Reviewed by Joseph Jamison

February 12, 2026

 

No Power Greater: The Life and Times of George A. Meyers by Tim Wheeler.  (NY: International Publishers, 2024. 258 pages)

 

This book is not, strictly speaking, a biography of George A.  Meyers. Its author Tim Wheeler makes use of a nearly 200-page manuscript  that George Meyers himself wrote in his last years. George called it Highlights, and perhaps modeled it on William Z. Foster’s Pages from a Worker’s Life.

Highlights is a kind of scaffolding on which Tim Wheeler builds No Power Greater: The Life and Times of George A. Meyers. The book is Wheeler’s own account of the main events of the US labor movement from the 1930s on, George Meyers’s role in the labor movement, in the Communist movement in the Maryland-DC area, and in the US Communist movement as a whole.  It’s a memoir of George Meyers. But it’s also a memoir of  Tim Wheeler who commingles his own labor and political stories from a 50-year career on assignment for the Worker, Daily World, People’s World, and People’s Weekly World.  Wheeler’s own writings fill out the George Meyers story and give the book a narrative unity.

The radicalization of George Meyers

George Aloysius Meyers (1912-1999) had a Catholic upbringing. His mother Katie was the soloist in the church choir in St. Mary’s of the Annunciation parish in Lonaconing, Maryland. He was an altar boy and reportedly an excellent singer himself.  He went to St. Joseph’s parochial  school in Midland, Maryland and Lasalle Institute, a Catholic high school in Cumberland, Maryland. Positive religious values were one of the forces shaping him: “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.”

George was born in the town of Lonaconing in western Maryland, the part of Maryland that juts westward away from Chesapeake Bay into the Appalachian mountains.  Western Maryland is coal country. George was of German and Irish descent. His German-American father, George Augustus Meyers, was a coal miner and an active United Mineworkers member. Having labored in the mines for 38 years, he died of Black Lung in 1941. George’s Irish-American mother was Catherine (Katie) Douglas Meyers.

George was the eldest of seven children. If he inherited his father’s unyielding union allegiances, his mother bequeathed other radical instincts:  the grandfather and uncles of Katie Douglas were Molly Maguires, a group of militant Irish miners who organized resistance to the despotic US mine owners. In Ireland, Katie Douglas’ great grandfather had been hanged by the British for his part in the struggle for Irish independence.

In 1929 the Great Depression hit. Tens of millions were unemployed. In 1931 George spent nine months in a fruitless search for work in Florida with his cousin Bancroft Douglas and he experienced a gradual loss of religious faith. He was back in Maryland, out of work and with time on his hands, when the local librarian gave him a book on utopias: Rousseau’s Social Contract and Thomas More’s Utopia. Soon he was reading Das Kapital, the Communist Manifesto; W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk; Lenin’s Imperialism and Leftwing Communism an Infantile Disorder. His radicalization was under way.

In 1935 as a young man (age 23) George was a central figure in the organizing drive that brought close to 12,000 workers in the giant Celanese plant in Cumberland, Maryland into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), creating Local 1874 Textile Workers Union of America, a spectacular achievement.

He joined the Communist Party in 1939 while serving as president of the Maryland-DC Congress of Industrial Organizations and was an officer of Local 1874 Textile Workers Union of America, the big Celanese local. In these years he met leading lights of the national CIO, including John L. Lewis of the Mineworkers and Phil Murray of the Steelworkers Organizing Committee. He met fellow left-wingers such as Harry Bridges, leader of the West Coast longshore union. Lewis and George became so close that at one point Lewis suggested  that George should run for national secretary of the CIO. In a May 1993 interview, he said of  John L. Lewis:

Lewis was a fighter, and he had tremendous courage. He fought for the coal miners, but not only them. As president of the CIO he got out there and slugged it out with the companies in all kinds of struggles. He was out in front, not sitting in his office in Washington.

He respected Lewis and Murray,  but in his estimation they had their weaknesses.  Wheeler writes:

Yet George was also clear about Lewis’s limitations. Lewis, he said, did not understand the class nature of the capitalist system, that workers and their capitalist employers were enemies. George called Lewis, Phil Murray, and other top labor leaders “center forces” who tended to shift back and forth from left to right. When the left was strong and united, rooted deeply in the rank and file, the center tended to gravitate toward them. Yet the left, even when strong, never had the strength to win on its own. It was a mutual need: the left needed the center and the center needed the left to win.

The giant corporation Celanese, a maker of synthetic fibers, also figures prominently in the making of George Meyers. He was in four plant-wide strikes while he worked at Celanese. His years of work at Celanese, breathing the acetone fumes, gave him textile workers asthma — brown lung — that was to afflict him his whole life.

In his Smith Act trial in late 1952, George was asked to “name names.”  Wheeler writes: “The prosecutor was bored by George’s testimony but moved in and demanded that he tell the jury the names of all members of the District Committee of the CP of Maryland.

I told him I would not say who was or was not a member of the Party… if I gave the names of members they would be subject to harassment. If I said they were not, the next issue of the Hearst press would carry a screaming headline ‘Meyers denies so and so is a member of the Communist Party”. The judge gave me overnight to change my mind. The next day the prosecutor asked me the same question. I replied that where I come from even the grandchildren of informers were scorned. The judge held me in contempt of court. At the end of the trial he sentenced me to 30 days in prison (On top of my four-year sentence.)

There was one question about names I agreed to answer: ‘Who recruited you into the Communist Party?’ Flynn (the prosecutor) got all excited. Here was a breakthrough. I stalled a bit before answering and Flynn got impatient and kept asking ‘Who? Who?’ There was dead silence in the courtroom. But then I gave my answer: ‘The Celanese Corporation of America.’

If there was one unifying idea that George adhered to over his whole career it was that big gains for working people could only be achieved by left-center unity. In 1935 and after, the meteoric growth of the CIO — its organization of nearly six million workers in just a few years. — was the supreme example of this. The CIO upsurge was an experience that shaped him for life.

Within the Communist Party, George identified closely with national party leader William Z. Foster, who championed industrial unionism and rejected AFL craft unionism. Foster also rejected the IWW’s sectarian refusal to work with the AFL. He called for the left to work within the AFL. Foster led an AFL union in the Great Steel Strike of 1919 that brought 100,000 workers out on strike.

George became  president of the Maryland-DC CIO almost by accident. In 1937, John L. Lewis was furious with FDR for refusing to support the steelworkers in the Little Steel strike in which police in Chicago had massacred striking steelworkers. One week before the November 1940 election Lewis resigned and pulled the UMWA out of the CIO. All UMWA leaders had to resign their CIO positions. This left George the sole remaining top CIO officer in the Maryland-DC area. He was unanimously elected president for the next two years; he accepted the presidency on the condition that an African-American be elected as vice president. Joe Neal, a Black steelworker, became the first Black officer of the Maryland-DC CIO.

With US entry into the Second World War in December 1941, like his four brothers, George voluntarily joined the armed forces, resigning his CIO position. As a buck private, he soon became an aircraft maintenance specialist working on B-25s at Westover Army Air Force base in Massachusetts. Demobilized in 1945 he went back to work at Celanese. But, though re-elected a shop steward, he found the work boring and constraining. He resolved to go to work full time for the CPUSA. In 1948 newly married and with an infant in tow, he and his wife Allie moved to Baltimore. In short order he became leader of the Maryland Communist Party.

After the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in June 1951, the McCarthyite witch hunters finally came for him. On Aug. 7, 1951 the FBI burst into his apartment and arrested five leaders of the Maryland Communist Party. The defendants were charged under the Smith Act with “conspiracy to teach or advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” George writes in Highlights:

A number of party leaders had already been arrested and the top leadership jailed under the Smith Act. This infamous law, tacked onto an important budget bill at the last moment, made it illegal ‘to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government.’

Not a single member of the Communist Party was ever charged with an act of violence. But under this vicious law, we were hounded and jailed under the charge that Communists were going to teach and advocate the violent overthrow the government at some future date.

Bail was set at $110,000 (about $1.3 million in today’s dollars). The trial began in late 1952. All six defendants were found guilty in April 1953. George was sentenced to four years in jail. He served his time (1952-55) in Petersburg, Virginia, a federal prison, taking classes on electrical construction skills taught by the IBEW. He was released nine months early for good behavior. George then had to find work. Blacklisted by most employers, he found a job working for the Seaview Construction Company, an installer of windows, storm doors, and fiberglass awnings. Until 1961 he worked at Seaview. He worked with a comrade, Joe Henderson, an African-American worker.

In 1961 he returned to work full-time for the party. He became a Daily Worker reporter, assigned to cover the South.  Wheeler writes admiringly,

Nothing his enemies threw at him could break him: Living as a child through the two-year coal strike of 1921-22, breathing the acetone-saturated fumes in the Celanese spinning department as a young worker, tried and convicted on trumped up charges under the Smith Act. Rockefeller and other robber barons [the main owners of the mines around Lonaconing] thought all these slings and arrows would silence or even kill Meyers. As surely as a blast furnace tempers steel, George Meyers came out stronger, more committed, yet also tough and flexible.

He understood the full extent of the devastation inflicted on the Communist Party, the CIO and all the left and progressive movements by Cold War anticommunism. He was determined to devote all his energy and brainpower to rebuilding the broad, democratic left-center coalition that had made such long strides in the years of the Great Depression  and in the worldwide struggle to defeat fascism.

Wheeler devotes certain chapters not to the George Meyers story but to other aspects of the radical history of Maryland.

In “Baltimore’s Premature Antifascist,  Bernard Ades,” for example, Wheeler recounts the life and work of a young Baltimore attorney who gave up a career in a prestigious law firm and joined the Communist Party. Assigned to work in the International Labor Defense, a legal team  known for fighting Jim Crow segregation  and KKK lynching attempts, he took on the defense  of Euel Lee, a 60-year-old impoverished Black man in Snow Hill on Maryland’s Eastern Shore accused  of murdering a white family of four for refusal to pay him wages owed.  After torture by police, Lee had “confessed.”  He was facing trial by an all-white jury in a part of Maryland where the Klan was strong and lynchings were all too common. Ades managed to get the trial moved to Towson near Baltimore,  but the Klan, hearing Ades was in Snow Hill, found him and beat him up badly. Ades eventually managed to get the jury racially integrated and the coerced confession quashed. In a tragic miscarriage of justice, Lee was nevertheless convicted and executed. In his will Euel Lee asked  Ades to bury him “where he saw fit.” Ades tried to move the body to New York. The Baltimore Bar Association tried to disbar Ades for “unprofessional conduct.” The judge rejected the Bar Association’s absurd charge. In due course Ades gave up the practice of law. Ades volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In Spain he rose to the rank of lieutenant, fighting in the battles of Brunete, Villanueva, and Pardillo and in the battle of the Ebro.

Tim Wheeler includes a chapter on Ben Riskin, “Ben Riskin, Author of Portal-to-Portal Pay.” Ben was a close colleague of George in the CPUSA Labor Department and a neighbor, friend and mentor of this reviewer. In 1930s and 1940s Ben  had been research director of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, or “Mine, Mill” a left-led CIO union. In the Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama region it represented some 5000 iron miners and some coal miners, most of them African-American. Mine, Mill launched a campaign to win “portal-to-portal pay” for the iron miners who were forced to travel sometimes up to 80 minutes round trip to the mine face through the clouds of choking dust either on foot or riding ore cars. The federal government eventually ruled that the time the underground miners traveled from the mine entrance to the mine face was “compensable,” that is, part of their working hours.  The union won. With the expulsion of the left-led unions, Ben later had to endure a long period of blacklisting. When he eventually found work again at an IUE local headed by an old friend Jim Garry, in its health and welfare funds department, he threw himself into health care reform work. He was a fighter to the end.

The title No Power Greater comes from the words of the labor anthem  “Solidarity Forever”: “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.” 

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Tim Wheeler must have enjoyed writing this book. He is trying to give due credit to the many lesser-known Communists and other leftwing activists who don’t normally have books written about them. The repression and injustices visited on these activists in the McCarthy era brought out the heroism of so many of them.

Tim Wheeler is well qualified to be the author of this book. He and his wife Joyce were friends, comrades and neighbors of George and Allie Meyers in Baltimore from 1969 to 1999.

The book is organized into many small chapters, often only of one or two pages.  It is an easy read. Many chapters are built around episodes in Highlights. There is an introduction by Fred D. Mason, Jr., Maryland AFL-CIO President 2002- 2017, who held the position once held by George. Aimed at younger readers, a short bibliography includes many labor classics, such as Labor’s Untold Story by Boyer and Morais, and Foster’s Pages from a Workers Life.

The final chapter, “Epilogue: An Idea that Did not Die” as if arguing with himself, Wheeler concedes that there are some grounds for pessimism: “George Meyers died in 1999. Cynics say his vision of a world without war, exploitation, racism and all other forms of oppression, in a word, socialism, died with him.” But then he goes on to list all the grounds for optimism: the resurgence of labor and antiwar struggles, the revival of anti-racism and other equality struggles, and a new radicalism among the young.

No Power Greater is meant to inspire, and that it does. Tim Wheeler is a talented journalist and storyteller. There was heroism not only in George’s life, but in the lives of dozens of others profiled in No Power Greater.  It is far from a comprehensive party history. It makes brief mention of the major internal party controversies (the Browder dissolution of the CPUSA in 1944 and the Gates factionalism of the late 1950s). It omits a discussion of the recurrence of the right opportunist danger in the first decade of the present century.

Younger readers who want to get an insight into what it meant to be a revolutionary in 20th century America can find it here. Wheeler dedicates his book to the “young activists who are standing up against Wall Street greed, some seeking a socialist future.”