LABOR: Holy Crusade

The shirt-sleeved audience sweltering in the frowzy, faded yellow hall on Atlanta’s Ivy Street included labor leaders from Texas oil fields, Alabama steel furnaces, North Carolina textile mills. They had gathered to be knighted for a new crusade. Up rose portly, grizzled Van Bittner, 61-year-old veteran organizer and director of the C.I.O.’s drive to unionize the South, to make the dedication:

“Every well-thinking man and woman will join in this holy crusade. . . . C.I.O. is not going to invade the South. The South is coming to us. . . . The day has gone by when the working men and women of the South can be considered Class B citizens. . . . We will organize . . . the toiling masses . . . into unions regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.”

Thus, one sultry afternoon Last week, a militant wing of U.S. labor opened the joust in a conservative and hostile land.

Scorning a similar drive by the A.F. of L., Bittner announced an objective of 1,000,000 new C.I.O. members in a year. He promised to send 400 organizers into the field, said that $2 million had already been pledged to the drive. The C.I.O. field men, he explained, would be predominantly native Southerners, largely war veterans, would concentrate on both Negro and white workers. For a question on the connection between his program and Sidney Hillman’s P.A.C., Bittner had an ambiguous reply:

“This campaign has no political implications. We believe that when people become members of the union, they will solve their own political problems.”