The 1930s saw the biggest labor upsurge in US history. Just like today, there was economic discontent and a general pro-labor atmosphere. But labor didn’t just passively benefit. Instead, it saw its opportunity to act, building unions for the long haul.
September 11, 2024
Source: Jacobin
A group of dressmakers on strike hold signs urging unionization and fair labor practices 1958
This engaging interview with labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein sheds light on the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and its enduring impact on American labor.
Lichtenstein delves into the CIO’s formation, its breakthrough in organizing industrial workers, and the role of key figures like John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther. He recounts pivotal moments such as the Flint sit-down strike against General Motors and the CIO’s creative strategy of infiltrating company unions in the steel industry. Lichtenstein offers thoughtful perspectives on the CIO’s handling of racial divisions and its ties to the Democratic Party. Throughout the conversation, Lichtenstein underscores the CIO’s historical significance while drawing interesting parallels to today’s labor organizing efforts.
This interview was conducted by Benjamin Y. Fong for the Jacobin podcast Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO. Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at UC Santa Barbara and the author of numerous books and articles relevant to Organize the Unorganized, including State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2003), Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (University of Illinois Press, 1997), and Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Temple University Press, 2003).
Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the CIO, and what is its primary historical significance?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The letters CIO originally stood for Committee for Industrial Organization. That was a committee set up in 1935 by John L. Lewis, who was the leader of the United Mine Workers [UMW], then a very large union with six hundred thousand members. He was joined by Sidney Hillman, who was head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and David Dubinsky, who was head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. At first, it was just a committee for industrial organization within the American Federation of Labor [AFL].
The committee said, “Look, we must take advantage of the situation, which is now occurring, with the [Franklin D.] Roosevelt administration and with new labor laws.” The Wagner Act was just being passed and there were a lot of strikes, all sorts of activities going on in 1933, ’34, ’35. They thought the American Federation of Labor should take advantage of this and begin new organizing campaigns in industries that were not organized and very important. Those industries were at the commanding heights of the economy. In those days, that would be like automobiles, steel, electrical products, things of that sort. They were often called the mass production industries, because they used assembly lines. They were big and run by big companies, too. The obvious analogy today would be Amazon and Walmart.
The American Federation of Labor had been reluctant to do that kind of organizing, partly because there’d been lots of defeats. There had been a huge defeat in 1919 when they tried to organize steel. There had been efforts in auto, textiles, etc. So the AFL was reluctant to plunge into this because it feared losing, but there was also a general sentiment that they were only going to organize skilled workers. Often, that meant white, older Northern European workers.
This wasn’t uniform. The Mine Workers took in all sorts of people, and they were in the AFL. But the AFL tended to be comprised of what we call craft unions. That is, skilled workers, like railroad engineers, skilled electricians, carpenters, etc. The AFL thought, “Those workers are in high demand. They have more money, they get higher wages, and we can organize them. We’ll leave aside women, we’ll leave aside immigrants, African Americans too, and we’ll leave aside people in the industries where the companies were tough and anti-union.”
The CIO challenged that thinking. And what happened over a two-year period was that the committee began to organize. The Mine Workers were the treasury, and they began to set up committees of their own, like the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or the Packing House Workers Organizing Committee, or the Textile Workers Organizing Committee. They began to hire organizers. Many of those organizers were radicals, communists, and socialists.
All of this created conflict within the American Federation of Labor, because some other unions thought, “Well, wait a minute, you are stepping into our jurisdiction.” With the Carpenters union, for instance, they said, “If we have a few carpenters in various industrial plants, and you’re trying to organize the whole plant or the whole factory, you’re going to step on our toes.” So conflict was created.
By late 1937, the CIO had been transformed from the Committee for Industrial Organization into the Congress of Industrial Organizations, meaning that it was now an independent labor federation with its own unions in it. This lasted for eighteen years, but it was an important eighteen years. In 1955, the CIO and the AFL would merge once again and become the AFL-CIO, but in the meantime, the CIO had a dramatic and fundamental impact on the organization of American workers, and on American capitalism in general.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Why did the CIO finally break through where previous efforts at industrial unionism had failed?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, I think that both Lewis and Hillman recognized that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We have here the Great Depression, which has delegitimized business as the backbone of prosperity and success. The Great Depression had demonstrated the weaknesses and problems of American capitalism.
Second, new labor laws were being passed. In the beginning of the New Deal, there was the National Industrial Recovery Act, which had a section called Section 7A, which was put into the legislation at the behest of the AFL and Frances Perkins, who was secretary of labor. It said workers have the right to organize unions of their own choosing. The language of Section 7A would once again be put into the Wagner Act, which was an even more powerful piece of labor legislation passed in 1935. The preamble of the Wagner Act basically says, “If we want to make capitalism work, we have to have unions because unions will create purchasing power for ordinary workers. They’ll buy things and we’ll have prosperity and commerce.”
Then, of course, there was also the growing radical mood in the nation, in the same way that today we see much pro-labor sentiment. In 1935, collective action, unionism, and radicalism were all popular. Communists, socialists, and other radicals were not numerous, but they had a growing sense of self-confidence. Some labor leaders, again, had been old mainstream labor leaders and they finally saw the light. I’m not talking about the younger crowd. Of course, they were in favor of organization, but I’m talking about the older, established ones. They said, “Look, this is the opportunity. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to use our treasury, use our resources, even put some of those radicals on the payroll.”
The degree to which Franklin Roosevelt [FDR] was pro-labor is debatable, but certainly, he was more so than Herbert Hoover. The CIO would say to workers, “We have a friend in the White House, and he wants you to join a union.” They used that language. That wasn’t 100 percent true, but it was true to a degree.
They thought the time was ripe, and we better do it now or we won’t have a chance again. That was true, because decades later, or just even a decade or two later, once business figured out how to fight the unions and more conservative forces were in charge of the government, it became much more difficult. So this was a moment of opportunity, and the CIO said, “We have to seize that.”
Benjamin Y. Fong
What are the factors that led the Mine Workers to be the leading organization here?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The fact is that all over the world, and for more than a century, mine workers have been a core constituency in the labor movement, and often radical. Mine work is dangerous. You’re underground. Supervision is difficult. It’s not like there’s a foreman that’s over your shoulder. And in fact, the tradition is that the workers organize the work underground. And of course, if they stop work, it’s very hard to find strike breakers.
Miners all over the world have been radical. There had been militant and practically insurrectionary strikes in the United States since the 1870s, and they’re legendary. Blair Mountain was a pitched battle between the Mine Workers and the US Army in 1921. There’d been this long tradition. On the other hand, there are many, many coal mines, and they’re often run by the railroads. Winning higher wages also meant winning higher prices. So the Mine Workers were thinking in broad societal economic terms. They thought, “We have to reorganize the entire industry in order to make unionism work.”
Now, the second thing about the Mine Workers, and the specific problem that Lewis and others had, was the anti-unionism of the big steel companies. There were hundreds and hundreds of coal mines all over the place. But when it came to the steel industry, it was an oligopoly. There was just US Steel and Bethlehem, a few other giant firms. They’d always resisted unionization. These steel companies owned some coal mines themselves. They were called captive mines.
Even where the Mine Workers had been successful by 1935, and they had a big spur of organization in the early ’30s, they had been unable to organize the captive mines. Lewis thought the only way to organize the captive mines was to organize the entire steel industry. Steel was, at that time, one of the great industries of America. Really with auto, it was one of the two great industries.
If you’re going to organize the steel industry, that’s a big operation. You need lots of organizers, you need a whole new strategy to do that. And the Miners were the vanguard.
Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the relation to earlier efforts at industrial organization?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] had been a radical inspiration to a generation of leftists who came of age in the ’30s. But I think the CIO leaders, and including the radicals as well, understood that the IWW strategy was limited.
To the IWW’s credit, they wanted to organize immigrants, women, farmworkers, people that AFL had ignored, and also do it on an industrial basis, meaning everyone in one factory or farm or mill, not just an elite stratum. They understood that. But on the other hand, the Industrial Workers of the World had officially, formally said, “We don’t want to sign contracts. We don’t want to create a big institution. That hampers us, becomes a burden on us. We’re against that.”
I think the CIO people, again, from the left to the right, said, “Well, no, we have a Wagner Act, which is based on the idea of having collective bargaining and signing legally enforceable contracts, and we’re going to do that.” I don’t think there’s any distinction between the most militant communist on this question and John L. Lewis.
Now you might question this, but here’s the defense of this institutional unionism. Consciousness is episodic. Today we have much union enthusiasm among Starbucks baristas and whatnot. In 1935, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the New Deal. There had been enthusiasm in 1919 for unions in many industries. So consciousness is episodic. It can rise to great, almost revolutionary heights.
But it also can ebb, it also can go down. You can have recessions; you can have repression, you can have the passage of time, and you can have labor turnover. What a union does, and a union that signs a collective bargaining contract, is that it freezes that consciousness in an institutional-legal form, so that in a period of recession or repression or just apathy, the union still exists. It’s still there. Now, maybe it’s run by bureaucrats or something, but it still exists. It doesn’t disappear. What had happened with the Industrial Workers of the World, and with many other unions that had been unable to form a contract, is that they disappeared. There’s something worse than a bad union, and that’s no union.
Benjamin Y. Fong
John L. Lewis was known as a pretty conservative guy in the ’20s. What accounts for his change in the 1930s?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, you’re right that in the ’20s he was a petty tyrant. There were opposition groups in the Mine Workers, and he fought them. He expelled communists and socialists in the 1920s. Not to defend the union autocracy, but if you are in an organization where you fear that its existence can be destroyed by an ill-advised strike or other activity, then you’re going to crack down. That was his view. He was aware of the fragility of the UMW.
Now, in the ’30s, he became a creative opportunist. He said, “This is my opportunity, I’ll take it.” One thing he did was that he got in touch with all the people who were expelled from the union earlier and he offered them jobs. He also was willing to hire communists and socialists because he knew they were good organizers. Lewis famously was asked at a press conference, “Hey, President Lewis, you’re hiring all these communists. What’s going on here? What are you?” And Lewis said, “Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?” In other words, I’m the hunter. The communists are the dogs. They’re organizing the workers, but they’re going to be organized into my organization.
He also understood that you had to have the state on your side. He understood that you couldn’t just have rank-and-file enthusiasm or radicalism. You had to have the state. Lewis had had this experience for decades of the National Guard coming in and breaking strikes, or some legislature passing anti-union laws. But he saw and expected that Roosevelt would be on the side of the union. In 1935, he famously gave something like $500,000 to the Roosevelt reelection campaign, which today is probably the equivalent of $10 million or more. In those days, that was a new thing. Famously, when Roosevelt did not come to the support of the CIO during the steel strike in 1937, Lewis denounced Roosevelt in a Labor Day speech. He said, “It ill-behooves one who has supped at labor’s table to curse with impartiality labor and its enemies when they’re locked in deadly embrace.”
Lewis expected FDR to be on the side of the unions. To a degree, while FDR was not always reliable, much of the state apparatus in the ’30s was indeed pro-union. And not just the National Labor Relations Board, which was full of liberals and radicals. There was also, for example, the La Follette investigation, a Senate committee on the violations of free speech and the rights of labor in 1937–39. It publicized the anti-union and illegal activities of corporations.
For a moment in world history, Lewis was an absolutely crucial figure. He would then, later on, become more marginal. But between 1933 and 1940, he was an extraordinarily important figure.
A group of dressmakers on strike hold signs urging unionization and fair labor practices 1958
This engaging interview with labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein sheds light on the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and its enduring impact on American labor.
Lichtenstein delves into the CIO’s formation, its breakthrough in organizing industrial workers, and the role of key figures like John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther. He recounts pivotal moments such as the Flint sit-down strike against General Motors and the CIO’s creative strategy of infiltrating company unions in the steel industry. Lichtenstein offers thoughtful perspectives on the CIO’s handling of racial divisions and its ties to the Democratic Party. Throughout the conversation, Lichtenstein underscores the CIO’s historical significance while drawing interesting parallels to today’s labor organizing efforts.
This interview was conducted by Benjamin Y. Fong for the Jacobin podcast Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO. Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at UC Santa Barbara and the author of numerous books and articles relevant to Organize the Unorganized, including State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2003), Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (University of Illinois Press, 1997), and Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Temple University Press, 2003).
Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the CIO, and what is its primary historical significance?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The letters CIO originally stood for Committee for Industrial Organization. That was a committee set up in 1935 by John L. Lewis, who was the leader of the United Mine Workers [UMW], then a very large union with six hundred thousand members. He was joined by Sidney Hillman, who was head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and David Dubinsky, who was head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. At first, it was just a committee for industrial organization within the American Federation of Labor [AFL].
The committee said, “Look, we must take advantage of the situation, which is now occurring, with the [Franklin D.] Roosevelt administration and with new labor laws.” The Wagner Act was just being passed and there were a lot of strikes, all sorts of activities going on in 1933, ’34, ’35. They thought the American Federation of Labor should take advantage of this and begin new organizing campaigns in industries that were not organized and very important. Those industries were at the commanding heights of the economy. In those days, that would be like automobiles, steel, electrical products, things of that sort. They were often called the mass production industries, because they used assembly lines. They were big and run by big companies, too. The obvious analogy today would be Amazon and Walmart.
The American Federation of Labor had been reluctant to do that kind of organizing, partly because there’d been lots of defeats. There had been a huge defeat in 1919 when they tried to organize steel. There had been efforts in auto, textiles, etc. So the AFL was reluctant to plunge into this because it feared losing, but there was also a general sentiment that they were only going to organize skilled workers. Often, that meant white, older Northern European workers.
This wasn’t uniform. The Mine Workers took in all sorts of people, and they were in the AFL. But the AFL tended to be comprised of what we call craft unions. That is, skilled workers, like railroad engineers, skilled electricians, carpenters, etc. The AFL thought, “Those workers are in high demand. They have more money, they get higher wages, and we can organize them. We’ll leave aside women, we’ll leave aside immigrants, African Americans too, and we’ll leave aside people in the industries where the companies were tough and anti-union.”
The CIO challenged that thinking. And what happened over a two-year period was that the committee began to organize. The Mine Workers were the treasury, and they began to set up committees of their own, like the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or the Packing House Workers Organizing Committee, or the Textile Workers Organizing Committee. They began to hire organizers. Many of those organizers were radicals, communists, and socialists.
All of this created conflict within the American Federation of Labor, because some other unions thought, “Well, wait a minute, you are stepping into our jurisdiction.” With the Carpenters union, for instance, they said, “If we have a few carpenters in various industrial plants, and you’re trying to organize the whole plant or the whole factory, you’re going to step on our toes.” So conflict was created.
By late 1937, the CIO had been transformed from the Committee for Industrial Organization into the Congress of Industrial Organizations, meaning that it was now an independent labor federation with its own unions in it. This lasted for eighteen years, but it was an important eighteen years. In 1955, the CIO and the AFL would merge once again and become the AFL-CIO, but in the meantime, the CIO had a dramatic and fundamental impact on the organization of American workers, and on American capitalism in general.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Why did the CIO finally break through where previous efforts at industrial unionism had failed?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, I think that both Lewis and Hillman recognized that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We have here the Great Depression, which has delegitimized business as the backbone of prosperity and success. The Great Depression had demonstrated the weaknesses and problems of American capitalism.
Second, new labor laws were being passed. In the beginning of the New Deal, there was the National Industrial Recovery Act, which had a section called Section 7A, which was put into the legislation at the behest of the AFL and Frances Perkins, who was secretary of labor. It said workers have the right to organize unions of their own choosing. The language of Section 7A would once again be put into the Wagner Act, which was an even more powerful piece of labor legislation passed in 1935. The preamble of the Wagner Act basically says, “If we want to make capitalism work, we have to have unions because unions will create purchasing power for ordinary workers. They’ll buy things and we’ll have prosperity and commerce.”
Then, of course, there was also the growing radical mood in the nation, in the same way that today we see much pro-labor sentiment. In 1935, collective action, unionism, and radicalism were all popular. Communists, socialists, and other radicals were not numerous, but they had a growing sense of self-confidence. Some labor leaders, again, had been old mainstream labor leaders and they finally saw the light. I’m not talking about the younger crowd. Of course, they were in favor of organization, but I’m talking about the older, established ones. They said, “Look, this is the opportunity. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to use our treasury, use our resources, even put some of those radicals on the payroll.”
The degree to which Franklin Roosevelt [FDR] was pro-labor is debatable, but certainly, he was more so than Herbert Hoover. The CIO would say to workers, “We have a friend in the White House, and he wants you to join a union.” They used that language. That wasn’t 100 percent true, but it was true to a degree.
They thought the time was ripe, and we better do it now or we won’t have a chance again. That was true, because decades later, or just even a decade or two later, once business figured out how to fight the unions and more conservative forces were in charge of the government, it became much more difficult. So this was a moment of opportunity, and the CIO said, “We have to seize that.”
Benjamin Y. Fong
What are the factors that led the Mine Workers to be the leading organization here?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The fact is that all over the world, and for more than a century, mine workers have been a core constituency in the labor movement, and often radical. Mine work is dangerous. You’re underground. Supervision is difficult. It’s not like there’s a foreman that’s over your shoulder. And in fact, the tradition is that the workers organize the work underground. And of course, if they stop work, it’s very hard to find strike breakers.
Miners all over the world have been radical. There had been militant and practically insurrectionary strikes in the United States since the 1870s, and they’re legendary. Blair Mountain was a pitched battle between the Mine Workers and the US Army in 1921. There’d been this long tradition. On the other hand, there are many, many coal mines, and they’re often run by the railroads. Winning higher wages also meant winning higher prices. So the Mine Workers were thinking in broad societal economic terms. They thought, “We have to reorganize the entire industry in order to make unionism work.”
Now, the second thing about the Mine Workers, and the specific problem that Lewis and others had, was the anti-unionism of the big steel companies. There were hundreds and hundreds of coal mines all over the place. But when it came to the steel industry, it was an oligopoly. There was just US Steel and Bethlehem, a few other giant firms. They’d always resisted unionization. These steel companies owned some coal mines themselves. They were called captive mines.
Even where the Mine Workers had been successful by 1935, and they had a big spur of organization in the early ’30s, they had been unable to organize the captive mines. Lewis thought the only way to organize the captive mines was to organize the entire steel industry. Steel was, at that time, one of the great industries of America. Really with auto, it was one of the two great industries.
If you’re going to organize the steel industry, that’s a big operation. You need lots of organizers, you need a whole new strategy to do that. And the Miners were the vanguard.
Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the relation to earlier efforts at industrial organization?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] had been a radical inspiration to a generation of leftists who came of age in the ’30s. But I think the CIO leaders, and including the radicals as well, understood that the IWW strategy was limited.
To the IWW’s credit, they wanted to organize immigrants, women, farmworkers, people that AFL had ignored, and also do it on an industrial basis, meaning everyone in one factory or farm or mill, not just an elite stratum. They understood that. But on the other hand, the Industrial Workers of the World had officially, formally said, “We don’t want to sign contracts. We don’t want to create a big institution. That hampers us, becomes a burden on us. We’re against that.”
I think the CIO people, again, from the left to the right, said, “Well, no, we have a Wagner Act, which is based on the idea of having collective bargaining and signing legally enforceable contracts, and we’re going to do that.” I don’t think there’s any distinction between the most militant communist on this question and John L. Lewis.
Now you might question this, but here’s the defense of this institutional unionism. Consciousness is episodic. Today we have much union enthusiasm among Starbucks baristas and whatnot. In 1935, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the New Deal. There had been enthusiasm in 1919 for unions in many industries. So consciousness is episodic. It can rise to great, almost revolutionary heights.
But it also can ebb, it also can go down. You can have recessions; you can have repression, you can have the passage of time, and you can have labor turnover. What a union does, and a union that signs a collective bargaining contract, is that it freezes that consciousness in an institutional-legal form, so that in a period of recession or repression or just apathy, the union still exists. It’s still there. Now, maybe it’s run by bureaucrats or something, but it still exists. It doesn’t disappear. What had happened with the Industrial Workers of the World, and with many other unions that had been unable to form a contract, is that they disappeared. There’s something worse than a bad union, and that’s no union.
Benjamin Y. Fong
John L. Lewis was known as a pretty conservative guy in the ’20s. What accounts for his change in the 1930s?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, you’re right that in the ’20s he was a petty tyrant. There were opposition groups in the Mine Workers, and he fought them. He expelled communists and socialists in the 1920s. Not to defend the union autocracy, but if you are in an organization where you fear that its existence can be destroyed by an ill-advised strike or other activity, then you’re going to crack down. That was his view. He was aware of the fragility of the UMW.
Now, in the ’30s, he became a creative opportunist. He said, “This is my opportunity, I’ll take it.” One thing he did was that he got in touch with all the people who were expelled from the union earlier and he offered them jobs. He also was willing to hire communists and socialists because he knew they were good organizers. Lewis famously was asked at a press conference, “Hey, President Lewis, you’re hiring all these communists. What’s going on here? What are you?” And Lewis said, “Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?” In other words, I’m the hunter. The communists are the dogs. They’re organizing the workers, but they’re going to be organized into my organization.
He also understood that you had to have the state on your side. He understood that you couldn’t just have rank-and-file enthusiasm or radicalism. You had to have the state. Lewis had had this experience for decades of the National Guard coming in and breaking strikes, or some legislature passing anti-union laws. But he saw and expected that Roosevelt would be on the side of the union. In 1935, he famously gave something like $500,000 to the Roosevelt reelection campaign, which today is probably the equivalent of $10 million or more. In those days, that was a new thing. Famously, when Roosevelt did not come to the support of the CIO during the steel strike in 1937, Lewis denounced Roosevelt in a Labor Day speech. He said, “It ill-behooves one who has supped at labor’s table to curse with impartiality labor and its enemies when they’re locked in deadly embrace.”
Lewis expected FDR to be on the side of the unions. To a degree, while FDR was not always reliable, much of the state apparatus in the ’30s was indeed pro-union. And not just the National Labor Relations Board, which was full of liberals and radicals. There was also, for example, the La Follette investigation, a Senate committee on the violations of free speech and the rights of labor in 1937–39. It publicized the anti-union and illegal activities of corporations.
For a moment in world history, Lewis was an absolutely crucial figure. He would then, later on, become more marginal. But between 1933 and 1940, he was an extraordinarily important figure.
Benjamin Y. Fong
What happened in Flint in ’37?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, some might say it was a “spontaneous” action, but I will not use the word spontaneous. I want to say a quick word about spontaneity. I will not use it. I think all social historians should ban the word spontaneity. It does not exist. Nothing is spontaneous.
“Spontaneous” is a word that people who are on the outside use to explain something they can’t understand because they don’t know what’s going on inside, or that the upper class uses to explain what’s going on below. All social activity, whether radical or conservative, is part of a world of knowing, thinking and planning. There were groups of radicals, groups of unionists, who’d been fighting the foreman, fighting the company for months or years. Finally, in late 1936, early ’37, they said, “The only way we’re going to win is to have a sit-down strike.” From the point of view of a New York newspaper man, or even from that of John L. Lewis on top, it might appear spontaneous, but it wasn’t.
But when these sit-down strikes happened, Lewis, instead of repudiating them, supported them. The Wagner Act is passed in 1935, and it has a mechanism for holding elections, negotiations, and signing contracts. All the companies, and the Republican Party for that matter, were saying, “The Wagner Act is unconstitutional. We will not obey it.” So the sit-down strikes were, in a sense, designed to force the companies to obey the existing law as it was written. That was the rationale for it. “Okay, we will do something illegal, but that’s because you’re doing something illegal. And once you’ve stopped resisting unionization and resisting the Wagner Act, then we will cease our sit-down strikes.”
In auto, they began in a few plants in Detroit — and Atlanta! — but the center of the sit-down strike activity would be Flint, Michigan, which was where General Motors had its most important plants. At that time, General Motors was the model corporation, and the largest corporation, in the United States. It was both technologically and organizationally at the cutting edge. It was the corporation that was studied at every business school for fifty years. “You want to have a corporation? You want to be a successful businessman? Model yourself after General Motors.” The auto industry at the time was highly innovative. It had the excitement of Silicon Valley today. So the audacity of taking on General Motors and getting them to come to the table was really something dramatic and important, and everyone knew it.
In 1937, when you had a sit-down strike in the important motor building, Chevy Four in Flint, that stopped the entire corporation. Most workers at General Motors were not on strike. Most of them were sort of sitting at home and seeing what would happen. It was this militant minority who were in the plants and who displayed an enormous heroism and organization to sustain these sit-down strikes for six weeks, bringing in food, sometimes battling the police, etc.
Now, one of the crucial things was that, because of the mood of the country, the state of Michigan had elected a governor named Frank Murphy, who did not intervene to suppress the strike. That would’ve been the normal thing to happen, and that would happen later on. But it didn’t happen in 1937, in part because Murphy was pro-labor, in part because Roosevelt and Frances Perkins were saying, “Don’t do it.” Lewis himself dramatically would say, in a meeting with Murphy, “If you’re going to send in the National Guard to shoot up the plant, I will go to the factory, bear my breast, and you’ll have to kill me first.”
Well, that didn’t happen, and on February 11, 1937, in the governor’s office in Lansing, a contract was signed between the UAW [United Auto Workers] and General Motors. It was a very short contract, with few provisions. But the crucial thing was General Motors recognized the UAW, not as the exclusive representative of all the workers, but as a representative. And that gave the UAW a warrant to then organize everybody. And that’s what happened. They only had a few thousand members in February of 1937, but by September, they had upward of three hundred thousand and the majority of the General Motors workforce.
And after that, you got this enormous surge of unionism. One of the results of the General Motors sit-down strike, and the victory that the UAW won, was that very quickly thereafter, Myron Taylor, the head of US Steel, and John L. Lewis have a famous luncheon at the Willard Hotel in DC, and they basically agreed, “Okay, US Steel will recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, basically on the same basis as UAW. Not with exclusive jurisdiction, but as a representative, and you have the right to organize in the plants.” This was the great breakthrough for the CIO. But its moment of victory would not last unchallenged for long.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Could you talk a bit more about the CIO’s steelworker organizing campaign?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, it is true that the decision to organize US Steel is made basically over lunch at the Willard Hotel. But in steel, there had been this history of organization going back decades. One of the things that the steel industry had done, because they’d had this experience with unionism and they didn’t like it, in early 1933, the steel companies formed company unions. These are organizations set up and funded by the company. They’re designed to include rank-and-file workers, but also some middle managers, superintendents, foreman, people of that sort.
In the mid-’30s, many of these company unions had a good deal of support from ordinary workers, but they were really controlled by the companies. Some said at the time, “These are just phony unions run by the bosses; to hell with them.” The communists had done that earlier on. But the strategy of the steelworkers union, which I think was the right one, was to say, “We want to go into the company unions and take them over,” which is what they did. Many of these company unions became locals of the Steel Workers Union.
Now, here’s what’s good about that. The management, in seeking to control the workforce and the company, would bring in levels of workers who otherwise would be excluded from the union, like foremen and certain kinds of specialists, people they viewed as loyal to the company. But once those company unions become locals of the Steelworkers, you have a denser and more extensive membership than in other places. Some of the company unions would become particularly militant Steel Workers locals later on.
But in general, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee [SWOC] is very authoritarian, run from the top. When it becomes the United Steel Workers of America, that continues. Compared to the autoworkers union, it’s considered very much a kind of top-down operation. And that’s true, but at the very bottom, there’s a lot going on that is not apparent in the newspaper headlines of that day.
Benjamin Y. Fong
What lesson do you draw from SWOC’s investment in taking over the company unions?
Nelson Lichtenstein
You go where the workers are. In electrical, they had fishing clubs. There were baseball teams. Wherever the workers are, that’s where you go. By the way, I would say that today, companies have learned that lesson. It used to be that these company unions were formed, even in the ’40s. Today it’s almost a cardinal rule: an anti-union company never creates an organization where workers could come together and talk among themselves. At Walmart, which I studied, there are not even company Walmart picnics.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Some historians have argued that the CIO constrained the radical consciousness that was awakening at that time. What do you make of that idea?
Nelson Lichtenstein
I think the history we’ve lived through subsequently demonstrates, through things like Occupy [Wall Street], that you can’t have a pure kind of consciousness. You need institutions. Capitalism is an authoritarian, hierarchical, organized system. I’m being a Leninist here. To counter that, you need another kind of organized, structured army. As C. Wright Mills said, trade union leaders mobilize discontent, and then they structure it.
I just think that that’s the lesson of labor history. Labor unions are not revolutionary organizations. They are designed to cut a deal. I’m not being cynical here, and I don’t think I’m being hostile to the most important liberatory expressions of the working class. But if you’re going to cut that deal, then you have to sort of abide by it. It’s just the nature of capitalism. So I think it would be an overstatement to say the CIO was designed to suppress radicalism.
Yes, there were expressions of radicalism all over the place, and sometimes, yes, they were suppressed, as in what Lewis did with the Chrysler workers. After General Motors won, Chrysler workers went out. While in General Motors, you might have had two or three thousand workers sitting down in the plant, at Chrysler, you had twenty-five thousand who sat down. Now, Chrysler also had a company union, which had empowered and brought into it a lot of levels of workers who were later excluded from the union, like foremen. Chrysler had a very powerful union, and they were having a sit-down strike in Detroit a month after the Flint sit-down.
Lewis basically told them, “Stop, this is too much. You’re going to get a contract. You have got to stop this massive sit-down strike,” which really was taking over the company. He used whatever power he had to stop that radicalism. There’s no doubt about that. But his argument was, “We have to cut a deal here, and if we go too far, then there’ll be a backlash.”
Benjamin Y. Fong
And there was backlash, and a stopping of the CIO’s forward momentum.
Nelson Lichtenstein
Right. In the fall of 1937, we had a recession, a severe recession, partly brought on by FDR’s failure to continue a kind of expansionary Keynesian program. But some people argue that there was also a kind of capital strike. “Okay, we’re not going to invest because the labor costs are too high, so we’re going to shut down some plants.”
Anyway, there’s a severe recession, and recessions make it difficult for unions to organize and grow, especially given the fact that there were not union shop contracts at this time. The new members who had just joined the union, some of them drifted away, and it was difficult to organize new workers. The strike in what’s called the Little Steel companies, that strike was defeated by the companies in the summer of 1937.
But then the war comes along, and by 1940, you begin to get a tremendous employment boom. A sort of second state intervention takes place in which the state is in the midst of this mobilization for war. Then later on, after Pearl Harbor, the companies and the state come back and say, “Okay, we will ensure, in return for a no-strike pledge, that the unions can gain members in the new war industries and that you’ll have a kind of modified form of union shop.” This means that a worker who is employed in an industry where the union exists, will have to join the union and pay dues. Or if they don’t, if they refuse to do it, they will lose their job.
That meant that all the unions did in fact increase their membership by about 50 percent during the war, AFL and CIO together. Partly because of the expansion of existing unions, but also there was this [National] War Labor Board, which had a mechanism for ensuring that unions were recognized in places like southern textiles or warehousing, which had been very resistant to unionism.
Now, it was kind of a Faustian bargain here, because the other side of it was that there was a no-strike pledge, and the strike is the union’s ultimate weapon. At the top level, where you’re dealing with wages, these were being controlled on a national level. But strikes are not just about gross wage levels. They’re also about the intimate, daily interaction between workers and their foremen over all sorts of grievances and problems in the shop. The right to have a strike, to curb the tyranny of a petty foreman or other supervisor, is very important.
Strikes did of course take place during World War II. They were called wildcat strikes or illegal strikes. But then both the government and union leaders would say, “No, no, stop. Go back to work. We’ve signed a no-strike pledge.” Well, that created a lot of internal tension, as well as systems of authority and even authoritarian structures of power, which would continue into the postwar period.
So it was a kind of Faustian bargain there. I would say, given our experience of the last forty to fifty years, where opposition to unionism has been so intransigent that the Faustian bargain — the side of it that said, “The union’s going to exist and grow” — looks like a little better part of the deal than it did, say, before Ronald Reagan.
Benjamin Y. Fong
How would you characterize the CIO’s legacy in confronting racial and ethnic divisions in the working class?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The answer is mixed, unquestionably. Now you have some unions, often run by the communists, that were progressive. One of the great things about the communist moment in American history is that they understood, very early on, really late ’20s and early ’30s, that there was a sizable black working class, and that you had to have unity of the races to really make fundamental progress. You can look at the communist-led unions, the ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the food and tobacco workers. They’re exemplary, for the most part.
However, you can find all sorts of racists in other CIO unions. America is shot through with racism. The white working class in the 1930s was straightforwardly racist, even the better elements of it. Did you have integrated dances? No. Was social equality a practice? No. You can find all sorts of racism, from steel to auto, you name it.
But when it came to having an organization or certainly a strike, they said, “Well, wait a minute, you want to win? If the black workers are in the motor building, which is the most central thing in an auto company, making the motor blocks, or if the black workers are slitting the throats of the cattle, as they’re on the disassembly line in the packing house, I mean, you got to have black workers in your union. You can’t exclude them.”
One of the crucial moments in the CIO’s history came in 1941 during the Ford strike. Henry Ford had hired lots of black workers. He went to the black churches, and he thought they’d be loyal. And many were loyal. They were better jobs than you could get somewhere else. But during the strike, the autoworkers knew they had to get black workers involved. They got in touch with the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] over the issue of black workers being strike breakers. But over the course of the strike, they convinced them not to be. There were lots of black workers in the Ford organization. By 1943, and really for many years after, the black workers were at the core of one of the most militant unions in the country. In Local 600, which had like eighty thousand workers at one point, it just became a cockpit of civil rights activism in the Midwest.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Walter Reuther emerged as the key CIO leader after the war. Could you describe his background and ascendance in the UAW and CIO?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Reuther came out of a German socialist family. He’d been sympathetic to the communists in the ’30s. He went to the Soviet Union and worked there for eighteen months. He then became a leader of the General Motors department of the UAW. He was very imaginative and brought around him a kind of socialist brain trust. He was very active in the war and was in favor of labor helping to run the defense industries in various ways. He had a famous plan for five hundred planes a day that would be run in a joint labor-management way.
While he was formally in favor of the no-strike pledge, he could see the damage this was doing. So in late 1945, he was very adamant about having a big strike at General Motors, which they did. It had a very progressive, advanced demand. It wasn’t just for more wages, but also to keep the price of General Motors cars stable so that you wouldn’t have an inflationary upheaval.
He was a dynamic figure, albeit linked eventually to anti-communism. But he was not a retrograde, not a conservative. He declared, “The UAW is the vanguard in America.” When he used that word “vanguard,” every radical wondered, “What, the Vanguard Party, you mean?” And in fact, that was what he meant, actually.
Philip Murray died in 1952, and Reuther became leader of the CIO. By that point, all the CIO leaders, and AFL too, were looking for a merger. They were looking to get back together. So there really wasn’t much to Reuther’s leadership of the CIO. It was basically preparing for the merger. By the ’50s, the AFL was growing, and it had more members than the CIO. Partly because companies liked the AFL, being not as radical as the CIO, but also because American capitalism was not going to have more and more auto plants and steel plants. We had retail, trucking, bakeries, and all sorts of other little industries where the AFL had always been. The AFL was really twice as big as the CIO by the mid-’50s. When the merger takes place, Reuther plays second fiddle to George Meany.
Reuther remains a kind of iconic, progressive figure. He has many of his own problems. He runs the UAW with, not exactly an iron hand, but a very effective autocratic hand. He always wins reelection by 99 percent of the vote. He’s trying to be progressive, but there’s the kind of iron cage of collective bargaining. It does have these structures, these legal structures. Reuther was imprisoned within it. In the book I wrote about him, I called Reuther a prisoner of the institutions he’d created. He welcomed the New Left, at least the early New Left, because he thought, “Oh, this is a new spirit of mobilization and activity.” But he was trapped within a world of Democratic Party politics in the 1960s, supportive of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war policy, and never really broke free from that. He died in 1970.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Do you think the CIO was too dependent on the Democratic Party?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, the state is important, and the CIO was right to understand you had to have the state on your side, or at least being neutral. But that can easily lead to a kind of dependence. There was a cult of Roosevelt, no doubt about it. And there was a kind of relation where the union political activity just consisted of giving money to Democrats. The Democratic Party, certainly back in the ’30s and ’40s, was a completely mixed bag because they had this huge southern reactionary, anti-labor, racist wing. And if you’re strengthening the Democratic Party, you’re strengthening that wing.
So some thought about a Labor Party. That was discussed and debated within lots of unions in the 1940s. Certainly the threat of having a Labor Party is a way of prodding the Democrats to be more to the left, at least the Northern Democrats. The problem is, and we see that today more so maybe even than in the ’40s, is that we have this terrible, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. We don’t have a parliamentary system. That’s really undemocratic, and it makes it really difficult to form labor parties. If we had a parliamentary system, I think we definitely would’ve had a Labor Party, as you had in Great Britain.
But yes, I think independent political action was another avenue that CIO leadership failed to explore. Reuther toyed around with it for a while, but basically, they didn’t explore that. Why didn’t they? It’s complicated, but it was a failure of nerve to a degree.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Any last words about the historical importance of the CIO?
Nelson Lichtenstein
This is what I’d say to twenty-two-year-old people who work at Amazon, REI, Starbucks, or some place like that. Don’t think that the people who created the great CIO unions eighty years ago were supermen or superwomen, somehow imbued with sophisticated radicalism. They were identical to you. There was hesitation. There was sitting around. There was fear. Don’t just think that this was a land of giants.
The labor movement has always grown in spurts. Long years of frustration, and then a breakthrough. You never know when that breakthrough is going to happen, and you have to be prepared for it.
What happened in Flint in ’37?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, some might say it was a “spontaneous” action, but I will not use the word spontaneous. I want to say a quick word about spontaneity. I will not use it. I think all social historians should ban the word spontaneity. It does not exist. Nothing is spontaneous.
“Spontaneous” is a word that people who are on the outside use to explain something they can’t understand because they don’t know what’s going on inside, or that the upper class uses to explain what’s going on below. All social activity, whether radical or conservative, is part of a world of knowing, thinking and planning. There were groups of radicals, groups of unionists, who’d been fighting the foreman, fighting the company for months or years. Finally, in late 1936, early ’37, they said, “The only way we’re going to win is to have a sit-down strike.” From the point of view of a New York newspaper man, or even from that of John L. Lewis on top, it might appear spontaneous, but it wasn’t.
But when these sit-down strikes happened, Lewis, instead of repudiating them, supported them. The Wagner Act is passed in 1935, and it has a mechanism for holding elections, negotiations, and signing contracts. All the companies, and the Republican Party for that matter, were saying, “The Wagner Act is unconstitutional. We will not obey it.” So the sit-down strikes were, in a sense, designed to force the companies to obey the existing law as it was written. That was the rationale for it. “Okay, we will do something illegal, but that’s because you’re doing something illegal. And once you’ve stopped resisting unionization and resisting the Wagner Act, then we will cease our sit-down strikes.”
In auto, they began in a few plants in Detroit — and Atlanta! — but the center of the sit-down strike activity would be Flint, Michigan, which was where General Motors had its most important plants. At that time, General Motors was the model corporation, and the largest corporation, in the United States. It was both technologically and organizationally at the cutting edge. It was the corporation that was studied at every business school for fifty years. “You want to have a corporation? You want to be a successful businessman? Model yourself after General Motors.” The auto industry at the time was highly innovative. It had the excitement of Silicon Valley today. So the audacity of taking on General Motors and getting them to come to the table was really something dramatic and important, and everyone knew it.
In 1937, when you had a sit-down strike in the important motor building, Chevy Four in Flint, that stopped the entire corporation. Most workers at General Motors were not on strike. Most of them were sort of sitting at home and seeing what would happen. It was this militant minority who were in the plants and who displayed an enormous heroism and organization to sustain these sit-down strikes for six weeks, bringing in food, sometimes battling the police, etc.
Now, one of the crucial things was that, because of the mood of the country, the state of Michigan had elected a governor named Frank Murphy, who did not intervene to suppress the strike. That would’ve been the normal thing to happen, and that would happen later on. But it didn’t happen in 1937, in part because Murphy was pro-labor, in part because Roosevelt and Frances Perkins were saying, “Don’t do it.” Lewis himself dramatically would say, in a meeting with Murphy, “If you’re going to send in the National Guard to shoot up the plant, I will go to the factory, bear my breast, and you’ll have to kill me first.”
Well, that didn’t happen, and on February 11, 1937, in the governor’s office in Lansing, a contract was signed between the UAW [United Auto Workers] and General Motors. It was a very short contract, with few provisions. But the crucial thing was General Motors recognized the UAW, not as the exclusive representative of all the workers, but as a representative. And that gave the UAW a warrant to then organize everybody. And that’s what happened. They only had a few thousand members in February of 1937, but by September, they had upward of three hundred thousand and the majority of the General Motors workforce.
And after that, you got this enormous surge of unionism. One of the results of the General Motors sit-down strike, and the victory that the UAW won, was that very quickly thereafter, Myron Taylor, the head of US Steel, and John L. Lewis have a famous luncheon at the Willard Hotel in DC, and they basically agreed, “Okay, US Steel will recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, basically on the same basis as UAW. Not with exclusive jurisdiction, but as a representative, and you have the right to organize in the plants.” This was the great breakthrough for the CIO. But its moment of victory would not last unchallenged for long.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Could you talk a bit more about the CIO’s steelworker organizing campaign?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, it is true that the decision to organize US Steel is made basically over lunch at the Willard Hotel. But in steel, there had been this history of organization going back decades. One of the things that the steel industry had done, because they’d had this experience with unionism and they didn’t like it, in early 1933, the steel companies formed company unions. These are organizations set up and funded by the company. They’re designed to include rank-and-file workers, but also some middle managers, superintendents, foreman, people of that sort.
In the mid-’30s, many of these company unions had a good deal of support from ordinary workers, but they were really controlled by the companies. Some said at the time, “These are just phony unions run by the bosses; to hell with them.” The communists had done that earlier on. But the strategy of the steelworkers union, which I think was the right one, was to say, “We want to go into the company unions and take them over,” which is what they did. Many of these company unions became locals of the Steel Workers Union.
Now, here’s what’s good about that. The management, in seeking to control the workforce and the company, would bring in levels of workers who otherwise would be excluded from the union, like foremen and certain kinds of specialists, people they viewed as loyal to the company. But once those company unions become locals of the Steelworkers, you have a denser and more extensive membership than in other places. Some of the company unions would become particularly militant Steel Workers locals later on.
But in general, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee [SWOC] is very authoritarian, run from the top. When it becomes the United Steel Workers of America, that continues. Compared to the autoworkers union, it’s considered very much a kind of top-down operation. And that’s true, but at the very bottom, there’s a lot going on that is not apparent in the newspaper headlines of that day.
Benjamin Y. Fong
What lesson do you draw from SWOC’s investment in taking over the company unions?
Nelson Lichtenstein
You go where the workers are. In electrical, they had fishing clubs. There were baseball teams. Wherever the workers are, that’s where you go. By the way, I would say that today, companies have learned that lesson. It used to be that these company unions were formed, even in the ’40s. Today it’s almost a cardinal rule: an anti-union company never creates an organization where workers could come together and talk among themselves. At Walmart, which I studied, there are not even company Walmart picnics.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Some historians have argued that the CIO constrained the radical consciousness that was awakening at that time. What do you make of that idea?
Nelson Lichtenstein
I think the history we’ve lived through subsequently demonstrates, through things like Occupy [Wall Street], that you can’t have a pure kind of consciousness. You need institutions. Capitalism is an authoritarian, hierarchical, organized system. I’m being a Leninist here. To counter that, you need another kind of organized, structured army. As C. Wright Mills said, trade union leaders mobilize discontent, and then they structure it.
I just think that that’s the lesson of labor history. Labor unions are not revolutionary organizations. They are designed to cut a deal. I’m not being cynical here, and I don’t think I’m being hostile to the most important liberatory expressions of the working class. But if you’re going to cut that deal, then you have to sort of abide by it. It’s just the nature of capitalism. So I think it would be an overstatement to say the CIO was designed to suppress radicalism.
Yes, there were expressions of radicalism all over the place, and sometimes, yes, they were suppressed, as in what Lewis did with the Chrysler workers. After General Motors won, Chrysler workers went out. While in General Motors, you might have had two or three thousand workers sitting down in the plant, at Chrysler, you had twenty-five thousand who sat down. Now, Chrysler also had a company union, which had empowered and brought into it a lot of levels of workers who were later excluded from the union, like foremen. Chrysler had a very powerful union, and they were having a sit-down strike in Detroit a month after the Flint sit-down.
Lewis basically told them, “Stop, this is too much. You’re going to get a contract. You have got to stop this massive sit-down strike,” which really was taking over the company. He used whatever power he had to stop that radicalism. There’s no doubt about that. But his argument was, “We have to cut a deal here, and if we go too far, then there’ll be a backlash.”
Benjamin Y. Fong
And there was backlash, and a stopping of the CIO’s forward momentum.
Nelson Lichtenstein
Right. In the fall of 1937, we had a recession, a severe recession, partly brought on by FDR’s failure to continue a kind of expansionary Keynesian program. But some people argue that there was also a kind of capital strike. “Okay, we’re not going to invest because the labor costs are too high, so we’re going to shut down some plants.”
Anyway, there’s a severe recession, and recessions make it difficult for unions to organize and grow, especially given the fact that there were not union shop contracts at this time. The new members who had just joined the union, some of them drifted away, and it was difficult to organize new workers. The strike in what’s called the Little Steel companies, that strike was defeated by the companies in the summer of 1937.
But then the war comes along, and by 1940, you begin to get a tremendous employment boom. A sort of second state intervention takes place in which the state is in the midst of this mobilization for war. Then later on, after Pearl Harbor, the companies and the state come back and say, “Okay, we will ensure, in return for a no-strike pledge, that the unions can gain members in the new war industries and that you’ll have a kind of modified form of union shop.” This means that a worker who is employed in an industry where the union exists, will have to join the union and pay dues. Or if they don’t, if they refuse to do it, they will lose their job.
That meant that all the unions did in fact increase their membership by about 50 percent during the war, AFL and CIO together. Partly because of the expansion of existing unions, but also there was this [National] War Labor Board, which had a mechanism for ensuring that unions were recognized in places like southern textiles or warehousing, which had been very resistant to unionism.
Now, it was kind of a Faustian bargain here, because the other side of it was that there was a no-strike pledge, and the strike is the union’s ultimate weapon. At the top level, where you’re dealing with wages, these were being controlled on a national level. But strikes are not just about gross wage levels. They’re also about the intimate, daily interaction between workers and their foremen over all sorts of grievances and problems in the shop. The right to have a strike, to curb the tyranny of a petty foreman or other supervisor, is very important.
Strikes did of course take place during World War II. They were called wildcat strikes or illegal strikes. But then both the government and union leaders would say, “No, no, stop. Go back to work. We’ve signed a no-strike pledge.” Well, that created a lot of internal tension, as well as systems of authority and even authoritarian structures of power, which would continue into the postwar period.
So it was a kind of Faustian bargain there. I would say, given our experience of the last forty to fifty years, where opposition to unionism has been so intransigent that the Faustian bargain — the side of it that said, “The union’s going to exist and grow” — looks like a little better part of the deal than it did, say, before Ronald Reagan.
Benjamin Y. Fong
How would you characterize the CIO’s legacy in confronting racial and ethnic divisions in the working class?
Nelson Lichtenstein
The answer is mixed, unquestionably. Now you have some unions, often run by the communists, that were progressive. One of the great things about the communist moment in American history is that they understood, very early on, really late ’20s and early ’30s, that there was a sizable black working class, and that you had to have unity of the races to really make fundamental progress. You can look at the communist-led unions, the ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the food and tobacco workers. They’re exemplary, for the most part.
However, you can find all sorts of racists in other CIO unions. America is shot through with racism. The white working class in the 1930s was straightforwardly racist, even the better elements of it. Did you have integrated dances? No. Was social equality a practice? No. You can find all sorts of racism, from steel to auto, you name it.
But when it came to having an organization or certainly a strike, they said, “Well, wait a minute, you want to win? If the black workers are in the motor building, which is the most central thing in an auto company, making the motor blocks, or if the black workers are slitting the throats of the cattle, as they’re on the disassembly line in the packing house, I mean, you got to have black workers in your union. You can’t exclude them.”
One of the crucial moments in the CIO’s history came in 1941 during the Ford strike. Henry Ford had hired lots of black workers. He went to the black churches, and he thought they’d be loyal. And many were loyal. They were better jobs than you could get somewhere else. But during the strike, the autoworkers knew they had to get black workers involved. They got in touch with the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] over the issue of black workers being strike breakers. But over the course of the strike, they convinced them not to be. There were lots of black workers in the Ford organization. By 1943, and really for many years after, the black workers were at the core of one of the most militant unions in the country. In Local 600, which had like eighty thousand workers at one point, it just became a cockpit of civil rights activism in the Midwest.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Walter Reuther emerged as the key CIO leader after the war. Could you describe his background and ascendance in the UAW and CIO?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Reuther came out of a German socialist family. He’d been sympathetic to the communists in the ’30s. He went to the Soviet Union and worked there for eighteen months. He then became a leader of the General Motors department of the UAW. He was very imaginative and brought around him a kind of socialist brain trust. He was very active in the war and was in favor of labor helping to run the defense industries in various ways. He had a famous plan for five hundred planes a day that would be run in a joint labor-management way.
While he was formally in favor of the no-strike pledge, he could see the damage this was doing. So in late 1945, he was very adamant about having a big strike at General Motors, which they did. It had a very progressive, advanced demand. It wasn’t just for more wages, but also to keep the price of General Motors cars stable so that you wouldn’t have an inflationary upheaval.
He was a dynamic figure, albeit linked eventually to anti-communism. But he was not a retrograde, not a conservative. He declared, “The UAW is the vanguard in America.” When he used that word “vanguard,” every radical wondered, “What, the Vanguard Party, you mean?” And in fact, that was what he meant, actually.
Philip Murray died in 1952, and Reuther became leader of the CIO. By that point, all the CIO leaders, and AFL too, were looking for a merger. They were looking to get back together. So there really wasn’t much to Reuther’s leadership of the CIO. It was basically preparing for the merger. By the ’50s, the AFL was growing, and it had more members than the CIO. Partly because companies liked the AFL, being not as radical as the CIO, but also because American capitalism was not going to have more and more auto plants and steel plants. We had retail, trucking, bakeries, and all sorts of other little industries where the AFL had always been. The AFL was really twice as big as the CIO by the mid-’50s. When the merger takes place, Reuther plays second fiddle to George Meany.
Reuther remains a kind of iconic, progressive figure. He has many of his own problems. He runs the UAW with, not exactly an iron hand, but a very effective autocratic hand. He always wins reelection by 99 percent of the vote. He’s trying to be progressive, but there’s the kind of iron cage of collective bargaining. It does have these structures, these legal structures. Reuther was imprisoned within it. In the book I wrote about him, I called Reuther a prisoner of the institutions he’d created. He welcomed the New Left, at least the early New Left, because he thought, “Oh, this is a new spirit of mobilization and activity.” But he was trapped within a world of Democratic Party politics in the 1960s, supportive of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war policy, and never really broke free from that. He died in 1970.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Do you think the CIO was too dependent on the Democratic Party?
Nelson Lichtenstein
Well, the state is important, and the CIO was right to understand you had to have the state on your side, or at least being neutral. But that can easily lead to a kind of dependence. There was a cult of Roosevelt, no doubt about it. And there was a kind of relation where the union political activity just consisted of giving money to Democrats. The Democratic Party, certainly back in the ’30s and ’40s, was a completely mixed bag because they had this huge southern reactionary, anti-labor, racist wing. And if you’re strengthening the Democratic Party, you’re strengthening that wing.
So some thought about a Labor Party. That was discussed and debated within lots of unions in the 1940s. Certainly the threat of having a Labor Party is a way of prodding the Democrats to be more to the left, at least the Northern Democrats. The problem is, and we see that today more so maybe even than in the ’40s, is that we have this terrible, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. We don’t have a parliamentary system. That’s really undemocratic, and it makes it really difficult to form labor parties. If we had a parliamentary system, I think we definitely would’ve had a Labor Party, as you had in Great Britain.
But yes, I think independent political action was another avenue that CIO leadership failed to explore. Reuther toyed around with it for a while, but basically, they didn’t explore that. Why didn’t they? It’s complicated, but it was a failure of nerve to a degree.
Benjamin Y. Fong
Any last words about the historical importance of the CIO?
Nelson Lichtenstein
This is what I’d say to twenty-two-year-old people who work at Amazon, REI, Starbucks, or some place like that. Don’t think that the people who created the great CIO unions eighty years ago were supermen or superwomen, somehow imbued with sophisticated radicalism. They were identical to you. There was hesitation. There was sitting around. There was fear. Don’t just think that this was a land of giants.
The labor movement has always grown in spurts. Long years of frustration, and then a breakthrough. You never know when that breakthrough is going to happen, and you have to be prepared for it.
