Chapter 29 : 
Graveyard: Boston is Boston
--------------------------------------------------------------------

19451945

People :
----------------------------------

Author : Rose Pesotta

Text :
----------------------------------


CHAPTER 29



Graveyard: Boston is Boston



REFRESHED AFTER MY HOLIDAY, I was ready for a new assignment. Two
jobs were offered to me. Our small Dressmakers' Local 38 in New York
wanted me to conduct a drive among the shops of the Fifth Avenue modistes.
Women who made costly gowns, priced at hundreds of dollars, could hardly
make a living on the low wages paid them. Firms which operated under union
conditions on the Avenue could not compete with the open shop group. But
Boston dressmakers pressed me to come there.

I chose Boston. At different times since 1916 I had lived in that city,
working in season on waists and dresses and making my home with my sister
Esther, who was raising a family. As a place to work, however, it had never
appealed to me÷production methods were complicated, machinery
antiquated.

The ILGWU branch in Boston was one of our oldest. Once a strong union,
it had had many ups and downs. The internal war in our ranks in the Twenties
and the depression later had played havoc with it. I saw that area as a
neglected field, overrun with weeds.

Three pioneer Boston members÷Charles Jacobson, Benjamin Kurland,
and Isaac Posen÷had served on our General Executive Board. Jacobson was
once the International's acting president for several months. Their GEB
member now was Philip Kramer, a cutter by trade. He and I once worked in
the same dress shop.

Kramer is a remarkable fellow, a local boy who made good. Prior to 1932
various national officers had been stationed in Boston, but none had stayed
any great length of time. Kramer, however, has been repeatedly
reelected as Joint Board manager through twelve years, having been a
business agent earlier. Young in appearance, and to my mind the handsomest
man on the GEB, he is a member of the American Legion and widely
liked in Boston, His great virtue as a labor leader is that he never makes any decisions until he gets the consent
of the union elders, who like to be consulted on actions affecting their units In
civic affairs he plays a notable role, being appointed to many important state
and municipal committees.

In 1938 the problem of the dressmakers in Boston was critical. The local's
treasury was depleted, the small membership dejected.

Late in January, after a GEB session in New York, I went by plane to the
new job scene with three other board members Luigi Antonini,
secretary-manager of our big New York Italian Local 89, Israel Feinberg,
Pacific Coast ILGWU director; and Kramer. We spoke at a meeting of Italian
Local 80. Its president, Federico Borsa, amiable cloakmaker, who capably
conducted the local's business while working in a shop, called upon the
membership to give me its unstinted aid.

It was gratifying that first evening to have seven members of Local 80's
executive board volunteer for the coming campaign÷ Mario Turco, Minnie
Polito, Elizabeth Gangemi, Matilda Minigleri, Esther Antonucci, Anna
Finnaciere, and Alfred Scola. And Antonio Di Maggio, the secretary, and
Antonio Di Girolamo, the business agent, promised wholehearted help.

Next day I acclimated myself by attending shop, local, and committee
meetings. In the evening I was officially introduced to the Joint Board by its
chairman, Joseph Garber, tall slim presser. I reminded them that in the
ILGWU there was a saying: "Boston is Boston!"÷which was not
complimentary÷and that it was known as a graveyard for organizers. Those
who had worked in that city reported that all they got from the local
membership was lip-service.

Because I was a different kind of organizer, I declared, the members of all
the locals must work with me or I would leave in a month. And if it came to
that, my report would advise the national office never to send another
organizer into Boston. Wolf Winer, cloakmaker and perennial recording
secretary, took down my remarks, and I knew that these minutes would be
read before every local.

Those meetings were held in union headquarters, a dingy run-down
building on LaGrange Street behind the Hotel Touraine, a block from Boston
Common. Formerly occupied by a continuation school, it had known no
paint in eight years, the windows badly needed washing, and the pictures and charters on the walls were brown with
smoke and grime. As I walked down from the fourth floor, I inadvertently
clutched the banister for a moment, and dust clung to my hand like a dark
gray glove.

Naturally my first demand was for renovation. Any nonunion worker
who attended one meeting here likely wouldn't return. The elders agreed to
have the whole building redecorated when I pointed out that in the event of a
strike we could use the upper floors for meetings instead of renting space
elsewhere.

Carpenters and painters were hired and began work under my general
direction. I had partitions torn out to enlarge small rooms, hitherto used
chiefly for storing junk and for pinochle games. Toilets and
wash-rooms, repellent with dirt, were scrubbed and put in decent shape.
Furniture was brought from the basement, and I busied myself with cleaning
and shellacking it to hasten our progress.

Old-timers, mostly cloak and skirt makers, looked on, shrugging
their shoulders. Would this bring in new members? They recalled when a
union meant something to its members; when some of them gave their
weekly pay envelopes to the secretary, or mortgaged their homes÷the
money going to defray union expenses. But now things had changed, they
averred.

As soon as the paint was dry and the place took on a new and inviting
complexion, I arranged an official opening, with plenty of salami, herring,
corned beef, pumpernickel bread, sour pickles, and ample firewater to wash
down the edibles. Executive members, shop chairmen and chairladies, and
active rank-and-filers ate liberally and thawed out.

On Saturday morning a "committee" of three appeared at my office.
Wouldn't the new organizer treat them to a drink? Of course she would. I
gave them a $10 bill, expecting to get some change. They showed up again
Monday evening, thanking me, having spent all the money.

When they came the next Saturday with the same idea, I agreed on one
condition÷that they bring "the stuff" to union headquarters where all could
share it. They accepted a second ten-spot and presently returned with
drinks and food. We made another spread, and everyone who happened to come in joined us. These refreshments became a
regular weekly feature.

And soon the members attending brought in nonunion workers as
guests. These visitors, joining up, gave me valuable information about shop
conditions.

My special job was to organize over a thousand nonunion dress
workers. The dress pact would expire shortly, and we began making plans for
its renewal÷this time without the customary general strike.

In the past the system of organization in Boston was simple: Every two
years the collective agreement would expire. Then a general strike would be
called, its purpose being to unionize the open shops, which offered keen
competition to the union factories. After about two weeks of conflict in
February bitter cold, those who already had contracts would renew theirs, and
the rest would either fight it out on the picket lines, or close their factories for
the duration and leave for Florida. After the strike was officially settled
employes with union agreements would return to work with better standards
and wage increases. Workers in nonunion shops also would be called
back, under slightly improved conditions, only to find that the improvement
soon wore off. It was a sort of tuneless merry-go-round.

Employers who actively resisted all attempts of our union to organize their
workers did not understand that, by so doing, irreparable damage was done
not only to their own business but to the garment market as a whole. Like
ostriches burying their heads in the sand, they did not realize that as a result
of their guerrilla tactics neither their group nor the union was the winner; that
the Boston market was constantly shrinking, many buyers avoiding it because
of inability to get orders filled on time. Moreover, when strikes occurred, they
failed to see that they owed consideration to the community.

Our case had to be carried to the public at large. Seldom in recent years had
we got a decent break in the Boston daily press, which rarely saw news in our
union except when there were picket-line clashes or arrests in strikes.
Fortunately, in earlier days I had made friends with several local newspaper
men. Under the guidance of one of them, I wrote a carefully phrased letter to
the editor of the Boston Traveler. It called attention to "the peaceful achievements" of the
ILGWU, which usually did not get into the news columns, and its current
campaign "to complete its organization in Boston without a strike, or even a
threat of one, if possible."

That letter, though 570 words long, was printed in full, and readers bearing
well-known names wrote me, commending our respect for public
opinion and our sane approach to a problem which so often had led to violent
conflict.

The existing agreement was an old-fashioned cumbersome document
of twenty-six pages, with supplementary clauses, some nullifying
others. Invariably this would be signed by only one member of a firm. Owing
to the high mortality of such firms, which lived from hand to mouth,
partnerships would be dissolved at the end of a season, their responsibility
under the contract ceasing.

Immediately I set out to have the agreement form streamlined. I took it to
our attorneys, George E. Roewer and Frank Reel, and they reshaped and
greatly shortened it.

When that had been done Phil Kramer made the rounds of the garment
firms, and this time he had both members of every partnership in the union
shops sign our simplified contract.

From the start I had urged each local to form its own organization
committees, which would work under my direction. Discovering that I meant
business, they actually rolled up their sleeves and went to town. Morning,
noon, and evening they busied themselves talking with nonunion
workers around the market, in lunch-rooms, and in subways, visiting
some in their homes, and brought them to the office "just to sign up."

The question of the correct approach to prospective members also was
discussed at length with Anne Sherman, president of Dressmakers' Local 46,
and various members of its executive board, including Rose Simkins, Manya
and Anna Titelbaum, Mary J. Kearns, Jane Marra, Minnie Nathan, Agnes
Nash, Mollie Nagel, Jennie Chiplovitz, Ruth Klarfield, Ida Gorman, and Rose
Handelman. All these generated fresh energy for the campaign.

After work hours this group÷Italian, Syrian, Irish, and Jewish
women÷went out of their way to urge nonmembers to visit our headquarters. At each meeting we would serve substantial sandwiches,
sponge cake, and coffee to potential members, who admitted that this was
their first knowledge that a union "also could be a nice place."

The pressers had their own difficulties. As a closely knit group
maintaining their union standards, their wage scale was $49.50 a week. But
new, small electric irons had lately been introduced in the big shops, replacing
the old-fashioned large bulky gas irons and heavy electric irons, and
employers found an ample supply of colored women pressers willing to work
for $14 or $16 a week. These new pressers could turn out as many garments
per day as the others, or even more, and offered keen competition in the
industry. Naturally our appeal to them was mainly on the basis of
wage-rates. We could not offer at once to raise their wages to $49.50,
but a sliding scale upward could be worked out. As soon as the women
learned how they were being cheated, they began to sign union cards, hoping
soon to be able to earn as much as our men.

Their cause was fortified by setting up a special pressers' committee headed
by three progressive Negro members of Local 12÷ Elena Clark, Ida Green,
and Ethelle Andersen, who were supported by the leadership of their
local÷Henry Tokman, Abe Schwartz, Frank Foster, Hyman Newman, Joe
Garber, Hyman Weisberg, Sam Kramer, Morris Fox, Mayer Karesky, and
others. They saw that only by getting the underpaid women pressers under
the union wing could they safeguard their own jobs.

In the cutting departments we also had a serious problem. This craft
requires a certain amount of training and skill, for employers want to save
yardage and to avoid wasting any material. Hence the cutters have long
considered themselves the aristocrats of the industry. But in Boston, as
elsewhere, the employers had learned a new trick. Lads hired as errand boys,
shipping clerks, or sweepers, would assist at the cutting tables in their spare
time, with the cutter in charge teaching them. Gradually they would take over
parts of the skilled cutters' work÷spreading material on long tables prior to
having it cut to patterns, cutting the trimmings, making up the cut material
into bundles. For this they received little remuneration Meanwhile skilled
cutters with families would be out of jobs.

The cutters' local, under the guidance of Joseph Rosenblatt, and Jacob
Ames, vise-president and treasurer respectively of the Joint Board, and
Morris Kramer, Louis Kriesman, Sam Goldberg, Tom Boulos, and Jack
White, took up its task with determination. As soon as a cutting department in
one factory signed up as a unit, designated our union as its collective
bargaining agent, we would meet with their employer, who would reluctantly
sign a memorandum agreeing that this department was temporarily
recognized as an appropriate unit until the NLRB could rule on the question,
and that the workers had a right to belong to Cutters' Local 73.

By the end of spring we had enrolled all the cutting departments of the
shops on my list. Other crafts followed in line.

Our Boston branch of the International was divided into two distinct units
the cloak, skirt, and dress joint board, which had to do with the higher priced
women's wearing apparel, and the cotton dress and miscellaneous
department.

Boston cloak and suit workers had an excellent collective agreement, with
high standards. Harry Bergson, a fair-minded citizen, served as their
impartial arbitrator. Morris Damarsky, Wolf Winer, and Morris Greenberg for
the machine operators, and Jacob Schneider and Isaac Borenstein for the
hand finishers, guarded their hard-won union conditions, and refused to
be bulldozed.

For some intangible reason the higher priced dress business in this area did
not grow. But New England factories producing cotton garments, blouses,
skirts, and miscellaneous knitwear had flourished in recent years, though
comparatively few of those were in Boston Rather they were in other
Massachusetts towns and in Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Maine. Most of these were runaway shops from New York, Boston, and as
far west as Chicago, with grasping owners who were trying to dodge the
minimum standards prevailing in the industry since the NRA's advent.
Employing mostly housewives, women from farms, and school-girls,
they maintained their sample rooms in the larger cities.

The cotton garment and miscellaneous department of the ILGWU in
Boston was in charge of Jacob Halperin, former International
vise-president, who had the assistance of Mary Levin, stately, level headed executive and former dressmaker, long with our Philadelphia office.
That department had come into being after the 1936 dress strike m Boston
ended with scarcely any gains; the union then began to concentrate on the
runaway shops in other New England towns.

Linked to Halperin's division, the rainwear section of the industry, managed
by Nathan Barker, was expecting a good season. Excellent reports came from
Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where William Ross was in
charge. He had succeeded in checking the flow of open-shop
manufacturers from Boston and New York into that area by building up a
strong organization in his territory.

Upon my arrival in Boston, I had reweighed the ILGWU local educational
program, and saw it did not meet the membership's need Much concerned, I
formed a joint educational council, with representatives from every local, and
with a letter-head listing all their names. A budget was agreed upon, and
all classes, except swimming and gym, were held in union headquarters.

Our aim was to win over the habitual critics who scoffed at
"education-shmeducation." Whereas in other cities I often had to deal
unionists workers who had no conception of trade unionism and our place in
workers' education, here all of them were sincere unionists who simply had
lost their perspective. They needed to be aroused from lethargy and stirred
into constructive action.

We endeavored to give the Boston membership a clear understanding of
the new labor legislation that had come into being since 1933, and what
benefits they could derive from it. That fall the Fair Labor Standards Act was
to become effective, setting a floor for wages and a ceiling for hours. Hence I
asked several local educators, lawyers, and officials of the state and federal
labor departments to enlighten them on these topics.

Timidly some of those who had scoffed at us earlier began to show up at
these sessions. Going a step further, I announced that we would send
members that summer to Wellesley Institute, some on two weeks'
scholarships.

I selected for those special studies certain individuals whom I thought
would get large value out of them. They included Jacob Schneider of the hand
finishers' local; Joseph Garber, chairman of the Boston joint board; Hyman Newman, pressers' chairman; Sarah
Greenspoon, Rose Simkins, and Hazel Dobbs, dressmakers, and Ethelle
Anderson and Ethel Neblett, Negro pressers. Ann Baden, dressmaker, was
sent to Bryn Mawr Summer School.

Some of our older members needed to learn that they as well as the
youngsters must be trained in new techniques for conducting the union's
affairs. Toward that end I arranged with Mark Starr, director of our
educational department in New York, to send us speakers with important
messages for this special audience. Starr himself came to speak, and others
were Fannia M. Cohn, pioneer in his department and its executive secretary;
Simon Farber and Serafino Romualdi, respectively editors of our Jewish and
Italian publications; and Charles Zimmerman, secretary-manager of my
own Local 22. Arturo Giovannitti and Frank Liberty, on several occasions,
delivered rousing addresses to the Italians; and Frank Crosswaith, member of
our staff and head of the Negro Labor Committee, with headquarters in
Harlem, came from New York repeatedly to help line up his co-racials.

To create new opportunities for workers who were jobless because some
sections of the garment industry were overcrowded, I set up a sewing school
to retrain them for work in other sections. That school was equipped with five
machines, with all sorts of attachments for special types of sewing. Mary Le
Blanc, skilled sample-maker from Maine, served as instructor.

At a cloakmakers' meeting I listened to speeches by men who harked back
across four decades to days "when a union was a union, when elected officers
had real consideration for the rank-and-file."

When called upon to speak, I said that after hearing those speeches, I was
sure they were lucky people. In the basic industries, few men could sit at such
a meeting and recall what had happened in their union forty years earlier. And
in some industries, a man forty years old was out, and hardly could find
employment. The fact that these workers in Boston could take part in a union
meeting, damn the leaders, and get away with it, I held, was ample proof that
theirs was a good union.

When I noticed a bright looking youth hanging around our office, I asked
who he was, and learned that he was Leo Karesky, a presser. His father,
Mayer Karesky, I knew as one of our most valuable members. Sounding the
boy out as to his ambitions, I was enough impressed by his intelligence to
offer to send him to Wellesley Institute, and promised to train him as an
organizer.

"What's in it for me?" was his first question.

"Nothing at present," I said, "but if you have a head on your shoulders, you
can learn things, become a somebody, and live like a human being."

The two weeks at Wellesley were an eye=opener for him, and on returning
to Boston he began to supplement what he had lately learned by systematic
reading and observation of union procedure. In due time we placed him as an
organizer in the skirt division.

The following summer I sent him and other members to attend our
week-end Institute at Hudson Shore Workers' School in West Park, N.Y.
Later he became chairman of our Massachusetts Educational Council, serving
thus until January, 1942, when he volunteered for war service. Today
Lieutenant Leo Karesky is using his talents in handling rookies in the Army
Air Corps.

I was fortunate in those days in having the assistance of my niece, Dorothy
Rubin, and a young woman from our Philadelphia office, Rebecca Berg Born
in Boston, Dorothy had attended both high school and business school, and
knew shorthand, typing, and mimeographing. She was eager to follow in my
footsteps.

Later, when Winifred McDonald, a vivacious young teacher, came in as
recreational director, the three girls worked in fine harmony and union
headquarters soon was gay with theatricals and parties. In the fall we
branched out further and made many new friends by holding dances, style
shows, and a gay Hallowe'en festival÷all in the Bradford Hotel.

In the summer months we arranged various outings, including excursions
by steamer to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims first
landed from the Mayflower, and in cars to Plymouth, where they finally
settled. We made jaunts, too, around Boston and to nearby towns, where historic monuments greeted one at
every turn. Making it a point always to have some one along familiar with
happenings in colonial days, we learned some history not taught in the public
schools.

The more I saw and heard of Boston's oldest families, the more I was
convinced that they had little sympathy for the working masses, immigrants,
and children and grand-children of immigrants, with whom I was
concerned.

During my years in Boston I met not a few Daughters of the American
Revolution. They liked to recall that that city was the Cradle of Liberty, but I
never found any willing to admit that they had descended from outlaws, who
had won independence for a new nation by breaking the laws of
England÷their mother country.

Once when a local newspaperman told me that his grandmother, a D.A.R.
member, had upbraided him for the company he kept, I asked whether his
people came on the Mayflower. 

"Hell, no!" he said. "My ancestors were brought here in chains ÷for
nonpayment of debt."

Labor organization got an early start in Boston. As far back as 1809 the
printers were unionized, and a seven months' strike was staged by 600
carpenters in 1835 to cut their working day to ten hours. Shortly after the Civil
War an Eight-Hour Day League was in action there. The Boston
Tailoresses' Union, formed in 1869, provided in its constitution that any
member doing more work than allowed by the union's bill of prices would be
fined for the first two offenses, and expelled for the third.

But labor had some of its toughest fights in Massachusetts. None was more
bitter than the 1912 woolen strike in Lawrence. Out of that grew the trial in
Salem of Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor, IWW organizers, accused of being
"accessories before the fact" in a murder case, because of speeches alleged to
have incited a riot. Both were acquitted when it was shown that Anna Lo
Pizza, one of the strikers, was killed by a bullet from a policeman's gun.

Mention of the Boston police strike of 1919 could still make conservatives
there see red in 1938.

One was impressed by the tender regard for children shown by the state
legislature in 1866 when it prohibited employment of any child under 10 in any factory. But in 1940 the State Federation of Labor, the
Consumers League of Massachusetts, and the League of Women Voters were
still trying to prevail upon the legislature to ratify the child labor amendment
to the national Constitution, proposed by Congress in 1924. New hope of
such action had been aroused in the breasts of optimists in 1939, when, after
148 years, the newly elected Governor Leverett Saltonstall prevailed upon the
legislature to ratify the ten original amendments to the Constitution, known as
the Bill of Rights.

For me Boston held bitter memories of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I
remembered talks with the two Italian radicals in jail and prison,
correspondence with them, speaking tours of industrial cities in their behalf,
and picketing the State House in the last days before Governor Alvin H. Fuller
gave the decision that sent them to the electric chair.

With a hostile judge and a hand-picked jury, they had been convicted
in 1921 of a payroll holdup and double murder; actually, to any one knowing
the flimsiness of the prosecution's evidence, they were doomed because of
their social opinions. Members of a group of philosophical Anarchists, they
had had the misfortune to be arrested at the height of the A. Mitchell Palmer
"red" terror. August 22, 1927÷when they were executed÷stands as the
blackest day in the history of Massachusetts. For years afterwards, I stayed
away from Boston.

As soon as the factories opened for the autumn season, certain
manufacturers began to discriminate against our cutters and pressers, while
nonunion persons took their places. After futile efforts to meet with
these employers, we declared their factories on strike.

It was something new in Boston to find Kneeland Street crowded with
pickets on a bright sunny morning in mid-August. Never had any of the
Boston dressmakers had such a good time on a picket-line. Scores of
them who had been in winter strikes recalled snow and biting winds. The
union voted to pay substantial sums as strike benefits, the pickets were fed at
a cafeteria around the corner, and all were satisfied.

But employers who had closed their factories "temporarily" as in the past, now had unfilled orders piling up, and had reason to worry. This
time, it became evident to them, they might have to stay closed a long time.

When the situation reached the boiling point, Anna Weinstock, New
England conciliator for the United States Department of Labor, arranged a
conference at the Parker House.

Julius Hochman, general manager of the New York Dress Joint Board, now
came to Boston at my request. Large and bulky, heavy eye-browed,
baritone and first-rate orator, he is the dean of negotiators in the dress
field. In the mid-Twenties he had been the ILGWU representative in
Boston, and knew the caliber and habits of the group with which we were
dealing.

As our spokesman he argued to the employers that only by their signing an
equitable agreement with us could Boston regain its lost prestige as a dress
market. He cited pertinent statistics to back up that contention. For three days
the discussions went on.

Meanwhile many of our pickets were arrested, with brutal handling by the
police. But this time we had public opinion on our side. The press had been
enlightened, and gave a true picture of the struggle.

No settlement had been reached when Hochman returned to New York for
the Labor Day week-end. By Tuesday, however, the employers had
realized that there was merit in our position, and consented to sign a
provisional agreement to run for six months. Under this all the workers got
wage increases.

Employers who hitherto had shunned our union became more friendly,
and not only met with us now, but later called upon Manager Kramer and our
business agents to consult them on general problems in the industry.

With the first group out of the way, we set out to line up the remaining
nonunion firms, tackling each shop individually. No two groups of
workers could be handled in the same way. Moreover, having to deal now
with a new and younger element that had been kept out of the union through
employer-maneuvering, we needed to make a different approach.

Calling together the business agents, Abraham Hollenport, Alfred Scola,
and Saul Wallace, I explained to them that when a customer bought a dime's worth of ribbon in a five-and-ten she naturally
expected to hear a cheerful "Thank you." The same girl coming to our union
would look for a cordial welcome and was entitled to it.

Day after day, new shops would be signed up. It was necessary to meet
with the incoming members and explain to them the functions of the union
and their own obligations to it, and to enlist them for some active part in
bringing in others.

Toward the end of the first year, practically the whole group of firms on my
list, all on Kneeland Street, were under a two-year union agreement.

Early in December I received word from Hilda Worthington Smith that on
a recent trip abroad she had visited the national conference center and
workers' school in Pontigny, two hours from Paris. This school, established
two years earlier by French and Swedish trade unionists, already had created
a stir in workers' education circles. In April a new term would begin there, a
three months' course to be taken by trade unionists from various countries.

The directors were eager to have an American worker participate. Hilda
Smith arranged to have an invitation to attend sent to me, and urged me to
make the trip. I would have gone gladly but for the job before me. The Boston
drive was moving with such momentum that I did not want to take any
chance of slowing it down by being absent. Regretfully I had to decline this
opportunity to meet with European trade unionists. I've been sorry ever since,
for that was the last labor school in operation on the Continent.

At the end of two years in Boston, I had completed my task. The
dressmakers had a strong, healthy union. With my mind at ease I went to a
GEB meeting in Atlantic City with a report of which I was proud Then
President Dubinsky announced that he had reorganized our Los Angeles
branch, and would ask me to go there and take over the organization
department.

Though other board members congratulated me on my "luck" in being sent
to Sunny California, I was not elated. For I felt that nothing but trouble was to
be expected there.

The Boston crowd objected strenuously to my leaving; and Jacob Ames,
joint board chairman, and Phil Kramer were sent as a committee to New York
to protest. I went with them, and learned that my trip to Los Angeles would
be an emergency mission÷because Louis Levy, the International's new
Pacific Coast director, was ill in bed.

With this knowledge, my Boston friends gave in gracefully. In voicing
appreciation, the spokesmen for the various groups touched me deeply when
they thanked me for returning to them their self-respect.

Shortly before I left for the West Coast, Winnie McDonald married and
resigned, and at my suggestion Myriam Sieve, who earlier had been
connected with the educational department, came in to take charge of that
end. Our ever-blooming office secretary, Judith Friedman, graduate
from the dressmakers' ranks, promised her full cooperation. I was
satisfied that my work would be carried on conscientiously.


     From : Anarchy Archives

Events :
----------------------------------

     Chapter 29 -- Publication : November 30, 1944

     Chapter 29 -- Added : February 09, 2017

About This Textfile :
----------------------------------

     Text file generated from : 
http://revoltlib.com/