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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

trained organizers to work would tend to be better organized as institutions -- you know, after they got their contract -- than places where they were being built from the ground up by people who didn't know 1199. We would take people and bring them in from outside. “Come to 1199, spend a month seeing how we work.” But you're also beginning to deal with non-black workers in more of the American heartland where the traditions were different, where people were not so together in a community. There you found peculiar kind of things happening. For example, we had it as a given that there had to be a guild division, a hospital division, because they couldn't work together because of all kinds of class and other kinds of differences. We found that in some small towns, that was wrong! Because in the town, everybody knew each other! So there was no problem of the nurse, or the clerical worker, working together with the service worker -- they all knew each other, they were friendly. Also there wasn't a race question. Invariably those were places where they were all white.

Where it was black and white there became another phase of it -- the guild. There was always a feeling that you had to develop special approaches for guild people, nurses. We tried as best we could to learn these things, you know. Remember we had no experience with registered nurses. But it was Davis' ability to think through that the union could not be successful unless you had everybody in the hospital in one union. So that years before he was already thinking of organizing nurses. At a time when I was pledging with my blood to the American Nurses Association, “You have nothing to fear from us!” [laughs] In Davis' mind he already had his mind to go after them.

Q:

But you didn't really answer the question of the level of activity in the new areas of the national union, the level of commitment.

Foner:

It varies, and here leadership plays a very key role. In West Virginia, for example, where we are not very very large -- we may be like four or five thousand members. They have gone through the most bitter strikes imaginable, make 1199 strikes look like tea parties. These are places where there is a tradition in the town. There are traditions from the miners. These are from families of miners. So that we've had strikes where guns are all over the place. To New York that's crazy, but to them it's not. [Phone rings. Tape stops and starts.]

In New Jersey, where we had a leadership that came from 1199 -- but they came from [District] 65, really -- Aberdeen David. He died recently. He died about a year ago. A very nice guy but not the most effective leader. Always very very cautious of being threatened by others around him, and always being very very careful. They never





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