Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship by Robert Bussel (review)

In Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, Robert Bussel uses a joint biography of two union leaders to explore the role of organized labor in the larger communities that surround them. The two protagonists, one white, one black, both hailed from working-class families in coal country, and both wound their ways through the non-communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s before landing together in Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis. Bussel follows the two organizers as they dug in deep in their adopted local union and city, the white Harold Gibbons as the organization’s head and the black Ernest Calloway as his right-hand man. Together, the two nonsectarian socialists developed the concept of “total person unionism,” which held that gaining power at the workplace through collective bargaining was not sufficient to protect the interests of ordinary working people (p. 5). Gibbons and Calloway instead sought to engage workers when they were away from the factories, warehouses, retailers, and taxi and transportation firms that employed them. Doing so would allow the Teamsters to build power and bargain collectively in the community writ large, not just in electoral politics but also in a broad range of local decision-making arenas. In the process, the union would protect its members and the larger working class and, more important, transform ordinary workers trained in deference to managerial and political elites into full-fledged citizens.

The duo proved remarkably successful in reaching this broad, democratic vision. In 1957, Bussel contends, the union led the charge in defeating a proposed amendment to the city charter that would have shielded downtown developers and their political allies from the messiness of participatory, ward-based politics. The Teamsters achieved victory in partnership with the local branch of the NAACP, of which Calloway was also a frequent officer. Indeed, fighting racism represented an integral part of Gibbons’s vision of total person unionism. As union chief, Gibbons pushed white rank-and-file members to understand the importance of creating a democracy that included all people. Throughout the 1960s this egalitarian stance translated into a series of largely successful local campaigns.

Yet Bussel cautions that the duo’s success in modeling total person unionism ultimately fell short. Technological innovation undermined Teamster jobs, while white flight undermined their vision of community organizing. More important, Gibbons became embroiled in the national Teamsters union’s corruption scandals and then faced a counterinsurgency among members in Local 688 who claimed that his desire to build community and electoral power came at the expense of concerns on the shop floor. Gibbons’s disavowal of the Vietnam War only added fuel to the fire, ending in his removal from the union’s presidency. Meanwhile, Calloway increasingly lost traction in the city’s civil rights movement after a series of ideological, tactical, and generational conflicts with dissident members of the NAACP and of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bussel connects the two activists’ demise by arguing that both suffered when they strayed too far from the democratic principles that had animated their earlier organizing efforts. They lost touch with their respective members, dooming their more innovative campaigns and eventually their own leadership careers.

Overall the book is a captivating must-read for historians of postwar labor and civil rights movements as well as for present-day union officials and community organizers. My only quibble is that I would have liked more sustained engagement with the recent, well-regarded books on urban and civil rights history in St. Louis by historians Colin Gordon and Clarence Lang, both of which focus closely on labor, the working class, race, and politics in the very same communities. While Bussel ably recovers Gibbons and Calloway from obscurity...