National Affairs: On the Run

The operation on the C.I.O.’s Communist-line wing was performed with a meat ax by a stern and rejuvenated Philip Murray and his staff of strategists. Leaders of the biggest Red-run union of them all, the United Electrical Workers Union, did not even show their faces on the convention floor. They huddled in Cleveland’s Allerton Hotel, sniffing the cold, strange wind and making distant and preposterous sounds of defiance. A day before they and their little brothers, the Farm Equipment Workers, were expelled, they packed their bags and fled.

Halo & Goodbye. It was Communst Party-Liner Harry Bridges who stood his ground. Party orders were to get into any kind of ideological sheep’s clothing and stay, if possible, within the folds of C.I.O. With the ax poised over the remaining ten Communist-run unions, needle-nosed Harry intoned his innocence and righteousness in a rasping cockney voice. “To get rid of us, you are going to have to throw us out,” he cried. “So now we have reached the point where a trade union, because it disagrees on political matters with the national C.I.O., can be expelled.”

Swinging his crippled arm, the triumphant anti-Communist leader, Walter Reuther, hooted at him: “All I can say, Harry, is that your halo is on crooked today.”

Others closed in. Did Bridges want to belong to “a democratic organization such as C.I.O.?” shouted the maritime union’s Joe Curran. “Then, by God, carry out its national policies and programs.” Roared Mike Quill at Bridges and the other left-wing leaders: “Pinks, punks and parasites.”

But it was Phil Murray, long defender of the rights of the Reds, who rendered the final, Olympian judgment: “There is enough room in the C.I.O. movement to differ about many subjects . . . plenty of room, plenty of room. But there is no room for Communism.”

To a hushed audience, Murray told of “meetings” in New York between Communist Party Bosses William Foster and Eugene Dennis, U.E. Bosses James Matles and Julius Emspak and “our good friend Harry Bridges.” He charged: “There evolved plans and policies to corrupt and destroy if possible the trade union movement in America. And if our country was engulfed in another war, they would go underground and undermine the people and this Government of ours.”

Surrender of the Pie Cards. Thus Murray brought to an end eleven years of a Communist campaign to wiggle into and capture his C.I.O. The overwhelmingly right-wing delegates voted down the line with Murray. They were mostly “pie card” unionists (men & women on union payrolls), not labor’s rank & file. They were well disciplined. With a loud aye, in effect they surrendered their old constitutional authority as a convention and gave Murray and his executive board virtually absolute power over 39 C.I.O. unions—the power to 1) bar Communists from sitting on the executive board, 2) expel any C.I.O. union from the parent body without a convention vote.

Reuther and Murray’s other chief strategist, Emil Rieve of the textile workers, wanted to expel not only the U.E., but all the Communist-line unions at once. But C.I.O. lawyers counseled caution; they would have all they could do in the next few months handling the legal complications raised by the liquidation of the Electrical Workers. Murray took their advice. The other ten left-wing unions would still be in C.I.O. a while longer, but their days were plainly numbered.