Workers Want Unions. Labor Movement Ingenuity Can Provide.

David Brody

The Communists . . . that’s a complicated subject. I would start by saying that in the 1930s, given the industrial conditions and the suffering that working people experienced, there were going to be workers who would turn to radical ideas. They would look around and say, “Where are people who are saying the system is unfair and should be changed?” There were socialists, and there were still remnants of the IWW and other left-wing organizations, but the primary one was the Communist Party. So workers who were bent toward radicalism out of their circumstances were drawn to the Communist Party.

The other thing about the party was that it produced a whole fighting force of organizers. Communists were more dedicated. They were more willing to take chances. They were hardworking, and they became great organizers. So in various unions, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes deliberately, Communists became organizers and local leaders. In the case of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, quite a large number of the two hundred organizers that were hired in this period were Communists, maybe about sixty. And they did great work.

So Communists and other left-wingers tended to be activists and to take leadership roles in local unions. There was factionalism, and the Communists were involved in that. In unions like the United Auto Workers, there’s a whole history of internal struggle in which Communists played a role.

Then there’s the question of the party itself, which was going through changes in this period. One of the essential questions almost from the very beginning, in the 1920s, was whether the strategy of the new party should be to create independent unions, radical industrial unions, or “bore from within” — meaning bore within the AFL unions. William Z. Foster, who had been the brains behind the steel strike of 1919, advocated…