In 1948, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book called The New Men of Power, which examined the careers of postwar labor leaders who emerged from industrial union struggles in the 1930s. At the time, the author was hopeful that labor’s progressive wing — led by this new generation of trade unionists — would be a bulwark against war, militarism, and resurgent corporate power.A decade later, Mills became a cheerleader for the emerging student movement, because the “main drift” of organized labor and most of its officialdom in the 1950s was trending in a conservative direction. That trend was symbolized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) purge of left-wing unions representing a million workers. This paved the way for its mid-1950s merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an alliance in which craft union influence was predominant.One exception to this generational trajectory was the career of a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union with then-strong CIO traditions of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy.While Mills welcomed the revival of campus radicalism in his famous 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” mainstream unions were very hostile, then and later, to any migration of New Leftists from college campuses to unionized workplaces. The stodgy cold warriors at AFL-CIO headquarters viewed the growing militancy of the civil rights, antiwar, Black Power, environmental, and feminist movements as a big political threat.Only a few longtime working-class leaders welcomed 1960s activists into the ranks of labor, and Tony Mazzocchi was one of the most influential among them. His personal mentoring enabled many former students to become more effective organizers, contract negotiators, strike leaders, and advocates for independent political action.Mazzocchi developed a wide…
