Monday, Aug. 01, 1949

Trouble at Home

In the sweltering evening, the shouts from the union hall on Kansas City's Main Street could be heard almost a block away. There was a crash of glass, and some bodies hurtled out onto the tile roof. One man dropped to the lawn, then dashed back upstairs to rejoin the fighting. Congressmen Leonard Irving, who is also president and business agent of Kansas City's Hod Carriers' Building and Common Laborers' Union (A.F.L.), was talking things over with his rank & file.

Democrat Irving has been the duly elected representative of Harry S. Truman and 250,000 other constituents of Missouri's Fourth District since last November. A fortnight ago, in a court suit, 85 members of his union suggested that he was also a crook.

Two Cadillacs. Even before he became a $12,500-a-year Congressman, Leonard Irving had been living pretty well for a $125-a-week boss of Local 264 -- each of whose 1,800 members had paid a $59 initiation fee for the right to dig a ditch or hoist a hod. His campaign for nomination (which President Truman did not support) had been expensive. In Washington, he rented an eleven-room house on fashionable Marlboro Pike, sported two Cadillacs, and dressed like a Texas banker:

Led by one Theodore Baldwin, a Negro janitor who had been custodian at union headquarters, the disgruntled 85 in Local 264 accused Irving and two other officers of diverting union funds to their own use, and of spending large amounts on political campaigns (presumably Irving's).

The petitioners asked some probing questions. Why had "motor cars" been bought for Irving's personal use? Why, in one 14-month period, had Roy E. Livingston, union treasurer, been paid $4,400 and Irving $3,800 for "overtime"? Why, in approximately the same period, had $16,762 been paid to "cash" without accounting? Why had the union's bank balance dropped by $37,000 in five months?

"We'll Get You ..." Last week Irving boiled out to Kansas City and called a meeting to deny all. To reporters, he explained that he had bought one Cadillac for his wife; the other had been given him by the "unanimous vote" of the membership. He pointed out that Baldwin had been fired as custodian at union headquarters. Irving thought it "highly significant" that all but four of his critics were Negroes (who comprise 40% of the union's membership).

Rebel Baldwin gathered his supporters downstairs on the porch, getting minute-by-minute reports from the packed meeting room. Just before Irving rose to read his financial report (it would have shown, Irving explained later, that the local's net worth was a handsome $204,000), Baldwin's boys rushed upstairs. In the stifling room, bedlam broke loose. Men seized chairs, smashed them over the heads of their opponents. Knives flashed. One member leaped to protect Irving, was deeply slashed for his pains. Before the police arrived, 25 men had been cut. "We'll get you at the next meeting," yelled one man as Irving was escorted out by police. There would not be another meeting, retorted "Two-Cadillac" Irving as he boarded a plane back to Washington, "until this thing quiets down."

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