Love in the Underground
RASKIN, A.H.
Love in the Underground Mike Quill Himself: A Memoir By Shirley Quill Devin-Adair. 334pp. $17.95. Reviewed by A.H. Raskin Former chief labor correspondent, the New York "Times"; co-author,...
...Even the most insignificant lackey of the employer had life and death control over a worker's destiny...
...At the time Shirley entered his life, Mike was yoked in a loveless marriage that he could not formally break off because the predominantly Irish Catholic members of his union would have disapproved...
...Contrary to her claim that Quill supported the father of the New Deal in that election, the TWU chief led the Left-wing faction seeking to block an endorsement of Roosevelt at the New York State CIO's riotous convention in Rochester...
...He was banking on his imprisonment to pay off handsomely in extra "milluns" for his members, and indeed it did...
...Jewish councilmen and reporters howled uproariously at Quill's interjection, but non-Jews in the chamber had to wait till the debate was over togethis "clarification" on whathehad said to silence his confrere...
...That became plain when Harry Van Arsdale and other leaders of the AFL-CIO New York Central Labor Council sought to persuade the Mayor to release him...
...When the forces of Amalgamated Clothing Workers' President Sidney Hillman prevailed and the gathering passed a pro-Roosevelt resolution, Quill scorned it as unworthy of inscription on toilet paper...
...Learning that the MBA planned to send a protest delegation to meet Wagner, Quill notified His Honor that the subways would be shut down if he received the group...
...Nor did Quill reform his ways upon breaking with the Communists...
...Crucial moments in his career and the basic flaws in his character are ignored or glossed over in a love-glazed rewriting of the record compiled by the quixotic trailblazer of unionism in the underground fastness of the subway system...
...The chairman of the Radio Corporation of America, who had served on a transit fact-finding board in the late 1940s, told Mike that his ability to handle people would have made him an excellent corporate executive...
...It was the end of a career that had gone beyond elevating the wages of men who once earned 33 cents an hour or cutting their hours from 84 a week to 40...
...His tactics and the role he played in the general labor movement were often execrable, however, both in his days as an unwavering follower of the Communist Party line and after his flamboyant break with the comrades in 1948...
...A student at Brooklyn College during the Great Depression, she joined the Young Communist League and majored in drama, focusing on ways to advance the class struggle through proletarian art...
...At his behest, the municipal transit authorities planted spies in MBA meetings, bugged the motormen's offices, paid bonuses to TWU members for service as scabs, and threatened to discharge the strikers en masse...
...No formal charges of wrongdoing were necessary...
...Shirley's own first marriage— a postcollege elopement with her girlhood sweetheart, Morton Gould, the pianist-conductor—had ended in divorce long before she met Quill...
...Quill's engrossing recital exceeds in fascination her account of how she herself—the unwanted second daughter of Russian-born parents, who grew up in Woodhaven on the Brooklyn-Queens border trying to win their love by being sweet and docile—turned into a blazing revolutionary...
...Spearheading a Left-tist secession from the hall, he labeled the adopters "paid gangsters" in the service of Wall Street, and excoriated FDR as a " double-crosser and betrayer of the workers...
...But in 1959 Mollie Quill died of cancer, and 18 months later Mike and Shirley made their union legal in a sneak ceremony at Juarez, Mexico...
...Shirley had begged Quill to settle without a strike, fearing the strain would push him to his grave...
...He responded: "To outwit and outsmart a stronger adversary...
...The Motormen's Benevolent Association (MBA) then decided to call a wildcat strike to preserve its independence...
...Two days later he was dead...
...Finally, in his j oust with Mayor Lindsay, Quill experienced no evident twinge of conscience in donning the martyr's mantle of Eugene V. Debs and similar patron saints of labor as the sheriff ferried him off to j ail for shredding inj unctions into confetti before the television cameras and admonishing the judge to "drop dead in his black robes...
...Before TWU appeared on the scene," he told his flock on the union's 25th anniversary, "a transit worker had far more to fear than fear itself...
...In the mid-1950s, Mike sweet-talked his buddy, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., into delivering to the TWU all the small unions representing skilled crafts in the subways...
...Mike's real revolution was bringing strength and security to the minions of an underground feudal empire...
...Those who remember Mike Quill's quick wit, skill at turning the table on his tormentors and indomitable energy— in the closing years, following a series of heart attacks, he gulped nitroglycerin pills by the handful and stored tanks of oxygen in his bedroom, office and car to keep going—will find Shirley's memoir releasing a warm tide of affectionate recognition...
...Shirley asked him later what was fun...
...Nobody ever bothered to' frame' a worker...
...Irritation over Mike's insistence on having her as well as his Irish respectability led Shirley into two other unsuccessful marriages...
...It would be nice to leave that, and that alone, as Quill's epitaph and monument...
...Quill explains away Mike's endorsement of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact as a mark of loyalty to John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, rather than slavish adherence to the party line...
...Perhaps the book's most revealing clue to Quill's scale of values is an anecdote involving a conversation with David Sarnoff...
...Quill replied that he could think of nothing duller than spending all his time accumulating money...
...Her love affair with Quill began in 1943, almost as soon as the Left-wing officers of District 4 of the United Electrical Workers, in Newark, assigned her to help the TWU president get back into the City Council...
...The elegant Yalie had vowed to drive the "power brokers" out of City Hall...
...co-author, "David Dubinsky: A Life With Labor" Michael J. Quill, whose three decades as founding president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) gave him an indelible place in the minds of millions of New Yorkers as the werewolf of the subways and buses, was an outrageous blend of engaging leprechaun and exasperating rapscallion He made an inestimable contribution to improving the wages and working conditions of his membership...
...But the man limned here is atoweringhero: He is resolute in his commitment to principle, audacious in puncturing the pomposity of wealthy and powerful malefactors and their lackeys in the press, a cheerful martyr in the service of the downtrodden and despairing...
...Unfortunately, the glow recedes substantially alongside the sleazier episodes in his saga...
...Yet the incarceration was an integral part of the Quill game plan...
...The boss had the right to hire and fire at will...
...No soap opera has ever approached in tenderness or in trauma the story of their life together, both prior to and after marriage...
...To win is sweet, but the real fun and excitement are in the challenge...
...Tis an old Gaelic word,'" he patiently explained...
...Mike Quill Himself will hold you spellbound for that tale alone...
...If you had joined our side, you would have been a millionaire by now," the RCA head said...
...Her second contribution to the Quill vocabulary was megillah, which he used with devastating effect to cut short a long-winded orationbya Bronx colleague during his 1937-39 stint as an American Labor Party member of the City Council...
...Soon the panicky business establishment was exerting so much pressure on the new Mayor for peace at any price that the TWU walked off with a wage package twice as big as it had ever won, and an unfunded pension plan that did much to hasten the Big Apple's slide into near-bankruptcy within less than a decade...
...Their torrid relationship, narrated in a manner worthy of Eugene O'Neill, included many macabre twists and turns...
...Quill's stand-ins at the settlement negotiations gave them a swift signal to get lost...
...Alas for him, a 12-day transit strike began on the very day he was sworn in...
...Then he spelled it out," 'M-c-G-i-l-l-a.'" Tome, though, nothing in Mrs...
...Lindsley" who was boss...
...This intensely readable book by Mike Quill's widow is essentially a touching love story, the account of a romance that deepened over 23 tempestuous years...
...She has a harder time defending her husband's stand in 1940 oil Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for a third term, opposed by both Lewis and the Communist Party...
...But Quill, from a prison hospital bed in Bellevue, had taught "Mr...
...Examples of Quill's chutzpah, aterm Shirley taught him from her limited Yiddish lexicon, abound in every section of this book...
...He did not, and the motormen were duly gathered into Quill's net...
...Quill immediately used his muscle at City Hall to smash the insurgents...
...There's no fun in that," he declared...
...No one can question the consistency, cunning and passion Mike Quill displayed pursuing that chase right up to his "last hurrah": his humiliation of Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1966...
...A week after his victory he felt well enough to address his shop stewards and promised: "The best is yet to come...
...Every one of them presented challenges that would have shattered any conventional attachment, let alone the bonds linking an unreconstructed rebel from Ireland's County Kerry heading a predominantly Catholic union and a strong-willed, radical Jewish divorcee from Brooklyn...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 6
