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“An Anarchist with a Program” East Coast Shipyard Workers, the Labor Left, and the Origins of Cold War Unionism  David Palmer For East Coast shipbuilding trade unionists, the Cold War began before the end of World War II. A broad left-wing developed in the major Atlantic Coast shipyards of the Northeast during the early 1940s that became the target of anticommunist business, government, and union leaders. While the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) played a role in this shipyard labor left, other forces were equally significant even though they lacked the institutionalized organization of the CPUSA. Labor historians often characterized Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) unions as battlegrounds within which activists of the CPUSA “left” combated those of the anticommunist “right,” with most workers consigned to being “supporters ” of either the “left” or “right.”1 Some labor historians pit a presumably activist CPUSA against a trade union–oriented labor left that lacked political dynamism and diversity.2 The experience of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) at the grassroots provides a different picture.3 The World War II history of IUMSWA Local 16 at Federal Shipbuilding , Kearny, New Jersey illuminates both the complexities of the fierce anticommunism that characterized union and political life in America on the eve of the Cold War and the role of a broad labor left that was the target of this anticommunism . In the IUMSWA, the labor left went far beyond the rigid politics and practices of the CPUSA. Its essence was perhaps best captured by inside organizer Lou Kaplan, who explained his politics to Federal Shipyard workers with a very basic phrase: “I’m an anarchist with a program.” The experience of this particular union local points toward a grassroots political explanation for American trade union decline in the second half of the twentieth century, a decline that was not reversed until a broad left was reestablished within the ranks of labor locally and nationally during the 1990s.4 Founded in 1933, the IUMSWA emerged from inside organizing, and it 85 dominated East Coast shipyard unionism by the end of the decade. Its first success, at New York Shipbuilding, Camden, New Jersey, preceded the formation of the breakaway CIO, and it was the earliest of the new industrial unions to become part of the CIO once it was formed. During the late 1930s, the IUMSWA’s main organizing successes were concentrated in the Northeast, with major gains in the port of New York and North Jersey. In 1937, the IUMSWA won a union election at Federal Shipbuilding in Kearny, New Jersey. The yard was located between Newark and Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, a strategic location for the IUMSWA and the CIO. By World War II, the shipbuilding industry employed more workers in America than any other, reaching a peak of 1,686,600 by 1943. Federal Ship, owned by U.S. Steel Corporation, had become one of the major shipbuilding employers in the Northeast and built more destroyers during the war than any other shipyard in the world. Given the industry’s indispensibility during the war, the IUMSWA’s ability to maintain production and worker morale made the union critical to an Allied victory. In this larger national drama, Federal Shipyard became a turbulent focus for the union when its earlier election victory seemed to vanish as tens of thousands of new non-union workers flooded into the two yards at Kearny and Newark.5 At Federal Ship, activists held a wide range of political views, reflecting in turn the varied outlooks of rank-and-file workers. On the right, anticommunists who identified with the Democratic and Republican parties, usually based in North Jersey urban machine politics, coalesced with socialists, often experienced shipbuilders from the River Clyde in Scotland. The left included leftwing Democrats , progressive Republicans, and Communist Party members and allies. Other independent leftists can best be described as highly pragmatic anarchists with philosophical roots in the American syndicalism of William Z. Foster’s early years and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) of Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs. John Green and Phil Van Gelder held the IUMSWA’s first major offices and played key roles in organizing the union. They also shaped the IUMSWA’s early political outlook and practice. Both of them belonged to the Socialist Party (SP), rather than the Communist Party, but were members of the SP’s left faction , the Revolutionary...

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