It was necessary to appeal to workers’ self-interest and persuade them of the IWO’s virtues, for left-wing immigrants frequently balked at control from above. Members of Communist foreign-language branches exercised willful independence, talking back to supposed Party superiors when they believed they were wrong. Among left-wing Jewish workers, the ethnic community and its concerns were often of more central concern than the agendas and pronouncements of the Party’s leadership. Jewish members from New York infuriated Party leadership by even writing to Stalin questioning Moscow’s policies.71
“Red” Finns also were committed to autonomy, even if they supported world communism, and retained tight control of Finnish Workers’ Clubs, cooperatives, and their newspaper, Tyomies. Radical Finns prizing autonomy resisted amalgamation of their benefit societies into the IWO until 1940.
Jewish and Finnish comrades caused headaches for the Party’s central lead-ership when they refused to turn over control of their children’s camps to the Party’s Young Pioneers. Party leaders in Minnesota and Michigan reported that they hoped to raise funds for Daily Worker subscriptions through Finn-ish festivals, but the red Finns refused to donate. In Hancock, Michigan, workers expressed “passive resistance” toward plans for an open-air demon-stration they considered ill-advised. In Superior, Wisconsin, members of the left-wing Finnish Club voted 61–2 to bar use of their facilities to those siding with the Party in its attempt to control Tyomies. At the paper, editorial staff went on strike rather than accept the firing of a nonconformist employee.72
Comrades likewise objected when the Party directed them to put up their Lithuanian hall as collateral to bail a colleague out of jail, while “four party members also spoke and voted against the decision of the party.” They asserted that “the party had no right or authority to control the paper as far as its business is concerned.” Comrade J. Buivydas, one of the majority op-posing Party instructions, went even further. “I would have spoken against this motion even if Comrade Stalin himself was there. The party wants to destroy our institution as it has already destroyed many of them. The party wants too much control.” Buivydas’s independence was not punished. At the following meeting he was nominated by the Lithuanian Bureau secretary as one of the comrades recommended for study at the Moscow University for Western Minorities, even after refusing to carry out Party orders.73
In 1932 members of the Bulgarian Workers’ Mutual Benefit and Educa-tional Society of Detroit wrote to the Daily Worker demanding that the Party reprimand Comrade Bocho Mircheff after he rudely commandeered the
$18.75 they had raised to assist with the funerals of workers killed in the hun-ger march to Ford’s River Rouge plant. “Why this took place?” the Bulgari-ans demanded in halting English. “In the organization is a private property?
Is Comrade Mircheff a dictator in Detroit?” If the Party did not act, the Bul-garians vowed to do everything they could to expose the “clique” of Mircheff and his allies. Cases such as these suggest ethnic comrades were not willing or required to don ideological strait jackets.74
This stubborn independence continued throughout the IWO’s life. In 1950 a Baltimore member of the Garibaldi Society reported to his national secretary, objecting to a call for participation in a national conference of the CRC, “These are matters that don’t concern us; those four blockheads who are in New York do it simply for propaganda, and to protect the policies of that beggar Stalin who is trying to conquer other peoples and to enslave them, just as he has already enslaved his own entire people. . . . [I]f I could get him in my hands, I would grind him to dust.” Evidently, many Baltimore Italians in the IWO were no fans of world communism’s leader, nor did they have any problem mocking or dismissing the Order’s national leadership when they disagreed with its agenda.75
Officials of the IWO often recognized their membership was a some-times unwieldy combination of left-wing believers and more apolitical or even conservative members. Gebert discussed some of the difficulties in building the IWO’s Polish American Section, which he said many conserva-tives had joined simply as a cheaper form of life insurance. During World War II, Gebert worried that many Polish lodges had reactionary majorities more sympathetic to the conservative London Polish government in exile than to the social-democratic foreign and domestic goals of the Order. Con-versely, Bedacht had to remind Croatians that it was necessary during war-time to work with more moderate political strains within the IWO in order to maximize the allied effort. From the Left and Right, opinionated IWO members talked back and caused problems for their leaders.76
On other occasions, even when IWO members were more sympathetic to Party leadership, they did not hesitate to question specific policies they considered ill-advised. In 1932 Gardos of the Hungarian Bureau objected to attempts of Party members to intervene and influence votes at the IWO’s national convention. Gardos submitted “a sharp protest against the leading committee at the I.W.O. convention because of . . . the irresponsible and bureaucratic practices they followed.” The delegates had voted to allow the democratic election of the Order’s language section secretaries, as well as to allow “housewifes” to join and be eligible for a lower $4 weekly sick benefit, only to have a Party member overrule the convention’s majority vote on both issues. Gardos demanded that the matters be put to a referendum of all Hun-garian IWO members, warning “if things will remain as steam-rolled through, we are going to lose much more than the dollars. I am sure that after all those beautiful talks about democracy, . . . the leading comrades in the I.W.O. will understand this.”77
Such heavy-handed interference, Gardos said, would serve “maybe more than the very artificial throwing in of the Scottsboro boys to ‘cool off’ peo-ple,” suggesting not every member was sympathetic to the Order’s early sup-port for black civil rights. The main criticism, though, was directed at the Party’s suborning of democracy within the Order. Gardos called this “an-other link of that heavy chain around the neck of the Party. We have had too much of this irresponsibility from the top, too much of this bureaucratic handling of comrades like pawns on a chess-board, too much music to be faced by us, lower functionaries, because the conductors . . . do not practice what they talk.” He warned, “Unless there is going to be a change . . . on the top, our work is going to suffer tremendously.”78 Problems with democratic centralism arose almost immediately, but just as quickly, members pushed back to defend grassroots democracy.
In 1935 Luigi Candela, president of the Order’s Italian Society, likewise appealed to Browder when he disagreed with the majority decision of the Italian Bureau. “I feel that if I don’t appeal I would be committing a crime against our movement,” he wrote. “The decision of the majority did not con-vince me that I am wrong.” Candela objected to making the focus of a pro-posed national Italian Congress unemployment insurance, believing the main topic should be opposition to Benito Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia. He argued that an antiwar focus would “develop and strengthen our united front of Italian and Negro workers in this country.”79 While the IWO de-voted a great deal of energy to both social-policy and antifascist lobbying, the point remains that Order officials, even those in the Party, were not shy in speaking back to the powerful when the majority did not convince them they were wrong.
African American members of the IWO also exhibited independence, which sometimes got them in trouble with national officers. In 1945 Harlem Solidarity Lodge 691 sought and received headquarters’ permission to expel Charles Stevenson because during a meeting he “had associated our leaders with the worst reactionaries in the country.” The charge stemmed from a eulogy of Roosevelt that Stevenson had delivered. In appealing his expulsion, Stevenson admitted that he had criticized “the peculiarly obstructive role which Brothers Bedacht, [William] Weiner, . . . and certain other groups played in one of the most dangerous crises in the history of our country and of the world.” He referred to opposition by the Order’s leaders to Lend-Lease and the National Service Act in 1940–1941, adding, “At that time so fraught with peril for our country, these groups popularly used the presumptuous slogan, ‘The Yanks are not coming.’” He asserted, “The attitude of these leaders . . . caused many a defection from the progressive and so-called left- wing movement. The remarks might have been unpleasant to hear—and perhaps, even indiscreet, but are nevertheless true.”80
The abrupt turn to an antiwar position following adoption of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact in August 1939 was indeed cause for great dis-may among many leftists. While most Party members fell in line with the new position rejecting aid to Great Britain in an imperialist war, others saw this as evidence of a Party cynically manipulated to serve the interests of Moscow. In any case, though, this abrupt change in the Party’s position did not go unchallenged within the IWO, as Chapter 5 shows at greater length.81
Stevenson defended his right to free speech as outlined in the Bill of Rights, suggesting that by 1945 Order members had inculcated Popular Front Ameri-canism as well as left-wing militancy. While Stevenson praised the “magnifi-cent accomplishments of the progressive movement, including the International Workers Order, during the 1930’s,” he stood by his right to dis-sent. He cited leaders of the Order who in other contexts had defended consti-tutional free speech rights and wanted to know “what is wrong about a dissenting member of an organization subject to the laws of the land, making statements of fact and criticisms of the leadership of said organization.” Ste-venson pointed out that he had not “taken some oath or obligation as a mem-ber of some ultra political or other group, thus surrendering to them the power over my person and beliefs. I owe allegiance only to America in the support and maintenance of my human rights.” Similar homages to the Bill of Rights would be deployed by the IWO during its castigation by the attorney general as subversive.82 Stevenson’s private letters to his lodge mates and Order execu-tives suggest this fealty to American principles was heartfelt, not calculated.
Stevenson was also charged with frequently “attempting to show that the leadership of the Order does not have the interest of . . . the people of this community at large,” suggesting that for all the Order’s ostensible commit-ment to interracialism, tensions remained between some African American members and national leaders. In the Harlem lodge, it seems, Stevenson was not alone in finding fault with leaders, for Solidarity Lodge’s officers wrote to their membership charging his “continued defiance of the chair” caused other members to act similarly. The case of Solidarity Lodge suggests that the Order contained many shades of progressivism not always in accord with the opinions of the national leadership.83