The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland

Abstract

Those in search of a fast-paced book that is both inspiring and tragic will profit from reading Toni Gilpin's The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. This well-researched study explores decades of what Gilpin aptly calls “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester's production plants (282). She has produced the go-to book about labor unrest at the multilocational agricultural equipment giant, which ultimately led to the establishment of the CIO-affiliated Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE). These leftist union activists struggled mightily against state and business forces in numerous worksites over the course of decades, including in the years after securing collective bargaining rights. Unlike today's MAGAs, FE members likely did not perceive the nation as “great” during the post–World War II economic boom.Originating as a Yale dissertation produced under the direction of the late David Montgomery, The Long Deep Grudge offers rich descriptions of management's dictatorial practices at the giant International Harvester plants and the multiple struggles launched by wage earners on and off shop floors. Gilpin moves chronologically, first introducing us to the filthy rich McCormick family, a dynasty determined to rule unilaterally. Cyrus McCormick II, we learn, “focused obsessively” on managerial questions and remained convinced that he was a benevolent guardian. Yet he was unable to extinguish class conflict. The Chicago-based McCormick Works was the scene of intense unrest that led to the Haymarket affair after cops killed at least one protestor on May 3, 1886. This, and the following day's riot, left a meaningful legacy on both exploiters and workers.Labor-management relations remained tense in subsequent years, and workers continued to challenge their exploitative conditions by organizing walkouts and joining unions, including the Industrial Workers of the World. Like other industrial heads of the era, McCormick recognized the necessity of addressing his chronic labor problems holistically: “What can we do now in the way of improving our relations with our own workers?” (44). Management experimented with welfare programs, and Gilpin spotlights the role played by Arthur H. Young, who had previously worked to solve labor difficulties at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Young, who started at International Harvester in 1918, launched “a host of pioneering managerial practices,” including welfare programs and a company union, the “Industrial Council Plan” (45). Gilpin's statement that International Harvester was somewhat of a pioneer isn't entirely convincing given what industrial relations scholars like Bruce Kaufman have noted about the development of human resources, but her larger point is spot-on: management believed that repression alone could not solve their labor problems.The introduction of welfare work and company unions failed to hoodwink most proletarians into believing that managers cared about their well-being. Growing numbers joined the Communist Party (CP) of America, which emerged in Chicago in 1919. The party's formation represented a personal blow to McCormick, partly because socialists outside Moscow had seized International Harvester's plant during the Russian Revolution. Growing numbers of leftists and workers throughout the industrialized world found inspiration from this revolution, and many sought to follow in the Bolsheviks’ footsteps. But the 1920s was no revolutionary decade. Wages at the Harvester factories, as well as many other industrial establishments, remained low while, as Gilpin maintains, the ruling classes became “spectacularly richer” (55).The labor movement achieved significant victories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when, following strikes at various International Harvester plants, the CP-affiliated FE, formed in 1938, made meaningful inroads. In May 1942, McCormick formally recognized the union at multiple plants. Gilpin acknowledges the Soviet Union's influence on the CP, yet points out that its members “never constituted more than a small fraction of the union's membership” (75). And these people didn't behave like the cartoonish Stalinist dupes caricatured by their enemies. Gilpin persuasively demonstrates that activists recognized the practical value of Marxism and the necessity of organizing across racial lines while holding, in her words, “a belief in perpetual class conflict that would shape their political worldview and define all aspects of their engagement with International Harvester” (76).This assessment was correct. Demands for production increases and managerial harassment, including red-baiting, never stopped, and union members remained defiant. The book's most impressive chapters describe the postwar years, when Black and white FE members fought to secure good contracts, staged walkouts and slowdowns to protect their benefits, and defended their union against United Auto Workers (UAW) raids. This was a deeply unfavorable climate, one characterized by the presence of hostile business forces and anticommunist politicians, including those who supported the Taft-Hartley Act's passage and sought to enforce its draconian rules.Gilpin tells us much about conflicts within the labor movement. The anticommunist CIO leadership, for example, demanded that the FE merge with the UAW, a union that prioritized labor-management cooperation over what Gilpin calls the FE's “culture of confrontation” (206). In 1949, FE members chose a different path and affiliated with the leftist United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. The FE continued to wage defensive battles in the late 1940s and early 1950s against the considerably larger UAW. Remarkably, FE members succeeded in staving off the bigger and more conservative union until 1955, when the UAW absorbed the FE.To understand this capitulation, Gilpin points to the disastrous strike in 1952, when the FE was “knocked off course and gravely crippled” (226). In her interpretation, the militancy that had once produced union growth and rank-and-file confidence reached its limit in the face of numerous challenges: management's demand for no-strike clauses in contracts, court issued injunctions, police harassment, firings, and the pressure of Congress's anticommunist House Un-American Activities Committee, which set up shop in Chicago and declared that the FE was “a menace we dare not ignore” (254). Persistent UAW officials capitalized on the repressive anticommunist environment. Yet FE-turned-UAW members, Gilpin explains, “retained the adversarial approach to collective bargaining that they had developed when they had been close to the CP” (305).Gilpin makes several important contributions to labor historiography. Her sharpest critiques are found in the endnotes, where she convincingly challenges the idea that her subjects fought for what Lizabeth Cohen famously called “moral capitalism.” Additionally, Gilpin's evidence calls into question the popular assumption that the 1950s was defined in part by increased union power. After reading this book, it is difficult to accept Gary Gerstle's statement in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: American and the World in the Free Market Era (2022) that the Cold War assisted in “strengthening labor” (46). Persistent and nasty anticommunist attacks, emanating from state authorities, business heads, and flag-waving union leaders, hardly strengthened combative and racially progressive unions like the FE.