A Torpedo Named Joe

The nation's biggest maritime union--and one of those most diligently cultivated by Communists--split wide open last week. The man who split it open was none other than Joe Curran, its blustering builder and longtime (nine years) boss.

Last February, Joe Curran was sold a bill of goods. The name of the goods: the Committee for Maritime Unity. From a trade-union point of view the idea seemed fine; C.M.U. would be the united front of all maritime and longshoremen unions. Ham-handed Joe Curran took his big East Coast National Maritime Union into the group, lined it up with five other much smaller seamen's unions and Harry Bridges' big West Coast International Longshoremen.

Curran and Bridges were cochairmen. United, they won substantial wage gains. Big Joe was happy--but he was also uneasy. The reason for his uneasiness was that the top layer of C.M.U.'s officialdom was dominated by Communist party-liners, and in the midst of trade-union victory they were playing their own game, as slow-thinking Joe Curran slowly found out.

Big Joe had long been surrounded by Communists in his N.M.U. and for months they had been trying to capture his union. Now they operated in close cahoots with shrewd, slippery Harry Bridges.

In C.M.U. meetings, although Joe's single union represented by far the largest number of men, he was outvoted by Bridges and the Bridges' coalition. They used the C.M.U. as a political weapon without Joe's approval. They undercut him and outmaneuvered him.

"Throw the Commies Out." Joe was so baffled that he was even ready to take advice from his old A.F.L. rival, roughneck, Communist-hater Harry Lundeberg. Lundeberg told him: "Throw the Commies out of your union and get out of that phony C.M.U."

Joe thought it over, going from warm to hot. Last week he took the action which hurled his union into the biggest open fight it has had yet. He resigned from "that phony C.M.U."

Joe's torpedo shook C.M.U. from stem to stern, although C.M.U. was not yet sunk and Harry Bridges and comrades were not yet licked. Bridges was on his way to Honolulu to negotiate a longshoremen's contract. But in the Manhattan headquarters of N.M.U., Curran's Communist pals, now his bitter, open enemies, scurried around like enraged locusts, shrilling propaganda.

Both sides--Joe's men and the Communists--shouted "Mutiny." They called off the fight long enough to march in a body on the ship owners to demand a 25% wage boost. But this was only a truce in the face of the common enemy, as they saw it.

The internal struggle boiled. Curran had the support of Vice President Jack Lawrenson and soft-spoken Treasurer Hedley Stone. Curran's enemies are led by three smart Communist-line operators: Vice President Joe Stack; Jamaican Negro Secretary Ferdinand Smith; weary-looking Vice President Howard McKenzie. Stack, Smith and McKenzie have one objective: to toss Curran out and realign N.M.U. solidly with Bridges and the Party. Curran, who once thought he could run the Reds--and sometimes even run with them--knows that this time he will be lucky if he survives them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.