STREATOR ON SATURDAY NIGHT

“Bob! Get back here!” Carl Soderstrom, Sr., shouted after his young son as the latter ran haphazardly across the depot platform. Bob pretended not to hear, darting among the disembarking passengers in a fevered search for his grandfather, affectionately known as “Pom Pom.” “Carl! Ginny! Bob!” Carl Sr. called after his other children as they took off in pursuit. The race was on. Suddenly, a hand shot out from the evening snowfall, clutching the young Carl with such force that he nearly fell backwards.

Reuben Soderstrom, dressed in black tweed coat and hat, lifted and squeezed his grandson tight and laughed in the cold air, “Now, why were you in such a hurry to find me?”

“Saturday and payday!” Bob shouted almost in unison with his brother and sister, “Four o’clock and after. Everyone’s silent soul is filled with silent laughter!”

“Well, what a lovely poem,” Reub teased, recognizing the lines as his own. “And such passionate delivery! I guess you deserve a little something for that.” Reuben had scarcely pulled the dollar bills from his breast pocket before they were snatched by his grandkids, who then instantly ran off to buy candy inside the depot. “Don’t spend it all in one place!” Reuben reminded.

The scene that played out in the bitter January cold was a familiar one. “Whenever we saw Grandpa on a Saturday evening, if the kids came up to him and quoted the lines from his poem, he would give them a dollar,” Carl Jr. later remembered. “Over the years, that cost him a lot of bucks, or ‘green backs,’ as he called them.[1]” For Reuben, these moments were welcome distractions from the political fights that increasingly consumed his days. He would need more such diversions in the months to come, he thought to himself as he walked off the platform, discussing the current challenges in Springfield with his son.

MERGER PROBLEMS

Public Progress

At the start of 1956 the membership of the ISFL was seemingly on the verge of healing one of the deepest and longest-standing divisions within Illinois labor—the rift between the AFL’s State Federation and the CIO’s Illinois Industrial Union Council. The national “reunification” of the AFL and CIO the previous year had infused workers across the state with a mix of excitement and expectation; reunification fever was in the air.

Yet this task—which had progressed so quickly on the national level—would prove much harder than Reuben or his CIO counterpart Joe Germano could have ever anticipated. The mechanics of reunification were no mystery to Reub; he had, quite literally, written the book. Shortly after the close of the first national AFL-CIO convention, President Meany personally asked Reuben for his help in managing the merger of the state and regional levels. He appointed the ISFL president to a special committee, headed by AFL Secretary-Treasurer Schnitzler, tasked with writing a new set of rules to govern the young organization’s state and local bodies.[2] The committee was set to meet at the end of January, ahead of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council meeting that February in Miami.

By this point, Soderstrom’s efforts to unite his Illinois State Federation of Labor and the CIO’s Illinois Industrial Union Council were already well underway. On Tuesday, January 3, he, ISFL Secretary-Treasurer Stanley Johnson, and attorney Dan Carmell met with IIUC President Joe Germano, Secretary-Treasurer Maurice McElligot, Vice President Pat Greathouse, and General Counsel Abraham Brussell in Chicago to begin merger talks ahead of the IIUC’s Central Labor Union Conference.[3] As they optimistically stated in a joint press statement immediately following the affair, “tentative agreements were reached with respect to the future program and future organization.”[4] Reub reaffirmed his belief that the two groups would be united before the year’s end, noting that “it would be advantageous for our two organizations to be a single strong unit before the next session of the state Legislature meets in 1957.”[5] That weekend, Reuben gave an address at the Illinois IIUC’s Conference, touting the strength of the new organization would have. In his first speech to the 1,300 delegates who, all assumed, would soon refer to him as their President, Soderstrom issued a call to challenge the media’s traditional narrative about labor and its work:

While building up and strengthening the labor movement through mergers and organizing drives is fundamental, and putting on pressure in the legislative field for beneficial laws is a necessary union activity, these are not the things that are applauded by the employers or the commercial press. But there are many things which labor unionists do which can receive this type of applause and good publicity. When a union donates work or gives other contributions to local community welfare or charities, it should not keep it a secret. We should tell our friends, our neighbors, and the whole community about it.

Too much of the newspaper stories about labor is about controversial matters—strikes and fights! Only our own people hear about union members building a house for destitute people, or helping a local veteran’s organization build a new building, or wiring a nearby community ballpark. We should not only increase our community services but also advertise our interest and accomplishments in this field. This is news. This is the kind of news a newspaper will print if we make an effort to give such news to our local newspapers.[6]

The speech helped establish Reuben as a leader of labor as a whole, not just the AFL-affiliated unions he had led for so long. “It was my impression that your remarks were very well received by the CIO delegates,” Assistant Professor of Labor and Industrial Relations A. J. Wann wrote to Soderstrom after the speech. “I made a point of talking individually with six or eight delegates to ask them what they thought of your talk and the opinion was unanimous that you had made a most effective presentation.”[7] President Germano likewise reinforced the idea that a merger was imminent. He opened the conference by proclaiming he expected this to be the last CIO Convention, telling those present “I can assure you that the AFL and the CIO in Illinois are going to achieve unity—as fast as humanly possible.”[8] To all eyes, including those of the ISFL and Illinois CIO membership, it appeared that the Illinois merger would prove just as quick and smooth as its national counterparts had.

Private Differences

Behind the scenes, however, significant problems began to emerge. Some were political; the ISFL, for example, was supportive of Republican Governor Stratton, while the IIUC planned to support his Democratic opponent.[9] The largest difference between the two organizations, however, was financial. As the two organizations began to open their books to one another, it became clear that the CIO was, bluntly, broke. Despite (and in part responsible for) this state of affairs, the IIUC had a substantially larger staff, including a Farmer’ Union Liaison and a Community Services Director—positions and programs that had no counterpart in the AFL. Stanley Johnson, who would be responsible for the new organization’s finances, immediately made it clear that he had no interest in using ISFL members’ money “for a CIO project.”[10]

CIO chief Germano, however, believed these jobs to be vital. In an effort to check Johnson, he demanded half of the combined organization’s officers be pulled from the ranks of the CIO. It was, from the Federation’s perspective, an untenable request; ISFL members outnumbered their CIO counterparts by as many as four to one. On the basis of representational fairness alone, Reuben had no choice but to refuse. Germano likewise felt obligated to insist, fearing an AFL-dominated leadership would marginalize the CIO members he represented and dismantle the organization he’d helped build. What began as a staffing issue had by the end of January become a full-blown crisis.

Further complicating matters were the rules proposed by the AFL-CIO Executive Committee on State and Local Mergers. Although he was a member of the committee established to advise the AFL-CIO Executive Council on the issue, Reuben’s participation had apparently been limited by his negotiations with the IIUC. Their resulting guidance was, in his view, wholly unacceptable. From the naming formula that would rechristen his beloved ISFL the “Illinois State Labor Council” to the insistence on a number of (costly) CIO programs, Soderstrom felt the committee’s dictates “follow[ed] CIO thinking rather closely and consistently.”[11] Frustrated, he dispatched his chief legal counsel Dan Carmell to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council’s meeting in Miami to discuss the Illinois negotiations with Meany, along with a letter appealing to the president for help. Soderstrom’s blunt and confidential assessment of the situation in Illinois was far different from the upbeat scenario presented to the public:

Friend Meany,

In our negotiations thus far to blue-print or architect the merger between the Illinois State Federation of Labor and the Illinois Industrial Union Council some interesting facts have unfolded.

First of all, the CIO on the Illinois State level has no money in its treasury. They are coming into the State partnership or merger empty handed. On the other hand, the financial assets of the Illinois State federation of Labor are close to a quarter of a million dollars.

Despite this difference in assets, the CIO representatives are insisting that their educational, community service, political action, and other programs adopted or reaffirmed by their last convention, be written into our new joint State Body Constitution. They have no official State newspaper either—or publication. They claim to have 188,000 members in Illinois. If their members are anything like our AFL membership, and I think they are, only about half of them will be paying per capita tax into their State Council.

There are easily four times that number of A. F. of L. people in Illinois. We have an official State publication known as the “Weekly News Letter”…We carry on sensible non-partisan political activity in cooperation with our State and Cook County Leagues for Political Education. Our State legislative and political work is successful—second to no other State in this country! The CIO has been in existence here since 1935, but so far as I know, it has not succeeded in enacting any legislation in Illinois…Our own State Federation legislative, educational, political, accident prevention and affiliation programs have been far more successful in Illinois than that of the CIO, and I am a little disturbed about their insistence to establish and implement less effective proposals by writing them into our constitution in the state level.[12]

Reuben was determined not to tinker with the successful financial, political, and organizational principles he’d spent over 25 years developing for the sake of accommodating what was, in his estimation, a penniless CIO with a history of failure. He felt confident he could bend the CIO to his will, but needed the current merger committee rules relaxed. He asked Meany:

I have been wondering how close we must follow the rules prepared by the new Executive Committee for State level mergers…Perhaps these rules can be amended by the Executive Council so that the long-established State Federation name and proven methods, which are less confusing and far more effective, can be included in our State Constitution, which will, of course, bind, guide, and control future actions and activities of the State AFL-CIO in Illinois.

I don’t know the remedy, but it occurs to me that more leeway and flexibility can perhaps be attained in drafting acceptable state constitutions by allowing you, the national President of the AFL-CIO, to suspend the rules, when necessary, with respect to a new name and such other rule restrictions which are obviously distasteful and financially unfair to us or, for that matter, to either side. Could this power be given to you, and be included in the rules?...It is my hope that such unbending rules can be modified by the present meeting of the Executive Council, making them less rigid, thus creating a workable constitutional flexibility on the State level.[13]

While Reuben wanted intervention, he still sought to keep his request quiet for fear of even further entrenching the opposition. He stressed to the AFL-CIO President:

This is a confidential letter, and I know you will treat its contents sub-rosa. Our Illinois negotiations are still in the exploratory stage, and no bitterness or clashing has occurred, nor do I expect any insurmountable obstacles in creating a new organization, a new constitution, and in selecting a new name…A verbal picture of the Illinois situation can be unfolded to you by our chief legal counsel, Dan Carmell, who is in Miami Beach, Florida, and who is helping us draft our new state constitution.[14]

Clashing Personalities

Despite Soderstrom’s request, there would be no decisive action on Meany’s part, perhaps because he understood that this was in part a clash of personalities. The CIO’s Joe Germano had long maintained publicly and in private conversation that he believed Soderstrom to be a partner he could work with and a president he could accept. The problem, from the CIO perspective, was ISFL Secretary Stanley Johnson. Bob Gibson, then a confidant of Germano, later described:

Stanley was an odd guy. He didn’t have two different personalities, but he acted different it seemed to me around different people, and sometimes it was almost like bullying…I was a staff guy then but I wasn’t privy to all the meetings that had gone on with the negotiation. I knew Joe Germano very well and he was telling me what his opinion was of why it wasn’t working…he would say all the time “It’s that damn Stanley Johnson! Reuben we can live with, Reub’s a nice guy; believe me his word is good. That damn Stanley Johnson—you can’t trust him!”[15]

Joe might have been willing to move off his demands if he believed his people would be protected and his contributions respected. He was convinced, however, that the minute he surrendered control that Stanley would fire his staff and steamroll whatever he felt like through the leadership. Moreover, Stanley had told others that Reuben had privately assured him when he selected Johnson for Secretary-Treasurer in 1950 that he would step aside in five or six years.[16] Germano could abide a President Soderstrom, but he bristled at the idea of a President Johnson.

Germano’s reservations about Johnson may have been legitimate, but his approach to dealing with the ISFL Secretary-Treasurer only exacerbated the problem. The Illinois CIO chief’s temper and excitability were well known. Again from Gibson:

He [Germano] was a real gregarious Italian with a hot temper. If you made him angry he never forgot it…His brother-in-law, John Alesia, who was the COPE Director of the Steel Workers, got along like brothers-in-law do…One time we went to lunch, there was an Italian restaurant right over there by the office…I would go over there for lunch and he [Joe] and John would get in the damnedest arguments, loud and waving their hands. They’d have to come over and tell them to settle down a little. Then Joe would call the waiter in the afternoon and apologize. He was a good guy.[17]

Joe, however, wasn’t Stanley’s main concern. He could deal with Germano’s anger, but his CIO counterpart Maurice McElligott struggled with far deeper troubles—ones Johnson believed could imperil the joint organization. Maurice had long suffered from alcoholism. And though he was universally well-liked, McElligott’s illness forced Johnson to call his fitness as Secretary-Treasurer into question.[18]

Still, Reub continued to wear a brave and optimistic face in public. He focused attention on the groups’ shared goals and principles in a series of interviews and essays, writing in the Illinois Labor Bulletin that May:

The Illinois State Federation of Labor is completing plans to join with the C.I.O. State Industrial Union Council to enable the wage-earners on the State level to build a more dynamic economy and a better world. Its purpose will be to abolish slavery, misery and suffering, intolerance and crime in a united drive to attain that radiant and better life which all Americans, including wage earners, are destined to enjoy.[19]

Then came a devastating blow. On Monday, September 24, ISFL General Counsel Dan Carmell was indicted in Davenport, Iowa, for violating the Mann Act, a federal anti-prostitution law. Carmell, himself a former assistant attorney general under Governor Henry Horner, disputed the charge brought by Mrs. Ethel Darlene Fenn Cameron, 19, that he brought the Davenport native to Chicago for the purpose of “prostitution and debauchery.”[20] “I completely deny any and every allegation by this woman,” he told reporters as he flew to Iowa to post bail.[21] Still, the allegation that the married father of two had met Cameron, then a minor, for sex during a labor convention in 1955 continued to plague him.[22] Carmell was removed from the list of speakers at that year’s ISFL convention, and he withdrew from the merger negotiation to focus full-time on his legal defense. Meanwhile, newspapers around the state reported the sensational story of the labor attorney accused of “white slavery.”[23]

Reuben never made a public comment concerning the charges, nor did he leave behind any private correspondence on the matter. Still, the revelations concerning his friend and long-serving ally in the ISFL must have been devastating. Since Olander’s passing Dan Carmell had become Reub’s longest-serving advisor; he was the one Soderstrom sent in his name when issues of major importance—like the merger—were involved.

This, then, was the situation Reuben faced as the negotiations progressed: a close ally tainted by scandal, a second-in-command the CIO did not trust (and was eager to replace), a temperamental counterpart, and an unwell bookkeeper overseeing a broke organization. The road ahead, so bright at the year’s beginning, now appeared very dark indeed.

REUBEN RESISTS POLITICAL ALIGNMENT

Restoring Neutrality

While there were many obstacles to uniting the AFL and CIO in Illinois, Soderstrom believed there were tremendous benefits as well. Mine and factory owners, he argued, had famously played the two camps off one another for years at the bargaining table, negotiating sweetheart deals in exchange for recognition of one group’s union over the other. Anti-labor politicians and associations had similarly taken advantage of this division in Springfield. Governor Green even used it to nominate a coal merchant as State Director of Labor, convincing the CIO to endorse the appointment as an alternative to a “Federation Man.” A host of labor bills on issues of salary, safety, and compensation were likewise lost over the years, with the upstart CIO opposing ISFL legislation or endorsing weaker alternatives in the hopes of claiming victory or currying favor. Uniting labor would end this exploitation of petty rivalry, Reuben promised, asserting that through merging “workers will have an enlarged opportunity to work together, in closer unity and more unitedly than ever before.”[24]

Almost as bad in Reuben’s eyes were the rival political endorsements. The CIO had exclusively endorsed Democrats since its inception; by now the organization was largely viewed as an arm of the Democratic Party. Illinois CIO chief Germano even served as a delegate to the Illinois Democratic Convention.[25] This one-sided support, Reuben believed, violated Gompers’s “elect our friends” policy and left politicians of both parties less responsive to labor’s needs. Already, too many Springfield Republicans believed they could do nothing to gain labor’s vote while Democrats believed they could do nothing to lose it. Soderstrom, himself a former Republican official, had fought hard against this perception. He continued to support pro-labor Republicans in the primaries, with his Joint Labor Legislative Board endorsing a slew of Republican candidates for the General Assembly (including 14 “good to very good” and four “excellent to outstanding” ratings).[26] Many, like Rep. John King, took out large ads in their local papers touting ISFL support.[27] Reuben’s own son Carl ran as a pro-labor Republican with great success; that year Carl easily won re-nomination on the top of his party’s district ticket, beating rivals Clayton Harbeck and Mike Signorella by 3,333 votes and 11,053 votes, respectively.[28]

Reuben was also a vocal supporter of Governor William Stratton and Attorney General Latham Castle, both Republicans. In January of that year he presented the governor with a ceremonial plaque honoring Stratton for his firm opposition to anti-labor and “right to work” legislation, an event which IDOL Director Cummins put on the cover of the Illinois Labor Bulletin.[29] Soderstrom likewise spoke highly of Attorney General Castle, particularly after his work on behalf of the 1955 Ford-UAW contract, which guaranteed a Ford employee 60 to 65 percent of his normal pay during a layoff in addition to standard unemployment benefits, up to 26 weeks a year. Reuben saw the deal as precedent setting, telling the press that the Ford-CIO deal was “bound to draw the attention of thoughtful people in Illinois to doing something similar in leading industries. We in the AFL are happy over the potential possibilities.”[30] The Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, expectedly, was as horrified as Reub was happy, claiming:

Under existing unemployment compensation laws, many workers find the temptation to seek benefits unjustly and remain unnecessarily unemployed is practically irresistible. With the substantial supplementary benefits which this plan apparently contemplates, this temptation to remain unemployed and not seek work elsewhere would be greatly aggravated, and the army of unnecessarily unemployed would be materially increased.[31]

The IMA lobbied the governor and attorney general to issue an opinion that such industry payments would disqualify laid-off workers from receiving state unemployment benefits, effectively killing the agreement.

Soderstrom would have none of that. Working with Joe Germano (since this was a CIO contract), Reuben arranged for top-level meetings with Stratton and Castle to advocate for the UAW agreement.[32] As a result, the attorney general issued an opinion in favor of allowing workers to legally collect both state unemployment compensation and payments from supplemental jobless benefit plans, giving the green light to both Ford and General Motors (who had also signed on to the agreement) to implement the new contract in Illinois.

IMA Executive Vice President James Donnelly was furious, charging “The Attorney General of Illinois has obviously followed the dictates of the CIO.”[33] He vowed to take “every possible legal step to prevent this ruling from becoming effective,” and soon two Illinois firms sought an injunction against the payments. Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge DeWitt Crow denied the motion, however, ruling that the companies had no standing.[34] The only companies that did—Ford and GM—had no intention of court challenges, removing any further impediment.

Convention Fight Over Stratton Endorsement

To Reuben, supporting Republican politicians who advanced labor’s legislation—or at least opposed anti-labor legislation—was of paramount importance, and one of his top goals in the reunification of the AFL and CIO in Illinois was what he viewed as a restoration of political balance and influence. That January he sent Secretary Stanley Johnson to the CIO meeting to reinforce both the importance and effect of a true “elect our friends” policy:

This is one state where labor is free, where there is no anti-labor legislation. This didn’t come about through one political party. Under both parties in the state we have made progress. We must give credit where credit is due. We must look into the record of the legislators and the governor and other state officials. We should support candidates who have demonstrated they are thinking of us.[35]

The message was clear: support the politician, not the party. Reuben went even further in his ISFL convention address that year, giving and extended endorsement for four pro-labor candidates:

There are four outstanding candidates—two Republicans and two Democrats –who have always been on our side in many highly controversial situations. They are the Honorable Latham Castle, Attorney General of Illinois, who recently ruled that Supplemental Unemployment Benefits could be given to wage earners without any deduction from their Social Security Unemployment Benefits. Then, too, we have the Honorable William G. Stratton, Governor of Illinois, who has signed a large number of labor bills for us, and who has assured us, again and again, that there will be no anti-union or oppressive legislation enacted as long as he is the Governor of this great State!

Then we have the Honorable Richard Stengel, who served eight years in the Illinois House of Representatives and voted for all our labor bills during that time. He is now the candidate for the United States Senate, and he will continue to stand with us after he arrives in Washington D.C., when the November election is over. Then, last but not least, we have the Honorable Adlai E. Stevenson, former Governor of Illinois, and a candidate for the Presidency of the United States—a real friend of labor![36]

The pairing of two Democrats with two Republicans was no coincidence. In choosing to speak on these candidates, Reub was again reinforcing the bipartisan ideal of union support. The endorsements were the highlight of the speech. The Southern Illinoisan headlined its front-page coverage of the convention “State Labor Leader Backs Adlai, Stratton,” while the Mt. Vernon Register titled its story “Soderstrom Praises Adlai and Stratton.[37]” Reuben’s hometown paper quoted Reuben at length as he continued:

These four—Castle, Stratton, Stengel and Stevenson—have done everything that labor asked them to do…While I am not telling you how to vote or whom to support in the November election, these four candidates are certainly entitled to favorable consideration from all of us.[38]

Rueben’s attempt at bipartisan support soon faced pushback. Surprisingly, it came not from the CIO but from his own Federation delegates. The ISFL convention had begun as a very bipartisan affair, with friendly politicians from both sides on both the state and national level making their way to the Springfield event to speak to labor. This illustrious list included such prominent Republicans as US Secretary of Labor James Mitchel, who was held in high regard by many in labor. In his address, Mitchel highlighted the nation’s record employment and wage levels, boasting to the audience that under President Eisenhower, American workers possessed “the highest purchasing power and greatest well-being in our history.[39]”

Governor Stratton also capitalized on the economic boom. In his address, the Illinois leader highlighted the all-time peak in industrial employment in Illinois—more than four million working men and women. He told the crowd:

Our prosperity was earned by us. One of its causes has been the harmonious relationship which has prevailed between labor and management. I am firmly convinced in the absence of a mutual understanding and whole-hearted cooperation which we have over the years, provided, the economy of our state could not have advanced to its record breaking levels, either in the standard of living or in the level of employment. The improvements which have been made in the lives of not only working men and women but of all people as well, are the direct product of the efforts or organized labor and of its forward-looking leadership. You can well be proud of your organization and its achievements. Through your support, we can say we have better schools, and better working conditions. Illinois workers are better off today than ever before in the history of the state.[40]

Not all in attendance were convinced by Stratton’s words. Despite his record and Reub’s endorsement, many wanted labor to go on the record in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Austin. While they conceded that Stratton had not worsened labor’s situation in Illinois, they wanted more, and were swayed by Austin’s Tuesday night convention warning that “I think you would be making a bad bargain to back the Republican state administration on the basis of a half-promise, half-threat that if you back Stratton, no anti-labor legislation will be passed.”[41] It was no rump faction; the movement, headed by Earl G. Quinn of the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and William Black of the Machinists Lodge, claimed to have the support of 75% of the delegates behind them.[42] When they sought to win an endorsement of Austin on the floor, Soderstrom’s executive board intervened, with Reuben asserting that any floor vote on the matter “would have trouble because the Federation constitution entrusts the executive board with exclusive jurisdiction over state candidates.”[43]

Ultimately, Reuben was able to break the impasse by re-wording Stratton’s endorsement to include a favorable reference to Austin, which Quinn praised as “just, fair and fast treatment.”[44] Still, the fight underscored just how difficult it was becoming to maintain unity even within the Federation, let alone in union with the CIO.

Fighting For Labor’s Right to Lobby

While Reuben fought to keep labor from being captured by forces on his far left, he also had to contend with radically conservative voices in the media that increasingly sought to silence labor’s voice in the political arena altogether. Soon after the national AFL and CIO united, they formed a new political arm, the Committee on Political Education, COPE, to make their influence felt in the 1956 election. No longer distracted by intra-labor strife, the new political body embarked on an ambitious agenda with confidence and tenacity. As labor historian Joseph Rayback writes:

C.O.P.E. activity throughout the spring and early summer of 1956 was more vigorous than that usually revealed by labor’s earlier political agencies. In addition to normal activities, C.O.P.E. directors and supporters scheduled scores of regional and union conferences to build up enthusiasm for the coming campaign…Meanwhile, C.O.P.E. engaged in one of the most vigorous political campaigns in labor history on behalf of candidates favorable to labor. Its greatest effort, occasioned by a knowledge that only five out of eight union members were voters, were used to secure a high registration.[45]

These efforts were music to Reuben’s years. For years he had tried to increase labor turnout at the polls in Illinois, believing elections were the single best way to make labor’s influence felt. He dramatically increased his efforts in 1956; in the weeks leading up to the primary elections Reuben turned his Weekly Newsletter into a voter information publication. He provided primary election calendars and apportionment maps. He published the Joint Labor Legislative Board Recommendations for every race and party. Perhaps most impressively, he crafted a 12-page voting record of all Illinois legislators, listing how each incumbent legislator voted on every issue important to labor.[46] Week after week, he placed ads in the paper to drive laborers to the polls. He placed special emphasis on registration, calling it a “citizen’s duty” and repeatedly reminding his readers “It’s our American Privilege to REGISTER and VOTE.”[47] He repeated these efforts in October and November, ranking state officials’ voting records on labor legislation and asking workers “Have YOU Registered to vote?”[48]

Not all were as excited as Soderstrom to see such a strong labor presence at the voting booth. Increased efforts by the AFL-CIO prompted new national anti-labor legislation, this time sponsored by Democratic Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska and future Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Fearful of labor influence, these men introduced a bill that made it a crime for union officials to contribute to political parties or committees in any way, shape, or form. As labor columnist Victor Riesel wrote at the time:

While the White House is quietly trying to contact some of labor’s political leaders, there’s an influential bloc of Republicans which would rather jail them than woo them…Down in Florida, I saw AFL-CIO president George Meany almost chew his traditional cigar in half when he talked of the Curtis-Goldwater bill. Meany said this would wipe out the labor movement and he had no intention of sitting by and letting this get any place in the Senate…Curtis couldn’t have hit the unions harder. Here I want to steal a line from Sam Goldwyn. Once while discussing the H-bomb, Goldwyn said, “We got to be careful of that thing, there’s dynamite in it.” Watch this fight blow high.[49]

Reuben didn’t waste time striking back at such efforts, which he viewed as fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American. At speaking engagements that year, Soderstrom began to articulate a theory of labor’s role in American politics, providing a theoretical and rhetorical framework for other labor leaders to follow. His speech to the Carpenters’ Union that September took the issue head on, making perhaps his most complete argument. After listing the all the recent legislative accomplishments of labor in Illinois, he said:

There are some things, however, that are becoming quite certain. One of them is that labor unions have a right to participate in politics. More harm than good would come from denying labor leaders and their members the right to become articulate in political campaigns. Whether labor unions are right or wrong in politics, it is still a good thing for the country that they do have the right to participate in campaigns. Labor unions politically active will counterbalance the political activity of the business community. As a matter of fact, neither business nor labor can be legislated into political inactivity...

Labor union leaders sometimes irritate the public and the public press. Labor leaders sometimes claim more political power than they have. Labor leaders sometimes claim more control over their membership, politically, than they have. Our conservative enemies agree labor leaders have this power and that they bear watching because of it. These conservative enemies will say that the average union member is being coerced into political activity which he does not want and that he ought to be delivered from such coercion. As a matter of fact, and actually, no trade unionist can be coerced politically. He is a free man when he enters the polling booth. When he follows his leaders it is because he agrees with them.

Of course, I am aware that your ballot is your own to do with as you please and you have but to satisfy your own judgment and your own conscience. It is not my intention this morning to tell you what to do, or how to vote on election day—but as your legislative representative I have a right to report to you just who, in public life, has been friendly to the labor movement, to labor legislation, and to labor's great cause.[50]

Stratton and his Attorney General won re-election. Nationally, labor made similar advances, with 159 House and 15 Senate labor-backed legislators winning their races.[51] Labor was also able to stop the Curtis-Goldwater bill, killing it in committee. However, this proved to be only the first of a growing number of attempts silence labor; Reuben would find his work far from finished.

“Together We Can Go Forward!”

While Soderstrom was pleased with the legislative achievements he had achieved with respect to workers specifically, he was prouder still of the crucial role labor had played in advancing the national conscience and human welfare as a whole. What began as a fight for decent pay and better hours had by 1956 blossomed into a movement that sought to better life for everyone. Again from his speech to the Carpenters:

In its early days of struggle labor was limited in its objectives to the most immediate and pressing of human needs. Its efforts, however, resulted in straightening out conditions so deplorable and so oppressive and so unjust and so undemocratic one finds it very difficult today to believe that it could have actually existed and have been defended by the powers-that-were in those early days. Even then, the trade union movement or the trade unions devoted their efforts not only to improve conditions of their own members but towards the greater welfare of the people as a whole…Labor has sort of grown up.[52]

This “grown up” labor had begotten benefits so fundamental to the American experience that the United States of 1950 would have been unrecognizable without them. Individual public welfare laws and programs were now so numerous and comprehensive that they weaved a vast web, ensuring everyone could live a life of opportunity and dignity. And at the center of that web in Illinois—and in many respects the nation—was Reuben.

Soderstrom had spent the past 38 years crafting and passing each one of those bills, spinning each of those threads. Typically, these efforts began as attempts to address wrongs he’d personally experienced. His family’s bankruptcy and the childhood he lost paying off their debt in the blacksmith’s shop and Streator’s glass factories spurred him to outlaw child labor. His father’s destitution and early death was the birth of his fight for old age pensions. The injunctions placed on him without trial or jury, preventing him even from traveling across town to care for his elderly mother, compelled him to bring an end to such judicial abuse.

He likewise sought to share the benefits he’d enjoyed. It was no accident that the very first bill Reuben ever passed, an act providing free books to schoolchildren, mirrored what he considered his first and greatest gift—the books he’d received from Johnny Williams, Arthur Shay, and the Streator public library.[53] Fond memories of Sundays spent with his father, a Swedish Lutheran preacher, served as inspiration for Reub’s “one day’s rest in seven” bill. In truth, the origin of nearly every bill Reuben ever sought or sponsored can be found in the experiences and privations of his own life.

What made these accomplishments so impressive, however, was not just the story that spawned them but their breathtaking scope and universal application. Reuben didn’t just seek to protect children in situations like his or limit the abuses they suffered; he sought to end child labor in all its pernicious forms. While Reub’s father could always rely on his son’s income and was never at risk of being sent to a state home, the compassion he awakened in Reuben compelled him to advocate for all who yearned for dignity in the final years of their lives. The bigotry Reuben experienced as the son of a Swedish immigrant drove him to repeatedly push for legislation outlawing all discrimination based on race, color or creed. Reuben never looked simply to right the wrong he suffered; he sought to eradicate its cause.

By 1956 this approach to reform had resulted in a series of acts that formed the foundation of labor’s legacy—a rich legislative tapestry that protected not only union laborers, not only working men and women, but all Americans. Now that labor stood united, Soderstrom declared, it would be their duty to further that legacy, to continue to act as a force of positive change in the world:

The American labor movement has a long tradition in the field of human welfare activities…American trade unions have not been limited to hours and working conditions. We all know what the unions have done to eliminate the sweatshop and child labor.

Now with labor united we hope to do even more in the field of human welfare. We are making plans to increase our participation in the effort to eliminate such evils as juvenile delinquency, racial and religious discrimination, the evils of crime, and the evils of disease. There are literally hundreds of instances, receiving very little publicity, in which unions are giving equipment to hospitals, books to libraries, in which union members are giving their labor to constructing and repairing buildings for community programs and humanitarian projects. There is plenty of evidence everywhere that the labor movement meant what it said in that great merger convention in New York City, when it created the slogan, ‘What is good for America is good for the members of the AFL-CIO.

We want to abolish poverty, misery and suffering, intolerance and crime and to wipe out entirely man’s inhumanity to man, and establish a permanent peace and prosperity everywhere in America, and everywhere in the world. We want to abolish all wrongs, all industrial injustices, all oppression, and make our people secure from poverty, hardships and want, the ancient enemies of the human race. This is also the goal of the CIO. Together we can go forward![54]

This beautiful sentiment, however, cut both ways. Labor could not truly move forward without unity, and despite their merger on the national level, the Illinois AFL and CIO had yet to come to terms. The greatest battle for the soul of labor in Illinois was yet to come.

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