Domestic Left #45: Keep the red flag flying
In February of 1996 I traveled from Iowa City to Chicago along with maybe half a dozen other graduate workers from the University of Iowa. We were part of the organizing committee that, later that spring, would prevail in one of the largest labor board elections of that year and establish UE Local 896, affectionately known as “COGS” (the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students). We were in Chicago to attend a meeting of UE locals from around the Midwest as part of our introduction to our new union, and while we were there Carl Rosen, then president of UE District 11 (and now the General President of the national union), gave us a tour of the murals on the interior walls of the UE Hall on South Ashland.
As you enter the hall, to your left is a group of women and men, Black and white, demanding that a boss sign a union contract. The boss, pale and recoiling in fear from the workers’ vibrant unity, is the fictional head of “Bipco,” the generic corporation name used by legendary UE cartoonist Fred Wright. The UE members, though, are real people from UE history, the workers whose courage and tenacity and commitment to collective struggle established industrial unionism in this country.
The mural follows the stairs up to the second floor, as UE International Representative Florence Criley, one of the founders of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, passes out leaflets to workers as they enter a factory.
As you climb the stairs to the landing, the wall in front of you is covered with a scene from an industrial forge. Workers in gray protective gear tend the fiery heart of a gray machine. The image is not unlike Diego Rivera’s Detroit industry murals, but more somber. These men are serious about their work, they are not afraid of the fire but they respect its power, and they are confident in the ability of UE Local 164 to ensure their safety. I have been told that the owner of the foundry, upon seeing the mural, proclaimed it a good, true and beautiful representation.
As the mural ascends to the second floor, a multiracial group of women and men, holding picket signs reading “Huelga contra la Injusticia” (strike against injustice) and “Down with Speed Up,” ascend beneath a red flag that declares, simply, “SOLIDARITY.” They are led by a dove carrying an olive branch.
Our organizing committee had voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with UE largely because they successfully made the case that they were the union that could best ensure that we would win. I was in my first year of graduate school, but two years previously the UI grad workers had tried to organize with another union, and lost.
Nonetheless, for many of us, UE’s politics and history also played an important role. UE’s preamble, adopted in 1936, declares that “the struggle to better our working and living conditions is in vain unless we are united to protect ourselves collectively against the organized forces of the employers.” It makes explicit the founders’ intent to “form an organization which unites all workers ... regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race, creed, or political beliefs.” UE was fighting for equal pay for equal work in the 1940s, and launched a national campaign to win no-discrimination clauses in all of our contracts in the early 1950s, a full decade before civil rights legislation created legal protections against discrimination.
UE was also the first U.S. union to come out against the Vietnam War, and did so long before antiwar protests roiled college campuses. UE has consistently opposed U.S. intervention in other countries while the AFL-CIO worked with the State Department to undermine democratically-elected governments.
The Chicago mural was painted in 1974, a year after a military coup in Chile, supported by the U.S. and at least aided and abetted by the AFL-CIO, resulted in the murder of thousands of trade unionists, community organizers, cultural workers and others. The mural makes it clear who we are up against. Lurking over the stairwell, crushing workers beneath them but opposed on all sides, are “the organized forces of the employers”: a Southern sheriff, a hooded Klan member, a banker, and a general and his stormtroopers, with noose, safe full of money, guns and a tank.
The workers’ flag is deepest red, it’s shrouded oft our martyred dead
In one of the upper corners of the murals is a depiction of the three officers who led UE through the “Dirty Decade” from the late 40s through the late 50s, when our union was under attack, not only by the corporations but also the government and other unions, for being “Communist-dominated” (i.e., militantly fighting for our members and daring to have an independent voice on foreign policy).
Holding a red banner reading “ORGANIZE” is James Matles, the Romanian immigrant who the government tried to deport, whose patriotism was questioned despite the fact that he took a leave from his position as Director of Organization to volunteer to fight on the front lines in World War II. Next to Matles is Albert Fitzgerald, an Irish Catholic GE worker from Lynn, Massachusetts who in 1941 successfully challenged the union’s erratic first General President, James Carey, and who led the union into the late 1970s. (Carey went on to found a rival union in 1949 and baldly admitted that, in his attempts to destroy UE, “we will join the Fascists to defeat the Communists.”)
Both Matles and Fitzgerald were still national officers when the mural was painted in 1974, but the third man depicted, Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak, died of a heart attack in 1962, aged 57. His death has been attributed to the stresses of the anti-communist witch hunt against UE, and against the UE officers personally. Emspak was convicted of contempt of Congress by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1950, and had a jail term hanging over his head for years until the Supreme Court eventually threw out his conviction.
And despite the fact that social media was still more than 60 years away, the UE officers were still subjected to what is now known as doxxing. They received thousands of postcards full of abuse and death threats, as various right-wing forces encouraged their followers to hound these “UnAmericans.”
Emspak was not the only UE leader to die young during these years. John Nelson, the president of UE Local 506 in Erie, PA, died at age 42, after being investigated by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, fired by General Electric as a “security risk,” and regularly denounced both in the local press and from the pulpit of his own Catholic church.
One of the most inspiring moments in my life was the dedication of another mural on an interior wall in the Local 506 hall, at the UE convention in Erie in 2000. I was no longer a graduate worker (having, um, dropped out of grad school and moved to Vermont), but had found a job in a small UE shop, and was there as a delegate from Local 221.
As the UE NEWS reported, “The mural electrified the delegates, Local 506 and 618 members, GE retirees and community leaders in the room. Bright and vibrant, big in size and conception, the mural celebrates working women and international solidarity with scenes from U.S. and Mexican labor history.”
Muralist Juana Alicia spoke, proclaiming that “organizing and art are one and the same movement.” Amy Newell, UE Secretary-Treasurer from 1985 to 1994 and the first woman to serve as a principal officer of a U.S. manufacturing union, explained how the Cold War politics UE fought against led to the AFL-CIO’s cozy relationship with the government-controlled unions in Mexico that kept wages low — and encouraged the movement of jobs from places like Erie.
But the most moving moment was the speech given by Benedicto Martínez, one of the three national coordinators of Mexico’s foremost independent union, the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (Authentic Workers’ Front). I don’t remember much of what he said — he delivered his remarks in Spanish, and I suspect much of his eloquence was lost in translation — but I remember his passion, and the surge of emotion from the crowd.
UE’s membership was still mostly manufacturing workers at the time, largely from rust-belt cities like Erie, places that had been losing jobs to Mexico since NAFTA’s passage in 1994 and often before. They cheered this Mexican worker, embraced him as a brother, as indeed he was and is. I turned to S, the UE organizer who had helped bring Local 896, and me, into the union four years earlier, and said, “Imagine this happening in every union hall in America.”
“It would be a different country,” he said.
From the other side of the hall, a framed portrait of John Nelson looked on.
On the final day of UE’s 2021 convention, held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic, current Local 506 President Scott Slawson spoke on the resolution “Defend Our Civil Liberties.” Invoking the memory of John Nelson, who “was willing to give his life to the defense of our members, the UE and the labor movement as a whole,” Slawson called on UE members “to fight, not just for our [own] locals, but collectively for all of our locals. We need to be collectively prepared to mount an attack and go on the offensive.”
I am writing about the Chicago murals because one of the things I’ve been working on at work this past week is an effort to preserve them. We’re selling the building, which is not in great shape structurally but worth a lot of money because the area it’s in has become super gentrified (also making it, well, no longer a great place to have a union hall). But we’re hoping to raise enough money to be able to transfer the murals to canvas, like was done with Goya’s Black Paintings. Or, failing that, at least do high-quality digital preservation with photos and video.
In order to help convince arts funders that there is widespread support for preserving the murals, we’re circulating a statement of support, which, if you’re so inclined (and my social media posts about this haven’t already reached you), you can sign here.
If you want to learn more about the murals, or just see more of them, this 2019 article in the Chicago Sun-Times includes an interview with one of the muralists and spectacular photos of the murals themselves.
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