National Affairs: Fighting Machine

More than 600 labormen filed into Denver's cavernous municipal auditorium one morning last week and settled back for the 1937 convention of the American Federation of Labor. It was A. F. of L.'s 57th, the fourth held in Denver. There in 1894 the late Samuel Gompers received his first and only defeat for the A. F. of L. presidency. There in the same building 1 6 years ago William Green, then the inconspicuous pink-cheeked secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers, uprose to nominate John L. Lewis for the A. F. of L. presidency. Mr. Lewis was defeated but three years later he returned the courtesy by boosting Bill Green into the job he could not get himself.

Little time was wasted last week on the ironies of Labor politics in Denver. Keynoting to the delegates and later to the nation in a radio broadcast, President Green swore he would drive the C. I. O. out of existence. "The clock has struck. The hour is here. . . ." he cried. "Our patient, long-suffering, hopeful group of organized workers and their representatives will now change from a position of watchful waiting and earnest appeal to the greatest fighting machine that was ever created within the ranks of Labor."*

High though the hopes of Mr. Green were, the A. F. of L. in convention sessions was not precisely the picture of a fighting machine. Purple tirades against John L. Lewis seldom roused the stolid, hardheaded delegates to more than perfunctory applause. A stirring denunciation of the Sit-Down by Mr. Green brought hardly a dozen handclaps.

Labor Society. Even less like a fighting machine was the convention out of session. A joy to Denver's hotelmen, the unionists ate expensively, drank extensively, took all the best rooms and confined their fun mainly to poker. Mr. Green stayed in an $18-per-day suite in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where he was served by a union waiter, had his bed made by a non-union chambermaid. Across the street in the Brown Palace, Michael Carrozzo of the Hod Carriers, Building & Common Laborers' Union had a $15-per-day suite. Two delegates from the International Union of Operating Engineers shared two bedrooms and a parlor at $30. Some of the labormen who brought their wives & children set up housekeeping apartments rented for the duration.

For diversion the delegates and their ladies attended a WPA play, excursioned to mountains, inspected the Moffat Tunnel. On Sunday many a Denver church had an A. F. of L. leader in the pulpit.

Repeal the Wagner Act? Though the A. F. of L. conspicuously omitted Secretary of Labor Perkins from the speakers' list, the delegates listened with polite hostility to Chairman J. Warren Madden of the National Labor Relations Board, who flatly denied that his rulings had favored C. I. O. It was, he explained, illegal for an employer to coerce employes into joining any union, and that included A. F. of L. unions. Whenever the Labor Board discovered an employer forcing his workers into an A. F. of L. union as the lesser of two evils it was up to the Board to act, "for no Board which can read English and can understand the purpose of this law can ever hold . . . that the employer may choose the union for his employes."