(24714607 - Journal of Labor and Society) US Communists As Early Social Movement Unionists Circa 1930 To 1956

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19
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Review
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US Communists as Early Social Movement Unionists
Circa 1930 to 1956?
Victor G. Devinatz
Department of Management and Quantitative Methods, Illinois State
University, Normal, IL 61790–5580, USA
vgdevin@ilstu.edu
Abstract
Through the examination of three recently published volumes, in this review essay I
argue that US Communists were “premature social movement unionists” in the quarter
century circa 1930 to 1956. US Communists had adopted social movement unionism
(smu), which did not officially emerge as an accepted type of trade unionism until
the late 1980s/early 1990s, approximately a half century before becoming accepted
throughout the world. This demonstrates that US Communists recognized the
enormous potential of what trade unionism could achieve beyond the American
Federation of Labor’s craft-oriented business unionism and the Industrial Workers
of the World’s shopfloor based revolutionary syndicalism. Thus, the Communists’
smu can be interpreted as a precursor to the twenty-first century Bargaining for the
Common Good.
Keywords
US communists – social movement unionism
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1 Introduction
US Communists were the most enthusiastic anti-fascist fighters during World

War ii. Even though they were an integral part of the effort to help defeat the
Nazis, this does not mean that they were politically accepted by most Americans,
notwithstanding the name change of the Communist Party USA (cpusa) into
the Communist Political Association in 1944. Although cpusa members also
were active anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) with many
of them volunteering for the International Brigades, they were derogatorily
labeled “premature antifascists” to identify that they were not only antifascists
but Communists as well (Knox, 1999: pp. 133–135). In this review essay, I argue
that the US Communists were in essence “premature social movement union-
ists” (although I do not invoke the word “premature” in a derogatory manner.)
Rather, US Communists were adopting social movement unionism (smu),
which officially was recognized as a form of trade unionism in the late 1980s/
early 1990s, some 50 years before it became popular throughout the world indi-
cating that Communists saw the tremendous potential of what trade unionism
could accomplish beyond the American Federation of Labor’s (afl) narrow
craft-oriented business unionism and the Industrial Workers of the World’s
(iww) shopfloor based revolutionary syndicalism.
2 Social Movement Unionism and Its Early Practice in the United

States
The concept of smu was first framed in the late 1980s by a British labor the-
orist, Peter Waterman (2004: p. 217), although the term was first used by the
South African labor scholars, Rob Lambert, and Eddie Webster, where, instilled
with both class and popular community dimensions, this form of unionism
possessed both political and scholarly influence on the South African labor
movement (see Webster, 1988). Moody (1997: p. 276) describes the operation of
smu when put into practice:
In social movement unionism…(u)nions take an active lead in the streets,

as well as in politics. They ally with other social movements but provide
a class vision and content that make for a stronger glue than that which
usually holds electoral or temporary coalitions together. That content
is not simply the demands of the movements, but the activation of the
mass of union members as the leaders of the charge—those who in most
cases have the greatest social and economic leverage in capitalist society.
Social movement unionism implies an active strategic orientation that
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uses the strongest of society’s oppressed and exploited, generally organ-

ized workers, to mobilize those who are less able to sustain self-mobili-
zation: the poor, the unemployed, the casualized workers, the neighbor-
hood organizations.
The stage was set for the appearance of smu by the end of the 1980s because
business unionism was already in trouble. Due to deindustrialization and the
loss of heavy manufacturing jobs in industries such as auto and steel com-
bined with the outsourcing of jobs and private-sector employers vigorously
battling union organizing drives through hiring union-busting consultants,
union density plunged. Additionally, with global competition intensifying and
the economic success of nations such as Japan, US economic growth slowing
down and the squeezing of profit rates, the United States no longer dominated
product markets as it had in the 30 years after World War ii (Nissen, 2003: p.
160). Moreover, other obstacles confronting business unionism included the
nation’s political climate shift with then-President Reagan firing 11 000 air
traffic controllers in August 1981 (Shostak and Skocik, 1986; Nordlund, 1998;
Round, 1999) and the unraveling of the New Deal coalition after more than
four decades in existence. Business unionism’s lack of success was evident at
the bargaining table during the early 1980s with weakened US unions engag-
ing in concession bargaining (Cappelli, 1985; Craft et al., 1985; Kassalow, 1988)
and agreeing to participation in labor-management cooperation programs
(Schuster, 1984; Parker, 1985; Cooke, 1990) as a quid pro quo for concessions
granted to management.
Even with business unionism on the ropes by the early 1980s, smu did not
immediately appear as a methodology for reviving the US trade union move-
ment. Moreover, smu theorists contend that the US labor movement had
missed the opportunity for revitalization. They argue that the US trade union
movement would have looked a lot different if it had established alliances with
the 1960s and 1970s social movements, such as the anti-Vietnam War, the civil
rights, and the women’s movements (see Turner and Hurd, 2001: pp. 14–17) in
challenging US corporate hegemony rather than expressing resentment and
disdain for such movements.
While the afl-cio kept its distance from these social movements, the
Alliance for Labor Action (ala), established in July 1968 by the United Auto
Workers (uaw) and the Teamsters Union, actively engaged with social move-
ments in seeking to revitalize the US labor movement. Besides attempting to
unionize the millions of unorganized US workers, the ala sought to create
“community unions” for aiding poor and unemployed persons. Other objectives
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included the attaining of a guaranteed income, national health insurance and

free education for the US citizenry (Devinatz, 2006: pp. 71, 73).
Community unions were the central element in the ala’s social movement
unionist strategy. Because the organizations perceived trade unions as inap-
propriate for aiding “the isolated human beings living in poverty” (Devinatz,
2006: p. 74), the ala anticipated that community unions would be composed
of largely minority (e.g., Black, Latinx, etc.) community residents comprised of
welfare recipients, the working poor, the underemployed and the unemployed
who would possess the power to make decisions on community issues that
affected them. Examples might include interacting with “public officials about
the breakdown of public services in poor neighborhoods…. or with slum land-
lords about exorbitant rents and horrible living conditions, or to attack the
core problem of poverty besetting an entire community” (Devinatz, 2006: pp.
74–75).
Even though the ala spent much money to organize approximately 10 000
workers in Atlanta from 1969 to 1971, it was unable to successfully organize
community unions with the federation disbanding in 1972. Upon the Alliance’s
disappearance, smu did not reappear until the late 1980s with the Service
Employees International Union’s (seiu) “Justice for Janitors” campaigns that
sought, through a civil rights model, to obtain collective bargaining rights for
immigrant workers and workers of color who were employed in large office
buildings in metropolitan regions (see Waldinger et al., 1998; Fisk et al., 2000).
Additionally, at the end of the late 1980s, the United Mine Workers utilized
tactics consistent with smu principles during the 1989 Pittston Coal strike
(Beckwith, 2001; Brisbin, 2002).
Examples of smu among US trade unions abound during the 1990s includ-
ing the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees’ (unite)
formation of Garment Workers Justice Centers in New York City for develop-
ing “ideological and political consciousness” before launching unionization
campaigns among community workers (Ness, 1998: p. 100). Another example
includes the United Electrical Workers’ mid-1990s drive in Milwaukee which
fused shop floor action with unionization among various community groups
for attaining a first contact for a predominantly Black work force at Steeltech
Manufacturing (Sciacchitano, 1998). A third involves seiu and Hotel and
Restaurant Employees Union local unions establishing community alliances
during union organizing drives among Northern California immigrant workers
(Sherman and Voss, 2000). Finally, one must also include central labor coun-
cils becoming “union cities” (Ness and Eimer, 2001), Jobs with Justice chap-
ters led by labor unions and unions’ role at the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” (Crosby,
2000) along with living wage campaigns (Reynolds, 2001) conducted by trade
unions and central labor councils as exemplars of smu throughout the 1990s.

3 US Communists and Social Movement Unionism, 1930–1956
The three books reviewed in this essay (Buelna, 2019; Pettengill, 2019; Stanton
2020) cover approximately a quarter of a century (1930 to 1956) and discuss
the cpusa’s role in the trade union movement in three different geographic
regions of the United States (Detroit, Alabama and Los Angeles) which dif-
fered both politically and culturally. What emerges from these three volumes
is that the cpusa was actively pursuing a strategy of smu decades before the
concept was formalized in the late 1980s/early 1990s although it could not be
carried out in the same ways in the three areas. While the authors of these
books do not deny the cpusa’s Stalinist nature and that the Party’s major deci-
sions concerning national and international events were directed by Moscow,
the focus of these works is on the grassroots activism of local militants in
the Detroit, Alabama, and Los Angeles cpusa chapters. What also becomes
apparent is that although the Communists’ long run objective was the imple-
mentation of US and worldwide socialism, at the local level, cpusa members
were trying to integrate labor and community struggles to give community res-
idents, trade unionists and workers agency in the shaping of their futures. The
Communists believed that workers who possessed rights as industrial citizens
through collective bargaining agreements was important but that for their full
development, working class individuals had to attain full citizenship rights in
society as well.
Race looms large in each of these books with the focus of the local cpusa
chapters on the creation of interracial coalitions in advancing the rights of
workers and citizens. In Pettengill’s and Stanton’s volumes, the focus is on the
civil rights struggles of Black workers and citizens. Much has been written on
the relationship between the cpusa and blacks with these two books contrib-
uting to this massive literature. Buelna’s volume, on the other hand, deals with
the civil rights struggles of Mexican American workers and residents in the
American Southwest with much less written on mid-twentieth century Latinx
labor. Thus, the cpusa believed that for there to be economic justice, there
needed to be racial justice as well.
4 Detroit Communists, the Trade Union Movement, and the Struggle

for Civil Rights
Ryan Pettengill’s Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit’s Labor

Movement, 1941–1956 covers the cpusa’s smu activities beginning from the
start of World War ii through the years of McCarthyism. To improve the living

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conditions for all of Detroit’s working-class residents, the Party combined its
organizing work in labor and community groups to push liberal politicians
to combat racism in housing and employment. The primary union that the
Detroit cpusa worked through was the United Auto Workers (uaw) which had
several locals and thousands of members in the metropolitan area. The Party
had a tremendous base of support in uaw Local 6001 at the Ford River Rouge
complex, the largest of the union’s locals with approximately 90 000 members
during World War ii.
The community groups in which the cpusa was active were the National
Negro Congress (nnc), the Civil Rights Federation (crf), and the Citizens
Committee (cc). Pettengill discusses the Party’s work in 1942 through the nnc,
the crf, and the cc in having Black families move into the Sojourner Truth
Housing Project which was built to deal with the housing shortage and to pro-
vide accommodations for workers in the expanding war industry. Due to the
pressure of the crf, the city initially awarded occupancy in the housing com-
plex to Black residents but then because of the contentions of the Seven-Mile
Fenelon Improvement Association and real estate groups which claimed that
Black residency would harm property values, the city backtracked and decided
that white residents should occupy the complex. Working through the crf and
the cc, the cpusa was successful in getting Mayor Jeffries to change his mind
again, deciding that Black residents would inhabit the housing project. A riot
ensued on February 28, 1942 after 65 Black families moved into Sojourner Truth
and were attacked by 500 armed whites. Due to efforts of the nnc, the crf
and the cc after this incident, many unions and working-class organizations
passed resolutions condemning the Ku Klux Klan’s role in the riot and sup-
ported the Black families’ right to reside in the housing project. In March 1942,
this victory of the three organizations was codified when a federal court ruled
that Black residents should remain the occupants of Sojourner Truth. Despite
the occurrence of “hate strikes”2 in the automobile factories and the racial ten-
sion that engulfed Detroit during World War ii, the cpusa through its work in
the community organizations continued the struggle to improve the workers’
1 For a discussion on how Communist Party USA factions increased the level of union
democracy in uaw Local 600, see Stepan-Norris (1997). An illuminating history of uaw
Local 600 based on interviews of workers is Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin (1996).
2 Glaberman (1980), who was an autoworker and a member of the Trotskyist Workers Party
during World War ii, discusses the wildcat strikes that occurred in the automobile industry
at the time. He, however, does not systematically analyze “hate strikes” but only mentions
them in passing in his book. For a detailed discussion of “hate strikes” occurring during
World War ii, see Wolfinger (2009).

living standards, while promoting interracial cooperation and battling racism

at this time.
The cpusa continued its smu activities in the immediate post-war period
as the country shifted politically to the right and anti-Communism began to
take hold. The Party launched the Michigan School for Social Science3 which
engaged in many community education initiatives. Although the coursework
did cover topics related to cpusa history and Marxism, courses related to
strengthening the US trade union movement also were taught such as “Wage
Theory for Collective Bargaining,” “Strike Strategy” and “Labor Journalism.”
The school also offered courses that would be interesting to community res-
idents from a variety of different ethnic and racial backgrounds such as “Life
and Culture of the Negro People,” “The Negro Liberation Movement,” “The Life
and Culture of the Jewish People,” “Women in Society,” and “The History of the
Youth Movement in Michigan.” Additionally, other courses of general interest
in the curriculum included “Improve Your Written and Spoken English” and
“World Politics.”
Even as the cpusa came under attack due to the rise of McCarthyism in the
early 1950s, the Detroit chapter continued to engage in activities that would be
labeled smu through groups such as the Emergency Housing Committee, the
Citizens Committee against Police Brutality, the Committee for the Protection
of the Foreign Born and the Greater Detroit Negro Labor Council. Issues that
these organizations were involved in included slum removal, urban renewal
projects, the protection of civil rights for blacks and foreign-born Americans,
the advancement of employment rights through the attempt to establish a Fair
Employment Practices Commission branch in Detroit and the elimination of
police violence directed against Black residents.
The purge of the cpusa trade unionists from the uaw by September 1952
dramatically impacted the Party’s role in community activism. No longer hav-
ing a base in which to operate, social change now shifted to the social-demo-
cratic uaw shorn of Communists. Although the union financially backed the
national civil rights movement, fought against capital flight, and supported
other liberal causes, for example, it was not engaged in rank-and-file and com-
munity organizing to the extent that the Communists had been. Rather by the
3 The cpusa established workers schools throughout the country that were very similar
to the Michigan School for Social Science located in Detroit. A discussion of two cpusa-
organized workers schools, the New York Workers School (1923–1944) and the Jefferson
School of Social Science (1943–1956), in New York City can be found in Gettleman (1993) and
Gettleman (2002). A detailed analysis of the cpusa-organized Chicago Workers School is
contained in Farr (2020).

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late 1950s the uaw seemed more concerned with expanding the economy and
promoting middle-class security by fighting for things at the bargaining table
such as the Guaranteed Annual Wage. The union was still interested in imple-
menting progressive change in society but only through wielding its power at
the union’s highest levels.
5 Alabama Communists, the Share Croppers’ Union and Battling

Race Terror
Mary Stanton’s Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950
(Stanton, 2019) also demonstrates the cpusa’s smu but in a geographical
region that was not only extremely hostile to any form of radical politics but to
any form of political liberalism as well. It is a harrowing story of violence and
intimidation demonstrating the extreme dedication of Black and white activ-
ists in the Jim Crow South who risked life and limb while experiencing loss after
loss interspersed with extremely rare minor victories. Stanton’s volume is a his-
tory of District 17 of the cpusa which was created in 1929 with the objective of
establishing a republic for Black workers in the Deep South. Although based in
Birmingham (Alabama), the district stretched from Tennessee and Alabama to
Georgia. While the building of a Black Belt republic was dumped by the Party
due to lack of interest by the Black citizens, the Alabama cpusa did everything
it could to combat the exploitation of Black workers and the violence directed
at the Black citizenry. Although there were white leaders and members, by the
mid-1930s, most of the Alabama cpusa membership was black.
Central to its strategy of improving the Black workers’ lot, the Alabama
cpusa was heavily involved in trade union organizing. The Party was commit-
ted to establishing interracial unions to which white workers had to be won
over, but which resonated with Black workers and resulted in them following
the Alabama cpusa leadership in labor struggles. Since many Black workers
were engaged in sharecropping, one of the Party’s major efforts revolved around
organizing these workers when it established the Croppers’ and Farm Workers’
Union (cfwu) which numbered 800 members by July 1, 1931. One month later,
on August 6, 55 cfwu members reorganized the group into the Alabama Share
Croppers’ Union (ascu)4 which was broken up into five Tallapoosa County
4 Besides the cpusa’s organizing of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union
among California’s farm workers, the Party’s union organizing efforts among Southern farm
workers was centered on the Alabama Share Croppers Union (ascu). For two excellent
sources and detailed information on the ascu, see Kelley (1991) and Johnson (2011).

locals. The ascu was designed to be an underground resistance movement

which would expand beyond Tallapoosa County to Lee, Macon, and Chambers
Counties by the end of 1932. By early 1933, five new ascu chapters had been
created with the union totaling 3000 members.
Towards the end of 1934, the ascu was ready to fight back against the
increasingly miserable working conditions that sharecroppers confronted. The
union’s cotton pickers and choppers had demanded of planters in Tallapoosa,
Lowndes, Lee, Cambers, Dallas, and Montgomery Counties that they be paid
a minimum of $1 per hundred pounds of cotton picked which was an increase
from the going rate of 40 cents. The ascu achieved some gains in Tallapoosa
and Montgomery Counties where it bargained a raise to 65 cents per hundred
pounds, an increase from $10 to $15 in croppers’ monthly credit allowances as
well as the right of croppers to independently gin their cotton on a handful of
plantations. However, planters refused to negotiate with the union in Lowndes
and Dallas Counties which led to the planning of a strike by the spring of 1935.
The walkout commenced on August 19, 1935 when 1500 sharecroppers struck
the Bell and Bates plantation in Lowndes County at the peak of the picking
season. Confronting massive violence which resulted in severe injuries and
some deaths, the strike was easily defeated although sharecroppers striking in
Tallapoosa and Lee Counties achieved limited monetary gains. At the ascu’s
October 1936 convention, the union merged into the National Farmers’ Union,
eventually becoming locals of the latter organization.
The Alabama cpusa also was active in the Trade Union Unity League5 and
its affiliated National Miners Union (nmu)6 which played an integral role in
the 1931–1932 Harlan County conflicts and strikes in southeastern Kentucky
which the coal operators defeated by March 1932. Moreover, the Party was
active in organizing a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill and
Smelter Workers7 at Birmingham’s Republic Steel in July 1933 which led to a
5 Although there have been no books written on the Trade Union Unity League (tuul), the
only volume published on a tuul affiliate is the recently authored book on the Marine
Workers Industrial Union (mwiu) by Pederson (2019). Scholarly articles analyzing the red
federation from a generally sympathetic perspective include Johanningsmeier (2001) and
Devinatz (2005, 2007, 2019). Books which contain discussions of the tuul from various
theoretical positions are Cochran (1977: pp. 43–81), Klehr (1984: pp. 38–48 and 118–134) and
Ottanelli (1991: 17–48). For published books and articles on the tuul-affiliated National
Miners Union and its activities, see note 6.
6 For information on the catastrophic strikes led by the National Miners Union in the western
Pennsylvania and the Harlan (Kentucky) coal fields during the spring and summer of 1931,
see Draper (1972), Nyden (1977) and Meyerhuber (1987: pp. 109–136).
7 Originally organized as the Western Federation of Miners in 1893, the union changed
its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union in 1916

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May 1934 strike when the company refused to recognize the union after it had
won a certification election.
Certainly, the Alabama cpusa’s major smu activities involved combatting
the racial violence directed against Black citizens typified by the well-known
Scottsboro Case8 in which nine Black teenagers were accused of raping two
white women on a freight train at the end of March 1931. Stanton recounts this
story in tremendous detail in which the Party not only defended the boys in
court through cpusa lawyers but was responsible for publicizing and generat-
ing support for the accused throughout the world. Another well-known trial,
that of Angelo Herndon,9 is also told. Herndon was arrested for insurrection
when leading an integrated hunger march in Atlanta and was defended by
the cpusa’s legal defense arm, the International Legal Defense. Party involve-
ment in seeking justice for the lynching of blacks and for lesser-known cases
of violence allegedly committed by blacks against whites in the forms of rapes
and murders is covered in painstaking detail in the book. Other smu activi-
ties in which Alabama cpusa members participated included those involved
with the unemployed worker council movement where they were very suc-
cessful in their confrontation of relief agencies such as the Welfare Board, the
Community Chest, and the Red Cross.
As Stanton reveals, the accomplishments of the Alabama cpusa from 1930
to 1950 were few and far between. Although not much remains of its trade
union organizing during these two decades, Stanton argues that the Party’s
work among the Black citizenry set the stage for the successful civil rights
struggle to emerge in the following generation through organizations such
as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of
Racial Equality which were crucial in aiding Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference and the Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights of Fred Shuttleworth. Thus, the Freedom Rides, the Freedom
Schools, the Mississippi Summer, and the Mississippi Free Democratic Party
of the 1960s, according to Stanton, can be directly traced back to the Alabama
cpusa’s yeoman work earlier in the twentieth century.
organizing both US and Canadian workers. Popularly known as Mine, Mill, articles on the
union in the United States, include Keitel (1974), Draper (1996), and Mercier (1999). While
there have been no volumes written on Mine, Mill’s endeavors in the United States, two
books and an article have been published on Clinton Jencks, a union leader throughout the
1940s and 1950s, which include Lorence (2013), Cabellero (2019) and Myerson (2020).
8 The Scottsboro Boys was the major civil rights case that the cpusa undertook in the 1930s.
Books written on the topic include Carter (1979), Haskins (1994), Acker (2007) and Miller
(2009)
9 A detailed analysis of the Angelo Herndon case can be found in Martin (1976).

Although neither addressed nor contended by Stanton, scholars have argued

that the South could have been successfully organized had the cpusa adopted
a different trade union strategy in the 1930s and 1940s. Although cpusa mem-
bers were some of the most dedicated cio union organizers, the Party was
unwilling to disrupt the cio center-left alliance during the Popular Front era,
beginning in the mid-1930s. This meant that the cpusa failed to challenge
the decisions of the cio’s trade union leaders who comprised the federa-
tion’s political center concerning the Southern organizing campaigns of the
woodworkers and textile workers which ultimately led to the defeat of these
unionization drives. Assuming the woodworkers and the textile workers had
been successfully organized in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, this might
have resulted in the reinvigoration of the US trade union movement during the
1950s and 1960s combined with the emergence of a more successful civil rights
movement by recruiting substantial numbers of white and Black workers to
both movements (Goldfield, 2020).
6 Ralph Cuarón, Trade Union Activism and a Community Democracy

Experiment
Enrique Buelna’s Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice focuses
on Mexican American trade union activism in Southern California from 1930
to 1970 told through the life of Ralph Cuarón who was a cpusa member active
in several organizations including the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(cio)-affiliated United Furniture Workers of America10 Local 576 and the
Independent Progressive Party, among others. Dropping out of school in 1940
at age 17 Cuarón became a truck driver for a store before joining the Civilian
Conservation Corps to work in the San Bernardino National Forest where
he became responsible for providing orientation programs to new recruits.
Upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Cuarón joined the Merchant Marine late
in 1941 and became exposed to radical politics as well as issues of class and
race through the National Maritime Union (nmu)11 eventually joining the
10 There has been very little written of a scholarly nature on the National Maritime Union
(nmu). Horne (2005) is a biography of the Jamaican-born Ferdinand Smith who was a
founding member of the union in 1937, and an nmu leader until his 1948 expulsion from
the union during its anti-Communist purge. Haywood (2012) recounts his involvement as
an nmu member while working as a seaman in the Merchant Marines from 1943 to 1945.
Finally, Critchlow (1976) argues that even though the nmu promoted that Black and white
workers be integrated on the ships, the union did not resort to militancy or radicalism to
achieve this objective.
11 For a history of the United Furniture Workers of America, see Cornfield (1989).

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union that represented the Merchant Marines. Through the education and
mentorship that he received through the cpusa trade unionists in the nmu,
Cuarón became a Party member in 1942. Due to the rise of anti-Communism
within the nmu after the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, Cuarón found it
increasingly difficult to obtain work on ship crews which led to his obtaining
employment at the Crest Pacific Furniture Company located near Chinatown
which enabled him to become immersed in ufwa Local 576 politics. Within
one year of his employment, Cuarón was appointed a Local 576 organizer with
responsibilities for leading the shop stewards’ council, empowering him to
develop Mexican American leadership within the union.
While being active in the ufwa, Cuarón became involved in several com-
munity activities (that would now be considered variants of smu) he saw
as integrally related to labor struggles and those of Mexican Americans. He
participated in the Civil Rights Congress (crc), and its Los Angeles affiliate
the Mexican Civil Rights Committee (mcrc) which was engaged in cases of
police abuse directed against Mexican Americans, including the murder of the
teenager Augustine Salcido, as well as the middle-class Community Service
Organization (cso). The goal of the crc and the mcrc was to develop a mul-
tiracial, cross class coalition in defending the civil rights and civil liberties
of Los Angeles residents. Moreover, Cuarón participated in the Independent
Progressive Party (ipp), and the related group, “Amigos de Wallace,” whose
goal was the election of Henry Wallace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s former
vice-president, to the US presidency in 1948. The ipp received support from
several Los Angeles trade unions and endorsed a Mexican American as a can-
didate to the state assembly who also ran on the Democratic Party line. After
the 1948 elections, with the formation of the Mexican American National
Association (mana) due to the cpusa-led International Union of Mine Mill
and Smelter Workers’ (Mine Mill) financial support and volunteers, Cuarón
became the youth director on the mana executive board. In this role, Cuarón
worked tirelessly to mentor and to provide leadership training to young
Mexican Americans from the community.
Cuarón also participated in the 1953 making of the film Salt of the Earth,12
which told the story of Mine Mill Local 890’s strike against the Empire Zinc
12 An eloquent book-length discussion of the making of Salt of the Earth and the arduous
effort to have the movie screened in US theaters by the film’s director and a Hollywood
Ten member is contained in Biberman (1965). In another volume, Lorence (1999) analyzes
the movie industry’s state during the filming of Salt of the Earth, the US trade union
movement’s situation during the early 1950s, an account of the Empire Zinc strike which
is the event which inspired the making of the film and the problems experienced by the
movie’s producers to get it in front of audiences.

Company, where he served as a background actor. Although the film was

attacked and only 12 commercial theaters were willing to show it, Cuarón took
the movie on the road where he screened it before “as many workers as he
could throughout the Southwest” (Buelna, 2019: p. 111). Cuarón found the film
to be very popular, resonating with audiences. However, McCarthyism and the
virulent anti-Communism engulfing the country not only prevented moviego-
ers from viewing Salt of the Earth but put the cpusa on the defensive through
the Smith Act Trials. During this time, Cuarón suffered professionally and
politically as well. Los Angeles cpusa members felt that Cuarón was “reckless,
headstrong and untrustworthy, a man prone to following his own agenda at
the expense of the party” (Buelna, 2019: p. 114) so he was not backed in the 1955
ufwa Local 576 business agent election against a more senior comrade. Upon
his opponent’s reelection, the incumbent removed Cuarón from his organizer
role and he became blacklisted in the furniture industry. As such, he had to
depend on odd jobs to make a living. While he remained a committed cpusa
member, he was not only ostracized by the ufwa but by the Party as well.
The revelations of Khruschev’s 1956 secret speech on the crimes of Stalin
led Cuarón to perceive the cpusa no longer as an infallible organization in
its struggle to represent the working class’ interests and for the achievement
of democracy and socialism in the United States and abroad. Although he
remained a Party member, by the end of the 1950s Cuarón did not possess the
same undying loyalty to the cpusa as he had in his earlier years. Since Cuarón
was no longer tethered to the cpusa, his community activism took a different
turn although it still bore a direct relationship with his previous smu activities.
In June 1964, Cuarón tore down his bungalow at 3726 Princeton Street in
East Los Angeles and launched a creative social experiment in community
democracy with the construction of community housing at the location. The
communal apartment complex was finished in January 1965 with the objective
of attracting college students, primarily from East Los Angeles Community
College, to live there. Although there was much tenant turnover in the hous-
ing complex from 1965 to 1968, a stable community eventually developed
although it consisted primarily of Mexican American teenagers who were from
single-parent families and were educated and mentored by Cuarón. Ultimately
these housing complex residents became the core group of activists in the 1968
Los Angeles high schools’ student strikes due to the mentoring and training
that they had received from Cuarón.
The major activity that promoted a feeling of community and solidarity at
the housing complex was the reading circles led by Cuarón which were held
up to four times per week. Based on the large quantity of books that Cuarón
had amassed as a cpusa member, the volumes discussed in the reading circles

14 10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | devinatz
included political and philosophical titles authored by Karl Marx, VI Lenin,

Antonio Gramsci, and Maurice Cornforth. Additionally, the students were
exposed to literary works of fiction and poetry in Cuarón’s collection written
by “Pablo Neruda, Howard Fast, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Wolfe,
Jack London, Feodor Dostoyevsky and Ethel L. Voynich” (Buelna, 2019: p. 162).
For some reading circle participants, this activity was life changing. One stu-
dent, Steve Valencia, remarked, “Ralph (Cuarón) became like a father. . . a men-
tor. . . a political mentor. He showed me that you don’t have to just accept all of
the conditions that are handed to you; you can do something about it. It was
a different context of thinking” (Buelna, 2019: p. 162). Another student, Harry
Gamboa stated the reading circles were crucial in explaining “a few things in
a couple of ways that I hadn’t really understood. Previously. . . I had read a lot
of different things, but I had never been instructed on organizing, or basically,
socialist theory, communist theory, urban theory” (Buelna, 2019: p. 163).
Cuarón’s move away from Princeton Street to the San Jacinto mountains
in the early 1970s did not mean an end to his activism. He began working
for Kingston Homes Incorporated (khi), a mobile homes manufacturer, and
joined Carpenters Union Local 3193 returning to labor activism with plans to
convert his home in the mountains to a “workers school.” During the 1971 strike
at khi, Cuarón served as the strike committee chair and when the eight-month
strike was lost, almost all the employees, including Cuarón, lost their jobs. In
1974, after obtaining a job as a janitor at the University of California—Riverside,
within a few months, he was elected American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees Local 3246 president, remaining active in labor struggles
until his 1984 retirement after a heart attack.
7 The cpusa’s Social Movement Unionism: a Precursor to Bargaining

for the Common Good
While much has been written about the cpusa’s role in the cio and its affili-
ated unions at the national level, there have been a dearth of studies of cpusa
activities at the local level linking the Party’s trade union work with its com-
munity activism. The three books discussed in this review essay demonstrate
that although the local cpusa chapters were confronted by different political
situations and cultures in different geographic regions of the country, they still
took similar approaches in their integration of trade union and community
struggles. As the US trade union movement has become considerably weaker
in the last 40 years and can no longer be counted on to deliver the same type
of economic gains at the bargaining table that it was able to achieve for its

members during the halcyon days of the mid-twentieth century, nurturing

community organizations as allies appears to be increasingly important for
the success of trade unions. The type of smu promoted by local cpusa chap-
ters from the 1930s to 1950s was visionary and should be emulated by trade
unions at the start of the twenty-first century’s third decade. It was a precursor
to the twenty-first century Bargaining for the Common Good (McCartin, 2016;
Andrias, 2019; McCartin et al., 2020) in which trade unions involve themselves
with broader working-class issues including climate change, affordable hous-
ing, and progressive taxation, as examples which will enable these labor organ-
izations to speak for unorganized workers as well.
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(24714607 - Journal of Labor and Society) US Communists As Early Social Movement Unionists Circa 1930 To 1956

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Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

US communists – social movement unionism

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, Downloaded

US Communists were the most enthusiastic anti-fascist fighters during World

2 Social Movement Unionism and Its Early Practice in the United

In social movement unionism…(u)nions take an active lead in the streets,

10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

uses the strongest of society’s oppressed and exploited, generally organ-

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included the attaining of a guaranteed income, national health insurance and

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3 US Communists and Social Movement Unionism, 1930–1956

4 Detroit Communists, the Trade Union Movement, and the Struggle

Ryan Pettengill’s Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit’s Labor

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

living standards, while promoting interracial cooperation and battling racism

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

5 Alabama Communists, the Share Croppers’ Union and Battling

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locals. The ascu was designed to be an underground resistance movement

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Although neither addressed nor contended by Stanton, scholars have argued

6 Ralph Cuarón, Trade Union Activism and a Community Democracy

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Company, where he served as a background actor. Although the film was

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

included political and philosophical titles authored by Karl Marx, VI Lenin,

7 The cpusa’s Social Movement Unionism: a Precursor to Bargaining

10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

members during the halcyon days of the mid-twentieth century, nurturing

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

10.1163/24714607-bja10070 | Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19

Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–19 | 10.1163/24714607-bja10070

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