Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

himself as dictator; the DuPonts, whose dollars were earned
with the blood of American soldiers; Morgan, financier
of war."
Thousands of boos followed each name. Then,
with the crowds worked up against their hated exploiters,
the Presidential motorcade drove into the stadium to frenzied
cheering. The observer wrote of Roosevelt's entry:
"'He entered in an open car. It might have been the chariot
of a Roman Emperor. " (17)
So it was not just the social concessions that the
government made; the deep allegiance of the Euro-
Arnerikan workers to this new Leader and his New Deal
movement was born in the feeling that he truly spoke for
their class interests. This was no accident. Nations and
classes in the long run get the leadership they deserve.
mm
WORK
In order to end the company-town feudalism of
their communities, the CIO unionists took their new-found
strength into the bourgeois political arena. The massed
voting base of the new unions was the bedrock of the New
Deal in the industrial states. The union activists themselves
merged into and became part of the imperialist New Deal.
Bob Travis, the Communist Party militant who was the
organizer of the Flint Sit-Down, proudly told the 1937
UAW Convention:
"We have also not remained blind to utilizing the
city's political situation to the union's advantage,
whenever possible. In this way, for five months after the
strike, we were able to consolidate a 5-4 pro-labor majority
bloc in the city commission, get a pro-labor city manager
appointed, and bring about the dismissal of a vicious
police chief, notorious as a strike-breaker."
By 1958, Robert Carter, the UAW Regional Director
for Flint-Lansing, could resign to become Flint City
Manager. Things had come full circle. Once outsiders
challenging the local establishment, then angry reformers,
the union was now part of the local bourgeois political
structure.
Nor was this limited to Euro-Amerikans. Coleman
Young (Mayor of Detroit), John Conyers (U.S. Congressman),
and many other Afrikan politicians got their
start as young CIO staff members. In Hawaii, the
Japanese workers in the CIO International
Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union became the
active base of the Democratic Party's takeover of
Hawaiian bourgeois politics after the war. The CIO unions
became an essential gear in the liberal reform machine of
the Democratic Party. (1 8).
A significant factor in the success of the 1930s
union organizing drives was the U.S. Government's refusal
to use armed repression against it. No U.S. armed repression
against Euro-Amerikan workers took place from
January, 1933 (when Roosevelt took office) until the June,
1941 North American Aviation strike in California. The
U.S. Government understood that the masses of Euro-
Amerikan industrial workers were still loyal settlers, committed
to U.S. Imperialism. To overreact to their economic
struggles would only further radicalize them. Besides, why
should President Roosevelt have ordered out the FBI or
U.S. Army to break up the admiring supporters of his own
Democratic Party?
Attempts by the reactionary wing of the
bourgeoisie to return to the non-union past by wholesale
repression were opposed by the New Deal. In the 1934
West Coast longshore strike (which in San Francisco
became a general strike after the police killed two strikers),
President Roosevelt refused to militarily intervene, despite
the fact that the governors of Oregon and Washington requested
that he do so.
In speaking for the shipping companies and
business interests on the Coast, Oregon Gov. Meier
telegraphed Roosevelt that troops were needed because:
"We are now in a state of armed hostilities. The situation
is complicated by communistic interference. It is now
beyond the reach of State authorities.. .insurrection which
if not checked will develop into civil war." Roosevelt
publicly scorned this demand. It is telling that at the most
violent period of the strike a picture of President Roosevelt
hung in the longshoremen's union office in San Francisco.
This was the universal pattern in the industrial
areas. In Anderson, Indiana, the auto workers at GM
Guide Lamp took over the plant in a 1937 Sit-Down. By
1942, strike leader Riley Etchison was a member of the
local draft board. Another Sit-Downer was the new
sheriff. John Mullen, the Steelworkers union leader at
U.S. Steel's Clairton, Pa. works, went on to become the
Mayor, as did Steelworkers local leader Elmer Maloy in
DuQuesne, Pa. Everywhere the young CIO activists integrated
into the local Democratic Party as a force for
patriotic reform.