THE MOOD OF AMERICA
White, Walter & Miller, Joe
THE MOOD OF AMERICA Hopeful Youth By Walter White Walter White Utbana, Ill. NEWS of 50 or more Bowl games, real and synthetic, clogged newspapers and radio during the recent Holidays to such an...
...But there remains the wholesome and cheering reality that in every section of the country today's students are profoundly and intelligently concerned about doing something as well as talking about problems of race, war, economics, and politics...
...In 1947 a genera] strike at Oakland disintegrated when Dave ordered his men to break through picket lines...
...Similar revolt against such un-democracy at Amherst College and several other schools is found all over the United States...
...It was predominantly Southern students who swarmed around the speaker after the meeting to express agreement and to ask for advice on how best and most swiftly racial segregation could be abolished in church, school, and state...
...Few of them are the reticent, anemic youth who a decade or so ago constituted the bulk of the Christian movements on many campuses...
...In plainer language, this means no strikes, the curbing of labor's basic right...
...In May, 1948, Beck's teamsters had crashed the striking Machinists' picket lines, recruited and organized strikebreakers inside the plant and, after several months of heart-breaking struggle, forced the IAM to abandon its strike...
...Somber but not discouraged faces reflected agreement with his thesis that "the only sane policy is to abandon the policy of preponderant power and substitute a positive program of peace, involving a settlement with Russia...
...Beck thinks of himself as a businessman, the president of a large labor supply company...
...But not all of them will do so...
...In this case a large body of industrial workers were given a clear-cut choice: Beck's immensely powerful oligarchy offering a promise of no strikes, good wages, and stabilized working conditions, or the Machinists, a democratic labor organization...
...We'd like to strike but with Beck ready to scabherd on us, we can't take the chance," is a plaint that I have heard many times from the leaders of smaller unions...
...Of late the rapacious West Coast boss of the AFL Teamsters' Union has been the target of a series of telling pay-off blows, all from other Western labor groups which are rebelling against his vicious policies...
...The Boeing affair, in addition to being a loss of prestige, has revealed how far Beck has wandered from the workers...
...The 8,107 to 4,127 vote in favor of the Machinists at Boeing wrote a happy ending to the most sordid labor experience in Seattle's history...
...His strikebreaking mission completed, Beck persisted in his campaign to organize the Boeing workers...
...But here at the University of Illinois is an entirely and infinitely less frenetic aspect of contemporary education which commands fewer headlines but means far more as a barometer of student opinion...
...In the San Francisco bay area, Beck is being JOE MILLER has covered labor developments in the Northwest for the Seattle, Wash., newspapers . . . WALTER WHITE retired recently as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...NEWS of 50 or more Bowl games, real and synthetic, clogged newspapers and radio during the recent Holidays to such an extent that the uninformed might have believed all of America's college students to be either playing in or attending one of the games...
...His attitude is fairly typical...
...Realizing that his chances were slender, Beck turned to the national AFL for help...
...It is for this reason that considerable significance can be attached to Beck's recent reversals in the West, particularly the Boeing affair...
...The vote for democratic unionism and against Beckism was overwhelming...
...A few came from India, Puerto Rico, China, Japan, Norway, and the Malay Peninsula...
...For Beck is a company unionist at heart...
...Shortly before the Boeing election, delegates of the AFL lumber workers, representing 45,000 Northwest woodworkers whom Beck had been instrumental in organizing, branded him a "traitor to the labor movement...
...But it is in Seattle, his home town, that Beck has received his severest come-uppance...
...a vote against Beckism," commented the Portland Oregonian...
...Should Beck be successful in his drive for national power, the results could be crippling to many segments of labor, particularly smaller international unions...
...By whipping the boss teamster so convincingly, the Machinists thoroughly punctured the myth of his invincibility, a fiction that had been built up through the success of his relentless crashing of the jurisdiction of smaller unions...
...It was okay to slug Bridges and the CIO, but belting our own guys is another thing," the business agent of a big teamster local grumbled to me...
...The Oregon Labor Press, official organ of the AFL...
...When Beck's truckers tried to crash CIO longshoremen picket lines to unload "hot" Hawaiian pineapple and work with scab labor at The Dalles, Ore., they wound up in the hospital—and three AFL papers declared that the CIO workers' action was justified...
...In Portland the teamster who had been president of the AFL Central Labor Council for 15 years and two other Beck teamsters were defeated for reelection by write-in candidates...
...The issue of Beckism has forced the teamsters to retreat throughout the Far West...
...At Princeton, McMurray College in Illinois, Denison University in Ohio, and scores of other schools from which unwritten customs or high tuition fees have barred Negro students, active campaigns by both student bodies and faculties are being conducted to bring qualified Negroes to those schools...
...They traveled by train, bus, and jalopy, some of them coming a thousand or more miles from Texas, California, Massachusetts, and Florida...
...Even Harry Bridges' tough CIO warehousemen came to a hasty agreement with San Francisco chain stores, against whom they had been striking in 1948, when Brother Dave appeared on the scene...
...The courses taught by Negro professors and instructors in 72 American colleges and universities are among the most popular in those institutions...
...Beck, who is a healthy 55, is aiming for control of U. S. labor, and has the treasure chest of one of the country's richest unions and 1,000 organizers at work to accomplish this end...
...The action basically was a revolt against Dave Beck of Seattle...
...boycotted" by AFL unions representing 90,000 workers, and their representatives have branded him in a resolution for entering into "collusion with employers in an effort to take over the entire labor movement in the United States...
...It is probable that a decade ago many of the Southerners would have been angered by so un-sugar-coated a recital of our national and sectional prejudices...
...Long curbed by his no-strike policy and subservience to business, his disregard for the rights of other unions has made his men pariahs in the labor world...
...If the Boeing affair has shown that the Big Bad Wolf has a soft underbelly, the U. S. labor movement has reason to be grateful...
...While Beck's defeat was by no means a surprise, his remarkably puerile campaign was...
...Beck may now do a quick aboutface and soften his policies, as he has often before...
...Early last year Beck, who has seized control of the million-member U. S. Teamsters' Union away from Dan Tobin, announced that he was going to organize another million teamsters within five years...
...Several quite hefty football teams could be formed among the men, so far as size and health are concerned...
...Earlier the Washington state AFL, with 305,-000 members, had expressed similar sentiments...
...And he is...
...Dave Beck's Retreat By Joe Miller Seattle DAVE BECK, who is consumed by the ambition to become ruler of the American labor movement, is finding out the expensive way that it doesn't pay to break strikes or raid other unions...
...Thus the phenomenon, which is rapidly becoming the general pattern of student thinking and action, and which is so visible here at the University of Illinois conference, provides one of the most heartening aspects of contemporary American life...
...They are rapidly becoming as discredited as the D.A.R...
...Seduced long ago by the fawning praise of business, Dave has succeeded in diverting the machinery of his union from its legitimate purpose of advancing the workers' interests and has virtually put it at the disposal of the employers friendly to him...
...With the rest of U. S. labor watching and with his prestige at stake...
...Beck fired his heaviest guns in a desperate bid to win the workers...
...They are well fed, ebullient, alert, serious but not pompous about the national and world issues they have come here to discuss...
...In areas where he has control of "everything on wheels," this has often resulted in what Beck likes to call "stabilization...
...So powerful has been his dominance that he was able to control labor relations in many areas of the West...
...II Contrariwise, the student organizations which have abandoned discrimination are becoming the most popular...
...Few of the speakers at the conference could be labeled as dispensers of sweetness and light or as authors of the vacuous religious doctrines which would have made up the program of such a conference before the war...
...But Bill Green didn't speak for the AFL in the West...
...William Green responded with a transcribed radio speech...
...for its Constitution Hall policy...
...What about the rank-and-filer...
...Some—perhaps a majority—of the students will succumb to parental or community prejudices after graduation...
...1 strikebreaker of America...
...He spent $100,000, but his efforts were unimaginative and tiresome...
...The purpose of this Beck activity is perfectly clear here...
...And at least a score or more winners or at least runners-up in beauty contests could be seen among the women...
...A picture of Green and Beck, arms interlocked, was widely used to convey the idea that Boeing workers would receive the support of eight million AFL members if they voted for Dave...
...Those who dare to step out of line suffer for it...
...Beck shouted that a Machinist victory would make the Communists happy, when it was common knowledge that the IAM is as loudly anti-Soviet as Beck...
...But since they are beholden to Beck for their well-paying jobs, their resentment seldom comes to the surface...
...Both of those comments can be substantiated by much evidence...
...Or that this convention represents...
...On the side he is president of a $3,-500,000 apartment corporation, and his 29-year old son, Dave Jr., is president of a big beer distributing company...
...Talk with Beck's subalterns, and you find well-banked coals of discontent...
...The gainer will be you and me as this oncoming generation lives up to the promise and goal of the Bill of Rights better than we have...
...This interest is as intense in the Middle West as it is on the east and west coasts with the South not far behind...
...Instead tumultuous applause greeted the assertion that any American, especially if he be a member of Congress, who blocked legislative or other steps to end race and religious bigotry in the United States and colonialism anywhere in the world is "more treasonable and dangerous to democracy than the 11 Communists recently convicted in New York City...
...His reversals throughout the West demonstrate that Beckism can be beaten—a significant fact for labor to remember...
...Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University ^of Chicago presented a gloomy future for the world in an address on atomic power and the futility of spending billions of dollars for defense against "something (from which) you cannot defend yourself...
...Equally vociferous and spontaneous was the agreement with the declaration that "the church cannot call itself Christian as long as the shadow of Jim Crow darkens it...
...With equal seriousness and receptivity the audience, of which a high percentage was Southern white students, listened to a brutally frank presentation of the race question...
...College fraternities and sororities on virtually every one of 40 campuses I have visited during the past two months which cling to policies of exclusion are losing caste themselves and becoming the butt of student ridicule...
...called his Boeing move "one of the most infamous acts in labor's history...
...only one of numerous religions on college campuses or that the majority of students ignore religious affiliations...
...In the past his opportunism has made him a New Dealer, a Republican, a radical and ally of Harry Bridges, a conservative and Bridges' worst enemy, a supporter of public power and then its foe...
...He is the author of "A Man Called White," "Fire in the Flint," and "Rope and Faggot—A Biography of Judge Lynch...
...Twenty-five hundred college students gave up holidays at home to attend the Fourth Annual Methodist Student Convention...
...In November, the factory workers of the Boeing Airplane Co.'s Seattle plants soundly rejected his attempt to corral them into his stockade of 290,000 Western duespayers and voted instead for the independent International Association of Machinists in an NLRB election...
...When Beck broke a walkout of 6,000 AFL Retail Clerks in Los Angeles with the same tactics, Joe DeSilvia of the clerks called him the "No...
...At Middlebury College in Vermont, Alpha Sigma Psi which resigned in protest against the national fraternity's demand that it de-pledge a popular and able Negro student is the most sought-after fraternity on the campus...
...This wrath against Beck from within the AFL has had its effects inside his tightly-ruled Western conference of teamsters...
...He is supposed to be satisfied with his reasonably good wages plus the assurance that he doesn't have to strike to win them...
...Beck lives in a lakeside mansion, drives Cadillacs, dresses expensively on his $25,000 salary, and acts in every respect like a corporation executive...
...They were duds...
...He has no say in union policy, and a "Big Brother Is Watching You" attitude, typical of George Orwell's 1984, prevails at teamster meetings...
...Skeptics may scoff and say that this is but another example of youthful enthusiasm which won't last long after the students have returned to school...
Vol. 14 • February 1950 • No. 2
