Head of the House
(See Cover)
On a bleak November day in 1952, twelve men dressed in somber suits gathered in a waiting room in Coshocton, Ohio. They were members of the executive council of the American Federation of Labor, and they had just attended the funeral of 82-year-old William Green, their longtime chief. As the labor leaders waited for the train, Green's successor, George Meany, bluntly announced that he had chosen William Schnitzler, of the Bakery Workers Union, to be secretary-treasurer of the federation. Old Dan Tobin, president emeritus of the Teamsters Union, objected angrily. But Meany was unshaken; the election of Schnitzler, he said, would be held the next day in Washington.
The labor elders were flabbergasted. Never before, in all the 28 years of Bill Green, had they seen such rank insubordination on the part of the man they tolerated as their president. Meany had his way, and the following day Schnitzler was elected by a vote of 7-6. From that day on there was no doubt about it; Meany was boss as well as president of the A.F.L. He did not seek power for its own sake; he had some aims in view.
Today Meany is within sight of his first goal; barring unlikely accidents, the 10 million A.F.L. members and the 5,000,000 C.I.O. members will unite next fall, under Meany's leadership, in the greatest free labor organization the world has ever seen.
In his first official act as president, Meany revived the dormant Labor Unity Committee, and for two years he worked ceaselessly toward a merger. This year at Miami he knew that the time was ripe. Meeting in February with five other top leaders, Meany told them it was then or--as far as he was concerned--never. C.I.O. and A.F.L. negotiators quickly ironed out their differences, signed the agreement to merge.
What this huge combined force will mean to the U.S. future can be glimpsed by looking at the circumstances and the men (George Meany in particular) responsible for labor's reunion.
A Better Connection. Under the leadership of the miners' John L. Lewis and the garment workers' Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, the C.I.O. was formed in 1935 with two slogans: 1) "organizing the unorganized" and 2) doing it by setting up unions of industrial (as opposed to craft) scope. The C.I.O. took with it a high proportion of the brains and drive of the A.F.L. and about one-third of the membership. The C.I.O.'s great achievements: organization of the automobile workers and the steelworkers. Its great failure: the heavy infiltration of Communists into some of its unions and its own high councils.
Dubinsky and his International Ladies' Garment Workers went back to the A.F.L. in 1940, Lewis went back (temporarily) in 1946, Hillman died the same year. Lewis' able lieutenant, Philip Murray, held the C.I.O. together by the cohesive pull of his own shining integrity. It took him years to clean out the Communists, an effort that sapped much of the C.I.O.'s energy. When Murray and his bitter rival William Green (both began as coal miners) died within two weeks of each other, it became possible for new men to make a new and serious try at labor unity.
Meanwhile, the original causes of the split had disappeared. Spurred by competition, the A.F.L. organized more of the unorganized than the C.I.O., and in so doing, it managed to solve in many multi-craft industries its old problem of adjustment to the labor structure of the modern factory. The C.I.O. had the brains and the flash, but the A.F.L. had a better connection with the deep taproot of the U.S. labor movement. The older organization embodied the spirit of traditional American unionism--realistic, unaffected by doctrinaire theses, and responsive to the actual conditions of U.S. business with which it had evolved.
A Flaw to Correct. The gravest defect in the revitalized A.F.L. that Meany took over was the weakness of the central leadership in comparison with some of the individual union heads. The public knew about the A.F.L.'s failure to stamp out racketeering in some of its unions--e.g., the longshoremen and teamsters. Almost as serious were the unceasing membership raids between A.F.L. unions. Meany started by negotiating a no-raiding agreement within the A.F.L. Meanwhile the unity committee mulled over some sobering statistics showing how labor was wasting its strength in internal warfare. The figures: in 1951-52, out of 1,246 cases of union piracy involving 366,470 workers, the net change amounted to a mere 8,373 workers lost by the C.I.O. Clearly, union raiding was folly--particularly in view of the 45 million unorganized U.S. workers, many of them repelled by the union warfare. In the face of the facts, the conferees drew up a no-raiding agreement. By last week 77 of the A.F.L.'s no unions and 31 of the C.I.O's 33 had ratified the no-raiding agreement.
Walter Reuther, brilliant, cocky head of the C.I.O., was as deeply committed to labor unity, in principle, as was Meany. There were those who suspected--perhaps unfairly--that Reuther's ambition would keep him out of a federation headed by Meany. But even if his ambition had outrun his convictions, Reuther had little practical chance to stand aloof from Meany's vigorous wooing. The antagonism of the Steelworkers' Dave McDonald and some other C.I.O. leaders toward Reuther was undisguised. The C.I.O. could elect reunion with the A.F.L.--or fragmentation. Whatever the mixture of Reuther's motives, he worked honestly and actively with Meany for a merger that might mean his own partial eclipse.
Minutes of the Meeting. At 60, George Meany, the Bronx plumber who rose to one of the world's most influential positions, is an impressive man. He is big: 228 lbs., 5 ft. 9 3/4 in. tall. He is jug-eared, with close-cropped grey hair that has receded far back on his head. His neck is larger than the largest conventional collar size, and his shirts are made to order. So are his suits (eight a year, at $125 a suit). He has huge, deeply calloused, plumber's hands, made to grasp a Stillson wrench or to bang a conference table. His eyes are heavy-lidded, wary: they cloud over like a lizard's when Meany is nettled, and he becomes ominously calm. When that calm descends, says his secretary, "it's time to watch out."
Tough as he looks--and can be--Meany wins his arguments by plain-spoken logic and fingertip facts, not by bulldozing or dramatics. He has a keen, uncluttered mind that has carefully filed a vast amount of labor lore in 43 years as a trade unionist. In his Washington office is a bookcase of bound volumes of the minutes of A.F.L. conventions dating back to the federation's infancy. Duller reading would be hard to find, yet Meany has read every volume, diligently mining useful facts.
He is a hard fighter who usually wins his battles, but he is also a good loser who respects the letter and spirit of a contract and gracefully accommodates himself to unpleasant situations. During World War II, as a member of the War Labor Board, he fought hard for the workingman's point of view, but whenever he lost a decision he took it without whimpering. At such times, Meany usually explained the situation to his fellow union members.
"This is a hell of a decision," he would say. "The board knows I think so. But, gentlemen, we are at war. Never let it be said when this is over that the A.F.L. did not give complete support to the war effort." Then he would add: "We'll take care of things after the war."
Gin Rummy & Cigar Butts. George Meany works a standard eight-hour day in his Washington office on Massachusetts Avenue, six blocks from the White House. On a salary of $35,000 a year (and an unlimited expense account), he and Mrs. Meany and their two younger daughters are able to live comfortably in a seven-room brick house across the street from the fourth fairway of that citadel of capitalism and officialdom, the Burning Tree Club. Meany is driven to work every morning in an official A.F.L. Chrysler limousine. Several nights a week he is likely to be found at his dining room table, studying a stack of official papers, with a silver cigar box close by.
Meany has a warm sense of humor and, under the cagey surface, he is as ebullient as any Irishman. Despite his girth, he is a light-footed dancer, and an all-round athlete who in his time has played semi-pro baseball and has swum and bowled. By methodically correcting his mistakes, he has pared his golf game down to a high-70s average. He likes to play pinochle and poker and dearly loves to beat his old friend and comrade, Dave Dubinsky of the Garment Workers, at gin rummy. When Meany lived in New York he regularly joined the cardplayers among the sporting crowd at Jack Dempsey's restaurant. He is a fair pianist (after the Miami concord, Meany ripped off a chorus of La Seine on the hotel piano to celebrate) and sings a rich social baritone (his favorite ballad: Cockles and Mussels). He has an awesome appetite (curbed at lunch by his daughter Eileen, an A.F.L. employee, who prepares a Spartan midday snack that Meany eats in the office). In his travels abroad he has acquired a connoisseur's taste for fine French wines. He usually has a cigar butt vised in his teeth, smokes ten or eleven Webster Queens (three for 50-c-) a day.
Organ-Eye-Zation. The second of Mike and Annie Meany's ten children was born in a brownstone flat in the heart of Harlem in 1894 and baptized William George. His father, a plumber, bought a nine-room, red brick row house in the Port Morris section of The Bronx, where George and his brothers and sisters grew up. The boys swam in the East River in the summertime and played catch in the broad fields that surrounded their house. The Meanys were a happy, close-knit, devoutly Roman Catholic family, and "Brother," as the family called George, was an even-tempered boy who stayed out of trouble. In the evenings, after the supper dishes had been cleared away, Annie Meany, an insatiable cardplayer, usually organized a family game of euchre around the dining-room table. Annie was tempted by auction bridge, which was just coming into vogue, but rarely played because she hated to be dummy.
Mike Meany, a strapping, handsome man, was president of his plumbers' union local and a Democratic Party district captain. On Sundays big Mike held court in his front parlor. "I can remember little groups of people coming to our home on a Sunday afternoon," George recalls. "There were no movies in those days and not many automobiles around, and people visited one another on Sunday, and practically all of the visitors who came to my home were officers and members of the union.
"I can remember these men talking about something known as 'the organization,' and I may say to you that they did not pronounce it that way, they called it the 'organ-eye-zation.' But I can remember the reverence in which they used the term, and inculcated into my mind at that time was the thought that whatever the organization was, it was something with these men almost on a par with religion. I grew up with faith in the trade-union movement."
George was never much of a student, and when he was 16 he secretly asked one of his father's Sunday callers for a job, went to work full time as a plumber's helper at a salary of $1.50 a day. In 1915 George became a journeyman plumber and a member of his father's union, and his wages rose to $30 a week. He worked all over the city, installing pipes in buildings that have become Manhattan landmarks --the Yale Club, Grand Central Terminal, the Commodore Hotel.
As a young journeyman George was more interested in his social life than in union meetings at the Plumbers Local 463. He took a confirmation pledge not to drink until he was 21, stuck to it for many years. (Today he drinks sparingly, will take an infrequent Scotch and water or, after a hot golf game, a gin and tonic.) But his early abstinence did not stop him from becoming the life of many a picnic at Sulzer's Harlem River Park and other favorite plumbers' playgrounds, where he often won the fat man's race. Sundays he played semi-pro baseball (catcher) for $7.50 to $10 a game. On Wednesday and Saturday nights George usually went to some sporting event at Madison Square Garden, or danced the two-step with his best girl, Eugenia McMahon, at Tammany Hall near Union Square. ("They ran the best dances in town," recalls Meany.)
Picket Courtship. Eugenia operated an embroidery machine in a Bronx dress factory, and George's only real union activity at the time was to walk with her on picket lines when her union, I.L.G.W.U. Local 6, was on strike. (As a working plumber, Meany never went on strike.) In 1919 George and Eugenia were married. Shortly thereafter, perhaps because of Eugenia's influence, he began to take an active part in Plumbers Local 463. In 1920, with the help of some other young dissidents, he was elected to the local board, and in 1922, at 28, he became business agent for the plumbers' local.
At the Wednesday-night union meetings it soon became clear that Meany was a born leader. Says Dave Holborn, a veteran plumber and an old friend: "George would start out mildly enough, but by the time he finished you could hear him a mile away. Speaking came natural to George, and with very good English, too." He was, says Holborn, "an everything-on-the-level kind of guy--particularly, he was honest." Employers respected George Meany's word.
In 1923 Meany was elected secretary-treasurer of the New York building trades council and began to be a minor mover and shaker in city labor affairs. With the Depression, construction work in New York almost came to a halt. Along with other union officials, Meany took a 50% cut in salary, then went nine months with no pay. The city unions were in a desperate condition, and when an upstate bartender seemed likely to become state president of the A.F.L., the New York City building trades decided he knew nothing about their problems, and nominated Meany, who was elected.
As state president, Meany became a highly successful legislative lobbyist. In his five years at Albany, the New York legislature passed more labor bills than it ever enacted before, or has since. When the session opened in January 1935, Meany was ready with 105 bills, and the support of Governor Herbert Lehman. Meany had learned his new job well. He became a fountainhead of information, the confidant of Democratic leaders in the legislature, a star witness in committee hearings. He slapped no back, bought no drinks. What he offered was facts, figures, arguments and Sam Gompers' old principle of political action for the A.F.L.: to reward labor's friends and punish its enemies. At the end of the first session, 72 of Meany's bills had become law, e.g., a model unemployment insurance law, a 48-hour week for women in industry.
"Work or Starve!" Meany's duties in Albany occupied him just three days a week while the legislature sat. Meanwhile, he found plenty to worry about downstate. The Depression was in full tide, and in the summer of 1935 the New Deal came to the rescue with the WPA. The wages WPA offered to the unemployed were less than the prevailing union scales for building-trades members. Said Meany: "We are not attempting to dictate how the Federal Government shall handle relief. We are merely endeavoring to uphold the prevailing wage law for which we had to fight for 50 years." Four weeks later the first building trades strikes against the WPA began. In Washington Harry Hopkins, with White House approval, issued what George Meany called a "work or starve" ukase.
But the strikes continued. Meany found himself locking antlers with the terrible-tempered General Hugh Johnson, WPAdministrator for the New York area. Meany and Johnson publicly denounced each other on the air, blasted each other in the newspapers--and dined together in private. Eventually Johnson and Hopkins gave in, granted union wages to WPA workers. The repercussions of this victory went round the country. Meany was becoming a figure in the national labor movement.
While he was state president of the A.F.L., Meany got his teeth into politics. In the 1937 mayoralty election he broke Tammany Hall's political influence on the local A.F.L. unions, swung them over to his good friend Fiorello La Guardia. But Meany was not swept along with the American Labor Party tide that included many New York labor leaders in a sticky association with the Communists. In 1938, Meany denounced the A.L.P. leaders as "political self-seekers, left-wingers, political renegades and non-laboring laborites."
Early in his career George Meany had recognized the Communists and Fascists for what they were. While he was still the Plumbers' business agent, he had reprimanded and fined a Communist agitator in his union local. In 1939, a few days after war broke out in Europe, Meany took a firm stand against totalitarians of the right or left in a speech before the New York state American Legion convention. "Labor has more reason to be vigilant in defense of democracy," he said, "than has any other group or class. Organizations of working men and women formed for the sole purpose of raising the standards of life and work for wage earners cannot exist under any other form of government . . . Free trade unionism cannot exist where there is a dictator in control."
In 1939, with some reluctance, Meany took the secretary-treasurer's post at A.F.L. headquarters in Washington. He wound up his New York career by putting on a monster labor parade up Fifth Avenue, as a demonstration of A.F.L. strength. There were 90,000 A.F.L. men and women in the parade, 178 bands and bagpipe corps, and long after darkness fell, the marchers whooped it up with flashlights and flares.
The Snake Pit. In Washington, Meany found his opportunities severely hampered by the senescent William Green, who was jealous of his prerogatives and had no intention of giving the young whippersnapper from New York any real power. A few months after Meany arrived, he was dispatched to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Rules Committee on a labor bill. As usual, he was well prepared, and he made an excellent impression. It was years before Green permitted him to testify on the Hill again.
Meany's ambition might have been frustrated, had he not found other areas where he could operate. He built more reputation as a labor member of the War Labor Board. Because Green disliked travel and had little interest in international affairs, Meany became an expert in international labor movements. He took courses in Spanish in order to exchange amenities with Latin American labor leaders. (He had already picked up a smattering of Yiddish from Dubinsky.) Once again he collided with the Communists. When the World Federation of Trade Unions was founded in 1945, the C.I.O. joined up readily, but Meany refused to let the A.F.L. participate in a body that admitted the Russian trade unions.
Despite chivvying from Henry Wallace and articles in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, Meany stood firm. As Meany had foreseen, the W.F.T.U. proved to be a red snake pit, and after being bitten, the C.I.O. and the non-Communist unions withdrew. When the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was formed in 1949, Meany was a founding father, and brought in the A.F.L.
Meany sparked the A.F.L.'s fight against the Taft-Hartley bill, launching a $1,000,000 publicity campaign that brought down a torrent of mail on Congress. The A.F.L. resented Taft-Hartley more bitterly, if possible, than the C.I.O., and Meany's resolute part in the unsuccessful fight raised his standing still more with his fellow labor leaders.
The Giant-Killer. By all odds Meany's crowning achievement as secretary-treasurer and the one that marked him as heir apparent to Green was his defeat of John L. Lewis in debate. At the 1947 A.F.L. convention in San Francisco, the executive council prepared to get around the non-Communist-oath clause of the Taft-Hartley Act by changing the A.F.L. constitution. Up rose John L. Lewis, in full roar. He advocated open defiance of Taft-Hartley, deplored the federation's "kneeling in obeisance before this detestable and tyrannical statute . . . What are you going to do?'' he asked. "Oh, I see. You are going to change the constitution. God help us." Then Lewis turned on Bill Green. "I don't think that the federation has a head," he growled. "I think it's neck has just grown up and haired over."
Under Lewis' tongue-lashing, the bigwigs of the A.F.L. squirmed and dithered, until George Meany asked to be recognized. "I think we have before us a very practical problem," he began quietly. Then he pointed out the folly of challenging Taft-Hartley on the loyalty-oath clause. "Whether you like it or not, the fact remains that the Taft-Hartley Act is on the statute books. We know it is a bad law, [but] the only way it is going to be changed is by our representatives under that system." As for Lewis, Meany continued, "with his right hand [he] has upheld the position of the United Mine Workers in uncompromising resistance to Communism; but with his left hand he made fellowship with Harry Bridges, Julius Emspak, Michael Quill, Lew Merrill and all the other stinking America-haters who love Moscow." For himself. Meany concluded, "I am prepared to sign a non-Communist affidavit. I am prepared to go further and sign an affidavit that I was never a comrade to the comrades."
A few weeks "later, Lewis dispatched a terse, angry note to William Green: "Green, A.F.L. We disaffiliate. Lewis. 12-12-47."
"All in Favor . . ." After Meany succeeded Green, some of the elders tried to scare him in the ways they had used so often to scare Green. When Meany was in the midst of his successful effort to settle the 40-year-old jurisdictional strife between the Carpenters and the Machinists Unions, Maurice Hutcheson, hereditary chief of the Carpenters, pettishly announced that he was unhappy about Meany's methods. Unless the A.F.L. took a different tack, he told the executive council, he would withdraw. Snapped Meany: "A motion has been made for withdrawal of the Carpenters Union? Do I hear a second? All in favor say aye." And with that Hutcheson and the Carpenters were out. Within two weeks they were sheepishly asking to be readmitted. Meany graciously accepted them. Out of such encounters. Meany developed enough authority and discipline to give the A.F.L. the gravitational pull that brought back the C.I.O.
George Meany's record gives ample evidence about how he will behave as head of labor's reunited house. He has fought disunion and jurisdictional strikes --and he will again. He has fought racketeering--and he will keep on fighting it. His attitude toward employers will be at once militant and friendly--militant in fighting to get for workers a larger share of the national income, friendly in a deep-rooted belief in the American system, including the rights of management.
In politics, Democrat Meany shows no sign of moving from organized labor's present alliance with the Democratic Party, an alliance closer than the shifting independence of the Gompers tradition. Meany is disgusted with President Eisenhower's failure to get Congress to amend the Taft-Hartley law. But Meany does not necessarily yearn to go back to the Wagner Act. Eventually, he would like to see Government's policy on labor-management relations confined to a few broad principles.
In George Meany's time. U.S. labor has come a long way--and shows every sign of going farther. European trade-unionists used to sneer at their American counterparts as retarded stepchildren, but since World War II U.S. labor and its gains have impressed the world.
George Meany summed up the American success a few years ago in Britain, when a British trade-unionist who was also a member of the Labor Party asked him: "When are you Yanks going to wake up and form a political party?" Meany floored him with a proud reply: "When collective bargaining yields as little for us as it does for you, we may have to form a political party."
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