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chapter 17 B. J. Widick In the annals of American labor and its committed partisans, Branko J. Widick, who died on June 28, 2008, at the age of ninety-seven, is not a well-known figure . He deserves much recognition and admiration, however, because Widick was not only an activist at the very epicenter of the great strikes that launched the industrial unions in the 1930s, but he also remained a radical and an acutely honest observer throughout those postwar decades when the great organizations he had helped to build entered an era of stagnation and decline. Known as “B. J.” or “Jack,” he was born on October 25, 1910, in the Serbian village of Okucani and was brought by his father to the United States just prior to World War I. Like other working-class families, the Widicks moved frequently, first to Serbian communities in Minnesota, then to Detroit, and finally to Akron in 1923. There B. J. graduated from the University of Akron and then found work as a journalist at the Akron Beacon Journal (1933–1936). He led a double life. In his day job he was a cocky reporter, nicknamed “Scoop” by the local police; off work he was a revolutionary, joining the Communist Party in the early 1930s but shortly thereafter aligning himself with the Trotskyists, whose forceful opposition to the dictatorship emerging in the Soviet Union and whose leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis General Strike made a large impression. All the while he plunged into work as a writer, researcher, and editor for the unions that were spawned by the working-class upsurge of that Depression era. He helped organize a chapter of the Newspaper Guild at the Beacon Journal, he set up a research department and newspaper for the United Rubber Workers in 1936, and then he assisted in the 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike. In June 1937 he spent time in Mexico with Leon Trotsky as well as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Trotsky, who had read Widick’s reportage from Flint, Akron, and other sites of the union upsurge, wanted to know if a prerevolutionary situation existed in the United States. It did not, but upon his return to the States Widick turned down offers to take a paid job with the new unions and instead spent the years until World War II as Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 230 5/24/13 8:04 AM B. J. Widick 231 a writer, speaker, and organizer—first, for James Cannon’s Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party, and after 1940 for Max Shachtman’s Workers Party, the anti-Stalinist political group, which was equally hostile to the Western capitalism and Soviet-style Communism.1 After serving as a sergeant in World War II, Widick settled in Detroit and got a job in an automobile plant, not unlike scores of other Trotskyists and hundreds of Communists who saw the United Automobile Workers as the most strategic venue from which American radicals could attempt to shift the politics of the unions and the working class. Widick was a forceful and attractive figure, a natural leader on the shop floor, and an autodidact who happily and heartily held his own among credentialed intellectuals on campus or on the union staff. The literary critic Alan Wald, who knew Widick for the last three decades of his life, described him as “selfassured , quick, energetic, expressive and warmhearted. Widick kept up affable ties to several generations of socialist activists on whom he eagerly bestowed advice. Although he was only five feet, four inches tall, his personality aura was powerfully etched in the minds of many who knew him well.”2 B. J. Widick was among those men of the left, including the influential group who were influenced by Shachtman’s “third camp” socialism, for whom the post–World War II United Auto Workers (UAW) became the institution into which they poured their passion, intellect, and organizational energies. For at least two decades the UAW filled the vacuum once occupied by the socialist or Trotskyist commitment that had formed their politics in the 1930s and early 1940s. For some this engagement with America’s largest and most powerful trade union eased the way to an accommodation with a tepid brand of laborliberalism and often to a set of politics far to the right even of that. As the writer Harvey Swados once put it, the problem with the UAW leadership and the circle of formerly left-wing intellectuals who sustained it...

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