Beyond legislative demands, IWO lodges orchestrated campaigns to help strikers or destitute workers thrown out of their houses. Already in 1931 New York lodges competed to provide the most boxes of food, milk, and other necessities for families of striking coal miners, with “the comrades or sympathizers . . . who collect the greatest amount . . . given a trip to the strike
field.” New York’s IWO lodges had already advanced the Strike Committee
$2,000, and now they were encouraged to do more. Williamsburg lodges responded to the evicted miners’ plight, although one organizer complained that when he showed up at one Brooklyn lodge with a miner to state his case for assistance, lodge officers refused to grant him the floor. Better results came from Newark, New Jersey, where the IWO Center became a collection site for shoes and clothing “for these heroic strikers and their children.”
Newark members were informed that four thousand miner families had been evicted onto the roads and highways, and truckloads of clothing and shoes were sent for the needy families of miners. Closer to the coal fields, Massillon, Ohio, hosted a “Big Picnic and Dance” at Utopia Hall to aid homeless miners. “Evicted by the Coal Barons,” posters declared. An illustration of a despairing mother with her child was captioned, “She Is Hungry, Answer Her Cry!” Another interracial audience in aid of miners was told by a National Miners Union (NMU) speaker, “You miners must not starve quietly.”33
As Randi Storch notes, during the Depression the CP and its affiliates won a reputation in Chicago’s Black Belt as effective advocates for the dispos-sessed. When an eviction notice arrived, African American mothers told their children, go and “find the Reds!” As the actions of the IWO, NMU, and Unemployed Councils demonstrate, the same summonses could be heard throughout industrial America. Lashawn Harris writes, too, that the anti-eviction and unemployed campaigns of the CP gave agency to African American working-class women during the Depression at a time when few other venues for leadership existed and the class-based and racial-justice messages of the Party resonated with them.34
Women from all ethnic backgrounds found leadership within the IWO.
Thompson, for example, became an IWO vice president in 1938 after orga-nizing interracial IWO lodges among Deep South sharecroppers and other workers.35 And Vrábel became president of the SWS. Women, too, were ac-tive in eviction prevention, although those engaged in these anti-eviction campaigns sometimes ran into trouble. In 1951 Russian immigrant and IWO member Clara Dainoff faced deportation proceedings after the Order had been labeled a subversive organization by the attorney general. The Justice Department noted that Dainoff had been arrested twice, in 1931 and 1933, on disorderly person charges. The first charge stemmed from a “Bread Strike”
as Dainoff and other women picketed a bakery they said had raised the price of a loaf from five to twelve cents; the second charge related to “a mass arrest of persons watching an eviction.” Both charges were dismissed, and Dainoff was allowed to remain in the United States. However, activism on behalf of those facing starvation or eviction that may have seemed rational and desir-able in the Depression came back to haunt many IWO members.36
This activism sometimes fell into gendered norms. As supposed guard-ians of the home, women such as Dainoff may have been expected to be at the forefront of anti-eviction drives. Then, too, by stepping outside of re-ceived gender norms as nurturers, disturbing bakers’ and landlords’ peace, such women often enraged authority figures and brought the wrath of the law, or sometimes, as with Thompson’s African American peers in the South, state violence on their heads. As Kali Gross has written, women, especially African American women, who behaved “unnaturally” were perceived to have abdicated the “protections” of their gender and deemed “legitimate”
targets for repression. While Dainoff and other women such as the Polish activist Stella Petrosky, likewise targeted for deportation, might be said to have benefited from white privilege, in the 1930s Slavs, too, were also often denigrated as atavistically suspect beings, “dangerous women.” Especially when they contested against capitalism, Dainoff and others seem to have aroused the state’s ire as menacing “amazons.”37
Dainoff’s actions were typical of the IWO, which collaborated with CP-affiliated organizations such as the Unemployed Councils and the NMU, which targeted miserable living conditions even as they sought to prevent evictions and organize industrial workers. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the NMU distributed shop papers decrying more than 60 percent unemploy-ment, demanding “immediate unemployed relief” but also adequate housing for miners in outlying “locations,” where “the miserable Hovels of miners as dreary as the ‘dog towns’ of Czarist Russia are the only homes for the min-ers, wooden houses with leaking roofs, with the wind sweeping through under the floors doors and the windows.” Degradation could only cease when workers ended company domination of their towns.38
The Copper Miner of Hancock, Michigan, derided meager welfare pay-ments, expressing in verse idle miners’ frustration:
Sing a song of “Welfare,”
A pocket full of tricks
To soothe the weary worker When he groans or kicks.
If he asks for shorter hours Or for better pay, Little stunts of “Welfare”
Turn his thoughts away.
Sing a song of “Welfare,”
Sound the horn and drum, Anything to keep his mind
Fixed on kingdom come.
“Welfare” loots your pocket While you dream and sing,
“Welfare” to your pay check Doesn’t do a thing.39
In March 1934 the IWO Youth Section magazine The New Order simi-larly satirized meager palliatives of the early New Deal when it published
“The Soup Song,” which was “written by unemployed workers in Detroit in the heat of their struggles against hunger and evictions.” The song, sung in
“Tempo: mockingly,” began, “I’m spending my nights at the flophouse, I’m spending my days on the street, I’m looking for work and I find none, I wish I had something to eat.”40
These verses indicate that the relief measures of the early New Deal were looked on skeptically. To many labor activists, the National Industrial Re-covery Act (NIRA) in particular seemed to favor industry and offer cartel-ization as the answer to unemployment. “Codes of Fair Competition” drawn up by industry insiders offered minimal protection to workers’ wages, inef-fective safety standards, and limited defense from the speedup, and the col-lective bargaining rights of Section 7(a) were quickly co-opted in management-directed employee representation plans. Other employers sim-ply ignored the act’s labor provisions, leading many on the Left to conclude that NIRA was an inadequate response to industrial workers’ woes.41
As an alternative to the New Deal, the IWO pushed for greater institu-tional transformations of industrial America than the government was will-ing to deliver. Pronouncements dismissed the early New Deal as only more capitalist pablum; Chicago members mourned the accidental death of one of their own in a pamphlet, Crushed to Death! bitterly mocking the National Recovery Administration (NRA). “James Owens got an N.R.A. job and of course was laid off soon after. The N.R.A. did not guarantee him anything—
no decent wages—no unemployment insurance—no security. It proves in-stead to be an empty bubble.” Inin-stead of shoring up corporations through industry-drafted Codes of Fair Competition, Bedacht urged an IWO confer-ence to disseminate “a Leninist understanding of the tasks of our Order among all of our members.”42
In April 1934 delegates from the Philadelphia area pledged to continue their campaign for unemployment and social insurance and organized an open-air demonstration to compel their city council to endorse an unem-ployment bill. They also passed a resolution dismissing the NRA, which was
“organized mainly to strengthen the power of big trusts and corporations”
and had actually immiserated workers. When workers complained, the NRA became a “strike-breaking agency” for the “suppression of militant workers.”
“Fascism” was, they claimed, lurking behind the Blue Eagle.43 The Blue Eagle
decal, symbol of the NRA, served as a ubiquitous sign that cooperating busi-nesses complied with Industry Codes of Fair Competition.
Opponents would continue to be branded “fascists” throughout the Or-der’s life, and the overwrought nature of rhetoric sometimes limited the ef-fectiveness of critiques. Still, in 1934 the NRA offered a meager solution to workers, and in Toledo auto-parts plants, Minneapolis Teamster halls, and San Francisco warehouses grassroots-led, wildcat strikes were met with state-sanctioned violence and little government sympathy. Under such cir-cumstances the IWO was not alone in critiquing the early New Deal.44
Gebert and other leaders of the Polish Chamber of Labor circulated peti-tions demanding the insertion of unemployment insurance into the indus-trial codes governing conditions in steel, coal, textiles, and other industries.
Gebert, who had been organizing coal miners on behalf of the Communist-affiliated NMU, would soon take a leadership role in the Polish Section of the IWO. Communists worried that Gebert was creating the false view, in their opinion, that with a little tweaking the industrial codes would be acceptable, but he did not see “what harm” such incremental improvements could do if such campaigns mobilized more workers. Another organizer worried that too blunt a condemnation of the NRA would scare away Polish workers.
Even as Gebert and others pointed out the shortcomings of the industrial codes, they did what they could to add workers’ protections to their administration.45
The CP also recognized that the NRA retained the racial stratifications permeating American industry, what David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch document as the remunerative “production of racial difference” by employ-ers. Browder wrote critiquing a Seattle comrade’s draft pamphlet on the NRA, that he “must insert a few words showing that the defense of the right of the Negroes, Japanese and Filipinos is an essential part also of the interests of the white workers, that the white workers in defending their colored brothers are defending their own interests.” As Chapter 3 shows, the IWO, too, combined interracial solidarity and civil rights activism with its cham-pioning of labor’s cause, a prefiguration of the later demand for intersection-ality regarding racial and class equity.46
The ethnic press of IWO affiliates such as the SWS was deployed in the campaign against the NRA. Browder telegrammed the editors of Rovnosť ľudu urging them to “use [the] Daily Worker cartoon Evolution Eagle” mock-ing the NRA emblem. The NRA’s Blue Eagle was a satirist’s delight. Perhaps the Evolution Eagle was similar to a cartoon, “Very thin stew,” printed the following year in the Delco Worker, a Communist shop paper in Dayton, Ohio. The “NRA Eagle” asks a worker, “Well what are you squawking about—you’re still eating, aren’t you?” To which the worker, wielding a fry-ing pan, replies, “Yeah! You old buzzard—and tomorrow I may have to make eagle soup.”47
Less satirically, posters urged women to fight against night work in mills cooperating with the NRA, while demonstrators exposed the “True Mean-ing of the NRA.” Workers read that “savior Roosevelt” had forgotten the forgotten man in reconciling with Wall Street, while food workers in the Party’s German Bureau distributed anti-NRA leaflets outside sausage facto-ries. Militant ethnic workers such as these mocked the president for his sup-posed favoritism toward big business, a portrait at odds with many industrialists’ demonization of “that man in the White House” as well as later lionization of Roosevelt by the IWO. Still, when industrial codes posited eighty-hour work weeks as fair conditions, many labor activists concluded that there was much to criticize about the Blue Eagle.48