LABOR UPSETS OLD PARTY APPLECARTS AS U. S. GOES TO POLLS
LABOR UPSETS OLD PARTY APPLECARTS AS U. S. GOES TO POLLS Candidates Rush to Woo Union Favor By BRYCE OLIVER Seng Commentator at WEVD, New York PRESIDENTIAL timber will be whittled next...
...and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a curious and terrible pain...
...in Washington, there is a distinct union effort to return Senator Homer Bone by such a landslide that he will stack up favorably as a 1940 candidate with Indiana's American Legionnaire, Paul MeNutt, The latter would become a distinct log of Democratic timber should Senator Van Nuys also be returned, in Indiana, by a (Continued on Page Eight) Candidates Rush to Woo Union Favor (Continued landslide vote...
...They arrive bewildered and beaten and usually in a state of semi-starvation, with only one necessity to face immediately, and that is to find work at any wage in order that the family may eat...
...The real CIO leaders are as reliable, consistent, and honest in the trade union policies as anyone in the A.F.ofL...
...However, the political marriage of the unions in California ¦ even more complete than in Pennsylvania, and Labor is a»U»Sf backing Culbert Olson, Los Angeles lawyer, who is running » a platform considerably to the left of the New Deal...
...In certain sections of the country, notably in- Ohio and Pennsylvania, labor's political activity is dearly forcing a test of strength between democracy and special privilege based upon political corruption...
...It lacked the long tradition of the East...
...Probably Mr...
...A Communist can't join the United Mine Workers...
...In the past they have been of several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap labor...
...S? finally, he "stuck his neck out" by walking into Philadelphia and laying down $15,000,000, cold cash, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, powerful house organ of the Republican machine and heir to the business and political connections of the late William S. Vare...
...They hold caucuses, smear the officials, pull unauthorized strikes...
...Many of them are boys from the farm who up to a few years back never saw more than twelve men working at one time—and these were neighbors doing the thrashing...
...Only just now are Republicans jumping over the fence, and vice versa, in order to smack down their ballots on their pet economic and social theories...
...jkTOTABLE examples are in New York State, where Edward |P Corsi, Republican nominee for the short term in the Senate, has kicked over the party traces and promises what amounts to juore and better New Dealism than his opponent, James Mead, who has both the Democratic and Labor nomif Jj, nations...
...In Montana, virtually all unions have joined in the Democratic campaign to re-elect Representative Jerry O'Connell...
...Thirty thousand of them have come Into the state since January...
...Fos Mr...
...All of this history Benjamin Stolberg sketches...
...fc&mma* as a Republican by appealing for the campaign ^Bk^^mF cheers of professional red-baiters and uniformed • Nasi storm trooper...
...Stolberg knows his history...
...In New York, where the American Labor Party wields a balance of power...
...family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress...
...Among the newcomers were thousands of men and women who had theoretical ideas of the labor movement far in advance of those current in this country...
...Now—when Labor should be zooming forward—it is almost at a standstill, with the two wings snarling at each other...
...They have applied the injunction on labor laws with a lavish hand...
...It is only on close approach that it can be seen that these are homes...
...Part of this tragedy is due to history and geography...
...Their success is their complete vindication...
...As ti?»» written, Olson is a favorite in the betting on the GovernWlW race by two to one...
...From regulating technique of presentation it may be a short step to controlling what is said...
...These nice boSk-reviewers are broadminded...
...The theatre may have its melodrama, and its tricks of murder from the audience...
...Their cars have broken down and been repaired with the ingenuity of the land man...
...They are men who have worked hard on their own farms and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close touch with the land...
...jTRUE, Moe's Inquirer has been able to protest that some of the Democratic powers don't have such immaculate hands themselves, but the Annenberg connection with the Republican candidates has given labor's political organizations such a talking point that A. F. of L. unions have been lining up^Tapidly, in defiance of orders from Washington, for the Democratic candidates, Governor George H. Earle for the Senate and Charles A. Jones for Governor...
...It will appear in three short articles: the accompanying one, on the origins of the Itinerant workers...
...The roof is peaked, the walls are tacked to a wooden frame...
...More are trekking their way west to live in hovels, live off crumbs and watch tkeir kin die of starvation in tke Golden State...
...son of the former G.O.P...
...I can testify that for that section his account is true—figures, personalities, influences, results—everything...
...came along it was made up of a combination of European radicals from the East and frontier radicals from the West...
...Taft is defeated in Ohio—and it's a toss-up—organized labor wffl be in position to claim the credit On the other hand, if Taft wins...
...When the I.W.W...
...The drouth in the Middle West has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward...
...a of the Rules Committee (who once proclaimed \ 1 himself a New Dealer), is seeking re-election...
...The venom furnishes a fine tartar sauce for the style, but I could do with a little less of the tang...
...If they attempted to organize they were deported or arrested, and having no advocates they were never able to get a hearing for their problems...
...Skelter," a magazine devoted to housing progress, has made it possible tor Tke New Leader to print Mr...
...Many of the bitter struggles in the American Federation of Labor have been directly due to the differing conditions faced by various sections of our labor movement...
...So it was natural that the Western Federation of Miners should believe in "direct action" and should furnish the leading spirits of the I.W.W...
...Several were indicted...
...And we have the bitterness and the loss...
...From 1890 to 1918 conservatism, respectability were tactically justified...
...Many of these loyalties have been dynastic, running in families »ince Smith became the No...
...Americans AdriftUERE is the story of America's 20th century slaves told by John Steinbeck, who followed Me itinerant farmer* searching for work—any work—so they could feed tkeir wives amd youngsters...
...CUPPO.SE you have a local of some thousands of...
...400 A YEAR IF HE'S LUCKY 11/ITH the first rain the carefully built house will " slop down into a broken, pulpy mush...
...They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who • have gone through the hell of the drouth, have seen their lands wither and die and the top soil blow away...
...But there is still pride in this family...
...The Communists, -the Comintern, the great strategists of the Third International planned it this way...
...Herbert Hoover spoke in Spokane this week, but Hoover's influence is of such doubtful force that it is reportoi the New York State G.O.P...
...He » neither an innocent nor a factionalist—like some others who have bam dabbling in labor/history of late...
...The howls of pain from the camp of liberal writing-men are due to Mr...
...unions, developed and nurtured by Labor's Non-Partisan League...
...The West was lawless long after the East was settled and sedate...
...There are at least 160,000 homeless migrants wandering up and down the state, and that is an army urge enough to make it important to every person in the state...
...President, in an effort to advance him as a presidential possibility, one of the smelliest political deals in the state's checkered history is reported...
...It .is located on the banks of a river, near an irrigation ditch or on a side road where a spring of water is available From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built...
...but this election is a revelation of party loyalties...
...And if LaFollette should win, the National Progressives be ready to launch a national campaign for 1940 immediately...
...To head Bone off...
...Trade unionism for the first time was recognized as a part of our social machinery...
...He had begun his carrer in Chicago, where he had subsidised the underworld in a circulation war between Hearst and the Chicago Tribune...
...The alleged deal brings the personal machine 'of Governor Martin Davey (Democrat) into alliance with the Republican money gang...
...Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they may eat and feed their children...
...Phillip Murray and his committee have kept a tight rein on them among the steel workers...
...The epithets flung at William Green, John P. Frey, and Matthew Woll have a little the effect of a child's daubs of catar ia a drawing-book...
...in Wisconsin, where the Farmer-La bor-Progressives are expanding on a labor platform...
...The one CIO region which I know personally is the Pittsburgh area...
...They were conscious of industrial evolution...
...The craft form of organization had not become a religion...
...The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water...
...One has only to go into the squatters' camps where the families live on the ground and have no homes, no beds and no equipment...
...Stolberg's plain and uncompromising revelation of what the Communists have done to dijtide the trade union movement and to keep it divided...
...While William Green, president of the Federation, and his Council supporters have attempted to frustrate this political union marriage, fearing that it will weaken their defenses in the union controversy, they have apparently lost the battle—not because of any membership disloyalty to Green but because, in order- to oppose the political union marriage, they were compelled to pick candidates in opposition to the candidates endorsed by Labor's Non-Partisan League Green had only a Hobson's Choice—to pick the Republican candidates...
...Human beings who happened to be trade unionists acted as we should expect them to act in their historical and geographical environment...
...Our unions are bleeding to death from an inner wound...
...and tke final chapter reveals what the government Is doing to aid them...
...They get reports of membership which they know are false...
...Then came the abdication of the trade unions to the federal government during the World War...
...If the story is just as accurate for the other areas, we have here a fair survey...
...The western labor movement, too, was born in the time of mass production...
...By JOHN STEINBECK Author of Tortilla Flats, Of Mico and Men, and The Long Valley AT the season of the year when California's great ^* crops are coming into harvest, the heavy grapes, the prunes, the apples and lettuce and the rapidlj maturing cotton, our highways swarm with the mi...
...Hence* the howls of rage and pain...
...IN their heads, as they move wearily from harvest to * harvest, there is one urge and one overwhelming need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering...
...A LL of this history follows a course which—as we look back ¦ seems natural—almost inevitable...
...This is not the case with the new migrants...
...For the first time in America we had a group of steady-going labor organizations with - realistic policies and techniques...
...IN Wisconsin, powerful Labor support by the Milwaukee'aniow * for Governor Phil LaFollette makes hit election for a fenrtn term, a precedent, a strong possibility...
...But—somehow —they have let the Communists eat into four or five organizations to such an extent that the whole structure is threatened...
...Both Sawyer and Bulkley have back of them a laborite political movement, comprising both C.I.O...
...These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized and segregated and herded about...
...Now they have nothing...
...in a few months the clothes will fray off the children's bodies, while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes...
...It also gave Annenberg all the political power that could be wielded in the solidly Republican courts of the state...
...auto workers...
...It was natural that Eugene V. Debs' American Railway Union should remain exclusively a western and midwestern organization...
...A bitter wrangle starts—like the one in United Auto Workers...
...He does it with a good deal of spirit arid not a little venom...
...The American Federation of Labor was deliberately built to make trade unionism a part of American life...
...It is at once too close and too distant (too awe-inspiring) for any such startlings of our easily roused emotions...
...California and Michigan are the hot spots, with Labor in*** but on the defense...
...Incidentally, he is committed to a pardon for Tom Running with Olson is Sheridan Downey, Democratic* cand?* 150,000 Farmers Seek Shelter In Diseased Hovels of Calif...
...WATCHED LAND GROW BARREN "?*HEY arrive in California usually having used up * every resource to get here, even to the selling of the poor blankets and utensils and tools on the way to buy gasoline...
...These courts have been unanimously anti-labor...
...He knows exactly what is happening in Pittsburgh, in Akron, in Detroit, on the Pacific Coast...
...Their lands are destroyed and they can never go back to them...
...The squatters' camps are located all over California...
...It may be amusing to inquire what sort of mind, nurtured on radio tales of annihilation—rays and space bombs and interplanetary racketeering, will jump to belief in a sudden, invasion from Mars...
...All this has happened among the United Automobile Workers...
...THE great historical cause of division has been immigration...
...Would drills increase the fear that war is near, .while helping to guard against attack ?—These are some of ike basic questions raised when drama comes off the stage and out of the studio, and stalks like a wraith of warterror oyer the land...
...McNutt, fascist inclined, could only be met in the Democratic convention by a progressive and laborite who had shown equal power to» stampede a state...
...Notions, attitudes, slogans which were useful in one generation became a handicap in the next...
...Van Nays in Indiana, and Senator Bone, who represents nobody but himself...
...The growth of Organized Labor's political consciousness has turned a trick that Bryan's silver issue and his cross of gold couldn't do...
...There cannot be unity as long as these things last...
...rather forcefully suggested that it would not be wise for him to speak for Thomas E. Dewey, a Hepublican candidate for Governor with such an outward appearance of progressivism and lahorism that he has been compared tt reaction's "Trojan Horse...
...The trade union system could not make necessary changes in a peaceful and orderly way...
...Later came the futile struggle against defeat and disillusion during the 1920's...
...No organization can win with such a set-up...
...Often they patched the worn-out tires every few miles...
...Despite the haaoi hiatae placed (Continued on Pag* Seven) Sto I berg's Story of the CKJ Exposes Fatal CP Tactics (Continued front Page Five) on the shoulders of honest men t?ying to do their best, the author is quite consciou.- of the deep social causes of which these men were only instruments...
...Many of these participated in the organizational advances of the eighties and nineties of the last century...
...in troubled Washing-ton...
...And because of their tradition and their training, they are not migrants by nature...
...This gave Annenberg virtual control over the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and enabled him to "hand-pick" the Republican candidates this fall...
...What are they to think...
...First the union loses its reputation with the public, and then it loses the respect of its own members...
...Sto I berg's Story of the CIO Exposes Fatal CP Tactics Sees No Labor Unity Possible Until Stalinites Lose Power in Unions...
...And the only two Senators standraf a chance of landslide elections are McNutt s man...
...There are now more than 250,000 homeless migrants Im the agricultural Melds of sunny studio-laden California...
...They could easily see the need of industrial unionism...
...And then they have made the crossing and have seen often the death of their children on the way...
...The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class...
...Some sources of schism are in the nature of things...
...But beyond this there rise two questions that are bound to be widely discussed...
...It shows us how undisciplined, how ready for panic terror, is a large portion of the American people- It reveals (and advertisers may do well to note) that the public has largely conditioned itself to pay no heed to preliminary announcements: the program's the (Continued on Page Seven) Radio Panic Over Martians A rouses Serious Questions (Continued from Page Five) thing—all else is let slide by...
...It is particularly active in* Pennsylvania, where it has sought desperately—and with considerable success—to effect joint political action between C.I.O...
...They raised chickens, pigs, pigeons and vegetables and fruit for their own use...
...Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans...
...Davey, whose labor-baiting won him a thumping defeat in the primaries of his own party, now realizes thatytfie interests of his backers lie with the Republican machine...
...in Minnesota, where the Farmer-Laborites have already tossed the Democratic doifkey Into the silage machine, this revolution of loyalties is a fairly old story...
...In California, William Green sought to h*» the A. F. of L. into support for Governor Merriam, who ta» support of big business and the fake "farmer" organizations, *nV sidized by the utilities and the Southern Pacific Railway...
...And it's the political movement of organJames Farley ized labor, forcing a show of hands on fundamental social and economic issues, which has induced the epidemic of frightened fence-jumping...
...and one has only to look at the strong purposeful faces, often filled with pain and more often, when they see the corporation-held idle lands, filled with anger, to know that this new race is here to stay and that heed must be taken of it...
...But there are more significant warnings caught in this episode...
...It is always so...
...Now ypu have in the local a group of adroit and well-directed Stalinists bent on running the show...
...We are almost the only country not to have trained the public for such emergency...
...Steinbeck's story...
...but the radio is a part of life...
...Wherever they stop they try to put the children in school...
...But only just now is it becoming a best-seller through the rest of the nation...
...Radio Panic Over Martians Arouses Serious Issues By JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY WHEN Wells meets Welles ™ there's a roar of war...
...This was unfortunate for Green for this reason...
...And disturbed minds the world has made ready in large numbers, with persecution and war scares so that the sun never sets on dictatorships, injustice, savage cruelty...
...I ATER, he had rolled up a tremendous fortune, with an income *"* estimated as high as $8,000,000 a year, by monopolizing all of the gambling information for "poolrooms" in some thirtyeight states...
...But this man Stolberg has been around...
...You can see a litter of dirty rags and scrap iron, of houses built of weeds, of flattened cans or of paper...
...But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun to organize, and at this danger signal they have been deported in great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great quantity of cheap labor could be Obtained...
...and their land produced the tall corn of the Middle West...
...When we had a million immigrants a year the labor movement was necessarily affected...
...and where a former Democratic wheely\ horse in Congress, John J. O'Connor, chairman 1WA...
...But Moe had the money, and he wanted respectability and political power...
...But if anything happens, if his old car breaks down, if he is late and misses a harvest or two, he will have to feed his whole family on as little as $160...
...These men don't care about contracts, fairness, decency...
...If the husband hits every harvest without delay and works the maximum time, he may make $400 this year...
...So we had the split...
...Already the "Storm Over New Jersey" nas descended in talk of censorship—called at first, mildly, self-imposed — upon the radio...
...But the money so needed for food cannot be used for soap nor for clothes...
...They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm hands who lived with the family in the old American way...
...A part of the objection to unity has a perfectly sane basis...
...INHERE is no question that breaking in upon ordinary program...
...This situation has permitted Labor's Non-Partisan League and John L. Lewis to assume the roles of vice crusaders in their opposition to the Republican candidates, Judge Arthur H. James for Governor and Senator James Davis for Senator...
...Our traditional unions have built up reputations, standards, ways of doing things...
...The limitations of the craft union system had been built into a dogma, a religion...
...You can bank on it...
...wun exciung news manufactured for a sensation, must stop...
...They are descendants of men who crossed into the Middle West, who won their lands by fighting, who cultivated the prairies and stayed with them until they went back to desert...
...It involved cutting it off from European Socialist theories and from wholly western physical forcism...
...The other is a more immediately practical concern: since war rumors are rife, and since our country is far from immune, either to panic or to war, may not some citizenry drill be on the cards...
...Five years ago this family had fifty acres of land and a thousand dollars in the bank...
...A great tragi-comedy that has brought headlines of Federal investigation swooped out of the broadcasting studios upon an unsuspecting land when two radicals from opposite ends of our generation collided...
...Now the members read in the papers of wild speeches, wild doings...
...But this success was achieved partly as the result of shouting down the radicals, the Socialists, the industrial unionists...
...A couple of years ago, Moe Annenberg, millionaire publisher of racing papers and the owner of a racing information monopoly, became consumed with a desire to win recognition among the respectably elite...
...By WILLIAM E. BOHN IN "The Story of the CIO"* Benjamin Stolberg has pointed out * the present tragedy of the American labor movement...
...The mass-production industries were not organized...
...The result is that in some Congressional districts the Democratic candidates are more Republican than the Republicans, while in others the Republican hopefuls are more Democratic than welladvertised New Dealers...
...Stolberg is ' right when he says that the slowing down of growth is due to the Stalinists more than to the depression...
...Labor will be called upon to accept the responsibility because they have driven so many of the Davey Democrats into the Republican Party...
...In Ohio, where the Republican machine is spending huge amounts of money to elect Robert Taft...
...The victim of one of Chicago's most colorful gang murders—the famous flower shop murder—had been on Annenberg's payroll...
...He'isn't broadminded...
...and C.I.O...
...and A. T. of X...
...And there is only one field in California that can receive them...
...Some of it could not have been avoided...
...Let us see what a typical one is like...
...The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the...
...The inevitable result was a poverty of ideas and ideals, a rigidity of structure...
...It may be that the children will be in a school for as much as a month before they are moved to another locality...
...LABOR UPSETS OLD PARTY APPLECARTS AS U. S. GOES TO POLLS Candidates Rush to Woo Union Favor By BRYCE OLIVER Seng Commentator at WEVD, New York PRESIDENTIAL timber will be whittled next Tuesday in the maddest election mixture the United7 States has incurred in generations...
...In the end, one of these courts went so far as to enjoin the State Legislature from inquiring into Moe's sources of income...
...But it is California which has and needs the majority' of these workers...
...The split between A.F.ofL...
...The house is about ten feet by ten feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper...
...grant workers, that shifting group of nomadic, povertystricken harvesters driven by hunger and the threat of hanger from crop to crop, from harvest to harvest, up and down the state and into Oregon to some extent, and into Washington a little...
...He is accurate, sharp, unrelenting...
...They probably support their conservative leaders and throw their voices against union with the CIO...
...One of these is the size of country and the wide variation in its sections...
...breeds bitterness, holds down membership, undermines loyalty, fosters dual unionism, divides forces in the face of the enemy, forestalls successful political action...
...The wife belonged to a sewing circle and the man was a member of the Grange...
...This involved making it respectable...
...Ineligible for relief, they must become migratory field workers...
...The issues in Senatorial, Gubernatorial and Congressional dog fights run from the European crisis to the little red schoolhouse, but boring from within the whole smear is a general realignment of voter loyalties...
...and A. F. of L. unions...
...They have weathered the thing, and they can weather much more for their blood is strong...
...Th* same kind of solid Labor support is now back of Senator Ktt** Thomas, in Utah, as a reward for his ball-carrying, on long ¦"¦n" from Senator "Bob" LaFollette, in the Senate Civil Liberta*» inquiry...
...Let us see what kind of people they are» where they come from, and the routes of their wanderings...
...Here is a house built by a family who have tried to maintain a neatness...
...They are gypsies by force of circumstance...
...They want to be fair to everyone...
...And the great leaders of American labor, William Green and John L. Lewis, haven't had statesmanship enough to protect their armies against this foreign enemy...
...But the worst of it is due to deliberate planning...
...the second, appearing next week, vividly paint* tke horrors endured by the termors rained by tke drouth...
...They were in the craft unions, in the Knights of Labor, and they struggled desperately to control the American Federation of Labor...
...And this is a new thing in migrant labor, for the foreign workers were usually imported without their children and nothing that remained of their old life with them...
...1 name of the nation...
...Other states in which Labor's Non-Partisan League is active are California, Montana, Washington and Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah and Michigan...
...LABOR LEAGUE SERVES AS THIRD PARTY IJE is acting accordingly, and latest reports show him working pretty actively to defeat the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Charles Sawyer, and the Democratic Senator Bulkley...
...A few years ago he was associated in the publication of a green tabloid, .published in Philadelphia and Baltimore, which circulated'largely In the segregated districts and brought him and his associates into conflict with the Federal postal authorities...
...We would have no Labor Relations Act were it not for the fact that under the leadership of Samuel Gompers Labor developed the machinery and the capacity for collective bargaining...
...While the American Labor Party in New York is the only tairf party actually bearing the name "Labor," this Labor's Nonpartisan League is, in fact, functioning as a third party in many states...
Vol. 21 • November 1938 • No. 45
