Throughout its existence the IWO was committed “to act as a brother-in-arms to the militant trade and industrial unions.”65 Along with its campaigns on social legislation, the Order was committed to union drives before and then during the CIO’s rise to prominence. In its first year, the IWO reported members in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio aiding miners and metal workers. In the South these unionizing drives were coupled with commit-ment to interracial solidarity. As early as December 1930, IWO chapters in Birmingham and Chattanooga and Elizabethton, Tennessee, contributed volunteers and funds for organizing in textile and steel mills. When the IWO ventured south to aid union drives, it did not respect Jim Crow. Thompson successfully helped the IWO enroll black and white workers into Atlanta painters’ unions, organized an interracial sharecroppers’ lodge, and in New Orleans supported a strike by furniture workers. In the Crescent City, Thompson recalled, she attended a meeting of the faltering union: “When I went to the meeting that night, that was when I told them that if they wanted to win that strike, they had to take the ‘Whites Only’ clause out of their contract. I walked into this meeting of all white men and I felt kind of funny walking around, but I did it.”66
Dispossessed miners and organizers faced real hardship when they de-manded adequate wages or a safer work environment. Just a few years before the IWO’s founding, a Pennsylvania judge prohibited the distribution of food to striking miners. In the NMU’s journal, The Coal Digger, an unrepen-tant Anthony Minerich wrote, “A man who knew . . . of the clubbings by Coal and Iron and State police, . . . said ‘Now I can understand why the statue of Liberty has its back turned towards the United States.’” As the IWO added its support to miners and other workers fighting for the right to unionize, assaults by Coal and Iron police, dubbed the “Cossacks” by Slavic immi-grants, were fresh memories.67
In 1931 lodges throughout the country were mobilized to raise funds for striking miners, with the Order setting a quota of $6,000. German, Jewish, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian members of the IWO raised funds for the miners, although not without some difficulty. In Ridgewood, Brooklyn, the IWO waited so long to start a relief campaign in the German Krankenkasse Verein that Socialists beat them to the punch. “Then our com-rades reminded themselves that there is a miners’ relief campaign.” Closer
to the strike scene, CP organizer Steve Nelson noted problems developed when Comrade Almasoff of the IWO spoke before a nascent Jewish lodge in Wilkes-Barre, then demanded they pay a fee of $15 plus $10 travel expenses.
The few IWO members in Wilkes-Barre had already committed to support-ing the miners’ strike, as well as financially contributsupport-ing to a hunger march, so they and Nelson considered Almasoff’s demands excessive. Nevertheless, the IWO continued to contribute to the miners’ relief committee, which the committee gratefully acknowledged.68
Despite the problems organizer Nelson had identified with some anthra-cite country members, evidently the IWO proved an effective organizing apparatus for coal miners. In 1934 Nelson requested a Slovak organizer be sent into the eastern Pennsylvania coal region. Korenič provided the needed organizers and was also the conduit for sending Slovak members to the Gary and Chicago steel region to aid the Trade Union Unity League in building locals of the Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union.69 Thompson con-firmed that political consciousness and commitment to unions was endemic to the Order, so that black and Latino organizers aided coal miners’ union-ization drives in West Virginia, and most of her IWO speeches in the South were before either union or church meetings. Such interracial union activism was a hallmark of her career with the IWO. In western Pennsylvania com-pany towns, too, not only was the IWO hall the only social center for mem-bers aside from seedy saloons, it was often the only place to hold union meetings or discuss politics freely. She recalled in one western Pennsylvania town a “little Bohemian guy named Joe” in the IWO was able to get the first one hundred steelworkers to sign union cards. This was “typical of all these little mining towns that you went through. Aliquippa, Washington.”70
Militant activism on behalf of destitute workers often led to arrest, and there is no doubt that some IWO activists engaged in union organizing were Communists. Gebert was a charter member of the CP, and the FBI began recording his speeches on behalf of bolshevism as early as 1919. In some of his speeches, agents noted, Gebert compared the oppression of industrial workers to British imperialism in India and Egypt, an early example of the CP’s linking anticolonialism and class exploitation. He was reported as say-ing of capitalists, “We have to teach them the same way the bear is taught to dance.” Not surprisingly, deportation proceedings were begun against him, although by 1922 the decision had been made not to deport. Gebert, later president of the IWO’s Polonia Society, reported on his activities to the Co-mintern in 1932. Communism was near to Gebert’s heart, and the fact he had once reported to the Comintern, although not known in the 1930s and 1940s, would have offered proof to anticommunists that they were correct in labeling the IWO he served a subversive organization.71
Yet this correspondence with the Comintern discussed his campaigns on behalf of the NMU, work designed to improve the lives of coal miners, not
espionage. Gebert had reason to be concerned with the plight of coal miners, for he had labored as one in and around Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, after emi-grating from Russian Poland in 1912. Not spying or subversion, but a shared commitment to bettering workers’ lives through unionism seems to have drawn Gebert to socialism and, after 1919, to the CP.72
The criminal charge that hounded Gebert for sixteen years was not es-pionage but stemmed from his union activism on behalf of coal miners. As Gebert himself related, he was arrested on November 11, 1931, on criminal syndicalism charges “based on my participation in [a] strike of Orient Mines in Illinois in July and August 1931.” Syndicalist charges were deployed fre-quently against strikers during the pre–Wagner Act years as well as infa-mously against Communist organizer Herndon for leading an interracial unemployment meeting, violating Georgia’s segregation and antisyndicalist statutes. Thompson, too, ran afoul of segregation statutes when supporting an interracial miners’ strike in Alabama as an IWO organizer. Often im-migration and other authorities served as enforcers of the open shop. In Atlanta, too, interracial IWO lodges were prima facie dubbed subversive and in violation of Georgia’s segregation and syndicalist statutes.73
In Gebert’s case, his lawyer, David Bentall, pointed out that the CP was a legal party and wanted to know if an alien forfeited all right to criticize America’s political institutions. He argued that if the deportation were up-held it would send a message to every alien laborer “the moment he sets foot on American soil he forfeits all right to think, reason or plan.” As Daniel Kanstroom and Rachel Buff note, deportation proceedings were frequently deployed against militant labor activists such as Harry Bridges and Carlos Bulosan, answering Bentall’s question. Although subject to deportation for these charges, action was continually deferred in Gebert’s case, and as late as 1937 Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Ben-tall were asking for some definitive decision, or at least return of his bail money. Finally, in 1941 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) determined as the deportation was in abeyance, and as Gebert had admitted to membership in the CP up to 1939 and complied with the Alien Registra-tion Act, no further acRegistra-tion was contemplated, although the deportaRegistra-tion order was only “in abeyance,” not dismissed outright. As president of the IWO’s Polonia Society, the threat of deportation hung over his head for his activism on behalf of Illinois coal miners. In 1947, when he voluntarily left to assume labor and diplomatic posts in Communist Poland, the IWO grate-fully recalled the services he had offered in organizing CIO unions in auto and steel plants. Although in 1947 the Order’s magazine, the Fraternal Out-look, made no mention of the still-pending deportation case, those who re-membered that it stemmed from a Depression strike may have weighed Gebert’s communism as less onerous a crime than state suppression of la-bor’s free speech and association rights.74
Into the 1950s, when the IWO was under assault as a “subversive” orga-nization, grassroots members pointed to the support shown to strikers as proof the Order was a praiseworthy organization. “During the miners’
strike, I helped with my coal truck to deliver hundreds of food packages made up by the I.W.O. and distributed to needy miners’ families,” Anton Opara attested. “The Lodge does many other good deeds for the members who are in need.” Charles Wasyluk agreed, noting, “During the coal strike when times were hard the I.W.O. sent food for the members of my lodge.”
The IWO, in coordination with the ASC of western Pennsylvania, had of-fered material and moral support to the miners’ 1949 strike, continuing to advocate for safer working conditions and health standards for miners. In 1951 the IWO’s treasurer, Peter Shipka, proudly asserted, “During strikes, such as the last miners’ strike, we exerted every possible effort to help our members maintain their insurance. We stretched out the hand of fraternal assistance to our members in the coal strike, just as we always did in the past.” The Order’s Garibaldi Society more bluntly asserted, “We have given food to the children of IWO striking miners. Is this a crime?”75
Of course, many IWO members likely remembered only a few years be-fore in western Pennsylvania a judge had indeed decreed feeding hungry miners against the law. In 1950 members still faced company retaliation when vocal in support of strikes. In West Virginia, members urged corre-spondents not to send them letters or literature through the mail, as officials in company-controlled towns still opened letters and punished employees who favored anything as “subversive” as unions. “We don’t live here like people live in the cities,” a member wrote Daniel Kasustchik of the IWO’s Russian society. “You know that we live in Company houses, and we are sup-posed to do whatever the Company tells us to do.” In some respects, the Wagner Act had changed little for workers, especially those favoring militant organizations labeled subversive, or those living in company-controlled towns. The company panopticon, though, may have made some people receptive to an organization preaching an alternative to capitalism. There was a reason to listen to the IWO, and it had nothing to do with espionage.
IWO members often wore their defiance of antilabor injunctions as badges of honor.76
In other industries as early as the 1930s the IWO twinned its campaign for unionization with calls for racial justice, as when the CP’s African Amer-ican vice-presidential candidate, James Ford, led discussions in Detroit on how to bring the IWO to railroad workers and “how to get Negroes into unions” as well as the “struggle against growing spying and stool pigeons.”77 As Barrett, Roediger, and others have noted, black people had long been barred from most unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), stig-matized as a “scab race” prone to strikebreaking. This exclusion, though, made strikebreaking for some African Americans seem a rational act of
self-advancement and provided employers with a ready pool of labor with which to eviscerate union strength as workers were played off against one another. The IWO’s commitment to interracial solidarity is more fully ex-amined in Chapter 3. It is important to note here, however, that the IWO, like earlier Communist-affiliated organizations, recognized that “wages of whiteness,” the reformulation of Du Bois’s concept, were poor recompense for white workers in industrial America when racism proved such a handy tool for bidding down all workers’ wages.78
In the 1930s, Order organizers performed “exceptional work” on union-izing drives in steel, mining, and longshore industries. By 1935 in New York the IWO was participating in union drives among longshoremen and ma-rine workers but also aiding campaigns for teamsters and workers in heavy metal trades. Money was raised to target marine work, which Gerald Horne and Howard Kimeldorf have written were notoriously corrupt and exploitive industries. The New York IWO pledged itself to “help out as much as possible in support of all strike struggles,” in 1935 contributing “about $3,000” in support of various strikes by taxi, marine, metal, furniture, and office work-ers. Such help from the IWO was not always welcomed by established unions, however. Several IWO members were expelled from the United Mine Work-ers (UMW), and the Amalgamated Clothing WorkWork-ers of America (ACWA) had “taken steps to decide on ways and means to destroy one of our Italian branches” in New Brunswick, New Jersey, after IWO clothing workers were
“consider[ed] . . . a menace to the leadership.” Still, organizers soldiered on.
Thompson reported on union drives among building service workers, me-chanics, and Pullman porters. In Harlem, she reported, the IWO had “re-cruited one member who sent us an invitation to participate in the Labor Day demonstration in Harlem.” The IWO prepared a leaflet for distribution at this gala.79
Beginning in 1935, even many established unions such as the UMW and ACWA began to see the possibilities of organizing “unskilled” workers in industrial unions, and with the creation of the CIO late that year, labor lead-ers such as the UMW’s John L. Lewis and Philip Murray began to collaborate with formerly stigmatized Communists, now valorized in the CIO for their dedication and organizational skills.80
In CIO campaigns the IWO proved instrumental. Rebecca Grecht wrote approvingly of “The IWO and the Steel Drive” in The New Order. Grecht reported that in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago steel districts “active leaders of the I.W.O. are serving as voluntary organizers to recruit steel workers into the union.” The IWO sent speakers to address locals of the moribund Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, urging old unionists to pour into the vibrant CIO. In the three districts, steelwork-ers in IWO lodges “are discussing the drive to unionize the industry, are holding general membership meetings, are trying to do their bit in this great
campaign which will fundamentally affect the lives of the entire American working class.” CIO speakers were invited to address IWO picnics, and “in McKeesport, the I.W.O. is officially on the Steel Workers Organizing Com-mittee.” The head of the CIO’s Pittsburgh region “expressed his appreciation for the support the I.W.O. is giving the steel drive, adding that the I.W.O. has earned the respect of all the workers.” With CIO support the IWO convened a national fraternal organizations’ conference to harness benefit societies on behalf of SWOC. Incipient IWO campaigns for the steel union were noted in Buffalo and Philadelphia, too, and Grecht hoped similar drives could be begun in auto and textile industries.81
Not surprisingly, the Daily Worker praised the leadership the IWO pro-vided to the steel campaign’s Fraternal Orders conference. With the an-nouncement that the United Ukrainian Toilers and CFU were joining the conference, the paper noted that more than twenty ethnic societies were slated to attend the meeting to be chaired by Gebert, who by 1936 was serv-ing in the Polish Society of the IWO. The paper approvserv-ingly noted that women, too, were supporting the steel drive. In Chicago a women’s auxiliary of an Amalgamated local issued a call for a similar fraternal conference on behalf of SWOC. Gendered language that asserted women’s custodianship of the home was issued by the auxiliary to appeal to support for the union effort: “While the cost of living goes higher, our husbands’ wages remain the same or are lowered. . . . We want better homes, better living conditions and educational opportunities for our children. How can we have these things unless our husbands, brothers, and fathers become organized into a power-ful union of their own?” SWOC’s Chicago regional director, Van Bittner, buttressed this call for a Midwest fraternal conference by appealing to gen-der norms, too, asserting that “the steel workers are fighting for their fami-lies, and ‘those whom we love dearer than life itself, the children of the steel industry.’” Normative, nuclear-family values were evoked on behalf of the steel union’s campaign. A second Daily Worker article on the Fraternal Or-ders conference cheered the multiethnic nature of SWOC’s support, arguing that unlike in the failed 1919 steel strike, the bosses were proving unable to divide the workers based on ethnic origin.82
Other IWO organizers advocated for unions in similarly gendered lan-guage. Sadie Doroshkin asked Thompson to recommend a black woman steelworker who could serve as an IWO spokeswoman on a national tour, while Thompson told female audiences in West Virginia and Ohio that as “as wives of workers, women, too, would benefit from the union.” Thompson also commented that Ukrainian women and others were some of the leaders in IWO centers supporting union drives. Thompson herself would later run Chicago’s Du Sable Center, a largely African American IWO lodge that also served as a relief center catering to black and white striking packinghouse workers and their families.83 She therefore was not insensitive to the burdens
of women workers. Indeed, she would play an instrumental role in the short-lived Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an African American women’s orga-nization that took intersectionality as its core principle, and which was financially supported by the JPFO’s Emma Lazarus Women’s Federation. In 1952 Thompson, as well as other Sojourners, declared, “Negro women, as women, as Negroes, and as workers are the most oppressed group of the whole population in the United States.” This organization’s assertive articu-lation of intersectionality—the Sojourners declared at their Eastern Sea-board Conference, “We will not be trampled upon any longer!!”—is ably explored by Gore. The IWO, too, often spoke to racial and gender oppression, while at other times, when appealing to women as “miners’ wives,” it privi-leged male concerns and lent primacy to “traditional” breadwinners in the CIO.84
Within the CIO, Murray acknowledged the importance of the IWO, writing in The New Order on the “patriotic” service that fraternal organiza-tions provided. Murray argued that the IWO was “helping the entire nation”
because only unionized workers possessed the purchasing power, “the key to prosperity,” that would lift the country out of its economic morass.85
because only unionized workers possessed the purchasing power, “the key to prosperity,” that would lift the country out of its economic morass.85