I’ve been watching a series on BBC-2 called “The Seven Industrial Wonders of the World”. Tonight’s episode was the story of the Hoover Dam which was built during the ‘made in Washington DC’ depression era of the 1930’s. The Beeb did a mostly bang-up job and filled in much interesting detail on the harsh and dangerous condition the workers endured.
They showed the Bosses versus the Union. The organizer and everyone with him got fired and run off the job site. Many workers had serious health disabilities caused by working in improperly ventilated tunnels with gasoline powered machinery packed to the rafters. The company claimed illnesses were pneumonia when they were plainly caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
One worker sued and claimed, among other things, sexual dysfunction. The nasty old bosses set a prostitute on him… and she later testified in court that his function was quite satisfactory!
The Beeb told us the heroic Union organizer was from the IWW or International Workers of the World. The Wobblies. They left out a ‘minor’ detail: the IWW was a Communist front organization. I happened to be quite aware of who they were because I gigged in a Pittsburgh South Side Bar called “Wobbly Joe’s” for many years. To those not familiar with the Pittsburgh that once was, the South Side was Steel Worker country. [Remind me to tell you the story about the night I got my tires slashed after beating a local in an impromptu drag race in my souped up MGB]
The Wobbly’s of the 1930’s were widely known to be Communists. This is no conspiracy theory. They were Reds, pure and simple. Just try a google on the terms: “IWW Communist”.
I know how Communists operate albiet (fortuneately!) not as well as some here at Samizdata who grew up under them. If this was the source of information on the Union strife at the Hoover Dam, then the information is likely as truthful as a Pravda editorial. That the BBC neglected to inform the viewing audience of this places a very big question mark on all the rest of their historical information about the working conditions and worker mistreatment.
I do not doubt things described in the documentary could be true, but I require a more trustworthy source than 1930’s Marxist-Leninists to convince me.
The BBC version sounded exactly like the ole Soviet Pravada version. I’ve seen documentary on American Discovery and History Channel about Boulder Dam (Congress forced the name change to Hoover Dam, over the objection of Roosevelt), and nothing quite so colorful.
Didn’t Clarence Darrow do work for the Hover Dam unions?
Access to Soviet archives has begun to slowly rewrite the history of America’s union movements. According to documentary evidence, communists infiltrated many (not all) labor unions as well as government commision overseeing industry-labor relationships. This has cast into doubt much of the accepted history of the rise of the AFL and CIO, as well as official accounts of labor strife.
In particular, the communists infiltrated Senator La Follete’s commision which investigated union activity. While La Follete was anti-communist, his affiliation with the Progressive Party, which had a large number of covert communist members, allowed communists to infiltrate his commission. The significance of this lies in La Follete’s reports on industry-union interactions which may have been slanted by communist members to favor the unions against industry.
It sounds as if the BBC may have taken out of date historical accounts on face value without exploring those written with recently available Soviet archive documentation.
See The Secret World of American Communism by Harvey Klehr and John Haynes.
Does anyone know how can i get me some of these communist super-powers? Seems like all you need to do is “infiltrate” an organisation, & suddenly you’re in control of it… f**ing brilliant! If only the Samizdatans could acquire the same powers, they’d just have to get jobs in the right institutions, & before you know it, they’d have the whole world marching to a libertarian drumbeat… fantastic!
Well since the Aging Aquarians are in the latter stages of their Long March through the institutions I’d say we’ve seen recent evidence of just such a thing. All it takes is time, numbers, and patience.
A_t. Don’t worry. We’re working on it.
David: Yes, I’ve seen some of the historical research that has come of this. The one that most surprised me was that the Rosenbergs really *WERE* guilty of the treason they were executed for. The Russian records showed they were passing the H bomb info on to the KGB.
The other shocker was just how many communist infiltrators they had in the State department and other places in the US government in the late 40’s and early 50’s. I’d always thought it was right wing commie under the bed stuff.
However Joe McCarthy still comes off pretty badly in my book. He didn’t actually catch any of the real moles. He just managed to make life miserable for lots and lots of innocent people.
One wonders if some day we’ll find out he was being paid to both not find the real ones and stir up discontent by tromping on the Bill of Rights.
A_t. There is no secret to it. I’ve *watched* leftish organizations get taken over, one step at a time, by hardliners. It’s like the hatching of the cuckoos egg.
A_t,
I wasn’t talking about any great re-write of history, merely a better understanding of the facts. This BBC episode seems to have used a one-sided and possibly biased account of industry-labor relations. The opening of various Soviet archives and the declassification of western intelligence data is allowing us to re-evaluate our understanding of what actually happened. Just like the declassification of ULTRA allowed us to better understand how the Allies defeated the U-Boat threat in WWII.
Here is how covert communists could change our perception of 1920s and 1930s U.S. labor problems. Say, for example, the leadership of a labor union in a western state decides to call a strike. Nobody in the public knows that the leadership are mostly covert members of the CPUSA. During the strike, the leaders (covert communists) incite the union membership to commit acts of petty vandalism. Although nothing major, industry reports the incidents to the police. The police arrive on the scene to investigate, and the CPUSA members in the union deliberately get into an unprovoked scuffle with the police.
The scuffle gets into the news and La Follette sends two of his committee investigators to check it out, not realizing that both are covert members of the CPUSA. These investigators return with a story of police and industry conspiring to violently suppress the union. La Follette releases his report and it now enters the history books as the vicious capitalists oppressing the working man.
The communists in the United States rarely had enough numbers or power to seriously impact U.S. government policy. However, they did have enough people in enough places – such as a combination of union leadership and government labor committees – to at times skew our understanding of historical events.
That’s all I was saying.
Dale,
Here’s a quote from Secret World of American Communists:
“Communists lied to and deceived the New Dealers with whom they were allied. Those liberals who believed the denials then denounced as mudslingers those anti-Communists who complained of concealed Communist activity. Furious at denials of what they knew to be true, anti-Communists then suspected that those who denied the Communist presence were themselves dishonest. The Communists’ duplicity poisoned normal political relationships and contributed to the harshness of the anti-Communist reaction of the late 1940s and 1950s.”
Joe McCarthy opportunistically fed off this poisened political climate to get himself in the public limelight. Ironically, U.S. intelligence agencies had used decrypted Soviet spy cables and the defection of dissafected CPUSA members to run down most of the major Soviet moles and agent rings by the time McCarthy came on the scene.
In retrospect, we could have been spared the McCarthy hysteria if the government had been a little more open about the threat and how they had largely dealt with it already. At the time I am sure the intel guys thought that any such disclosure would give the Soviets enough insight in order to rebuild their agent networks. I’ve heard arguments both ways and don’t know enough to form an opinion.
Although Dale is generally right about CPUSA infiltration of US labor unions, the specific instance of the IWW has some errors. First, IWW stands (the union still exists, just barely) for “Industrial Workers of the World”. It has never been formally Communist or Marxist, and in fact was closest to anarcho-syndicalism, although they also denied that they were that. Many far-left labor agitators were IWW’s between 1905 when it was founded, and 1919-21, when the precursors of the CPUSA were formed. Most of the hard-core types left the IWW for the CP at that point. The remnant was never all the significant thereafter, although they continued to have pockets of strength in some indutries through the early 1950s. They were popular at that point primarily because they more honest than the AFL unions, less cadre-controlled than the CIO, but still strong bargainers. Ironically, they effectively excluded Communists because they opposed political control of unions in the USSR, but they refused to sign the anti-communist affadavits required in the 1950s because of their general hostility to government. This ended their last areas of real membership strength, mostly machinists in the Cleveland area, who needed to be represented by effective bargaining agents.
“Wobbly”, the nickname for IWW members, became a general term for a hard-core union militant, as “bolshie” has become British slang for a pain-in-the-ass type. “Wobbly Joe” couldn’t have been an actual IWW member if he was actually a CPUSA member — IWW rules excluded them, and the CPUSA was more interested in infiltrating the CIO.
IIRC, the Wobs actually won a labor dispute in the ’70s. Trivial little thing; ushers and such at a single movie theater in Chicago, but hey, it was a win.
The IWW is actively seeking a resurgence right now, presenting themselves, based on the “World” in their name, as the original anti-globalizationists.
There was a lot of interconnection during the time of history we are discussing.
Also, the Joe in “Wobbly Joe’s Cafe” was Joe Hill, as in “I dreamed I saw, Joe Hill last night, alive as you and I”. Also, there was a mural on the wall of the “One Big Union Gets The Job Done.” which was kind of cute… it was the night time outline of cats on a fence leading a whole bunch of kittens following the two adult cats…
It’s also the only place I ever ran into someone who admitted to being a Communist organizer (well other than a secretary of a start up company I was in who was selling the SWP newspaper!) before I moved to Belfast and ran into the common UK academic variety of the species.
David writes:
“Ironically, U.S. intelligence agencies had used decrypted Soviet spy cables and the defection of dissafected CPUSA members to run down most of the major Soviet moles and agent rings by the time McCarthy came on the scene.
In retrospect, we could have been spared the McCarthy hysteria if the government had been a little more open about the threat and how they had largely dealt with it already. At the time I am sure the intel guys thought that any such disclosure would give the Soviets enough insight in order to rebuild their agent networks. I’ve heard arguments both ways and don’t know enough to form an opinion.”
In reading McCollough’s biography of Truman, I didn’t have the impression that Truman felt that the threat had largely been dealt with already. (According to McCollough, Truman was the one who authorized the investigation into governmental workers’ communist affiliations.)
So, I’d say be careful when using the word “government.” Some would construe it to mean the President’s administration, and in this case I don’t think that would be correct. Could the “intel guys” have known, and kept it from Truman (or his cabinet)? Most certainly. Which raises a whole other set of interesting questions.
If anyone wants to recommend reading material on this subject, it would be most welcomed.
cj,
You’re right, when I said “government” some could construe it as merely the administration. It was actually the entire federal government. For example, La Follette eventually became aware that communists had infiltrated his senate commission and he fired them. Also, when FDR established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) one of the three commisioners as well as the staff director were covert communists. The staff director then hired several other communists to positions on the NLRB. The significance of this comes from the NLRB’s power to arbitrate when the non-communist AFL and the communist-influenced CIO attempted to unionize the same workers. The covert NLRB communists coordinated NLRB investigations with the CIO head attorney, a non-very covert communist, in order to favor the CIO over the AFL. The problem the communists had was that they couldn’t actually do much before people became suspicious. In 1940, FDR investigated the NLRB and removed those members who had obvious communist sympathies. So it was congress, the FBI, FDR, Truman, as well as state and local officials which worked to uncover communist influences throughout American government.
In retrospect, the Soviets had better luck when they used the CPUSA as a source of information than as a source for agents of influence. When the CPUSA members attempted to become agents of influence, they tended to expose themselves which got them removed from their posts.
I am of the opinion that FDR did more harm to freedom and democracy in this country through the New Deal and his attempts to pack the Supreme Court than any covert communists ever did. Still, hidden histories are pretty cool.