Oral History Research Office
Columbia University

Q: We're going to start by clarifying some of the chronology which came up in the last interview. So Moe, do you want to run through those dates?

Foner: Yes. I was married in 1941, December. I joined the staff of Local 1250 and 5, the Department Store Union, on February 11, 1947. I continued with 1250 and 5 until it was absorbed into Local 65 on February 6, 1950, and remained with 65 until September 1952. Late in September 1952, September 26, I joined the staff of 1199 and remained there until I retired in November of 1982. I continued from November 1982 to 1983 as the executive secretary of the National Hospital Union and remain until this day as an emeritus of the National Hospital Union, and continue the position I've had since 1978 as the executive director of Bread and Roses.

Q: We left off at a sort of confusing welter of facts.

Foner: Where?

Q: We were just getting into the whole question of your experience in 1250. You talked about "Thursdays 'Til Nine." We were getting ready to talk about the splits inside of 65. I would like to backtrack a little bit and ask a couple of questions. The thing I was really wondering about was the impact of activities like "Thursdays 'Til Nine" on the membership. Could you talk in a more general way about the importance of those kinds of cultural activities in building the labor movement and also sort of the general relationship of culture to the labor movement, because obviously that becomes the theme of your entire career.

Foner: In the Department Store Union, culture did not play a very important role. As a matter of fact, "Thursdays 'Til Nine" was the major thing, although it was a very, very big event and required about a year of preparation. Its impact was an entertainment and personal pride kind of thing. Remember that it was performed for four nights. I would say in excess of 6,000 people attended. They had to purchase tickets.

Q: Primarily members?

Foner: Primarily members, yes, union members. Now, the entire Department Store Union at that time may have been around eighteen, twenty thousand members at most, all of the Department Store Union. So that kind of turnout is very, very high. We did not really get much deeper than the show. We did not follow it up. We were then running into a period of great difficulty for the unions--Taft-Hartley, the attack on the left -- so the union was just trying to fend off attack after attack. These attacks came from government, they came from other unions. In the Department Store Union's case, they came from the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Clothing Workers who were given the jurisdiction by the CIO to go after department stores. So they, working hand in glove with management, went after us and tried to decertify. There were representational elections and that kind of thing. In answer to your question, culture and arts didn't play a very dominant role, but it could have played a much bigger role in a bigger union. One of the problems you have with cultural programming is that it requires a large base to select people, to involve them in activities, and for them to perform for other people, so they have to have a large membership to perform for. But it was a beginning, and 65, which had had its own experiences with cultural activities much before I was involved, and they were very formidable experiences that grew out of their own activities, was a natural place for me to land right after the Department Stores, to move into that union and to develop activities at that time there.

Q: At the time of "Thursdays 'Til Nine" and later, did you have a particular concept that motivated your attempt to bring together culture in the labor movement?

Foner: At the beginning it was not out of a philosophical approach, but it was something that we did all the time. For example, you have to think back for a moment. I came out of the student movement which used cultural programming to build the organization. The kind of shows like "Thursdays 'Til Nine" -- "Thursdays" was much more ambitious--were done in the American Student Union on a regular basis every year. Those programs had also been undertaken in the Young Communist League. So it was almost a natural thing for me to expect that in an organization you should do this kind of thing, because there was a good feeling about it. For example, "Thursdays 'Til Nine," you had fifty or more people, members who were working together for six to eight, nine months on a three- or four- and later five-day-a-week. So these people became very, very intimate and very close, and they were doing it under the union auspices. It was almost as if you were to say that you were to run a workshop every night in the week for six or eight months with people in the union. You would be accomplishing a great deal, even though you never have form a program of education per se, but they were living together about the union and enjoying themselves at the same time. It was a great experience, tremendous, like summer camp.

Q: It seems that at that time issues like popular culture versus elite culture were not issues at all in the way that they would be now, because the left does not have deep roots in many ways in the working class, and therefore is not perhaps as easy with popular culture.

Foner: Well, the strains of pop culture were very different then than they are now. There was at that time a great emphasis on dances. The people who were involved in these movements were primarily young people, at least in the unions that I was identified with. Now, there were old people there, you know. Department store unions were notorious in the sense that the membership included people who had come into the stores to work for pin money to spend one or two nights, and they were going to leave and they ended up spending their entire lives there. So that you had these big gradations. You had elderly people to whom the store, a job, was their living. Then you had these young people coming in who looked at the job as something that they were passing through. While they were passing through, they were going to do whatever they wanted to do. They were involved in going to school, they were doing a lot of things at the same time that they were working.

Wages were relatively low. It wasn't considered a very important job on the economic ladder of income, but it had certain benefits that other jobs didn't have. For example, there was a certain glamour for the young people to be in a department store. Also, you got the big discount on shopping, and so a lot of members were always shopping in the store. But, there was a permanent group of people who lived and worked there, and for them it was their lives. But the culture itself, remember, this is a period when to go to a Broadway play was very inexpensive. To go to a movie was a quarter, thirty-five cents. You could get into a Broadway play for fifty cents. That doesn't mean that all these people went to Broadway plays, but it was much more accessible to people.

The other thing is that unions like 65 were notorious in the sense that 65 attempted to become your entire life. When they bought the building, what was then called the Tom Mooney Hall, now 13 Astor, located at 13 Astor Place, they saw it as a center, almost in the tradition of the old labor centers of the Twenties that grew up in various sections of the city. Because they had a young workforce, these were workers, these were largely unskilled workers, they came together. The union became the place where they fought. "Sing while you fight" was the slogan of 65. They would develop union songs about their struggles, and people came to the union. There were meetings going on every night in the week after work. Most of the work force lived and worked in the New York area. Very few people lived outside of Manhattan. Therefore, it was easily accessible from the shop to the union hall.

The union hall had everything going there, not only meetings. They had classes. They even developed a consumer service, where you could shop, and because of the wholesale trade, they were able to buy materials and to sell them at low prices. This also became a thing that encouraged people to come with their families to shop. So there was something rocking in that building all day long--choruses, classes, entertainment, you name it. So that the union was the center of people's lives -- not for everybody, but for a large number of people, a very, very large number of people.

Q: One thing that struck me in talking last time was that when you began to organize these various cultural events and in your own modest performing career, you were hooked up with people who were real cultural figures, especially, for instance, when you talked about the production of "Thursdays 'Til Nine" and the people that you were able to call upon. All these people came out of the "progressive milieu." This is really maybe an elaboration on the questions I've been asking, but was it that the left the youth movement sought to create around itself a cultural retinue, so to speak? Or was it just something that happened and survived the splits and the problems, and there just was more of a sort of progressive cultural milieu than there is now?

Foner: Well, for one thing, the party had great strength among intellectuals. They had strength among youth. They had lesser strength among workers. So you play it where you got it. Now, where you have influence among intellectuals, some were rather important intellectuals who themselves influenced other intellectuals and brought others in. Now, this was true not merely among writers. Remember, this is a period when The New Masses is an important magazine, where, for example, the cartoons -- I'm not merely talking about Art Young and Robert Minor, the editorial cartoonists, but I'm talking about cartoonists who appear in The New Yorker are doing cartoons for The New Masses. You're talking about writers like Albert Maltz, who were writing for The New Masses, Malcolm Cowley, who was in The New Republic, but also writes for the -- It's a very respectable kind of thing. Then because of its influence in the theater, the left had formed a theater union down at 14th Street and would perform plays by communists or left playwrights who were looking for audiences and writing about stevedores, miners, writing about workers. The intellectuals were writing about workers, performing plays about workers for audiences of intellectuals. Very rare that you'd get workers down there. I guess in some cases they did, but you'd get worker intellectuals. You'd get some of the people, who would move in that direction. So that you have audiences developing, and then you had the Group Theater. It’s not communist, but there are communists in the Group Theater. But there is an openness to ideas in that period, so that Broadway, Hollywood, many of the writers then end up in Hollywood, and on the coast there is a contingent that develops around there. We were always familiar with people who were coming in and out from the coast, who had gone to the coast, who were now writing for Hollywood, who were progressives until the Hollywood Ten kind of thing, the same period kind of thing.

I don't know if I've answered your question, but there is a big reservoir of people, activities. Also, progressive writers and playwrights and songwriters and musicians, they're anxious to perform for workers. See, that's a very important thing we got. The fact that 65 is doing programs for workers, you can well imagine how some of the artists felt. "Oh, we're going to do things for the working class." See, it was an opportunity for them to bring their talents to the workers, not that these were basic workers, but we did that. That was something that proved invaluable when the hospital workers came, because via the exploited, downtrodden black, Hispanic workers, women, and black actors and actresses and Hispanic and whites were sympathetic, just as the issue of hospital organizing struck a very responsive cord even among just ordinary people--ordinary people, not merely intellectuals. Because I remember we got television stuff and radio stuff of the stations doing interviews, man on the street, public opinion kinds of things of the hospital workers. It was fascinating to see how they reacted, because we had gotten our message across, and people felt, yes, it's unfair that anybody should be forced to work for so little, and they have a right to have a union. They weren't asking for the moon. So that we were in touch, we were hitting a responsive cord. These people came to help on a good issue. They stayed to do other things. Some developed an identity and closeness to us that continues to this present day.

Q: What, I guess, is a little bit surprising to me is that the whole thing -- that is to say, relationship between these intellectuals and artists and so forth, and the left wasn't more thoroughly exploded by the McCarthy period, because you're talking about, going to work in 65 at the height of McCarthyism.

Foner: Yes, but if you look back, you'll find that the Hollywood situation was a violent attack on actors and actresses. There was the period -- I don't have the years anymore -- but in the Wallace campaign there was a very strong effective utilization of intellectuals and performers, etc., for Wallace I remember--and this hurt her for a long time afterward--Lena Horne with pictures with Paul Robeson.

Q: For Wallace?

Foner: Yes. You see, Robeson played a very important role in the Wallace campaign.

Q: I wasn't aware of that.

Foner: Yes, he went on tours, singing, you know. Yes, he did. Whether it was Lena Horne on the Wallace campaign, but with Robeson, you see, these issues sort of dovetailed and moved in and out. One of the problems I have is trying to fix dates for the things, so that I will make some serious blunders on dates.

Q: Now, you went to work for 1250, you said, in 1947, which was the year that the Taft-Hartley Act was passed. Do you recall the impact of the passage of the act? It was very close. I mean it was almost --

Foner: Yes. I remember outdoor demonstrations on 23rd Street, Madison Square Park. I remember, I think, a rally, may have been at Madison Square Garden. But you had a feeling that it was going to happen, that you couldn't stop it, that it was coming. Now then the question is, what impact. To tell you the truth, since I did not deal with bargaining, it didn't have that kind of impact on me and my work. But it did have impact in terms of the section on communist affidavits. That created a great deal of concern. What are you going to do about this? And how are you going to get the members to approve? I remember that the issue had to come to the membership, they had to vote on whether the people would sign the affidavits, and we campaigned to avoid signing. It was a big deal.

Q: And what about the Wallace campaign? [tape interruption] Wallace campaign.

Foner: Wallace campaign. It must have been shortly--let's me think. When did I come in?

Q: You came in '47.

Foner: February of '47.

Q: And the Wallace campaign was in '48.

Foner: The things I remember about the Wallace campaign was, first, to try to persuade Henry Wallace to run. We had to develop this ground swell, telegrams that had to be put out to him to urge him to run, that kind of thing. So that was the first thing. Now, then you have to separate the campaign -- I’m sorry.

Q: Who generated that? Did it come from the union or from --

Foner: Now, in New York City, there was strong Wallace sentiment and strong support. Remember there had been the American Labor Party, there were communists in the City Council, there were American Labor Party people in the City Council, there were some people in Albany. By the way, you know, 65 elected two assemblymen, a state senator and assemblyman from its ranks in Albany, Kenny Sherbell and Sam Kaplan to the assembly. So there was a base for it, and in a sense, it was very different from America, as New York is most of the time. So that when you campaigned for Wallace in New York City, you were not going into hostile territory. You were running with the tide, to a degree. You weren't a majority, but you were an important force. You had to be listened to, you had to be covered, and you could generate a lot of support. The unions came in, the CIO Council was involved in it -- to what degree I can't remember now, but the local unions were involved in it.

Q: Ultimately, though, the CIO did not back Wallace.

Foner: Oh, no. Absolutely not.

Q: And the Central Labor Council here didn't either.

Foner: No, no, no. They did not, but nevertheless, there were people there who may have moved out of the council and devoted full-time to the Wallace campaign as labor forces. So that's what I remember about the Wallace campaign, and trying to promote support for him among the union members. Remember, at the end the whole bottom fell out because of the Truman thing, but we weren't exactly running huge support for Wallace. This is before -- I'm in 1250 now, 1250 and 5 are essentially conservative members. The Local 5 membership is largely non-Jewish. Stern's Department Store is a Fifth Avenue store, and therefore, it doesn't hire a lot of Jews. Hearn's, most of those, Oppenheimer-Callius, Loeser’s the membership is not Jewish. They're really out of sync with our political views. They're in sync with the union as a union. The union had -- you know, fairly traditional.

Q: Getting back to the Wallace campaign, people still are debating whether the Wallace movement was a major mistake.

Q: Do you think it was?

Foner: It’s hard to say. I don’t think I’ve come to -- At different times I come to different conclusions. On the labor movement I think that the major mistake that took place was in pushing the left forces out of the labor movement, for the left to make it stand around the Marshall Plan and not to try to work out something with the CIO to stay in. That, I think, could have been accomplished, and I think it was a mistake to--you know, you put your head out on the block by doing the things they did.

Q: On the question of the Marshall Plan.

Foner: The Marshall Plan, yes.

Q: What else do you recall about that fight? You weren't really directly involved.

Foner: I wasn't directly involved. But the more I learned about it, the more I concluded in my own mind that it had been a mistake to break from the CIO.

Q: In general in this period--this is really the last of the general questions before we resume with the chronology--there's an increase, obviously, in red-baiting activity in the society in general. In this period you move toward the expulsion of the CIO unions. What are your recollections about that period in terms of the red-baiting and especially in terms of these divisions which are growing in the CIO?

Foner: We on the left had a sense of being isolated, except that we would tend to like put the wagons in a circle kind of thing. You’d get together with your own people, because it's easier and more comfortable to be that way. So we were isolated, no question about it. On the other hand, as you came into 65, even though 65 was having great trouble because of this, and this was the basis for the fight later on, the base was bigger. See, 65 felt the effects of this period, too, but not -- they were able to keep themselves together. They still were a strong, powerful organization, because they were dealing, for the most part, with small employers. See, if you're dealing with a department store, you're dealing with big stuff. If you're dealing with 1199, it's dealing with small drugstore owners who may be united in associations, but you can manage there. But if you're dealing with department stores, you're dealing with more powerful interests, who were not interested so much in live and let live with you.

Q: You went to work for 65 in 1950.

Foner: Yes. See, 1250 was running into real trouble, and it met 65's need to make another merger. See, 65 is a union that grew that way, by absorbing other unions, as well as organizing, but over the years, if you examine 65's history, you'll find a theme that runs right through it, this whole question of working out mergers with other unions.

[Tape interruption] -- I'm into 65, and 1250 is absorbed, it's not clear what I'm supposed to do anymore. It's like 1250 remains as a local, but it's inside 65 and it's no longer a power. Once you unite with them at the beginning, they pay attention to Nick Carnes, but Nick Carnes knows that he's not going to stay for very long in any kind of position of power. One thing about 65 people they make no bones about. They're all sweet talk when they're talking about merger, but that's the story about mergers anyway. The power is what -- it was not clear what I was going to do, but they knew what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to be working out of Union Voice, which was their publication, but to work on education and cultural programming, and social-cultural affairs, and to revive and revitalize what they had been doing. So that's what I started to do.

Q: What kinds of products did you get involved with?

Foner: I have the documents on this. They had a variety group. I think I discussed that. With that variety group I raised the idea of a nightclub.

Q: Right. We talked about that.

Foner: Okay. In the nightclub, we had chorus, we had softball leagues, we had classes -- all kinds of things, a lot of activities -- children's programs, kiddie carnival. And I would at the same time, without knowing anything -- I could write, but I didn't type -- I would write the stories on these activities for the paper, and I operated at a desk with the paper people. Now, the paper people included, at that time, the editor was Irving Baldinger. He's the guy who anonymously reviewed "Thursdays 'Til Nine." On the staff was Bernie Stephens, now retired, later moved to RWDSU Record as the editor and then moved to Public Employee as the editor. I got him that job. Then there was Marty Solow, who was a very, very gifted writer and editor, who is now a big wheel in advertising, who taught me how to put out a paper, when I had to. Some of the people who came over from the merger with the United Office and Professional Workers, I forget the name of the woman, she later went to school and got a Ph.D., very, very advanced in years. They worked on the second floor on the paper. Fortunately or unfortunately, the kind of programs that I was in charge of, everything happened at night, and so you didn't finish at night until 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock at night during the week, and then the weekends were terrible, were just murder. I was excited about it, but for my family -- like, there was agreement that we were saving the world. That was a very, very bad kind of thing. I just want to show you something to see what this is. For example, this is the saturday night club. I found it -- this is the rank and file program, see.

Q: Your handwriting hasn't changed in thirty years.

Foner: I know. These are rank and file programs. Then you have here, then you have here, see, for one thing, in 65 you also learned finances, and that things had to pay for themselves. You thought in terms of cost. You didn't just throw away money at all. That's how I became very penurious. Look at this one. We're looking for performers. Someone gave me this, of the different members. And look at, here.

Q: These people were professional actors, and some of them were professional concert-givers. People who were members?

Foner: Members, yes. I'd ask --

Q: What's New Era?

Foner: It's a shop. It's a direct mail shop. This is the score for the chorus.

Q: This was for Negro History Month, 1951.

Foner: Here is one of the locals in Philadelphia, asking Dave Livingston to get them entertainment for their open house in Philadelphia. This is the income and expenses_____of the night club. I look down here and I see the cost of an average night at a club, license, rent, linen, general supplies, depreciation, $2, miscellaneous, $5, $403_____ cover one night. We would make a profit. But look at the attendance. The attendance was high, but this does not show you. Each area had the tickets. Then at the consumer service there would be public sale to the members generally. Then there's a door sale and there's a total sale. Then there's tickets outstanding, not paid for yet. Ordered food, liquor, cigarettes. Liquor license. Then you have income, profit, October $678, November $1,740.

Q: $1,740 represents the total income?

Foner: Total profit. [tape interruption] Here's the children's program, the kiddie carnival. Number of admissions, door sale, advanced ticket combinations. Very complicated. Oh, you'd go crazy. Advance sale, total income at the door, profit, $188 loss for the year. The show for each program, and see what it was.

Q: These are what years now?

Foner: It's got to be '50, '51. It's got to be the years when I was there. Dance class, first dance class, beginners, advanced, $49.50. Second class, beginners, advanced. It always ends up with a profit or loss. At 65 you'd go crazy. Here, for example, this is the Daily News, Danton Walker, Broadway columnist. "The first worker's nightclub, opening Saturday under the banner of Union Voice, the labor newspaper, in the Panel Room on 13 Astor Place, the club will feature a floor show by union members."

Q: So you got a mention in the Daily News. That's 1949. September 26, 1949.

Foner: Well, let's see. This is the official date that I come in. That's for my pension. Here's the nightclub. This is Dave Livingston. This woman married, she was on the committee, Sue Hart married Cleve Robinson, died several years ago. This was the Treniers, one of the big, hot acts touring the country. I can't remember how I got them, but they came down. They tore the place apart, their own band, dancers, and singers. I don't know what else I've got here.

Q: This is great stuff.

Foner: This would be when? This is 1951, April. Daily News. Let's see what else I have in here. Oh, here. Art exhibit 65, first art exhibit 65. I organized it. These are members art. I remember we had a contest, and the members chose the winner: Jim Lee, a Chinese guy, very realistic kind of artist.

To get back to the situation in 65, we're in the Distributive Trades Council. We're outside the AFL-CIO. We left probably in 1950. We left. We weren't kicked out. We knew what was coming, so in the Distributive Trades, the unions left, walked out. So then we could say we were never expelled; we left.

Q: Now the RW [RWDSU] is in or out?

Foner: It's in. [tape interrupted] See, what's interesting here is that remember, you've got now this being given out by the management, and really the same thing being given out by the RWDSU.

Q: What we're looking at are two very slick pieces of red-baiting literature, two colors, fancily produced, that were distributed at the time of these various fights. So when 1250 comes into 65 in 1950 --

Foner: It's about the time we're all out. We come in and form the Distributive Trades Council. And 1250 gets --

Q: Which is a part of the RWDSU?

Foner: No, no, no, no.

Q: It's independent?

Foner: It's independent. We're independent. 1250 maintains its number.

Q: From the RW?

Foner: As independent.

[Begin Tape 5, Side 2]

Foner: After a while--I don't have the dates on this--there is a department store council inside there, but the numbers now are erased, and it’s you're just part of 65.

Q: And 65 is independent?

Foner: Is independent, yes.

Q: It had left before 1250 comes in?

Foner: They all left at the same time. They worked together. Whether they left before I came in, it's hard for me to say.

Q: What's happening here, explain exactly, the RW --

Foner: The RW is attempting to take the members back from the locals they're with and to stay with the CIO. They do it by administering trusteeships. In each case, the trustees are not permitted by the workers to even come into the headquarters, so the trustees have to operate from the offices of the RWDSU. The unions secede, and they're independent.

Q: Okay. So that's at the point when the 1250 had left. Okay.

Foner: Yes.

Q: So now we're coming to the period where there come to be divisions inside of 65. What I had asked you to talk about a little bit was describe the character of 65, if you have any more to add on that.

Foner: Well, to me, 65 was a big eye-opener. I had never seen a union like that, of that size, capable of doing so many different things, and whose leaders were very, very sharp and able people. I, to this day, believe that much, if not most, of what I know of labor, I learned in 65. If you attended staff meetings led by Arthur Osman, president and founder of 65, you could not help --if your pores were open, you would learn a great deal of how to run a union and how to work at a union and how to involve workers in activities in the program. It was really an eye-opener to listen. They had a lot of pluses, a tremendous amount of pluses of what they did. They also had an enormous amount of minuses. I think that the pluses far outweigh the minuses. They were a very democratic, centralized union. The leadership came from the ranks. They involved a lot of people. They had delegate structures, stewards meeting every month, and a lot of people were involved in making decisions or in hearing the decisions and discussing the decisions, in carrying out decisions. The organizers worked their ass off and were proud, and they admired, respected, and feared the leaders. They were afraid of them, and yet they loved them. They were afraid that they would be and they were criticized left and right. They would be really chewed out all the time, and yet they busted their chops for the union. As a matter of fact, before I left, I remember that--I knew Davis -- if you look at the nightclub things, 1199 had two nights at the 65 nightclub, and so they knew me. But when the battle inside 65 was taking place, Davis, who lives in Flushing, Davis' daughter, his younger daughter Lee, and my older daughter, Nancy -- [telephone interruption] Our daughters were attending the same Jewish Sunday School. I like to refer to -- that that's a Sunday School, where you learned about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Right here in Bayside, not far from here, a storefront, a shula. They attended the same class, and I'd see him come by. I’d bring Nancy, and he’d say, "Why don't we walk around?" And he would ask me every Sunday, "What's happening in 65?" And I would talk to him about 65. That's how we got to know each other. So that when I told him I was going to leave.

He said, "Where are you going to go?"

I said, "I don't know."

"What are you going to do?"

I said, "I don't know. Someone told me that I should learn typesetting and printing, that maybe they can get me a job as a printer."

Q: The honorable old left profession.

Foner: That's right. Then one day he said to me, "How would you like to come to work for us?"

I said, "Work for you? You don't have enough money to pay a person like me. Not in the amount of money that -- you don't need a full-time person to do what I do."

He said, "Well, listen. You could put out the magazine, you can do this."

Then one day he said to me, "How much do you make?"

I said, "Well, I make sixty-five dollars."

He said, "Okay, we can pay it." When I come there, I find out everybody is getting like eighty dollars. But, anyway, so that's what happened.

Q: You were in the middle of detailing the pluses and the minuses of 65, that it would involve the membership on the one hand, but was fundamentally undemocratic on the other.

Foner: When I came and I was there, it was a time when they had already merged with the United Office and Professional Workers and the Distributing Processing and Office Workers, the DPO from the South, in Savannah, in Norfolk, and a couple of places in the South. The UOP was here. They were unable to withstand the attacks, and so it was discussed, the question of merging, with them. They merged. And what was supposed to have been a merger of equals became quickly -- Not only that, but Osman and Livingston thought nothing of every Saturday going after the leaders of the locals, to show how little they knew and how they had messed up everything and how they were faced with all the problems.

Q: In the staff meetings?

Foner: In the staff meetings. It was really merciless, merciless. There were some people in the staff from UOP who like to argue with them. And, boy, did they get it. One of them is now what is his name, he's at Brooklyn Jewish, you've heard his name, he is a great talker, Mark Tarail, he's a vice president of Brooklyn Jewish Hospital -- Jim Durkin, who was the president of UOP. It was a sad kind of thing to see this happening.

Q: Why did they do that? A power trip?

Foner: It was a power trip, but also they had messed up on so many things, and they were trying to defend their positions. So you could not defend yourself. If you said, "Okay, you’re right and I’m wrong," it would be one thing, but you started to come back at them, oh, boy, it was bad.

Q: Okay. So now you were going to describe the genesis and development of issues in the union.

Foner: The problem we got down to, at the bottom of it was the fact that Arthur Osman decided that it was going to be very, very difficult for his union to remain independent for a long, long time, and that he foresaw a time when the left unions would have to come back to the CIO, because they could not stand up on their own. He was one of the early people to push to go back, and so he began to have private talks with CIO people about coming back. So he was setting the groundwork for coming back. As part of setting the groundwork, you had to show that you were no longer communist. So little things he was doing and saying and writing to indicate criticism of communists, etc. To the party the CIO is the enemy. Stay out. We can maintain ourselves and grow and stay out. Osman decides to go back. He really precedes the other unions to go back. Some wait, and they’re destroyed in the process.

Q: Like Mine Mill.

Foner: Mine Mill. Some wait, furriers, and when they have to go back, they are shadows, hardly anything left. In other words, in a sense he was farsighted to see that it was possible to get back.

Q: Did they point to the UE, for instance, as being the vanguard of the independent unions at the time?

Foner: The UE was never going to go back. In history, they never did go back. They felt that they could withstand it. When deals were being made--and I use the word loosely--to go back and get in, and people were talking about mergers, come back in like, for instance, we went back into the Retail Wholesale Department Store Union.

Q: And stayed.

Foner: And stayed. We got some concessions. One concession was the window, the right to secede. If we don't like it, we can get out. There were discussions and offers to the UE to come back. As a matter of fact, sections of the UE went in.

Q: To the IUE.

Foner: To the IUE. It was impossible to get the UE in, because I don't think that Matles and Emspak were ever going to go back. They had their own reasons, they were political, theoretical, and personal. But the union was being chopped into bits. It was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It kept losing and losing and losing. So it decided to remain as a small outfit. Everybody else went back. Many of them went back later, and they went back as shadows. We went back.

Q: "We" being District 65, you're talking about?

Foner: 65, 1199, you know, the Distributive Trades Council. They all went back together, went back holding their own and being able to stand inside that new situation on your own, but having the CIO label again.

Q: Why was it so important to have the CIO label?

Foner: Couldn't organize. Raids. You spent all your time being raided.

Q: So that the red-baiting of the CIO and the society in general was quite effective.

Foner: Of course, it was effective. To say it wasn't is looking at things on its head. Obviously it was effective. If it wasn't effective, no one would have gone back. We were running against the tide.

Foner: I personally think that Arthur and David knew that it was in their interest. They're weren't unhappy about an internal conflict, that it would be helpful to them.

Q: In what way?

Foner: Gave them the whole coloration. "Look who's attacking us." See, it wasn't easy for them get back in. They had to make certain concessions. People were saying, "They're still communists." That kind of thing.

Q: And you basically agreed with Osman?

Foner: I agreed with Osman. Davis agreed and came back, too, but Davis never went into this violent anti-communist stuff, although he was critical of the party, too, on this thing. But you didn't have in 1199 this same kind of open blood bath, because he convinced the 1199 party people that this was the right to do, and the party did not fight it then. The store workers went back. Bill Michaelson was then head of the store workers and played an important role in the union until he split. He and Dave Livingston couldn't get along, so he took the store workers out into a separate local of the RW.

As for me they stripped me of my positions, my activities, in the sense that because I was not gung-ho for them, I should not be permitted to remain in active roles, so other people began to take over things that I was doing. They never said to me, "We're going to fire you." There was an agreement, "You'll have to leave at some time, and you can work out with us when you want to leave." I was sort of in limbo, when suddenly along comes the thing from 1199. They knew exactly what's happening, because I'd been in touch with them all the time.

So I come to them and say, "I'm going to 1199." And they say, "Good. Go. It's all right."

Q: What kind of terms did you leave Livingston and Osman on?

Foner: Not angry. We were not buddies. They knew that I was opposed. Bernie Stephens stayed, remember, and yet we were very, very close friends. So we could remain friends. But the strangest thing about it all is that later on, after we get into the hospitals and Livingston begins to play a role in the hospital thing, because he was in the hospital during the ’59 strike. I'll get to that later. But Davis and Livingston and I would spend a lot of time together. Livingston one day said, "Biggest mistake we ever made was to let him go." [telephone interruption] By this time, the 1959 strike and again in '62, we're very, very much in the news. We're in the headlines. W're big, big news. If there's anything that David Livingston wants, is to be in the news. And to see this happening, there but for the grace of God. But we have a very good relationship now, although I haven't spoken with him in a number of months. Until recently, every six months, "You promised me that when you were going to become a consultant, that you were going to find some time to be a consultant for us." And I kept putting him off.

Q: Following this split, there was, I gather, a big campaign to kick out all the communists from 65?

Foner: Staff people. Stewards. You pushed them aside. Later on, the breach was healed, but it left a lot of very, very, very bitter feelings. It was a tough period, very tough period.

Q: Now, to go back to sort of general history and things going on, this is already the period of the Smith Act trials, the Rosenbergs? Just getting close. The Rosenbergs were executed in '53.

Foner: In '53, I'm already in 1199.

Q: Right, but the trial and everything was going on.

Foner: Yes. Yes, it's going on during this period. See, this is all going on in the background of this battle, so you can see it's not exactly the most conducive period for unions to grow. You had to just tuck your head in and see if you can live. And people like Livingston and Osman, they did not see unions as defensive things that you would hang into a corner and pull in your horns. If there's anything I learned from Arthur Osman, it is that you must give workers impossible tasks. You must constantly be organizing, because if theunion does not organize, it is going to start contemplating itself, and you're going to end up with people fighting each other inside the union.

Q: Were you very sad to leave 65?

Foner: By the time I left, I was sad to leave 65. I had a lot of very, very good experiences there. But on the other hand, it also was difficult to work with some of the people like Livingston. By this time, Osman was--no, Osman was still there. They were difficult. But it was sad. I didn't know where I was going, that was the big point, but I was young yet, still young.

Q: So now we get to 1199. Why don't you begin by describing the character of 1199 and your initial impressions of Leon Davis.

Foner: 1199 at that time was continuing in the mold of what it had been formed as. It was formed in '32 as a Union of Retail Drugstore Workers. It was formed as an industrial union. It was formed by a small handful of people, including Leon Davis, who met down on Chamber Street to unite with other groups who had been talking for years about the need to have a union of drugstore workers, pharmacists, a guild. They didn't know what they were going to call it. So they formed a Pharmacists Union of Greater New York. It was an independent union, and they had no money, they had nothing. They went around, and they tried to organize drugstores. The important thing about it is that the drugstore field at that time, the retail drugstore field, is a field in which the average establishment is one-and-a-half workers. The pharmacist or the clerk, whoever works, works directly side by side with the boss, which makes it very difficult to organize. But in '32, it's the height of the Depression. Most pharmacists were out of work. Those who worked earned twenty-five cents or fifty cents a day and didn't have work. So there were a lot of unemployed pharmacists looking for something to do, and so they tried to mobilize those people. They had a number of strikes, they had an important strike in the Bronx, and they had strikes in different boroughs. Gradually very, very difficult, they got contracts. They were accused of being communists from the very beginning, and some of them were. Most were not. There were socialists and communists. They spent a lot of time in the early days fighting among themselves, political questions. What was interesting is that the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York was formed as an industrial union. That is to say that if there was a porter in the store, they organized in the same union. I think you know what that meant. You also are organizing a union of professionals and non-professionals. These things are things that are to play a very important role with this union later on and to provide experiences that are very, very valuable to the union. They also build a structure where they base themselves on stewards, although the current structure of the union stems from Davis' association with those meetings at 65. Delegate assemblies, 65 assemblies, with a steward for every so many people, etc. Davis is the first full-time organizer in '36 at ten dollars a week. By the time I arrived, the union is a union of 5,000 members, very well-respected in labor union circles, although small, very, very much respected by the bosses, had won important economic gains, and had a strong union. It was nothing like 65 in the sense of the kind of activity, you know. But there, there were still things happening at night, but not on same way as 65.

So I come in and I am to organize social, cultural, educational programs and to put out the magazine, about which I know from nothing. I don't know how to type, and Davis says, We have somebody. We give a stipend. We have a free-lancer who puts out the magazine, so you'll take it over from him, and they have a magazine that's sixteen pages on glossy paper, they used a two-color cover. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, and I go, and I am typing with two fingers, I'm writing stories in longhand. Marty Solow, who by the time is in advertising, lives out in the Island, says, "I'll help you. You come out to my house with the stories, and I'll go over it. I'll show you how we do it." And Stanley Glaubach says, "Don't worry. I'll be the designer." You know, after a while I'm learning how to put out a publication, and it becomes a very much better publication because I have access to people like that. Also, my imagination, you know, ideas and things, what you do with it.

At the beginning, I'm doing things like classes and there are cultural programs, right away, cultural programs. I go to my friend, Mady Lee, Jack Gilford's wife, whom I knew from the student movement, and Will Lee, who died recently, who ended up on "Sesame Street," a very fine actor and very wonderful guy, and I say to them, "I'm now in this union. I'm doing this thing. Maybe you can help me."

And they say, "Sure, we'll help you." And they both at different meetings say, "There's a couple you've got to meet. He's working in the post office now. His name is Ossie Davis, and his wife is Ruby Dee. You ought to get to meet them."

And I get to meet Ossie and Ruby, and before long, Ossie and Ruby are coming to do things for us.

Q: How did you meet them?

Foner: I called them up. They had worked with Will Lee and Jack Gilford in "The World of Shalom Aleichem" that had been produced at that time, that Howard De Silva directed. So Ossie was the stage manager, and Ruby was one of the avenging angels. So they knew each other from that period. So I said, "Oh, them, they're great. What do you want?" And I tell them. "Sure, we'll do it."

So I'm doing things like we have a Sunday night film series and we have one night a Chaplin series, and I get -- What is his name, he's dead now, but I know it -- Sidney Meyers. He made a very important documentary film, "The Savage Eye," something like that. He is an expert on Chaplin, and he tells me, "Do Chaplin films." I get "Nothing but a Man." We show "Nothing but a Man." You know, select films, and we do them on Sunday. And after if there's a social, serve tea and cookies. Then a series of lecture discussions, I get a psychiatrist who will talk on something and someone else will talk on something else. So we involve people.

I remember the first meeting of the rank and file committee, and so I ask Les Pine, who is the stand-up comic and writer, very clever, I said, "Les, will you come to this meeting and do your routine? Do your routine on the drugstore." He had a routine about drugstores. He comes in this darkened room and he does this routine, and it like falls on deaf ears. Anyway, but everybody's happy anyway. A guy comes and entertains.

So we do that, we do children's programs, we do a big Christmas kiddie program, a Negro history celebration, Salute to Israel, a Spanish-American night, and a lot of things. For example -- put it off, let me show you some things that I have.

Q: No, we can leave it on while you show. You bruoght a few props there.

Foner: No, in the file I was looking, I found a folder. Look at this. This is April 1957. This is The New York Post. "Union's teen program gets Norse attendance." Someone from Norway came to it. "Members of the Teen Time Committee: Joe Davis and Richie Sharnoff, Moe Foner." Me with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and Alma John.

Now, this is a program of teenagers. We have a headquarters on 50th and Eighth Avenue, right in the neighborhood. What we do is some kid writes a letter to the magazine saying, "You union's do all these social programs. Why don't you do something for the kids?" So I say to Davis, "Let's invite some over here."

He sends his daughter, and we get a couple of active people's daughters and kids in it. We talk, and we decide that we'll do something called Teen Time at 1199, a monthly social. I get Piute Pete's square dances, and we use the records with the dancing on them. We get seventy-five, eighty, a hundred kids, and I bring in a guest star. So we have Tom Ewell, who's then in "The Seven-Year Itch" on Broadway. What's-her-name who did a film recently on the bank strike? She directed it. Remember "The Willmar Seven" when it was done for television? I forget her name. She was married to Arnie Manoff, the writer, that's how I knew her. Lee Grant. That's right. She was performing in a Broadway play, so I got Lee Grant to come, to talk. Ruby Dee comes. I get a guy from the New York Knicks, Slater Martin, to come with the manager or the PR guy. So it creates more excitement. So that continues.

Then on a radio show, Alma John from WWRL, she says she's interviewing Mrs. Roosevelt, so we get there and we take pictures, and we meet Mrs. Roosevelt. So that starts it. Later on I got to meet Mrs. Roosevelt again. So we're doing things that way, and it's a small union, getting a Negro history celebration every year, starting with Ossie. Ossie comes and he decides he will write a living newspaper. You know what that is.

Q: No.

Foner: If that year was the Emmett Till murder case--Emmett Till doesn't mean anything to you?

Q: No, no, it does.

Foner: Okay. So he'll write a dramatization, and then for a week before the program, we announce it. We get a speaker, it will be either Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Ralph Abernathy.

Q: How did you have access to people like that?

Foner: You call somebody, you call somebody, and you call somebody, and you find out, and we'd say we'll make a contribution to this and to that. And so Ossie writes a script. He dramatizes that case. Then for a week before the program, he will come every day with a group of actors and actresses, who will come into the conference room, and they will rehearse it. They will do it as a staged reading, but he's directing it and rehearsing it, and usually a singer with it, whether it's Pete or Bob DeCormier or something, they’re going to do appropriate songs for it. And then Ossie is in--this is before the hospitals. Every year he's doing this and Ruby is coming. Ruby, I remember, comes and does the scenes from "Shalom Aleichem," and we’re doing -- Sidney Poitier is part of it, Will Geer, whoever is around is coming, because of Ossie. One year Ossie is in the musical "Jamaica" with Lena Horne, and that's the year we're beginning to organize hospital workers. So, Ossie, I remember going to him in the dressing room and telling him about the hospital organizing campaign and maybe we should do a dramatization because it would bring hospital workers to it. It's '1958, we're beginning. He starts to dramatize the Montefiore campaign in a living newspaper thing, and who does he bring to narrate it, and we rehearse all day Sunday -- Ricardo Montalban. And there's Ricardo Montalban and Will Lee and Will Geer -- that kind of people, and Bob DeCormier is there. And I remember I'm sitting with Bob, a Sunday, and I'm saying to Bob, "Isn't it wonderful what Ossie will do?"

And Bob says, "There's only one person who would get Ricardo Montalban to give up his Sunday to come and rehearse here." You know he's rehearsing under Ossie's direction to do the thing. "It's Ossie Davis." So you had this kind of thing that's happening.

For example, one year the Negro history program, because "Jamaica" ran for two years, he brings the cast of "Jamaica." Who's in the cast of "Jamaica"? A little kid, Augie Rios, who's a star. He's about eight, nine years old. He could never get Lena. He's getting the singers and the dancers from "Jamaica," and they're doing things. I remember that program we also brought in John Henry Faulk. Mean anything to you?

Q: Not really.

Foner: I saw him last Sunday. John Henry Faulk was a very hot property on CBS Radio, and beginning to get into television. His homespun Texas humor, very funny, very witty, very charming guy. He was very big when the blacklists came, and he was blacklisted. One of the companies started a campaign -- that was a blacklist that they listed in Red Channels, and one of the companies was doing it. John Henry Faulk decided to sue, and John Henry Faulk was represented by Louis Nizer, and John Henry Faulk eventually won the case. It ended up in the Supreme Court. I don't think he ever got a lot of money on it. One of the people who funded his case, because he had to raise money for it from a number of people, Bernard Rapaport, from American Income Life, in Waco, Texas -- was Cora Weiss' mother, Vera Rubin. It must have come from Sam Rubin. They were married at the time. Because at the memorial for Vera, one of the people who came up to speak was John Henry Faulk. He's back in Texas, running a radio show and doing well, doing very well. I hadn't seen him in years. It was just nice. He's very funny, very funny. He tells the story, here’s the kind of the humor, about his coming down to Texas, you know, and he’d talk about the Vietnam War. And "I'm scheduled to speak to this Chamber of Commerce group, and the person who is supposed to introduce [and he started with his Texas drawl] is not there, and so old cousin Elmer is going to do it." Then he digresses to show how anti-communist Cousin Elmer is. He does this broad thing on Cousin Elmer and Lyndon Johnson, etc. Very funny but very pointed. So this Cousin Elmer (it's the wrong name) says, "I'm going to introduce someone you all know, John Henry. There is two things about him I want to say. First, John Henry ain't ever been to the penitentiary, and second, I don't know why." [Laughter] He was very, very funny. And John Henry was delighted to come. He wanted to entertain, and he was blacklisted, and we would provide an audience. So we would provide an audience for a lot of people that way. So we were doing this kind of thing.

Q: How was Ossie so well-connected?

Foner: Ossie was in the theater.

Q: How old was he then?

Foner: Well, Ossie is now probably around sixty-two, sixty-three. So we're talking '52.

Q: He was about thirty.

Foner: Thirty, yes. He was working in the post office. He was also working in "Wisteria Trees." That's where I met him, backstage at City Center. He’s with Helen Hayes in "Wisteria Trees." We become very friendly, and the families get to know each other. We visit at his home. The first time Anne and I go there. He lives in Mount Vernon then. Before we eat, they start saying grace. The first time I've ever been to anything like that. But anyway our kids knew each other, their kids. I remember when Ossie was in "Jamaica," Ruby was still playing opposite Sidney in Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun." And I tell Ossie, "I'm going to see "Raisin" tonight." He says, "Okay, let's get together. We'll get Sidney and Ruby and I, and we'll go out after." This is '59. This is after the strike. The strike is finished already.

Q: We're jumping around a little bit now. That’s okay.

Foner: And I remember we're sitting in this darkened place and Sidney comes in, and we say hello. I knew Sidney. The first thing he says to me, he says, "Moe, I want to apologize. I want to apologize to you. I know I have not been involved with the strike as much as I should have, and I'm sorry. I want to apologize." And he's apologizing to Ossie, too.

So we're doing things like that, and I have other things here, that will--

Q: I think we're going to have to save it, unless you want -- I don't know what to do, because we are really running out --

Foner: Okay, we're running out, but we also had things like the 1199 university. I decided that we would have classes, not only just education, but we decided we'd have cosmetics classes to teach pharmacists how to sell cosmetics, because it's an important thing, so we get the companies to bring in their trainers who train cosmeticians. So cosmeticians are being trained, pharmacists being told how to sell cosmetics.

[END OF SESSION]