The Herdsman

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As befitted the most powerful labor leader in the West, Seattle's bald, pink-faced Dave Beck toiled assiduously last week to satisfy the demands of protocol at the A.F.L. convention. He arrived in Cincinnati for the big doings as punctiliously as a good Moslem entering Mecca. He donned a proper hand-painted necktie, submitted cheerfully to interviews, and loitered diplomatically in the lobby of the Netherland Plaza Hotel, glad-handing rheumy and belligerent old union patriarchs.

But when the convention proper began, Teamster Czar Beck acted less like a union big shot than a man taking a rest cure at some stodgy, back-country hot springs. He made no speeches at all; when he sat down to listen to convention oratory, he did so with the resigned air of a man lowering himself into a mud bath for the good of his soul and his sweat glands.

He spent a good deal of his time holed up in his room, alone, reading Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson. Despite the convivial atmosphere of the convention, he sternly denied himself lunches (he struggles religiously to keep his weight at 185 lbs.--at one time he did daily roadwork to reduce). He turned down all invitations to visit bars, nightclubs or gambling joints (at 54, he has yet to touch either alcohol or tobacco).

He did no visible wirepulling, showed no interest in kingmaking, and--except for visits with aging, trigger-tempered Teamster Chief Dan Tobin--he steered clear of smoke-filled rooms. With beet-faced vehemence, he denied a rumor which had gotten to Cincinnati before him--that he was hell bent to boot old Dan out of office and grab the teamsters' presidency for himself. "Mr. Tobin," he said, with dignity, "is like a father to me."

The Booster. Delegates and newsmen who had never seen Dave Beck before were a little startled, not only by his mild and self-effacing performance, but by his personal appearance. His quiet, expensive clothes, his full-toothed smile, his bland face, his high-pitched, almost boyish voice, gave him the aura of a super-Rotarian booster right out of Main Street. But his eyes--cold, blue and direct--explained him more fully.

They also explained his lack of interest in the machinations of the A.F.L.'s jealous, bumbling, convention-bound rulers. In the 22 years since he climbed down from a laundry truck to become an organizer for the teamsters, Dave Beck had never begged for crumbs at the table of the A.F.L. hierarchy. He had become a Big Man despite them, by virtue of his own ambition, ability and ruthlessness.

In many ways he seemed like a throwback to the lumber barons, the cattle kings and the mining magnates who had ruled the West before him. Like them, he had seen the West as a vast, unfenced, unclaimed territory where a strong man could take what he wanted. Beck had wanted its roaming herds of labor. He rounded them up, hogtied them, and branded them by the thousands. He fought off Rustler Harry Bridges with one hand while piously rustling the herds of lesser unions with the other.

He became something unique in American labor--a regional prince whose power and interests extended far beyond the confines of labor and into the entire life of his community. Unlike Walter Reuther, Phil Murray and John Lewis, he had no yearnings to become a political power, or to take part in plotting a political labor party. The demands of his own principality, where he was supreme, were enough to occupy his time.

Everything on Wheels. His principality now spreads from Canada to Mexico, from the Rockies to the Pacific. The unions encompassed by his Western Conference of Teamsters move virtually "everything on wheels" in the eleven western states. His men send enormous diesel rigs snarling across the Mojave Desert, drive hearses in Oakland, deliver laundry in Seattle, unload mining machinery in Butte.

Though truckers are the elite of the Western Conference, it is a corral which also contains dozens of other, oddly unrelated trades. In Beck's domain "teamsters" make beer, can fruit, dehydrate vegetables, sell and service automobiles, pump gasoline, work in warehouses, and clean suits. They are undertakers, cow punchers and aircraft mechanics.

Dave Beck not only dominates western labor; he dominates great chunks of business as well. He sees himself as a kind of self-appointed price-wage czar. With deadpan audacity he has used his power to prevent cutthroat competition, to punish price cutters, and to help firms with teamster contracts make a safe margin of profit.

If some businessmen resent his interference, fear and respect prevent outcries. The sound of the name Dave Beck still touches the nerve centers of thousands with the impact of a fist on bone. But the great majority of employers think he is wonderful and applaud like happy seals when he speaks at the Chamber of Commerce.

With a Capital E. They have their reasons. Beck abhors strikes and stands for free enterprise with a capital E--as long as it is run Dave Beck's way. He is an able, honest, startlingly frank man--and in recent years he has become startlingly reasonable. He is full of the kind of civic pride which rich industrialists had once reserved for themselves; he wants his minions to prosper. His word and his contracts are as good as gold. He not only gets pork chops for his unions but disciplines them with an iron hand.

In Seattle, the capital of his domain, he has made himself a leading citizen. The job was done in part by the lever of power and the trowel of publicity, but mostly by the touchstone of success. By virtue of his hard-won eminence, he rubs shoulders with bankers and bishops, raises funds for charity, and serves, beaming with pride, as a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Washington.

It is an exhilarating and heady experience for Dave Beck, a man who is fond of recalling that he had come up a hard and rocky road. He was born in Stockton, Calif, in 1894. His father, a Tennessee-born carpet cleaner named Lemuel Beck, brought his family to Seattle four years later, seeking a handhold on the better life. Lemuel Beck never found it. As his growing son soon discovered, he was the "world's worst businessman."

Machinist's Mate. Dave sold newspapers and Christmas trees, fished in houseboat-bordered Lake Union to piece out the family fortunes. His mother worked in a laundry. He never forgot waiting for her outside its steamy windows while she drudged on late at night. Eyeing the ornate houses of the rich on Capitol Hill, Dave resolved to be as good as any of them.

He left Seattle's Broadway High School after three years to drive a laundry truck. During World War I he joined the Navy, was sent to Killingholme, England as a machinist's mate, and flew over the North Sea in lumbering Curtiss flying boats on anti-Zeppelin patrols. Travel fanned his ambition.

When he came home he worked his laundry route like a prospector working a gravel bar. He made good money--more than $100 a week. He got himself elected business agent of Laundry Driver's Local 566, made speeches in Seattle's down-at-the-heels labor temple at every opportunity. He took extension courses in economics, law, business administration, and English.

His energy, enthusiasm and his loud, table-thumping speeches caught the eye of Michael ("Bloody Mike") Casey, the famed leader of San Francisco's teamsters. Casey recommended him to Dan Tobin, and in 1926 Tobin made Beck a teamster organizer. It was a wise, decision.

Boom Town. Seattle, a city then so new that many a citizen could remember shooting deer inside its limits, was the product of great booms--the migration, which followed the railroad, the Alaskan gold stampede, the frenzied era of shipbuilding during World War I.

When redheaded Dave Beck took office, the gusty breath of all this excitement still hung in the air. The headsaws of lumber mills screamed along almost every lake and waterway. Loggers, fishermen, sailors and bums lounged by the hundreds beside the Skidroad's missions, hash joints and flophouses. Seattle's tough cops still took pride in using force sufficient to make an arrest, and dragged in many a prisoner by the heels.

But for all this, and for all the eccentricities of Washington state politics, Seattle was a conservative city. It was crazy for education, community clubs, home cooking, Sunday automobile trips to Snoqualmie Falls, and solid construction in municipal buildings. The core of its population was composed of thrifty, churchgoing Scandinavians who enjoyed the rain and yearned to own their own homes. It was a city which liked rose bushes. Dave Beck mirrored its conflicting personality. But for years, Seattle was indignant at its own reflection.

War. In those days, becoming a labor organizer meant going to war. The history of labor in the Northwest was full of the sound of rifle fire, the crash of explosives, and the surrealistic thud of club on skull. The noisiest battles had been set off by the I.W.W. in its invasions of the woods and sawmills. In the celebrated Centralia massacre of 1919, Wobblies shot down four parading American Legionnaires; three years earlier in an equally bloody battle at Everett, Wash, in 1916, gun-toting deputy sheriffs killed or wounded 36 men with I.W.W. cards.

Beck thought the Wobblies were crazy. He considered them dynamite-loving, song-singing romantics who bayed for the class struggle, but never seemed to know where they were going. But employers who had pistol-whipped Wobblies out of town had no more charitable reaction to more sensible union men with sensible ideas. In the hard world of labor organization there was no substitute for power and little power without violence.

Dave Beck--a man who has never been known to brawl himself--used violence as calculatingly as a general uses artillery. His teamsters could take care of themselves on almost any picket line. At one time he announced that hundreds of them were being trained in jujitsu and boxing for the sake of their health.

During the bitter jurisdictional battles of the 19305, Beck's teamsters also gathered a force of "goons"--hefty, beer-guzzling musclemen who wore heavy shoes for kicks to the groin and fought with baseball bats, fists, rocks or whatever other weapons came to hand.

Said one ex-goon, reminiscing last week about the teamsters' battles to contain Harry Bridges' inland march into uptown Seattle warehouses: "We always used indoor bats with about four inches sawed off so we could hide them in the sleeves of our coats. We had to use bats because the longshoremen fought with their cargo hooks.* Sailors used a two-foot length of tracer chain, or wrapped window-sash chain around their fists."

Pressure. In the years after the passage of the Wagner Act, the teamsters' pressure on their enemies never relaxed. Price-cutting dry-cleaning establishments were brought into line. This seemed to end an epidemic of mysterious explosions, with which they had been plagued. Laundries formed an employers' association to police their industry and appointed one of Beck's friends, Bill Short, to run it at a fine fee. Taxicab drivers were organized, after they got tired of being rammed by automobiles with steel rails for bumpers.

Beck, who directed his confused and far-flung battles with consummate generalship, gained himself a magnificently effective ally. He backed a red-faced, ambitious attorney named John Francis Dore for mayor of Seattle. Dore won and said: "As long as I am mayor ... I am going to do all in my power to help the teaming unions."

He kept his word. When the teamster goons went into action, Seattle police looked the other way; at times they even convoyed teamster-driven trucks through C.I.O. picket lines.

The P-l Strike. Beck also silenced the carping of Seattle's newspapers. When the American Newspaper Guild (then in the A.F.L.) struck Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Beck came to the Guild's aid. A mob of his hard-fisted cohorts surrounded the P-I building, beat up fleeing nonstrikers and closed the plant up tight as a coffin. Hearst set his writers to beating out virulently anti-Beck radio scripts. General Clarance B. Blethen, corpulent publisher of the Seattle Times, indignantly penned an editorial which ended with the ringing line: "How do you like the look of Dave Beck's gun? The shame of it!"

Beck sued the Post-Intelligencer and four radio stations for $550,000 and the Times for $250,000, settled out of court for $15,000 and $10,000 respectively. It was the last time a Seattle newspaper ever spoke a harsh word about him. Today they publish editorials praising his statesmanship; critical references by Westbrook Pegler or Drew Pearson are carefully deleted.

As Beck extended his sway he suffered one major setback. Three hired goons confessed that Al Rosser, his lieutenant in Oregon, had been instrumental in paying them $105 for burning down a West Salem box factory. Rosser was sent to the penitentiary.

Beer Blockade. On other fronts Beck was consistently victorious. At one teamsters' convention during his struggle to stem Bridges' invasion of Seattle, he cried: "If Harry Bridges and his crowd want to . . . make this thing an alley fight, the teamsters will wallow with them in the gutter and when it is all over we will be on top." The teamsters wallowed, and they came out on top.

They attacked A.F.L. United Brewery Workers with the same remorseless tactics. Goons trailed U.B.W. beer drivers, beat them up, wrecked their trucks. Despite innumerable lawsuits, Beck also maintained a blockade which kept the opposition's California and eastern-made beer out of Seattle and Portland for years. In the end, every brewery in the eleven western states signed teamster contracts.

But even as he applied bone-cracking pressure on picket lines, Beck was seeking more peaceful means of accomplishing his ends. When the Seattle Junior Chamber of Commerce daringly asked him to speak at one of their meetings early in 1937, he cried: "There is no place in our union for Communists or Bolshevists. I am for the capitalistic system!" The young men were almost as surprised as if he had removed his shirt and disclosed a set of wings.

A few weeks later, while Detroit, St. Louis and Chicago were plagued with sit-down strikes, the Seattle Real Estate Board also called on him for a few words. Purred he: "I stand unalterably opposed to the sit-down strike. It is illegal seizure of property and will breed revolution." Almost immediately, Harry Bridges did him a good turn. He came to Seattle and predicted the eventual extinction of the employer. Said Beck, in rebuttal: "Some of the finest . . . men I know are employers."

The Sheik. Business in general and the Chamber of Commerce in particular responded to this wooing like Lady Diana Mayo responding to the Sheik. Businessmen had reluctantly decided that unions had come to stay; they now felt, not too reluctantly, that it would be a good idea to do business with Beck, a man who stood by contracts. As a result, Beck's capture of the department store clerks was as easy as picking plums. Management stood aside with relieved smiles and it was simply a matter of telling the clerks they were in the union, furnishing teamsters to run their locals, and renting them space in Teamsters' Hall.

Meanwhile Beck's Western Conference of Teamsters--which made possible regional bargaining with big employers--yielded more bloodless conquests. When Sam Langendorf, president of the Langendorf Baking Co., refused to sign a contract in non-union Los Angeles, Beck had a quick answer. He threatened to strike Langendorf's union operations in Seattle and San Francisco. Langendorf signed.

As peaceful techniques began to work, the goons vanished almost as magically as they had appeared. Beck declared himself the foe of strikes and promised to prevent them--a promise which has gone virtually unbroken for almost a decade.

During the ten years of peace, Beck has bent every effort to gain popularity for himself and his unions. During World War II the teamsters' treasury was tapped to buy football uniforms for the 146th Field Artillery at Fort Lewis. Teamsters recorded the farewell messages of 60,000 soldiers who passed through the Seattle Port of Embarkation and sent the records to their families. Dave Beck ran the state of Washington's third war bond drive and exceeded the quota by $30 million.

Many an industrialist has come to consider him a vastly capable business executive. In his impressive office in Seattle's Teamsters' Hall, he flips through correspondence at split-second speed and barks out advice and orders to every point of his realm by long-distance telephone. He drives to work in a 1947 Cadillac. Although he is paid $25,000 a year, he lives modestly in the same five-room Ravenna District bungalow in which he and his wife started housekeeping in 1920.

Vociferous Critics. He still has vociferous critics--most of them now among union men. Some of his own minions grumble at his repetitious speeches, his peremptory commands. Said one teamster, of a campaign Beck waged to ingratiate himself with eastern Washington farmers: "For a while, everybody in the Teamsters' Hall had to have an apple in his mouth. Next year Dave had trouble organizing the apple sheds and you were canned if they found a seed in your pocket."

Seattle taxi drivers speak of him sourly. Since 1944, Beck has kept them under local trusteeship (a state in which the rank & file cannot initiate meetings) as punishment for holding a wildcat strike. Many teamsters complain that they have no voice in the union's affairs.

Officials of the C.I.O. are more outspoken. Harry Bridges has long accused Beck of running company unions for the benefit of the employer. Since Beck began organizing the Boeing Airplane Co. last spring during a machinists union strike, other union leaders have called him the hardest names they know: scab and strikebreaker. But despite this, every West Coast labor leader envies him the power his tactics have yielded, and none can deny that he has won teamsters both wages and prestige.

Partial Answer. His own prestige has been matched by a spectacular rise within the hierarchy of the teamsters' international union. His ideas of regional organization, once regarded as odd and unsound, have been freely adopted. Last year touchy old Dan Tobin named him executive vice president of the international union--in effect, second in command.

Because of this, the rumor persisted that he planned to unseat Tobin. But he has enormous power with Tobin in office and will probably get more. The notion that he is scheming to succeed Bill Green as president of the A.F.L. also seems unsound--it is a post to which strong men are not elected.

For it is as a strong man that Dave Beck has made his mark. What disturbs many a more democratically minded unionist is that Beck's benevolent but monopolistic dictatorship might eventually stifle competition, corrupt his own unions, stagnate business, and ruin the consumer.

Beck has an answer to that, but it is only a partial answer, based on the wielding of personal power. "It hasn't happened yet," he says. "If it does, we'll think of a way to deal with it."

* One teamster, Anthony ("Stonearm") Harn was hooked in the head with a cargo hook; his left arm calcified as a result, providing him with a dangerous, natural club.

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