The Communist Party (CP) and its allies played a role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but largely wasn't successful either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the Congress of Industrial Organizations's (CIO) expulsion of unions in which the party held the most influence in 1950. The expelled parties were often raided by stronger unions, and most withered away.Max M. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO: A Study in Power Politics (1957).
Historiography
Scholars disagree why the American union movement never formed a major labor party, and why American workers have never embraced socialist parties. German sociologist Werner Sombart emphasized the absence of socialism. Seymour Martin Lipset compared the US and Canada and asked why Canada had more success; Ira Katznelson looked at weaknesses in the working class, and Kim Voss emphasized early union formations. Others argue that a strain of American exceptionalism made US workers resistant to parties that emphasized class struggle. Some say that Americans downplayed political and social agendas for the sake of unity, so that short-term gains and building strong unions came at the cost of a potential labor party. Others say the left lost its power to lead the labor movement by what commenters charged were 'ideological zig-zags'.Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton University Press, 2007) pp 1-19. The Communist role within the labor movement support parts of all of these theses.Seymour Martin Lipset, and Gary Marks, It didn't happen here: why socialism failed in the United States (WW Norton & Company, 2000).
Factionalism, zig zags and retreats After playing a leading role in the United Automobile Workers's (UAW) victories in Flint against General Motors and Chrysler in 1937, the Communist Party found itself under sharp attack from its opponents within the UAW. Homer Martin, first president of the UAW, sought to drive out all of the left activists within the UAW in order to eliminate any rival contenders for power. Martin brought in Jay Lovestone, former executive secretary of the CP before his expulsion in 1929, as his advisor and installed Lovestone supporters in key positions throughout the union.
Martin only succeeded, however, in bringing about his own downfall. After he failed to persuade the UAW Convention in 1937 to give him authority to fire organizers and eliminate local union newspapers, Martin set out to expel his rivals. After firing or transferring a number of CP members who had played prominent roles in the Flint sit-down strike, Martin first suspended, then expelled, Mortimer and his other opponents on the UAW's Executive Board. The CIO leadership, alarmed by the possibility that sectarian infighting might destroy the UAW, forced Martin to reinstate the Executive Board members. When the reconstituted Executive Board ordered Martin to sever his ties with Lovestone and to submit all his public announcements to it for its approval, he attempted to suspend the majority of the Board, including both his opponents associated with the CP, such as Mortimer, their allies, such as Richard Frankensteen, and the UAW leaders associated with the Socialist Party, such as Walter Reuther. That nearly split the UAW. After skirmishes at the UAW headquarters and some local unions, the expelled Executive Board members, with the support of the CIO, regained control in 1939 and expelled Martin. He left with about 20,000 members to form his own union, which affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Lovestone left with him.Nelson Lichtenstein, The most dangerous man in Detroit : Walter Reuther and the fate of American labor (1995).
The CP was in a particularly strong position at that point: it was the leading player in the Left-Center coalition that had defeated Martin and would have been able to elect George Addes, a close ally of the Party, as President of the UAW if it had pressed the point. But that would have required that the Party defy Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the most powerful force within the CIO after Lewis, and Philip Murray, Lewis' protégé and head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, who came to the convention to demand the selection of R.J. Thomas, an apolitical Board member who had, until recently, supported Martin, as its candidate to end the factional fighting within the UAW.
According to some reports, when Hillman and Murray could not bring Mortimer and his supporters around, Earl Browder, Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), came to Cleveland to demand that they support Thomas. Eager not to appear as sectarians and thus endanger their role within the CIO at large, the CP leadership had the Communists within the UAW support Thomas and also permit the elimination of the Vice-President positions that they had held. At the same time, the CP began dissolving its factions within the UAW and dropping its shop papers as it aligned itself even more closely with the New Deal. In the name of labor unity, the CP undertook a tactical retreat.
The CP's conciliatory stance did not, however, protect it from its other factional rivals within the UAW. The working alliance between the CP and the Socialists in the UAW had broken down in 1938 over differences over the CP's support for "collective security", an alliance of the Soviet Union with the non-fascist nations of the West against Hitler. The Socialist Party, at that time even further left than the CP on many issues, organized a separate caucus within the Executive Board that, from that point forward, opposed the CP and its alliance partners.John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Wayne State U. Press, 2004)
Break with the Roosevelt administration The CP made it easier for its opponents by making a number of sudden and shocking changes in policy. After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the CP campaigned vigorously against any US involvement in the war against fascism; a journalist with the CP's Weekly Worker newspaper coined the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming" to sum up the Party's position. What is more, the CP now repudiated its Popular Front strategies of the previous four years, attacking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration's efforts to support France and Britain against Germany as a campaign to lead the US into an imperialist war. The federal government responded by arresting Earl Browder and a number of other CP leaders.
The CP's opponents within the labor movement capitalized on the Party's break with FDR to attack it. James Carey, the president of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (or UE) who had worked closely with Communist UE officials in the past, now distanced himself from them over their opposition to a third term for Roosevelt. The UAW passed several resolutions condemning both Nazis and Communists at its Conventions.
At the same time that their break with Roosevelt isolated them within the CIO, opponents of the CP outside the labor movement stepped up their attacks on the loyalty of Party members, accusing them, among other things, of engaging in sabotage by supporting strikes of aircraft workers during the UAW's organizing drive in that industry. While some of these accusations, such as those made by the Dies Committee or Reader's Digest, were so wide of the mark as to discredit the accusers, the tide of unfavorable publicity made any association with the CP that much riskier.
The CP also lost ground within the CIO. While the CP believed it could shelter itself within the CIO by continuing to loyally support Lewis, who also opposed a third term for Roosevelt, that reliance on Lewis was misplaced. Lewis was prepared both to use the CP and to get rid of CP members when they no longer served his purposes, as demonstrated by the activities of his lieutenant, Adolph Germer, who actively undercut the CP leadership within the International Woodworkers of America when sent to assist it in organizing lumber workers in the Northwest in 1940. At the same time Lewis abolished the position of west coast director of the CIO, which Harry Bridges had held, limiting his authority to California.
Whatever protection the CP could have hoped to receive from Lewis evaporated in any event in 1940, when Lewis abruptly resigned from his position as President of the CIO following his baffling decision to support Wendell Willkie over Roosevelt for President that year. Philip Murray, Lewis' successor as head of the CIO, was determined to stop the spread of the CP's influence in the CIO and to demonstrate to the public at large that the CIO was not controlled by the CP. To that end he insisted on a resolution at the CIO's 1940 conference that condemned Communism, along with Nazism and fascism, as "inimical to the welfare of labor." Lee Pressman, the most highly placed CP ally within the CIO, presented the resolution in his role as secretary of the resolutions committee.
Murray did not, however, insist on banning Communists from the CIO; on the contrary, he had no desire to provoke a public fight over the CP's politics or CP members' role within either the CIO or its affiliates. This suited the Party, which likewise did not want to risk a showdown that could possibly result in either their expulsion or split the CIO. So while internal political disputes kept the battles raging within unions such as the UAW, the UE and the IWA, the CP agreed to a compromise that forced them to accept the label of "totalitarian," but allowed them to maintain their positions within the CIO itself.
Communist influence in labor unions was seen by the Roosevelt administration as a serious threat to US military preparedness. As the US military built up in 1940 and 1941, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson was convinced that labor strikes and slowdowns at key facilities were due to the CPUSA's efforts to block Franklin Roosevelt's military preparedness policy. Strikes at Harville Die-Casting Company, Alcoa, and North American Aviation were widely seen within the Roosevelt administration as communist-inspired for ideological reasons, rather than for better wages and working conditions. The most important strike seen as communist-inspired was at the North American Aviation aircraft plant in Los Angeles on 5 June 1941. The plant built bombers for the U. S. and British governments, and the strike was seen as a serious threat to American aid to the Allies. The federal government seized the plant and army troops forced open paths through the picket lines to allow workers to enter the plant.John H. Ohly, Industrialists in Olive Drab (Washington: US Army, Center of Military History, 1999) 14-16, 19-30.
World War II and the no-strike pledge
The CP's policy toward President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and war changed as soon as Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. At that point, the CP changed into unqualified supporters for the war effort. For their labor allies, that meant not only unconditional support for a wartime no-strike pledge - which the rest of the labor movement had endorsed to some degree - but also opposition to anything that would compromise anti-fascist unity at home. The CP's opponents within the labor movement would also use CP's sudden change against them in the factional battles of the years to come.