Early reports on the progress of the IWO stressed the importance of recruit-ing efforts among Mexican workers, “Negroes,” Chinese and Japanese work-ers, as well as young people, who, it was hoped, could be recruited from IWO youth branches into the Young Communist League (YCL) and Young Pio-neers. The importance of reaching second-generation ethnic Americans was recognized, too, for it was noted that many younger workers would have difficulty attending lodge meetings conducted in Slovak, Magyar, and other languages of their parents. English-language lodges were created for these workers.57
Moreover, amalgamation with other, non-Jewish ethnic benefit societies was achieved through persuasion, not coercion. Fraternal members were reached via newspaper editorials, traveling lecturers, and debates in national fraternal society conventions. These methods were deployed to convince people of the advantages of uniting in a larger multiethnic and multiracial IWO. The IWO’s creators stressed the need to persuade fraternalists of the advantages of amalgamating into the multiethnic IWO, appealing and tai-loring lodges to the material needs of potential members. At meetings in
September 1930, the necessity of publishing editorials and articles in foreign-language papers arguing for the benefits of amalgamation was stressed. The main points of these editorials were to be “the struggle for unemployment, accident, sick, and old age insurance and death benefit on the line of the Party’s Social Insurance policy.” Every foreign-language bureau was also to send organizers “to visit all the fractions and branches to win them over for the amalgamation.”58
The Language Department argued that workers had to be convinced via slogans such as “unite to fight for full insurance for the entire working class.”
This campaign had to proceed “without mechanically speeding and enforc-ing the amalgamation.” The department further stressed that new IWO lodges “must be organized in the form as the workers desire to have them.”
Workers’ own interests and agendas had to be addressed if the Order was to get off the ground. Organizers and editorialists were advised to deploy “facts to prove to masses, that amalgamation is in their interest, as well [as]
working-class interest.” This process of convincing potential members could sometimes be frustrating, and in the department’s view only the Yugoslav Party press was devoting enough attention to the amalgamation campaign in the fall of 1930.59
In many early IWO lodges, Party members were already outnumbered by non-Marxists who joined for strictly instrumental reasons. At the IWO’s first convention, Philadelphia’s twenty-five-person delegation did not include a single Party member, and minimal Party membership in the Russian and Slovak societies was cause for alarm. In 1933 Hungarian Bureau secretary Gardos noted the success of Hungarian IWO lodges in Detroit in enrolling black members, Spanish miners in Whitman, West Virginia, and “building branches of all nationalities” in Logan Valley, West Virginia, but lamented that in many large IWO lodges there was not a single Party member. Only with great difficulty were members in Trenton, New Jersey, composed mostly of “church people,” prevented from sending delegates to a Democratic Party victory celebration. Despite its founders’ aspirations, the IWO quickly be-came a mixture of ideological members and those less convinced of the Communist cause. In later years many members asserted that it was the necessity of finding affordable insurance that attracted them to the IWO, confirming the Party’s assessment of the situation in the early 1930s.60
Builders of the Order hoped that the severity of the Depression could sway workers of the need for a united, multiethnic fraternal society. In Janu-ary 1931 the Language Department announced a plan issued in its report
“Building of the Working Class Mutual Aid Organizations.” Increasing
“Americanization” of various immigrant groups, the report’s author argued, enabled unity of action to overcome common problems. “This process of unification of the ranks of the different foreign language speaking groups,”
the report said, “is especially hastened as a result of the crisis, by the need for
[a] unified struggle for bread and butter.” The depth of workers’ suffering was not ameliorated by the existing ethnic fraternal societies, which had invested their treasuries in commercial real estate, banks, and other capitalist ven-tures, and thus been drained of assets just at the time when working-class members needed help most. The IWO, a working-class mutual benefit soci-ety, was held up as the salvation of the workers, for only in such an organiza-tion “can they draw the full benefit made possible by the mutual aid organizations controlled by the workers themselves and struggle jointly with the rest of the working class for full social insurance.” With the Depres-sion lengthening, the IWO appealed to workers’ self-interest in pushing amal-gamation.61
The January 1931 report focused primarily on efforts to amalgamate the Jewish members of the IWO with the “Hungarian, Slovak and Russian Mu-tual Aid Organizations,” but the importance of organizing branches for the
“millions of Mexican workers” was stressed, too, anticipating the interracial, multiethnic structure the Order assumed. Already in November 1930 a Los Angeles organizer was setting up Japanese and “Spanish” lodges. By the late 1930s, eleven language branches existed within the IWO, and the Order’s monthly magazine printed articles in Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Carpatho-Russian, Carpatho-Russian, Croatian, Romanian, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish as well as English to reach its multiethnic members. The virtues of amalgamation, the 1931 report argued, could be achieved “without mechanically forcing the amalgamation” by working through ethnic fraternal organizations and
“carry[ing] through this joining when the majority of the membership is really convinced that this is in their interest.”62
Ethnic groups were granted “full language autonomy,” with “the form of the local organization . . . decided upon by the members themselves.” Im-migrants from the same ethnic group were to be afforded their Polish, Slo-vak, and Hungarian lodges, but English-language lodges were encouraged for reaching second-generation white ethnics as well as potential African American members. James Ford, the Party’s African American vice-presidential candidate in 1932, reported on the IWO’s success in organizing English-language lodges for black and white members, particularly high-lighting the IWO’s success in reaching three hundred members in Harlem.
Provision was also made for IWO branches “according to the place of work,”
or “according to the trade.” In New York lodges for longshoremen were established as well as Teamster branches. Ford also presented a plan in 1932 to bring the IWO to the railroad workers of Detroit, expressing optimism that the Order’s superior benefit package would win over this group. By 1935 the Order’s Buffalo organizers reported on efforts to reach German, Polish, and Italian workers in their own language lodges, but they also established an English-language lodge for “Americanized” workers at Bethlehem Steel.
Workers’ own organizational preferences were given wide latitude. A multi-ethnic framework was flexible enough to allow affiliation based on occupa-tional status or in interracial English-language lodges, too.63
Organizing efforts within the SWS demonstrate the manner in which ethnic workers were convinced to amalgamate. Prior to the national conven-tion of the SWS, whose delegates were to vote on whether to amalgamate, meetings were scheduled between the city committees of IWO and SWS lodges, and Czech and Slovak factions in New York and Newark “in order to explain the task before the comrades concerning the amalgamation pro-gram.” Proponents of amalgamation anticipated the opposition of some members. The Language Department’s Amalgamation Sub-Committee is-sued a pamphlet in English “containing questions and answers regarding the problem of the amalgamation.” The SWS newspaper Rovnosť ľudu “shall im-mediately translate, print, and publish it in two or three issues of the paper.
The different mutual organizations shall print this pamphlet in their own language.” While the pamphlet was being prepared, Saltzman made a speak-ing tour to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago “to take up with the Jewish, Slovak, Hungarian and Russian comrades the problem of amalgamation.” In addition, an outline was prepared “containing answers to the arguments opposing the amalgamation” to assist organizers in swaying members in favor of the IWO. Articles were to be written by both Party and nonparty members in places where SWS lodges had reservations.64
Some of the speaking tours delivered dispiriting results. Comrade Tuhy reported of his talks at SWS lodges, “Among miners too much drinking. The Branches work very little, on many places not at all.” Although Tuhy was criticized for his excessively bleak outlook, it was thought advisable to send Comrade John Zuskár to an SWS convention in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, to counter opposition to amalgamation. Zuskár evidently was an effective ad-vocate, for “although there was only one Party member on the Conference,”
his motions for amalgamation prevailed.65
When some Slovaks still balked at accepting amalgamation, the “unclar-ity” of arguments put forth by IWO proponents was faulted. The Language Department told Gebert that among the Slovaks it was not just opposition from members that impeded amalgamation, but that “the whole problem was discussed only at the top . . . and no real measures were taken to propa-gandize the members of the organizations through convincing arguments.”
SWS members were urged “to go down to the branches and to the individual workers who are opposed to the amalgamation and bring convincing argu-ments to them. They must understand that the campaign for amalgamation must be a patient and persistent one which will convince the members of the organizations.” To ensure “unclarity” did not persist, a committee was tasked with bringing examples of all the arguments of workers opposing
amal-gamation “and to work out in detail all the answers which will clarify the workers on all technical problems that are being brought forward.” The ne-cessity of translating an English pamphlet explaining the wisdom of joining the IWO was raised.66
Rovnosť ľudu was faulted for refusing to print letters from SWS members opposed to amalgamation. The editor was told to answer such objections “in a clear and convincing manner and not in an aggressive tone.” It was recom-mended that he devote “a special column for discussion on this subject in which the correspondence and articles of those workers opposing the amal-gamation shall be printed and of course the articles that are answering them also.” Order leaders invited opponents to submit articles to Party journals, using a democratic forum to win converts rather than authoritarian control, which allegedly permeated all Communist-initiated organizations in 1931.67
At other moments Slovaks were chastised for not doing enough for the cause of amalgamation and for not working in concert with Hungarian and other ethnic groups. This was regarded as a particular shame, for the IWO had already established a dental clinic by July 1931, with a full-scale medical clinic on the horizon. If Slovaks recruited more proponents of amalgamation
“it is clear that here also there are big possibilities for medical assistance of the members.” Revolution may have been the ultimate goal, but appeals to the tangible benefits of dental clinics and affordable medical care would be the tools to reach the blue-collar masses.68
In arguing for the IWO, other fraternalists were advised to discuss the plight of the tens of thousands of unemployed workers whom the IWO could help. The real selling points were that “a united fraternal organization would be in a position to give to the workers more benefits with no extra payment.
We would also be in a position to organize medical centers, sanitarium and other important features in the fraternal field.” A united left-wing “mass fraternal movement would be in a position to carry on an intensive cam-paign to insure the workers at the expense of the government.”69
The advantages of mass lobbying for relief from Depression-era ravages likely proved attractive to thousands of people with nothing but sick pay from near-destitute fraternal societies on which to rely. While later scruti-nizers of Communist influence in the IWO would highlight orgascruti-nizers’
rhetoric of “the revolutionary labor movement,” they would ignore the de-gree to which organizers focused on convincing and persuading members of the wisdom of uniting in such left-wing societies. To be sure, the campaign to win ethnic fraternal societies was well coordinated and planned, with leaflets setting out the arguments in favor of the IWO translated and run verbatim in various foreign-language Party papers. Red-hunters cast this as evidence of a Kremlin-led conspiracy. But it can just as easily be interpreted as a sophisticated lobbying campaign on behalf of a cause that members themselves found worthy.70