutional protections of witnesses in 1955...

...Tom Quinn survived repeated appearances before HUAC, lived half a century in a strong and supportive family, and had a successful career as a union representative and labor mediator...

...Hoerr, who is an expert guide to the differences between a semi-autonomous city neighborhood, a borough, and a suburb in a metro area that perversely defies the standard city-suburb framework, entertainingly shows how his Uncle Harry cobbled together the leftover bits of a district designed to be Republican forever...

...Harry was John Hoerr's uncle, his mother's brother...

...From 1946 until the summer of 1949 Harry Davenport gave voice to that common-man ideology as well as or better than anyone...

...When the time seemed right in 1959, he broke with the UE's lawyers and told HUAC the whole truth about himself, roasting the representatives for their decade of lying about him and his union in a real-life speech that rivaled Jimmy Stewart's in Mr...

...This, however, is criticizing the author for not writing the entire book I'd like to read...

...Most of all, he underestimates the mechanics of the Taft-Hartley affidavit requiring all union leaders to swear they were not communists in order for their unions to enjoy the protection of the National Labor Relations Act (which in those days actually provided valuable protections...

...The differences among these three unions, and their collective differences with the American Federation of Labor unions, forced a creative tension as each tried to figure out, and create, its place in postwar America...

...What's missing, however, is an assessment of the damage done by this clash of union titans in 1949 and an analysis of the causes...

...He, his wife, Irene, and his kids endured some shunning...

...Quinn, who grew up as an orphan, died last year with his mental faculties and spirit intact, and with three middle-aged sons who are still in awe of him and have been well schooled in how to live a life...

...All recovered in some form or fashion, but with diminished capacity...

...The affidavit, installed in 1947 as part of the Taft-Hartley Act, was the perfect axe to cleave the CIO unions, which had come out of the Second World War with a tense but impressive unity in the 19451946 strike wave and seemed ready, willing, and able to transform both American politics and American life, not just American workplaces one at a time...

...The 1949 HUAC hearings were part of a process that all but destroyed this progressive force in American life, dividing electrical workers, weakening both their bargaining power and political influence, but also further dividing the American labor movement, engendering animosities that lasted a lifetime, and closing doors, covering over pathways that in retrospect might easily have been kept open...

...He was the executive director of the East Liberty Chamber of Commerce in 1946, when he decided to run for Congress from the lopsidedly Republican twenty-ninth congressional district...

...Though he wouldn't admit it until the Red Scare was over, Tom had never been a member of the Communist Party USA...

...Harry, Tom, and Father Rice is Hoerr's novelistic investigative report of these three men's lives and how they intersected, and crashed, in 1949...

...But if you did it to a friend who, although trying to help himself, was also trying to help you find your way out of a bad situation, and was doing so without self-righteousness, threats, or clever manipulation, you can imagine how Davenport might never have gotten over that moment...

...Local 601's internal union politics had marched into the U.S...

...Yes, he lost his union job when the IUE took over at the East Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, going back to work there as a welder...

...More than one of my friends who are labor professionals, on all sides of the split, are now looking for other lines of work, saying something like, "I didn't sign on here to fight other unions...

...At the heart of this world were two of the Congress of Industrial Organizations' strongest unions, the Steelworkers in the steel valley where a string of U.S...

...Still, once the divide occurs, passions are reorganized, refocused, and most people find a way to move forward...

...He stuck with his union and the fellows that brung him, told HUAC to go to hell, and beat his contempt-of-Congress rap before the U.S...

...But most will go on, like Tom Quinn, being true to themselves in one way or another, doing well as they locate those diminishing opportunities to do good...

...Supreme Court (in Quinn vs...

...What he did write is hauntingly human, and it will make you wonder anew, with your heart as well as your head, why things fall apart...

...Hoerr overestimates the role of anticommunist ideology among Catholics in the labor movement, as embodied by Father Rice, and underestimates the impact of the left-led unions' mounting a presidential candidate against Harry Truman in 1948...

...What was damaged irrevocably were institutions, not persons— Local 601, the UE, the CIO, the larger labor movement, and the democratic prospects of the postwar world...

...McCarthyism crippled his union and the larger prospects of the American labor movement, but it never laid a glove on Tom Quinn...

...96 DISSENT / Winter 2006...

...In the fall of 1950, McCarthyism actually included McCarthy, we were at war with actual communists in Korea, and probably more important for Davenport, the UE had been expelled from the CIO in November of 1949 and voted out of Local 601 in favor of its CIO-created rival, the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers (IUE...

...But Tom Quinn makes a lousy victim...

...The UE was a strong CIO union in 1949, smaller and purportedly more democratic, but with a public presence equal to the Auto Workers and Steelworkers...

...In a place like Pittsburgh, traditional Republicans and New Deal Democrats embodied this postwar clash of worldviews in a particularly palpable way—one hoping to return to the halcyon pre-depression days of the business-class 1920s and the other determined to "take no backward steps" from what had been won through depression and war...

...Hoerr's book is the human face of the cold war on the home front...

...Hoerr's stated purpose in telling us this story is to show how what is now known as McCarthyism harmed ordinary Americans like Quinn, not just cultural celebrities like the Hollywood Ten...

...As a labor reporter, Hoerr knew Tom Quinn as a UE staff rep and officer, but he didn't know until 2000 that Tom and Harry had been such good friends in the immediate postwar years, or how their friendship had ended so disastrously...

...As Hoerr quips a half-century later, "It wasn't hard to beat Harry in 1950,' Quinn told me...

...In August four leaders of UE Local 601, urged on and in some measure engineered by Father Rice, appeared before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to denounce four other leaders of UE Local 601 as communists...

...House of Representatives, and Harry had to choose sides...

...Why did the CIO unions split apart in 1949 and then go to war against each other...

...Hoerr, who was Business Week's labor and workplace reporter in the 1980s and 1990s, grew up in the steel valley town of McKeesport, graduating from high school the same year Harry Davenport successfully ran for Congress...

...The Westinghouse plants were divided, some reDISSENT / Winter 2006 95 maining UE, others going IUE...

...He lost in 1946, but assembled a classic postwar coalition to win in 1948...

...The district had a piece of Pittsburgh's black Hill District and of Jewish Squirrel Hill, as well as the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh and some emerging postwar suburbs amid the independent boroughs...

...Steel mills hugged the Monongahela River, and the Electrical Workers in the Westinghouse plants on the other side of the mountain in Turtle Creek's "electric valley...

...As one neither employed by nor a member of a union, but who sees them as the only hope left for a tomorrow that is at least as good as yesterday, I perhaps have more sympathy for Davenport than I should...

...Children could be told Quinn's story as a tale about how being true to yourself, not just in heroic moments but day in and day out, can lead to living happily ever after...

...ON HIS FIRST DAY as a congressional representative, January 3, 1949, Pittsburgh's Harry Davenport made history by offering a resolution to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC...

...Harry Davenport, who was briefly a communist in Detroit in the 1930s, had made a good living for himself as an advertising and public relations boomer for small businesses after he returned to Pittsburgh in 1939...

...You fellows have to clear yourselves," Harry said sternly...

...He became a mediator for the state in the 1970s, where his reputation as a fiercely pro-union but fair-minded professional eventually earned him an appointment as the director of the Pennsylvania mediation bureau (appointed by Republican Governor Dick Thornburgh...

...JACK METZGAR is the Mansfield Professor of Social Justice at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and is author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Temple University Press, 2000...

...Previous HUAC opponents had tried merely to cut off the committee's funding...

...Tom Quinn was an especially smart and capable union leader, but folks like him were a dime a dozen in the postwar American working class...

...Davenport sought to shame it out of existence for its "silly tactics" that had "smeared, maligned, slandered" so many good people while paying no attention at all to the real un-American activities of "anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-foreign-born groups that infest . . . our country...

...To me that's like criticizing a rattlesnake for being poisonous and the rocks and rills for allowing him to slither among them...

...Steel and Westinghouse at home...

...Harry, once head of the East Liberty Chamber of Commerce, had been...

...The CIO unions were the practical mechanism for enforcing and refreshing the New Deal vision, as they had a vested institutional interest in unity and solidarity across the racial, religious, ethnic, occupational, and ideological differences among workers and citizens...

...By 1950 he was one of the broken and shattered—not because he opposed HUAC, but because he passively supported it and betrayed his friend and political ally Tom Quinn, legislative director of United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 601...

...According to Hoerr, the HUAC acted shamefully, and so did all those who fell silent in the face of its, and later Joe McCarthy's, outrages...

...DISSENT / Winter 2006 93 Hoerr wasn't paying attention to his Uncle Harry's political career at the time, and the early part of the book is an investigative mystery story, as Hoerr traces the various paths (his own memories, interviews, old newspapers, and documents in archives) through which he discovered pieces of the story—revealing the contexts of place, time, characters and institutions as he does so...

...Is there any way it could have been avoided...

...Near homeless," as Hoerr says, in the end, Davenport strikes me as not so pathetic a figure as Hoerr seems to think, but rather more like a precursor of an early seventies hippie who lived out his withdrawal from a world for which his best instincts were not suited...

...I WAS READING Harry, Tom, and Father Rice last summer as the AFL-CIO split was approaching and then occurred...

...Harry knew the accused as his supporters, but only Quinn was a friend with whom he had spent nearly every evening in the fall of 1948 walking and talking the twentyninth district...

...It is an important story, the consequences of which affect us today...

...In the summer of 1949, when the CIO blew apart, it put Davenport in a particularly tight spot...

...The great strength of Hoerr's tale is how strongly it reminds us that each decision made and action taken (or not taken) by not-quitecommon people like Harry, Tom, and Father Rice reverberates through their own and others' lives...

...Harry was a true believer in the postwar "common man" ideology that still hoped for a new and better world where everybody counted, not just the big shots...

...We have less to lose today, less to try and defend, because they got less than they had hoped for and in 1948 could reasonably have expected...

...He refused, trying to keep his head down and to ignore what was happening...

...Hoerr never explicitly addresses these issues, but he implicitly answers them in the way he tells the tale...

...If you've ever done anything that you were ashamed of while you were doing it, you'll have some sympathy for Davenport...

...But after a few years, he became a field rep for the UE, representing Westinghouse workers at the Wilmerding plant, and worked his way up as a UE district officer in the Pittsburgh area...

...Though Hoerr gives most attention to the "anti-Negro" elements of the postwar right, Davenport ran for Congress in a rigidly WASPish dominant culture, where Catholics and third-generation immigrant families with difficult-to-pronounce names were still often referred to as "foreigners," well above blacks and Jews in the WASP pecking order, but still vaguely "unAmerican...

...but though fascinated with Harry as a snappy-dressing, itinerant intellectual hanging out in industrial barrooms in the fifties and sixties, Hoerr never understood how Uncle Harry's life had been broken...

...All three unions had creative, dedicated leaders who reached deeply down to dozens of shop floors to find, educate, and be educated by people like Tom Quinn, savvy workers fascinated with making things work, whether welding pieces of metal together, enforcing a contract, or running a legislative campaign...

...Still, if you think about the larger situation, after he lost his reelection bid in the entirely different political world of 1950, Harry may have correctly figured out that the postwar world had no place for him...

...The Westinghouse plants in the Turtle Creek valley were outside Davenport's district, but ten thousand workers from those plants were inside...

...Harry figured out a way to retire from this world, reading voraciously, drinking and talking a lot, living off the kindness of family and friends among people who only half-mockingly called him "Senator...

...Previously a successful advertising entrepreneur, Harry lost his bid for reelection in 1950, as well as his wife and daughter, and never held a steady job again...

...In the penultimate scene of the book, Quinn recounts visiting Harry in his congressional office, asking for a little support and getting none...

...He was put in a very tough spot in 1949, handled it badly, and, according to his nephew, never got over it...

...All it took was for the UE to actively do nothing while the IUE passively did nothing...

...Campaigning against HUAC stalwart John McDowell, Davenport ran as a smallbusiness progressive who eagerly pitched the 94 DISSENT / Winter 2006 New Deal idea that union wages were good for business, especially retailers...

...Davenport blamed HUAC for "broken homes, broken lives, and shattered reputations...

...DAVENPORT'S small-business roots took some Republican votes from McDowell, and his pro-labor stance gained him the fierce allegiance of Quinn and most of the Westinghouse workers in his district...

...Dividing the labor movement is the boss's game, and everybody playing knows that...

...Some, like Harry Davenport, will know their time is over and will find a soft place to land, at least for a while...

...Quinn's version of that meeting, as told by Hoerr, is devastating to Harry precisely because Quinn had such a strong, practical sense of empathy for the terrible spot Davenport was in...

...By 1950 the commonman ideology was dead, as the common men had been effectively divided against themselves...

...Hoerr tells his story with the kind of matter-of-fact admiration that perfectly suits his character...