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LEFT UNIONS WERE REPRESSED BECAUSE THEY THREATENED CAPITAL  
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Victor G. Devinatz
May 29, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ During the 20th century’s two red scares in US and Canada,
Wobblies and Communist-aligned unions faced fierce repression from
employers and government. They were targeted because they were seen as
posing a real threat to the capitalist social order. _

Radical labor leaders Harry Bridges (L), Henry Schmidt (C), and J. R.
Robertson (R) during their trial for perjury, on November 16, 1948. ,
Bettmann / Getty Images

 

Review of _Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War
on Radical Workers _by Ahmed White (University of California Press,
2024), _Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend_ by Robert W.
Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2023), and _Smelter Wars: A
Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western
Canada_ by Ron Verzuh (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

A little over a hundred years ago, radical leftists like Socialist
Party of America (SPA) leader Eugene V. Debs and Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW) members were prosecuted under the Espionage Act during
and after World War I. On June 13, 2023, former president Donald
Trump, undoubtedly a right-wing strongman and an authoritarian leader
(if not an outright fascist as considered by several experts) was
arraigned in a Miami Beach federal court several days after his
indictment under the Espionage Act for retaining federal government
documents dealing with highly sensitive military information from his
2017 to 2021 presidential term. In his speech to supporters only hours
after his arraignment, Trump remarked that his indictment was “a
political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or
communist nation,” and then referred to President Joseph Biden, who
he claimed “will forever be remembered as not only as the most
corrupt president in the history of our country . . . but perhaps even
more importantly, the president who together with the band of his
closest thugs, misfits and Marxists tried to destroy American
democracy.” My, how a century makes a difference! A hundred years
ago, Marxists and anarcho-syndicalist radicals were persecuted for
their political beliefs, while Trump now claims that he is targeted by
alleged Marxists for illegally retaining classified and top-secret
government documents.

 

Besides Debs and IWW militants, there has been a long history of
repression of the North American trade union movement, dating back to
the late nineteenth century. Much of this repression has occurred in
response to union militancy during strikes, some of which were
connected to political radicals of various stripes, including
socialists and anarchists. Examples abound of this repression, which
included employer and government violence directed against striking
workers, such as the 1877 St. Louis Railroad Strike, the 1886
Haymarket Square Riot, and the 1892 Homestead Strike.

Repression against the US left and left-wing trade unions reached its
first apex during the World War I era with a confluence of events
confronting the United States at the time. With the Bolsheviks leading
the working class, obtaining power, and attempting to build socialism
after the 1917 Russian Revolution, communism became a real fear
confronting capitalist nations and their governments. Prior to US
involvement in World War I, the SPA, which was at its membership peak
of approximately 150,000, opposed the country’s participation in the
war. However, the craft-union oriented American Federation of Labor
(AFL) unions came to support the war effort upon its declaration. The
revolutionary syndicalist IWW did not back the war and refused to
honor the no-strike pledges to which the AFL unions adhered during
World War I. Moreover, the formation of two US communist parties, the
immigrant-dominated Communist Party of America as well as the more
native-born led Communist Labor Party, emerging from the SPA’s left
wing (or Marxist wing) over the 1919 Labor Day weekend, fueled fears
that Communism was not just a European threat but also could become an
actual risk to the United States.

Repression against the US left and left-wing trade unions reached its
first apex during the World War I era.

The next peak of repression against the North American trade union
movement occurred a quarter of a century later, upon World War II’s
conclusion in which the Allied powers (United States, Soviet Union,
Great Britain) defeated the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Italy, Japan).
Although the United States and the Soviet Union were partners in
defeating fascism, this alliance did not survive for long after the
war. With the United States viewing the Soviet Union as its biggest
threat to world domination, the Cold War developed in the immediate
post–World War II period. While the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and
the CPUSA-led unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
were enthusiastic supporters of the Allies’ war effort, which
included the backing of the wartime no-strike pledge and incentive pay
to maximize production during the war, by 1946, the CPUSA had become a
domestic target of Cold War politics.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which outlined a myriad of restrictions on
US trade unions, specifically targeted the CPUSA-led unions under
Section 9(h), which required that union officials sign an affidavit
that they were not Communist Party members. Refusal to comply resulted
in the union forgoing access to the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB), which meant that unions could neither participate in union
certification elections nor file unfair labor practice charges against
employers. If union leaders signed even though they were CPUSA
members, they could be charged and convicted of perjury, culminating
in a prison term. Moreover, the 1949 Smith Act trials charging twelve
of the CPUSA’s national leaders with advocating the violent
overthrow of the US government ended with convictions and prison
sentences of three to five years, combined with a $10,000 fine per
individual. Attacks on the CPUSA-led unions also came from within the
US trade union movement, with the CIO expelling these nine unions due
to their opposition to the Marshall Plan and their backing of Henry
Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in the 1948
election as opposed to Harry Truman, the Democratic Party candidate,
who defeated Thomas Dewey by the slimmest of margins.

The IWW, Harry Bridges, and Mine Mill

The repression of left-wing trade unions is a major theme of three
recent volumes: Ahmed White’s _Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies
and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers_, Robert W.
Cherny’s _Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend_, and Ron
Verzuh’s _Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its
Life in Wartime Western Canada_.

White’s volume is the first exhaustive account of the legal and
vigilante attacks on the IWW beginning in 1917, at the same time as
World War I and the Russian Revolution, when the organization was
becoming stronger and increasing in membership. By 1927, the
organization had been essentially destroyed by the federal government
and employers, who were threatened by the group’s militancy.

Cherny’s book is undoubtedly the definitive biography of Harry
Bridges, president of the International Longshoremen’s and
Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), now the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union, for forty years from 1937 to 1977. Bridges brought a
militant trade unionism to the stevedores working on the West Coast
docks during the 1930s while extending trade unionism to the
warehouse, sugar, and pineapple workers in Hawaii. Known for his
militancy and effectiveness as a leader, Bridges was attacked for his
left-wing politics and success, while there were several attempts to
deport and imprison him for his communist sympathies. Moreover, the
CIO expelled the ILWU for its politics. Nevertheless, after the
union’s expulsion, Bridges continued to effectively lead the
independent union while dealing with controversial issues such as
racial integration and the mechanization/containerization on the
waterfront.

The repression of North American left-wing unions was severe because
of the strength of these unions and the threat they were perceived to
pose to employers and the government.

Verzuh’s treatise examines the CPUSA-led International Union of
Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) Local 480, which
represented more than five thousand workers at a smelter that was
owned and operated by the formidable Consolidated Mining and Smelting
(CM&S) Company of Canada. The book discusses how Local 480 fought
corporate, media, and religious attacks on the union during the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold War era.

These works, I argue, demonstrate that the repression of North
American left-wing unions was severe because of the strength of these
unions and the threat they were perceived to pose to employers and the
government. Given that these left-wing unions were much more militant
than the AFL unions, this governmental repression (as well as that of
other forces) can be viewed as a conscious set of tactics invoked to
break, or at a minimum tame, these radical unions in the service of
capital.

Born in the Melbourne, Australia, suburb of Kensington in 1901 as
Alfred Renton Bridges, the young Bridges was strongly influenced by
his Uncle Renton, a wool presser and member of the Australian
Workers’ Union. Additionally, Bridges’s father and uncle were
strong supporters of the Australian Labor Party, which in 1910 became
the globe’s first social democratic party to achieve a substantial
electoral majority in the nation’s bicameral parliament. Bridges
first worked on a small sailing vessel in December 1917 on a
month-long trip to Tasmania; he continued to work aboard ships for
five more years, serving in various capacities including cook,
ordinary seaman, and able seamen.

Bridges arrived in San Francisco in April 1920 aboard a sailing
vessel, but initially did not have plans to make the United States his
permanent home. Shortly after the ship docked, Bridges joined the
Sailors Union of the Pacific. After working a ship to Boston in
December 1920 and being exposed to IWW organizers in early 1921,
Bridges joined the revolutionary syndicalist organization. In 1922,
Bridges began laboring as a San Francisco longshoreman, experiencing
the waterfront’s brutal working conditions including the shape-up
and high injury rates. Bridges’s leg and shoulder were hurt in 1923,
and in 1929, he experienced a devastating injury, a crushed foot.
Although he flirted with union matters from 1922 to 1932, it was not
until the Great Depression that Bridges immersed himself in union
affairs.

By the middle of 1933, Bridges was actively involved in efforts to
bring a new ILA local to the San Francisco waterfront, meeting weekly
with a dozen or so ILA members who were all political militants, with
some being members or sympathizers of the CPUSA who came to be known
as the Albion Group. By this time, Bridges’s fellow workers were
turning to him for leadership while his political views were shifting
to the left, as he came to believe that capitalism could not resolve
the Great Depression’s problems. In the local union elections that
September, the Albion Group (including Bridges) obtained victories in
a majority of executive board seats and business-agent positions.

In 1933, with the breakdown of the National Recovery Act’s code of
fair competition hearings regarding wages and working conditions among
longshoremen, employers, and the federal government, and with
employers refusing to recognize the union, there was sentiment among
West Coast port workers for conducting a walkout. Strike votes were
taken in mid-March 1934 among the ILA locals, which voted decisively
in favor of a work stoppage, setting the stage for the historic May
1934 strike.

Lasting eighty-three days from May 9 to July 31, 1934, the ILA strike
encompassed between 10,000 and 15,000 Pacific Coast longshoremen who
were fighting for a union-controlled hiring hall and a contract
covering all West Coast stevedores. Undoubtedly the seminal moment in
ILA history, the walkout was of decisive importance to Harry Bridges,
who became the San Francisco local’s de facto head and emerged as a
principal leader throughout the entire Pacific Coast. Since there were
only six to eight CPUSA members on the Strike Committee, which had
more than seventy members, the party influenced but neither directed
nor controlled the strike. In July 1934, all maritime unions were
involved in the general strike, engulfing San Francisco in open class
warfare. The ILA emerged victorious, embedding the longshore union
firmly within the West Coast waterfront, along with a union-controlled
hiring hall that had an ILA-selected dispatcher, achieving a coastwide
collective bargaining agreement, a six-hour workday, a thirty-hour
workweek, and an arbitration system for resolving disputes, combined
with small wage increases.

Harry Bridges on June 7, 1937. (Wikimedia Commons)

While there was joint action among the maritime unions during the 1934
strike, after the walkout there was an attempt to formalize this unity
through the establishment of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific
(MFP) in April 1935, in which Bridges and Harry Lundeberg (of the
International Seamen’s Union) played key roles. This umbrella
organization encountered difficulties from the start due to job
actions and boycotts that not only frayed union-employer relations but
also led to clashes between Bridges and Lundeberg. During the MFP’s
strike from early November 1936 through late January 1937, the
organization’s unity was severely tested. Besides confronting the
matter of whether the badly damaged relations within the MFP could be
repaired, the walkout’s conclusion raised issues (first occurring
within the strike) over the AFL dispute regarding industrial unionism
as well as dealing with the CIO as an independent trade union
federation.

In July 1934, all maritime unions were involved in the general strike,
engulfing San Francisco in open class warfare.

After the ILA–Pacific Coast Division (PCD) executive board voted on
July 26, 1937, (by a nearly four-to-one margin) to affiliate with the
CIO, the industrial union federation chartered the International
Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) on August 11, 1937,
with Bridges assuming the union presidency as well as the CIO western
regional directorship. Within nine months of receiving the charter,
all but four ILA-PCD locals (Tacoma and three tiny Puget Sound locals)
in Washington State had joined the ILWU. From its affiliation with the
CIO in mid-1937 and for the next two years, Bridges and the nascent
ILWU were strong supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New
Deal, believing that it was important to remain politically active to
consolidate the union’s gains obtained through both militant action
and collective bargaining. Additionally, the union backed the NLRB
certification election process as the methodology for determining unit
representation in its jurisdictional battles with the Teamsters.

 

Although opposed to US intervention in World War II prior to Nazi
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Bridges
modified his position three months later (despite the CPUSA
immediately having called for US entry in the war). Although opposing
racial and gender discrimination during wartime and still attempting
to protect the longshoremen’s hard-fought gains despite making a few
concessions, Bridges and the ILWU backed the war effort. Remaining
politically active in supporting FDR and the New Deal Democrats, the
ILWU expanded its base by organizing in new geographical regions
including the Midwest, the South, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Although
the ILWU began organizing longshoremen in Hawaii in 1937, the union
extended its organizing in this archipelago to include twenty thousand
railroad, sugar, pineapple, and other industrial workers by 1945.

In the immediate postwar period, with the Cold War heating up, the
ILWU sought to extend its gains through a work stoppage beginning on
October 1, 1946, which was resolved on November 17. Another 1946
strike among ILWU sugar workers in Hawaii resulted in a large wage
increase.

Besides the passage of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947,
Bridges’s opposition to the Marshall Plan and his modest support for
presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 resulted in attacks on
the ILWU by CIO president Philip Murray that the union was following
the CPUSA line rather than that of the CIO, which led to Murray
removing Bridges as CIO regional director. In August 1950, the CIO
expelled the ILWU for being a CPUSA-led union, along with eight other
such unions in 1949–1950. The ILWU’s expulsion did not seem to
harm the union’s effectiveness in the early 1950s, with the ILWU
steadily expanding the number of benefits provided to its members,
such as lengthier vacations, dental insurance, medical insurance for
pension recipients, and dismemberment insurance, among other things,
through collective bargaining.

The next major issue to confront the ILWU throughout the 1950s was the
technological change of containerization occurring on the waterfront,
culminating in the 1960 Modernization and Mechanization (M&M)
agreement. Provisions included the PMA contributing $5 million
annually to a fund that would be used to assure against layoffs and
cover minimum weekly earnings, an early retirement program, a lump sum
payment for longshoremen achieving normal retirement age, expanded
death and disability benefits, guarantees that speedups would not
occur and the maintenance of the current safety rules. In exchange,
the ILWU agreed to permit the introduction of more efficient work
methods combined with labor-saving machinery. Criticism of the M&M
agreement included that the ILWU had accepted the PMA’s fund which
was, in essence, a bribe to concede hard-won working conditions to the
employers.

The 1960s and the ’70s continued to bring challenges to Bridges and
the ILWU. In 1964, Bridges was sued by forty-five B men (probationary
employees), a majority of them black, who, according to Bridges, had
been deregistered because of work rule violations. Remedies sought by
these individuals included being returned to A status and monetary
damages of $600,000. Lawsuit supporters alleged the B-men
deregistration had occurred due to racial discrimination or opposition
to Bridges’s regime. Upon losing their lawsuit in 1965, the B men
filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB that went nowhere.
Additional lawsuits were unsuccessful; the final appeal of a federal
lawsuit of the B-men case was lost in 1980.

The ILWU’s longest strike commenced on July 1, 1971. After more than
three months on strike, then president Richard Nixon invoked the
Taft-Hartley Act, resulting in the strikers returning to work for an
eighty-day cooling-off period. A vote on the employer’s final offer
was taken toward the conclusion of the cooling-off period, which was
scheduled to end on December 26, with the union strike committee
urging that the offer be rejected — which it was, with 93 percent
voting “no.” The previous contract was extended to January 17,
1972, and when a new agreement was not reached the ILWU resumed its
strike.

By the end of January, Congress threatened to pass legislation
requiring that the dispute be ended by binding arbitration. A
tentative agreement was reached between the ILWU and the PMA on
February 8, which was approved by 71 percent of the union membership.
Although Bridges proclaimed the contract a victory, there were few
gains made that had not already been achieved upon the strike’s
mid-January resumption. Probably the biggest improvement was the
guarantee of work for longshoremen, which averaged over twenty-six
weeks. Upon stepping down from the ILWU presidency in 1977, Bridges
had held this position for four decades.

It was not only businessmen and conservatives who were in favor of
subjugation of the IWW, but also leading progressives.

White’s book is the first volume to deal solely with the repression
that the IWW faced during its tumultuous existence. White contends
that most books covering the organization focus on the suppression of
the IWW’s free-speech rights and civil liberties during the World
War I years as if it were an anomaly due to the politically charged
times. But White argues that repression of the IWW did not only occur
during World War I, but both before and after the war as well.
Moreover, he claims that it was not only businessmen and reactionary
conservatives who were in favor of subjugation of the IWW, but also
leading progressives, including President Woodrow Wilson and US
Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. And
White’s treatment is distinctive in making clear that repression of
the IWW was the most brutal when the labor organization was at its
peak of strength and was perceived by capital and political elites to
pose severe threats to US society.

White also argues that the lessons of the IWW’s harsh treatment have
been misconstrued by liberal historians who interpret the union’s
experience as aberrant during World War I and the 1919–1920 Red
Scare. Such scholars contend that even though law and reason were
briefly abandoned during these years, both freedom of speech and the
principles of collective association survived despite the failure of
the IWW and its philosophy. The IWW foundered for a number of reasons,
including changes in technology, the social structure, and the type of
work being performed, which depleted the pool of migratory, primarily
unskilled workers from which the labor organization recruited its
membership, as well as a long-simmering factional conflict that
divided the IWW. But repression was a primary factor for its collapse.
White emphasizes the crucial point that is often overlooked: the
repression against the IWW was ultimately intended to destroy the
organization and US radical industrial unionism because of the dangers
both posed to capital.

During World War I, the organization was at the apex of its strength,
at perhaps 150,000 members (although not all paid dues), with many
more workers supporting the IWW. The IWW opposed the war and the draft
and would not agree to a wartime no-strike pledge, as did the AFL
unions. While the organization advocated sabotage in the past, the
group’s leadership was moving away from encouraging this tactic.
Much of the repression against the IWW invoked by the business class
and the federal government occurred because of work stoppages such as
the 1917 Bisbee (Arizona) strike and the 1917 Lumber Workers
Industrial Union strike.

However, in 1917, even when not participating in strikes, as in
Oregon, Wobblies were arrested and convicted of vagrancy, sentenced to
thirty days to six months in jail, and fined up to $100. And on
September 5, 1917, the US Justice Department officers raided the homes
of leading Wobblies and seized control of the IWW national
headquarters in Chicago, removing five tons of office equipment,
records, literature, and so on. Three weeks later, 166 IWW members
were indicted by a Chicago federal grand jury. On the same day as the
Chicago foray and the day after, the federal government raided IWW
offices in approximately fifty cities, including all the Wobblies’
West Coast bastions.

At the beginning of the First Red Scare — from the time of the 1919
May Day riots to the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, on
November 7 1919 — raids conducted by federal agents, police, and
vigilantes led to the arrests of some one thousand radicals (or
purported radicals) including socialists, communists, anarchists, and
IWW members, with the latter group numbering a few hundred. The
federal government’s primary method for dealing with these arrested
Wobblies was deportation; this occurred more often among IWW members
because they were more likely to be immigrants.

Even when not participating in strikes, Wobblies were arrested and
convicted of vagrancy.

When the Red Scare receded late in the spring of 1920, the repression
had severely harmed the IWW’s viability in Montana, the Kansas and
Oklahoma oil fields, the lumber and iron-mining industries in northern
Minnesota, and mining in Arizona. Nevertheless, the IWW still remained
a force on the West Coast waterfronts, in the construction,
agriculture, and lumber industries where the union enrolled new
members.

Thus, in the post–Red Scare years, although repression still
occurred in other US geographic regions, beginning in fall 1921 it was
increasingly directed against the labor organization in the West.
Repression appeared to intensify during strikes in California like the
work stoppage of several thousand men led by the IWW’s Construction
Workers Industrial Union on two major construction projects during
October and November 1922, a lumber mill work stoppage of ten thousand
workers called in late April 1923, and the IWW’s Marine Transport
Workers Industrial Union (MTWIU) walkout of three thousand workers on
the San Pedro waterfront, which also began in late April 1923.

IWW leader Bill Haywood, flanked by fellow Wobblies, during the 1913
Paterson Silk Strike. (Wikimedia Commons)

It appears that the IWW was irretrievably damaged in California by the
end of spring 1924, after police arrested approximately six union
members a day. At the same time, on March 1, 1924, some three thousand
legionnaires, college men, and Klansmen cordoned the San Pedro MTWIU
hall, and later, in the middle of the month, a smaller group, with the
aid of policemen, destroyed the facility while several IWW leaders
were arrested. Another raid on the San Pedro Hall took place on June
14, 1924, where a pack of 150 police, Klansmen, and AFL union members
ransacked the place, lit documents and furniture on fire, and attacked
IWW members.

Once the IWW was essentially destroyed, incidents of repression
significantly decreased. In the summer and fall of 1924, a handful of
Wobblies were put on trial for vagrancy while mass arrests
occasionally occurred, such as when the San Francisco police arrested
twenty-one IWW members for the distribution of literature to
high-school students on December 3, 1924. Moreover, criminal
syndicalism cases dwindled to only four in California in 1924. In
1925, there were no vigilante attacks on the IWW, and only a handful
of Wobblies were tried for vagrancy or other minor infractions of the
law. The declining trajectory of assaults against the IWW
demonstrates, as White suggests, that as the union was perceived to be
less of a threat to employers and the government, the intensity of the
repression against it declined.

White also makes clear that repression not only crushed the IWW as an
organization, but also destroyed individual Wobblies’ minds, bodies,
and spirits. IWW members who lost their mental faculties due to the
ordeals they faced in prison included Abe Shocker, John “Jack”
Beavert, Olin Anderson, and Fred Esmond, for example. Wobblies were
chained, beaten, and placed in solitary confinement, the dungeon, or
the “hole” in prison, in response to their protests over their
living and working conditions. Some IWW members died from diseases
contracted in prison. R. V. Lewis was luckier than other Wobblies:
upon his 1922 release from San Quentin, Lewis left prison with only
one leg — the other leg had to be amputated because prison officials
failed to treat an abscess on a timely basis.

Verzuh’s book deals with a Canadian local of a scrappy CPUSA-led
union, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers
(Mine Mill), from 1938 through 1955. Led by the Communist Party of
Canada (CPC), Local 480, established in 1938, represented the
five-thousand-strong labor force of largely immigrant workers who were
employed at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (CM&S)
smelter in Trail, British Columbia. However, it was not until 1944
that Local 480 obtained legal standing with CM&S for collective
bargaining purposes.

Repression not only crushed the IWW as an organization, but also
destroyed individual Wobblies’ minds, bodies, and spirits.

Because of Local 480’s radicalism, it experienced repression and had
to battle anti-communism from the government, the company, and the
community, and within the Canadian labor movement as well.
Additionally, Local 480 had to combat the Workmen’s Co-operative
Committee (WCC), a company union, organized after the 1917 strike
along with the company’s implementation of welfare capitalism. The
WCC engaged in red-baiting Local 480 as soon as it appeared on the
scene in 1938, contending that the local’s union leaders and the CIO
were “agitating campaigners” and “foreign labor parasites” who
used “communistic inspired tactics.”

Such propaganda may have been effective because in 1939, the CM&S
employees voted decisively for the WCC, meaning that the company union
would represent the workers for at least one more year. However, Local
480’s leaders and CPC members were “boring from within” the WCC
to acquire influence. The radical local was making progress in
obtaining employee support, as indicated by the April 1943
certification election vote; the company union still retained legal
collective bargaining rights, although the margin of victory was much
smaller (1,977 to 1,888). In spring 1944, Local 480 obtained legal
bargaining rights after it won a majority in the certification
election vote. The path to victory appeared to be based on winning
over hesitant immigrant workers, many of whom could barely speak
English, convincing them that the union was the best vehicle for
representing their interests.

As in other industries, women smelter workers were hired and worked at
CM&S during World War II, with men engaged in fighting the war.
According to the Mine Mill constitution, the union was committed to
fighting for gender equality in the workplace, including advocacy for
pay equity between men and women. However, this struggle was
jettisoned by the local in an all-out effort to win the war. Even
after World War II’s conclusion, the Local 480 leadership abandoned
women workers, and sided with male rank-and-file workers in opting for
the male breadwinner model — with women returning to their
traditional roles after demobilized soldiers filled the jobs held by
women workers during wartime.

Although Local 480 obtained collective bargaining rights through
mobilizing immigrant worker support in 1944, after the war’s
conclusion, the local had to deal with the anti-communist, anti-union
attitudes of Trail’s Catholic and Protestant churches that resonated
most strongly among immigrants, who comprised 30 percent of the
community. According to a 1941 Canada Census, some twenty European and
Asian nationalities labored at the mill. Because the local union
depended on immigrant employee support, it portrayed itself as being
tolerant of immigrant worker religious beliefs, even though some
communist leaders of Mine Mill were atheists. But the local union had
to be extremely careful in defending immigrant interests, with
politicians and the government invoking nativist and racist arguments
in blaming immigrant workers for bringing a communist-led union to
Trail. This constrained the union in what it could fight for, to
prevent most Trailites’ disaffection. Moreover, Local 480 went out
of its way to address issues that were of particular concern to
immigrant workers, such as health and safety in the workplace,
sickness, and funeral benefits, as well as workers’ compensation.

In 1949, with McCarthyism sweeping across the United States and
Canada, Local 480 was confronted with a raid by the United Steel
Workers (USW), the same year that the Canadian CIO expelled six
unions, including Mine Mill, for being led by the CPC. The USW
differed substantially from Mine Mill, with its bureaucracy and
centralized decision-making power, union leaders earning considerably
more than rank-and-file members, and its vehement anti-communism. The
USW’s assault against Local 480 began in full force on February 9,
1950, with the distribution of anti-communist literature and a
full-page ad taken out in the local newspaper.

The United Steel Workers’ assault against Local 480 began in full
force on February 9, 1950, with the distribution of anti-communist
literature and a full-page ad taken out in the local newspaper.

While Local 480 responded to the USW’s vicious attacks, the local
union negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement at the end of
May 1950. This bitter struggle continued for several years, with the
provincial Labour Relations Board (LRB) dismissing the USW’s
reapplication for certification in May 1951. This decision meant that
Local 480 remained the legal collective bargaining representative for
Trail’s smelter workers. In mid-May 1952, Local 480 won the LRB
certification election vote, thus retaining its right to represent
Trail’s 5,000 smelter workers.

Even with McCarthyism on the wane, the Canadian Mine Mill locals
separated from the US-based International in 1955, with Local 480
being the largest Mine Mill local in Western Canada. The local hoped
that by becoming autonomous, the red-baiting and anti-communist
attacks on it would cease. The USW continued with its attempts to raid
Local 480; such assaults finally ended in 1967, when the Mine Mill
international merged into the USW.

Verzuh poses the question, “Why Did Trail Support Local 480?”
given that the radical union was attacked by both the political right
and segments of the political left such as the social democratic
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). He argues that despite the
Communist union’s leadership, Local 480 effectively defended the
workers’ class interests. Verzuh also speculates that the local
union’s underdog status in challenging a corporate behemoth might
have played a role in garnering worker support. Moreover, the local
effectively attacked the company union that, for two decades, had
beaten the workers into submission. Verzuh finally contends that
previous strikes in 1901 and 1917 among the smelter workers had
developed the class consciousness and led to a maturing of the Trail
working class, which resulted in large portions of workers willing to
be represented by a Left-led union.

The Trials of Harry Bridges

Much of the government repression directed against the ILWU was
expressed by its virulent and numerous attacks on Harry Bridges.
Undoubtedly, the reasons for these assaults were the ILWU’s
strategic position in the US economy and the threat that the union
posed because of its strength and its radicalism. The method for
taming the union was to go after Bridges, who was the union’s
indisputable leader but was vulnerable because of his political views.

As Cherny states, “Bridges’ union activism produced enemies in
high places. Since he was not a U.S. citizen, they repeatedly accused
him of being a member of the Communist Party to deport him. He found
himself repeatedly investigated, charged, and tried from the mid-1930s
to the mid-1950s.” Cherny’s biography devotes an entire chapter to
examining the issue of whether Bridges was a CPUSA member. He
concludes that while Bridges worked closely with the party on various
issues and his political sympathies remained with the organization, he
was never an actual party member per se.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which, at the time,
was part of the Department of Labor, first investigated Bridges in May
1934 but found no solid evidence of CPUSA membership. Nevertheless,
there were calls for his deportation from leading businessmen,
politicians, and citizens, which resulted in a 1939 INS hearing. In
her oral history, Frances Perkins, secretary of labor during the late
1930s, admitted that she was aware that “the Immigration Service had
been used improperly to get rid of certain militant and effective
labor people,” which would explain the INS’s targeting of Bridges.

The 1939 INS hearing, which lasted from July 10 to September 14,
included thirty-two witnesses called by the INS and twenty-seven by
the defense over forty-five days of testimony, with Bridges appearing
toward the end of the trial, acknowledging his Marxist politics. Judge
James Landis issued his 150-page report late in December 1939,
contending that he did not believe the government witnesses. He
concluded that Bridges was a radical but found that the government did
not present evidence that Bridges had been or currently was a CPUSA
member. Perkins accepted Landis’s conclusions and dropped the filed
charges against Bridges.

A second attempt to deport Bridges occurred during the World War II
period (1940 to 1945), which involved an FBI investigation that also
included the attorney general and his underlings. Another INS hearing
for Bridges was conducted under the 1940 Smith Act, under which the
labor leader could be charged with having been affiliated in the past
with the IWW, the Marine Workers Industrial Union, and the CPUSA;
these three organizational memberships constituted alleged Smith Act
violations. The second hearing commenced on March 31, 1941, with
Charles Sears, the hearing officer, issuing his 187-page decision
ruling against Bridges at the end of September 1941.

Bridges and his lawyers first appealed this decision to the Board of
Immigration Appeals (BIA), which rejected the decision. The INS and
the FBI requested that Francis Biddle, the attorney general, uphold
Sears’s decision at the end of May 1942, calling for Bridges’s
deportation. The second appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals decided
against Bridges 3–2 at the end of June 1942 and paved the way for a
US Supreme Court appeal. _Bridges v. California_ was heard on April
2–3, 1945, with the judges ruling 5–3 (with one recusal) that
alien residents possessed First Amendment rights of speech and press.
In his analysis of this case, Cherny contends that Bridges was
targeted because he was a highly effective leader of the ILWU, arguing
that if he had remained a rank-and-file longshore worker such charges
would not have been brought against him.

Frances Perkins, secretary of labor during the late 1930s, admitted
that she was aware that ‘the Immigration Service had been used
improperly to get rid of certain militant and effective labor
people.’

Early in the Cold War period, in 1948, the INS undertook a third
investigation of Bridges that culminated in a May 1949 grand jury
hearing to determine whether Bridges and his associates had committed
perjury regarding his alleged CPUSA membership during his
naturalization hearings. After indictments were filed against these
individuals, the trial was conducted in mid-November 1949, with prison
remaining a distinct possibility. After four days of deliberation, in
early April 1950, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Bridges and his
associates’ lawyers filed an appeal in July 1951 which was heard in
March 1952, with the three circuit court judges rejecting the appeal,
leading to another US Supreme Court case. The case was heard on May 4,
1953, with the court ruling on June 15 for Bridges and his associates.
In a 4–3 decision (with two recusals), a 1942 law that was utilized
to bypass the statute of limitations was determined to be irrelevant
to this case because it could only be applied to cases “where the
fraud is of a pecuniary nature or at least of a nature concerning
property.”

The planning for a final deportation trial against Bridges was
initiated by the INS and the Department of Justice to deprive Bridges
of his citizenship only two weeks after the Supreme Court decision,
with this last trial beginning on June 21, 1955. On July 29, Judge
Louis Goodman ruled in favor of Bridges retaining his citizenship,
arguing that former Communists testifying for both the prosecution and
defense, as well as other witness testimony, were highly problematic.
Moreover, he found that Bridges’s testimony denying his CPUSA
membership and indicating his loyalty to the United States was
“articulate and emphatic.”

The Many Forms of Repression Against Mine Mill Local 480

While the primary form of repression directed against Left-led unions
has been federal government action, in the case of Mine Mill Local
480, repression against the local union took various forms, including
those of the company union, the churches, newspapers, the company,
certain sections of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth
Federation, and rival trade unions. As Local 480 gained strength in
the early 1940s and throughout the next decade, the union experienced
escalating attacks from a variety of sources.

With Local 480 continuing to gain supporters after the close 1943 LRB
election vote, the company union, now named the WCC-Independent
Smelter Workers’ Union, constantly issued anti-communist propaganda
until the 1944 LRB certification election. Upon Local 480’s
certification, the company referred to communism as “a destructive
subversive force” with which it was impossible to compromise.
Furthermore, Bill Kirkpatrick, the CM&S assistant general manager, in
a radio address based on a company-issued pamphlet entitled “Your
Union and You,” stated that the Communist-led Local 480 was working
assiduously to destroy the employees’ freedom while having no
intentions to engage in collective bargaining.

Although the community’s religious leaders possessed these political
views prior to the 1944 LRB election, after Local 480’s victory,
Trail’s Catholic and Protestant church leaders explicitly opposed
communism. As the local union continued to gain strength after World
War II, the community’s churches “continued to condemn Local 480
and support anti-Communist efforts to lure immigrant workers from the
Mine-Mill fold.” Local clerics, such as the Right Reverend F. P.
Clark, Anglican bishop of Kootenay, enthusiastically participated
“in the anti-Red crusade,” citing local church doctrine that
referred to communism as “the greatest threat in the world today.”

Canadian Mine Mill locals gather to found Mine Mill Canada in 1955.
(USW Local 480)

The late 1940s USW raid on Mine Mill Local 480 also was an exercise in
vigorous anti-communism, in that the USW represented an “enduring
and powerful bastion of anti-Communism within the CIO.” Some labor
historians contend that among the CIO–Canadian Congress of Labour
unions, the USW’s leadership was the most rigidly anti-communist and
was committed to crushing the red unions. Verzuh considers the USW’s
assault on Local 480 and its communist leadership as being “among
the most notorious examples of Red baiting in Canadian labour
history.” As with the _Times_, the USW placed newspaper
advertisements in March 1949, implying that because of the
“atomic-bomb related heavy water plant” at the smelter, the
communist-led Local 480 was a national security threat to Canada.

Among the CIO–Canadian Congress of Labour unions, the USW’s
leadership was the most rigidly anti-communist and was committed to
crushing the red unions.

The Effects of the Destruction of US Radical Unionism

The persecution of US radical unionism dramatically tamed US trade
unionism, resulting in tremendous benefits to US capital. The
continuing attacks on the IWW after the 1919–1920 Red Scare severely
damaged the organization by 1925. When US radical unionism revived in
the Great Depression’s early years, the IWW was in no position to be
a leading force in reviving industrial unionism. This task fell
primarily to the Communists, but to a lesser degree to other left-wing
forces such as the Trotskyists, the Socialists, the Musteites, and
even the Proletarian Party, who helped to build the CIO into a viable
industrial union federation.

In the late 1940s, the Second Red Scare negatively impacted the
CPUSA-led unions to the same degree as the First Red Scare harmed the
IWW, with the CIO expelling these Left-led unions from the industrial
federation from 1949 to 1950. As the most militant organizers of the
CIO’s industrial unions in the mid-to-late 1930s, the party-led
unions emerged as the most vigorous fighters for civil rights and
engaged in community unionism before it became a recognized concept a
half-century later. Moreover, the CPUSA-led unions favored social
unionism, as opposed to a bread-and-butter business unionism, as the
guiding ideology of the US trade union movement.

With the CPUSA-led unions’ expulsion from the CIO, the industrial
union federation’s radical wing was decimated, resulting in the
CIO’s ideological orientation becoming increasingly similar to that
of the craft-union oriented AFL. Thus, when the 1955 AFL-CIO merger
occurred, it did so based on an acquiescent business unionism, with
George Meany as the new organization’s first president — the
quintessential business unionist, who expressed little interest in
expanding unionism to new jurisdictions or in seeking broader societal
goals for the US trade union movement.

With the CPUSA-led unions’ expulsion from the CIO, the industrial
union federation’s radical wing was decimated.

With this defeat of radical unionism, for the first time since the
late nineteenth century, the Left’s base was no longer situated
within the US trade union movement. This absence had real consequences
for labor when worker militancy and strikes were reignited in the
mid-1960s. The Left’s new home in the 1960s became college campuses,
where students comprised a burgeoning New Left, who became
enthusiastic participants in the anti–Vietnam War, civil rights, and
women’s movements. With increasing factionalism and the beginning of
the disintegration of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at
its 1969 national convention, the SDS’s organizational remnants
flocked to socialist groups such as the International Socialists (IS),
who were industrializing and entering the unions beginning in the
early 1970s.

While these activists contributed to the establishment of dissident
and reform movements within the unions, such as the Teamsters for a
Democratic Union and the Steel Workers Fight Back movement, if the
destruction of a radical unionism had not occurred in the early 1950s,
perhaps business unionism would not have become so entrenched in the
US trade unions by the mid–twentieth century. Combining this influx
of a new generation of political radicals with a surviving Old Left
still extant in the US trade union movement during the 1970s, a viable
US radical unionism might still exist in the twenty-first century’s
third decade.

Radical Unionism’s Defeat and Twenty-First-Century Trade Unionism

The repression of the left-wing unions — that is, the IWW, the
CPUSA-led CIO unions, and the CPC-led CIO unions — was due to their
effectiveness as labor organizations that threatened the prerogatives
of capital. Although the IWW did not like to sign collective
bargaining agreements because it felt that such documents would tie
the organization’s hands in carrying out its militant shop-floor
struggle against employers, the CPUSA-led CIO unions negotiated better
and more democratic collective bargaining agreements than the
non-CPUSA-led unions in the industrial union federation. By attacking
these left-wing unions, the employers and the government were sending
an explicit message to nonradical unions: if these latter unions
engage in the same type of militant behavior as the Left-led unions,
the government implied, it would go after the nonradical unions as
well.

Thus, the attack on these left-wing unions was an attack on all unions
— consistent with the IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury
to all.” The dynamics are well illustrated in a cartoon by United
Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) artist Fred
Wright, with strikers carrying signs that stated “Anti-Communist
Union on Strike” and policemen bashing the strikers’ heads with
batons. When a stunned striker informs a policeman that his union is
an anti-communist union, the policeman responds, “I don’t care
what type of Communist you are. All you Communists are the same to
me!”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries
from 1989 to 1991, along with the folding (or the weakening) of the
ruling communist parties of these states and other leading Western
European communist parties (e.g., the Italian Communist Party), one
might think that the previous red-baiting and the repression of
Left-led unions in the United States and Canada could never occur
again in the twenty-first century. However, as Austin Sarat and
Richard Seymour have pointed out, there can exist an “anti-communism
without communism.” With the revival of US socialism through the
growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which now claims
around 55,000 members and is the third-largest socialist group (behind
the SPA and the CPUSA) in US history, the organization and its members
have become increasingly active in the US trade union movement in the
last few years. Because of this development, it is not impossible to
imagine that there might be more viable Left-led unions in the future
(along with the ILWU and the UE in the twenty-first century’s third
decade). If such unions are perceived to become too powerful and
threaten capital’s prerogatives because of their strategic
importance in the US and Canadian economies, we might see similar
types of repression directed against these unions, as occurred from
World War I through the mid-1950s.

Republished from Labor Studies Journal
[[link removed]].

_VICTOR G. DEVINATZ is distinguished professor of management at
Illinois State University. He is the coeditor of Labor Studies
Journal._

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* Red Scare
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* McCarthyism
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* unions
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* AFL-CIO
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* IWW
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* Communist Party
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* US History
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