LABOR: Six Down

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The C.I.O. was cleaning out one more Red-infested corner of its labor empire. This time the man in the corner was 39-year-old Maurice Travis, boss of the militant Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, who lost an eye and several teeth last year as the result of a labor brawl.† In the smoke-filled auditorium of the C.I.O. Steelworkers Washington headquarters, the Clothing Workers' spade-bearded Jacob Potofsky read the indictment, which was also a good case history of how the Communists controlled some U.S. labor unions. Said the Potofsky indictment:

"Only the Communist assumption that what is good for the Soviet Union is good for American labor could justify Mine-Mill's position. Only constant subservience to the Communist Party can explain it." Mine-Mill, said Potofsky, was dominated and its policies set by a four-member steering committee, which took its orders from Eugene Dennis and the rest of the hierarchy of the Communist Party. The Reds ran the union newspaper, its organizing staff and its leadership. The veto power of 44,000 members was only "theoretical."

Maurice Travis, onetime steelworker, had been placed on the Mine-Mill staff by the Communist Party, charged Potofsky. In less than two years he was made executive assistant to the president. Later he became vice president. When the president, Reid Robinson, resigned in the middle of a. left-wing v. right-wing fight in the union, a Redder-than-Robinson Travis might have become permanent president, but "the party decided his Communist affiliation was too well known." A stooge was picked instead. Travis became secretary-treasurer and the power behind the throne.

Travis denied the charges, declared that the hearing was a "kangaroo court." But C.I.O. President Philip Murray gave him short shrift. He threw Mine-Mill out of the C.I.O. and, after similar bills of particulars, threw out the Office and Professional Workers, the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers, the Public Workers. With the big United Electrical Workers and the Farm Equipment Workers already purged (TIME, Nov. 14), Murray had only a few more corners to clean: Harry Bridges' Longshoremen's union, the Marine Cooks' & Stewards', the Fishermen, the Fur and Leather Workers, the Furniture Workers, and the little but strategic American Communications Association (telegraph and radiomen).