Lesson One

Walter Reuther ruled the annual C.I.O. convention in Los Angeles last week with the precise authority of a schoolmarm. His slate of officers (with himself as president) was re-elected without opposition; his resolution praising the committee on A.F.L.-C.I.O. unity was quickly passed; his ideas on many subjects from foreign affairs (against blockading Red China) to a guaranteed annual wage (he is for it) were approved.

The one shrill note of opposition came when the Transport Workers' volatile Mike Quill, still burned up at the way the New York Democratic Party had blocked his candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., from the gubernatorial nomination, rose on the floor and claimed that the C.I.O. was a tail to the Democratic kite. He be moaned the fact that "we are tying ourselves tighter and tighter to the Democratic Party ... All across the country we find the blundering of the Democratic Party weighing us down." Quill called for "a third party, a political party, a labor party, a trade-union party, call it what you will, but a party of labor!"

Then the schoolmarm restored order. Patiently, Reuther recalled Lesson One: "Now to begin with, everyone who knows anything about the elementary facts of political history in America knows that third parties will get no one anywhere . . . We will get better results in New York when we have fewer press releases and more practical work in the neighborhoods in New York City. You cannot win political campaigns by making noise."

Quill, having made his noise and taken his public spanking, voted for Reuther's resolution praising the work of the C.I.O. Political Action Committee in its "traditional nonpartisan manner."

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