Cover with Photo of Philip Randolph

Mr. Black Labor: The Story of A. Philip Randolph by Daniel S. Davis

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The Politics and the Leadership of A. Philip Randolph

If your students need inspiration to participate in politics, they can consider the life of A. Philip Randolph. His strategies succeeded in confrontations with two presidents and with the management of the anti-union Pullman Company.

He forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open jobs in the defense industry to African Americans in 1941. He persuaded President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed forces in 1948. Read more about Philip Randolph and President Truman here. He later organized the March on Washington for jobs and civil rights in 1963.

A. Philip Randolph brought the gospel of trade unionism to millions of African American households. Randolph led a 10-year drive to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and served as the organization’s first president. Randolph directed the March on Washington movement to end employment discrimination in the defense industry and a national civil disobedience campaign to ban segregation in the armed forces. The nonviolent protest and mass action effort inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Randolph became the most widely known spokesperson for black working-class interests in the country. In December 1940, with President Franklin Roosevelt refusing to issue an executive order banning discrimination against black workers in the defense industry, Randolph called for “10,000 loyal Negro American citizens” to march on Washington, D.C. Support grew so quickly that soon he was calling for 100,000 marchers to converge on the capital. Pressed to take action, President Roosevelt issued an executive order on June 25, 1941, six days before the march was to occur, declaring “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Roosevelt also set up the Fair Employment Practices Commission to oversee the order.

In 1963, when A. Philip Randolph in­troduced Martin Luther King, Jr., from the speaker’s platform at the now fa­mous March on Washington, he de­clared him the moral leader of our nation. But it was Randolph himself who earlier established the tactics for civil rights action that King employed with such outstanding results.

Philip Randolph brought African Americans en masse into the labor movement in the twenties and thirties, conceived the dra­matic strategy of a massive march on the government, and calmly and con­fidently guided several generations of Black leaders.

This account of Randolph’s life work by an official at the National Urban League is a tribute long overdue, and it marks the beginning of a new, broader look at the civil rights movement in the twentieth century.

Cover of Labor's New Millions

Labor’s New Millions by Mary Heaton Vorse

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This is the story of how labor unions used sitdown strikes to force automakers and steelmakers into contracts that provided living wages for millions of American workers at the midcentury. The reading level is 9.1.

“How this young union whirled its membership from 30,000 to 400,000 in a year is one of labor’s greatest epics,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse in Labor’s New Millions referring to the United Auto Workers. “In some places, wages increased from thirty and forty cents to one dollar an hour. Much had been done to set up healthier working conditions in the industry.” In Labor’s New Millions, Vorse explained how workers in the rubber plants, and steel mills and auto plants used sit-ins to force management to recognize their unions and then negotiate with the new unions. By the time of Labor’s New Millions, she had written about earlier labor struggles in national publications such as Harper’s and The Nation, and published novels and short stories about domestic relationships and family life. Her experience as a writer shows. Your students will see that she reported on the labor-management conflicts of mid-century with energy and enthusiasm. After the organizing of the 1930s and 1940s, one-third of American workers were union members in the 1950s. Today the number is 10%.

Vorse’s background as a writer is interesting. A historian wrote that it was a textile strike in Massachusetts that pushed Mary Heaton Vorse into writing about labor. “…Yet it was the 1912 textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that she would name in her 1934 autobiography as the turning point. For the rest of her life, until her death in 1966 at the age of ninety-two, workers’ battles for fair treatment would be her primary focus. “We knew now where we belonged;” she wrote, “on the side of the workers, and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born.”

“The conditions in the mills at Lawrence are still shocking. At the turn of the century, workers, many of them teenagers, scraped by on two or three dollars a week, most of which went to paying their rent in overcrowded districts. Women were subject to routine sexual exploitation by their bosses, and death from accidents or lung diseases were everyday occurrences. Thirty-six out of every hundred men and women who worked the mills died before the age of twenty-five. In early 1912, the state attempted to enforce a law cutting the hours of the women and those under eighteen in the mills to fifty-four hours a week. In response, the mill owners cut everyone’s hours and their salaries, and were accused of speeding up output.” See more about Vorse’s life at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/25/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse/

Cover of the Pullman Strike

The Pullman Strike by Rev. William H. Carwardine

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From Goodreads

During the heroic Pullman strike and boycott of 1894, a young Methodist minister defied the conventions of company-town self-censorship by writing this searing expose of the dictatorial and penny-pinching regime of multimillionaire George M. Pullman. That the Rev. Carwardine suffered immediate exile from his Pullman church suggests how deeply threatened the giant railroad manufacturing and operating company was by his plainly written book. Filled with appreciation for meaningful details of the everyday lives of diverse workers with common problems, and with a balanced admiration for the leadership of Eugene V Debs, The Pullman Strike vividly shows how a great experiment in industrial unionism like the American Railway Union could arise. Aware of the vast power and ruthlessness of the Pullman Company, Carwardine also suggests why the union was unable to prevail.

From the Back Cover of a Print Edition

Pullman was built as a company town on the edge of Chicago to turn out sleeping cars.

In the prettified tenements that fooled passing journalists, hungry workers crowded five families to a faucet. After severe wage cuts by the Pullman Company during the recession of 1893, the workers joined Gene Debs’ American Railway Union and struck. A Pullman preacher, the Rev. William Carwardine, spoke up on their behalf and detailed the conditions of their lives in this book of 1894. “Never did men have a cause more just,” he said “and never did corporation with equal pretenses grind men more unmercifully.”

 

Cover of Walter Reuther biography

Walter Reuther by Fred J. Cook

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When Walter Reuther spoke for labor, he spoke from a background of two generations in social reform and the labor movement, for his father and grandfather were leaders before him. As a boy, Walter grew up among the factories and mines of Wheeling, West Virginia. He became a diemaker and in 1927 went to Detroit, the Motor City. There the forces were beginning to work that were to create in the 1930’s the United Auto Workers and the Con­gress of Industrial Organizations. Walter became an excellent tool and die maker. He and his brother Victor educated themselves to become labor lead­ers, first in Detroit, and then on a round-the-world tour. They worked in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and saw firsthand how Communism repressed the workers. The brothers felt the weight of Nazism and Fascism in Germany and Italy.

Back in Detroit, Walter Reuther found the auto workers’ demand for a union increasing because of the effects of the Depression. Unemployment, wage cuts, and tighter and tighter control of the workers’ lives led to sit-down strikes, riots, bloodshed, mar­tial law, and the ultimate capitulation of the Big Three, General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, to the forces of the Union.

World. War II brought a new era of responsibility to labor leadership. Successively Reuther rose to head the UAW and the CIO. In the 1950’s, he helped merge the twin giants of the American labor movement, the older American Federation of Labor and the CIO. He worked to fight rising prices and for full employment.

Though assassins’ bullets twice endangered his life, he continued to work hard building the house of labor until his death in a plane crash in 1970.

Debs Speaking to a Crowd

Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid by McAlister Coleman

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From a Review by H.L. Mencken in the American Mercury, August 1930.

“Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.”

MR. COLEMAN’S sub-title may seem a bit pretentious, but the record bears it out. Debs was one of those fanatics who are simply unacquainted with the meaning of fear. At a time when practically all of the other Socialists of America were running ignominiously for cover he stood his ground magnificently and went to jail without a quaver. He would have gone to the gallows, I believe, in the same serene and unperturbed manner. Perhaps it is something of a slander to call him a Socialist at all. He died without knowing more than the A B C of Marxism, and had relatively little to do with its chief prophets. The shabbiness of spirit that is their chief mark, at least on this side of the water, was not in him. An ignorant man, and, in more than one way, a childishly silly man, he yet managed to show a singular fineness of character.
Someday, I suppose, his admirers will be comparing him to Lincoln, as Lincoln is compared to Jesus. The likeness is faulty in each case. Lincoln was a far shrewder and more politic fellow than Jesus, and Debs was far braver and more forthright than Lincoln. In old Abe, in fact, the cross-roads politician was always visible. He never did anything without figuring out its consequences to five places of decimals, and when those consequences promised to damage his private fortunes he usually found a good reason to refrain. But Debs banged through life without caring a damn, innocent and cocksure. He got into trouble very often, but I can find no evidence that he was ever bothered by doubts.
If common decency ever gets any credit in America, and the schoolbooks are revised accordingly, there will be a chapter in them on the great encounter between Debs and Woodrow Wilson. They never met face to face, for Wilson was in the White House and Debs was in prison; nevertheless, their souls came together, and it was old Gene’s that won hands down.
The conflict between them had been fought out in the world many times before, but never by two such perfect champions. On the side of Wilson were power, eminence, learning, glory, a vast forensic skill, a haughty manner, and the almost unanimous support of the American press and people; on the side of Debs there was only the dignity of an honest and honorable man. Debs remained behind the bars, but Wilson danced naked before the world, exposed to posterity as the abject and pathetic bounder that he was. It was his tragedy that he was not only quite unable to achieve decency himself, but also quite unable to recognize it in other men. When he died Harding turned Debs loose, with a gesture both generous and charming. Thus it remained for a boozy Elk out of the Jimson weed country to teach manners to a Princeton Presbyterian….
The whole labor movement in the United States is in the hands of sleek, oily gentlemen who have learned that it is far more comfortable to make terms with the bosses than to fight them. These gentlemen, as I have said, are well fed and well tailored, and have no sympathy with dreamers. Presently they will be collecting money for a monument to old Sam Gompers. But they will never propose a monument to Debs. • In the long run, however, he will probably be recalled, at all events by romantics. There was genuinely heroic blood in him, though he sacrificed himself to a chimera. Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.