Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor

327 Pages·1999·6.971 MB·English

by  Paul Buhle

TAKING CARE 0F BUSINESS

TAKING CARE 0F BUSINESS
SAMUEL COMPERS, GEDRGE MEANY,
LANE KIRKLAND, AND THE TRAGEDY
OF AMERICAN LABOR
PAUL BUIILE
QB
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 1999 Monthly Review Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging—in-Publication Data
Buhle, Paul, 1944-
Taking Care of Business : Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland,
and the Tragedy of American Labor / Paul Buhle.
. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58367-004-1 (cloth). —ISBN 1-58367-003-3 (pbk.)
1. Labor movement—United States—History—20th century.
2. Working class——United States—History. 3. Trade-union
democracy—leaders—United States. 4. AFL-CIO—History—20th century.
5. Labor leaders—United States—History—20th century. 6.
Trade-unions—United States—Political activity—History—20th century.
I. Title.
HD8072.5.B84 1999
331.88’0973—dc21 98-47888
CIP
Monthly Review Press
122 West 27th Street
New York NY 10001
Manufactured in Canada
1098765432
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
1. Samuel Gompers and Business Unionism 1 7
2. Meany Takes Command 9]
3. Meanyism: Apex and Decline 146
4. The Kirkland Years 204
Conclusion 249
Plotes 264
Index 303

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began with an extended essay written by Julius Jacobson
on George Meany. I proposed to write several chapters around this essay,
toward a jointly authored book, and I continued my end of the work,
thinking of the process as collaborative. At last, the volume had so ex-
panded and changed so much that Jacobson, no longer feeling an equal
partner, reluctantly bowed out. If the phrase, “with the assistance of,” did
not connote a research aide, he would at least be entitled to this claim on
the jacket. Still, the spirit of his work and the antibureaucratic temperament
of the journal he co-edits, New Politics, remain herein, and I am proud to
say so. He has, of course, no responsibility for the views expressed (or the
errors committed) by myself along the way, but the book could not have
been done without him.
I would not disguise my own predilections if I could. The needle trades
bureaucrats of the 19203 who styled their left-wing rivals “gilgul DeLeon-
ists” defamed the original but would have had a point with my case. At
eighteen, between the civil rights movement and the anti-war crusade, I
became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of the Sephardic socialist from
the little Caribbean island of Curacao. The Socialist Labor Party, a small
organization made up mainly of self-educated working people, had long
since lost its historic role by 1963. But leader Daniel DeLeon’s penetrating
critique of “labor fakirs” had a real resonance, and led to a syndicalist or
Wobbly but distinctly non-Leninist way of looking at labor. I left the SLP
quickly, but I have remained, in some ways, a “gilgul” (that is to say,
spiritually transmorphosed) DeLeonite of old, through forty years of my
own political activities involving more labor support and labor education
viii Taking Care of Business
activity, as well as more labor history scholarship, than I could have
imagined.
Another experience has been, perhaps, even more important to me. My
paternal grandfather, a German immigrant, was a pattermnaker at the Rock
Island Arsenal—the only unionist branch in a family tree made up mostly
of farmers, health workers, teachers, and civil servants. But my mother, the
granddaughter of an abolitionist, a proud Phi Beta Kappa, birth control
advocate, and settlement house worker in her youth (also, casual acquain-
tance of Jane Addams) wanted badly to become a unionist with her fellow
nurses in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. A few years before I joined the SLP,
she had begun to “talk union,” finding none of the unions on hand at all
interested in organizing nurses and soon finding herself on an unofficial
blacklist. That punishment literally ruined her life, although she took real
satisfaction in later news of nurses’ strikes and hospital unionization. To
the memory of Pearl Drake Buhle (1906-1985) and to the example of
rank-and-filer Paul Andreas Rasmussen, whose faith and financial contri-
bution helped make the publication of this work possible, I dedicate this
volume.
I have a strange sort of acknowledgment to make to the late Vanni
Montana, sometime anarchist, avid anticommunist, and longtime function-
ary in the Italian-language section of the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union. Attending a fiftieth reunion of the Norman Thomas
campaign of 1932, in hopes of interviewing old timers, I found Vanni, or
he found me. Perhaps because he was bitter at the union’s dissolution of its
Italian-language newspaper, or perhaps because he wanted to unburden
himself (albeit not on tape), he told me candidly about his role in the bribes,
vote-buying, and assorted other blatantly illegal activities carried on by the
AFL in Italy after the Second World War. After decades as a civil rights
and anti-war activist interested in history of the American left, I was naive
enough to be shocked by the degree of moral cynicism and outright
corruption. (Earlier in the day, I’d been equally shocked to hear some of
Vanni’s fellow social democrats enthuse about Reaganism, but relieved to
meet Victor Reuther, who had bravely exposed the CIA labor activities
long denied by officials.) This conversation launched a new interest on my
part, and eventually my discoveries about labor bureaucracy, going back
Acknowlegments ix
to Gompers’s secret funding by the Wilson administration to defeat anti-
war movements, fell into place.
Additonally, I wish to acknowledge some of the old-time labor
activists and rank-and-filers whose experiences and heterodox views
conveyed to me over the decades new ways of seeing labor history: H. L.
Mitchell, C. L. R. James, Martin Glaberrnan, Len DeCaux, Stan Weir, Mary
Zackheim, Dick Powell (the president of the busted Television Writers of
America, not the actor of the same name), David Montgomery, and Sid
Resnick. I wish to acknowledge, likewise, those who read early or late drafts
of the manuscript and made suggestions for revision: Paul LeBlanc, Frank
Bardacke, Dave Wagner, Chuck Schwartz, Peter Rachleff, Jack Stuart,
Dexter Arnold, Hobart Spalding, Stan Weir, Gina Rourke, Howard Brick,
Staughton Lynd, Allen Hunter, and my editor at Monthly Review Press,
Christopher Phelps.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge two figures in the leadership of today’s
AFL-CIO, Joe Uehlein and Bill Fletcher, whose insights and determination
mark the path toward potential labor rebirth, and whose commitment has
given me particular inspiration for finishing this book. I’m delighted to
have had the opportunity to work closely with the AFL-CIO’s Organizing
Institute, and to draft considerable sections of Faculty@ Work, published
by the AFL-CIO in November 1998. And I wish to acknowledge those staff
members at the George Meany Center, including the late Stuart Kaufman,
who during the early-to-middle 1990s had the courage to break ranks and
offer insights as well as damning research materials on the Lane Kirkland
years, accurately foreseeing the collapse of labor’s authoritarian regime
and contributing in assorted small ways to hastening its end. Perhaps, in
light of this book and the new scholarship more generally, the AFL-CIO
will end the embarrassment of a name (i.e., the Meany Center) just as
ill-suited to a functioning labor educational and organizing center as “J.
Edgar Hoover” or “ Roy Cohn” would be for a much-needed memorial to
the victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist.