Chicago, 1953

“I used to work in Chicago in a department store … .
But I don’t work there any more … .” (traditional)

At the turn of the New Year, Jim Sinkule and I found a one-bedroom shabbily furnished apartment with a two-burner kitchen gas stove for cooking in a large tenement house with a bathroom to share in the hallway of each floor. I ended up sleeping on the living room couch and Jim had the back bedroom. We were a few blocks closer to Lakeside from Whitman co-op which was our home away from home.

Next came the job hunt which was easy enough, US Steel’s South Works was hiring. The main entry gate at South 92nd Street was several miles southward from Hyde Park toward Chicago’s city limits with Calumet City’s notorious honky-tonk district just over the line. I got a job as a general laborer in the open hearths just like at Lorain and Jim, with his considerable college chemistry background was hired for the chem lab with his main routine testing steel samples carried over from the open hearths just after a heat was poured. It was a fair-sized trip via public transit from Hyde Park and we worked the standard weekly rotating eight hour shifts which changed weekly as the mill worked around the clock. Payday was weekly as I recall.

My day-side open hearth foreman was a congenial Polish-American native Chicagoan named Eddie Kaczmarek, also a WWII veteran. He was an easy guy to work for with a good sense of humor. The union shop steward for the open hearths was a middle-aged man named Walt Schaible who was easy to talk to. Walt had attended Northwestern University for two years during the Depression years but ran out of money so grabbed a rare job opportunity at South Works and had never left. He was something of a labor intellectual because of his academic background. He was a close adviser to Jerry Wilcezski, the bull-necked Polish-American president of our Local 16, United Steel Workers of America, who personified the expression of Chicago being the “city of the wide shoulders” with his upper-body bulk. Wilcezski was somewhat of a bullying type who ran Local meetings with an iron grip. YSLer Fred Meier told me that this local union in the prevailing anti-communist era had prohibited the right of Communist Party members to attend union meetings although they were allowed to retain their jobs in the mill. Some union democracy! President Paul Schremp in Lorain’s Local 1104 had been an exemplar to the contrary.

I started out working alternately as a third helper on the main furnace floor, and as a cinder pitman on the ground level behind the furnaces cleaning up after a heat of molten steel had been poured. It was the dead of winter and I was moved as a regular to the far end outside of the open hearth building where the mold casings containing the white hot ingots were brought to a yard by trolley platform trains for stripping. We stayed warm in a little corrugated metal shack in this yard with a heated stove as our savior with endless cups of strong black coffee to keep our innards warm and lubricated. When the ingots were brought to us they sat in the little platform cars until they had cooled off sufficiently to have the yard cranes strip the molds off them. That’s when I’d don my asbestos fire-proof coveralls. helmet, mask and heavy gloves to dash outside and run up near the ingot mold being pulled up to expose the still white hot ingot to the elements. It was my task to run up as close as I could to the exposed steel with a hose to water and cool it down. The icy winds of Lake Michigan were lacing my back while the white heat of the steel ingot would burn my front side. I’d have to hit and run several times to splash cold water on it until it began to cool down. In between ingots I’d duck back into the warm shack, divest myself of some of my heavy gear and grab a coffee and wait for the next ingot to be bared. This routine would last the shift, minus lunch breaks.

SCRAP YARD CRANE HOOKER

I worked at a whole host of semi-skilled labor jobs around the open hearth but my favorite came later in the year when I started to work outside the open hearth department on its other end as a hooker for the scrap yard crane building which was a high enclosed corrugated steel building where my job was to attach and detach magnets, wrecking balls and various calipered lifting tongs for the high overhead crane which was connected to a platform near the roof. Basically the task of the crane operator to make “lil’uns” out of “big’uns” in disposable scrap metal that littered the ground. There was an elderly steelworker called Otto in charge of the operation in another shack at this end for us to stay dry and keep warm, with a telephone connection to the foreman’s office out on the main floor. So I got to bring a thermos of coffee a few times a shift from our shack to way up high to the cab of the overhead crane for the operator. I’d climb up some long steel stairs to the high platform access door of the crane’s cab. Looking over the edge of the platform to the ground far below made my head swoon with nausea in my gut.. So when I was asked a few months along whether I’d like to be trained to operate this crane to fill a vacancy with extra premium pay, I politely declined because of my aversion to high places and the fear I would drop my wrecking ball on a hooker working below.

My straw boss Otto was an interesting guy. He had been involved in the 1919 steel strike and remembered William Z. Foster, the strike leader who at various times was Communist Party boss later on according to Joe Stalin’s whims. Otto remembered that Foster wore a cowboy hat, duds and boots whenever he saw him in 1919. A nice little Mexican immigrant and his black American partner were welders taking care of the smaller scraps that needed work around the yard as part of Otto’s small crew. Around that time the Marlin Brando film “Viva Zapata” directed by the highly-talented Elia Kazan, who became hated in much of Hollywood because of his naming names to the Un-American Activities Committee, hit the first-run theatres. Both Jim and I had loved the film, as did my Mexican welder brother at South Works. Brando did a first-rate job of portraying the great peasant leader Emiliano Zapata martyred in the Mexican Revolution.

SUBBING AS RAILWAY YARD CLERK

One of the jobs I worked from time to time was to fill in for the regular yard clerk who had more seniority, and to tag and expedite rail cars loaded with steel that was being shipped to customers here and abroad. I’d tag an empty car, check and report it when loaded, then write the time it was shipped when notified by phone by the worker responsible for that task. This job called for more brain power than anything else I did at the mill but I never accumulated enough seniority to claim a permanent clerk’s position by the time I quit in early 1954.

“I’M STICKIN’ TO THE UNION”

One thing I’ve always believed in is trying to attend meetings of any union to which I’ve belonged as regularly as I can. USWA Local 16 was no exception. Jim attended a couple of meetings with me but was turned off by the cold, hostile autocratic environment of these meetings chaired by President Jerry Wilceszki. So I don’t blame Jim for not returning again, yet I don’t expect these meetings to be all that exciting but bear with it. The president’s response to a first-timer trying to take the mike was an angry: “What’s your name and badge number!:” Gulp! Choke! So I never tried to take the floor at a membership meeting as most attendees were part of Wilceszki’s political machine. One time an older black member who was a loyal member of his entourage asked the chair a question when he had announced the names of functionaries who he had named to attend a University of Illinois two-week summer seminar in Champaign on the union’s dime, all spots reserved for favored pie-cards. A neat mid-summer vacation. Our black brother apprehensively took the floor and tentatively asked: “Mr. President, how come it’s always union officers who are picked for these seminars? I’m sure some of our rank and file brothers would get a lot of out of these opportunities.” President: “Are you questioning the integrity of the Chair!” Fumbling answer: “No, I just thought......I mean...” President again, louder: “ARE YOU QUESTIONING THE INTEGRITY OF THE CHAIR!” “Err, I just ..” Prez: “Then sit down, brother!”

I used to see chalked graffiti around the walls of the open hearth: “Elect Brother (long Polish name) as local union president!” Ah, ha, maybe a more democratic opponent to Jerry, I thought. Until Brother (long Polish name) showed up at a union meeting. A discussion had arisen over a rash of locker room thefts. Brother (long Polish name) belted out: “ In our department we don’t fuck around! If we catch someone trying to break into a locker, we’ll bust his arms and legs!” Hardly my kind of choice as a union reformer. I understand in the early 1970s Local 16 elected a democratic rank and file reformer Edward (Oil Can Ed) Sadlowski, as a second generation steelworker, as his immigrant father had toiled at South Works all his working life in America. Sadlowski later successfully ran for director of District 31 of the USWA.. In 1977 he ran as a progressive alternative for USWA International President against the notoriously conservative incumbent Lloyd McBride. He lost as McBride’s political machine rolled over him, whose underling salaried bureaucrats made major personal campaign contributions to retain their boss that Oil Can Ed couldn’t match.

 CARL SHIER, SAUL MENDELSON

One of our Whitman House hangers-on was June Greenlief. An Iowa native she had a BA and MA in English literature from the University of Wisconsin and had lived in the Green Lantern Co-op while at Madison. She had a grandfather who’d been president of a Typographical Union local in Iowa, so she developed a pro-labor attitude naturally. She worked on the UC campus as an assistant to Professor Kermit Eby (1903–1962), a historian who had been national education director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in Washington, DC. One time he hosted a public forum featuring young and up-coming labor leaders in Chicago. One was an ISLer named Carl Shier (1917–2007) who worked in the regional office of the UAW in Chicago and was a leading activist for the union. With Socialist parents (1912–1986), he’d been a Yipsel in 1931 but gravitated to the Schachtman school as he went along. Another panellist may have been Bob Swanson, an organizer and business agent for a Chicago SEIU local which organized on an industrial basis in Chicago, directed by Sidney Lens (1912–1986) who had been an Oehlerite Trotskyist in the Revolutionary Workers League (long defunct) as a young man. He was now an unaffiliated socialist close to the SP left wing and ISL, and a prolific author and world traveller. I don’t remember who the third panellist was but I’ll introduce Saul Mendelson now (1914–1998) a high school and college teacher and an AFT activist and prominent in the ISL with a long and rich history in the civil rights movement. Saul was an impressive public speaker with a sense of humor, sometimes not easy to find in radical circles. This forum gave me a better insight into the left wing politics of radical labor in Chicago, compared to the oligarchic bureaucracy of my USWA local.

DEMONSTRATION AT SPANISH CONSULATE

Public protest demonstrations were extremely rare those days in Chicago as the growing McCarthyism was taking its toll as well as government persecution. The CP was almost invisible publicly being under state siege. The Chicago papers reported that Joe Dougher of the Lorain CP was just sent to jail on Smith Act charges as a second-string party leader along with Lucille Betancourt, a young Venezuelan-descended CP activist who had been sent to Lorain to organize among the numerous Puerto Rican workers at National Tube. That party was riddled with FBI informers which spread paranoia in its ranks. About the only public activity I read about them was an occasional hootenanny or other songfest in People’s Songbook circles.

So when we read of a streetcar conductors’ strike and mass arrests in Barcelona in Franco Spain, the non-Stalinist left in Chicago decided it’s time to hit the streets for a change. Members of the left SP and YPSL, the ISL-SYL, Libertarian Socialist League and IWW would meet to plan a demonstration at Sid Lens’s SEIU Local headquarters in the Loop. Lens himself was away from Chicago doing research on a book, so Bob Swanson was our enthusiastic host for our meetings at its office. The plans jelled for a street demonstration at the Spanish consulate in the Loop on a Saturday to protest crackdown on strikers in Barcelona. Leaflets and picket signs were prepared as well as posters to publicize the event. Press releases were issued and unions urged to lend their support. Plans were made to hold a mass public meeting in a downtown auditorium to be co-sponsored by willing unions of the Chicago labor movement in which Norman Thomas agreed to be featured speaker.

The demonstration went off very well for those times as 50 protesters was considered a “success” then. Besides members of the sponsoring organizations we had a fair showing from Hyde Parkers like Whitmanites June Greenlief and Herschel Rader. A surprise picketer to me was Doug Kelly, the Students for Democratic Action; leader from Michigan State in 1948–’49. Doug must have found a job in Chicago or was in graduate school. A few cops stood around to monitor us but made no unfriendly moves. But more ominous was a truck for some obscure movie company which filmed our entire demonstration. Some of us suspected them as being in the employ of the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad. Our suspicions of this was realistic for those repressive times. But we were glad to have organized this protest as street actions are an integral part of Constitutional free speech and assembly. So we were the ones to break the ice in these ominous times.

 AUDITORIUM RALLY REFLECTS CURRENT FEARS

Work now began to organize the hopefully large auditorium rally to publicize the arrests of the gutsy Barcelona trolley car conductors. I took a bunch of flyers and posters to the Steelworkers Union Hall of Local 16. The District Director refused to post our material suspicious about the political character of the sponsors. Since Norman Thomas was considered “a respectable rebel,” I indicated he would be our featured speaker. His curt response: “That’s the son-of-a-bitch who ran against Roosevelt.” Lucky he didn’t throw me out. I had better luck at the offices of the Needle Trades Unions downtown. These were the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. I don’t recall if the Cap and Millinery Workers Union had shops in Chicago but they would have been on my route. These were Old Guard Social Democratic unions, frequently run by Jewish socialist immigrant leaders. They were among our official sponsors with their speakers invited.

I attended the auditorium meeting on Spain with Bessie Eldridge, secretary to SEIU local leader Sid Lens. Bessie was a Tennessee native and grew up around the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, started by educator Myles Horton as an institution in the mid-South that trained civil rights activists and labor organizers. She was a close friend of June Greenlief. I dated Bessie during my final Chicago year and we were compatible in both political as well as social values. We had a sizeable audience that night that nearly filled the auditorium. Our preliminary speakers were the grizzled aging leaders of the Chicago Needle Trades Unions. They were all strongly anti-communist right-wing Jewish immigrant Social Democrats who spent most of their remarks attacking the Soviet Union, giving the jailed streetcar conductors in Franco Spain relatively scant attention in comparison. They were as much paralyzed with fear being attacked as Un-American by the McCarthyite Right as was the Left generally in Chicago in these times. Thus, their heavy emphasis in trying to prove their anti-communist credentials. This calls to mind a morbid joke circulating around the Left in those years: A New York or Chicago cop was clubbing the hell out of a participant in a mass street protest. His victim called out: “But, Officer, I’m an Anti-Communist!” Cop: “I don’t give a good fuck what kind of Communist you are,” and kept on beating the poor wretch even harder. Featured speaker Norman Thomas showed much more savoire faire in his remarks, and after a couple of ritual anti-Soviet remarks, focussed most of his speech on defending the rights of workers in fascist Spain against the brutal crimes of the Franco regime against its own citizenry.

“THIS IS NOT A MASS PERIOD”

One of our libertarian socialist comrades learned of a Spanish freighter coming through the Saint Lawrence-Great Lakes waterways to the Port of Chicago to trade. He brought the matter to the attention of our committee who staged the earlier demonstration and evening meeting, and suggested we organize a picket at the docks urging boycotting of the Spanish ship when it docks in Chicago. By this time Sid Lens had returned to his job and he adamantly opposed such a plan, joined by the Schachtmanites on our committee saying “this is not a mass period”, casting doubt on the efficacy of our earlier street protest before the Spanish consulate. The Libs, Wobblies, and SPers on our informal committee supported a demonstration. No doubt to get dock workers to not unload or load the Spanish vessel would have required involving the larger Chicago trade union movement,, a difficult task in these times. But we felt even a more modest effort would have created some public notice of the plight of the Barcelona streetcar strikers. But without the support of Lens and the ISL this became impossible. I can remember the late Catholic anarchist Ammon Hennecy who for years made a lonely one-man protest against nuclear warfare daily in front of the Federal Building in Phoenix, Arizona. So why couldn’t have even a smaller rally by the Chicago waterfront created some visibility for dissenting witness for workers trying to fight the good fight in fascist Spain? I often wonder whether Lens and his supporters in their negativity to any kind of public demonstration might also have been a case of McCarthy period jitters?

SOCIALIST PARTY HAPPENINGS

The biggest Socialist Party happening in Chicago was a public

meeting at Roosevelt College for Frank P. Zeidler (1912–2006), elected in 1948 for his first of three terms as the third Socialist Mayor in the history of Milwaukee. The city had a remarkable history of socialist city administrations which made it one of the best governed municipalities in the country supported by its huge German-American population. There’s something to be said for honest government focussed on municipal issues to make it good place for its population to live, which its detractors from the left sneeringly called “sewer socialism.” True, potholes had to be filled, parks, schools and libraries built, but leaders like Zeidler championed civil rights, public enterprise, and co-operative values. all a part of socialist ethic. With its powerful brewery workers union movement, it was a strong labor town.

A large audience attended Zeidler’s talk at Roosevelt including hundreds from the Chicago University’s South Side, including practically every SP member in Chicago. A modest, plain-spoken man, Mayor Zeidler listed all the projects in which his administration was engaged, No grandiose nirvanas, but common sense policies. Martin Diamond was at the time director of labor studies at Roosevelt which was a key sponsor of the Zeidler visit. I’m sure the Zeidler brand of socialism fell on welcome ears with the audience which the loud posturing of the revolutionary sects of the left could never achieve.

On the National scene, Vern Davidson resigned as YPSL National Secretary and retuned to California with Margaret to face his draft board in Los Angeles as a conscientious objector, but not before recruiting a young Catholic Worker named Michael Harrington to the Yipsel in New York. We’ll have much more to say about Harrington later who became one of the country’s if not the world’s most eloquent democratic socialist spokes-persons. Carol Denitch, Bogdan’s spouse of that period, became the temporary YPSL National Secretary. The New York YPSL of the Luxemburg Tendency drew closer in their activities with the Trotskyist SYL to the chagrin of a number of old-line SPers in that City.

In Chicago YPSL activity was quite low-key. I brought Jim Sinkule to a meeting and although he was sympathetic he was not the joining type. His maternal Swedish immigrant grandfather had been a prominent social democrat in Grand Haven, Michigan. An autobiography of left wing British Labor Party leader Aneurin Bevan titled “In Place of Fear” appeared in a Hyde Park bookstore in 1953 which I promptly purchased. He quickly became one of my BLP heroes. He went to work in the Welsh coal mines as a very young man and was turned onto socialism by Jack London’s class war novel “The Iron Heel.” He became the architect of Britain’s National Health Service as Health minister in Clement Attlee’s first Labor Government in 1945. He was an outstanding campaigner for nuclear disarmament, but not in a unilateralist sense like the celebrated pacifist Lord Bertrand Russell with whose position I identified. When Bevan became Defense Minister in the 1970s he waffled on the issue saying he “would use the nuclear issue as a diplomatic bargaining chip,” according to anarchist John England I met in Britain in 1976 who had been a Labour Party youth activist to that point.

Another new development in 1953 was the resignation of literary figure Irving Howe from Schachtman’s ISL to help found the left socialist magazine DISSENT which publishes to this day as a high quality journal. It seems Howe wanted to function in a broader socialist environment than the still doctrinaire Trotskyism of the ISL. He and his academic colleague Professor Lewis Coser, art critic Meyer Shapiro and novelist Norman Mailer, whose WWII novel “Naked and the Dead” was a favorite of mine, were among the founders of DISSENT. I immediately became a subscriber for a number of years, as it wasn’t too far removed from my Third Camp politics.

CHICAGO’S BOHEMIA

Many readers are familiar with colorful Chicago personality Studs Terkel’s books: The Good War — An Oral History of World War II, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; Hard Times — An Oral History of the Great Depression; Giants of Jazz and Working. Terkel (1912–2008), was also a popular entertainer as an actor, night club performer, and late evening radio host. I can recall his radio show, Studs Terkel Radio Program on Station 98.7 WMFT which ran from 1952 to 1997. Listening to it during weekday evenings as he commented on Chicago off-beat news and popular culture in his informal style was always a treat. Later on he interviewed famous personalities of his time from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Dorothy Parker.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

One day we read that Studs was hosting a nightclub act including back-up musicians in Mid-Town Chicago on weekends, so Jim and I double-dated with June Greenlief and Bessie Eldridge and took in the show. We had dinner at the place plus a few beers while taking in the act. A delightfully mixture of songs, music and comedy. Then Studs invited us to sing along with him and his partner some Methodist hymn with social content. “Let’s all be Methodists for now,” he said. Not bad for a man who was known to call himself a “cowardly atheist.” Whereupon a couple of wiseacre white guys at a nearby table cut in to request some pro-Soviet song to red-bait Studs. Our host was momentarily startled but quickly regained his aplomb and we all became Methodists. Everybody knew Studs was some kind of left-liberal, though I’d never heard him referred to as a communist. We agreed it was a great evening as we called a taxi to take us back to Hyde Park.

BUGHOUSE SQUARE

Although I’ve spent many an evening at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park listening to countless soap box orators on my London visits, I must confess that I never visited Chicago’s historic Bughouse Square during my Chicago years. Officially known as Washington Square on the North Side by the Newberry Library, Bughouse Square has been a free speech site since 1910 in the Windy City. Its platforms and soap boxes have seen many thousand s of orators. their listeners and hecklers over the decades. Appearing have been socialists, anarchists, Wobblies, Henry George Single-Taxers, suffragettes, artists, poets, ranters and ravers, hoboes and just plain crazies all with their panaceas for saving the world. Denizens were best organized as the Dil Pickle Club. Virgil Vogel said he’d addressed listeners there on socialism both as a Yipsel and a Lib.

COLLEGE OF COMPLEXES

Another venerable Chicago Bohemian tradition came into being in 1951, founded by Myron Reed “Slim” Brundage at 1631 North Wells Street ln “Old Town” as “a playground for people who think.” It’s been subsequently located at other addresses. It seeks to “disquiet the minds of people” through a huge variety of speakers resembling the soapboxers of Bughouse Square. The College is a venue where the “literary loungers and the cognoscenti congregate.” Each speaker is allowed five minutes to declaim, “only one fool at a time.” Subjects have ranged from “Why I Refrain to Deny or Confirm Anything,” to “How to Photograph a Spirit,” to “The Conspiracy Against Reality.” It was visited by the Chicago police Red Squad several times during its early years because of its anti-Cold War political disposition. Anarchist-pacifist poet Joffre Stewart, a regular participant, was the first to tell me about the College of Complexes. Sorry to say, this was another Chicago experience I missed. Too many evenings at Jimmy’s Bar, I guess. While doing some research on Joffrey I discovered a You Tube clip of him preparing the podium for a reading at the College fairly recently. He is now totally white-haired and bearded and bent over, far from being the straight-postured youth of the 1950s.

KOREAN WAR ENDS; MAMMA VISITS CHICAGO

The three-year Korean War ended on July 25, 1953 in an armistice stalemate, after protracted negotiations which remained approximately at the 38th parallel between North and South Korea near where it started with a demilitarized area dividing them. Five million died including nearly 40,000 US service personnel with 100,000 wounded. It was no great military victory for the United States. It remains an armistice and is not officially over in conventional terms. The only knowledge about this conflict for most contemporary Americans may be the re-runs of the fictional TV series “M*A*S*H”, about life in a surgical military hospital in Korea which is largely a comedy.

I had bought a car during the spring, a 1948 6-cylinder Plymouth sedan. This prompted me to invite Mamma to visit me in Chicago the summer of 1953. Outside of a trip to Niagara Falls a few years earlier with Irma still a school kid, courtesy of some old Westminster friends in their car, she had never been further West in the United States. So I mailed her a round-trip railroad ticket for her visit. Jim and I had moved to a more spacious one-bedroom in Hyde Park, where there was room for an extra cot in the living room..June Greenlief had also moved into the building, renting an apartment below us. Mamma really enjoyed the experience. I took her to all the museums and tourist attractions in the city. There was a Finnish Hall on the North Side on the 4200 block of Lincoln that a had a public sauna and a bar. We stopped by there but only the bar and sauna were open. We drove up to Waukegan, Illinois where there was a sizeable Finnish community and a coop store and dairy. Leo Saari worked for the coop in the office so we met someone who spoke Finnish. Leo Saari was a familiar name to Mamma as he was the Waukegan correspondent for Raivaaja writing news about the Finns in Northern Illinois. Leo was a democratic socialist who spanned ideological lines by also submitting local items to the pro-CP Tyomies, the Finnish Wobblies’ Industrialisti, and the non-ideological Päivälehti in Duluth. Leo treated us to coffee and pulla, the traditional Finnish coffee bread. I also treated Mamma to a unique experience. We went to a burlesque theatre on a seamy block on Chicago’s South State Street. Mamma was never a puritan in her exterior social attitudes and enjoyed hearing ribald jokes in Finnish. She was indifferent to the strippers that day as they didn’t “take it all off” anyway but covered their three vital spots with pasties. But she did enjoy the ludicrous male comics in their ridiculous cast-off costumes and makeup whose cornball physical humor is essential to the burlesque circuit. That’s how Jack Benny and the Marx Brothers got their start. It was fun treating Mamma to this visit as a major metropolis is a bit more colorful than Fitchburg outside its Finnish community.

YPSL CONVENTION IN READING

We were excited about the forthcoming Fall national convention of the Young Peoples Socialist League in the historic Socialist stronghold of Reading, Pennsylvania, another first for me. We worked on many common front issues with the Schachtmanite Young Socialist League and its parent ISL, but the New York Luxemburg Tendency of YPSL was aiming to go much further, like an organic unity between YPSL and SYL. In Chicago we were a bit apprehensive over this possibility as we knew there would be opposition from others in YPSL and particularly within the more conservative elements of the SP which saw the ISL as a rival Leninist organization. It was a non-issue of no real interest within our Chicago YPSL while people like Comrade Fredericksen and me were more apprehensive. Dick and I were the only Chicago Yipsels who planned to attend. Our New York Finnish comrade Niilo Koponen would not be there as he had married his fiancee Joan and had gone homesteading in Fairbanks, Alaska and they’d just had an infant son, Karjala or Karl.

We took the train with connections to Reading and upon arriving, our local YPSL comrade Joe Schwartz arranged for housing for us. I stayed at an empty house still owned by the Reading SP which had once bedded Eugene Debs on one of his Presidential campaign tours. Besides its renowned successes in electoral politics in the 1920s and 1930s, Reading had become famous for its cooperative cigar factory that had manufactured the Karl Marx label cigar. I would have given anything to find an empty cigar box that had contained the Karl Marx stogie but there were none left. Dick told me that during YPSL’s “Reading Summer Project” in Reading in 1951 he had met an old SPer there who had been dishonorably discharged from the Army for busting an officer in the mouth during WWI. An old bachelor, he had hung the Dishonorable Discharge certificate as a badge of honor in his room all these years. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet this comrade as he had passed on since 1951.

Delegates were mostly from New York City who included Bogdan Denitch, his then spouse Carol (later Marshall), and Michael Harrington. The Reverend Bill Shirley came from the Midwest, and old Yankee stock Peter Winant came from Boston, the only acknowledged YPSL bolshevik, and perhaps a dozen or more whose names I’ve long forgotten. Resolutions on various topics were introduced, debated and voted upon. The YPSL’s Third Camp world view was upheld. The Denitch-Harrington group promoted unity with the SYL which created controversy in the SP, and doubt among some of us in YPSL. Revolutionary songs were sung. A major highlight was the convention dinner. 1952 SP Presidential candidate and National Chair Darlingon Hoopes came and delivered some welcoming remarks. Some older Reading comrades were present including Mark Brown, the president of a Steelworker Local in Pennsylvania. But to some of us the surprise dinner guest was Max Schachtman, National Chair of the ISL. (For a detailed account of Schachtman’s life and political career (1904–1972) check Wikipedia.) An expansive, loquacious speaker, he apparently mesmerized a number of the YPSL as a revolutionary hero, but there was a slickness in his style that created suspicion in me, as well as Dick and Reading’s Joe Schwartz.

His speech was followed by questions and answers. There had been recent talk and proposals in the national SP for merger of the Party with the Social Democratic Federation to our right which had split from us in 1936–’37, a tumultuous period when the Trotskyists had entered to take over our increasingly radicalized and growing YPSL and who were expelled in 1937 for their wrecking tactics. So the question was asked of Schachtman what he thought of a merger between the SP and SDF. Surprising to many of us, he didn’t discourage the idea and said there were a number of highly experienced union leaders in the SDF which would strengthen us, virtually dismissing the fact we had union activists and officials in our ranks as it was. Mark Brown got up and spoke at what he considered the speaker’s insulting tone as a democratic reform union militant himself. Those of us who thought in terms of militant rank and file opposition to entrenched conservative union bureaucrats, these remarks from a leading “revolutionary socialist” were disturbing. We saw this proposed merger as a step to the right that would bring in some of the most conservative bureaucrats in the trade union movement who represented a most right wing form of social democracy. Election of a new YPSL National Committee ended the Reading Convention. Most of those elected came from New York and reflected the Denitch-Harrington majority. Joe Schwartz was elected from Reading and Dick Fredericksen and me from Chicago. Among those elected as NC Alternates in absentia were Mars Hill of Chicago and David McReynolds, a Los Angeles pacifist and recent UCLA graduate.

MERGER VOTE WITH SYL GOES THROUGH

Some weeks later a vote was taken within our new National Committee whether to merge with the SYL as instructed by our Reading Convention. The majority headed by Bogdan and Mike voted assent. Joe Schwartz, Dick and I voted “NO” as we weren’t convinced that merger with a Leninist group would work. Besides the three of us came from SP Locals that were compatible with our Third Camp position, As was the Los Angeles YPSL with its parent Local with no California YPSL signing up with the newly formed Young Socialist League which arose from that isolated merger. The SP National refused to recognize the merger with the young Schachtmanites and threatened to expel the proponents of the merger which happened in effect as none from the new group stayed with the SP. Comrades like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko from Ohio stayed with the SP and left it for other reasons later and became well-known historians. I saw Gabe’s name listed as new National Secretary of YPSL in some document. I wrote to the SP National Office that I was staying in the SP and with those YPSLs who did not join the new YSL. I also thought I’d bow out of youth work anyway as I was now 26. Although I may have differed politically with our “right-wingers” especially on foreign policy, I also believed in a diverse party compatible with many democratic currents. A few years further into the 1950s the Schachtmanites came knocking on the SP’s door to join as they had reached the end of the line as a small insular sect. Much more on that later.

AMICABLE SPLIT IN LSL

During the fall we heard that there had been a split in the Libertarian Socialist League along geographical lines. There were no denunciations of one side to the other, but since most of its small membership lived in either New York and Chicago they had decided to function as separate organizations with Chicago renaming itself as the Libertarian Socialist Committee with New York retaining the LSL marker. The newly minted LSC held its first convention in a basement meeting room at Whitman House. Familiar names including Chicago Libs, Wobblies, and anarchists formed its core like Virgil J. Vogel, Burt Rosen, Marty Ptacek, Peter Meier, Fred Thompson, Eddie Adamowicz, Chuck Doehrer, Janet Johnstone, Joffre Stewart, and John Forbes. Rosen and Forbes would end up for a couple of years in prison as draft resisters. Chuck Doehrer, a UCLA graduate, invited an old comrade Don Thomas from the Westwood Socialist Club on that campus to attend the confab from Madison where he was doing graduate work. Japanese-American socialist Robert (Lefty) Yamada of Berkeley, CA accompanied Don from Madison for a look-see. Neither of the two Californians joined LSC as I later knew them in the Socialist Party of California. People like Dick, Erica and me attended some of the weekend sessions of LSC as sympathetic friends and allies. After a brief flurry of interest both Lib groups had died out by 1958.

WE MEET THE KOPONEN FAMILY

One day during the fall before winter snows began to fall we had a quick visit from fellow Finnish YPSL Niilo Koponen (1928–2013) and his wife Joan and infant son Karl, who were on their way back to their Alaska homestead after visiting their families on the East Coast. Niilo’s parents were Finnish-American democratic socialists from the Fifth Avenue Finnish Hall in Harlem, whereas Joan’s father was a Harvard professor, descended somehow from Ralph Waldo Emerson, truly New England Yankee stock. They crashed at Whitman House for a few days with their van parked in the back yard, loaded with camping supplies for their long haul back to Fairbanks. Niilo was an affable, joyous sort and spoke passable Finnish so we palavered at times in our ancestral language. I had reserved space at the Finnish Hall on the 4200 block of Lincoln for a catered dinner to honor the Koponens. We had about 25 people attending as Niilo regaled us with colorful stories of life as homesteaders on turf which hadn’t attained standing as a state yet at this time. There was supposedly a lot of infrastructure building going on in the territory with high wages for construction workers. So Jim and I talked with him considerably about going there for seasonal construction work to pick up some extra bucks before deciding on more far-reaching plans. In time Niilo became about the closest friend I’d ever had, the nearest I’d ever have for a brother. The Alaska Fever hit us hard and Jim contacted our old Howland House buddy Mike Barney if he’d like to join us the next spring for an adventure in the great Northwest. It didn’t take much to whip up Mike’s enthusiasm as we discussed such plans. I enjoyed Chicago but the spirit of adventure still beckoned me.