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Session:         Page of 592

It was my feeling at a time -- remember, we're in the Sixties. In the Sixties we're getting articles published. I remember that in a very learned publication, Solomon Barkin -- Al Barkin's father, the guy who was the political--

Q:

Al Barkin.

Foner:

Al Barkin's father. Al Barkin was the political action director for 10,000 years in the AFL-CIO.

Q:

I know.

Foner:

Who made the same speech 20,000 times. It drove me crazy listening to him. It was like selling medicine, like a whiskey, like old- time religion. His father was a theoretician. His father wrote an article, that appeared in about 1960 about the crisis in American labor. See, one of the things that happened is by the time we emerged in the hospitals in '59, it's a period when people are talking that the labor unions are in a crisis, it's moribund, it's dying, it's declining.

Q:

Sounds familiar.

Foner:

That's the truth. And we're jumping. Now it's true we're organizing with black and Hispanic workers, a new breed of people who have never been in unions. So they are perfect for this kind of thing. First of all, they're not cynical. They're excited about their union. It's their union. It's a very exciting kind of thing. So that they are anxious to do all kinds of things, and the union is becoming like the church for them. So it's easier to promote the idea of events that you can get them to do, and it also fits in with the strategy. The strategy is to keep everybody busy all the time, organizing, selling tickets, doing this. The organizers begin to get very unhappy about the thing. When I do a series of four theater programs and always sell tickets -- nothing free -- even if it's 75 cents or it's $1, or films.

By the way, we had a film series. We had labor films at that time. We had a Friday night film series, once a month, Sunday night theater programs. And the film series, I remember, included “Salt of the Earth, Sacco and Vanzetti,” the Italian film, “The Battle of Algiers.” They had to be good films that people would react to. We had two film things. It was called 1199 Film Festival. That was in the Reuther Room, that seats like 80, 90 people. Deliberate. We knew that the film thing wouldn't break down the doors of the big hall. So that's it. But the organizers had to sell series tickets, because it's $3 if you buy a series and it's $1 each, you know, and you had the theater things. They were





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