Note by Hunterbear: These are two related posts of mine dealing with historical Red-baiting [although it doesn't seem that long ago.] The first -- posted by me earlier this month -- is on the matter of Steelworkers et al. motivations in their savage [a word I don't use lightly]assault on the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers [Mine-Mill]. The second is a page from a long 1960 article of mine on the witch hunt against Mine-Mill -- with updating notes into contemporary times. That page is on our large Lair of Hunterbear website www.hunterbear.org -- which contains, among other dimensions, a good deal of Mine-Mill material. The Link for that page is http://www.hunterbear.org/repression.htm and various other Mine-Mill pages precede and follow it. In addition, some other Mine-Mill things are in other portions of our website.
The attack by the right-wing unions and the Feds [and very much the bosses] on the Left unions in CIO in the early Cold War era and their purge from CIO cut much of the "fighting guts" and creativity and effective social conscience out of the mainline American labor movement. In a very real sense, most of the AFl and CIO [AFL/CI0 after '55] "organizing the unorganized" momentum faltered and failed. AFL-CIO related only uneasily and sporadically to the rising Civil Rights Movement and then largely failed to join with it in the emergent New South when such a coalition between labor and the unions could have finally cracked and organized much of the Dixie Citadel. And almost all of mainline labor became a junior partner with the Cold Warriors. Although the Left unions contained many Catholic members who were always extremely loyal to their radical unions, there were organized Catholic attacks from the outside. Much of this was spearheaded by the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. But, a generation or so after the "purge" of the Left unions from CIO, many of the old ACTU leaders [e.g., Monsignor Ryan] indicated they'd made a massively grievous mistake in their attacks on Left labor -- and that the ouster of the Left unions from the "mainstream" had resulted directly and indirectly in the breakup of much existent unionization and in the general and continuing failure to organize the unorganized. The lessons for today -- critical, urgent -- could not be more obvious. ==================================================== Note by Hunterbear: This is a portion of a letter I've written in response to some excellent questions from a "Mine-Mill baby" involving radical labor in the United States and Canada: ========================== My own activist career started early in 1955 -- but I do know some critical history that precedes that time period: My own take on the Steel union's motives in attacking Mine-Mill in its consistently venomous fashion over all of those many, many years is that it initially started with an effort to seize, for Steel, Mine-Mill members and potential members -- wrapping this up with the ideological rationalizations of what I'd call right-wing social democrats in CIO [Phil Murray, the Reuther brothers, et al.] Mine-Mill, and not Steel for example, should have had the Mesaba -- Iron Range -- iron-mining jurisdiction in Northern Minnesota. That was old WFM turf and clearly, as the Alabama situation indicates, well within Mine-Mill's official and established jurisdictional context. But Murray et al. steered all of that to Steel. Later, as the Cold War heated up -- late '40s etc -- the right-wing/centrist unions in CIO and CCL made a Faustian deal with the so-called "liberals" in their respective Federal governments -- which boiled down to knifing the Left unions in an effort to maintain "mainline labor respectability." In doing so, and forcing the Left unions from CIO and CCL [where, among other things, the Left unions could be attacked and raided openly and mercilessly], the Murrays and the Reuthers et al violated not only every moral tenet in the concept of functional and traditional Solidarity, but also the legally protected autonomy of the individual Left member unions [and all member unions] within CIO and CCL. In 1949, Mine-Mill published a 58 page mimeographed pamphlet, "Mine Mill and the CIO." This was put together by Graham "Cozy" Dolan, a key research and education staffer in the International Office. Your father's papers very likely include this, which has as its chapter headings: [1] "Autonomy -- The Right of Self-Government" [2] "The Cold War" [3] "Independent Political Action" [4] "World Federation of Trade Unions" [5] "Taft-Hartley Sellout." This is an early and truly excellent discussion of the whole worsening situation. Dolan and his staff did a fine job. In Solidarity - Hunter Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] RED SCARE WITCH HUNTING AND ANTI-LABOR REPRESSION http://www.hunterbear.org/repression.htm >From John R. Salter, Jr. (HG), IUMM&SW: THE GOOD, TOUGH FIGHT , MAINSTREAM, October, 1960 (with up-dating notes): "When it became obvious that management and right-wing union pressure was not enough, the government moved in. In 1952, the Senate Internal Security Committee, led by the late Pat McCarran of Nevada, and staffed by such worthies as J.B. Mathews and Harvey Matusow, hauled some of the most prominent Mine-Mill spokesmen before it in a futile effort to prove "Moscow domination" in a IUMM&SW strike in which, ironically enough, it had been the mining concerns and not the union, who had refused to bargain. The hand of the government was in Grant County, New Mexico, in late 1952 and early 1953, when Mine-Mill Local 890, led by Juan Chacon and Clinton Jencks, assisted a Hollywood group in filming "Salt of the Earth," based on the prolonged and successful IUMM&SW strike which had occurred at Hanover, New Mexico the year before. Intermixed with the burning of homes of union members, the brutal assaults on Mine-Mill officials and friends, and the formation of a vigilante committee which told union militants, "Clear out of Grant County in twelve hours or be carried out in black boxes," the U.S. Department of Immigration deported, on a minor technicality, leading lady Rosaura Revueltas to her native Mexico. In 1954, Clinton Jencks, then an International Representative of IUMM&SW, was, on the flimsy and sketchy testimony of Harvey Matusow, convicted in a Dixiecrat courtroom in El Paso of perjuring himself on the non-Communist Taft-Hartley affidavits. Years later, Matusow announced that he'd lied, and eventually, in 1957, Jencks was released by the Supreme Court. In 1954 again, the National Labor Relations Board attempted to strip, through de-certification procedures, the bargaining rights of IUMM&SW, charging that Idaho-born Maurice Travis, at that time International Secretary-Treasurer, had committed perjury when he had signed the non-Communist Taft-Hartley oath. The Supreme Court later killed this maneuver which, had it been successful, would have eventually led to the complete destruction of Mine-Mill. Travis, however, was singled out in 1955, charged and eventually convicted of Taft-Hartley oath perjury. He appealed and eventually received a new trial, at which he was again found guilty.(1) In 1957, the Subversive Activities Control Board held almost half a year of hearings calculated to prove the "Communist domination" of the mine union. The hearings were eventually recessed with no decision being announced. (2). . .The month of November, 1956 saw government authorities hand down indictments against thirteen top Mine-Mill staff members and Maurice Travis who had left the union some time before, charging them with "conspiracy to file false non-Communist Taft-Hartley affidavits" in the period between 1949 and 1956." (3) 1) This second Maurice Travis "perjury" case was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961. 2) The U.S. Court of Appeals effectively killed this "proceeding" in 1965. 3) The Mine-Mill "conspiracy case," brought initially by the government in 1956, remained relatively quiescent for three years and was not brought to trial until the massive IUMM&SW-led industry wide copper strike (from "Butte, Montana to the Mexican border" and some other places as well) took place in 1959 into 1960. In what was obviously a deliberate case of planned management/government strike-breaking and union-busting, this sweeping conspiracy case was brought to trial at Denver by the government during the course of the copper strike itself -- thus tying up much of the time of the top IUMM&SW leadership and providing anti-labor news media with daily Red Scare stories. Mine-Mill won the extraordinarily hard-fought copper strike; but almost all of the Mine-Mill conspiracy defendants were convicted on December 17, 1959 and sentenced to prison terms and heavy fines the following March. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the so-called conspiracy convictions. [See the above cited long article of mine (JRS/HG), IUMM&SW: The Good, Tough Fight, for a discussion of Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers history with a primary focus on the hard-fought 1959-60 copper strike and the accompanying Federal "conspiracy trial" attack on the union.] In 1967, its fiscal resources cut to the bone by its prolonged persecution at the hands of a thoroughly vindictive United States government, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers merged with its old enemy, the United Steelworkers of America (whose leadership by this time included a few somewhat "better" faces than had previously been the case.) A significant exception to the merger was the Mine-Mill local at Falconbridge Nickel, Sudbury, Ontario which stubbornly refused to merge with Steel and which has carried on into the new century a quite effective Mine-Mill existence as Sudbury Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, Local 598. (Since the mid-90s, it's been hooked-up with CAW, the growing 1985 Canadian breakaway from the U.S.-based United Auto Workers.) previous index continue Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org Protected by Na�shdo�i�ba�i� and Ohkwari' In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and remembering way. 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