People : Author : Rose Pesotta Tags

Rose Pesotta
Bread upon the Waters
CHAPTER 9
Some History is Recorded in Chicago
MY MEXICAN co-delegate, BeatriceLopez, and I arrived in Chicago early Sunday morning, May 27. The specialtrain bringing the Eastern delegation to the convention was due at 10 a.m.,and we joined the official reception committee. I was happy to find manyof my New York friends among the delegates or guests, especially Anna Sosnovsky.Chums of long standing and classmates at Brookwood Labor College, we hadmuch to talk about. She had organized several hundred cotton garment workers,mostly girls and newcomers in the industry, in Newark, New Jersey, andwas now representing their local at the convention.
While we sat at breakfast, several delegates announced that they had"decided" to sponsor me as their candidate for a vise-presidencyin the International. I was too astonished to say anything, and the girlswent on to remind me that there was no woman on our General Executive Board.This was ridiculous, they said, in a predominantly women's industry. Inthe past, two women had served at different time as vise-presidents÷FanniaM. Cohn, now executive secretary of our educational department, and MollyFriedman, who resigned after she married and retired to private life toraise a family.
I tried to make clear that I had no wish to be a vise-president of theILGWU, though I recognized that it would be a great honor. Now that I hadfinished my job in California, I wanted only to return to a sewing machinein a New York dress shop.
The rest of the day I was so busy helping to check in delegates andplace them in hotels, that I had no time to give the vise-presidency ideaanother thought.
A serious problem arose at the Medinah Michigan Avenue Club, conventionheadquarters, where we were to hold our sessions. The management refusedto admit the Negro delegates from Local 22. In protest, the rest of No.22's delegation declined to check in, and remained outside, their baggagebeside them. After a protracted argument, the management relaxed its rule,and the delegation filed in and registered.
It is usual for the local ILGWU organization in a convention city toput on a good show in welcoming delegates and guests. Chicago, under theleadership of Morris Bialis, the International's vise-president there,did a creditable job. As a prelude, the Chicago unionists had organizeda parade, and on Monday morning 9,000 dress and cloakmakers marched fromCanal and Van Buren Streets to West Side Carmen's Hall on Ashland Boulevard.The women wore white costumes, with white overseas caps bearing the lettersILGWU, and the men wore similar caps of blue. Cheering onlookers linedthe sidewalks five deep, and countless flags waved, as the marching workerssang to stirring music played by three brass bands.
Carmen's Hall, with a seating capacity of 4,000, was swiftly filled,and an overflow of several thousand blackened the streets outside. Thestage was gay with flags and flowers, sent by locals and shop groups ofworkers.
Vise-President Bialis officially opened the convention. Slender andboyish-looking, with a mane of black wavy hair and clear black eyes, heseemed to personify the militant spirit of the International. Victor A.Olander, secretary of the Illinois Federation of Labor, made the welcomingaddress; and Alderman Oscar F. Nelson, a vise-president of the ChicagoFederation of Labor, extended "the key to the city" to the delegatesin behalf of Mayor Edward J. Kelly. Then Bialis turned the convention overto David Dubinsky, president of the International.
Before beginning his keynote address, Dubinsky asked the assembly tostand in silent tribute to his predecessor, Benjamin Schlesinger, who diedshortly after being reelected to the presidency in Philadelphia in 1932.
D.D. reviewed the struggles of the ILGWU through difficult years, asit surmounted great obstacles and fought enemies outside and inside. Sentenceby sentence, he built up a compelling picture of the tremendous significanceof our organization's achievements. One got a new conception of the International,of the boundless energy, stubborn devotion to an ideal, and stamina ithad taken to rebuild the organization out of the wreckage left by the dualunion after the disastrous 26-weeks' strike in New York in 1926. That hadbeen our first defeat, he pointed out; it left the ILGWU saddled with adebt exceeding $2,000,000, a shameful monument to the reckless spendingorgy which characterized the "left wing" administration thenin power.
The International had ridden out the storm and cleared the bulk of itsobligations, and its 35th anniversary was being celebrated with the greatestconvention it had ever held. The ILGWU membership had dropped from 110,000in 1920, to 40,000 in January I, 1933. Now it had climbed to a height ofnearly 200,000. At this 22nd biennial gathering were 369 delegates, 143locals, and 13 joint boards, located in 73 cities in 16 states and Canada.
Our president dwelt on how the union had pioneered in collective bargaining,and in labor education, enlisted the aid of public-spirited citizens andgovernment officials in the fight to eliminate sweatshops, protected thehealth of the workers, participated in community activities, given aidto charitable institutions, and helped other labor organizations both inthis country and abroad in their battles to uphold human rights. The Internationalhad reduced working hours in our industry to 35, won high minimum wagescales, and established the right of workers to their jobs, so they couldnot be discharged without review by a proper impartial tribunal.
Dubinsky touched upon the 1930 industrial upheaval, when tens of thousandsof our workers lost their jobs, employers forced work conditions down tothe lowest possible level, and the sweatshop in its worst forms reappeared.In the three years following, garment makers were close to starvation.
When the National Industrial Recovery Act came into being as a partof the New Deal, our workers benefited greatly, Dubinsky recalled, "largelybecause of the militancy of our union and its readiness not only to threatento strike, but actually to resort to strikes when the occasion called forit."
Mainly, however, he declared, our success was achieved because we concentratedour drive during the early months of the NRA, the "honeymoon period,"and because our International, like the United Mine Workers and the AmalgamatedClothing Workers, was quick to realize the importance of the new law.
At that time the administration in Washington appeared ready to givethe underdog a break, and employers had not yet shown much. resistanceto the NRA Codes. This came when the heavy basic indus-tries became involvedin Code hearings.
In the nonunion industries, the Codes were not being enforced, andflagrant violations by the most "patriotic" employers were com-mon.The unions, however, were in a better position to enlist the services ofthe NRA for enforcement; they could insist, under threat of strikes, thatrestitution of wages be made to underpaid workers. In our industry, tensof thousands of dollars in back pay were col-lected for ILGWU members.
Dubinsky regarded as a mistake the efforts of the Darrow Com-missionto maintain the small businessman's existence at all costs.
"From the first day of the depression," he declared, "itwas clear that the little man could survive only at the expense of labor.Un-willing to admit that economic forces were working against him, andthat he would shortly become a part of the working class himself or starve,the small business man continued a haphazard existence by slashing wageshere, chiseling there, lengthening hours....
"The little businessman ought to realize that as a capitalist hecuts a sorry figure, and that no legislation or other force can turn theclock back for him. In any event, labor does not propose to be exploitedby him. We refuse to return to the sweatshop or permit the degradationof our workers to justify or extend the existence of the small businessman."
Applause rocked the big auditorium as our president finished with thesewords:
"It was an outcry of injustice against miserable conditions thatfinally prompted the Government to begin thinking and talking and consideringsocial legislation. But it will be the power of organized labor that willmake it not only the subject for discussion, but a matter of law, a matterof practice, a matter of relief to the op-pressed....
"We are serving humanity, fighting for freedom.... Our cause isjust and our purpose is noble. Our defeats are only temporary setbacks.We are bound to win.... United as never before, shoul-der to shoulder,let us go marching on to our future battles and more glorious victories."
Short-statured and in his early forties, Dubinsky had a peaches--and-creamcomplexion, so cherished by women. In a corner of his mouth was clampeda cigar which peeled apart as it was smoked to a stub. At times his roundface, with upturned nose, would take on the expression of a baby. Gavelin one hand and cigar in the other, he conducted the convention sessionsmasterfully.
Much has been said and written, both commendatory and critical, aboutthe president of our International, since that convention. Some observershave compared him to the young David slaying the giant Goliath; othersconsider him almost a demigod whose wisdom cannot even be questioned. Reactionariesclassify him among the hated New Dealers, a connotation damning him inthe eyes of profiteers, Tam-many politicians, and gangsters.
As I viewed him on the opening day in Chicago, during the two weeksthere, and in my close association with him through ten succeeding years(as a member of the General Executive Board), Dubinsky was and is an ordinarymortal, who happens to be living in a period favorable to his type of leadership.And clearly he is not infallible.
He is the third man to head the ILGWU since I joined the union, andto my mind the luckiest of the three. Benjamin Schlesinger, cloakmaker,the first, put the organization on a rock-solid founda-tion. Morris Sigman,presser, became president at the beginning of the internecine war, neverrecovered from its blows. Abraham Baroff, congenial and fatherly, one ofthe builders of the Waistmakers' Local 25, served as secretary-treasurerfor ten years under both Schlesinger and Sigman. Late in the Twenties Sigmanresigned, and Schlesinger again became president. Baroff retired later,and Dubinsky, manager of Cutters' Local 10, and since 1922 an Internationalvise-president, was chosen to succeed him.
When Benjamin Schlesinger died in 1932 Dubinsky was elected as president-secretary-treasurer,and has held that joint post ever since. Within a year after he assumedofffice the whole American labor movement underwent a radical change. Withfavorable legislation to help them rebuild the ILGWU, he and the GEB hadthe cooperation of a loyal corps of men and women in various cities whohad given their hearts' blood to keep our organization from being destroyedin a critical time.
I came to know Dubinsky in the following years as a man of tremendousvitality, ready to undertake almost any big task, provided he was surethe huge membership of the International was behind him. An individualof strong feelings, sensitive and impulsive, he could alternately be ruthlessor break out in tears of humility.
Many times across a decade I dared to contradict him, when I saw thatwith all his knowledge of governmental, labor, and social problems, hewas unaware of the existence of issues confronting me at the moment insome remote part of the country. Sitting in his New York office, he doesnot always readily comprehend the peculiar situations faced by an organizerafield, and one cannot always give detailed explanations over the longdistance telephone.
Hence I frequently took liberties, using my own judgment in endeavorsto act in the best interests of the union and the workers involved. RememberingAdmiral Dewey, who cut the cable with the States so that he would not behampered in winning the Battle of Manila, I found that an organizer oftenhad to make her own decisions, even though they ran counter to her superior'sinstructions. But usually when there was reckoning afterwards, D.D. acceptedthe situation like a sportsman.
I had been appointed to serve on the organization committee of whichVise-President Joseph Breslaw, manager of Pressers' Local 35, was chairman,and at its initial meeting, I was chosen secretary.
All proposed resolutions on organization were referred to us÷and requestsfor organizers, charters, funds, educational directors, literature, andother forms of co-operation. We were in almost continuous session thatfirst week. A constant stream of delegates came to us to explain conditionsin their respective areas, and we got first-hand information about whatwas happening in our industry all over the land.
Enactment of the NIRA in 1933 had a profound effect upon milllions ofexploited people. Unorganized workers who had never before raised the questionof their rights as human beings, and who had accepted whatever they weregiven as inevitable, suddenly awakened to the fact that they were partof a great democratic nation. With a new sense of their own value in production,they began to clamor for organization. They had new and solid standingground in Section 7-a of the Recovery Act, which provided that workershad a right to join unions of their own choosing.
Stirred by the victorious general strikes of the Philadelphia and NewYork dressmakers, workers in the garment industry all over the countrycalled upon our International for guidance. We became aware of groups ofworkers numbering tens of thousands, in widely scattered cities where factorieshad sprung up like mushrooms during the depression.
These shops came into being as a result of advertisements by Chambersof Commerce offering alluring advantages to industry, such as free factorysites, no taxes, free power, and a dependable supply of labor, "cheap,plentiful, and contented."
Many workers in those factories were wives and daughters of unemployedminers, factory workers, and farmers, who had taken jobs at any pay offered.But they were not so contented nor so dumb as their sanguine employersbelieved. Many, too, were the wives and children of former union men. WhenNew Deal legislation gave governmental sanction to labor unions "ofthe workers' own choosing," the awakened ones realized the pressingneed of working-class solidarity.
Our national office responded quickly to the flood of inquiries, hasteningto send detailed information and constructive advice, and dispatching chartersand organizers wherever they were most needed. Organization drives werestarted simultaneously in many areas, some hitherto untouched Missouri,Illinois, Texas, Georgia) Ohio, Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, andon the Pacific Coast. Campaigns were carried on in at least 60 cities.Delegates from these centers gave our committee the human side of the story,the dramatic phases, the minor notes, that seldom get into formal reports.
Occasionally the committee recessed to hear addresses of special importancein the convention hall. This conclave was truly a pageant÷a richly coloredmoving panorama chronicling major victories of labor. Its interests anddiscussions were not confined to the ILGWU, large as that had now grown.We were concerned with the fortunes and fate of all workers throughoutthe world, and with their right to those liberties since called "theFour Freedoms."
To the flower-decked convention platform came a long line of distinguishedguests÷public officials and veterans of the industrial struggle and otherswhose hearts had long been close to labor's continuing fight for a betterworld. Among the speakers were men and women who had been arrested on picketlines; who had faced onslaughts by police clubs; who knew the inside ofcourtrooms and jails. Some brought close to us the tragedy of the Europeanlabor movement under the iron heels of Fascism and Naziism. Through thespeeches one dominant note constantly resounded: "Fight Fascism everywhere!Fight Fascism in any guise! "
Two speakers whose words made a deep impression were political refugees÷MartinPlettl, from Germany, fraternal delegate from the International ClothingWorkers' Federation, then centered in Amsterdam, Holland, who spoke inGerman, and Dr. Max Winter, former vise-mayor of Vienna, who had escapedwith his life and little else, from the terror under the Dollfuss regime.
"Vienna has been fighting and starving since February," saidDr. Winter, "not only for Vienna but for the workers the world over.On May Day we were not allowed to hold public meetings of workers, butwe had, in the Vienna woods, three great mass meetings...."
He told of a friend, John Bertzer, a former clothing worker and memberof the Austrian Parliament, who died in jail from starvation. The authoritiesforbade any announcement of the funeral. But the news spread secretly andswiftly, and when his body was brought to a crematory, 2,000 workers quicklygathered there.
"Not a word was allowed to be said in honor of my dead comrade,"Dr. Winter related. "No flowers were permitted on his coffin. Butas it sank into the fire those 2,000 men and women shouted: 'Freedom! Freedom!Freedom! "'
Then Luigi Antonini, vise-president of the International and secretary-managerof Italian Local 89, largest local in the ILGWU, with a membership nearing40,000, reminded the delegates of the nearness of June 10, the date onwhich the Italian Socialist Giacomo Matteotti was killed by Fascists. Itwas hard to realize that Matteotti was dead. One recalled his words: "Liberty,liberty÷it is like the air we breathe. We do not miss it until it is gone."First Vise-President Salvatore Ninfo added that it was only 11 months sinceyoung Anthony Fierro, Italian anti-Fascist, had been murdered in New Yorkby a member of the Khaki Shirts of America.
My interest was held strongly when William D. Lopez of the Puerto RicoFree Federation of Labor spoke. He told of the plight of that island's100,000 women needle workers. For 20 years Puerto Rico had been used asa source of cheap labor by outside manufacturers. Wages there were incrediblylow. Listening, I formed my own mental picture of the sorry lot of thosevictims of employers' greed. It was akin to that of the Mexican women andgirls in Los Angeles, whom I had organized a few months before.
Lopez urged the ILGWU to take the Puerto Rican needle workers underits wing. President Dubinsky answered that the convention already had beforeit a General Executive Board recommendation for an early organizing campaignin the island.
Jim Crowism cropped up anew at the Medinah Club at the end of the firstweek, when elevator operators refused to let the Negro delegates ride withwhites, and ordered them to use the freight elevators. So the GEB movedthe whole convention over to the Morrison Hotel. Tumultuous applause greetedthe announcement of its decision. The organization committee was the firstto hand in its report. On all requests for organizers and organizationdrives we made affirmative recommendations. When we reached the sectionof the report covering the Pacific Coast, which urged continuation of unionizingcampaigns in San Francisco's Chinatown and in the Northwest, PresidentDubinsky called on both Vise-President Feinberg and myself to tell thedelegates about the situation in our territory.
This was the third time in my life I had faced an ILGWU convention asa speaker. My thoughts flashed back to Cleveland in 1922, when I triedto speak in behalf of a fellow delegate whose seat was contested, and wasshushed down by President Schlesinger. Later I again demanded the floor,got it, and held it until I had voiced a plea for a resolution callingfor liberation of all political prisoners in Soviet Russia. And as a guestspeaker at the 1924 convention in Boston, I voiced a plea for the samecause, before a partly hostile audience.
Now, in Chicago, commended by Dubinsky for my work on the West Coast,I was listened to attentively and sympathetically. Some of my coworkers,who had never before been outside their own environment, sat with openmouths.
On Sunday two bus-loads of delegates went to Waldheim cemetery, to laya wreath on the joint grave of the five Haymarket martyrs: Parsons, Spies,Fischer, and Engel, who were hanged, and Lingg, killed by a dynamite explosionin his cell, never plausibly explained by the jailers. I presided at theceremony, Arturo Giovannitti and others speaking.
They brought one close to the long reign of police terror in Chicagoin 1886, growing out of organized labor's fight for an eight-hour day;the bomb, thrown by an unseen hand at a protest meeting; and the trial,in a hysterical atmosphere, before a biased judge, and with a jury crookedlychosen to serve anti-labor forces. And they paid tribute to Governor Altgeld,who, in freeing the other eight defendants from prison in 1892, declaredthat the whole eight were convicted of murder chiefly because they wereAnarchists, and that there was no evidence that any of them was guilty.
Throughout the convention my Eastern friends kept hammering at me, insistingthat I accept the nomination for vise-president. They argued that we mustnot pass up such a splendid opportunity to place a women on the GEB again;that mine was the best record of those eligible; that I was from "outof town" and therefore would be deposing no one. A-t least three womendelegates, two from New York and one from Cleveland, were gunning for thepost, these friends said.
Emphatically I reiterated that I did not want it. I tried to make myreasons clear. I had no ambition to hold executive authority. Valuing myown freedom, I wanted to avoid getting into harness, and to keep from becomingenmeshed in inner-circle politics. Too, I felt that I could serve the causeof my fellow-unionists just as effectively as a rank-and-file member. Andit was my contention that the voice of a solitary woman on the GeneralExecutive Board would be a voice lost in the wilderness. Having expressedmyself positively on the subject, I dismissed it from my mind, consideringthe issue closed.
To my great surprise on the last day of the convention, I was greetedin the Morrison lobby by several delegates who cried: "Congratulationson your nomination! " Indignantly I answered that I had never agreedto be a candidate.
"It's all settled," Isidore Nagler, a member of the caucuscommittee, told me. "You were officially nominated last night. It'stoo late to do anything about it now."
I poured out more protesting words.
"You're crazy to talk that way," Nagler said. "I knowsome women here who'd give an arm for a place on the board. One of themsat in the caucus room until five o'clock this morning pleading that shebe nominated."
Gloom pressed down upon me.
When the nominations for the eight out-of-town vise-presidencies weremade, Delegate Edith Phillips of St. Louis put forward my name. I felthot and cold at the same time. It seemed as if I were being dragged downby some dread force÷like a swimmer caught in an undertow. I wanted to cryout in protest, but my throat felt paralyzed.
All eight nominees were elected by acclamation.
Just before adjournment, Dubinsky asked Sol Polakoff, a former vise-presidentand one of the ILGWU's oldest leaders, to take the chair and swear in thenewly elected board.
The delegates stood up and a hush came over the entire audience as wewent through the solemn ceremony:
"I do hereby sincerely pledge my honor," each of us repeatedafter Polakoff, "to perform the duties of my office as prescribedby the laws of the union and to bear true allegiance to the ILGWU...."
This ritual, and the seriousness with which the whole regarded it, stirredme deeply, and helped console me as I assumed office.
Yet that was one of the most unhappy days of my life, and my diary showsthis entry: "The greatest misfortune happened to me this morning.The convention delegates unanimously elected me to serve on the GEB fortwo years. Although there were several who aspired to that office, theywere opposed, all favoring me. Some one else who wanted this honor wouldhave been happy÷I feel as if I had lost my independence. Cried the wholeday."
• Chapter 10 : I Go to Puerto Rico