American Labor and the Cold War

The United Packinghouse Workers of America, Civil Rights, and the Communist Party in Chicago

The United Packinghouse Workers of America, Civil Rights, and the Communist Party in Chicago
Randi Storch When the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) formed in 1943, workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry supported interracial and militant unionism. This union culture was characterized by a largely white ethnic leadership that openly reached out to black and white ethnic workers, who in turn promoted racial equality as one part of a larger agenda for workers’ rights. Chicago meatpackers’ vote for Herb March, a Jewish Communist trade unionist, to lead their district and to represent their locals on UPWA’s international executive board symbolized this spirit. In the early 1930s, when the AFL and independent unions focused more directly on white skilled and semiskilled workers, March began organizing black and white ethnic packinghouse workers into revolutionary dual unions. Through union defeats in the 1930s, many AFL unionists learned the unfavorable consequences of racial division among stockyard workers, and during World War II they joined March in building a strong interracial, industrial union. Yet by 1953, the UPWA and the Communist Party had fully developed a new approach to race, characterized by a shift from an interracial focus to one centered on black workers and their civil rights. Blacks replaced whites in highranking union positions, the district union hall moved to a black neighborhood, and the union’s business focused even more strongly on issues of civil rights. Herb March and his interracial ideals quickly fell out of favor with both his fellow leading unionists in Chicago’s stockyards and with leaders of the Communist Party’s national board. Fellow Communist and non-Communist unionists began to characterize March’s insistence on an interracial approach to leadership as racism. Accused by fellow Communists and unionists of being a “white chauvinist,” March 72 became demoralized and disgusted. He left Chicago, the stockyards industry, and the party. March’s story is not an isolated one. In the early 1950s, the Communist Party revised its approach to race and encouraged the UPWA’s shifting racial policies . The result was not only the UPWA’s loss of many white ethnic Communist leaders, but also the alienation of its historic base among white ethnic workers. This chapter contextualizes the postwar changes that encouraged such new racial Packinghouse, Civil Rights, Communist Party 73 Figure 4.1 Herbert March speaking at the “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” rally, in minus eight-degree weather, January 1952. Credit: Wisconsin Historical Society, Image Number Whi-6670. agendas, and seeks to explain some aspects of the relationship between the UPWA and Chicago’s Communist Party. By the 1940s, the Union Stockyards filled one square mile, five miles southwest of Chicago’s downtown Loop. Forming one of the largest industrial concentrations in the nation, the stockyards were the home not only to the “big three” packers—Armour, Swift, and Wilson, each employing five to seven thousand men and women—but also to smaller houses such as P. D. Brennan, Roberts & Oake, Miller & Hart, Agar, Reliable, and Illinois Meat, each employing between one and five hundred workers. By the late 1940s, around 30,000 workers labored in the Union Stockyards’ slaughterhouses, processing mills, and livestock pens.1 The Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood that joined the yards, and the neighborhood just over a mile to its east, Bronzeville, allowed stockyard employers to draw on a heterogeneous workforce. Several Slavic groups (with Polish most numerous ), a scattering of other European immigrant groups, and Mexicans, living in the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood, had worked in the stockyards since the turn of the century. African American workers living in the city’s black belt, however , began working in the yards in significant numbers only during and after World War I. World War II changed the racial composition of Chicago’s packinghouse workers. Wartime labor shortages allowed many white workers to leave the stockyards for more lucrative employment, creating opportunities for thousands of new African American migrants from the South. By the end of the war, black employment in Chicago’s stockyards reached 40 percent of the total workforce.2 Communist trade unionists, who had earned leadership positions throughout Chicago’s UPWA locals, set out to integrate these new black workers into the stockyards’ militant culture. Communists supported black workers’ notion that the union could be used for both racial equality and economic security. In using the union to better their position at work and in the...