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Uncivil War An Oral History of Labor, Communism, and Community in Schenectady, New York, 1944–1954  Gerald Zahavi During the first half of the twentieth century , Schenectady—lying at the eastern boundary of New York’s Mohawk Valley —was a small, bustling, and ethnically diverse industrial city that depended on two major industries for its economic survival and growth: the behemoth General Electric (GE) Works located at the center of the city, and the smaller adjacent American Locomotive Company (ALCO). Though both constituted the economic foundations of the city, the GE plant—by virtue of its size—clearly figured as the more significant force in the city’s development. The GE Works drew skilled and unskilled workers to the city; first, Anglo-Saxon and German machinists and engineers , then Italian, Canadian, and Eastern European workers. Men and women labored in the dozens of shops that together comprised the “Schenectady Works” of the GE. They fabricated or assembled refrigerators, wires and cables, electrical switches and controls, porcelain insulators, large and small motors, turbines, and—in wartime—hundreds of military-related products, including, in later years, nuclear power generation components. Along with industry and a diverse laboring population came socialism and Communism. Though Thomas Edison had sought to flee trade unions and worker militancy when he relocated the Edison Machine Works from New York City to Schenectady in 1886, the corporation he helped found failed to adequately insulate itself from union or radical assault. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century , anarchists, syndicalists, and Communists pounded at the gates of GE. In 1906, the Industrial Workers of the World staged the first sit-down strike at GE’s Schenectady plant. In 1913, over 14,000 workers struck the firm, and five hundred women walked out of one GE plant, led by socialist labor organizer Ella Reeve Bloor (later a Communist Party leader). During this latter confrontation, the city was led by a pro-labor Socialist administration headed by Mayor George R. Lunn. Even some of the firm’s white-collar workers and managers sometimes brought with them ideological traditions anathema to corporate capitalism. The firm’s most 25 famous research scientist, Alfred Proteus Steinmetz, was a German-born socialist who sometimes hosted local Socialist Party meetings at his home on Wendell Avenue , located in the prestigious “GE Realty Plot.” In the 1930s the city’s radical tradition was passed to a new generation of activists , many of them Communists active in the GE Works. Eliminating the firm’s company union, they and their non-Communist allies helped establish a strong left-wing CIO-based labor movement in the city and in the region, a movement that revolved around Local 301 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). Through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the local grew to include between 20,000 to 30,000 GE workers. Throughout these years, Communist organizers were sent into the community, most arriving from New York City. Schenectady was a major concentration point for the party, mainly because of its heavy industrial base, and because the largest number of party members in the 1930s were employed in the GE plants, scattered among the thousands of unionized workers. With time, particularly during the post-World War II years, the party’s ties to the union that had led GE’s workers since the Great Depression became a major liability for the union and for individual workers. As Truman, Eisenhower, McCarthy, and hundreds of politicians were warming up the Cold War in Washington , D.C., Schenectady—with its radical tradition, and with its core industry increasingly dependent on government contracts for military production—could hardly remain insulated from America’s second “red scare.” Between 1944 and 1954 a series of confrontations took place within and outside the massive General Electric complex, replicating similar conflicts in other industrial regions throughout the land. Local 301 and its very popular and able business agent, Leo Jandreau, came under increasing pressure from distant and local sources. In 1949 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled the UE and Local 301. It formed an opposition “right wing” union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), which very quickly established a beachhead in Schenectady to battle against Jandreau and the UE. Local clergy preached against Local 301 leaders; local politicians and former community supporters encouraged them to severe their ties to the Communist party and the UE, and to affiliate with the...

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