By 1938 IWO officials were extolling the advances of the New Deal, even appropriating Roosevelt’s language to condemn “economic royalists” who opposed the administration’s programs and workers’ unionization drives.
Scholars of American communism have pointed to the rapid shifts in CP policy toward cooperation with “bourgeois, capitalist” parties beginning in 1935 as evidence of the American Party’s subservience to the Comintern.
Recognizing somewhat belatedly the danger that fascism posed, Moscow directed all Communist parties to cooperate with the most progressive po-litical actors in their countries to stave off the fascist threat. The shift to the Popular Front certainly altered Communist perspectives on the New Deal and the prospects for social betterment arising from legislation enacted by non-Marxist parties, and this abrupt change was reflected within the IWO, too. For those conservatives who regarded the Order as tightly controlled by the CP, these sharp shifts were evidence that the IWO was little more than a
“transmission belt” for Communist doctrine.49
The Socialist Party newspaper The Call also delighted in publicizing the IWO’s “about-faces” as proof of its subservience to Moscow. “You boast that you participated in the fight for social security and other progressive legisla-tion in the interests of the working masses,” the Workmen’s Circle Executive Committee addressed the IWO. “How long ago was it, however, when you ridiculed the Roosevelt social reform program? Everyone whom you then suspected of giving support to the New Deal was characterized by you as
‘Social-Fascists.’ . . . Soon thereafter there was a reversal in Communist pol-icy and . . . you outdid yourselves in singing paeans of praise over anything and everything associated with the New Deal.”50
The leaders of the Socialist Workmen’s Circle contrasted their own prag-matic, steadfast support for the New Deal with the IWO’s lack of constancy.
Yet while leaders of the Circle may be forgiven their bitterness toward the IWO, more than the CP’s tactical shift accounts for the IWO’s growing
embrace of the New Deal. What is rarely acknowledged in discussions of this shift by left-wing organizations such as the Order is that the Roosevelt ad-ministration altered after 1935, too, becoming more palatable to militant activists. The Second New Deal delivered more substantive programs, with the Wagner, Social Security, and Fair Labor Standards Acts advancing a more workers’ rights-friendly, progressive approach than the First New Deal of the NRA. Whether the IWO was overclaiming to take credit for enact-ment of these measures, Order members could not help noticing the Second New Deal had substantively delivered tangible benefits worthy of support.
From 1935, too, the president began critiquing the “economic royalists” op-posing his programs, language that resonated with Order members weaned on antiplutocrat diatribes. Certainly the CP change to a Popular Front ap-proach of working with liberal parties to forestall fascism affected the IWO.
But the Democratic Party changed, too, at least in part in response to the activism and lobbying of organizations such as the IWO. Waves of strikes, demonstrations, and lobbying prodded the administration leftward, and it became more palatable. In this scenario the Popular Front was not a cynical, or manipulative volte face, rather an adjustment of attitudes toward
“bourgeois, capitalist” political parties and actors who themselves evolved more progressive stances in response to militant demands to address work-ers’ needs.51
While later red-hunters argued that these were merely cosmetic moves designed to conceal the IWO’s true subversive, Marxist nature, I argue that the move to accommodate the possibility for social-democratic reform with-in America was heartfelt. As Koch and others noted with-in respondwith-ing to IWO questionnaires about the strength of local lodges, many members joined the Order for pragmatic, insurance-based needs. When the New Deal began to satisfy, however imperfectly, these needs, members began to believe they could work with the Democrats. Charles Korenič and Helen Vrábel remind-ed the SWS that it was their own lobbying that had lremind-ed to passage of Social Security and urged further lobbying to enact universal health care.52 The Popular Front seemed to be delivering tangible results.
In the lead-up to the 1938 election, Bedacht embraced not just Roosevelt’s program but his rhetoric. Using the president’s favorite insult, he addressed members on the importance of “preventing the economic royalists from en-slaving their workers by refusing their right to organize,” and demanded to know were “the government, its army, its laws and its courts merely created for the protection of the rich and their possessions?” He answered his own question by calling on members “to use their votes to achieve a recognition of social responsibility of the government toward their problems. . . . [I]n the last analysis these problems are decided in the election battles . . . We must . . . be instrumental in selecting the right legislators who will listen to these de-mands and comply with the wishes and needs of the masses.”53
Earlier calls for Leninist revolution dropped away, perhaps because IWO members had seen that militant demands had delivered tangible legislative programs, which were somewhat ameliorating the misery of workers. Al-though Bedacht admitted that “in the field of social legislation and social insurance some first steps have already been made,” he lamented, “health insurance is still merely a dream. We must make it an imperative demand.”54 Until its demise the IWO lobbied for national health insurance, an advance America has still not been able to achieve.
The limits to actually existing Social Security, however, did not prevent the IWO from supporting the administration against its more conservative opponents. The fourth national convention “declared that the social pro-gram of the New Deal, despite its occasional inadequacy, covers in the main the social program of progressive fraternalism.” Members were urged to sup-port the program, as by August 1939 it had become evident that “the most reactionary forces of economic royalism in America are organizing against all social improvements.” The IWO foresaw the coming elections as a crucial battleground in preserving or extending as much of the social-insurance agenda as possible. Under these circumstances in which “the naked profit interests of economic royalism try to kill the social conscience of America”—
and even the New Deal’s architects were backsliding—it was imperative to
“remind the government of its social responsibility toward the people.” By 1940 cutbacks to programs such as the WPA were decried by Order officials such as Congressman Marcantonio, but even when administration officials were faulted, the programs they had enacted were defended. The IWO in many cases became a more stalwart New Dealer than administrators already facing conservative pushback against the WPA and other programs.55
The IWO’s embrace of Roosevelt, though, always remained pragmatic, a case of supporting the best alternative possible while still hoping for more systemic socialist change in the long term. In June 1944 an OSS agent re-ported that IWO officials said,
We are under no illusion that “state capitalism,” “monopoly control,”
“TVA,” . . . security controls, etc. are socialism. But they are not in-compatible with socialism, they are “steps in the right direction,” and they merit our support. We will support those who will support mea-sures which we regard as being progressively in line with a program which we would see achieved at greater speed, but which we are will-ing to now concede must and can be obtained only slowly and through evolutionary tactics.56
As Jefferson Cowie and others have argued, conservative business inter-ests, as well as aggrieved white ethnic workers, were picking apart large ele-ments of the New Deal consensus already in the late 1930s and 1940s. Under
such circumstances the IWO believed it prudent to stand with the most pro-gressive forces possible.57 As Bedacht reminded his members in January 1940, “Economic royalism has always looked on social security legislation with hostile eyes.”58
The president’s enunciation of the right of all people to enjoy the Four Freedoms resonated with members, too. In backing the president’s run for a fourth term, the IWO issued a pamphlet written by Vito Marcantonio, con-gressman and IWO vice president, with a foreword by Bedacht, Security with FDR. In emblematic, maculinist Popular Front iconography, the pamphlet’s cover displayed determined black and white working men striding into the future past factories with fully smoking chimneys (Figure 2.1). Bedacht noted that the measures the IWO had supported in the past such as the So-cial Security and Wagner Acts, and its endorsement of a proposed national health insurance system, were embodied in Roosevelt’s postwar vision for America. Marcantonio and Bedacht put the Order on record as supporting Roosevelt’s reelection because of his articulation of a “new economic Bill of Rights.” Individual IWO constituencies such as the Hispanic American Sec-tion committed to the president’s reelecSec-tion, too. Shortly after the war the Figure 2.1 Exhibiting the
masculinist iconography of the Popular Front, the cover of Security with FDR featured virile working men confidently striding past factories with smoking chimneys, the result of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, Vito Marcantonio argued.
Source: Vito Marcantonio, Security with FDR (New York:
National Fraternal Committee for the Re-Election of President Roosevelt, September 1944), IWO-CU, box 49.
IWO continued this campaign for economic security by issuing a second pamphlet in favor of universal health insurance. The cover of Joseph Staro-bin’s Never Again!, in contrast to the earlier pamphlet, featured grim-faced apple sellers from the depths of Hoover’s Depression. Starobin and the IWO made the case for enactment of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill, a measure to extend Social Security to cover universal health insurance (Figure 2.2).59
The IWO further articulated this vision of greater security for all Ameri-cans in Our Plan for Plenty, a social-democratic manifesto for the country (Figure 2.3). The IWO’s plan advocated a guaranteed minimum income of
$1,200 per person among other reforms. In November 1940 a Russian lodge heard confirmation that the Order was drafting a petition to Congress “to make the minimum wage of the American worker $100 a month.” “The poli-ticians promised you everything before the election,” a speaker said, “so now we will see if Mr. Roosevelt will keep his word and take care of the American workers as the American millionaire. $100 a month is not much, but it will give the lowest worker something to live on, because today no one can live on $300 a year like a human!” The IWO was determined to push the New Deal to its outer, leftward limits.60
Figure 2.2 In making the case for its “Plan for Plenty,” the IWO vowed that the depths of Hoover’s Depression were conditions that would “Never Again” be tolerated.
Source: Joseph Starobin, Never Again! (New York: IWO, August 1945), IWO-CU, box 49.
“Health, Limbs and Lives”: Occupational Safety
The Order recognized its payment of sick or accident benefits was only a bandage on the sores of industrial America. More systemic solutions to aid workers suffering from workplace injuries or toxic working conditions were advocated by the organization in its campaign to enact effective workplace safety legislation. A holistic campaign to sand the rough edges off of capital-ism included efforts to document just how grim working people’s health could be. As part of its support of labor unions, in 1938 the Order made plans “to establish a statistical department for research in workers’ health,”
paying particular attention to “the problems of occupational diseases and hazards.” Statistical information and “propaganda” was to be supplied to unions, while the Order engaged in lobbying to ensure adequate compensa-tion for victims of industrial accidents and occupacompensa-tional hazards. Bedacht committed the Order to serving as “a brother-in-arms to the broad progres-sive political movement which . . . presses for the enactment of laws protect-ing the health, limbs and lives of the workers on the job.”61
That the IWO’s campaign for effective workmen’s compensation might prove attractive is suggested by the case of George Palenchar, a coal miner from Powhatan Point, Ohio. When his back and shoulder were crushed in a Figure 2.3 The IWO’s “Plan for Plenty” in the 1940s featured universal health care and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.
Source: IWO pamphlet, Our Plan for Plenty [ca. 1941], IWO-CU, box 5, folder 7.
mine accident in 1929, “the company doctor did not want to take him to the hospital. After several weeks elapsed the company doctor told him he could go back to work and he considered the wounds as little scratches.” Palenchar could not continue working, and went to a private doctor who discovered his backbone and shoulder were cracked. However, Ohio’s Industrial Commis-sion deemed Palenchar only partially, temporarily disabled, and awarded him $6 a week, up to a maximum of $312. His lawyer told him, “I think you are fortunate in getting the amount that you are getting at this time.” While Palenchar had a doctor’s report indicating he was permanently disabled, his file also showed he suffered from “miners’ asthma, . . . and that all of your trouble doesn’t come from the injured back.” In the 1930s coal corporations still evaded responsibility for most of their workers’ accidents and diseases under the doctrine of “assumed risk.” Perhaps with his lawyer’s letter spell-ing out the realities of industrial capitalism in mind, Palenchar joined the CP. Other coal miners who turned to the IWO’s welfare fund may have found the group attractive when assistance from the state proved so meager.
A little democratic centralism may have seemed a small price to pay.62 With cases such as Palenchar’s in mind, the IWO championed a mine safety bill in 1940. Bedacht wrote to Marcantonio, urging his support for a Federal Mines Safety and Inspection Act. Bedacht took particular interest in mine safety, since he noted a recent disaster in Bellaire, Ohio, had killed seventy-one miners, of whom “at least eight, and possibly ten of those killed, were members of our International Workers Order.” He added that the Order, which enrolled thousands of miners, “is vitally concerned in the pas-sage of legislation by Congress which will prevent such tragedies.” He asked Marcantonio for a statement on the mine safety bill that could be used by the Order as part of a national campaign of support. Bedacht further told the congressman he would like to appear before the committee as a witness in favor of the bill. Grassroots IWO members lobbied for the bill, too. Victor Pŏverk of Yukon, Pennsylvania, wrote to congratulate Marcantonio on his opposition to the HUAC chaired by archconservative Dies but also urged passage of the mine inspections measure. “As a coal miner and conscious of the grim fact that we have had two disastrous mine explosions in the last few months,” Pŏverk wrote, “I sincerely hope that you would do all in your power for the Federal Mine Inspection Bill.” The miner enclosed a resolution sup-porting the bill passed by Yukon’s lodge.63
So convinced were IWO members of their place in the progressive new political order that Italian lodges in East Harlem and the Bronx orchestrated rallies “against the Dies Committee, for the New Deal.” Dante Alighieri and La Progressiva Lodges denounced the committee as “an agency for the prop-agation of anti-labor, anti-progressive and anti-New Deal sentiments behind the smoke screen of vicious red-baiting.” The Italians were confident Mar-cantonio could scuttle the “Un-American Committee” and work to expand
the WPA and other programs.64 To IWO members the choice between an
“un-American Committee” and progressive legislation was clear. Anti-Communism was deemed loathsome if it targeted individuals and organiza-tions working to deliver safe workplaces, social security, and workmen’s compensation.