Oral History
Research Office
Columbia University
Q: We’re going to pick up where we left off, and also Moe has some things to add based on a conversation he had recently with his brother. So do you want to start with that?
Foner: In high school, this is Jack and Phil’s experience, they had little social consciousness. Their peers, their friends were not involved in social issues. Late in high school he remembers reading, they read the Beards’ [Charles and Mary] Rise of American Civilization, and that had a very great effect on them. In college, they were at City College, they were not active or involved; they were onlookers of what happened, largely for two things. Number one, they were working after school, post office and that kind of thing, and also they had to travel from Brooklyn up to City College, and now I remember they graduated in three years. They had no contact with any kind of organizations as college students, although I remember that they read the Nation and New Republic and The New Statesman. That’s how that came into my life, through that.
Q: Let me stop you for just a second, only because in reviewing the tape, I was struck by the fact that you mentioned the Nation a couple of times. Nowadays, the Nation is not exactly a mass circulation paper. Did it have a broader impact at that time?
Foner: It wasn't the mass circulation paper then, either. However, it was read by intellectuals and left intellectuals. Later on, the New Masses appeared, although the New Masses had existed way, way back, but emerged as a more popular magazine during the Popular Front period where well-known people would write for it. Its position was obviously different from that of the Nation. The Nation was a true liberal publication, but it commented on all current national and international affairs, and one could get an enormous amount of information from a social point of view by reading those magazines. At the beginning, where we were interested in issues, you know, in the world and what was happening in the country, we found like open-your-mind articles by people who were prominent to us. They became more and more prominent, whether it was Norman Thomas or Fiorello LaGuardia or Bob LaFollette or people who were from the universities who wrote on all kinds of issues and you followed them there.
Q: So the Nation attracted big-name contributors from the socialist and left communities.
Foner: And liberal. The liberal community was an important community. It did not have votes in that sense, but it was an important grouping in the society. First of all, Jack said that their interests in Marxism came largely after they were graduated and when they started to teach, and they began to become acquainted with Marx and people who wrote from a Marxist point of view, and they became interested in it as teachers, and then their peers, as teachers, included people who were Marxists. I remember meeting them through my brothers, although there was always an influence of my brothers on me, even though our paths were very different, they were much more brilliant than I was, and there was a tendency for me to hide behind athletics, but nevertheless, I knew what they were thinking about and who they knew. And then when I got a job at the college -- I'm trying to put this into some kind of logical year perspective -- we moved from Williamsburg to Boro Park, I must have been sometime in my freshman or sophomore year. That means I must have been around seventeen years old.
Q: And so it was about 1932.
Foner: It was '33, because I entered college in '32, and I can remember going home to go Williamsburg during the first year. I think after that we moved to East Flatbush and then to Boro Park. This is '33. 1933, the communities were agog with the threat of fascism. This was before Hitler's rise to power. Hitler comes in in '36, right?
Q: No. Hitler is elected vice president under Hindenberg, if I'm not mistaken, in 1933.
Foner: Then it's around that period then that people are becoming very --
Q: And already the brown shirts and the black shirts, whatever --
Foner: And Austria, the Dolfuss thing, Austria in 1934 where they wipe out the socialists’ houses. And the threat of fascism becomes an issue, and the American League Against War and Fascism was formed, I recall. And I was a member of the American League Against War and Fascism in the community. I remember going to rallies in the streets of Boro Park where people like Norman Tallentine, one name, fantastic outdoor speakers, would bellow voices without microphones, could be heard for weeks, for years, and for miles and could really carry and impress an audience. They would do it very night and you would follow them. We had chapters of it. I'm in college, and because of my brothers' influence, and I'm reading the Nation and the New Republic, etc., I'm beginning to meet communists in college, in the class. The student movement is developing in college. My activities are largely in the community in Boro Park, with YCL, and then you get to '35,'36, you’re coming into Spain. I get to know my brothers' friends from college, teachers, too. Phil is teaching uptown, Jack is teaching at 23rd Street, and they're already involved in the Anti-Fascist Association at the college, and the College Teachers’ Union, and I’m already dragging around in those things, too, and I know people who are in the student organizations.
Q: I don't want to collapse all this history into a short time. I'd like to take it piece by piece. Was there more that you wanted to say based on your conversation with Jack?
Foner: Yes, there's one other thing that's important because it has an effect later on. I mentioned earlier, and I checked it out, the family had no difficulty during the Depression. None of us can recall any economic problems during the Depression. I think it was 1934, Phil is already teaching at the college and he's invited to go to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to teach a training school for the CIO. Now, when is the CIO?
Q: The CIO was formed in '35, when Lewis punches out the guy from the carpenters’ union, but there's a huge strike movement in '34.
Foner: In 1934, the rubber workers.
Q: The rubber workers were later, I believe.
Foner: Toledo.
Q: Toledo Autolite was '34.
Foner: Okay. So there are groupings coming together and a training school took place in Yellow Springs, and Phil came to lecture there, and he came back and told us about it. That probably was his first contact with the labor movement. He then many, many times would go to CIO training schools, to teach American labor history. We knew about that.
Q: So when we broke off, you were trying to pinpoint the point which you became politically active, and so you just mentioned that really the first activity was the American League Against War and Fascism, and that you were involved primarily in the community. You're still playing basketball, you're still playing music and so forth. How did you get drawn into the American League?
Foner: I guess friends, through friends in the neighborhood. See, there was one very close friend, who’s dead now, Frank Herbst. We grew up in the same house in Williamsburg, we were friends as kids. His family moved to Boro Park before we did, and we came later. He had already become active politically. He later went to City College 23rd Street, was an activist, and so I was involved in Boro Park.
Q: The American League was a group primarily organized by the YCL?
Foner: No, no, no. It was an adult group, but it had youth sections. It was largely a left group. I imagine the Communist Party had a great influence on it. I remember Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary was the chairman, the national chairman. It was influential to a degree in that period.
Q: Boro Park was, relatively speaking, a more prosperous community?
Foner: Yes. Boro Park was middle class, largely Jewish, private homes for the most part, two-family homes.
Q: And yet things like the American League and the YCL were prominent there.
Foner: Oh, yes. They were prominent all over. It's New York City. It's New York, and New York has always had a strong radical movement, much stronger than in any other city in the country.
Q: Was there in the community any strain of anti-communism that would be resistant to the development of this? And more specifically, did you have any feelings of anti-communism? You were, after all, a product of the American school system.
Foner: Yes. Well, I guess very, very early I think I did, but by this time too many things were happening, and you forgot about the other thing. Remember, this is also the period when the Communists developed the People's Front, and they are becoming twentieth-century Americansism and becoming more American than the Americans. So there was no difficulty in that score, and also, your friends who were involved were very decent, law-abiding, you know, very nice people, the best, we always felt.
Q: Why did you feel that they were the best?
Foner: Well, they were very bright students, they were capable in all areas, they read, they had a tremendous amount of information, they went to films, concerts, etc., and so they were culturally advanced.
I was also involved at school with friends who were active in organizations. I was at the same time, I'm playing basketball after school for the first two years. Starting with the second year, I leave school at 1:00 o'clock and go to a job that my brother Jack has gotten for me in the City College Registrar's Office evening session, where I work from 2:00 to 6:00 five days and very often at night, and then you go home. So there really isn't a lot of time for political activity.
Speaking of political activity, you're running into '36, '37, '38, Spain and its aftermath, '38 and the period. From '36 until the Pact is a period of great growth in the radical movement, great growth and probably its greatest influence. It's always questionable how influential, how big it was. Just last Saturday night, a number of us, friends for over forty years, all from similar backgrounds and similar activities, were discussing the communist movement and whether it was a positive factor in our lives. People were then evaluating, and there were people there, like ten different people there, five couples. In one case, a person said it was not a positive factor. He was always critical of it. In virtually all the others cases, they said that while one could look back and be critical and say we made horrible mistakes, that it was a positive factor in his or her life. They marked it down as positive. I felt that it was positive. Another person there who was an active person in the American Student Union and then went and got his master's in Iowa in English literature and then went to work in a factory concentration ended up as a skilled tool and die maker, and for maybe twelve of fifteen years was a shop steward and local union president of a UE shop in Queens, Waldes Zipper, and later finally left and went back to get his teaching degree and became a teacher in the high school system. He, who was very critical of the communists at the time, marks his association with the radical movement as a positive thing. I think historically it's positive in our lives. I think it's positive.
Q: We can pursue that for a second. I want to come back to the other details, but when you make that kind of a judgment that it's positive, what does that mean? Why do you say that? What were the benefits?
Foner: The benefits, first of all, while you learned a lot that was wrong, you learned a lot that was right. You learned methods of work, you learned the responsible way of organizing and being involved in an organization, things that most people don't have or don't experience. Then many of things we did, none of us would fault, involvement in Spain, fighting against fascism, all the other things.
Q: Joining the YCL was not any big emotional watershed. It was just something that came naturally?
Foner: No, no, it was not a terrible thing. Later, see, when I graduated college, I got a job, I was still working in the Registrar's Office part-time, doing more hours, and my brothers got me an appointment to a full-time position at the college in the Registrar's Office, and here you quickly became part of that whole left movement there. There while we were members of the College Teachers’ Union, and Anti-Fascist Association; and the Communist Party put out a bulletin, Teacher/Worker. I remember one of the things we fought for and won is we campaigned that the college adopt a change in its faculty to have a course in Negro history to be taught by a black. The college finally agreed. There was a course and I registered for it. We had to fill it up, too. It was given late in the afternoon in the School of Education, and the person who we won to teach it was Max Yergan.
Q: When was that campaign, do you recall?
Foner: That would be around '37, '38, '39.
Q: What were the last two years of college like for you?
Foner: They're frantic in the sense that in my junior year of college, I decide I'm going to be a student. Of course, until then I did nothing. I start to major in history and my grades start changing. But I go to school until 1:00 o'clock and at 2:00 o'clock I'm at City College in 23rd Street, and I work there from 2:00 to 6:00 and sometimes later. And you go home and you have to do your homework and call people, so that it's kind of hectic. In the weekends I'm playing in the band and that kind of thing. But nobody felt oppressed by it. You were just running around. Most people were running around.
Q: Did you have much involvement or perception of what was going on in the labor movement at this time?
Foner: Only what we read about. You read a lot of stuff and you heard people debating The colleges had debates all the time. And in the classes, even the history classes, on the history of the Russian revolution, the faculty person was Jesse Clarkson, he's now dead, he was brilliant, but he was a debater. He used to love to take the rightist or centrist position, and his classes would be divided, the right and the left. On the left was Joe Clark, Joe Cohen -- Joe Clark later was the head of the YCL, later became a correspondent for The Daily Worker in Moscow, is today retired way to the right, violent anti-communist. Leo Rifkin also moved to the right. People of that kind who were very bright. Then there were the socialists, and people would come to class carrying these huge stacks of books, you know, and they'd put them on the table and then they'd start, and the debating would start. He would very carefully involve people, posing this thing and getting people to debate. You’d just listened to it and learn a great deal.
Q: It reminds me of the scenes in the movie "Daniel." Did you see that?
Foner: No.
Q: I was wondering if you thought it was an accurate representation. Do you remember in the period of '34 and '35, any particularly big campaigns that you were involved in, in which you played a very active role?
Foner: 1934, '35, really not. The things that stick out in my mind is Spain.
Q: So it's a couple years later.
Foner: Yes. Well, I remember there were demonstrations at the schools for peace, you know, against war, that kind of thing, but nothing that really -- I think I must have gone to demonstrations that when the Nazi ships arrived, where everybody came to try to tear down the banner, you know.
Q: This is the story that that Bill Bailey told.
Foner: They were more intimately involved up front on it, but everybody went to those things. You went to Madison Square Garden meetings that were packed, about '36, '37.
Q: When you came into the movement in this period of '34 and '35, and fascism is on the rise, and the labor movement is growing, and you're going to constant debates, the schools are politicized, what was your sense of what was going to happen? What were you looking for?
Foner: We were rather optimistic that we were moving towards -- we call it a socialist society, a just society, that things were going to get better. You remember, this is the prelude to Roosevelt. Roosevelt was '32.
Q: Right.
Foner: Now, even though it passes us by, this is a period of great depression. We know that there is one, and we expect that -- you see, it's like on the one hand and on the other hand. You remember that this period is a period of great WPA organization, this is the Workers Alliance in '34, but we are not involved in that. So that there are mass movements that are taking place in the cities that involve unemployed workers. We know about them. They come and speak at the schools, come and speak in the neighborhoods to represent them, you know, to give everybody a shot in the arm, a real live worker is coming to talk.
Q: Your background is a strong working class background.
Foner: My father, you mean?
Q: Both your parents.
Foner: Yeah, but then my father, remember, bought a garage. But I went to school. Not everybody in the Depression went to college, not many people went to college. Most people had to go to work. You'll find a lot of people who are going to school at night and working. People who were at the student movement in the evening sessions, who went to school at night because their families were too poor to permit them. They needed that income from them to bring it in.
[END TAPE]
Q: Was there ever a point at which you considered joining the Socialist Party?
Foner: No.
Q: Why not?
Foner: I'm thinking of Maia, a close friend who died recently. This past summer we came out to the island with friends and they brought out a videotape camera and they deliberately had it there because we knew how ill she was. We spent most of the afternoon in a friendly way asking her questions.
Q: Who is this woman?
Foner: Maia Turchin Scherrer, a woman who died. We sensed that something was going to happen. She was feeling rather well, and so my wife, Anne, and others were serving as foils, questioning her about her background. On this question, she said, "You know, I remember I was in high school and a friend and I went to the Socialist Party because we were very incensed that the Communists were active and there was no Socialist Party, and we didn't like the Communists. We went to the Socialist Party and we said, 'You know, if you'll only come here, there are a lot of people who will join you.' They never came, so I joined the Communists." I guess it's pretty much that, who your friends were. And then you found a theoretical rationale as to why you were a Communist, not a Socialist. As a matter of fact, you'll probably find that the socialists operated the same way, the Trotskyites, although there was a moving in and out.
I think what another thing the movement did is that it made people feel that life was worth -- that they were contributing something to life, that is was more important that they do this. You know, not everybody did this, you know. Most students were involved in fraternities and sororities and the traditional football games, etc. But we were the thinkers, not that the others weren't thinkers, you know. You tend to be very snobbish after a while and think that only we know anything. There were many, many terrible things that we learned in this movement.
Q: Like what, for example?
Foner: Well, remember when we studied the world affairs and the role of the Soviet Union, I remember reading, after graduating, when I would work at City College, I would go there from Brooklyn and I had a forty-five minute ride in the Independent subway, and I would get a seat because it was the last stop. By the time I arrived at work, I had read The New York Times, the Tribune and the Daily Worker. So we did a lot of reading. Now, if you read the Times and the Tribune, you came across reports that were contrary to what you were being told about the Soviet Union. You would dismiss it from your mind, but you would read about -- 1936, there were trials, there's the Trotsky -- you would read about that thing and you would dismiss it, and yet because you were a student, it would still stick someplace in the back of your mind where you would be fearful to even raise it. Or if you read the Nation and the New Republic, which I continued to read through all these periods, I even read them today, terrible.
Q: Do you even read the New Republic?
Foner: The New Republic today because occasionally they have very good stuff in there. No, but it's almost like a habit. Sometimes it's like a drug. You feel that it's that old one-upmanship. If I don't read that, my gosh, somebody’s going to know more than I know if I don't read it. I've got to know this. So it becomes that kind of thing. But I know what happened in terms of blocking it out. In other words, you're not really thinking anymore; that was the major weakness of the Communist Party. Remember, I lived through the Pact and I was very wise and understanding in explaining that away. I lived through the Finnish War, and I remember putting out questions and answers on the Finnish War, with answers obtained from The New York Times. See, one thing you learn, you can find in The New York Times anything to prove anything, and people use it that way. You can find a fact to prove anything five times over. And that's what we did.
Why did we suspend belief? I don't know. You know, it's one thing to suspend belief for a short time, but I didn't leave the Communist Party until after the Khrushchev revelations, although by that time, even before then, I was very, very cynical about it. Not only that, but in the dispute inside District 65, which I left and went to 1199 in '54, the dispute hinged around a fight between the party and the leadership of the union. And I felt that the party was wrong, that the party was crazy in its position. It's hard for me now to remember what the dispute was about.
Q: We'll come back to that a later on.
Foner: Okay.
Q: So it's 1935, '36. You graduated from college.
Foner: Yes.
Q: And you're working full-time at City College.
Foner: Full-time at City College uptown, and then I'm transferred to work full-time downtown. In this period I'm active with student organizations.
Q: You said earlier most of the American Student Union was concerned with issues of peace, and also you said there were some student issues.
Foner: Yes. Free textbooks. NYA, National Youth Administration, that's like the WPA for students. They had a policy on issues in each college: to clean up the lunchroom, acting like a union, what would be in the best interests of the workers, of the students, to unite them and bring them together and to be leaders.
Q: And you employed all the traditional organizing techniques, petitions, demonstrations?
Foner: Petitions, demonstrations, outdoor rallies, indoor rallies, everything, you know, in classrooms.
The ASU was very large, must have had -- the membership goes up and down. Its influence was maybe 1,000 or more people. It could bring to a big rally, its annual peace rally, 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 people. But it had influence among the leaders of the Student Council, the editors of the publications, etc.
Q: Was it the leading student organization on campus?
Foner: Yes, it was the major student organization. There were other organizations on campus, the Newman Club, they were small organizations. None had the power and influence of the ASU. And people who belonged to the other ones also belonged to the ASU, and vice versa.
This a period where active in it are people like Bella [Abzug]. A lot of people whose names I could give you were involved. But the movement absorbed like a sponge a lot of people, you know, soaked them up and moved them out again as things happened. Many of the editors of the college papers.
Q: But what were your strengths, do you think? What did you do well then?
Foner: I think what I did well then was, first, people liked me, I think. People liked me and people knew I was serious and that I was committed and that I was prepared to do as much if not more than anyone else would do, and that I was smart. I don't know how smart they thought I was. I was smarter than they were because I read more. I could speak with greater authority than they did, and I was older than they were. I also had a very good sense of humor, always, all my life.
Q: It's a good thing for an organizer.
Foner: Good thing for a person. It can't hurt you.
Q: What was Bella like then?
Foner: Bella was like she is now, but less so.
Q: Did she wear hats?
Foner: No. Bella was a good person. She was a good person, and she's a good person now. She was always a leader. Bella was one of many people I could count on to come for activities that we were doing at the union, demonstration, etc., a problem. Bella was in Congress, and Bella would come and do things.
I haven't seen her in a long time. I have to call her to tell her about Maia. But Bella just made a wrong move when she ran for the Senate. She almost made it, but she lost it and then there's nothing around for her, so she's doing the lecture circuit. That's not for Bella.
Q: The thing I want to ask you about at this point, we're now into '36, '37, '38. You told me a story about Suspended Swing, the band. If I remember correctly, this was the period when you got going with Suspended Swing.
Foner: No, no, no. The band, Suspended Swing, comes in '41.
Q: My chronology is wrong.
Foner: When we are kicked out -- with the Rapp-Coudert Committee, although we had a band before, but it wasn't Suspended Swing. It wasn't looked as something for an income for me, because others might have other jobs.
Q: Right. So then maybe we should talk about Spain at this point because I guess it's July of 1936.
Foner: I can't tell you too much about Spain that you don't know. I can only tell you what we did. Spain had a fantastic impact on us, on everybody. It was the quintessence of good versus evil. One of the things in my life is that I have always sought to put things into a framework of good versus evil. Sometimes that can be very effective. Sometimes it's not as simple as that. But if you're in a movement, you pretty much must have that because there can't be in betweens. You can't move people on the basis of maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong. Whether it's in a student movement or in a union, see a union -- I don't know if our approach to unions was different from what others -- but I imagine the socialists had the same approach, that it was "we or they" and if you did anything different, you weakened the union, that it was the boss versus the workers. Now, that creates a lot of problems, because a lot of nonsense and corruption can fall out because it's "we or they" because that’s pretty much in line with the old communist approach. On the other hand, there are problems if you don't have that. I've always been in a union which had a very high sense of discipline and operated almost like a military operation -- left unions. I guess right unions work that way, too. This union was for different purposes. They worked the same way. I think that most unions worked that way.
Q: So, Spain had a tremendous impact.
Foner: Spain had an impact on everybody. You know, you saw many of your friends going off to Spain, and just the stories of Spain, you followed the battle lines while we were in college. You followed the battle lines like World War II, you know. I remember things that stand out in my mind on Spain as Frankie, now dead, Henry, and I going on the West End subway, which is the BMT that runs in Boro Park, runs out to Coney Island, Boro Park.
Q: The N train, I think, now, isn’t it?
Foner: N? Probably. Yes. Going into cars, you know, and as soon as the doors closed, one of us would make a speech and then we would walk around with cans. As soon as the doors opened, we’d go in the next car, and we'd spend a whole night doing that, and weekends doing that. We had to do something because people were dying in Spain. Not so much your friends; you did this as the whole question of internationalism, your feeling for the Spanish worker, the Spanish people, you know, people who you really didn't know from a hole in the wall and you attempted to glamorize and to make them into mountains. People being what they are, they're just plain shnooks, some of them good, some bad, some better, some worse, but they were caught in a web that was a terrible tragedy then. You know, this is the heart of Spain, movies came out, documentaries. I remember there was a magazine, Photo History. I have some of the copies, put out maybe four issues. Leo Huberman was one of the people involved with it, a lot of talent, a lot of talent. It must have been 11 by 13, full color on cover and maybe center spread. But following the style of Life magazine, devoted to an issue, the war in Spain, put together all the pictures and documents there, China, history of labor, wonderful things.
Q: Who put that out?
Foner: A group of people. I don't know what kind of publishing venture. At that time there were a lot of publishing ventures that came up. There was a Friday magazine that came out every Friday. Dan Gilmor was the editor, a brilliant editor, and it had a color cover, magazine format. This is the period of Life magazine. And so obviously the left had sources of funds, and people went to rich people and got money and tried to make a go of it and obviously couldn't. You can't keep those things going for a long time. It's very hard. Books began to appear. You read everything. So anyway, Spain had this fantastic impact.
Q: Why didn't you go?
Foner: I don't even remember even considering going. That's the funny thing. I don't remember considering going, although many other people I know did considering going. Some went and didn't come back. Some college teachers went and were killed in Spain, Chick Chaiken, Ralph Wardlaw, Jack Freedman from City College. Now, after forty-odd years, there is a plaque at City College with the names of the students and faculty members who were killed in Spain.
Q: They interviewed Chick Chaiken's wife in "The Good Fight," the movie.
Foner: I remember, yes, that's right. Yes. I don't know why I didn't go. It never occurred to me.
Q: What other kinds of activities did you do in relationship to Spain?
Foner: Raising money, going to meetings, picketing, demonstrating, that kind of thing, and talking to people. It was the thing. It was what covered your life at that time for a couple years until you saw it going down the drain. It was very hard to come to grips with that. That's why Del Vayo, all of us have -- Del Vayo was the last foreign minister of the Spanish republic, J. Alvarez Del Vayo. And some of these things stayed with us forever. Joe Cadden, who I mentioned, was a good friend of mine, and our friendship, you know, we knew each other and we did certain things together, but then we became much friendlier, he was interested in Spain, he had been in Spain. I remember I was at that time in 1199, but we were -- I can't even remember what year it was, but whenever Del Vayo, the last foreign minister of the Spanish Republic, would come to the United States, Joe would call me up and say, "Can you invite him to come to speak to your staff?" This was before the organization of hospital workers. It was important for Del Vayo, because he was the foreign minister, he would come from Mexico and go to the U.N. and everybody would pay homage to him because he was quite ill. It was very important that he be provided with audiences, so that we would do what we could do, things like that. I remember whenever he came, we'd come to see him at Joe's home and we'd talk, and when he died, and Joe came to me and said, "How about we do a big memorial for him."
I said, "Okay, let's do it." We put together a few people, a committee, Lenny Lamb from the Lincoln vets, Joe, I, and Joan Davidson's sister, in the J.M. Kaplan Fund, who was married to somebody who was close to Spain. And we decided that we would do a big thing, a memorial service for Del Vayo at the Community Church. I said the unions will put up a couple of hundred dollars right away, seed money for what we had to do, and he’d raise money. We would meet regularly at my office. We did this over a three-month period, and then we were putting together the program, and we were going to get somebody from Spain, from the underground, was going to come. Yeah, they did come. Someone from E.T.A.
Q: The bus.
Foner: The bus, yeah. We find out these guys are coming. What can I do? We said, "Now, who's going to speak?" And we figured it out. Ossie. "Okay, I'll get Ossie." And what's her name is the speaker, and I remember, I'll never forget her. She's the famous historian, Barbara Tuchman. See, Barbara Tuchman was a reporter for the Nation in Spain. She comes from a very wealthy family, very wealthy family. And she's a very good friend of the Caddens. See, Joe's wife, Vivian, his widow, is the editor of Working Mother, and they know everybody. Joe, when I started "Bread and Roses," Joe volunteered to help me raise money, fund-raise for me. But anyway, so I remember I had to clear the program with Barbara Tuchman, because she was speaking. And I remember going to see her, and she went over the list and she said, "And who is this Ossie Davis?"
So I said, "Well, he's a very distinguished black actor."
"Wwas he in Spain?"
I said, "No."
"I will not speak on a platform except with people who were in Spain."
Then this was left to Joe. He said, "Don't worry about it. I’ll get her to speak."
We had this guy from Spain who came, and he turned out to be a bomb-thrower. I didn't know it. Not only that, but he only could speak in Spanish and we had to have somebody translate. So there was somebody. We were down in the basement, we were there, and they were listening to him on the loudspeaker and somebody was writing and running upstairs to read the translation. What a wild evening. But it was a packed house.
Q: When was this?
Foner: Maybe in the Fifties some time. Maybe the Sixties. It must have been in the Sixties. Even things, like, I never forgot my friendship for someone like Carey McWilliams. I was a great admirer of Carey McWilliams, and when I got to know him, I got to appreciate him even more, and he was very fond of what we were doing in the union. We would invite him to come to lecture to the union staff about world events, and we could sell subscriptions to the Nation, my alma mater. Whenever I needed an editor or something for the publication, I would always go to Carey. "Carey, who would you suggest?" And he would make suggestions. I remember I once got an editor, Steve Murdock, who had been an editor for the ILWU Dispatcher and had been their legislative representative, had been red-baited out of his job with the Central Body and was now a sports writer for a small paper in Montana. I remember reading an article of his in The Nation, and I was very impressed with it, on sports. I forget what it was. I came to Carey and said, "Carey, I need an editor."
He says, "There's this friend of mine, Steve Murdock, he's in Montana."
I said, "He wrote that article on sports?"
He said, "Yeah. He's a very good man."
So I called him up and I said, "Are you interested?" He said he was interested. I said, "I'll tell you what you do. We'll pay for your transportation to come to New York, and we'll meet and go over it and see whether we like each other, and we can meet with Davis, etc." We hired him, and he was the editor, and then he died. He was very, very good.
Then I needed someone as a reporter, and he recommended Eleanor -- she just wrote this book on Josephine Herbst, Elly Langer. She was a reporter, very bright, and all the time she was doing research for an article on us, and did a series of two articles in the New York Review of Books, on 1199, an attack on lack of democracy, autocracy by Davis and all that kind of stuff, a lot of stuff. Oh, boy. I went to Carey and said, "Carey, look what you did to me." That was when I had my big argument with Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review, whom I had been friendly with. I called him up and said, "Didn't you have the decency to tell me you're doing the piece before it ran."
And he said, "Well, I couldn't. She was like an undercover agent for you." He says, "Moe, my columns are open. You want to write a letter?"
Q: I think the original part of the digression was Carey McWilliams. Did that have anything to do with Spain?
Foner: I knew him during Spain.
Q: What was he like?
Foner: You know, he was a gentleman, a very nice man. I was familiar with his books. He had written on migrant workers, he had written "The Mask of Privilege." Before he came to the Nation, he had a reputation out on the coast as a very, very -- and he knew everybody. Later on he would be a fantastic ally for us because he would open up all his sources to me. Like in Vietnam, when we were working on the labor opposition to the war and I said, "Carey, I need to give a national flavor to the thing. I've got to get editorials in papers around the country."
And he would say, "Okay, call this person and this person," and then suddenly we were reproducing, and that's what scared them -- it didn't scare them, but it got the AFL-CIO people so very angry. Of course, we would reproduce them and we would distribute them around the labor movement. Here is the Charleston Observer and the Seattle Post-Intelligence. It looked like everybody -- and I learned in the hospital thing that that's the way to go. And Carey was wonderful. So that when Carey died, they came to me and they asked -- no, no, no, he was still alive. They wanted to do, before he retired, a big tribute, a big bash, to raise a lot of money for the Nation and to do it right. I said, "I will devote my time to it and I'll pull out all my credit cards. There aren't so many/" But I had been through the Vietnam thing, so I had -- I said, "I'll get you Murray Finley to co-chair, a labor group with me."
And they said, "Okay, we'll get Studs [Terkel]. You and Studs will be co-chairs of the thing."
And I don't know where but it was a big ballroom, and I sold more than half of the hundreddollar tickets to the unions. You know, "You've got to get these for Carey McWilliams."
And I was delighted that I was able to do that. But it didn't hurt me either because, you know, people knew that I was doing that, so that Victor Navasky and Ham Fish, all of them, they would say, "Whatever we can do for you." And so Ham would open up his contacts to me, so that it was not harmful to me, but I felt good about that. I'm jumping around.
Q: It's okay.
Foner: The Nation is the thread. I’ll go home and read it now. Did you see that full-page ad today on the 007, next to the Washington page of the Times?
Q: No.
Foner: Full-page ad.
Q: This is kind of out of chronological order. I was bound to ask you a question about this sooner or later anyway, and since you’ve sort of gotten into it, it’s somewhat related in terms of when you developed an approach. It seems like you have a certain style of work that has to do with really the most remarkable networks and set of contacts of anybody I've ever seen. Personally, I mean, I haven't seen that many people, but from what I've seen. When you started organizing, did you have a conscious thing like that, or was it something that you just fell into over time? At some point it becomes conscious, no doubt.
Foner: I'll tell you what happened. It's a story and a history to it. See, when we got into the decision to organize hospital workers, we were a small union. You know that. You've read this stuff. And what happened was, getting to know hospital workers and the problems that they face had a tremendous impact on us, on all of us. It was like suddenly we found out that there were these workers in New York City who were being mistreated, who were making twenty-six and twenty-eight bucks a week, and they were all black and Hispanic workers, most of them were women, they had families, and they had nothing. Nobody had paid any attention to them. And as a result, those of us who were involved, there were very few of us at that time, very few, all the drug staff were assigned to do different things, so Elliot Godoff was the organizer of it, Davis was master minding it, and I was with them, you know, I was there. I wasn't an organizer on it, but I was there because I was doing the paper, and I was going to write about what we were doing, do leaflets, and that kind of thing. The more I became familiar with the problem, the more I came to the conclusion that we could not win this thing this way. So you begin to find out about the voluntary hospitals, what are they? Who are they? And you found out that the boards of trustees were very, very powerful people, and you found out that there would be no way you could possibly win because the law was totally against you. They didn't have to do anything, and they weren't breaking any law. One day I went to Davis and I said, "Dave, something is bothering me."
He said, "What's the matter?"
I said, "We can't win this way."
"What do you mean?"
"Assume we can get the workers. Even if we have the workers, we could never win in a one-to-one fight with the management. They don't even have to deal with us. They are so powerful. They own all the politicians, they own all the wealthy and they know everybody. We're nothing here. They have access to the press, to the media. This has got to be a cause. This can't just be a fight to organize. This has got to be something. We've got to get our anger, to get people in the city as angry as we are. The people ought to know that what we found out that this terrible thing happens."
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "We've got to get to the newspapers."
He said, "Good. Do it." So I didn't know what to do, and I think I told you once, when I was in the Department Store Union, I used to get diarrhea if I had to call The New York Times to give them the result of an election. To talk to a New York Times reporter, to me, was, you know, it was like people up on a pedestal someplace. I didn't know enough. What will they ask me? What do you say? How do you say it?
So I didn't know what to do. So first we said, okay, the best thing to do was, we'll go to the Amsterdam News and to El Diario, and I would call up a reporter, and finally ended up after a while, talking to the editor, and I was doing the "grab by the collar," not grab, but I was just telling him, "You know this story of these people? They make twenty-six dollars a week. They've got kids."
[SIDE THREE]
Foner: to them, I'm sure they hadn't thought of it in terms of the union. They knew that there were many people, thousands of people in Harlem who didn't have jobs and who were oppressed, but they felt that yeah, maybe it's a good story. So I'd say, "I'll bring you some workers. You'll interview them."
They said, Okay."
Then I went to El Diario, and we said, "I'll bring some of the workers with me, and you’ll talk to them." One day I said, "Hey, what if I bring together the checks and I give you the checks and maybe you could make a picture of them and reproduce them?"
They said, "Yeah, that's okay." The only trouble was, they were paid once a month, so you had to explain that this was once a month, see, but they did that Then they interviewed people, and we were getting some things there, and it was nice. We thought that we were really doing fine. It's helpful for organization because the workers read it. But that wasn't enough. So I called Jimmy Wechsler of the New York Post, and I went to Jimmy, I called him up and asked him if I could come to see him, and I told him. Jimmy was the sort, he had a very soft heart He was very touched, but he was looking always for things like this. And he started questioning me to find out whether I was lying to him, you know, and he would ask me the questions. I knew all the answers. He'd say, "Have you spoken to Mrs. Roosevelt?"
I said, "How can I speak to Mrs. Roosevelt?"
So he arranged it, and that day I was talking to Mrs. Roosevelt. He said, "You go back to your office and I'll have her secretary call."
Her secretary called me and said Mr. Wechsler called, and can I come to see Mrs. Roosevelt. She said, "When can you come?"
I said, "I can come any time you want."
"Can you come now?"
"Sure, I can come now." So I went to talk to her. But then Jimmy decided that he was going to undertake this, and he started doing editorials and columns. And that was good.
Then a friend of mine said, "You know, if you call Evans Clark at The New York Times, he might help you get a letter published."
So I called Evans Clark, who was a member of the editorial board. He turns to be the husband of Freda Kirchway, who is the publisher of the Nation. Evans Clark was also a Norman Thomas socialist, who had taught economics at Princeton and was now on the editorial board. He had been the director of the Twentieth Century Fund. He was a rather distinguished person. He wrote editorials on American economic problems and occasionally on labor. So on the phone I told him, and he said, "Okay, if you will send a letter from Davis' and send me a copy, I'll see if it can get in."
The long and short of it, I call him and he says, "It takes time," and finally the letter was published, and I said, "That's fantastic." And I showed everybody the letter, and nothing happened. I didn't think anything would happen anyway. I called him up and I said, "I want to thank you for the letter. This is good. But nothing's happened."
He said, "Well, what did you expect to happen?"
I said, "I thought the hospitals would read it and they would understand that there's a logical moral case here and it appears in the New York Times, that they would react to it."
He says, "Well, that's not exactly going to happen."
So I said, "Is it possible that we could have an editorial?"
He said, "No. The Times does not write editorials on Montefiore Hospital. We might have an editorial on the steel industry if there's a steel negotiation, or on the auto industry, railroads, but not this."
A week later I called him. "Are you sure?" I told him some more stories.
He said, "No, no, no."
A week later I called him again. "Look, I’ve got some other things I want to tell you about what's happening here." And he always listens to the stories. I said, "You know, the things that are happening here are going to end up, I can see down the line, there's going to be a strike here. Because we want an election, they won't give us an election, they won't react to us, the workers." He listens.
And finally one day he calls me and says, "Can you get me a little bit more information on this?"
And one day, lo and behold, there's an editorial in The New York Times on Montefiore, on the problems of the voluntary hospitals, written very, very carefully. Its conclusions: Is it wise? Is it fair? Is it just? We understand that the hospitals have problems. And I say, "Gee whiz, this is wonderful. This is magnificent."
In the meanwhile, Jimmy is doing things, and I'm beginning to start to feel my oats and start calling people in other papers, and I'm beginning to get certain reactions already to stories, because Jimmy's things are beginning to be known. After a while, he's writing two columns a week and two editorials a week and three editorials, and three columns. I could go to the Amsterdam and to El Diario and they say to me, "Write an editorial." And I'm writing every week an editorial for these papers and having somebody translate them. I'm trying to figure out different ways of saying the same thing every time, and we're reproducing this, the people should see it.
Finally, I have enough courage, I go back to Clark and I said "You know, that was a wonderful editorial, but it hasn't changed anything." And that begins a series of editorials in the Times to a point where the hospitals go to The New York Times, to the publisher, because the publisher is a friend of Alfred Rose, the president of Sinai -- they walk to work every day -- to complain, and when the meeting is over, Clark is present at the meeting, he calls me up and says, "I have questions that I need answers to."
I said, "I'll get you the answers immediately."
First, Montefiore, let's get rid of that, because by Montefiore, the Times and the Post and the El Diario and the Amsterdam are piling it on Montefiore. Together with the fact that we've already begun to reach Van Arsdale and he's become involved and is talking to the mayor, and we have the advantage that Martin Cherkasky, and he's got this fantastic dilemma.
Q: Who was he?
Foner: He's the director of Montefiore, and he's a director with power. He's considered the outstanding director in the hospital field, and he helped organize interns and residents when he was in Philadelphia as a student. We know that he's a liberal. We're talking to him, and I'm talking to his PR man, Victor Weingarten, and one day I say to myself, "Victor Weingarten. I know that name." He worked with Izzy Stone on In Fact, with George Seldes on In Fact before Izzy Stone. I call him up and I say, "Aren't you -- "
He says, "Yes."
I said, "I've got to meet with you." And Davis and I go to meet with him, and he admits that he's in a dilemma, too, and he is telling us about the problems that Martin has, because he's very close to Cherkasky. So there becomes a relationship there of people are trying to see, but their board is split. Who's on the board? One of the people on the board is George Kirstein, Bloomingdale's, owner of the Nation, liberal, he'll be with us. Boy, this is getting closer. The board is divided, and we're reaching a point where we think they might have to have a strike. We're going up to the wire, and the board is divided, and the workers are being prepared. You know, we're working on the level, like, I'm working the press and the media and that kind of thing, and people are organizing the workers, and we're working angles with the workers like big giant postcards and telegrams, you know, media kind of things for story things. You're reaching a point where Weingarten calls me one day -- and we're doing ads in the Times, and Marty Solow, who was writing the ads, you know, we've got people working on all levels. It's crazy.
And Weingarten calls one day and he says, "Moe, there's a very decisive board meeting tomorrow morning. If for some way you can an editorial in the Times tomorrow morning, the board is very close. We’re split. It could not hurt."
I go to Evans Clark and I say, "I've got to ask you now to do something that I've never asked you before." And I tell him there's a need for an editorial tomorrow. This is in the afternoon. And that morning there is an editorial.
You know, you reach a point where you get satiated on the thing so that people are beginning to say, "What are these guys doing? Who are these guys? What influence they’ve got." We're getting radio debates. I remember--who's the attorney 1968, in Chicago?
Q: Kuntsler.
Foner: Bill Kuntsler is a reporter-commentator for WMCA. I remember him sitting in my office doing a debate, doing our side of the debate with a tape recorder, for WMCA on the hospital thing. All I'm saying is that it's that grab by the collar, conscience, conscience, good versus evil. How can you not be for this? Now, we did it in Montefiore. It went to incredible heights after that, before the '59 strike.
Q: When was Montefiore?
Foner: '58. Election in December of 1958, when we won the election, ninety percent, contract negotiated, first contract negotiated. Cherkasky says to Davis, "I'd like you to come to my office on Saturday, just you and Moe, and we'll sign the contract." And we go.
And I had called Evans Clark beforehand, and he says to me, "You know, Saturday I'm in charge of the editorial page. Call me before 1:00 if you sign and let me know."
And so in front of Cherkasky and Weingarten, I get on the phone with Evans Clark and I tell him that the contract was signed, and he says to me, "Are there names of people who we should mention?"
And I say, "Yes. You should mention obviously Leon Davis and Martin Cherkasky, and it's spelled with one S." And I hang uip.
And Cherkasky looks at Davis and he says, "What do you pay this guy?"
So Davis says, "He gets sixty dollars a week."
He says, "Yeah?" He says, "Could he come here?" You know, it was this network. Because as you move, you begin to know more people. You get credibility.
Q: So what you're saying is essentially it was a lesson that was learned.
Foner: I didn't know how to do it.
Q: In organizing Montefiore.
Foner: In organizing hospital workers.
Q: Right.
Foner: It was learned in organizing hospital workers.
Q: I had a sense, when we first started talking, when we were driving to the city and so forth, that it was something that you had sort of cultivated for decades.
Foner: Well, 1958, it's a long time since then.
Q: I always thought that this is really, to tie in back chronologically, and we might as well talk about it now as well as any time else, that earlier radical experiences embraced such a broad spectrum of people and that so many of these people went on to some other different things, that you had an opportunity to have relationships with such a broad group of people that made possible -- I'm not saying that was it alone -- but it played a certain role.
Foner: I'll tell you the role it played. It didn't teach me how to do PR. That you learn yourself, and in the process of learning, you learn from a lot of people, too. What it taught me was how to work in a broad united front basis, how to see things that way, broadly, to see things that way. That’ss the key. That's the key. And I have always -- sometimes people will say, "You're too broad."
And I say, "You can't be too broad on these things." See, I would say that on Vietnam, we should not identify with the left position on this, a broader approach in the labor leadership. If those of us who want to identify should identify, but don't bring the organization into it. You'll hurt it that way because there's enough problems that you have. Be broad on it. Everything, be broad.
In '59, you see, the networking also is valuable, and people that you knew or got to know, or you'll see a name and you'll say, "Where did I see that name?" And you'd find a way of getting to him. Or I get to know Stanley Levison, and I can't at this moment remember how I got to know Stanley Levison. Oh, I know what it was, the Youth March of [A. Philip] Randolph.
Q: Not the '41 civil rights march.
Foner: Not the '41 civil rights march. In '59 I got to know Randolph very, very well. Not the '41 one, no. Later on there was a march for some kind of youth march that Randolph was involved in, and Stanley and Bayard [Rustin] were involved in it. That's where I went to a meeting and I met them. Then I heard that Stanley was close to [Martin Luther] King, and I would see Stanley and I'd see people who knew Stanley, and so I went to Stanley and I told him what we were doing, and Stanley had a great love for labor. He always would write things for King about labor, and he'd say, "Gee, Martin ought to meet you."
I'd say, "That's great."
He said, "Okay." Then one day he said, "Look, I want you to come with me. Martin's going to be here." And we talked about what we were doing. He was impressed with what we were doing. It ended up with I could use his name and check anything I wanted from him with Stanley. And so that I would call Stanley and I'd say, "Stanley, this is what we need." There was always a long pause.
"Uh-huh. Uh-huh." I'm talking and talking and talking. "Uh-huh, uh-huh." And there's a long pause. "Well, that's not a bad idea."
"So what do I do?"
"Why don't you draft something and send it over to me." After a while it was, "Why don't you draft something and call it in to me?" And then he’d say, "Okay." So I was really able to get King to react to things.
Q: And it was from this connection with Levison that goes back.
Foner: So all these things worked, so you could get a situation where we're fighting in Albany for a thing, and Rockefeller's people were saying, "You know, we got a call from Martin Luther King today."
I’d say, "I know."
Then the same thing with Randolph and Bayard. I got to know Bayard, and Bayard worked full-time with us, with Norman Hill and Rochelle Horowitz and Tom Kahn.
Q: Let's hold those until later.
Foner: Okay. Where are we now?
Q: Wherever we are, we are. If you want to get going, we’ll get going? We didn't get much progress chronologically. We got from 1933 to 1938, and we got off on this question of good and evil, so to speak. It was a very Nietzchean evening.
Foner: Yes. What do you need?
Q: I guess what I wanted to ask was just more about that period.
Foner: Which period?
Q: We're talking now, mid- to late-Thirties. What were you doing? I know it's going from the sublime to the mundane.
Foner: Okay. I’m at City College. Okay. I have some notes that are important of that period. My brothers are now, Phil particularly is very closely involved with labor.
Q: Through these CIO contacts?
Foner: CIO and in New York and all kinds of things. He's teaching school.
Q: He's already got a Ph.D. in history?
Foner: Yes. He starts teaching in '37. But by '38, they're radicalized, in '40, they're radicalized, and they're teaching already, and I'm beginning to pull from watching Phil and reading his notes and reading his stuff. So I'm capable of teaching a course in the History of American labor, the Role of Women, and the Role of Negroes in American labor. Through some strange reason, there are people I know who are in the Department Store Union, and I'm asked to come to teach classes for the Gimbel's local, the Local 2, the Local 1-S, Macy local. This must be '39, '40. They're mostly women. They want to have classes and they heard that I can teach a class, so I could, gladly. So I begin to teach and prepare to teach, so I teach classes. I get to know people in those unions. That's how I got to know people in the Department Store Union. That's my first job.
Q: You went to work later, though.
Foner: Later on, but they knew me.
Q: They knew you.
Foner: They knew me.
Q: What was the labor movement? You don't really know that much about the labor movement at this point. You have a limited contact?
Foner: I had no direct contact. I know it only from what I read.
Q: You were still at this point, making a living at City College.
Foner: Yes.
Q: How long did that last?
Foner: It lasted until Rapp-Coudert, which is '41.
Q: So really there's a unity to this period for you from, say, '37, '38, '39, '40, '41?
Foner: It’s either '40 or '41, Rapp-Coudert. I can't remember.
Q: Well, we'll figure that out next time. But you're working at City College.
Foner: Yes, and I'm doing this kind of stuff on the side.
Q: Teaching class. Any other things that stand out from that period, '38, when the defeat comes in Spain? Do you have a memory of that?
Foner: Just, "We will not be defeated. Workers United will never be defeated," except when they're defeated. That’s right. Yeah, it's a big, big blow, and then Hitler's moving already, so that he was saying, "I told you so. What did we tell you?" You have to fight Roosevelt, and you have to be careful how you fight Roosevelt.
Q: But that is '39?
Foner: No, the quarantine, you know, Spain lifting the embargo.
Q: Right, right. What was your opinion, if you had any then, of the New Deal?
Foner: Great.
Q: The masses will vote for Roosevelt. Do you remember anything in this period about the American Labor Party?
Foner: Of course. There's the American Labor Party there. There was an American Labor Party and there were splits in the labor party. There was unity because the unions were in there, in the Labor Party, and Sidney Hillman. But I remember the Labor Party mostly in the neighborhood.
Q: What role did it play?
Foner: It was an important political force. I didn't work with it on a day to day, but in elections we worked to help get the vote. Also this is a period when communists were running candidates for City Council and electing them.
Q: Who?
Foner: Peter Cacchione in Brooklyn.
Q: Did he run this early?
Foner: You have to put a year on these things. Ben Davis, Peter Cacchione. I don't know the year.
Q: 1938.
Foner: Probably about '38. But then [Mike] Quill is first elected as a labor party candidate for the City Council.
Q: I think we should stop now.
Foner: Yes.
[END OF SESSION]