VL is about Work (the CIO & Geee ...don't we bring good things to Slothrop).4
Sir Tainly Knot
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Sun Oct 19 07:05:20 CDT 2003
Mike Weaver wrote:
>
> >Ahh, if you and Mike ever get around to reading US labor history let me
> >know.
> Damn your insults sir - Foners at dawn! Your choice of volumes.
When I use the term like "Left Wing", Sir, it means exactly what I say
it means. No more and no less. Now, pick up your glove and wipe the egg
off your face of I'll have to call in All the King's Horses and Men.
First and foremost it refers to Communists. Party members were very
active in the formation of the CIO. How many were there? Difficult to
say. However, about 40% of the CIO's Unions had significant Communist
connections by the end of the 1930s. In 1948 the FBI asserted that of
the Party's 59,000 members, approximately 16,000 were in the CIO--less
than 1% of the total. Even if one assumes that all the Party members
were in the expelled Unions, the percentage rises only to 2 percent. But
the numbers do not tell us the whole story. Communists were heavily
concentrated among the full-time staff and national officers of the
Left-Wing Unions and therefore exercised power and influence far out of
proportion to their actual percentage of membership. The IUE, claimed
that 200 Communists or former Communists were on the UE payroll in
1950. IN most cases there was simply no way to determine whether a
person belonged to the Communist Party.
see
Steve Rosswurm, ed. The CIO's Left-Led Unions. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1992.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/bookrev1.htm
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list