A hundred people gathered outside the Empire Zinc Company’s mine and mill in Hanover, New Mexico, on a June morning in 1951. Some were employees, others worked in other local zinc and copper mines. Still others were miners’ wives and children. The workers belonged to Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) and had been on strike against Empire Zinc for eight months. Having failed to break the strike through attrition and an anemic back-to-work movement, the company was ready to reopen the mine by force.
Force came in the form of Sheriff Leslie Goforth and his twenty deputies. Thin and bespectacled, Goforth looked a bit like a retired school-teacher or an elderly Harry Truman. He belonged to one of the “pioneer families” of Grant County. After serving in World War I, he surveyed mining claims and ranched; like other men of his class, he moved easily in and out of local law enforcement, ranching, and mining. Ironically, he probably owed his 1950 victory over Democratic incumbent Bartley McDonald to Local 890, whose members had come out in force against McDonald because of an ugly police brutality case in 1949.1 McDonald lost by only three votes and demanded a recount. Answering his rival’s claim that “special interests” lay behind Goforth’s election, Goforth took pains to clarify his relationship to Local 890. The union had helped, he explained, but he was in no way beholden to it.2
Sheriff Goforth got the chance to demonstrate his impartiality when he commissioned his deputies. Empire Zinc announced on June 7 that it would reopen its mine and mill, and Goforth spent the next several days lining up his men, over union objections that they served the company. Goforth stood his ground. “I’m choosing my own men,” he insisted. “I will not allow [them] to take any sides in this dispute. . . . If a man trying to go to work hits a picket, he will be thrown in jail. So will a picket if he hits a man trying to go to work.”3 Still, the sheriff’s impartiality took a peculiar form. He declined to deputize any union men, and he conceded that Empire Zinc had requested and paid for the deputies.4 Among the deputies was Lester Williams, the elected constable for the nearby town of Central.5 Known as “Tex,” though born in Alabama, he favored cowboy hats and western-style shirts. He was tall and somewhat stocky, with a slight double chin. Robert Capshaw, another deputy, had moved to Grant County as a youngster in the mid-1930s from Oklahoma’s lead-zinc mining district.6 Capshaw and Marvin Mosely, a former Silver City policeman and now a resident of Central, would become the most notorious of the deputies. Not all deputies were Anglo, though: Silver Citians Jack Madrid, Manuel Montes, and Mike Terrazas joined the force, too.7
Strikebreakers and strikers faced one another on June 11. They “sparr[ed] around” for a few hours, but no one crossed the picket line except company officials. One strikebreaker watched the scene at the north entrance of the mine from a front yard in Hanover. “Go to work?” he asked. “Sure, I’ll go if some other guys do. But go thru [sic] that line all by myself? Hell, no. Not me.”8 Around ten in the morning, the sheriff received instructions from District Attorney Thomas P. Foy to clear the roads. Goforth first arrested Clinton Jencks, the union’s international representative, then ten more men. As each left the line, another came forward to take the picket sign: Max Doñez, David García, Wallace García, Tomás Gómez, Ray Marrufo, Claudio Padilla, Julián Perea, Daniel Salas, Sal Vásquez, Mariano Zamora. Elvira Molano, married to an Empire Zinc striker, shouted at the deputies until they arrested her, too. Hauled before Justice of the Peace Andrew Haugland, they all pleaded not guilty and were released on bail. They returned to the picket line and union hall the next day.
Only twelve people were arrested: hardly a big event in the scheme of labor conflict in the twentieth century. Still, the union members understood this to be a turning point in their strike, and they awaited the company’s next move. Again Sheriff Goforth delivered it, the very next day, but this time in the form of a temporary restraining order. Judge A. W. Marshall had granted Empire Zinc’s request for an injunction prohibiting all members, officers, and agents of Local 890 and of Mine-Mill from blocking the public road to the Empire Zinc property.
On the surface, the picketers’ dilemma seemed simple: picket and go to jail, or not picket and stay out of jail; either way, the strike would be lost. But their dilemma was not simple. It must be understood in the context of the complicated class relations of the early Cold War, when management once again wielded pre–New Deal tools such as court injunctions against mass pickets, while left-wing unions like Mine-Mill enjoyed few government protections. How the union men would choose their next step, or mitigate the effects of that choice, or slip around the dilemma altogether, would depend on the kind of union they had built over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. In the eyes of its members, Local 890 was a militant, democratic union that had done more than any other institution to improve local working and living conditions, especially for Mexican Americans, and it had done so by affirming rank-and-file power. The union’s political bent, structure, shifting legal and economic advantages and disadvantages, and accomplishments positioned the Empire Zinc strikers to see the stakes in their strike as especially high, to look to their own ranks for creative strategies, and to implement those strategies with remarkable unity.
This chapter moves chronologically through three periods—the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War, each defined by a distinct set of issues. It concludes with the events of the Empire Zinc strike leading up to the injunction crisis. During the Great Depression, miners collectively challenged the social order for the first time. Constant company intimidation made workers at the Chino mine and mill organize secretly; survival was their main objective, and even that proved almost impossible when the company shut down from 1934 to 1937. Still, two developments in this period set the stage for later organizing. First, the Chino local was organized by both Anglos and Mexican Americans, working together, a remarkable accomplishment made possible by radical changes in the international union’s policy. This made the union’s cross-ethnic organizing in Grant County during World War II much easier than in other southwestern mining districts, even to the point of Mine-Mill’s winning the loyalty of skilled Anglo workers, who would later stick with Mine-Mill even after their jobs fell under other unions’ jurisdictions. Second, while the economic crisis suspended most of Mine-Mill’s activities in Grant County, it also brought federal relief projects, which installed the federal government in the local political landscape. When Chino refused to rehire any known union men upon reopening in 1937, Mine-Mill forced the company to do so by bringing federal leverage to bear on local labor relations.
Federal machinery remained one of Mine-Mill’s tools during World War II, the subject of this chapter’s second section. What had been a fight for the union’s very existence in the 1930s became a fight against ethnic discrimination during the war, as well as a jurisdictional battle with unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Mine-Mill used the government’s wartime policy against racial discrimination and its protection of union security, and took advantage of the labor shortage, to carve a place for itself in the mining economy, to erode the dual-wage system, and to earn workers’ loyalty. Mine-Mill also used the rhetoric of patriotism in its fight against ethnic discrimination, arguing that discriminatory practices against Mexican Americans stunted the war effort. At the same time, it continued to attract Anglo workers, who appreciated the concrete benefits of membership and who were not, apparently, put off by the union’s assaults on the dual-wage system.
The postwar years leading up to the Empire Zinc strike were marked by acute class conflict in Grant County, and in the third section of the chapter I analyze the dimensions of that conflict. The local union’s structure, leadership, and history of political activism shaped its response to a new management offensive and alienation from the mainstream labor movement during the period 1946–50. Mining management reasserted itself in the context of national anticommunism, using federal anticommunist legislation and a tighter labor market to try to weaken the union. Meanwhile, Mine-Mill locals in other parts of the country were being ripped apart over the issue of communism (some of them even seceding from Mine-Mill and joining the rival United Steelworkers in the years 1947–50), and the international union was expelled by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1950 for failing to fire Communists from its leadership. Those Mine-Mill leaders who were Communists, like Maurice Travis, had resigned from the party in order to sign affidavits required by federal legislation, yet this did not protect them from federal prosecution in the 1950s, a topic I revisit in Chapter 9.
But Mine-Mill persisted into the 1960s, and it held on especially strong in the Southwest. A disjuncture between national and local conditions helps explain Mine-Mill’s endurance. While the arena for labor activism—especially for leftist unions—was shrinking throughout the country, Local 890 was in the process of expanding. It was strengthening its leadership from the ranks and expanding its struggle against discrimination from the workplace to Grant County society more broadly. Communism played a role in Local 890’s internal politics, but seldom the controversial one seen elsewhere, probably because the version that influenced Local 890’s structure and mission was an especially democratic one. A few union men became unhappy with what they saw as communist domination of the local, but most believed that the union remained their union, whether or not communists also belonged to it. Thus union men met management’s attacks with even greater militancy, challenging management each day at the workplace and rebuffing their employers’ crude attempts to red-bait them and their international union.
During the Great Depression, Grant County miners launched their first successful union drive. After Congress passed President Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933, workers all across America joined labor unions in unprecedented numbers; many people believed that President Roosevelt wanted them to join unions. One provision of the act, Section 7(a), protected collective bargaining and encouraged companies to accept employee representation.9 NIRA came at a moment of transition in Chino’s management. John Sully died in 1933 and was replaced by Rone B. Tempest, a “reserved, quiet man” who had been assistant general manager for ten years.10 Tempest came from Utah, having worked in Jackling’s Utah operations, and he was no more a fan of unionism than Sully had been. Still, he saw the need for some kind of employee representation to stave off more threatening forms of unionism, so in July 1933 he set up an Employee Representation Plan to channel worker complaints. It did not work out quite right.
The first employee representative in Tempest’s program was a Texan named Joseph I. Kemp, who had moved to Santa Rita with his wife and four children in the 1920s. He earned a good wage as a compressorman, enough to pay a stiff $25 monthly rent on their house.11 But good wages presumably did not compensate for poor work conditions or the indignities suffered under paternalist management, because Kemp soon turned Tempest’s plan on its head. In the spring of 1934, he wrote to the Mine-Mill international secretary for membership cards and began organizing his coworkers into a union quite distasteful to management. On March 24, 1934, Local 63 received its charter from the international union.12 The same thing had happened at Kennecott’s coal company in Gallup, New Mexico. Horace Moses, the general manager at Gamerco, Kennecott’s subsidiary, invited his employees to form a union in July 1933, just as Tempest had done in Santa Rita, but the meeting in which miners were to elect their officers resulted in something quite different: “Two men from a nearby mine . . . convincingly argued against a company union and suggested that a district union would provide additional advantages of independent strength and unity.”13 The assembled miners adjourned the meeting and later joined the National Miners Union, a Communist alternative to the United Mine Workers.14 And across the Southwest, both before and after the passage of NIRA, Mexican workers increasingly allied themselves with CP-led unions in manufacturing, warehousing, and agricultural work. The reason was simple: Communists stood up for them in the face of considerable violence.15
Railroad workers, craft workers, common laborers, Mexican American workers, Anglo workers: all kinds of miners joined the Mine-Mill union at Chino, with Anglos typically organizing other Anglos and Mexicans other Mexicans. Within six months, Santa Rita’s Local 63 had over 300 members and Hurley’s Local 69 had 59. The first officers of Local 63 were six Anglos and three Mexican Americans; the first two officers of Local 69 were both Mexican American.16 Attracting both Anglos and Mexican Americans was a remarkable achievement, one that did not always take place in other southwestern mining camps. When it came to persuading Anglos to join the Grant County union, organizers were probably helped by the fact that several Anglos, many of whom became the biggest union supporters, were married to Mexican women—even locomotive engineers, whose occupation was one of the most rigidly segregated and whose unions excluded nonwhites as a matter of policy.17 Indeed, a decade earlier, the composition of a Mine-Mill union in Grant County would have been all Anglo, or “American.” The possibilities for cross-ethnic organizing were created in some measure by the family ties that cut across ethnicity in Grant County, by changes in the national union’s class and racial politics in the forty years since its inception, and by the fact that Mine-Mill had organized before AFL unions or the Railway Brotherhoods got a foothold in Grant County.
Mine-Mill began in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a union of “hard rock”—metal, as opposed to coal—miners. The WFM distinguished itself by its rhetoric of class warfare in the evolving mining industry, one that witnessed many dramatic clashes between labor and capital. Labor was the source of all wealth, the WFM proclaimed, and mine owners had better give workers their due. The “bread and butter unionism” championed by the AFL, in which workers would satisfy themselves with wage gains and other benefits, rang hollow for WFM members eager to bring capitalism down. The WFM promoted industrial unionism over craft unionism and helped to launch the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905.18 Yet the WFM, and later Mine-Mill, fostered a militant class consciousness that was sharply racialized: the union organized white workers on the explicit basis of excluding Mexican workers, even going so far as to destroy bridges to derail trains carrying Mexican workers. In a bitter 1902 strike in Cananea, Mexico, for example, the WFM tried to organize white workers and deliberately ignored all Mexicans—this in the Mexicans’ own country.19
In 1916, the WFM changed its name and its philosophy, largely because of dissension over socialism and the IWW and because of government repression during World War I. Renamed the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and belonging to the AFL, the union confirmed its expansion, already under way, into associated industries and into other regions of the country. It claimed to represent all of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, but it never extended far into Mexico, which had its own increasingly powerful miners’ union that, quite understandably, distrusted the United States and its unions. No longer stating Mine-Mill’s agenda in revolutionary terms, the union’s new preamble modestly advocated greater safety measures.
But Mine-Mill’s expansion proved short-lived, for in the 1920s the union lost members and shrank geographically.20 Now confined to the core of unions from which the WFM had sprung—chiefly in Montana, Idaho, and Utah—Mine-Mill leaders annually lamented the postwar decline of the labor movement at their conventions, a decline they attributed to the Red Scare and to cheap Mexican labor. Delegates to the union’s 1928 convention, for example, supported the Box-Harris Immigration Quota Bill to restrict Mexican immigration. “It is almost impossible,” the union declared, “for the American citizen to secure employment in the southwestern States, particularly in the mining industry due to this influx of Mexican immigrants, and [it] is an utter impossibility for American citizens to live on the basis being established by these Mexican immigrants[, which] places in jeopardy the American standard of living.”21 In 1929, Mine-Mill had only 3,000 members.
The New Deal changed the political landscape. Like many other unions, Mine-Mill made great use of NIRA’s Section 7(a) and, after the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act, of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The union organized new locals throughout the West and in the Alabama iron district. The Connecticut brass industry came under the Mine-Mill umbrella beginning in the late 1930s, and locals arose in urban settings such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Newark as the union tried to consolidate jurisdiction vertically from mining through processing and manufacturing. By 1940, 153 contracts covered approximately 70,000 workers.22
Starting in 1934, leaders associated with the CP increasingly influenced Mine-Mill, and this opened the way for the union drives among both Anglos and Mexicans in Grant County.23 Within the AFL, Mine-Mill helped form the Committee on Industrial Organization and, when the AFL expelled those unions in 1935, helped form the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Mine-Mill readopted the class-conscious preamble to its constitution, but now the class-conscious rhetoric was matched by a formal commitment to racial and ethnic equality, manifest in its opposition to the poll tax and support for antilynching legislation. Mine-Mill leaders abandoned their anti-Mexican stance in 1934, fretting more over foreign competition—“slave labor” in South America and Africa—than over Mexican Americans in the Southwest.24
The same year that Mine-Mill abandoned its anti-Mexican policy, it was invited into Grant County by Chino worker Joseph Kemp. The union sent out membership cards, a charter, and an organizer, Verne Curtis of Bisbee, Arizona. Curtis’s father had belonged to the WFM, and Curtis himself started working in the metal mines before he was seventeen; they were both charter members of Bisbee Miners’ Union 30. Though Curtis was a seasoned organizer, Chino was a powerful adversary that could draw on the experience of managers in Kennecott’s other mining camps. Workers in Gallup had struck Kennecott’s subsidiary, Gamerco, in 1933, and Gamerco’s general manager, Horace Moses, severely repressed this strike and later, when another battle broke out in 1935, arranged for some of the activists to be deported to Mexico.25 (Moses would return to Grant County to manage Chino in the 1940s.) Foremen and superintendents at Chino pressured workers to steer clear of Mine-Mill. “Why are you such a strong union man?” assistant mine superintendent Roy Grissom demanded of Felipe Huerta, a Santa Rita laborer, who responded that he wanted better work conditions. Grissom warned him, “It is better for you to think it over or not vote for the union because this camp has been working and operating for twenty-five years and you have been protected. If the Union is successful the camp will stop for a year and you will lose your work, possibly you will not get it again. It is better for you to take your Union with the Company, put the Superintendent in as president and leave those outsiders out.”26 Claude Dannelly, a foreman at Hurley, told Marcelo Avalos that a vote for the union was “not agreeable to the Company.”27 Harry “Hap” Thorne, open-pit superintendent, conceded that unions were generally a good thing—but not in the Chino camp.28 Apparently, the organization of Mexicans especially galled the company. Antonio Cruz got under Thorne’s skin by “constantly exciting and constantly agitating the Mexicans.”29 Grissom warned José Portos that workers ought “to be careful and vote the proper way, especially the Mexicans.”30
Company intimidation forced Curtis, Kemp, Huerta, Avalos, and other pro-union workers to meet in secret, often “at midnight after shift work,” as Benigno Montez recalled. “There was always company officers watching to see what was going on, so we had to have the meetings in different places.”31 An abandoned cabin by Whitewater Creek was one such meeting place.32 This intimidation angered many union men, who allegedly started to threaten company officials.33 “When the union [gets] control in Santa Rita,” shovel operator Victor Crittenden was said to have declared, “all non-union men [would be] going down the canyon, and Captain Thorne would be leading them.”34 Dutch Stewart allegedly told the pastor of Hurley’s Community Church, “They will meet our demands or we will wreck their trains, blow up their shops, burn their houses, and get Tempest and Thorne.”35 Tempest worried that his children would be kidnapped, and “it was said . . . that [he] took to carrying a pistol in the glove compartment of his car.”36 But Mine-Mill’s efforts paid off in September, when the majority of Chino workers in Santa Rita voted to join Local 63. Hurley workers opted instead for their own local, Local 69, which then lost the representation election.
Santa Rita workers voted in September for Local 63 to represent them, but they had little chance to enjoy their victory: only a couple of weeks later, the company shut down completely. The union men were furious, and they complained to the NLRB that the company’s closing was an antiunion tactic that constituted an unfair labor practice.37 But the reality was that Chino had been hobbling along for three years, barely operating more than fifteen days a month and shutting down for a few weeks from time to time. The company had not turned a profit in over a year, and the economy gave no signs of improving. Chino had ground to a halt. Thus, the NLRB’s ruling against the union was reasonable.
Chino’s shutdown devastated Grant County. Already, people were suffering from the Depression. With mines operating only part time, workers had barely enough income to pay their bills. Once Chino shut down completely, many families (chief among them union supporters) were evicted, and the county could no longer count on the company’s taxes. Chino worsened the situation by insisting on a lower tax valuation, which threatened to reduce Grant County’s classification for purposes of receiving state funds for education, health care, and other services.38 Empire Zinc also closed its mine and flotation mill in Hanover from 1931 to 1937.39
At the very moment when people needed more support, the county was able to provide less. Public relief in New Mexico, or any kind of public welfare, had long been measly at best. For gathering and administering public relief for the destitute, Grant County relied on a voluntary organization, the Grant County Welfare Association, which was staffed by local mining managers, other prominent male citizens, and their wives, all of whom, the union alleged, discriminated against union families.40 The relief rolls were growing at the same time that funds were evaporating; the number of families on relief almost doubled between January and July 1934, from 242 to 452—this before Chino even shut down—and the Welfare Association’s monthly expenditures “jump[ed] from approximately $1,200 in January to $7,200 in November.”41 Families were evicted, and the hospital was boarded up. Most families moved away or returned to the small farms from which they had come. Several literally uprooted their houses and moved them to the newly incorporated town of Bayard, midway between Santa Rita and Silver City.
It was in this context that many New Deal social programs came to Grant County. In addition to direct relief, which never fully met the need, the New Deal offered work programs for youth and adults. NIRA created the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 created the Works Progress Administration (WPA, later called the Work Projects Administration). Money and enrollment were channeled through the states, which in New Mexico meant through quasi-public agencies like the Grant County Welfare Association. In New Mexico, the CCC drew 32,385 young men into its eight camps.42 Both Anglo and Hispanic youths found their way into the CCC.43 Women were much more poorly served; a dozen or so girls joined a National Youth Administration training program in domestic science, and a few dozen women were employed on WPA sewing projects. But most of the jobs were in construction—highways, public buildings, dams—and they went to men.44 Interestingly, even though they were no longer employed by Chino, some of the men working on the highway through the Black Range kept up the union spirit. Writing to Governor Clyde K. Tingley in 1935, Joseph Kemp protested their mistreatment and signed his letter “Local 63.”45 Similarly, Ysmael Moreno, formerly a mill worker at Hurley and still the secretary-treasurer of Local 69, alerted Tingley to the desperate need for jobs and relief in Grant County.46 Grant County workers turned to other sources of income and, perhaps more important, came to see the government as bearing some responsibility for their welfare. This shift in attitude, reinforced by the greater presence of federal agencies, would prove critical in labor relations.
Late in December 1936, Chino announced that it would reopen its operations in Santa Rita and Hurley. “Let us start up again clean,” W. S. Boyd, Kennecott’s executive vice president, told Chino superintendent Rone Tempest.47 “Clean,” of course, meant union-free, and union men soon found themselves on Tempest’s blacklist. James L. McCraney, a crane operator, approached his former foreman, Harvey Forsythe, for a job in the spring of 1937. McCraney had started out as a steam shovel operator in 1923 and had been promoted twice, but his union record overshadowed his accomplishments on the job. “We are not putting back any of the old men, the union men,” Forsythe told him, adding that it would be useless to appeal to general foreman Harry Thorne.48 Angus Gruwell, another steam shovel operator, had no better luck. Fifteen years before, when Chino reopened after a yearlong shutdown, the company had tracked Gruwell down in Arizona to invite him back to work.49 This time, Gruwell had stayed in the area during the shutdown (perhaps because he and his wife now owned their own house), but in 1937 he was refused work. Chino had done even more to bring Ysmael Moreno back to Hurley from Los Angeles in 1922: by special delivery it sent him an invitation and railroad tickets back to New Mexico. But Moreno “cut his neck when he joined the union,” his foreman explained, and the company would not take him back in 1937.50 Some miners did not even bother to apply, having heard from relatives and friends that the company would not rehire union men.51 In Forsythe’s words, they lacked “character.” The blacklist extended beyond the mines, too, underscoring Chino’s control over its town: even the “radical-leaning barber” was refused permission to reopen his shop. He “set up shop in Bayard and for 50c” one could get a haircut and “perorations on the evils of capitalistic enterprise.”52
One hundred and sixteen men filed a complaint with the NLRB, alleging discrimination on the basis of union membership, and the NLRB ruled in their favor.53 But Chino kept this case in the courts for years, until finally, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the NLRB ruling against Nevada Consolidated, Chino’s parent company.54 In the meantime, Locals 63 and 69 pushed hard for contract negotiations. Tempest stood just as firmly against them, remaining “outwardly unflappable, [but] the union issue raised the specter of radicals, threats against managers and families, [and] riots,” and ultimately the stress became too great for him.55 On May 7, 1938, a state district court ordered Tempest to turn over the company’s books. That night he shot himself in his garage. Tempest’s unexpected suicide took the wind out of the union’s sails more than his recalcitrance had, and the union campaign stalled for a number of months. Only with defense mobilization for World War II did Mine-Mill begin again to organize with vigor.
When Mine-Mill renewed its organizing efforts in the early 1940s, it centered its new campaign on fighting discrimination against Mexican Americans.56 Mine-Mill used its competition with the AFL to stress its commitment to Mexican American rights, and the strategy worked: Mine-Mill won recognition and negotiated contracts at all the major mines in Grant County. Moreover, Mine-Mill was well positioned on the political landscape of defense mobilization to take advantage of three things: the labor shortage, which gave the union greater leverage with companies; new federal policy, which forbade discrimination in defense industries; and the political culture of patriotism, which set the parameters of legitimate social activism.
Mine-Mill began a regional organizing campaign throughout the Southwest in 1940, starting with the Asarco smelter in El Paso, Texas. The national union soon extended the campaign to camps in Arizona and New Mexico, creating the Southwest Industrial Council and assigning a dozen organizers to the region in 1941 and 1942.57 By visiting all of the districts, the organizers developed a sense of the regional political economy. Organizers who worked in the Silver City area included Verne Curtis and George Knott, both of whom had worked in the metals industry for many years; Glenn Gillespie and James Robinson, long involved in Mine-Mill; and Harry Hafner, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Curtis knew the region especially well because he had already helped organize Local 63 in Santa Rita. Like many Grant County union men, Curtis had been rewarded for Bisbee union activity in the 1930s by getting himself blacklisted. A reputedly good motor swamper at the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company, Curtis was refused reinstatement after a 1935 strike. “In 300 years we will give you fellows a job again,” the company’s employment manager told him.58 Organizer Arturo Mata, who first came to Grant County in 1942, also had firsthand experience with labor repression. He had lived as a child in Morenci, Arizona, where his father had participated in strikes during World War I. In retaliation, local authorities deported the entire family to Mexico. Arturo Mata returned to the United States in the 1920s and joined unionizing and civil rights efforts.59
Organization and collective bargaining paid off first at Asarco, which operated the Ground Hog mine in Vanadium and a mill in Hanover. In April 1941, Asarco workers elected officers for Local 530 (with Mexicans and Anglos elected in even numbers), and four months later they won the election for union recognition by 165 votes to the AFL’s 34.60 When contract negotiations broke down at the end of October, the miners held a strike vote as a show of strength. It worked. Early in November they signed a contract, the first ever negotiated in the mining district, and one that raised wages between fifty and fifty-five cents a day; the larger increase went to the lowest-paid workers. Miners now took home $5.75 a day (a 10 percent increase), and “all other workers” got $4.69 (a 13 percent increase). The union asked for but did not get a closed shop and a union checkoff, but the company agreed to a week’s vacation for all employees who worked a year or more.61 The following spring, the NLRB certified Mine-Mill as the representative for Asarco mill workers, and Local 530 negotiated a similar contract for them.62
The Chino locals were revived in February and March 1941. Opening a meeting in May 1941, Local 63 vice president Julián Horcasitas announced, “The union is here to stay come hell or high water.”63 After Asarco workers negotiated their contract, Mine-Mill organizers built their district campaign around Chino. The plan was to win at Chino and then “to attack each of these small plants . . . and crack them in logical order.”64 Membership grew rapidly in 1941: 122 people joined Hurley’s Mine-Mill Local 69 in March 1941, and they elected an all–Mexican American slate of officers the following month. Membership increased steadily to 208 in July and then jumped to 316 the next month. In Santa Rita, Local 63 followed a similar path; seven out of its eight officers elected in April were Mexican American.65
The Chino campaign heated up in the spring of 1942, when competition became fierce with the Chino Metal Trades Council, which comprised eleven AFL craft unions. The Supreme Court’s ruling against Nevada Consolidated boosted morale among Mine-Mill supporters, as did a series of rousing meetings in April and May 1942. Mine-Mill ultimately won representation for all production workers but lost craft workers to the AFL.66 The Chino Metal Trades Council signed the first contract ever with Nevada Consolidated early in June 1942, and Mine-Mill signed its first contract in July.
Peru, Blackhawk, and Empire Zinc all followed suit over the summer of 1942. Mine-Mill soundly defeated the AFL in the Peru election: 105 workers at Peru’s Pewabic and Copper Flats shafts voted for Mine-Mill, and only 2 voted for the AFL.67 At Empire Zinc, the AFL had “been ruled off [the ballot] because it could not produce any proof of membership.”68 Here 110 workers voted for Mine-Mill and 67 voted for no union.69 Thus only at Nevada Consolidated did the AFL end up representing the craft workers; in all the others, Mine-Mill became the exclusive representative of all workers, Anglo crafts included. Consequently, the Mine-Mill locals at Santa Rita and Hurley, consisting entirely of production workers, were more heavily Mexican American than were Locals 530 (Asarco) and 604 (Peru, Blackhawk, and Empire Zinc), which included craft workers.
With few exceptions—such as Arturo Mata—the organizers who came to Grant County in 1941 and 1942 were Anglos. But the union’s constituents were largely Mexican American, and Anglo organizers had to craft their appeals in ways specific to this group because Mexican Americans did not inhabit the same world of work that their Anglo “brothers” did. This was not hard to do, in large part because Mine-Mill’s competition provided a perfect foil. The Chino Metal Trades Council and the railway brotherhoods were also trying to organize at Chino.70 Their poor track records in organizing Mexicans, or even accepting them, drove almost all Mexicans into the Mine-Mill camp. For example, the Operating Engineers, an AFL union, found that its discrimination against Mexican Americans caused it to lose jurisdiction at Chino. “If a man’s name was Hernandez,” observed later Chino labor relations director Bernard Himes, “he could not apply for membership in the Operating Engineers. No Lopez or Candelaria could aspire to operate a bulldozer or power shovel. This bargaining unit, the largest, most crucial of all units, quickly passed to Mine-Mill, opening at last hundreds of job opportunities to Mexican-Americans and transferring great bargaining power to Mine-Mill Locals 63 and 69.”71 Earlier in the century, Mine-Mill had used the desire for racial exclusion to organize Anglo workers; now the union used the injustice of racial exclusion to organize Mexican Americans.
Both the CIO and its opponents promised higher wages and better working conditions, but there were signs that Mine-Mill had especially close ties to the Mexican American community. For example, when Reymundo de la Torre, a young Mexican American boy, won the regional spelling bee in May 1941, the Mine-Mill locals all chipped in to send him to the national competition in Washington, D.C.; none of the AFL unions contributed.72 Similarly, Mine-Mill conducted its business in Mexican American neighborhoods and local establishments like Lucero’s Tavern in Hanover and El Rancho in North Hurley. Mine-Mill’s big rally before the Chino election in 1942 took place on the “Spanish side of Hurley,” and at least one large meeting was held in an Alianza Hispano Americana (AHA) hall.73 Meetings for the AFL’s Metal Trades Council met instead on company property, which suggests that craft workers felt at ease there.74
Not every meeting followed this pattern, of course; Local 63 sometimes met in Santa Rita’s International Pool Hall (itself an astonishing fact, in contrast to the clandestine organizing of the 1930s), and the AFL’s Metal Trades Council held a family meeting at El Rancho.75 And at least one AFL organizer tried to improve the federation’s bad reputation. Addressing the Metal Trades Council on October 9, 1941, Ernie De Baca of Albuquerque announced that his own appointment to the New Mexico State Federation of Labor was “a new symbol of unity among all the laboring men of New Mexico”; moreover, the state convention elected a Spanish American president and appointed an equal number of Anglo and Spanish American regional directors. To De Baca, these moves signaled a “whole-hearted cooperation between American citizens, whether of Spanish extraction or otherwise.”76 Still, none of the Chino Metal Trades Council officers in its early years had Spanish names; by 1948, six of eighteen did—a significant improvement but one that resulted more from Mine-Mill’s aggressive promotion of Mexicans into the skilled jobs that fell under AFL jurisdiction than from AFL efforts at promoting Mexican American leadership.77
De Baca’s defense notwithstanding, Mine-Mill organizers constantly denounced the AFL for excluding Mexicans as the two sides geared up for the National Defense Mediation Board elections to be held May 26, 1942. These elections would show the relative weight and appeals of the industrial unionism of Mine-Mill and the craft unionism of the AFL. Mine-Mill organizer George Knott invited AFL representatives to a debate on May 24. “In this meeting,” he announced, “the question of the Spanish worker will be discussed, the discriminatory attitude of the AF of L to these workers will be brot [sic] out into the limelight, the unfair effort . . . to coerce workers into the ranks of the AF of L by threatening them with high initiation fees if they don’t join now, by telling the Spanish worker on the job that even if they do vote their vote won’t count, all of these organizational malpractices will be exposed.”78 Three hundred workers belonging to the AFL and Mine-Mill came to the debate, but the AFL debaters never appeared.79 Arturo Mata also led a “well-attended” meeting of Peru workers in Hanover, which “three AFL stooges crashed . . . [speaking] their usual line of americanism.”80 The Mexican American workers were probably gratified to see “Mata [take] them apart so bad that they weren’t even able to answer and left the meeting in disgrace.”81
What exactly did members of Mine-Mill gain from their new affiliation? More than anything else, they got contract language that destroyed formal discrimination against Mexican Americans and contract provisions that gave workers a way to protest unfair working conditions. Even the Silver City Daily Press, which would later oppose many of the union’s activities, applauded Mine-Mill’s first contract with Chino in July 1942: “It is felt that the signing of this contract will have far-reaching effects in the southwest as it is the first time that racial discrimination has been voluntarily abolished in this area, thru [sic] the collective bargaining . . . , which was very fair thruout [sic] the entire proceedings and is to be congratulated on fair labor practices.”82 Seniority—not race, creed, color, or national origin—would now determine layoffs, rehiring, and promotions. This meant that anyone in Mine-Mill would have a chance at the craft jobs that had previously been reserved for Anglos. Daily wages would remain at “the prevailing rate,” which ranged from $4.60 for unskilled workers to $7.50 for skilled. Employees who worked a year or more could look forward to paid vacation, and all workers under the agreement could bring grievances before a five-man committee.83 Later that month, Mine-Mill organizer George Knott reported that “about fifty of our Spanish Americans” had gotten promotions and increases in pay at Chino. Moreover, miners immediately flooded the company with grievances, evidence that they took seriously their opportunities for redress.84
In at least one instance, the union stood up for Mexican American workers against the wishes of skilled Anglo workers. The converter cranes had always been run by Anglos in the Hurley smelter. When the union forced smelter superintendent E. A. Slover to promote a Mexican American to this position, Anglo workers threatened to walk out. Verne Curtis told Slover that Mine-Mill Local 69 would not recognize the Anglos’ picket line and would instead readily fill all the jobs with qualified people.85
Mine-Mill’s accomplishments in Grant County’s mining district are all the more impressive when one considers how many Anglo workers joined a union that explicitly attacked Anglo privilege, even when there was an alternative like the AFL or the railway brotherhoods. At all the camps except Chino, Mine-Mill won jurisdiction over craft and industrial laborers, and Anglo workers both joined the union and entered its leadership. From August to December 1942, monthly initiates into Local 604 (representing Peru and New Mexico Consolidated workers) were always predominantly Mexican, but Anglos made up increasing percentages, from 23 percent in August to 46 percent in December.86 This percentage dropped significantly by the late 1940s, however. In January 1948, only three of the forty-six initiates were Anglos.87 Asarco Local 530’s Anglo initiations ranged from a low of 31 percent of the total in April 1941 to a high of 45 percent in December; for the next two years, Anglos comprised between 40 and 44 percent of the total initiates.88
Even at Chino, where the AFL Metal Trades Council and the railway brotherhoods defeated Mine-Mill’s bid to represent craft workers, some craft and railroad workers stuck with Mine-Mill. These were typically men who had joined the union in the 1930s, had been blacklisted for that action, and saw in Mine-Mill a union that would stand up for them.89 The 1942 Supreme Court decision against Nevada Consolidated came at a crucial moment in the Chino organizing drive. By forcing the company to rehire blacklisted union men and to give them seniority retroactive to 1937, the Supreme Court’s ruling infused the Mine-Mill campaign with energy and probably convinced Anglos, whether themselves affected by the decision or not, that Mine-Mill was a militant, principled union that would fight for them. Anglo workers who joined Mine-Mill may also have done so because they preferred industrial unions over craft unions on principle. Quite apart from the exclusive interests of Mexican American workers, Local 63 and 69 went to great lengths to protect their union security clause that would protect Anglo and Mexican alike: they demanded that Chino fire 160 workers who did not pay dues guaranteed to the union by the contract’s maintenance-of-membership clause.90
The cross-ethnic organizing in Grant County’s mines was quite different from that in other districts like Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, where Anglos and Mexicans were openly hostile to one another. One Anglo worker in Clifton-Morenci penned an astonishingly nasty song about CIO organizers and Mexican workers. Carlos Castañeda, an investigator for President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), excluded this song from his committee’s public reports because it was too vulgar.91 Many things caused this tension, but one may have been that in Clifton-Morenci, the AFL organized first. It laid claim to Anglo worker loyalty from the beginning, while in Grant County the Mine-Mill union was the only game in town during the 1930s.
Mine-Mill’s appeal to Mexican Americans was not new in the 1940s. But it grew much bolder then, its boldness generated by the strategic advantages that Mine-Mill enjoyed under war conditions: a labor shortage, legal and political leverage, and patriotic credentials. With these advantages Mine-Mill began to erode the dual-wage system. By the end of the decade, Mexican Americans still held the vast majority of “laborer” positions—in fact they held an even greater percentage in 1949 than in 1944—which suggests that whatever changes in job segregation took place, Anglos did not take many “laborer” jobs.92 Still, Mexican Americans slightly increased their presence in craft jobs, although they made no inroads into skilled railroad jobs. Even more important was Mine-Mill’s attack on the large number of job classifications, which permitted employers to assign Mexican Americans to lower-paid jobs that were essentially the same as differently named jobs held by Anglos. By 1952, contracts guaranteed that Kennecott’s wages were more equitably distributed among a smaller range of occupations.
World War II effectively ended the Depression for Grant County and sent thousands of people back to work. The mining industry kicked back into gear in 1941, before the United States even entered the war, and mining payrolls were up by October.93 More people were working, and, just as important, they were working for higher wages. In 1941 alone, before any unions signed contracts with it, Chino granted a fifty-cent increase in wages for everyone. This pushed the daily wage for an unskilled worker from $3.85 to $4.35, and for a skilled worker from $6.75 to $7.25.94 So many workers flooded the mines that the Work Projects Administration, the New Deal work relief program, could not fill all of its Silver City jobs in the summer of 1942.95 But even with these new workers, and higher wages to retain them, mine operators faced competition from the military and from better-paying employers. In November 1942, Horace Moses, general manager of Chino, reported that “approximately 275 men have left this organization to join armed forces and a substantial number of skilled workmen have left to accept positions with contractors who are engaged in other defense industries.”96
By 1944, Chino’s copper production had declined because of the labor shortage.97 Despite its labor needs, the mining industry did not import Mexican workers, as the agricultural and railroad industries did during the war; there was no Bracero Program for the mines. Chino hired Mexican American women to work in the open pit, mostly as track laborers, and brought some 250 Navajo workers and their families to Santa Rita.98 Perhaps Horace Moses’s Gallup contacts played a role in bringing Navajo families to Santa Rita (he was a “founder . . . of the annual Gallup Inte[r]-Tribal Indian Festival” while living there); certainly Navajos employed off the reservation during World War II found hostility greatest in those towns closest to their reservation and, consequently, preferred to work farther away.99 Chino built a separate “Indian village” for them, “just west of the great waste dumps on the road to the precipitation plant.”100 This was the worst housing, consisting of tar-paper shacks located close to a creek bottom “rusty with copper precipitates.”101 The entire village shared one water tap. The Navajos did not join the Mine-Mill union in great numbers but rather engaged in their own collective actions: the entire extended family would confront Chino’s management, one spokesman articulating the complaint and the rest backing him up with their sheer numbers.102
The nationwide mining labor shortage led the War Manpower Commission (WMC) in September 1942 to declare the entire western region, consisting of twelve states, including New Mexico, a “critical labor area.” No one employed in mining, milling, or smelting any of twenty-one minerals could quit without a “certificate of separation” issued by the United States Employment Service.103 In 1943, the WMC lengthened the minimum work week to forty-eight hours and then to fifty-six, and it began releasing soldiers from the army to work in the mines.104
The WMC decree was quite a repressive exercise of executive power. Many labor historians, in fact, see in World War II’s enhancement of executive power the seeds of later union bureaucratization, not to mention the immediate repression of labor’s rights.105 But Mine-Mill often turned this executive power to the union’s advantage in Grant County. The WMC, charged with granting or denying wage increases during the war, sometimes reduced wage discrepancies among mine companies in the Grant County mining district and between companies in this district and those elsewhere. The latter was especially important in undermining a justification for the dual-wage system—that a lower standard of living for Mexicans in the Southwest warranted lower wages in that part of the country.
Mine-Mill used several federal agencies in this manner. One of its resources was the FEPC. President Roosevelt created this committee by Executive Order 8802, which forbade discrimination in defense industries. Its mandate was to hold public hearings in regions or industries in which there was some evidence of systematic discrimination. The FEPC was always weak; it never had the funding it needed, and Congress shut it down before the war ended.106 But it was nevertheless important in the class relations of the Southwest, not least because Mine-Mill called on it to investigate conditions there. Those conditions impressed FEPC investigators enough to plan public hearings in El Paso. These plans were scuttled because companies persuaded the government that “public revelations [of discrimination] would damage the nation’s posture in Latin America.”107 The very threat of hearings, however, helped Mine-Mill organize in the Southwest, and the union redirected its research on wages and job segregation toward cases brought to the National War Labor Board (NWLB), which replaced the NLRB during the war. The union brought seventeen complaints to the FEPC at Chino in 1944 as part of the committee’s regional investigation; nine complaints were dismissed the following year because the complainant was unavailable, four were dismissed on the merits, two were held for further investigation, and two were satisfactorily resolved (that is, the worker now held the job from which he had been barred).108 The FEPC concluded that the entire southwestern mining industry followed “the general policy and practice [of restricting] Spanish-speaking Latin-American citizens of Mexican extraction to . . . [c]ommon or unskilled labor positions in all departments [and] [s]emi-skilled jobs in departments manned totally or almost totally by Mexicans.”109
The various defense industries were brought under the supervision of the War Production Board (WPB). The WPB’s copper program did not explicitly prohibit discrimination, but Mine-Mill’s Southwest Industrial Council interpreted the program—which promoted “improved working conditions and ventilation, better servicing of miners and better utilization of miners’ skills”—as an opening to fight discrimination against Mexican Americans.110 Mine-Mill insisted that the Nonferrous Metals Commission (NMC), which regulated metal mining for the War Production Board, investigate wage discrimination in the Southwest. In 1943, just two months after gaining recognition and before signing its first contract with Asarco, Mine-Mill Local 530 brought the case of timekeeper Arnulfo Holguín before the NMC.111 Holguín had first been hired as a surface laborer and truck driver in 1939, earning $3.43 per six-hour day, and two years later he accepted the job of timekeeper for $110 a month. His predecessor, however, an Anglo, had earned $135 a month when first hired. Ultimately the NMC ruled that Stanley Campbell, Holguín’s predecessor, had more prior office experience before beginning as timekeeper, and that this difference adequately accounted for the salary difference. But it is interesting to note that this was not exactly the company’s defense: Asarco alleged that Holguín was “inexperienced and untrained” and thus had required much “supervision and assistance.” Campbell himself, however, testified to the contrary: not only had Holguín “caught on” at once, but the job also included more responsibilities than when Campbell held it; moreover, Holguín had graduated from New Mexico State Teachers College and had taken courses in bookkeeping and business psychology.112
The Holguín case was limited to comparing two individuals, but in another case brought by Mine-Mill in Arizona, broad patterns of discrimination became the object of investigation. In 1944, three Arizona companies were forced to submit payroll records to the NMC, which revealed “a consistent pattern of discriminatory rates for ‘other employees’” (i.e., non-Anglos).113 These records devastated the companies’ defense, which had been that wage differences and job segregation arose from “cultural tradition, skill variations, and jurisdiction conflicts between craft and industrial unions.”114 The NMC told the three companies to end this pattern, and eventually this principle spread throughout the Southwest.115
Like most CIO unions, Mine-Mill was eager to influence production decisions for the war effort. The WPB encouraged labor-management production committees for war industries and even sent two representatives from the Labor Production Division to help start one at Nevada Consolidated. But this committee mostly exhorted workers to work harder. With the help of the WPB and the U.S. Army, it sponsored a parade in August 1943 “to build in the men on the home front a fighting spirit to match our boys in the front lines”; guns, tanks, soldiers, and airplanes paraded through the county’s mining camps.116 The committee also put its energies into enforcing the WMC’s decree prohibiting workers from changing jobs.117 Organized labor was being channeled, willingly or not, into enforcing restrictions on labor mobility rather than helping to shape management decisions. If the experiences of other unions, and of the CIO on a national level, are any indication, it is likely that management stood squarely in the way of any intrusion into management decisions. Companies were happy for unions to police their members and to encourage greater productivity, but they did not want to be told how to run their operations.118
World War II eased economic distress considerably, and everyone rejoiced in the flush of high-paying jobs. But the war accomplished this economic miracle while also taking sons (and a few daughters) to the front lines, and the early Pacific campaigns drove home the cost of the war. Grant County’s first reported casualty, Eddie Driscoll, died in the first week of the war with Japan.119 But much more devastating was the fate of the 200th Coast Artillery Battalion, Anti-Aircraft, to which many Grant County youth belonged. Stationed in the Philippines, this National Guard unit was heavily bombed by the Japanese in December 1941. It retreated to Bataan early in 1942 and finally surrendered in April. The defeated battalion was forced on the infamous Bataan Death March, during which thousands of soldiers died or were killed; those who survived did so as prisoners of war for three years in horrific conditions. The day after the 200th had surrendered, dozens of men went straight to the Silver City enlistment office, most hailing from the mining camps at Hurley and Santa Rita.120 Grant County people were acutely aware of the real cost of the war effort. Dozens of families, Anglo and Mexican American alike, did not know for months, sometimes years, what had happened to their relatives in the 200th Battalion.
It was in this context that Mine-Mill resumed organizing in 1941. Mine-Mill used both its badge of patriotism—a rally for all-out production and a pledge not to strike for the duration of the war—and an explicit commitment to racial and ethnic equality in order to attract workers and to justify its place in the local political economy. Mine-Mill had opposed U.S. entry into the war during the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939–41, but once Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and especially after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the union backed the war effort in full force. Just days after Pearl Harbor, and even before the CIO signed a no-strike pledge in Washington, Mine-Mill locals in Grant County promised not to interrupt war production. Organizer James Robinson announced on December 11 that the three locals would “give 100% support to national defense as loyal Americans in this time of peril.”121 Robinson also spoke at the AFL-sponsored Victory Parade, held in Silver City on December 20, 1941, and reiterated his call for around-the-clock production, defense bonds, and efforts to detect sabotage.122
By standing firmly behind the CIO’s no-strike pledge, Mine-Mill was able to undertake an ambitious organizing drive in Grant County without risking condemnation for threatening war production. The no-strike pledge may have weakened workers’ shop-floor strength; certainly this is the conclusion drawn by labor historians studying unions elsewhere in the United States. But in Grant County, upholding the no-strike pledge did not entail simply accepting company policies. Instead, the pledge increased the union’s political capital, and this political capital lent legitimacy to Mine-Mill organizers’ arguments that agitation against ethnic discrimination actually supported the war effort.123
Companies in the Central mining district worked with the local defense bond committees to sign up workers for payroll deduction to buy bonds, a key component of the war effort, and Mine-Mill joined the defense bond drive, too.124 Those Chino workers who signed up for payroll deduction in February 1942, for instance, were identified as “CIO workers,” shorthand for “Mine-Mill workers.”125 That spring, organizers Verne Curtis and Glenn Gillespie challenged all companies in the area to donate a day’s profit each week to the war effort, just as miners were offering to give a day’s wages each week to defense bonds. Mine-Mill’s defense bond committee, under Curtis’s leadership, even drew the praise of the El Paso Times, which organizers described as a “reactionary paper.”126 By 1943, 81 percent of the workers in the Central district’s mines were donating a portion of each paycheck; these 2,453 workers, in fact, accounted for more than a third of Grant County’s war bond sales.127 The union locals held contests to reward workers who put their wages into defense bonds, and in 1944 the Santa Rita local unanimously voted again to give a day’s pay to the Grant County War Chest.128
Mine-Mill pointed to the Southwest’s military contributions in order to fight antiunion legislation. In 1943, the New Mexico legislature considered an “anti-racketeering” bill to ensure war production, and labor unions across the state protested to Governor John J. Dempsey. Mine-Mill’s Southwest Industrial Union Council reminded Dempsey, who opposed the bill, that “in the battle of Bataan . . . New Mexico lost many of her native sons. Many of your friends and mine were killed or are languishing in Jap prison camps. . . . [We find] that very many of them were working men and members of labor unions. They went willingly to fight for the American Way of Life. . . . Will they return only to find that we on the home front have lost our battle to perpetuate this same American Way of Life?”129
Patriotism worked well for Mine-Mill when the union’s politics were aligned with the larger political culture. Working for all-out production during World War II gave Mine-Mill locals patriotic credibility that was vital in a region like Grant County, which suffered so many losses of life. But patriotism was no longer available as a tool for labor after the war, because it was redefined exclusively as anticommunism. And it was a tool bluntly wielded against unions like Mine-Mill. In one respect, however, Mine-Mill managed to lay claim to patriotism by highlighting the number of veterans in the union, which I discuss in Chapter 4.
It was not immediately obvious that when the war ended labor would be thrown on the defensive. Toward the end of the war, Mine-Mill was optimistic that, in contrast to the post–World War I period, organized labor could not only hold onto its gains but also strengthen the nation’s social welfare through laws maintaining wartime price controls and subsidizing new housing. Even the American Mining Congress made its peace, of a sort, with collective bargaining.130 The labor movement was strong and getting stronger; almost fifteen million workers belonged to unions at the war’s end, and five million of them went out on strike in the year following Japan’s surrender in August 1945—the biggest strike wave in United States history.131 The desperate unemployment that followed World War I had never been far from the thoughts of labor and industry leaders as they anticipated reconversion to a peacetime economy after World War II, and in 1945, as the nation began to demobilize, labor seemed strong enough to make President Truman listen to noncorporate voices, too.
Soon, however, a combination of antilabor legislation and battles over communism within the CIO—and within Mine-Mill itself—began to sour the prospects for left-wing unions. Management pointed to the strike waves as evidence not merely of workers’ power but also of unions’ irresponsible use of that power. Many opponents of the Wagner Act of 1935 (and of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938) believed that it unfairly favored workers and labor unions. They were particularly alarmed by the prospect of supervisors and other salaried employees seeking collective bargaining rights, which threatened to deprive “management of its fundamental right to control its operations.”132 The period after the war appeared to be a good time to curb some of labor’s power, to restore balance, as they put it, to the relative strengths of labor and capital.
Congress responded with the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Taft-Hartley affirmed workers’ right not to join a union, made it easier to get a court injunction against strikers—a return to the years before the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act limited such injunctions—and forbade many union tactics as “unfair labor practices.”133 One of its most dangerous provisions, from the perspective of left-wing unions like Mine-Mill, was a requirement that all union officials sign affidavits denying membership in the CP. Those unions that did not file noncommunist affidavits lost access to the NLRB.134 Outraged at this abridgement of free association, leaders of the CIO refused to sign the affidavits for over a year.
Taft-Hartley presented an opening for the mining companies to shoulder Mine-Mill aside. In the summer of 1948, Kennecott, Asarco, and the U.S. Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company (USSRMC) all announced that they would negotiate new contracts in Grant County only if Mine-Mill signed the noncommunist affidavits.135 On May 1, Kennecott denied a request by Local 890 for contract amendments, hinting that Mine-Mill did not legitimately represent Chino workers and suggesting that union members become “good Americans.”136 The term “good American,” of course, was shorthand for both “noncommunist” and “native-born.” For all of its odious provisions, the Taft-Hartley Act did not actually prohibit negotiations if unions failed to file the affidavits; it stipulated only that unions could not appeal to the NLRB. But companies used the union’s inability to protest to the government as an opening to weaken the local union in Grant County. Kennecott fostered a rival organizing campaign of the International Association of Machinists because it knew Mine-Mill could not appeal to the NLRB in this jurisdictional dispute. As Clinton Jencks told Senator Dennis Chávez in 1949, when Congress was considering new legislation, the affidavit “was the big club every mining company in New Mexico picked up. This was their smokescreen, their bar against decent wages and working conditions.”137
But the union transformed the company’s obstacle into a tool for the union to reassert local workplace power. National, industrywide bargaining, which the union sought throughout the 1940s and which was blocked by the companies’ anticommunist maneuvers, had proven both a strength and a weakness. National bargaining helped secure better wages and, especially important to Grant County, an equalization of wages: it guaranteed fewer regional differences in wages, and companies could not as easily insist on “local custom” to justify a discriminatory dual-wage system. But there were drawbacks to national bargaining, which frequently produced contracts that forbade strikes and paid little attention to local conditions. Difficult as it was, the new situation created by the mining companies and their use of Taft-Hartley nevertheless gave Local 890 the chance to remedy some of the problems created by national bargaining.
When companies refused to negotiate in 1948, union members first worried that they could not defend themselves without a contract. But they quickly found room to maneuver without the contract, using walkouts, sit-downs, and strikes. If the company did not want to negotiate a contract, then workers, in international representative Clinton Jencks’s words, would “negotiate conditions every day on the job.”138 At Kennecott, for instance, the union rallied on the front steps of the superintendent’s office on June 11 and voted right there to authorize a strike. Whole departments went together to the manager’s office to demand redress on a range of grievances, both new problems and those that had accumulated over the years. The result was chaos with just enough whiff of worker power to make the companies eager to sign new contracts, even without the Taft-Hartley affidavits. Kennecott’s general manager promised to observe the old contract if the union would only stop its members from coming in every day with grievances.139
The new anticommunism also created conflicts within organized labor itself, sparked by management offensives and political imperatives that made unions finally sign the noncommunist affidavits, as well as by political conflicts that had long existed within unions. The 1948 presidential election sharpened these conflicts: anticommunist and liberal labor leaders threw their weight behind President Truman and thereby committed themselves to Truman’s anticommunist foreign policy, while leftists and other progressives supported third-party candidate Henry Wallace, who criticized Truman’s escalation of the Cold War. On the new political terrain, support for Wallace came to be treated as the telltale sign of a union’s subordination to the CP.140 In 1948, the CIO leadership finally agreed to sign the noncommunist affidavits. This decision came out of battles in the labor movement—within CIO unions and between them—over communism and the power of left-wing leaders.
In Mine-Mill, the issue of communism came to a head at the 1949 convention. The representatives of some locals, mostly in Connecticut, had long wanted to sign the noncommunist affidavits. Some sensed that Mine-Mill could not continue to resist the raids by hostile unions and that only the help of the NLRB could protect its locals; others felt that communism was a genuine problem in the union and that the affidavits would weed out CP union leaders.141 There had always been a left wing and a right wing of the union, long before the CP even existed, and the right wing became stronger after World War II. Many right-wing delegates came from the East Coast brass industry and from the die-casting industry, neither of which had been organized for long by Mine-Mill, and the fight over affidavits led some locals to secede from Mine-Mill. The international union that weathered these storms was firmly in the leftist camp—but one that agreed, finally, to sign the affidavits. Maurice Travis, Mine-Mill’s financial secretary, formally and publicly left the CP. It was a case of too little too late, however, and the CIO expelled Mine-Mill, along with ten other left-wing unions, in 1949 and 1950.
The Mine-Mill locals in Grant County stayed at some distance from these battles. Certainly their members held a range of political opinions. But with the exception of Local 530 (discussed below), the Grant County locals were not shaken up by the question of communism and generally supported the left-wing national leaders. After the union was expelled from the CIO, Local 890 told Mine-Mill president John Clark: “We will back you, and our brother officers of Mine-Mill 100% against the phony trials brought up by [CIO president] Phil Murray.”142 Most importantly, those trade unionists close to the CP developed their own brand of progressive unionism, which I discuss in the next sections.
Internal conflict did appear when the Grant County Mine-Mill unions changed their structure in 1947. The five local unions amalgamated into one district union, Local 890, with individual units representing workers at the different mines. Some leaders and members criticized this centralization and the changes in leadership that accompanied it, but only later did they couch their criticisms in terms of anticommunism.
The case of Rafael Lardizábal illustrates the conflict over amalgamation. Lardizábal had strong union credentials; his father had been a blacksmith and union supporter at Chino until it shut down in 1934, and Rafael was the very first to sign the membership book of Asarco Local 530 in 1941.143 Over the next decade he stayed active in the local, but in 1952 he was reprimanded for missing too many stewards’ council meetings. Lardizábal told shop steward council president Bud DeBraal that he did not want to attend meetings with “outsiders” like Clinton Jencks.144 “Outsiders” was a code word, it seems, for communist leadership. A few months later, Lardizábal came forward to support the “organizing efforts”—or raids on Mine-Mill—of the United Steelworkers. He had been ambivalent at best over the amalgamation, he explained in 1952. He had feared that it would give “too much power to one man—and it has happened. Every bit of publicity, or any thing that the membership does is directed by the international representative.”145 Mine-Mill’s expulsion from the CIO in 1950 had also troubled him, and he became convinced that the union’s international leaders “were guilty of following the Communist line.” The local leadership (primarily Clinton Jencks) was just as guilty; Lardizábal described pictures of convicted CP leaders on the walls of Local 890’s union hall and declared, “Jencks must have been aware that the international officers sent money to the convicted communists’ children for Christmas, when we were pleading for help to make a Christmas for the children of the Empire Zinc strikers.”146 Apparently Lardizábal changed his mind about the Steelworkers after he heard a talk by Asbury Howard, an African American Mine-Mill leader from Alabama, about Steelworkers’ raiding there. But news of his return to the fold came only from Local 890’s Ernesto Velásquez, not from Lardizábal himself.147
Lardizábal’s story was part of a larger story of power shifts in Asarco Local 530. From its beginning, this union’s membership and leadership was composed of roughly 60 percent Mexicans and 40 percent Anglos; after the war, though, Mexicans made up approximately 80 to 85 percent of the membership at the Vanadium Ground Hog mine and 60 to 80 percent of the membership at the Hanover mill.148 In 1946, some Anglo officers were defeated in a fight between left and right, paralleling the conflict in Mine-Mill on the national level.149 Among the displaced leaders was Leslie T. White, the financial secretary, who four years later explained that he, Charles Smith, and others “quit the union or became inactive when it became apparent that Communist influences had taken control.”150 They also left their jobs in the mine industry: White became an accountant and Smith opened a garage in Bayard.151 It is unclear, though, whether they left the union because they left mining, or left mining because they left the union. Only in the heat of the Empire Zinc strike, when these three former union men became some of Local 890’s most active opponents, did they frame their 1946–47 departures as a response to communist infiltration. For their part, union loyalists insisted that White and Smith were ousted because of graft.
The Mine-Mill unions had indeed become centralized in 1947, and Jencks had pushed for this change when he arrived in Grant County as an international representative. In fact, amalgamation was needed for the five locals even to afford a full-time representative.152 But the simple fact of centralization under Jencks’s guidance does not capture the nature of the changes that took place in Grant County from 1947 to 1950. Rafael Lardizábal saw centralization taking place around a single person, with union leaders and members serving only as mouthpieces for international representative Clinton Jencks, and that person an outsider who, by definition, could never have the rank and file’s interests at heart and therefore could never truly represent them. But Local 890’s executive board consisted of representatives from each plant, and the board’s meetings featured their animated participation, as well as Jencks’s steady presence: they were hardly mouthpieces for any individual.153 Moreover, these union leaders were often veterans, men who came from Grant County but whose absence had made them relative outsiders after they returned from the war. The distinction between insider and outsider was murky, and it did not correspond to a clean distinction between authentic and false representation.
Years later, some union activists believed that amalgamation helped to consolidate Mexican American leadership in Grant County, a development that they believed was long overdue.154 This is an important observation but one that perhaps says less about the number of Mexican Americans in leadership positions, which did not change radically, than about the kind of Mexican American (and Anglo) leadership that developed. Numerically, most locals were dominated by Mexican Americans from the outset, and increasingly so after the war.155 In Local 530, one of the more evenly represented, plenty of Anglos remained after White, Smith, and others left. Floyd Bostick, for instance, first joined Local 530 in October 1943 and then rejoined it when he was rehired at Asarco in July 1947, soon becoming an officer.156 Bostick had been “a dirt farmer in Oklahoma” before he brought his family to New Mexico because of his wife Flossie’s health.157 Never having lived among or worked with Mexican Americans, and coming with the stream of migrants from the South and Southeast, Bostick shared a background with many Anglos who kept Mexican Americans at arm’s length. Yet, unlike those who later volunteered as deputies for Sheriff Goforth, he clearly found in Mine-Mill a community for himself and his family. Whatever else a stronger Mexican American leadership meant, it did not mean driving away sympathetic Anglos like Bostick.
The centralization that so worried Rafael Lardizábal, in fact, went hand in hand with deeper and broader training of leadership, and with wider and wider spheres of union activism.158 Earlier in the decade, the Mine-Mill organizers had been responsible for vast areas in the Southwest, and they made only loose connections with the rank and file. Organizers typically stayed in a motel, worked on some grievances and negotiations, gave a speech at a union meeting, and then moved on to the next town.159 These men worked hard on behalf of Mexican American miners, but they rarely worked to develop Mexican American leadership. Local union officers gathered grievances and, guided by membership meetings, articulated what kind of contracts the rank and file wanted. But they ultimately relied on the international representatives to direct the actual negotiations and to pressure the companies on grievances. In one case of a Mexican American’s promotion to the job of bulldozer operator, for instance, Santa Rita Local 63’s grievance committee reported to the regular meeting, “It seems that we didn’t get very far with [Santa Rita superintendent] Mr. Goodrich. So we are going to take this grievance up to [Chino superintendent] Mr. Moses, and if we can’t fix anything with Mr. Moses, we will see our Organizer so that they will take this case higher up.”160
And even though international representative Verne Curtis actually did live in Silver City for some of the period from 1941 to 1947, it is telling that everyone I spoke with believed that Clinton and Virginia Jencks, who moved to Grant County in 1946, were the first organizers to live among them. That the Jenckses “lived among them” is indicative of the kind of relationship the Jenckses had with union members and of the work they did in building local leadership. While the Jenckses were also Anglos from outside, there seems to have been something different about their involvement in the Grant County unions. Virginia Chacón recalled that it did not matter that the Jenckses were Anglo, “because they didn’t act like they were even americanos. They acted like one of us. That’s the kind of feeling they always gave, and you can ask a lot of people here in Grant County about it. And his name wasn’t even Clint. They used to call him Palomino.”161
Clinton and Virginia Jencks came to Grant County from Denver late in 1946. They brought with them their two children and years of activism in labor and social-justice causes. Clint was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where his father was a mail carrier and his mother was active in the Methodist Church. He discovered social concerns through his Christian upbringing and attributes his activism to a belief in the brotherhood of all mankind. Still, religious activism went only so far for him, particularly when he encountered hypocrisy. As a high school student, for instance, Jencks delivered food baskets to striking coal miners only to discover that the eviction notices on workers’ houses were signed by a bank vice president—none other than Jencks’s own Sunday school superintendent.162
Jencks attended the University of Colorado, the tuition for which he paid by holding several jobs, and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1939. In Boulder, he found political action taking place in student groups like the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) and the Young Communist League.163 Gradually he came to see that the people doing the most to improve social conditions were Communists, and their commitment—particularly to antiracist work—deeply impressed him. “Long before the civil rights movement,” he remembers of his years in Colorado, “we sat in on local restaurants to break racial barriers.” After college he did clerical work for a John Deere distributor in St. Louis, where he started to learn about tenant farming issues through his work in the Interfaith Youth Council.
Virginia Derr grew up in St. Louis. As a teenager in the Depression she worked at a sweatshop and picketed it along with other young women workers.164 She joined the St. Louis Youth Council, which focused on issues like industrial pollution and tenant farmers’ rights. It was here that she met Clinton, and with him she observed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union’s dramatic highway sit-down strike outside Sikeston, Missouri, in 1939.165 Clinton joined the Army Air Force, and he and Virginia got married at an air base in 1942. Virginia moved to California while he served abroad. After the war, the Jenckses moved to Denver, where Clinton got a job working for the Globe Refinery, an Asarco plant organized by Mine-Mill, and he quickly made union work his second job. Virginia was evidently no stranger to the union headquarters, and when Clinton got the chance to move to New Mexico as an international representative, there was no doubt in their minds that the two of them would do the work together. Thus the locals in Grant County suddenly got two organizers for the price of one. When Verne Curtis was transferred to Globe, Arizona, in 1947, the Jenckses took over as full-time union representatives.166
Clinton Jencks has commented that he was working to put himself out of a job by developing leadership from the rank and file.167 He went about this in concrete ways that suggest his understanding of the psychological and personal dimensions of the men with whom he worked. While early organizers were careful to focus on grievances specific to Mexican Americans, Jencks went a few steps further. More than anything else, he tried to develop leaders from the bottom up and to impress upon them that ultimate authority lay with the workers they represented. Jencks organized several leadership training schools, making sure that they were conducted in both Spanish and English. (This meant that someone else helped run the sessions, because Jencks was not fluent in Spanish at the time.)168 Any “CIO Man” could attend these training sessions, although they were aimed particularly at stewards and elected officials.169
A person attending the stewards’ training would encounter basic Marxist economic theory, expressed in the preamble to Mine-Mill’s constitution:
We hold that there is a class struggle in society, and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions.
We affirm the economic condition of the producer to be that he is exploited of the wealth which he produces, being allowed to retain [a portion] barely sufficient for his elementary necessities.
We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product.
We assert that the working class, and it alone, can and must achieve its own emancipation.
We hold that an industrial union and the concerted political action of all wage workers is the only method of attaining this end.
An injury to one is an injury to all.170
Mine-Mill’s Education Department in Denver also provided a chatty introduction to Adam Smith’s labor theory of value, illustrated with references to contemporary corporations and working conditions, and a film strip (translated into Spanish) called “Why Work for Nothing.”171 Supplementing the written and visual materials were discussions of current politics, geared at explaining, as one flyer put it, “how your political action can save your union, your freedom.”172
Stewards did not just sit quietly while Jencks lectured to them about economic abstractions. They combined workers’ theater from the Depression with a Mexican tradition of oral performance. Stewards themselves chose a grievance and acted out its resolution in front of everyone. This technique loosened people up and let them make fun of management and each other. They did not rely on a script but rather drew on their own experiences at work, using humor to critique social relations. In the course of play-acting grievances, they began to see some of the larger issues in labor relations. And, importantly, the classes were not boring.173
Beyond learning economic theory, stewards worked directly on the nuts and bolts of organizing coworkers. As Arturo Flores recalls, Jencks showed them how to “talk to the guy next to us . . . and then have that guy talk to other guys,” thus building a strong network person by person.174They learned how to design their own leaflets and to operate mimeograph machines. They learned that stewards should always carry a “5¢ notebook and a pencil tied to it with a string” in order to be ready to take down a grievance on the spot.175
After learning some basics of trade unionism, leaders put them into practice. Chairmanship of Local 890’s executive board rotated among the representatives from the different units, a policy aimed at the dual goals of training many people and of preventing any one person from assuming too much control.176 At one meeting in which executive board members discussed the union’s finances, Alberto Muñoz, Brígido Provencio, Charles Morrell, and Art Flores all weighed in with complex analyses of the union’s finances, while Jencks played a comparatively low-key role, which suggests that he did not jealously guard such critical information but shared it with the other leaders.177 As further evidence that Jencks was not running a one-man show, the union’s weekly radio spots, delivered in both English and Spanish over radio station KSIL, frequently showed signs of having been written first in Spanish, which Jencks could not have done.
Union work often had social, cultural, and educational dimensions. In 1948, Jencks wrote to the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop) in Mexico City for a portfolio of pictures of the Mexican Revolution. “We are very anxious to obtain these pictures,” he explained, because “as much as 95% of our membership is Mexican-American and feel the closest ties with the people of Mexico.”178 He leased films from the state university and from the international office; the union’s purchase of a film projector suggests that the executive board believed that films were a necessary part of union business—not a luxury.179 Cipriano Montoya, Local 890 president in 1951, continued this tradition when he asked the international office for information on “progressive” films produced by the United Nations.180 And by holding meetings in Spanish, as well as English, and by making documents available in both languages, union leaders affirmed Mexican American culture—sometimes against company opposition. In 1949, for example, the Asarco bargaining committee was told that the contract would be printed in both languages. But Asarco superintendent T. H. Snedden and attorney J. F. Woodbury later balked at publishing it in Spanish. According to the union minutes, Snedden and Woodbury insisted that “this country was American speaking and would not tolerate it, but Brother Jencks says that he hasn’t read anything in the ‘Constitution of the United States’ that says anything of it being strictly American speaking.”181
Jencks encouraged union leaders to develop confidence and concrete skills. But strength of leadership was never meant to overshadow where the real strength lay: in union members themselves. Rather than seeing themselves as the experts who could solve all the problems, stewards and elected officials were instructed to “try to get all the workers in [their] department using their rights, using their steward, learning to be union members in action.”182 To this end, stewards refused to take up grievances by telephone. Only when a worker was ready to talk face-to-face with a foreman was he, in Jencks’s estimation, likely to follow through on the grievance. If a worker was not willing to do this, “he wasn’t ready to win.”183 Many Mexican American workers were used to Anglo intercessors and, indeed, had little reason to believe that their efforts alone would get them very far in an Anglo-dominated setting. Jencks believes that the policy of pursuing grievances in person helped show workers—rather than merely telling them—that they themselves made the difference. Stewards’ training brought this message home: a good steward “tries to get all workers to bring up grievances, take part in union activities, and support all parts of the union’s program.” He “tries to help the workers to stand on their own feet, independent of the boss, in the shop and out of the shop.”184
The example of Arturo Flores shows how Mexican American union leaders of this period made use of both their own experiences of discrimination and the opportunities that Mine-Mill offered for effectively representing workers and improving their lives in material ways. Flores thrived in the new environment of the late 1940s. Coming of age in the Great Depression, he learned stonemasonry in the CCC. But he could make little use of his trade when he applied to the Chino mines in 1940: the company hired him only as an unskilled laborer. “They didn’t ask for a résumé,” Flores remembers. “They just asked for my first name and my last name, and my last name determined where I was going to work. No matter what.” Confined to a job shoveling the ash dumped by a coal-powered locomotive, the young Flores soon discovered and joined the then-clandestine Mine-Mill organizing effort.185
From 1942 to 1946, Flores served in the navy as a metalsmith for aircraft and, later, as an instructor. The war sharpened Flores’s perception of discrimination. He encountered segregation in the navy, but only for African Americans, not Mexican Americans; Flores bunked and worked with Anglos. His problems were not with “the navy types” but rather with Anglo civilians. Flores described an incident that took place when he was traveling home and stopped in Dallas to change trains:
There was a soldier there, an Anglo soldier, real nice guy, nice fellow. He said, “Let’s go uptown, have a bite to eat. The food here is terrible at the station.” “Okay,” I say, so we start walking towards town and we started crossing a street, along with a bunch of other people, and a cop jumped on me. And he said, “Didn’t you see the light? I’m gonna put you in the can if you keep on jaywalking.” Here I was walking with all these people! And they said, “We were all walking!” And he said, “You shut up. I’m not asking you. I’m asking him.” Well he intimidated them, of course. . . . I was in uniform, and the soldier said, “Gee, you know, I can’t understand.” “Well,” I said, “some people in some of these parts here don’t like blacks, and they figure Mexicans are probably the same.”186
Then, after being rebuffed in a bar—“We don’t serve Mexicans here”—the two soldiers gave up and went back to the railroad station. When he left the service, Flores “made up [his] mind that [he] was gonna be an instrument of change, here in Grant County.”187
Flores returned to Chino, this time as a truck driver in the open pit, a position he held for decades. When he complained in meetings about the treatment Mexican Americans got in the mines, his coworkers elected him steward. His first case concerned a Mexican American who should have been promoted. “The contract clearly specified that our people had the right to bid for jobs that were open,” Flores recalled. When an oiler job opened, Ramón Hurtado applied and expected the promotion because he was next in line; the job, however, went to someone else. Flores quickly filed a grievance. “I was told right away, ‘We don’t put greasers with oilers.’ That’s what the foreman told me. I said, ‘But the contract here says different.’ He says, ‘Well I don’t care what your contract says.’” 188 Flores and Hurtado successfully appealed the decision, and Hurtado became an oiler. When management had insisted to Flores that “your people” could not operate the shovels, Flores declared that the union did not care if Mexican Americans were able or not—it wanted to give them the opportunity to try it out. And, according to Flores, after trying it out, Hurtado became an outstanding shovel operator in the open pit, “the best they ever had.”189
Mexican American workers used Mine-Mill effectively to challenge discrimination at work, and they soon directed their energies toward reforming Mine-Mill’s international leadership. Throughout the Southwest, these union men pressured the international executive board to live up to its commitment to ethnic equality by bringing more Mexican Americans into the leadership. They found a good deal of support from board member Chester Smothermon, who represented the Southwest (District 2) and who became convinced that Mine-Mill’s efforts in Superior, Arizona, required the skills of a Mexican American union representative. Smothermon solicited Local 890’s Cipriano Montoya for the job.190 The international also hired Arturo Flores to help repel a raid by the Steelworkers in El Paso.191 At the 1951 convention, Mexican American delegates caucused and concluded that the national executive board “would not function right without a Mexican American on the Board.” They blamed the international for not providing adequate leadership.192 Secretary-treasurer Maurice Travis recognized the paradox of Mine-Mill’s appeal to African Americans and Mexican Americans. Because those workers were “so responsive to organization and to leadership which fights in their behalf[,]” he wrote to Smothermon in 1951, “they become among the most militant trade unionists, and we therefore, as a form of escapism, rely upon them to carry the organizational load . . . , rather than facing the much [more] difficult organizational task of [getting] white and Anglo workers to accept some of that responsibility.”193
There are plenty of signs that Local 890’s leadership shared many of the principles articulated by the CP; the entire executive board in summer 1949, for instance, subscribed to the People’s Daily World, a CP newspaper published in San Francisco. Communist explanations of the political economy meshed with many Mexican Americans’ own perceptions of discrimination. They could see, moreover, that the union pushed companies hard and that union members became stronger the more they stayed active in challenging management prerogative. As Anita Torrez put it, “If this is what they’re gonna call communist, fine: Let’s all be communists then! Because we’re fighting for our rights.”194 Virginia Chacón said that for her and her husband, Juan, communism was part of strong trade unionism, “part of getting us to learn and walk further and see things the way they were happening. As far as we were concerned, Juan and I . . . didn’t think anything of the Communist Party. We just joined because we wanted to be in it, it had good principles, and it still does.”195 Lorenzo Torrez found in the party an encouragement to read widely and think deeply about class issues. He began to get interested in communism because the press called the most active and militant people communist: “I began to get curious and I used to invite them to a bar, for example, after a meeting. And I would ask them, ‘Well, why is it that they’re calling you a communist?’ And they would relate their experience in the union, how they were all stewards or something like that, and how they handled grievances, how they had built the union, how they had eliminated discrimination. Well, for me, that was the way it’s supposed to be. . . . But they never admitted that they were [communists].”196
The CP in Grant County was very small, but it organized effectively at the workplace—attracting people like Lorenzo Torrez—and among married couples. It was “an advantage to have the couple instead of the husband [without] the wife,” Anita Torrez observed. “It makes it very hard on the couple if he’s in the party and the wife isn’t. It’s a strain on the family.”197 Club meetings were essentially discussion groups; members read Marxist theory and related it to their experiences as workers and as targets of government harassment. Communists in Grant County focused on local politics and union activism. In the course of the Empire Zinc strike, according to Lorenzo Torrez, they “learned which side the politician is on, which side the newspaper is on, which side the government is on, so politics became very central to [them]: how to change it, how to gain representation, all of those things.”198
Membership in the party, though, took a back seat to trade unionism, if the two were ever to conflict. And they did conflict once Mine-Mill decided to sign the noncommunist affidavits in 1949. For Clinton Jencks, the choice was not difficult: he resigned from the party, and he signed the affidavit on October 15, 1949.199 The irony, of course, was that one’s political principles did not begin and end with actual membership in the party. Anticommunists realized this, and they angrily denounced union leaders like Mine-Mill’s Maurice Travis for paying only lip service to Taft-Hartley.
Democratic centralism was supposed to define CP structure; in Mine-Mill, it is apparent that the “democratic” part of centralism was much stronger than in the party’s version. A commitment to democracy lay behind Local 890’s efforts to train leaders up through the ranks and its policy of leaving all important decisions to the membership. But Local 890’s was still a centralism in that it developed a strategy for particular situations and contained dissent within the bounds of the union, and the secrecy surrounding CP membership certainly complicates any discussion of democracy.200 In a crisis, according to Lorenzo Torrez, the party committee would meet in advance to discuss strategy, and then its members would present the options to the membership at the regular meeting. The members voted and voiced their opinions, but they did so within parameters set by leaders. The same stewards’ training that emphasized workers’ independence also emphasized the steward’s loyalty to the union in terms that were established to diminish internal criticism in the name of the workers’ interests: “[The steward] always defends the union’s policies, even if he didn’t vote for them. He always defends the democratic wishes of the union members. . . . He never says anything anywhere that can be used to weaken or disrupt his union. . . . He is constantly alert to any and all attempts to weaken or destroy the union.”201
Most union members generally brushed off the charges of communist domination and criticized the motives behind the charges. Empire Zinc strikers, for example, were offended by the company’s claim that “leaders” ran everything, a not-so-subtle charge that the union was run by communists. “The leaders don’t dictate to me what I want,” Jesús Ríos told Empire Zinc. “I tell them and back them on what is best for me and all the workers.” Or as Luis Horcasitas explained, “We tell the leaders what we want, not like the Company says, that our leaders tell us. We back our leaders on our just demands.”202 Rarely did union defenders deny outright that the leaders might be communists; they focused instead on the reasons their opponents would level charges of communist domination.
Mine-Mill was a beleaguered union in 1950, cast outside the pale of the mainstream labor movement that it had helped build; struggling in a hostile political environment, the Mine-Mill locals that held on scrambled for creative solutions to difficult problems. In Grant County, though, mining managers found that anticommunism was not as strong a weapon as they had hoped, because the miners there not only found ways to defend themselves against it but even mounted a counteroffensive. Just as anticommunism in the labor movement was taking off, the Grant County unions were building on their recent successes. Many miners believed that the Empire Zinc strike would be the place where companies would try out new tactics, having failed to break the union during either a bitter strike at Asarco earlier in 1950 or a successful representation campaign waged by the nominally independent Grant County Miners Association at USSRMC.
The Empire Zinc strikers had direct experience with democratic unionism, both before and during the strike, and it was this experience that enabled them to persist and respond to company offensives. When the strike began on October 17, 1950, committees quickly assumed responsibility for strike relief, negotiations with the company, publicity, legal and police relations (which were friendly in the first eight months, until Sheriff Goforth swore in his deputies), recreation, and fund-raising. The negotiating committee and the chairs of the other five committees determined strike policy, which union members reviewed weekly and subjected to referenda.203
The company responded with an attrition policy, hoping to outlast the strikers, whose strike benefits barely met their needs. By wintertime, the attrition policy began to show results, and families felt the pinch of limited rations spread over too many people. “The men on the picket,” Local 890 president Cipriano Montoya reported to Maurice Travis, “are holding the strike solid but require assistance in the basic needs of food and fuel.” Montoya requested another $1,000 in strike relief—but also sent Travis “two small checks for the National Heart and Cancer Research funds.”204 The union paid strikers’ electric, gas, fuel, and utility bills and “an occasional car or furniture payment, so that [their] striking brothers [wouldn’t] have their property taken away.”205 Food for each family cost about forty dollars a month. The union bought beans, rice, chilies, flour, corn tortillas, cheese, oil, potatoes, milk, cereal, sugar, and soap in bulk at Southwestern Foods, a local grocery store, and gave it away at the union hall.206 Families found no meat, eggs, or butter in their weekly food baskets, although one man (employed at one of the other mines) brought “a big thing of bologna” every payday to the picket line.207
Some men wanted release from picket duty to look for other work, and others, who had found new jobs, resented turning over a quarter of their wages to the strike fund.208 Anita Torrez remembered “meeting after meeting, discussing and discussing” the question of looking for outside work. “We were lucky,” she said, “we had only one child. But there were others that had big families, and [they felt] ‘we can’t go on like this, I need to go out and look for a job.’” Her husband, Lorenzo, an Empire Zinc striker, recalled that “the discussions went along well. . . . It was agreed that those that had bigger families should try to get work and those that had less, the union would help us maintain. Finally it came to a certain weekly allowance. I think we went through the whole strike with something like $12.50 a week.”209 These weekly discussions changed policy. By February, strikers who took other jobs reduced their contribution from 25 to 15 percent of their wages. Even that seems to have been hard to collect, for the international office in Denver found the payment “haphazard and poorly organized.”210 Strikers who held jobs elsewhere either resented paying strike dues or were out of communication with the union.
In March 1951, the Empire Zinc Company started a back-to-work campaign, flooding workers’ mailboxes with letters from Superintendent S. S. Huyett. Workers had suffered too long, and for what? The union leadership was keeping the strike going despite workers’ desire to return to work. The company’s effort backfired. Instead of rallying to the company gates, Empire Zinc workers and their families offered their own interpretation of the strike’s unfortunate duration. Mrs. Antonio Rivera conceded, “Yes, Mr. Huyett, our families have suffered. No doubt about that. But for my part I don’t want my husband to work without the conditions the other companies have within the district.” Jesús Bustamante told the company, “QUIT spending our money on letters. Spend it on collar-to-collar and paid holidays and other benefits that prevail in the district.” Antonio Macías resented that the company did not even pay the correct postage: “I have had to pay an extra 2 cents to get their letter from the post office. Next time I am going to return the letter.” And Lorenzo Torrez suspected that the company was “not sorry for the $1,800 [he] lost but for the profits [they] lost.”211 The back-to-work movement failed, even with the help of Jesús Avalos, former Local 890 steward, and Charles Graves, Empire Zinc’s “top labor relations expert,” who was flown in especially to deal with the strike. And the effort to reopen the mine by force failed. The injunction served by Sheriff Goforth was the company’s next step. Fortunately for Local 890, its members were primed to entertain unorthodox proposals of their own. They would encounter one in the union meeting that they convened to deal with the injunction crisis.