National Affairs: Seaside Subjects

“I regret exceedingly that circumstances will prevent me from attending the 55th annual convention of the American Federation of Labor,” President Roosevelt, fishing in the Pacific, radioed William Green at Atlantic City last week. “I request that you express my regret to the convention and that you will convey to them my hope and confidence that your meeting will be successful and rich in accomplishment.”

To outsiders the annual conventions of the A. F. of L., an amalgamation of 3,000,000 assorted trade unionists who attempt to speak for all U. S. Labor, are seldom either successful or rich in accomplishment. Prime reason is that the Federation has for the past decade tried vainly to digest a vast hodge-podge of fundamental contradictions, with the result that most of its public acts belch forth in a fantastic vapor of inconsistency, incoherence, ineffectually. This dyspepsia gets the Federation into many an impolite predicament, not the least embarrassing of which occurred early at last week’s seaside gathering.

Ever since the Centralia, Wash, massacre of 1919, the nation’s most potent strikebreaking force has been the American Legion. Nevertheless, most celebrated non-laborite invited to address last week’s convention was the Legion’s corpulent new National Commander James Raymond (“Ray”) Murphy. Though scar-faced President Green later glossed over “mistakes by some Legionnaires” in past labor disputes, Mr. Murphy was there to ask the Federation to join the Legion (and the Daughters of the American Revolution) in a great nationwide Red-hunt. A number of radical labor delegates had absented themselves from the hall. Thirty others ostentatiously rose and walked out when Commander Murphy took the rostrum.

Thus was illustrated the pull-devil-pull-baker tension which gives a desperate organization the outward appearance of inactive somnolence. The NRA was not an unmixed blessing to the A. F. of L., for it brought into the Federation a horde of workers from hitherto unorganized, straight-line production industries. Result is serious factionalism, with Mr. Green, most of the 17 members of his all-powerful executive council and the oldtime, conservative craft unionists on one side and on the other a mass of younger, more radical workers from the modern assembly line. Impasse caused by the conflicting policies and personalities of these two groups was demonstrated in the major subjects which came before the Atlantic City convention.

Labor Party. The Ladies Garment Workers of pinko David Dubinsky, the United Textile Workers who put on a savage strike last year under bellicose Francis J. Gorman, a number of Federal and local unions plus the State Federations of Utah, Wisconsin and Oregon have all gone on record for an out & out Labor Party to put up a united Labor front at the ballot boxes. But the policy of Boss William Green and most of his lieutenants has been that of a ward leader: “Reward your friends and punish your enemies.” At last week’s meeting President Green squashed the Labor Party agitation in his keynote address by replying to advice sent last summer from the Comintern at Moscow urging U. S. workers to align politically. “[The A. F. of L.] will not take that action because some order comes from some gathering in a foreign country. . . . No government in a foreign land . . . can tell the American Federation of Labor what to do!”

Vertical v. Horizontal unionism bobbed up again. This time the drive to reform the Federation along vertical (industrial) lines rather than the traditional horizontal (craft) union structure was precipitated by the Oilfield, Gas Well & Refinery Workers, who were about to be decimated among metal craft organizations. Other small, new industrial unions were marshaling for verticalism under the covert leadership, it was said, of John Llewellyn Lewis, whose United Mine Workers are organized vertically and form the most powerful single A. F. of L. unit.

Strike Tactics. Labor’s biggest weapon is the general strike. In all U. S. history there have been but three. The first occurred in Seattle in 1919, the second in San Francisco in 1934. The last one took place within the past year, at Terre Haute, Ind., the late great Eugene Debs’s home town.* In the latter the national Federation had taken no active part. The resolution went to the limbo of a resolutions committee pigeonhole.

War & Peace. With that idea which dreamy Socialists hoped would prevent the bloodshed of 1914-18, the same delegates last week proposed “in any imperialist war we call upon President Green to immediately call a general strike of all workers affiliated with the A. F. of L.” But all they got out of William Green was a pious phrase: “Under no circumstances whatever must we be drawn into this European war.”

Rip. U. S. Communists, who mortally hate the A. F. of L.’s leadership as a parcel of boss grafters and labor racketeers, have long waited for the rent which would destroy the Federation’s whole factional fabric. Last week no major rent appeared but there was a significant rip.

For years a fixture of the Federation as familiar as the red-white-&-blue bunting over the speakers’ platform has been the squabble within the building trades group. It began with a series of jurisdictional disputes among the affiliated craft unions, following which the three biggest unions in the group (carpenters, bricklayers, electricians) withdrew from the Building Trades Department of the Federation but not from the Federation itself. At the San Francisco convention last year, the “triple alliance” sought and was given readmission. That called for re-election of officers within the Department, a move which brought howls from the Department President Michael John McDonough and the small unions within the Department which knew that the “triple alliance” would grab control of the Department just as soon as it got back into the fold.

Last winter, therefore, Mr. McDonough, an oldtime plasterers’ union leader and a onetime (1925-29) California Legislator, set up an independent Building Trades Department of his own with headquarters right across Washington’s 9th Street from the Federation Building. He had the backing of No. 2 Federation Leader John Lewis. “Official” presidency of the Building Trades Department, set up by the “triple alliance” and sponsored by William Green and most of the executive council, went to a figurehead from the carpenters’ union, James William Williams. Last week Plasterer McDonough brought the old fight to a crisis when he appeared at the Atlantic City convention, demanded a seat in the name of his rumpsters. Mr. Green confidently put the question to a viva voce vote, announced that Mr. McDonough had been counted out. “NO!” the convention roared back at startled Mr. Green. The roll-call vote on a proposal to withhold action on Mr. McDonough’s ouster until a compromise might be settled this week was 18,092½ -to-10,602, the worst reverse the Federation’s electorate has given President Green since he took office eleven years ago. Few days later, however, President Green happily announced that the disputants had agreed to have the matter settled by an arbitration committee.

*Tvvo and a half months after the Terre Haute strike was “settled,” the town was still under martial law last week. Nevertheless a metal plant was bombed. Elsewhere in the U. S. Labor showed its teeth. Following the assassination of a Kansas City truckmen’s organizer, all Kansas City building trades unionists called a one-day demonstration strike. More important, 9,000 Gulf Coast stevedores walked out in an effort to force union recognition at New Orleans and raise the general wage scale.