Tribute to the Master Teamster:
MORGAN, EDWARD P.
Tribute to the Master Teamster By Edward P. Morgan THE time has come to pay tribute to a great American, James Riddle Hoffa. Homage is due this fearless citizen who was re-elected this...
...And as every schoolboy knows, or will soon be taught, his rise to the top was accompanied at every step by a reverent devotion to the same traditions and principles so dear to the hearts and vital to the success of other great patriots, such as Boss Tweed, Jay Gould and Al Capone...
...James R. Hoffa is, clearly, what the country and the times call for—a simple man of direct action...
...Hoffa can't destroy or dominate the labor movement unless he corrupts it with his concept that the public be damned...
...Even the John Birch Society had better look to its laurels if it intends to retain pre-eminence as an authoritarian institution...
...The constitution now authorizes him and his henchmen to alter any action taken by this month's convention, and converts the Teamsters Union, in effect, into a new federation of labor claiming organizing rights in every segment of industry...
...There is some damaging disunity within the labor movement which Hoffa is attempting artfully to play upon...
...There is little question about what Hofla will try to do with the power now locked in his jaws...
...If that happens, nothing could save it...
...Further, it denies Teamster local autonomy, providing the formal backing for a drive to bring all trucking under a single national contract...
...Edward P. Morgan's program ore the American...
...The convention did toy with a few open procedures...
...Broadcasting network is sponsored by the AFL-CIO...
...Perhaps his crowning triumph, however, was not a renewed lease on the Teamster presidency at a modest 50 per cent rise in salary to $75,000 a year, but the wonderful changes wrought in the Union's constitution...
...He boasts that a half a dozen unions or more want the Teamsters reinstated, and a few may join his "federation" anyway...
...He has utterly no use, on the other hand, for the broad social responsibilities at home and abroad assumed by the AFLCIO, which kicked him out in 1957...
...The new constitution also drops a clause forbidding union membership to racketeers and it greatly simplifies the handling of union funds by, among other things, permitting locals to pay cash when desired and keep the cash in safe deposit boxes instead of bank accounts...
...He will use it to acquire more...
...No democratic damage was done, however...
...A call to elect officers by referendum was referred to a committee which Hoffa headed...
...and he has no compunction about strong-arm tactics or spitting in the eye of the law if he can get away with it...
...indeed, his coat of arms could well be a brace of blood-smeared fists rampant on a field of trampled responsibility...
...If I were Nikita Khrushchev, I would tear up the Constitution of the USSR and wire the Teamsters Union for a copy of Hoffa's monolithic contract with his members...
...Homage is due this fearless citizen who was re-elected this month—apparently legally this time—to the very pinacle of power as president of a humble, publicspirited instrument of our democracy, the Teamsters Union...
...Hoffa don't have no machine," Hoffa said reprovingly...
...In sum, Hoffa winds up, as one dispatch put it, with the biggest war chest (dues were increased by $12 million to a total of $20 million a year for the 1.7 million teamsters), with the highest personal salary, the largest organizing staff and probably the greatest centralized authority of any labor leader in the history of trade unionism...
...To this Machiavelli in the driver's seat, power is both tool and target...
...His threats against the AFL-CIO contain much bluster, but they contain some bite too...
...The troubling fact is that there are some AFL-CIO leaders, even though a small minority, who think in the same narrow, selfish terms as Hoffa, and are magnetized by his power...
...He has shown the weak how to be brutally strong, taught the selfish to be more lustful and the lawless to be more defiant of the law...
...though it is true he needed 37 lawyers in residence at his union convention in the Napoleon Room of the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach to see to it that his inspiring mockery of democracy did not make his reelection by acclamation illegal...
...Hoffa is interested only in fat paychecks for his teamsters and the expansion of the power complex by which he can extract rising wages and fringe benefits...
...President Hoffa also deserves the cheers of his peers because he is the very embodiment of redblooded, two-fisted Americanism...
...The legal beagles made sure that Hoffa, calling the signals from the rostrum with an electronic console device, permitted dissenters—few that they were—their turn at the microphones...
...When a California delegate charged that a Hoffa machine dominated proceedings, the master teamster steered through a motion to expunge his remarks from the record...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 28
