CIO OUSTS LAST RED UNIONS, NOW FACES OTHER GRIM ISSUES
REYNARD, DICK
CIO Ousts Last Red Unions, Now Faces Other Grim Issues Turning of Unions Into Bases For Sabotage Real CP Crime By DICK REYNARD WASHINGTON. IT WAS PAST 70 NOW and late. The old man sat wearily...
...like supplicants, meet with such Communist party chiefs aa Eugene Dennis...
...Of course, it's so—I'm not asking, I'm reporting...
...If Jim doesn't sweep the electrical industry against the Communists...
...The brazen effrontery of the Dixiegops on FEPC will be answered — in still more resounding language — at the polls this Fall...
...Left wing -unions had to be infiltrated for sabotage and espionage .purposes...
...Mr...
...In hotels along K Street, labor men were getting into black tie and tux lor the big party, some of them knowing they would be on the dais with the President of the United..States-rand even with the Vice-President and his chasming wife, who by this time must certainly be fatigued with her cracker-barreled - humored h us - band's not to subtle salacious wit...
...Americans have been consistently manifesting their profound disapproval of reactionary ideas for over two decades...
...Whatever the official - crime was—working for Wallace, following the party line, insulting Phil Murray, getting orgiastic over the WFTU (industrial cousin of the GPU')—the real crime was the Communists' failure to organise their jurisdictions, converting their unions into agencies of conspiracy instead of encouraging them to organize the unorganized...
...m * THERE WAS A TIME when all labor would be getting into tuxedos for the grand party of a victorious friendly party, when all labor would be lined up behind striking, hungry coaldiggers—but not today...
...But he had much to be bitter about for all around him he knew, without seeing, that other men of labor had succeeded where he had aspired...
...Lewis are you coming to our Jefferson-Jackson Day party tonight...
...But it would have no powers of enforcement whatsoever...
...Occasionally he strode over to his 15th Street window and glared down on the dismal sleet-laden square glimmering in the uneven weak light from K Street...
...And then Phil Murray said that all the dirt Durkin could dish out would perhaps sound understandable if he (Murray) and his colleagues didn't know that in years past, during every executive board session, the Communists would walk out of the CIO's national headquarters, across Jackson Place and into the staid, french-wlndowed Hay-Adams hotei and...
...As John Lewis crossed the crowded Statler lobby, the jubilant Democrats stared and turned away muttering- except for one dapper handsome Irishman who got into the elevator with John Lewellyn...
...There's a search on for leaders and more leaders...
...Emil Rleve's greet textile union is hitting a Southern Stone Wail, not a little of said wall being composed of ideological bricks provided by those who hate labor because they hate John Lewis...
...to provide pork barrels lor the party and training grounds for the Great Day...
...And so they were expelled...
...had lifted off the relief rolls back in 1936 and 19117 and turned into , $7f>-a-week organizers...
...One such second stratum organizer, Milton Murray, has recently been ¦ named to three spots .. • and then shifted from each before he could get any of the drives started...
...Rep...
...An Editorial: Let the Battle Begin Here A COMBINATION OF WILFUL CONGRESSMEN has again demonstrated that it will literally stay awake nights to prevent passage of legislation beneficial to the vast majority of Americans...
...And it's significant that the expunged ones load, as counted by James B. Carey, only 49,000 members in all in fields with a potential of 20,000,000 workers...
...Murray said, if the trial committees had not had evidence of exactly such sessions inside every Communist-control led union, if there 'had not been testimony by men who had gone to Lenin University, that delightful co-ed college of the revolution with all Moscow as the campus—and all rooms wired for sound by the MVD...
...As everyone knows, such an FEPC is worse than no FEPC at all...
...Unfortunately lor CIO, there's a grim satisfaction over its travail among AFL chiefs, who say, "we told you so...
...tk AND SO they were expelled — four of them were, at least...
...And there were more than psychic scars inside CIO...
...in New York—such as ^you've, been having in the past few weeks, comrades, while you've discussed what to do with the party, isn't it so comrades...
...It establishes a five-man commission which would co-operate "voluntarily" with various agencies, make studies, and receive and investigate complaints...
...The party's Trade Union Commission had made and broken union officials, run labor papers, worked With official Soviet agents, and siphoned off millions of dollars for party activity...
...It would have .been different, Mr...
...But the Republican-Dixiecrat coalition which murdered FEPC has, in the act of doing so, committed political suicide...
...and Joe Sedrne, the newcomer to the newest house of labor, doesn't beat the phone corporation, the CIO may lose 5004)00 members' Meanwhile, the long-publicised drives are stalled...
...And as Lewis left the lift for the coal crisis room, there were other labor leaders just a fewstreets away going down an elevator after a weary gabby day...
...John Williamson and William Zebulon Foster to take orders on their tactics inside the next session oi the committee...
...Time had to be taken out of history to dump the Communists, the six and eight-dollat - a-week Stalinists whom John Lewis Dick Reynard is the pseudonym of a well-known Labor reporter...
...And they had made a noisy exist In the peculiar labyrinths which pass for Stalinist minds, the thought had been put by the parly's thought putters, for some reason, that the CIO Communists had to go out only after eternal dull speeches, like those at a plenary session on the ninth floor of 35 East 12th St...
...to stall our conversion to peace...
...There's a telephone crisis which — although ^postponed — is still a tough battle against a giant company which feels that it's right and not re* actionary, which makes it tougher...
...It was with considerable heartbreak that Phil Murray and other national CIO leaders iiad to swallow enough undemocratic procedure to rid themselves of the American end of the Soviet sabotage apparatus, only now •winging into action against our efforts to arm Western democracy...
...Dullard Jim Durkin, the pathetic political palterer who carried out orders for his whip, Comrade Stanley, commissar of what passes for the office and professional workers, spoke for almost four hours despite weary interruptions by the patient and charitable Phil Murray, who had taken the advice of the genial legal genius Art Goldberg and was giving the Stalinists their day in court—sans confession, of course...
...The old man sat wearily before his huge fireplace, absentmindedly biting off bits of theround side of heavy cigars...
...Their crime, too, was that they had made it impossible for the CIO leaders to work with their unions in any fashion...
...and somewhere near the ninth floor said: "Mr...
...For after 15 years, they were undoing what John L. had left them, interring his legacy, dumping the Communists from CIO...
...1 And above it all is a weary, -wbite-haired man, fatigued over the internecine warfare, harassed by internal feuds, worried over his own vast union's needs — but who nonetheless knows that CIO will and must find the money, the manpower, the peace, to work out the panoramic destiny designed for it by a handful of men when they first gathered around the bushy eyebrowed giant...
...It is neither secret nor shameful to report that CIO is short on cash ami manpower...
...All the things the trial committees had discovered corroborated what the right wingers had charged—and move...
...As an unnamed hero declared during the War of Independence: Let the battle begin here...
...a rather adult and over* woslced habv union is braise — and Jim'a hswhao a time - (wa«spew WieswP' ip ¦ppp'tp^hpsj hp ^w^pjps" epsp** seising money iron Reuther and Jiiev* and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers...
...He walked alone—and what he thought he alone will ever know...
...Rankin of Mississippi, at any rate, is so certain that this is the real case that even he could bring himself to vote for it...
...Lewis turned to Phil Reagan, for that's who it was (the singing, sweet-tenored master of ceremonies), and snapped: "Young man, I've quite a party here myself tonight...
...This was the end of the road for them...
...Every weak spot 'is sprung at by some AFL leader eager to pick up some pieces...
...Then he threw on his overcoat, pulled his famous hat over more famous eyebrows and gray locks, the angered cartoonists delight, and headed for the Statler...
...Jim Carey's Julesjimtlirffiiil -Union of filosirlcsl Woskers...
...The names of all those who voted for the McConnell betrayal should be broadcast to very voter The issue itself should be made the touchstone for judging the worth of every candidate who runs for election...
...Walter Aeuther's massive auto union is in *he sixth week of a bitter, though unpubllclsed strike against Chrysler and is getting down to muscle to take on General Motors, cradle of the CIO...
...For the strength of the Congress 'of Industrial Organizations had been so sapped in endless bickerings, its funds so diverted into fratricidal civil wars, that it had neglected to build a huge war chest or develop second echelon leaders...
...At the sleepdrenched hour of 3 a. m. last Thursday, a coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats voted, 221-178, to pass the McConnell bill, which purports to be a fair employment practices measure but in reality is a weasel-worded compromise that kills chances for obtaining an effective FEPC statute in this session of Congress"The McConnell bill is adorned with so many last-minute amendments," one newspaper reports, "that even its sponsors were not sure of its final meaning...
...In auto union headquarters, telephone calls are feeing ¦aiioned and organisers lopped off and traveling curtailed because money is low...
Vol. 33 • February 1950 • No. 8
