so that she will never be able to work. She is in a hospital for a long time all ready [sic].” The IWO heard of a similarly distressed member who had “suf-fered a stroke on the right side. She cannot move her hand and her right leg has a brace. Most of the time she spends sitting down. Her husband . . . had to quit work for four months in order to . . . take care of her. They are request-ing help.”4
Even with New Deal legislation in place and the Brodsky welfare fund available to members, security was uncertain, as the Slovaks of the coal town of Lansford, Pennsylvania, could attest. There Frank Schubak’s claim for an injury was returned with a request for further explanation. The IWO’s Sick Benefit Department wrote, “On the surface, this disability is a very pro-longed period for the diagnosis indicated by the doctor.”5
In this instance relief was forthcoming, for the secretary explained the particulars of Schubak’s case. “The thing is, he was crippled in the finger at work, and he was under company treatment by the company doctor through
‘compensation’ when it was announced that he was already healthy and could go to work,” the secretary explained. After Schubak had been back at work for two or three weeks, the secretary went to visit him and discovered
“his whole hand was wrapped up in bandages. He said that his blood was poisoned.” His whole arm had turned black. The secretary surmised the hos-pital was receiving a kickback from the company doctor to hasten injured workers back onto the job. A check for fifteen weeks’ sick benefits was sent in June 1953.6
As the initial letter raising questions about the “very prolonged period”
of Schubak’s sickness suggests, in performance of their insurance-society duties IWO officers scrupulously guarded their meager treasury. In this re-gard, IWO officers behaved like officials of other ethnic fraternal societies.
Still, many IWO officers were sympathetic to a Marxist outlook, so there was always a chance a personal appeal noting corporate malfeasance (as with a company doctor prematurely hastening an injured worker back into the coal pits) would gain a sympathetic hearing. Prior to the unionization of much of the coal fields, deadly and debilitating accidents were widespread, and ethnic self-insurance fraternal societies were often the only recourse immigrant miners had.7 In 1920 in Guttenberg, New Jersey, the SWS (later affiliated with the IWO), likewise heard of the plight of Frank Galba, “soon to be for-ever blind” as the result of a work injury.8 Similar hazards were documented in the nation’s steel mills and auto plants, where lost limbs, lost eyes, and ailments related to toxic chemicals were common.9 Such woes brought home the grim nature of life in industrial America.
The level of trust that members placed in the IWO was touching. Isaac Galperin of Brownsville, Brooklyn, wrote in search of an electric blanket,
“wholesale or at a place like a[n] I.W.O. laboratory where I can get a certain
percentage off.” General Director of Organization Dave Greene replied, “The IWO has no laboratory” but reported that bargains on electric blankets were available at S. Klein’s on Union Square. Some members had such faith in the IWO that they sent their doctor’s bill to headquarters as well as requests to put them in touch with Soviet doctors who could cure them. In February 1951 Greene replied to Stella Fidyk, “The IWO is in no way connected, medi-cally or otherwise, with the doctors of the Soviet Union, and we have no contact with them.” He suggested, though, that Fidyk “get in touch with some of the doctors who have serviced our membership. . . . [T]hey may be in [a] position to help you with your medical problem.”10
The example of a member writing to the fraternal insurance society in search of an electric blanket suggests that by 1953, over the course of more than two decades, members had “regarded our Order as the head of a big family” that, as one member attested, was “always together in good times and bad.” As Fidyk’s plea to be connected to Soviet doctors indicates, mem-bers knew of the leadership’s Communist affiliation. In 1934 Bedacht, gen-eral secretary of the Order from 1933 until 1946, had run as CP candidate for senator in New York. For many members, however, more important than leaders’ politics was the tangible relief the Order could deliver—$10 sick ben-efits or a tip on a discount electric blanket—together with relief on the mac-rolevel, in leading campaigns for social legislation to sand the rough edges off industrial conditions.11
What such letters suggest is that by 1953 the IWO was not the radical threat envisioned by red-baiters but an organization—left-wing, to be sure—
catering to the desperate detritus of industrial America, people like Schubak and Galperin looking for a little comfort, security, or maybe even dignity as they wrestled with all-too frequent disability, industrial accidents, and, in-evitably, economically perilous old age. Such dire circumstances, rather than any international Communist conspiracy, may have explained the appeal of the IWO for such people.
The IWO was founded to meet the grassroots demands of working men and women for quality health care and insurance as well as to help them articulate their organic demands for substantive relief from the state on mat-ters such as social insurance and union rights. The Order embraced, too, albeit imperfectly, an interracial membership that shared a vision of a ra-cially egalitarian working class. From its earliest years, African Americans, Hispanics, and other non-Europeans, along with Southeast Europeans, were instrumental in the IWO’s growth. While the IWO was born in the meetings of American Communists, it grew through demonstrated commitment to members’ needs. It could not have been otherwise, for the building blocks of the Order, militant workers, were often stridently independent, determined to ensure that the organizations to which they belonged met their needs,
even if this meant arguing with their supposed leaders. This is the saga of the IWO, a fraternal organization that boasted, “It protects the worker as an individual,” which for the 1930s was in and of itself a radical idea.12