ROAD TRIP WITH OLGA TO MINNESOTA

For decades Reuben made a beloved summer pilgrimage back to Minnesota with his daughter Jeanne. Now, still stoically struggling in his own grief from her death, he briefly considered not making the journey at all, unsure if he could bear it. Ultimately, however, Olga convinced him that the trip would be good for him, and that they should travel together. Olga later explained:

Now, Reub always had a schedule on these trips and year after year when he went to Duluth with his daughter, they made the same tours. So everywhere we went this first trip, he did nothing but talk about events that happened with Jeanne. I felt this was doing him no good, so I decided there should be a change. I suggested we visit three distant cousins we had not seen for so long.[1]

Reuben would have none of it. This is how the trip had always been done, he said, and he saw no good reason to change it. Olga remained determined, demanding they go see their extended family. Her insistence annoyed Reub, who rejected any change to his traditional schedule. At one pit stop, Olga refused to get back in the car, telling her brother, “All right, you do as you please for a couple of days and I’ll take the train or bus to Thief River Falls to visit Myrtle and Ted Mills, for I’ll never be any closer.”

“Well, you’re not very close now!” Reub exclaimed.

“Well, I’m closer than when I’m in Kankakee,” Olga shot back.

Unable to coax her back into the car, Reub finally submitted. “OK, we’ll go,” he sighed. “Call them and see if they’re home and we’ll go tomorrow.”

As they started out the next morning, it seemed as though Mother Nature herself was putting up a fight. Again from Olga:

What a day we picked—there was a dense fog and it rained so hard—I figured he’d back out, but no, we started, and after a couple of hours we were back in clear weather. The visit was marvelous. Myrtle and Reub conversed in Swedish and he loved it…We stayed overnight and had such a delightful visit. Reub was so glad we went.[2]

The trip was good, a return to hearth and home, a reminder of how far he’d come in life. One can only imagine that when driving across Minnesota in a new Buick, the 79-year-old’s mind raced back to the days when his family sent him away as a 9-year-old child to work in a faraway blacksmith shop to help his father pay the household bills. Or the cold, windswept days when the family struggled to find meat and eggs during the Minnesota winters, trudging to church most days of the week. And the time he was again sent away to work as a child laborer, placed alone on a train by his mother to travel to Chicago and beyond, to meet a family relative in faraway Streator and to carry water buckets for immigrant workers on the trolley cars.

The year 1967 was a far cry from the late 1890s. It was full of challenges for the veteran Reuben G. Soderstrom, filled with personal attacks and organized attempts against his leadership. He faced angry editors, venomous politicians, and former friends, all with the same whispered accusation—that he was too old to lead, a relic of an era long gone by. But Reub was certain that he and only he could properly guide the ship of Illinois labor through these trying times, as he had done successfully for decades. There is no question that he spent very little time pondering retirement, and focusing instead on the trails at hand. He was needed more than ever.

WRESTLING WITH THE REPUBLICAN STATEHOUSE

The Changing Role of the Working Woman

The 1966 elections had been dismal for both the Democrats and organized labor in Illinois. In the US Senate, Reuben’s longtime friend and ally, Paul Douglas, lost his seat to Republican challenger Chuck Percy. In the Illinois General Assembly, meanwhile, Republicans scored a resounding win with an overwhelming majority. The reversal was dramatic; just two years prior the Democratic Party had won a full two-thirds of the House; now the Republicans enjoyed a 21 seat majority—a win so large that they needed no Democratic support to pass any bill. In response, the Democrats reacted as a party in exile, refusing to play any part in what they considered a radical Republican agenda. As Reuben described the situation later that year:

The clashing for supremacy between major political parties did not produce good government. It created an antagonistic, rancid to sour atmosphere, which stifled the efforts to properly solve the minimum wage, taxes, housing, and other problems vital to the working people in Illinois. The Senate Republican majority leadership was particularly obstinate, stumbling, bumbling, and fantastically persistent in an effort to drive back and kill the spirit of humanity and equality in its opposition to the minimum wage and civil rights and other forward-looking proposals.[3]

Labor’s opponents didn’t waste any time pressing the advantage. They introduced bills to take pension rights from and impose compulsory retirement on public employees. They again tried to pass a “right to work” bill emasculating unions. They attempted to create a legislative commission to study, codify and revise Illinois labor laws. But of all the anti-labor bills the Republicans attempted to pass in 1967, a select few earned Reuben’s greatest scorn. The first was a bill attempting to undo portions the Women’s Eight Hour Bill. Rep. Charles L. Hughes, R-Aurora, and Senator William Harris of the 37th Senatorial District introduced the legislation with arguments of equality, calling the existing law archaic and oppressive to women who wanted to work more hours and earn more money. He and his proponents claimed it violated Title VII of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination because of, among other things, gender. Moreover, he claimed, the repeal was only partial—it would affect only female professionals, not factory workers.

Reuben firmly opposed the effort, rejecting the premise that the protections—originally written by women’s groups, long advocated for by female activists, and designed explicitly to serve the interests of working women—was harmful. He further rejected the idea that this bill was intended to target only professional women in search of career advancement. As he wrote to the Senate that May, “Under (Hughes’s) HB No. 393 an endless array of office and factory workers, cloaked or designated at 20 to 40 percent assistants to executives, etc., would be removed from the provisions of the Illinois Women’s Eight-Hour Day and Forty-Eight Week Law.”[4]

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, this was a bill targeted at women wage-earners, not female salaried workers. It would harm both their quality of life and overall productivity. Reuben continued:

During a recent hearing antagonistic to wage-earners in the House of Representatives, designed to repeal the Women’s Eight-Hour Law, State Senator William C. Harris jumped into the anti-working women tirade and introduced SB No. 587 in the Upper House…This proposed legislation is not only miserable and degrading, but positively destructive even in the interest of production. It was found during the stress and emergency of the First and Second World Wars that wage-earners working 8 hours a day and 6 days a week produced more than they could working 10 hours a day and 7 days a week…Labor’s enemies are concentrating on shamefully exploiting and victimizing our employed women and Senator Harris is leading the way.[5]

Soderstrom used his political skills to quickly kill this effort in committee. He openly told the press he had assurances from Governor Kerner that he would veto such legislation in the unlikely event it was ever passed. “They had [Kerner] befuddled for awhile,” Reub said, but after a conversation with the Governor’s administration the matter was properly sorted.[6] The Democratic Party was also in step; the bill overwhelmingly failed in committee—all nine Democrats and five of the eleven Republicans voted against it.

Of course, the argument against the eight-hour law—that it unfairly discriminated against women—was as old as the law itself. As far back as 1893, when Illinois passed its first eight-hour bill, the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association brought cases against it on the dubious grounds of equal rights. In a hallmark case argued on behalf of employer William C. Ritchie & Co. of Chicago, IMA counsel Levy Mayer cloaked his opposition in the due process clause of the 14th amendment, arguing—just as Rep. Hughes did decades later—that the eight-hour bill violated the rights of women. Mayer centered his presentation in Ritchie v. People on testimony from female employees who charged the law made it impossible for them to support themselves. Ignoring the defense’s (and the Illinois legislature’s) argument that the inability to earn a living on a 40-hour week pointed to a problem with wages, not worker protections, the Illinois Supreme Court found in favor of Ritchie and the IMA. It agreed with his assertion that the law “deprives women of the right to work for more than eight hours in one day… (It) springs from the seeds of paternalism and socialism, which have no place in our government.”[7]

Female activists like the famed Florence Kelley were outraged by the court’s decision, especially at what she viewed as the duplicitous use of equal-rights law. “The measure to guarantee the Negro freedom from oppression has become an insuperable obstacle to the protection of women and children,” she fumed in the wake of the court’s decision. Famed female Chicago lawyer Myra Bradwell likewise attacked the Illinois Supreme Court for its “false equality,” warning “Antipaternalism may pretend an equality between people that does not exist. The pretense of equality may facilitate the continuation of actual inequality.”[8]

But while the industrialists’ argument hadn’t changed, those agreeing with it had. By the mid-1960s, many advocates for women’s rights had rejected (or forgotten) Ms. Kelley’s and Ms. Bradwell’s admonition, siding with industrial interests to undo eight-hour protections across the country. As the mid-century feminist movement took shape, it shifted its focus from the protection of vulnerable working women to the professional and social advancement of middle and upper class women—a change that had a profound impact on the movement’s view of the very laws it had helped create. In 1965, Velma Mengelkoch, an employee of North American Aviation of California, sued her employers when she was denied a promotion because, they claimed, the state’s Women’s Eight-Hour law rendered her ineligible. As she wrote to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), “We women of California and 25 other states with so-called protective legislation are finding these laws to be discriminating against us instead of protecting us. They are being used to hold our pay checks at a minimum and our job advances to a nli.”[9] When EEOC Commissioner Aileen Hernandez’s finding of reasonable cause was set aside by the full commission (chaired by none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.), Hernandez resigned her post and cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) with feminist Betty Friedan, a native of Peoria, Illinois. They immediately filed the case of Mengelkoch v. Industrial Welfare Commission of California in late 1966, making the end of protective labor laws for women a primary goal of the newly-formed NOW legal team.

As the 1960s’ feminist movement continued to take shape, Reuben and his peers were fast finding themselves on the losing side of the argument. Despite his defeat, Rep. Hughes and his supporters were buoyed by the Mengelkoch case, believing the court could well do their work for them. As the Southern Illinoisan noted:

Hughes has indicated he does not plan to seek (another) vote on his motion until late in the session because of a case pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. In this case a California woman is asking the court to declare unconstitutional California’s eight-hour law for women. A ruling like this in a federal court soon would make invalid similar laws in Illinois and 39 other states.[10]

Most importantly to Reuben, an overturning of the women’s eight-hour law would bring an end to his push for broader work-week reform. Soderstrom, like others in labor, had supported legislation limiting the hours of women and children not only because they believed in protecting society’s most vulnerable, but because they viewed it as a gateway to legislation supporting universal hour limitations. Soderstrom had for years pushed for legislation making the protections currently afforded to women applicable to all workers, specifically a law that that not only created a universal hour limitation but set it far lower, at 35 or even 30 hours. To him, only sweeping government action could effectively limit or decrease the working day. As he declared at the start of the decade:

Government can do anything. It should make things favorable for the people. It can and should help to wipe out unemployment by encouraging the establishment of a six-hour day without any reduction in pay . . . (A)s a matter of fact the 40-hour work week is no more sacred than the 60-hour week or the 44-hour week. After almost a quarter of a century it has become necessary, once again, to adjust the work week to the realities of the economic and technological situation.[11]

In the early 1960s, national unions had in fact used women’s protective legislation as the model for universal worker reforms. In 1961, for example, they supported legislation which would have made a right to 10-minute rest breaks every four hours—already afforded to women under gender-specific legislation—universal.[12]

These efforts met with failure, however. In this regard, unions were largely a victim of their own success. By the 1960s most unions had been able to secure very favorable terms, including a 40-hour week with overtime pay, in major industry contract negotiations, thus removing the impetus for statewide or national protective laws. Still, such gains were piecemeal and impermanent, and Reuben remained concerned that workers in Illinois and the nation were still vulnerable. He worried that without protection under the law, just one well-publicized breaking of a national union by a major industrialist or political figure could wipe out all the advances they’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much to achieve.

Sadly, he would eventually be proved right.

Return of the ConCon

While Reuben was able to stop the rollback of the Women’s Eight Hour Act, he was less successful in stopping another bill he found contrary to labor interests—a proposal to place the question of whether or not to hold a constitutional convention to rewrite the Illinois constitution (an event commonly referred to as “ConCon”) on the November ballot. Reuben loudly criticized the effort, telling a reporter from the Chicago Sunday American that “there are some things you just don’t change; the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments, and the Illinois Constitution.”[13] He was concerned that the legal successes, protections, and advancements he’d secured over the decades, rooted in the state’s constitution, could be unmoored by a convention. “No one, of course, knows what the recommended changes will be,” he lamented. “Depending largely on the kind of delegates sent to the convention, the recommendations might be very good or very bad; a constitutional convention that resembled our state senate, for instance, would be a scary prospect indeed.”[14]

Reub was right to fear what the delegate composition might be. If these constitutional designers were elected from the present senatorial districts (which were heavily gerrymandered to support Republican interests), the will of the general public (which the 1964 election had shown to be overwhelmingly Democratic) would be thwarted. He warned the delegates at the Illinois AFL-CIO convention that fall, “I say to you that we’d better be mighty wary of what might happen. I take a look at the state constitution and it says to select delegates to a constitutional convention from the senatorial districts. Well, the Illinois senate is not a liberal senate.”[15]

Not only was labor’s legislative legacy at risk; its court precedents were also at stake. As Soderstrom explained to his hometown press:

All of our court decisions are consistent only with the Illinois constitution. If it is discarded, many of our laws will fall with it. Dozens of special sessions would be needed to re-enact laws already on the books. Labor opposes a program which would require re-enactment of many of our labor laws and retrieving good decisions already handed down by the courts[16]

Yet Soderstrom’s was the only major voice calling out against the ConCon. A bill to place the question on the November ballot passed unanimously in the Senate and nearly unopposed in the House. Governor Kerner made a large appeal to labor at Reuben’s own convention on behalf of the effort, pleading that the labor delegates vote in favor of the ConCon. He told the delegates to “overrule Mr. Soderstrom,” saying:

We are trying to run the nation’s No. 1 state and achieve progress and opportunity while we are shackled by a constitution that was written and adopted six years before Custer fought the Sioux Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. This is no longer a horse-and-buggy constitution in a motor age. It is a bow-and-arrow constitution in a nuclear age.[17]

In response to Reub’s prediction that the selected delegates would be overwhelmingly conservative, the Democratic Governor stressed that he would personally prevent such an outcome, promising:

I know your good president and my good friend Reub Soderstrom, and some of your other leaders are concerned the voice of labor would be excluded from any convention. So long as I am governor, the views of the trade unions will be sought in the formulation of legislative programs and policies. After the call is approved by referendum, representatives of organized labor will have ample opportunity to help work out a fair and equitable method of selecting delegates. I can and will sit down with members of the Illinois labor movement, your position in a convention will not be disregarded. I pledge this to you.[18]

Most newspaper editors also sided with Kerner against Soderstrom. The Peoria Journal Star warned that “Soderstrom’s attitude, if it remains the avowed position of the AFL-CIO, will leave labor out in the cold. It is simple enough to figure that anyone who is blindly against a new structure is not likely to be seriously consulted when it comes time to plan the footings on which it will be built.”[19] The Freeport Journal-Standard went even further, accusing Reuben of “a severe case of myopia.” Combining it with his opinion on other issues, they accused Reuben of being essentially outdated. They wrote:

The Illinois AFL-CIO is clinging desperately to an outlook developed in the 1930s. At that time, the outlook on the whole was sensible and farsighted. Today it is outmoded and harmful to the interests of (the) majority of the rank and file that the leadership is supposedly serving.[20]

The recalcitrant Reuben ignored such critiques. His executive board voted 17-0 to oppose any attempt to call a convention, warning any convention created under the current conditions would be Republican controlled and very reactionary. Again, papers throughout the state ridiculed the AFL-CIO’s position. As the editorial staff of the Bloomington Pantagraph opined:

Add 80 to 100 and normally you get 180. When you add the age of the AFL-CIO leadership in Illinois to the age of the ideas they want to keep, those same figures produce a big nothing…President Rube Soderstrom said that labor would lose all its gains. No constitution can erase the gains that labor has made and the changes that labor has created in our society in the past 100 years…Labor’s gains are too deeply rooted in the present day economic picture to be subject for constitutional debate.[21]

Like the Freeport Journal Standard staff, the Pantagraph editorialists centered a considerable amount of their fire on Reuben’s age (even the article’s title, “80 Plus 100 Equals Zero,” was a swipe at Reuben’s years).

The Right to Strike!

Attacks on Reuben’s age played an even bigger role in the fight over public employee unions. In the 1967 session Soderstrom tried once again to pass legislation formally allowing public employees to join unions. While most Republicans were willing to concede the legal recognition of such unions, they had one central, devastating demand: they wanted an amendment making strikes by such unions illegal. On the surface, such an amendment might appear a minor sacrifice, as the Illinois State Supreme Court had already ruled that public employees could not strike. However, the amendment proposed to go much further, outlining penalties for striking that then did not exist. Under the new law, the attorney general could seek injunctions against striking employees, and taxpayers could sue unions for “damages” (i.e. lost profits) incurred.[22]

Furthermore, the bill itself actually gave little to public employees. While there was no law allowing public employee unions, there was no law forbidding them either, and several public employee unions, including two powerful teachers’ unions, already existed. The bill also made membership in any public employee union strictly optional, effectively making it, in the words of one legislator, “a right-to-work bill.”[23]

None of this stopped Rep. Ed Madigan, R-Lincoln, from attempting to cast the legislation he helped craft as a pro-labor bill. The anti-strike measure, he claimed, was the only way unions could ever get such a bill passed. “Collective bargaining bills have been pending in the last three sessions,” he told a reporter at the Bloomington Pantagraph, “and have never been passed.” He also claimed to have the “full approval” of both the governor and Illinois AFL-CIO President Reuben Soderstrom.[24]

Reuben quickly took to the press to deny any support of the measure. He called it:

A frightfully bad anti-union proposal which outlawed the right to strike, and outlawed any union security clause in any union contract between public employees and public officials. It also construes picketing as striking, emphasizes the right not to join a union, which is designed to keep the union from having a majority of employees enrolled. This would be a company union that couldn’t strike, picket or even have a proper number of employees enrolled to constitute a majority of employees. This bill nullifies all contracts that public employees already have and would provide legalized nonunion or scab conditions for the largest group of employees in Illinois. We just can’t have that in our state![25]

That June he went to the Executive Committee of the Illinois House to give testimony against the bill, telling legislators:

We have found out of a lifetime of experience that the surest way to destroy collective bargaining is to repeal the workers’ right to strike every time negotiations reach an impasse. When that right is threatened by state and federal legislation, as is happening today, collective bargaining will not work. Bargaining can only take place when both sides have a reason to bargain. If labor has no right to strike then management has no reason to bargain. All of this indicates to me that the real way to prevent strikes is to allow wage earners to negotiate union contracts in the regular way…

The labor movement would like to have public officials and public bodies enter into a contractual relationship with local unions just as private contractors and employers do now. Legislation prohibiting strikes makes it difficult to get a reluctant employer or public official to sit down and bargain in good faith, He knows labor is powerless to do anything about it. He can thumb his nose at negotiations and he does! Once a contract is signed it becomes a no-strike document during the life of the contract.[26]

To defeat the bill Reuben teamed up with Rep. Thomas Hanahan Jr., D-McHenry, a pro-labor legislator and union man who believed the no-strike amendment “would completely emasculate the bill,” to add an amendment of his own permitting public employees to strike if their contract expired. It passed, effectively killing the entire bill.[27] Hanahan took pride in the results, telling his constituents and fellow union members:

Under no circumstances will I support legislation that will be a detriment to the AFL-CIO, or any union. You know, it is very easy these days to be wishy-washy. I truly believe that what my actions were and the actions of your executive board, and in particular, our revered President Reuben Soderstrom, that the actions taken…in the last session of the general assembly was not only courageous, but miraculous that we have succeeded.[28]

Not all in labor were pleased at the outcome, however. Public employee union officials had been in support of the bill, believing it to be the surest path to official recognition. That summer the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Union (AFSCME) attempted to press the leadership in the House and Senate to renew their activities to pass the bill. Reuben cut short his vacation with Olga as soon as he received the news, racing back to Illinois to squash the attempt. The union, angry and resentful, threatened to undo Reuben at the convention that fall. Soderstrom was furious, writing in a letter to the Illinois AFL-CIO Executive Board that September:

Their conduct has been reprehensible and dishonorable. They would like to impeach the state federation officers for defeating legislation which was not only out-of-line with the aims, purposes and objectives of the labor movement, but actually would have brought self-destruction to all public employees and irreparable harm to all other unions as well.[29]

STUBBORN TRADITIONALIST OR INSPIRED VISIONARY?

Later that month AFSCME attempted to make good on their threat. The first shot was fired during a “stormy session” of the Illinois AFL-CIO convention. Some 68 labor officials and public employee union delegates walked out before a speech by State Rep. Thomas Hanahan, who drafted amendments which killed the collective bargaining bill. They returned after his speech.

The 79-year-old Reuben was energized, active and alert. He and his lieutenants spent several hours that night working with public employee union officials, trying to find agreement on how strong a collective bargaining bill should be. They failed. Reuben emerged from the meeting late that night and told the press “All we want them (public employees unions) to do is bargain collectively like the rest of us do.”[30] AFSCME officials, meanwhile told reporters that they considered the demands of Soderstrom and Executive Board wholly unrealistic, noting that 11 states had public employee collective bargaining laws, and all contained “no strike” clauses.[31]

The next day delegates from the unions of public employees introduced resolutions critical of the Illinois AFL-CIO leadership. They called for an investigation of the lobbying practices of the Federation and its actions during the last General Assembly session, accusing the executive leadership of “malfeasance and maladministration of office.”[32] Even more biting, for the first time in his 37 years in office, Soderstrom’s stewardship of the Illinois AFL-CIO came under serious attack when AFSCME officials submitted a second resolution calling for a prohibition against anyone over the age of 65 from holding office at the state federation. While the vote on these propositions failed, they made front-page news across the state.[33]

Newspapers also largely attacked Reuben for his resolute position on a “no strike” clause. The Freeport Journal Standard wrote:

Mr. Soderstrom maintains that any legislation which contains a “no-strike” provision is on its face unacceptable. Such a position is unrealistic. Quite obviously there is some difference between a policeman or a school teacher striking and an auto worker or hod carrier walking off the job…The public employees section of the AFL-CIO itself recognizes that demanding a right to strike provision above all else is nonsensical, as it displayed by walking out of the convention in Peoria when the AFL-CIO leadership tried to tell the group otherwise. The real need is not for an ideological battle over the right to strike, but for enactment into law of provisions that will allow fair, intelligent resolution of differences between public employees without disrupting essential governmental functions.[34]

Across all the battles Soderstrom faced in 1967—the ConCon, the right to strike, and protective laws for female workers—he faced one consistent critique throughout: that his positions, once forward-thinking and in the mainstream of progressive thought, were now dated and out of step with the current needs of labor and the State. For labor to face the future, they claimed, they had to leave behind a leader who was mired in the past.

Was this an accurate assessment? From the beginning of his political life during the Progressive Era on through the Great Depression and World War II and into the age of the Great Society, Soderstrom consistently maintained his position on most of the seminal topics of his time. However, it would be highly inaccurate to label his opinions on these matters as static products of the times in which they were formed. Quite the opposite; when Reuben opposed the ConCon in the 1940s, for example, his position was as unpopular and out of the mainstream then as it was in 1967. In both eras, Reuben was virtually the only major force in Illinois politics opposing a new convention, and was mercilessly thrashed by editorialists and politicians alike. His opposition to the ConCon could not faithfully be described as old-fashioned, as it was never in-fashion; nor could his intent be described as reactionary, as he largely shared the progressive goals of the reformers, disagreeing more on tactics—Reuben preferred amending the existing constitution over a constitutional convention—than outcome.

Likewise, Soderstrom’s fight over a public union’s right to strike is a powerful example of Reuben being ahead of the times rather than behind them. While the Illinois AFSMCE leadership may have considered strikes antiquated, Reuben’s stubborn insistence on their value proved prescient. In May of that year, New York public employees swarmed Madison Square Garden to protest the proposed Taylor Law, which would deny public employees the right to strike. Despite its passage, NYC teacher and transit unions violated the act multiple times in the 1970s and 80s, asserting that “no one, no body of legislators or government officials can take from us our rights as free men and women to leave our jobs when sufficiently aggrieved: when a group of our members are so aggrieved, then indeed they will strike.”[35]

The NYC protest was just the tip of the iceberg; as labor researcher Dr. Dane M. Partridge later noted, “Public sector strike activity increased dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that such strikes were illegal in most states. Furthermore, public sector work stoppages increased to record levels at a time when strike activity was decreasing in the economy as a whole.”[36] Public worker strikes were labor’s greatest success stories of the 1960s and 1970s, a time that (not coincidentally) corresponded with record growth in public sector unionization even as overall unionization numbers remained flat. In his groundbreaking work Strike Back, historian and former labor attorney Joe Burns covers the public sector strike movement in detail, noting that teachers, sanitation workers, air traffic controllers, and social workers combined to create an “explosion of strike activity (which) spanned the breath of the country, from major northern cities to rural western towns to southern ‘right to work’ states.”[37] In insisting on the right of public employees to strike, Reuben proved himself to be more forward-thinking than his opponents—yet another example of how, even at 79, Soderstrom kept his finger on the pulse of labor.

While the issue of the Women’s Eight-Hour Law is more complicated than the ConCon or the right to strike, Soderstrom was far from the only figure or thinker to grapple with the feminist movement’s change in focus. Truthfully, it is simplistic to describe the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s as monolithic and single-issue. Not all women’s groups were supportive of NOW’s efforts. A sizable number of advocates—particularly those representing women of color and of lower socio-economic status—didn’t approve of NOW’s approach, which they viewed as primarily concerned with the desires of white, upper-class and middle-class women. As the Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray, an American civil rights and women’s rights activist, pointedly complained after NOW’s first conference in Washington D.C.,“I saw no Catholic sisters, no women of ethnic minorities other than about five Negro women, and obviously no women who represent the poor.”[38] She and others sought to avoid Title VII fights, choosing to fight discrimination on 14th Amendment grounds because, as historian Robert Self notes, “This approach meant the broadest possible protection for women because it would require not the abrogation of all laws making distinction by sex, but only those that could be proved to materially harm women.”[39]

Many female labor leaders—particularly those who represented blue-collar working women—agreed with Reuben’s position on Title VII challenges to eight-hour day laws. Laura Gabel, who represented over 8,500 women in the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union in Los Angeles, argued “retention of the 8-hour day for women is vital to maintenance of a humane labor system…(it) represents a great advance (which) come about only after years of struggle on the part of labor.”[40] California’s Status of Women Commission Chair Ruth Miller likewise noticed the economic discrepancy between those seeking to keep hour protections and those seeking their removal. She aggressively questioned several employers during her commission’s hearings on their true motives and implications, asking one “Has it occurred to you that there might be some rather unpleasant results of the removal of the eight-hour restriction for [women in] less advantaged industries?”[41]

It is clear from Reuben’s letters on this subject that he was supportive of the professional advancement of women, but he did not believe it should come at the expense of those women who were economically disadvantaged or remained in traditional laboring jobs. He viewed bills like the one proposed in the Illinois House (a partial repeal) as “false flag” legislation aimed at pitting women against each other “No employer has ever been denied or refused a relaxation of the Act to meet a tight or urgent situation,” he maintained. “No employer or professional employee has ever been prosecuted or brought into a court of law because of alleged violations with respect to professionals.”[42]

When taken as a whole, there is far more evidence that the 79-year-old Reuben was more of a visionary than a reactionary. His opponents were not youth in revolt, but a mix of generally older officials and movement leaders who disagreed with him not over the old-fashioned nature of his views but on his uncompromising insistence on first principles, solidarity, and a deferential preference for the poor. For him, the past was not a golden age but prologue. It was a dark age from which labor had emerged—a progression from which today’s leaders could draw instruction and inspiration:

During this period of darkness and crisis labor unions and this state became an island of hope so that future generations might live in a better world. As we sit here today enjoying the efforts of the pioneers and enjoying prosperity, I think we ought to offer a silent prayer of thanksgiving for men like John Walker, Victor Olander, and John Fitzpatrick and all of the charter members of our local unions. Fifty years ago the world, as it is today, was a troubled state. Low wages and long hours and intolerable working conditions existed everywhere, in mills, mines, factories, and in the trades until workers banded together into unions.

The eight-hour day was the paramount issue around the turn of the century. It took thirty years of sacrifice, struggle, strikes and picket lines to firmly establish the eight-hour workday in the State of Illinois. If the unions had done nothing more for their members than to establish for them the eight-hour day they would have justified their existence.

As I look back over the sixty years of labor history, when I think of the hours of toil that have been lessened and the wages that have been increased, and the working conditions that have been improved, when I think of the joint safety Labor-Management Committees and the accidents that have been prevented and the lives that have been saved, when I think of the sum total of human misery that has been avoided and the happiness extended to millions of workers, I search my mind for words to describe the debt we owe the pioneers of the Illinois movement of labor![43] Illinois’s Lion of Labor was feisty, defensive, thoughtful and brave. It was a good thing, because the next year would be one of the most active in his long and storied career.

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