THE BARRICADES ON PARK AVENUE

...they aroused scant response, perhaps because so few in his audience had ever heard of them...

...from Cardinal Spell-man praying for collaboration and not conflict to President Eisenhower's characterization of Karl Marx as a lonely, embittered refugee...

...Eisenhower's efforts for peace...

...In each of them, there was a kind of passion...

...The Industrial Union Department had been marked as Reuther's appointed "province...

...III It seemed to none of these men, who began so differently, a thing of wonder that, among the vice presidents of their new federation, they picked two Negroes, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Willard Townsend of the CIO Transport Service Workers...

...Congress and was so inflamed by what he heard there as to suggest that the labor party is coming and vengeance is its creed...

...and, in that way, they are like most articulate Americans...

...The speech he makes is the same one he began with in the Student League for Industrial Democracy at Wayne University...

...They seem, in fact, quite content to live with their differences, which get smaller year by year...

...Reuther was elected president of the IUD without dissent, and Beck began dissolving from the stage, suddenly a ghost in a suit of horrible blue blotting-paper and obscured by a floral tribute on the one occasion where he appeared on the platform...

...at intervals, he would raise his eyes towards heaven and find there the requisite quotation from Calvin Coolidge...

...Governor Harriman offered a painfully detailed list of Administration malefactors...

...There was no talk here about the reconciliation of the class struggle...

...The unions are most American in their short tolerance of the man who exacerbates differences...

...they were very different men but each included references to the Negro in the South...

...One visitor said that his first experience with this charming sham had been at a press conference presided over by Harlow Curtice of General Motors, and that the press agent who set it up felt compelled to exclaim throughout Curtice's performance that only a genius of production could carry in his head that font of statistics the boss was spouting forth...

...The night before Stevenson addressed them, a half-dozen AFL-CIO leaders separately handed him suggestions for insertions...

...That unease was the great promise of the merger...

...he gave them hope of finding again that clan they had lost...

...his audience was silent...

...Only the name of Richard M. Nixon may be said to have been thoroughly booed from the floor of their convention...

...Harriman started no wild cries...

...the N.A.M...

...They are normal in their affectionate regard for the President, and they laugh, rather than growl, at C. E. ' Wilson...

...For these people were at their best on the unmistakable occasions when they cheered from a sense that they had done badly in the past and must do better in the future...

...and this seemed only a common recognition that he is a shifty fellow insensitive to moral challenge...

...The teleprompter is our final contrivance for that spontaneity we have lost...

...Men now gray heard their voices from that heroic time crying their defiance of Tom Girdler and the cops and the companies and all who laugh at dreams...

...yet their mere presence in the executive body of the AFL-CIO was a recognition, if not of a revolution accomplished, at least of a redress required...

...The difference was only the sense of compassion and the sense of shame...

...George Meany adverted to the Southern crisis more sharply than any other speaker...

...IV Up at the Waldorf, the National Association of Manufacturers was organizing the resistance...

...The N.A.M...

...All their visitors stood before a backdrop of workers marching towards some endless horizon, the proper percentage of Negroes among them, the eyes innocent of heat, the faces alike young, empty, and well-scrubbed...

...Prosperity cannot satisfy it...

...quite obviously conceived his reconnaissance in force as an engulfment of his great symbolic enemy...

...It is a dusty vault constructed in the nineties near the railroad terminals as a convenient headquarters for the National Guard in case Eugene Victor Debs should attempt to seize the rails...

...The strongest memory of that convention was a pageant of the CIO's history, with hired actors reading quotations from the days of the sit-down strikes...

...Yet Stevenson's employment of traditional applause-pullers fell almost as flat as Harriman's intimacies...

...And so many of the AFL delegates cheered Walter Reuther because he seemed to promise an elan they had never known...

...Beck's posture was that of a man threatening to walk out unless his due was granted him, and whatever hope of gore there was in the armory hung with him...

...The new American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations is a heavy portmanteau to pick up...

...He touched his audience just twice— first when he made an oblique reference to the troubles of the Negro in the South and second when he asked for better schools...

...They went reluctantly to the AFL as to an acceptance of maturity, but they cheered when they heard George Meany talk as one of their own...

...Having touched the social worker in every bricklayer, Reuther was content to let Meany set the tone thenceforward...

...it remains the same and he is going...

...And James Hof-fa, who runs the Teamsters and is altogether the popular conception of Emil Mazey's opposite, waved his manicured but muscled hand over the assemblage and said: "We got to drive...

...on the other a manufacturer of Kleenex proclaiming that P.S...

...Walter Reuther performed prodigies of adjustment and even accomplished the individual triumph of the occasion, if only by recognizing so clearly that the center of power had passed to George Meany...

...The effect of revelation from a Higher province turned out to be the product of a new teleprompter which consists of three transparent mirrors reflecting the script from the floor and allowing Henry L. Ryerson to move his head from side to side like an old maid poet with the frenzy of improvisation beating against her inhibitions...

...It seems hard to remember that only five years ago he came out of the West breathing portents of fundamental change in the labor movement...

...Dave Beck of the Teamsters Union defined the hazards of such effrontery when he moved to take all his 1,231,000 members into the new Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO...

...had once again been the cause of unreality in others...

...They do not, as an instance, appear much excited about their formal enemies...

...Nearly every speaker they heard somehow lost them, and they gabbled inattentively at their tables while the old resolutions about housing and civil defense were droned out over their heads...

...That sense was presumably behind their insistence that Adlai Stevenson throw them a bone on Mississippi...

...plainly heard the rattling of the tumbrels, but it was not alone in misunderstanding the assemblage down the road...

...and even the friendliest outsiders who approached it may be forgiven the hard time they had finding a handle...

...The President of the United States was respectfully heard...

...What lay between these two conventions was not a barricade so much as a great void...

...A few blocks up Park Avenue, the National Association of Manufacturers set up a command post of resistance to the coalescing proletariat at its annual Congress of Industry in the Waldorf...

...They talked, in deference to ancient custom, about what he must say to get votes of their members...

...These were odd seats for the passions of a special interest audience—odd enough in fact to provide a clue to the kind of audience it was...

...Ryerson is a prim man in rimless spectacles...

...But not even the illusion of divine inspiration could touch this audience...

...These 1400 delegates, like the movement they represent, are close to middle age...

...They may even grow so accustomed to notions of social advancement as eventually to be bored by Reuther's message...

...The CIO delegates had come there from their own dissolving convention, a great bath of sentiment, where it seemed as though they were rubbing their eyes at the wonder of their departed youth...

...This audience after all is fifty per cent lackies, since the works manager of a screw company always carries the assistant to the works manager to these rites with him, and sodden duty is rooted in every other chair...

...II It was an occasion when nearly everyone was on his good behavior— to brother as well as stranger...

...A visiting escapee from the merger assembly found Henry L. Ryerson, N.A.M.'s retiring president, exhorting his legions before a backdrop montage of smokeless factories upon a river, a scene of such sylvan purity that industry appeared to have eliminated not just the class struggle but even the innocent touch of tattletale gray...

...but in fairness to those present, it must be said that their blood was not heated by its passions...

...But they were really talking about recapturing their own enthusiasm, because they are with us in feeling the desperate need for a political voice which can make them care again...

...even managed a small triumph ofl diplomacy when, after a rather flats recital of Republican achievements, he touched his audience with an im-provised appeal for understanding Mr...

...wealth and power can only bring the sense that the achievement of the material thing you wanted leaves only the recognition that you lack so much else...

...Beck had...

...He offered a script heavy with the sort of thing habitually assumed to move and stir labor leaders at their ceremonials...

...It measures the failures of our society that the only available Negro leaders of labor were a pull-man porter and a red cap...

...Then Meany called Beck in and forced him to settle for a bare third of his demands...

...and his Secretary of Labor MURRAY KEMPTON is a dally columnist and labor expert for the New York Post...

...Adlai Stevenson came by with the assurance of the warmth guaranteed the candidate most of those present expect to support next fall...

...But they can be moved by moral challenge...

...Thoroughly scrubbed and well-barbered, they sat and listened pa-tiently while outsiders reminded them that there is no class-struggle in the United States...

...they were touched only by the language of hope...

...The interesting circumstance is that it now falls upon the AFL building trades like a gentle, reviving rain...

...The N.A.M...

...but he hardly believes that...

...The language of fear passed over them...

...He is the author of the much-discussed book, "Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties," published last year...

...And so there was for them very little reality in the talk of visitors about the reconciliation of the class struggle...

...Reuther ran the test of his introduction to his new AFL brothers handsomely, offering them the speech which has sat so well so long with strike leaders and advertising executives alike—a porridge about the solidarity of human brotherhood and the vineyards of democracy and the last best hope of free men everywhere and building together and fighting together—and got himself lustily cheered by what had originally been an audience of mistrustful strangers...

...Governor Averell Harriman of New York offered the merger convention a speech crafted by one of those sweating spirits who make up for the absence of inspiration by careful contrivance...

...if the new labor movement can offer nothing else, it holds forth a hope for all of us that is much, much more than wealth and power can ever be...

...No sense that they are a revolutionary army can long survive close contact with them...

...George Meany came down for the last day of the N.A.M...

...Walter Reuther is enough like the first Henry Ford to feel no disposition to update a loved and tested product...

...It could not have been written by anyone who was not possessed of an I.B.M...

...Their lives—or that best part of them which is their memories —have been built on struggle of a sort and those of them who have any chance to be consequential in our future have no disposition to settle down as sextons in a cathedral...

...Emil Mazey, the perennial picket captain who is secretary-treasurer of the Auto Workers, was asking one afternoon how anybody could suggest that there was no class struggle in America in the face of the Kohler and Perfect Circle strikes...

...There was something cold and not quite of this earth about its fixed silence as there was something engaging about the general inattention of the labor delegates...

...delegates were not even stirred when Secretary of Commerce Weeks announced that this was their government and they had best rouse themselves or they might lose the war...

...The N.A.M...

...There's too many guys here who're content to have 3,000 members and make $130-a-week the rest of their lives...

...84 is the shadow of 1984...

...He showed judgment in not disturbing the peace...

...On one side sat the union delegates, not perfect but troubled, feeling men, cheering a call for better schools...

...concluded its ceremonies by inaugurating a new president named Cola C. Parker who said that free public education was the first step on the road to serfdom...

...Henry L. Ryerson offers it as Averell Harriman offers the authentic nickname of a labor leader...

...They might have been asleep for ten years and waked to find the world grown old and them with it...

...machine in which you insert a card for the president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and come up with such esoterica as his nickname, which turns out to be "Park...

...They have a very meager sense of economic challenge...

...There was something ghostly in that still assembly with Henry L. Ryerson listening for voices from the Republican firmament like some Joan of Arc in a pin-striped suit...