US Labor Classic to Be Republished by International Publishers

For union organizers, community activists, and labor scholars the republication by International Publishers of Stephen Meyer’s “Stalin Over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 is especially timely. The cover of  the book — a 1946 cartoon image drawn from the rabidly anti-union Hearst newspaper The Milwaukee Sentinel depicts Stalin as a drooling giant spider hovering over the Wisconsin state capital with words indicating that the state is the 18th District of the Communist Party. The hideous image strikingly illustrates the intense anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.

Meyer tells the story of fiercely militant, and Communist-influenced, UAW Local 248, which represented the huge Allis-Chalmers plant outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded during the heyday of industrial unionism in the 1930s, Local 248’s history demonstrates how, against all odds, a forceful rank-and-file union can be built—and how and why it can be undermined.

Providing specific details that will prove valuable to organizers today, Meyer emphasizes how workers’ grievances served as the catalyst for unionization, and shop floor struggles challenging ‘managerial prerogatives’ provided Local 248 with an ongoing source of its strength.

The company and Local 248 long ago passed from the scene —but its story, thankfully, can now be revisited by those hungering to revitalize the labor movement.

It will  include a new Foreword by Roger Keeran, author of The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Union.  The new Foreword is below:

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Foreword to Stephen Meyer, Stalin Over Wisconsin

In 1991, a year before Stephen Meyer’s Stalin Over Wisconsin appeared,  the Allis-Chalmers Company dissolved, and its union,  Local 248 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), ceased to exist.   Before this, in the mid-twentieth century,  Allis-Chalmers stood out as a major manufacturer of  capital goods, like turbines, and agricultural equipment.   Its major shop in West Allis outside of Milwaukee served as the largest manufacturer in Wisconsin, and its two leaders, Harold Story and Max Babb, exemplified tough, sophisticated, and politically influential capitalists totally committed to the open shop.  With 8,000 members, Local 248 was  the largest union in the state, the leading force in the state’s CIO, and under the capable leadership of Harold Christoffel and Robert Buse, one of the most militant, leftwing locals in the country.

I came to know Allis-Chalmers while doing research for the book, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions[*].  In 1971, as part of this research,   I interviewed Harold Christoffel, the first president of Local 248 and its leader  during the local’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s.  Christoffel was the most impressive man I have ever met.  He combined a commitment to leftwing principles and ideas with a genius-level ability of a man of action. In his early 20’s, Christoffel spearheaded the organization of Local 248, which,  aside from a brief stint in the armed forces, he continued to lead in the 1940s.  Meyer deemed [Christoffel “a master strategist.”  Robert Ozanne, a labor historian with no sympathy with Christoffel’s politics, acknowledged Christoffel’s genuine popularity with the rank and file and his effectiveness as a trade union leader.  His regime, Ozanne conceded, “brought tremendous strides in working conditions, job security and wages.”[†]

My knowledge of Christoffel and Local 248 convinced me that Christoffel deserved recognition as a true hero of the American working class and  the story of Local 248 and its three great strikes  in 1939, 1941, and 1946-47 deserved a place next to the epic labor struggles of Haymarket and the great General Motors Sitdown Strike.  Though I never pursued my ambition of doing such a study of Local 248, I was extremely gratified that in his masterful Stalin Over Wisconsin Meyer did so.  Meyer’s book was an account worthy of the leadership skills of Christoffel and the accomplishments, creativity and tenacity of Local 248.   Reviews by historians Bruce Nelson, Gerald Zahavi, and others praised  Meyer’s work, and no subsequent treatments of Allis-Chalmers (for instance Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:  Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor) added anything important to Meyer’s account.   

On a critical point,  the historian Ellen Schrecker (Many Are the Crimes:  McCarthyism in America)  reinforced Meyer’s judgment.  In the Congressional  hearings and trials that surrounding the 1946-47 strike that ended in Christoffel’s conviction for perjury and a three-year jail sentence,  the main witness against him was, Louis Budenz, a former Communist leader who converted to Catholicism and was reborn during the McCarthy era as an ubiquitous expert on Communism.   Budenz claimed that in 1941 Christoffel was a Communist and was following Party orders when he called a strike against Allis-Chalmers.  Meyer called Budenz’s testimony “dubious.”  After examining FBI files, Schrecker confirmed Meyer’s doubts.  Schrecker pointed out that in an extensive “debriefing” by the FBI, Budenz made no mention of Party orders, and thus Budenz’s subsequent testimony against Christoffel was “probably a fabrication.”

Meyer’s history has stood the test of time,  but that was not the main reason for republishing it.   The main reason for republishing the book was that it made three important contributions that have relevance today.

First,  Meyer recounted the kind of leadership, strategy and tactics  it took to build and maintain a successful industrial union in a challenging environment.   Among other things, this required uniting a workforce divided by age, skill, ethnicity, race, gender, and politics.   This challenge became greater over time, as before and during World War II women, African-Americans and youth entered the Allis-Chalmers plant in great numbers.  Moreover, building and defending the union meant countering a hostile, sophisticated, and aggressive employer, who had the support of local and national politicians, the local newspapers, and others.

Long before Donald Trump, Harold Story and Max Babb self-identified as America-first conservatives.   Even after Local 248 won union recognition and secured collective bargaining agreements, and even after the New Deal legislation and wartime labor boards forced management to make accommodations to the union,  Story and Babb never gave up their open shop aspirations and never stopped trying to undermine the union and reverse its gains.   Like Karl Marx’s account in Capital  of the ceaseless struggle over the working day in the shops and factories of mid-nineteenth century England, Meyer described the relentless and ongoing class struggle at the shop level,  where no worker victory came easily or remained unchallenged[‡].

Maintaining the union at Allis-Chalmers also meant withstanding a campaign of virulent and sustained redbaiting  greater than any union has ever faced.   During the 1946-47 strike, this redbaiting included a series of front page articles by a fictitious John Sentinel that ran for fifty-nine consecutive days in the Milwaukee Sentinel, the local Hearst paper.  This series, secretly sourced by the company, claimed that Local 248 leaders and members represented a dangerous Communist conspiracy that had no legitimate trade union aims but only sought to further Red-Fascism.  Joining this pile-up were not only Congressional investigations  by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the House Committee on Education and Labor that held hearings on Communist influence in Local 248 but also the UAW’s newly elected president, Walter Reuther.   In my interview with him,  Christoffel reflected that that the union might have survived the attacks by the company and government, but that it could not withstand the attacks of all three, the company, the government, and their own union leader.  In any case, the redbaiting undermined the strike and  led to the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Christoffel.

Today, as new organizing efforts are emerging at Amazon, Starbucks and elsewhere, Meyer’s book showed how Christoffel and Local 248 met these challenges.

A second reason for republishing this book is that Meyer provided one of the best descriptions ever written of what militant, rank and file,  unionism meant.   Most importantly, it meant embracing class struggle rather than class collaboration.  The idea that advancing workers interests involved unifying all workers in a workplace and struggling with the boss rather than dividing workers by craft and  trying to cooperate with the boss was what distinguished most CIO industrial unions from the AFL craft unions.  Local 248 fully embraced this idea.  For Local 248, this meant building an aggressive, dense shop steward system that paralleled the management structure.   It meant a local union with an ideology that held that stewards were the heart of the union and that they were equal to their management counterparts.  It meant a union that devoted considerable resources to the education and training in everything from public speaking to labor history.   It meant a union that viewed fighting grievances as a continuation of collective bargaining and encouraged workers to bring up grievances with the full assurance that the whole union would stand behind them.  It meant a union that fostered and achieved what Meyer called a “staggering” level of membership participation in a range of social, educational, and political activity.  It meant a union that fought redbaiting  and racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace and in the community.

Third, Meyer showed how a decidedly leftwing union operated successfully in a decidedly anti-communist environment.  At a time when unions face a new McCarthyism directed by a president targeting “leftwing lunatics,”  this was an important lesson.  The leaders of Local 248 did not wear their politics on their sleeve, so to speak.   The two main leaders of Local 248, Christoffel and Robert Buse, denied ever belonging to the Communist Party.   This, however, did not prevent them or others in the union from adopting some Communist ideas and supporting Communist candidates.  Nor did it prevent them from developing a “working relationship” with the local Communist Party.  Nor did it stop them from conducting political education for the members.  Consequently, Local 248 “had a solid reputation as a Red local,” and leftwing ideas played an important role in the policies and outlook of the union from a stress on class struggle, to support for rank and file control, racial equality and international solidarity. Thus, while Meyer showed that anti-Communism became a critical cudgel against Local 248 during McCarthyism,  he also reminded us that leftwing ideas and people played a critical role in building and guiding the union.

For those interested in the future of labor, Meyer provides an indispensable look at the past.

Roger Keeran
Jersey City, New Jersey
Emeritus Professor Empire State University
State University of New York (SUNY)

[*] Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions (New York:  International Publishers, 1986).

[†] Ozanne quoted by Meyer, 14.