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Session:         Page of 592

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.





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