THE GREAT RECESSION SACKS STREATOR, NATION

Reuben brimmed with optimism. 1937 had been a powerful year for labor, both in Illinois and across the nation. Despite its split with the Committee of Industrial Organization, the American Federation of Labor was able to grow its numbers, reaching corners of the working world that had never before been organized. In Illinois, Soderstrom had grown the Illinois Federation (ISFL) to nearly 400,000 souls, even making peace with old foes like the Progressive Miners along the way. As Reub boasted at the ISFL convention:

A vast number of district councils, central bodies and independent locals were visited, and those who were not affiliated were cordially invited to enroll their memberships in the Illinois State Federation of Labor. The response to that request and that invitation was most satisfactory and most gratifying. Over three hundred local unions not formerly affiliated with the Illinois State Federation of Labor responded to that appeal. Those three hundred additional local unions will enroll approximately fifty thousand wage earners into our state body. A close check-up will show that the Illinois State Federation of Labor today, numerically, is the strongest state federation of labor in America.[1]

Across the nation, however, a new panic had begun to take hold. Facing political pressure and believ ing the worst was over, President Roosevelt drastically cut New Deal spending, including work programs such as the Works Progress Administration. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, pursued monetary policies that reduced money stocks. The results were disastrous, sending shockwaves through the American economy in the second half of 1937. Soderstrom tried to calm the public, writing that December that “this year will, no doubt, see the turning point in employment improvement, which all thoughtful labor officials agree, is the greatest problem of the present century.”

His hopes were soon dashed. Real GDP fell by more than 5% between 1937 and 1938, while stock prices plunged by 25%. Most devastatingly, unemployment exploded from 12% in 1937 to over 20% at the height of the crisis.[2] Reub’s native Streator was hit particularly hard. Of the 3,354 unemployed in LaSalle County, 778 were from Soderstrom’s hometown. The WPA did what it could, employing 140 men to work on the Streator Armory that spring and hiring others for school and park projects. It also established a sewing center in the city employing 35 women, who earned $44 a month producing everything from pajamas to work uniforms. The center also purchased all materials locally, adding $250 to $300 a month to the local economy, and gave what they manufactured to needy families once a month.[3]

But it was a drop in the bucket. Scores of unemployed did what they could to fight off poverty and starvation, growing subsistence gardens and learning to bake without “luxuries” like eggs. The federal surplus commodity corporation also established a food warehouse in Streator, stocking and distributing grapefruit, oranges, cabbage, celery, rice, navy beans, peas and potato flour to those most in need.[4] Sadly, the strongest support for those in need—the Unemployment Compensation Act which Reuben had fought so hard for—wasn’t scheduled to go into effect until 1939. At a hearing at the State Department of Labor, Reuben called for government action, offering the support of both the Illinois State and Chicago Federations of Labor.[5] But as 1938 wore on, it became clear to all that no support or single piece of legislation could counter the complex and deepening crisis; a “Great Recession” had settled in, dashing the dreams of Reub and others for an easy end to the Depression.

AFL AND CIO BATTLE FOR LABOR’S SOUL

CIO Sit-ins Turn Violent

Not everyone deplored the new state of affairs, however. The CIO in particular seized the growing crisis as a recruitment opportunity, branding the AFL as part of the establishment and partly to blame for the ongoing crisis. For many CIO leaders, especially President John L. Lewis, unionism was anti-establishment by nature. A union leader’s primary responsibility, in their view, was to relentlessly press employers as aggressively as possible. This contrarian approach to labor relations mirrored Lewis’s own personality. Described by Reub as someone “willing to take on a scrap with almost anybody,” Lewis was infamous for his aggressive tactics, and towards the end of the decade this trait, so instrumental in Lewis’s rise, began to drive a wedge though his most important alliances. By 1938 his initially friendly relationship with FDR had begun to sour, at least in part to due to personal disdain. “More fundamental [than policy] was the clash of personalities and of roles,” writes New Deal historian Irving Bernstein. “The styles of the two men were completely different. Lewis was dour, angry, direct, and demanding. Roosevelt was cheerful, chatty, effusively vague, a master of indirection.”[6]

This personal fissure was compounded by widening policy divides. The CIO’s predisposition for conflict had given rise to questionable tactics, including sit-down strikes which were characterized by violence and repudiated by Roosevelt. When the President responded to the events of the Memorial Day Massacre by declaring “a plague on both houses,” Lewis warned Roosevelt in a radio address that “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”[7] Lewis’s increasingly bellicose approach cost him with the public as well. Something of a media darling in 1936 and early 1937, Lewis had become widely disliked by 1938. A Gallup poll released in October of that year asking “Which labor leader do you like better: [AFL President] Green or Lewis?” found that Americans preferred Green by 78% to 22%.[8]

Of course, these numbers had as much to do with the AFL’s actions as it did the CIO’s. Unlike the CIO, the AFL had painstakingly sought peaceful and democratic solutions to labor’s problems, negotiating with its enemies and largely working through the legislative process rather than direct confrontation. No one exemplified this approach more than Reub. In the last few years, Soderstrom had crafted complex protections like the Occupational Disease Act and Unemployment Insurance through a careful mix of threat, compromise, and innovation. While unafraid to call for a strike, Reuben and his Secretary Vic Olander typically preferred less disruptive solutions, agreements that spared labor and business alike.

Soderstrom: “Organized Labor Does Not Want Communism”

Lewis’s unpopularity was also likely linked to the increasing public suspicion of communist influence within the CIO. While Lewis himself was strongly anti-communist, the industrial unionism of the CIO (as well as the confrontational approach it advocated) was attractive to Communist Party members, who held disproportionate sway within the organization. As historian Jennifer Luff writes:

Only a tiny fraction—less than 1 percent—of the CIO’s membership belonged to the Communist Party. A substantial portion of CIO union leaders and staff, however, were party members or closely aligned to the party. Unions including Mine Mill, the United Electrical Workers, and the Food and Tobacco Workers were led by Communists, while the TWU, NMU, and the International Longshoremen Workers’ Union had officers who were closet party members, and unions such as the UAW and the Office and Professional Workers had sizable Communist contingents among union leaders and staff.[9]

While many within the CIO were worried by this influence, Lewis refused to consider the communists a threat, and his seeming unconcern soon translated into negative press. Formerly sympathetic journalists (including Louis Stark of the New York Times) began to write about Communist influence, while Benjamin Stolberg’s The Story of the CIO, published that year, told the story of an ideal perverted by Stalinist agents.[10] Before the end of the year, concerns over Communist influence had driven the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) to leave and re-affiliate with the AFL and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP) to break off negotiations with the CIO.[11]

Of course, the presence of communist sympathies within the CIO didn’t only threaten Lewis’s organization. The CIO’s associations threatened to paint all labor with the same the same brush in the public mind, including Reuben’s Illinois Federation. This danger prompted a massive retaliation by the leaders of the AFL. Some, including President Green, used the charge of Communism as a weapon against Lewis, engaging in classic red baiting. After attending the AFL conference that year, President Soderstrom wrote of his experience listening to the opening address:

Over half of President Green’s address was devoted to denouncing the CIO and its leader, John L. Lewis…He used what he termed was Lewis’s own words in branding him Communistic. He read from two pamphlets which he said were prepared by the ‘leader of the committee of industrial organization,’ delivered to Congress and which warned that agencies hoping to overthrow the American government were attempting to gain a foothold in American labor. ‘Isn’t it strange, my friends,’ President Green shouted, ‘that this man who prophesied that communism was seeking to destroy our craft unions is now the leader of a movement which has for its purpose that very objective? He is attempting to do what he prophesied the Communists would do.’ It was a blistering attack on John L. Lewis and his CIO by a thoroughly aroused William Green…Green closed his address, which will go down in labor history as most colorful and interesting, within the allotted radio time.[12]

While he may not have approved of the personal nature of the attack, Reub pulled no punches when speaking and writing against Communist influence. To him, Communism was simply one more foreign element inserted into labor by its opponents—particularly employers—in an effort to sow division and disunity. As he wrote in his Labor Day message that year:

Organized labor does not want communism. Its members do not want rebellion within the American labor movement. Communism, division, secession, a terrible trinity originated by foreign agitators, developed partly by foreign dictators, brought into our country and organized by reactionary employers who believed they could use this combination to destroy the American Federation of Labor. Efforts to develop division and secession are, of course, old tactics. Adding communism thereto, however, is new.[13]

If reactionary and industrialist forces were the chief instigators of Communism, Soderstrom asserted, then the AFL was the nation’s strongest bulwark against it:

We, [the AFL’s] members, among other things, glory in its fighting qualities. We glory in the successful resistance it has given to communism and all other subversive forces. We glory in the patriotic service it has rendered to America exposing these vicious elements from destroying our government, stopping them from tearing down the starry banner of the nation and substituting in its place the communistic, revolutionary flag of red. Liberty is still liberty here. Equality is still equality. Freedom is still freedom. America is America because the AFL has been resolving, functioning and fighting to keep it that way. So that the whole world might see the seething, festering cesspool of communism that it really is.[14]

Dueling Unions

Despite these concerns, both Reuben and the AFL still sought a united labor front. In the two years that followed the formation of the Committee of Industrial Organization, both sides sought a negotiated end to the standoff. After much discussion, meetings held as part of a “peace conference” in late 1937 reached a workable solution. The potential agreement called for the return of all the original CIO unions to the AFL with no penalty or questions asked. For the CIO organizations formed in the wake of the split, a subcommittee would be created to iron out the inevitable jurisdictional disputes between them and the AFL unions already representing workers in those fields. The only issue left at that point was to select the subcommittee.

Before long, the problem of dualism--two unions representing the same trade—had infected nearly every corner of the working world in America. Oftentimes, the CIO would make a duplicate union to one in the AFL; anxious workers would join both unions because they were unsure which group would win and as a result all hell broke out. On December 21, the CIO representatives decided to insist upon their original offer calling for all CIO “dual” unions—those previously chartered by the AFL and those newly created—to be admitted and chartered into the AFL without any preliminary agreements or preconditions. Any less, the CIO negotiators declared, would be an act of “treason” by the original CIO members committed against their new brethren. To the AFL, however, letting these new unions in without question would create a system of “dual unions”” throughout the Federation, as valid existing unions would have to compete against their newly validated CIO counterparts. When the CIO refused to yield, the AFL had no choice but to abandon the conference.

This system of permanent dual unions wreaked havoc on organized labor for years. The de facto dualism brought about by CIO defection had already hurt working men and women, particularly in the mining industry. In a bid to outmaneuver the now AFL-affiliated Progressive Miners Association (PMA), Lewis made a sweetheart deal with the mine owners of Harlan County, offering them major concessions if they recognized his United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), not the PMA, as the only valid union under the National Labor Relations Act. The owners readily agreed, declaring that all mine workers would have to join the UMWA to work in the county. AFL President Green was furious, issuing a statement that read in part:

This deal stated in these simple terms merely means that the employer has selected and chosen the union to which his workers must belong to keep their employment hereafter and the union for which the employer is soliciting members has agreed in advance to the terms of employment under which these employee members are to work. A clearer case of conspiracy to violate the NLRA cannot be found. A more brazen and unlawful alliance to control workers without their knowledge and consent has yet to be disclosed. A more decisive instance of John L. Lewis using government machinery in violation of law to recruit members and to break down resistance to his will has never been presented to the public.[15]

Even Reuben’s own ITU was hit in 1938 when the American Newspaper Guild, a CIO union attempting to unionize the whole print industry, attempted to start a strike in Chicago against the Chicago American and Chicago Herald-Examiner, the Hearst morning and evening papers. When they tried to pressure the AFL to join them in the strike, the AFL responded that they would “not permit themselves to be manipulated into any alleged strike against the Hearst papers or anyone else by a few blundering CIO agitators.”[16]

As the war of dueling unions wore on, many workers were tempted to join both unions; that way they could wait on the sidelines, claiming allegiance to whomever eventually won out. In response the AFL initiated a bitter struggle against dual membership, conscripting both Soderstrom brothers for the battle. That January William Schoenberg, head of AFL activities in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa, dispatched Reub’s brother Lafe to the crucial labor city of Decatur to launch the downstate fight against the CIO. In a speech before a full audience at the local labor temple to the city’s Trades and Labor Council, Lafe declared “The war is on between the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization. There will be no straddling of the fence; you can’t belong to both.[17]” He called for a vote to immediately expel all CIO unions from the Assembly, including the local United Miners. In a scene repeated dozens of times across the state, all opposing unions were cast out from the temple, never to return. The message was clear: you were either with the AFL or against it; there would be no road between.

REUB REBELS AGAINST INDUSTRY’S ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY

Soderstrom Denounces Chicago “Manager” Plan

While Reuben and the ISFL were fighting the CIO on one front, a second, deadlier battle opened up in the world of Chicago politics. An unusual coalition of interests—reformers, businessmen, and racists—attempted to eliminate the “Kelly-Nash Machine,” a political union between Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly and Cook County Democratic party chairman Patrick Nash. The Machine was widely viewed as powerful, progressive, and corrupt. It rewarded and punished officials based on “loyalty” while often turning a blind eye to gambling and organized crime. At the same time, it effectively promoted and implemented New Deal legislation, helping those in need and undermining the political dominance long enjoyed by business interests. Most controversially, it pushed progressive housing policy with respect to race, angering white homeowners who opposed allowing people of color into their neighborhoods.

By its sixth year in power, the Machine had earned its share of enemies; however, removing Kelly from the Mayor’s office seemed impossible. Instead, his opponents proposed a wholly different idea—doing away with the mayorship altogether! In 1938 a Committee of Municipalities was formed in a special session of the House of Representatives to explore idea of a “city manager” form of municipal government for the city of Chicago.

Reuben, like many, had mixed feelings about the Machine. As a leader who valued (and practiced) honesty and integrity, he didn’t approve of Kelly’s corruption. At the same time, he approved of the Mayor’s commitment to FDR’s policies and progressive views on race. While he may have been conflicted about Kelly, however, Soderstrom thoroughly opposed the idea of a city manager. He disliked the term ‘manger’ for a city, believing it to be an industrial term. More importantly, he believed it was deeply undemocratic to appoint an official who should be democratically elected. Reuben brought the full force of the ISFL to bear against the measure in a contentious and raucous public hearing before the committee. As Bernice Van Der Vries of the Chicago Heights Star reported:

Some of the Illinois State police who were on hand at all of the sessions of the general assembly to keep the relief agitators under control could have been used in the municipalities committee on Wednesday when the second hearing on the city manager bills was held. In the first place many of the committee members were not able to secure seats; in fact some were unable to get inside the door of the committee room…This was the hearing for the opponents and they were there in goodly numbers, but all represented the Illinois and Chicago Federation of Labor. The first speaker and the most violent in opposition to the bills was president of the Federation R. G. Soderstrom.[18]

In his speech, Reuben addressed the nature of representative democracy, articulating the role of the elected official and the reason they, and not an appointed manager, should hold the reins of government:

The will of the people should be the law of the land… I learned rather early in life that a public officer is but a public servant… It is well for the officer himself to remember it, and equally important for the people to remember it. A public officer is simply a hired man employed by the people, at a fixed salary, to do certain work. He is not in office merely because he wants to be. His only reason for being there ought to be that those he serves want him to be there. In other words, he is chosen by the people to do certain work which they must have done and their only reason for choosing him, ought to be that they believe he can do that work for them. A public officer is not supposed to think for people. People are supposed to think for themselves. He is elected rather to act for the people simply because the people are so numerous that they cannot very well act for themselves. But the beauty of our form of government is that instead of acting through somebody who rules by permission… or who rules by Divine Right, the people of our municipalities, and the State of Illinois, act through elected city officials, and elected representatives, whom they have chosen and whom they themselves can turn out of office whenever they so desire.[19]

In the end, Reuben swayed the legislature through both strength of words and show of force. The city manager bills went down to defeat, leaving the democratic principle of elections intact.

Unions: An American Institution

Ultimately, Reuben’s fight against the city manager plan in 1938 led him to articulate a much broader vision of American democracy, as well as organized labor’s role within it. America, he wrote, was founded on the principle of democratic governance through representative institutions, formal organizations legitimized by their broadness, resiliency and democratic structure. These institutions included the Congress, the office of the Presidency, and, Soderstrom argued, the American Federation of Labor. The Federation had a history, character, and mission that qualified it to sit alongside government as part of the fabric of American society. It could reasonably be said to speak for a significant and cohesive portion of the American public. Moreover, any attempt to exclude the AFL from its proper place alongside the other great American institutions would expose the country to foreign threat. Communist and fascist ideologies thrived on feelings of powerlessness and resentment within America’s working class, and the best way to combat such sentiment was to ensure that the institution which most clearly represented their interests had a seat at the table. As Reuben explained in his annual Labor Day Address that year:

The American Federation of Labor has been honestly representing wage-earners throughout this land for almost six decades. It is a great cohesive economic organization, built on the very bedrock of democracy. Its every action is democratic, its executive council conclusions, its constitution, all of its policies, are subject to the decision of annual conventions…… And so the part of this message which should ring loudest and clearest in the hearts and minds of our citizenship on Labor Day is this: ‘That the American Federation of Labor and the government of our country must help each other, must become one and inseparable, now and forever, in order to defeat fanaticism, in order to save America, a land which has proven to be the greatest land in the world for organized wage-earners who desire to promote justice, right, freedom and humanity.[20]

Reuben’s view of the AFL’s importance in American society was matched by an expansive vision of what a union was and could be. In the press and even within the CIO, a narrative had emerged that held that a union’s raison d’etre was collective bargaining. Soderstrom and Olander, however, rejected such thinking. To them, the right to organize—not bargain—was of primary importance. Yes, unions bargained, but they did and could do so much more. Unions enabled free speech and free assemblage through publications and demonstrations. They were a vehicle for the development of labor law through the legislative process. They provided an opportunity for their constituents to fully and effectively participate in the public sphere. As Secretary Olander wrote:

Having the right to organize in trade unions…the workers will find relatively little difficulty in bringing about collective bargaining with employers. But collective bargaining with employers of itself does not bring the right to organize, does not protect the workers in their rights of free press, free speech and free assemblage, does not protect their right to strike, and gives them no opportunity to engage in activities as citizens necessary to protect their status under the law as workers. Collective bargaining is necessary as a part of trade union activities, but is extremely dangerous as a substitute for those activities.[21]

As Reuben’s and Victor’s writings demonstrated, the difference between the AFL and the CIO transcended the argument of craft vs. industrial organization. Soderstrom built a vision of what unions were (and could be) that was completely at odds with the mission of Lewis and the CIO. Lewis wanted to lead a rebellion, and saw his membership as troops he could marshal through mutual grievance and sheer force of will. Soderstrom’s ISFL, in contrast, sought to create a “fifth estate,” a vast federation of individual unions founded on American democratic principles and united in common cause. It was this question—what was the meaning of union?—that was at the core of the fight between the Reuben’s AFL and Lewis’s CIO. It would not be answered anytime soon.

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