Finish Fight

U.S. labor's war with Communism is bitter and for keeps. To date, the battle has clearly gone with the antiCommunists; but it is a running fight. Last week there were three skirmishes.

The United Electrical Workers, meeting for their 13th annual convention in Manhattan, plowed straight down the Communist furrow, despite the gees and haws of the C.I.O.'s Secretary-Treasurer Jim Carey, onetime U.E. president. By overwhelming majorities, the delegates denounced the draft as "part of big business' war against the American people"; condemned the Marshall Plan as a tool of Wall Street; re-elected all their Red-minded officers.

But before the convention was over, the Reds showed at least one sign of growing weakness. Though they rammed through resolutions opposing the election of either Harry Truman or Tom Dewey, they stopped short of a formal pledge to Henry Wallace. Explained President Albert Fitzgerald frankly: "No presidential candidate we could endorse here today could have any other effect than to split the organization wide open."

The Transport Workers' President Mike Quill, who had already led 40,000 of Manhattan's subway, bus and elevated operators out of the Communist-dominated Greater New York C.I.O. Council, locked horns with his own Communist-dominated international executive board. When the board refused to endorse Harry Truman, Mike countered by kicking out smart, swarthy Harry Sacher as lawyer ($6,000 a year) for T.W.U.'s Local 100. Said Quill: "He is a conniving member of the Communist Party and he has connived with the party to wreck the union. Sacher has an ego like a peacock and he goes today."

Sacher went, but still held on to his $12,000-a-year job as counsel for the T.W.U.'s international board. Quill cried that he had only begun to fight. At the T.W.U. convention next December he promised a "give & take, head-on fight between the Communist Party and those of us who represent the membership."

Michigan's Wayne County Council of the C.I.O. was finally delivered from Red hands. Under Phil Murray's personal direction, anti-Communist unions that had been seceding in disgust for years, were ordered to re-apply for membership. When the Reds refused to seat them, an emissary from C.I.O. headquarters led the anti-Communists into a rump meeting, took over all books and records, and left the Reds holding an empty bag.

This week anti-Communists in New York decided to try the same maneuver. They would apply to the C.I.O. for a charter aimed at supplanting the Greater New York C.I.O. Council. No one doubted that there would be many more such skirmishes before the battle was over. In the early days of the C.I.O., the Communists had been eagerly welcomed into U.S. unions. Now, unless they were uprooted bodily, they would dig in deeper & deeper.

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