Radical in the CIO

...Indeed De Caux ranks Lewis with William Z. Foster, Communist Party leader, and Eugene V. Debs, the great Socialist spokesman, as the three greatest American working class leaders...

...In the 1960s a new wave of radicalism beat strongly on American shores...

...De Caux's portrait of Lewis's personality and his analysis of Lewis's policies and actions are possibly the best now in print...

...The pen portraits of Hillman and Murray are equally revealing and ungrudging, though not so flattering...

...During these years, De Caux joined the British Communist Party, married a left-wing, Jewish immigrant garment worker from Milwaukee, and became ever more deeply involved with organized labor...

...Surprisingly, perhaps, John L. Lewis, a one-time Red-hunter and certainly no revolutionary, is the hero of Labor Radical...

...From Chicago, De Caux went further west, toiling on prairie farms, in West Coast woods, and at various odd jobs in Winnipeg, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle...

...De Caux's history of unionism in the 1930s should remind a later era's "cold warriors" that Communists in the labor movement were most concerned with building strong unions and winning immediate gains from employers, not with serving Joseph Stalin or Soviet Russia...

...Leaving New York City, he hiked, hitched, and rode the rods west, to Chicago, which impressed him as "some kind of hell...

...A man of rare talent, De Caux required a life more rewarding than migratory labor...

...instead, they realized that the great challenge to radicals was to induce labor to move, for without a dynamic working class social progress remains a chimera...

...These experiences taught him about the ethnic and racial tensions indigenous to the American working class, the nature of trade unionism in the 1920s, and why such radical labor organizations as the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—had declined...

...De Caux stresses basic similarities between the radicalism of the 1960s and that of the 1930s, and he calls upon today's left to remember their depression ancestors who didn't write off the labor movement because of reactionary leaders and passive ranks...

...Essentially," writes De Caux, "this welfare New Deal was wrested from government by popular rebellion...

...By then, he was thoroughly prepared for the position offered to him in 1936 as publicity director for John L. Lewis's new CIO...

...Along the way, as he dodged railroad and local authorities, he engaged in backbreaking day labor and met a variety of hoboes and drifters...

...These pages should reawaken warm memories for those who lived through the New Deal years, and, more importantly, should correct many distortions young people have about that crucial period...

...From his own personal experiences with Congressional investigating committees and FBI agents, and from his knowledge of events in the labor movement, De Caux justly observes: "Anti-Communism was the smokescreen for capitalist advance to contain the CIO within the limits of corporate liberalism and an American-Century foreign policy...

...Move your chair closer," said Lewis, "so I can tell my grandchildren how close I once sat to one and a half billion dollars...

...asked attorney Smith...

...Reversing the immigrant saga of rags to riches, De Caux hit the road as a migratory worker...

...For a time he even served in the merchant marine...

...Len De Caux, a child of privilege, sacrificed the advantages of birth and class to throw in his lot with the working class and the Communists...

...The union Communists, as described in this book by one of them, regularly sacrificed their own power within the unions in the interest of labor unity...

...They also prepared hirn exceedingly well for his future role as CIO publicist and editor...

...And De Caux explains how and why CIO joined the corporate-liberal society...

...And "new left" critics of the CIO might learn from De Caux that the working class upheaval of the 1930s was sponsored neither by the great corporations nor the New Deal...

...Born in Edwardian England, the son of a respectable Protestant minister, De Caux attended Harrow and then Oxford, whence he moved on to the trenches of World War I. His wartime experience convinced De Caux that capitalist governments and their statesmen could not be trusted and that only a revolution of working-class origin could transform the world...

...He includes this anecdote about Lewis's encounter with General Motors' Dupont family attorney during the 1937 Flint sitdown strike: "What's the matter...

...De Caux is remarkably evenhanded and generous in his estimate of men and events...

...After fighting for what they got, the CIO unions did become domesticated and more submissive before corporate leaders and government officials...

...This he discovered as a labor reporter and editor, first with Oscar Ameringer's Illinois Miner, then with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers' Journal, and finally as a roving reporter for the Federated Press, a wire service for labor and radical papers...

...The bulk of this autobiography, and by far the most intriguing and enlightening portion, concerns De Caux's career with the CIO, during which he witnessed firsthand the emergence of mass-production unionism and knew intimately that generation's trade union giants: John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and Philip Murray...

...This perception motivated De Caux to relinquish his English privileges for a singular life as an immigrant in America...

...Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky This book, the life story of an unabashed and unrepentant "old leftist" of the 1930s and earlier, consciously seeks to draw the attention of today's generation of radicals to their predecessors in recent American history...