Fragile Juggernaut: A CIO Podcast
@RADIO_CIO
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A @haymarketbooks original podcast about the CIO. Hosts: @gabrielwinant , @andrewelrod , @alexnpress , @emmateit , @_timbarker , Ben Mabie. Prod. by @rowhome_audio .
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Yes! The area was filled with union, immigrant press offices and working class saloons. The demonstration was organized by the Communist Party, and the stage was erected just outside their headquarters, which stood (I believe!) where the Barnes & Noble sits today.
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“In 1936 we developed this slogan: It’s anti-union to red-bait, race-bait, or queen-bait. We also put it another way: If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. That’s why we all have to stick together.”
Happy pride month! 🎉
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Full disclosure: our first episode won't even get to the CIO.
We agree with Mike Davis, who once drew up the chart below. To understand the CIO, you need the geology and topography of class formation - and the layered history of earlier worker defeats.
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We're joined by the one and only Robin D.G. Kelley to talk about the South and the CIO–miners, sharecroppers, steelworkers, workers in oil and tobacco and textiles–and how they related, or didn't, to the traditions of organizing across the region.
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Gabe's encounter invites the question: how do people find out about Fragile Juggernaut? Let us know in the replies here (our very well-paid and high-tech marketing team will correct for selection bias).
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In 1951, the US government indicted W.E.B. Du Bois on trumped-up charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. CIO unions and locals rose to Du Bois' defense. One example is the resolution below, passed by UAW-CIO Local 600 (Dearborn, Michigan).
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Today is the 94th anniversary of the first International Unemployment Day, which saw massive marches–and bruising fights with the police–around the world, including in Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Boston and New York.
You can listen to the story here:
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These were the "unorganizable" high-tech workers of their day! And they changed the world.
UE was founded 87 years ago today, by a group of mostly young workers in the electrical and radio manufacturing industries.
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Our new episode dials into New York City, with the eminent historian Joshua Freeman. We talk about organizing outside the CIO cast–in transit, teachers, laundry and domestics–as well as what made NYC, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary.
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New episode: a dramatic retelling of the nearly-revolutionary strikes of 1934, in Toledo and San Francisco, in Minneapolis and across America’s textile belt
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Tune in for James Baldwin and Truman Capote; Irish dance halls and cruising on the piers; burial societies, Tammany Hall, and clandestine organizations; the origins of bodegas and how the mob got rackets into organized labor; the trade union origins of “Strange Fruit”. . .
Our new episode dials into New York City, with the eminent historian Joshua Freeman. We talk about organizing outside the CIO cast–in transit, teachers, laundry and domestics–as well as what made NYC, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary.
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NEW EPISODE: "Who Gets the Bird", our deep dive into how communists changed to the CIO, and how the CIO changed the CPUSA.
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For the "why would a union weigh in on international events" crowd:
85 years ago, Dec 16 1938, thousands of mostly Chinese demonstrators marched to the San Francisco waterfront to picket the loading of scrap iron onto a Greek freighter bound for Japan. Longshoremen with ILWU Local 10 refused to cross the picket and ceased work for several days
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"Our foreign policy must always be an extension of this nation's domestic policy. Our safest guide to what we do abroad is a good look at what we are doing at home." - Lyndon Baines Johnson
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“It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.”
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NEW EPISODE: LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER. Our crew dives into the developing political divisions that emerge with a consolidating CIO–what the factional infighting was, and what it signaled about different ways to 'do' unionism.
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Ben Mabie and
@alexnpress
talk shop with friend of the pod
@tracyrosenthal_
about the parallels between tenant and labor organizing
Just like workers organizing on the job, tenants organizing against their landlords have a key role in ensuring everyone’s human needs are met.
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New Episode: on the escalating confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism. Was there an American fascism? Where did it come from and what did it look like?
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New episode: "The Lean Years," where we explore the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath.
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Today's the 90th anniversary of Bloody Thursday, when the SF police killed two strikes and injured 106 more. Although employers hoped the violence would deflate the strike, it catalyzed its spread, kicking off a general strike that would last 4 days.
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New Episode: Rupture. We survey the panorama of social life transfigured by the first three years of the Great Depression.
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"Since the 19th century, efforts to organize steel have been led by the shrinking vanguard of skilled workers, craft unions. But you can see a glimmer of industrial organization in this mass movement of semi-skilled immigrant workers, even in their violent defeat"
New episode: "The Lean Years," where we explore the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath.
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We went on
@KnowYrEnemyPod
to talk about the CIO and the right wing threat it was responding to, it was curtailed by, and that it faced inside the labor movement itself.
New
@KnowYrEnemyPod
: we're talking the CIO, 1930s labor militancy, & right-wing reaction w/
@_TimBarker
and Ben Mabie of "Fragile Juggernaut" (
@RADIO_CIO
), i.e. my favorite American labor history podcast.
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New Episode: Socialism in its Work Clothes, on the history of the US working class from 1877-1914. How did workers organize amidst shifts in the economic structure, from the acceleration of proletarianization to the rise of corporate capitalism?
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Our Fragile Juggernaut OC will be talking organizing all over the
@labornotes
conference. On Saturday night at 6PM,
@gabrielwinant
,
@ToniGilpin
,
@_ericblanc
and Ben Mabie will talk through the history of the CIO. Come say hi!
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New Episode: the impasse of the Second New Deal with the historian Ahmed White, when the newfound power of working-class organization in mass production confronted the counterattack of property and established social hierarchy.
1
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We've just dropped a bonus episode: a live recording from
@haymarketbooks
' Socialism Conference. We discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly: the state, hegemony, war, and the far-right
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We cover the patterns of Southern development set by slavery; the rich organizational ecology of the region, in and out of the labor movement; the strategic misfires of the CIO right-wing; the "Anglo-American minority" in the Black Belt; and the bases of fascism in America.
We're joined by the one and only Robin D.G. Kelley to talk about the South and the CIO–miners, sharecroppers, steelworkers, workers in oil and tobacco and textiles–and how they related, or didn't, to the traditions of organizing across the region.
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Come for the stories of North Carolina communists, stay for the discussion of how race structures the experience of class on the packinghouse floor
New episode: "The Lean Years," where we explore the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath.
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We're live! Listen to our first episode on patreon () or wherever else you find podcasts.
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Tune into our great big PMC concept album. We discuss office workers, journalists, academics and scientists, and workers in the culture industries, all interspersed with excerpts from Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical play The Cradle Will Rock.
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Marty was a fixture at just about every demonstration in New York City. We'll miss seeing him.
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In 1936 and 1937, Hollywood managed to produce two films about the same story: a protestant and yankee-born industrial worker seduced by nativism into Black Legion, a fascist gang stalking the auto-plants. One of them starred Humphrey Bogart.
It’s always fun when the media makes two of the same thing:
-Antz & A Bug’s Life
-White House Down & Olympus Has Fallen
-
@jacobin
“Organizing the Unorganized” &
@haymarketbooks
@RADIO_CIO
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NYC was the seat of the country’s largest manufacturing base, but one composed of a vast constellation of small and diverse shops; and also host to the nation’s largest port, transport system, white collar and cultural complex. What kind of labor movement would this city produce?
Our new episode dials into New York City, with the eminent historian Joshua Freeman. We talk about organizing outside the CIO cast–in transit, teachers, laundry and domestics–as well as what made NYC, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary.
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For many workers the CIO was a response not only to working conditions, but to the threat of a racist right wing authoritarianism and the drum beats of another world war.
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Miners and needleworkers have each, in their own way, played a 'vanguard' role in the history of the American working class. They are especially important to the pre-history of the CIO.
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With all eyes on campus, a special May Day shoutout to everyone in higher ed organizing job actions: launching strikes (
@GOLDartmouth
), sustaining them (
@gradworkersofBU
), walking out for Palestine (
@cunyonstrike
&
@payusmoreucsc
) or preparing a ULP for the same (
@uaw_4811
)
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"When fascism comes to the US, it will look like a Pennsylvania Coal Town."
Our new episode tracks the atmosphere of fascism and anti-fascism which indelibly stamped the subjectivity of the labor movement.
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Our New York City episode – featuring the inimitable Joshua Freeman – rolls off the assembly line later this week.
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In his NMU speech, King proclaimed: "We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die."
He then quoted industrial unionist Eugene Debs: "Let the people take heart and hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing and joy cometh with the morning."
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SIT DOWN: if you are interested in the interaction between the architectonics of capital and street battles barely won against advancing cops, this is the episode for you
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You're going to love this one; be sure to share with others you think might like it too.
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A snapshot of a John L. Lewis speech we read from and discuss at length in our latest episode. As
@_ericblanc
argues, his grandiose quality of speech reflected that workers wanted unions not just for modest improvements but out of a fundamental transformation of their lives.
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Episode One–'Why the American Working Class is Different'–drops tomorrow.
You can signup to support us and receive our newsletter on patreon:
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Our latest newsletter dives into the influence of TUEL on those who built
@labornotes
, featuring a new interview with Kim Moody, and "from the archives," an assessment of TUEL from the cadre group that founded its modern day successor
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General Motors president Alfred Sloan called the sit-down strike “a dress rehearsal for Sovietizing the entire country.”
FDR and his Labor Secretary Frances Perkins both considered the sit-down "reprehensible," though they knew better than to say that in public.
Though considered quintessential “good job”, auto jobs did not start that way. In 1935 average pay was half the amount necessary to support a family of four. The historic 1936-1937 Sit Down Strike helped create an industry where a job pays on average of $73k
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Our second episode–'Socialism in its Work Clothes'– arrives tomorrow, and will cover the Knights of Labor, the IWW, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party, the triangle shirtwaist fire, debates on progressivism, and more.
Check out our first episode here:
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Did communists merely supply the troops for someone else’s ambitions, or did they put their stamp on the CIO, in ways that were durable and lasting? Did their practice conform to the mainstream of the labor movement, or did it contain the germs of another kind of CIO?
NEW EPISODE: "Who Gets the Bird", our deep dive into how communists changed to the CIO, and how the CIO changed the CPUSA.
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New episode–our best yet!–coming in the next couple days.
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95% the TA; 96% for a strike!
“It’s become ‘we don’t care what it takes to hit that milestone, we’re going to hit that milestone even if it means sending the plane outside with open doors and no engine,’” one Boeing worker told
@JennyBrownLN
.
More on workers' reception to the TA:
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Our podcast features many treasured regional accents, like "guy from the Bay Area whose vowels all sound the same"
Great series and great episode but always funny to hear people try to pronounce "Kanawha."
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These moments that dramatize the powerful interaction between radical militant minorities on the shop floor and mass working class struggles
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Lots of great archival audio in here, including clips from this incredible speech by longtime UE officer James Matles - he really has to be heard to be believed!
NEW EPISODE: LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER. Our crew dives into the developing political divisions that emerge with a consolidating CIO–what the factional infighting was, and what it signaled about different ways to 'do' unionism.
1
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NEW EPISODE! "Passing Laws, Breaking Jaws" pivots to high politics and institutional history: chronicling the passage of the Wagner Act, debating its significance, and recounting the raucous AFL convention in Atlantic City where the CIO was born.
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We trace the strategic zigzags of America’s far-left, recount their pioneering role in organizing drives, and measure the Party’s own accounts of its politics against the often ambiguous, even contradictory realities of its practice.
NEW EPISODE: "Who Gets the Bird", our deep dive into how communists changed to the CIO, and how the CIO changed the CPUSA.
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Fragile Juggernaut playlist coming soon
discovered my new favorite union song from ep 6 of
@RADIO_CIO
the rhythm and cadence just gets me
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It seemed to burst forth everywhere from the working-class worlds of young second-generation Americans—street gangs, social clubs, movie theaters. They were citizens now—whether their parents had escaped from Alabama or Russia; anglophone; modern. There would be no ignoring them.
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Still catching up? There's still time before we drop episode 3, 'the Lean Years', which will take us from World War 1 to the onset of the Great Depression.
Episode 2 of Fragile Juggernaut: What Was the CIO?: “Socialism In Its Work Clothes,” is now available wherever you get your podcasts!
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One way you can tell that the narrative of our series has begun to shift is that it's blues tracks rather than roaring anthems or confident folk songs that are accompanying episodes again
The recession led state agents to turn toward repression of the labor movement rather than conciliation, FDR to reshuffle the basis of his coalition, and workers to find themselves without the leverage that they had possessed a few months earlier
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For packinghouse workers the CIO was more than an institution, but a movement whose prevailing ideas were that of unity and equality. We asked
@halpernrick
about what these ideas meant and how they were practiced.
We begin in the slaughterhouse, with special guest Rick Halpern explaining how the United Packinghouse Workers of America (PWOC/UPWA) brought together black and white workers despite segregation inside and outside the workplace.
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New Episode! The Spirit of 1936 turns to an insurgent CIO's relationship to electoral and legislative politics, charting how organizers on the ground navigated a moment that saw both leaps in working class organizing and the outlines of a new reaction.
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Their violently fought strikes would go on to produce a new “social warrant” for working class self-activity in the years to come.
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Examining the sharp and persisting business downturn as a crisis of social reproduction, we discuss how challenges of survival transformed into struggles defending working-class life.
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"At the same time that border walls are projected outwards, they are also a blunt instrument turned inwards. . .these anti-immigrant attacks were just the bleeding edge of a bigger backdrop of intensive labor repression"
New episode: "The Lean Years," where we explore the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath.
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No better soundtrack to tonight's vote count in Chattanooga than a two hour discussion of the sit down strikes that built the UAW and transformed the labor movement
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Our newsletter on the strike wave of 1934 was so good this week that we decided to unlock it. But in general this is a perk for subscribers, so please subscribe if you like it and want more!
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We did another episode on "state theory" and reach for a balanced, fuller accounting of the contradictions of the Second New Deal
New Episode: the impasse of the Second New Deal with the historian Ahmed White, when the newfound power of working-class organization in mass production confronted the counterattack of property and established social hierarchy.
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"At the start of the Depression, union leadership would often involve not just workers on the job but auxiliary members, community members, wives of workers. Within the strike committees there was a workplace and community dimension to the unionization."
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From the unemployed movement and farmers organizing to oppose foreclosures, to grassroots industrial- and municipal-level unions, the experience of 1930, 1931, and 1932 brought new collectivities to center stage.
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During the Great Depression over 13,000 unemployed miners illegally took over coal production for themselves, cooperatively producing roughly 2.4 million tons of anthracite coal in small groups of two to five friends, former co-workers, or family members.
If you liked
@EmmaTeit
's discussion of Depression-era social reproduction, you'll love our latest newsletter featuring vignettes of anthracite coal country and the Mexican-American Southwest. Become a patron for access!
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Thanks to
@domesticleft
and all our comrades at
@ueunion
for the early review. UE–then, and now–has played a leading role in the troublemaking wing of our movement, so it's tremendously cool to hear we're on the right track.
The past two months have seen the release of two new limited-run podcasts about the history of the CIO, the federation of industrial unions that arose from and led the worker upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s.
Read more: (1/3)
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"Typically it was artisans from small workshops–the same type that were the dynamo of the revolutions of 1848–that built the first unions. This was the working class of the 18th Brumaire, not the wage earners of Capital."
…
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Frustrated by the passivity of “the National Run Around” of FDR’s first years in office, workers took up “self-help” in the form of fighting unionism
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Dr. Martin Luther King on the class roots of modern white supremacy
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The answer is yes! As far as we know, it's a coincidence but perhaps everyone's picking up on the same vibes.
Or maybe it's the impending 90th anniversary of the 1934 strike wave.
In any case, we say two, three, many CIO podcasts.
@RADIO_CIO
Wait there are two CIO podcasts right now? I mean the more the the more the merrier but this is quite a coincidence...
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Our patreon subscribers just received our first newsletter, featuring reading recommendations and an extended discussion of class formation: "You can’t understand the CIO without understanding the making of the working class that ultimately made the it."
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🤔🤔
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Judith Stepan-Norris helps us connect the dots between democracy, militancy, egalitarian attitudes, and organized reds in the CIO
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In 1962, King spoke at the headquarters of the National Martime Union (NMU), the CIO union where his close associate Jack O'Dell cut his organizing teeth in the 1940s.
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and further still for the hybrid combinations of craft and industrial unionism; and the limits to workplace organization in a city defined by tremendous ethnic, religious, and neighborhood segmentation.
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. . .and for boxing and the romance of blue-collar toughness; Ella Baker and Esther Cooper Jackson; the IRA and Broadway musicals; how transit workers built their union campaigning against big squeegees, on the sociology of immigrant communities. . .
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Did you know that Stanley Kubrick's debut was a documentary commissioned by the Seafarers International Union?
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"In labor leadership there's an opportunity that they see for power, prestige & influence in foreign affairs that they are denied at home. So you don't control investment decisions in Detroit or Flint but they are told 'you can run the labor movement in Guatemala'"
@_TimBarker
We've just dropped a bonus episode: a live recording from
@haymarketbooks
' Socialism Conference. We discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly: the state, hegemony, war, and the far-right
1
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Great thread from friend of the pod David Stein
I was watching Berkeley in the Sixties last night and there is a moment when Mario Savio tries to take the mic at a university forum. He is tackled by cops. Some synergy with the 1935 AFL conference, re: silencing of advocates of industrial unionism prompting the Lewis punch
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How did it American fascism and anti-fascism relate to the labor movement? And what was the meaning of the Popular Front, the broad left coalition against fascism?
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🎵🎶Nooo, scaaabs🎵🎶
I feel like we need new union songs. Is that happening? There were so many highly specific amazing songs from the UMW fights.
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Our next newsletter will feature an interview with Kim Moody on the founding of
@labornotes
and the inspiration it drew from the Trade Union Educational League.
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The strike for divestment and for campus speech is now rolling across 6 campuses in the University of California system
Mediation has started. Our divestment demands remain clear.
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During 1937, the “Little Steel” Strike, the “Roosevelt Recession,” and the political dilemmas of union power in the two-party system challenged the growth of the CIO and began to change its character.
New Episode: the impasse of the Second New Deal with the historian Ahmed White, when the newfound power of working-class organization in mass production confronted the counterattack of property and established social hierarchy.
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"This is what the CIO teaches us: that it is within these living socio-political alternatives of mass organization, rather than the blueprints for some ministry in waiting, that another vision for tomorrow might be glimpsed."
We've just dropped a bonus episode: a live recording from
@haymarketbooks
' Socialism Conference. We discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly: the state, hegemony, war, and the far-right
1
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Why did the West Coast ports tend red while the docks out East were historically captured by rackets?
If you're just now learning about the ILA and the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, we talked about this on the latest episode of
@RADIO_CIO
(featuring this oral history excerpt with longshoreman and merchant marine Stan Weir)
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The National Labor Relations Board is again under threat, but how did such a body come about, and what were its consequences for the labor movement? In this episode we survey its founding and the debates it has inspired from a few vantage points.
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You love to see it
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"Reuther had missed death by an eyelash. He remembered turning a second before the blast—if he had not, his spine would have been blown out."
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One mayor put it plainly: "Jesus Christ couldn’t speak in Duquesne for the American Federation of Labor." Workers confronted both the dictatorship of the shop floor and the absence of civil liberties in company towns. The fight for democracy was on the job and just outside it.
"When fascism comes to the US, it will look like a Pennsylvania Coal Town."
Our new episode tracks the atmosphere of fascism and anti-fascism which indelibly stamped the subjectivity of the labor movement.
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