Rosemary Feurer’s Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 is an exceptionally well-researched history of union activism of the, shall we say, “lower Midwest”, primarily focusing on William Sentner, longtime President of District 8 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. Of course, like all good histories, it does not begin with its subject, but harkens back to the aftermath of the 1877 strike to establish a lineage of industrial organization, especially in St. Louis. In 1900 and through til World War I, the St. Louis Central Trades and Labor Union (CTLU), an AFL local, is dominated by German socialists (primarily in the Brewery Workers Union) who remember the General Strike. They were joined by the Knights of Labor, who, of course, developed a sort of civic reformism alongside their labor positions, along with the Federated Metal Trades Council of STL and Vicinity (FMTC), International Progressive Machinists' Union (who broke with the IAM after the institution of a color bar), Amalgamated Metal Mechanics, and the communistic Workers International Union. Additionally, the Communist Party was strong in the city, especially before the war up until the late 30s, primarily through the organizing of the Unemployed Councils (UC). This lineage is given a more revolutionary cast by Sentner himself, speaking in mid-1935:
"In our District our Party [the Communist Party] is the inheritors of the splendid labor traditions and revolutionary backgrounds as laid by John Brown of Kansas, the correspondents of Marx and early abolitionists in STL and Missouri, and the heroic farmers of Arkansas who led the premature Green-Corn rebellion during the world war in their attempt to turn it into a civil war. Yes, comrades, we can say that we are the inheritors of all that is good in the history of the gateway to the southwest...This is the language and traditions of the workers and the farmers of our district that we must again revive"
The book proceeds along in incredibly fine-grained detail throughout Sentner’s tenure as UE8 President, lavishing detail upon the union’s crusades against St. Louis’ “Big Three” electrical machining plants of Wagner, Emerson, and Century. Of particular note is the 1933 Funsten Nut Company strike, out of which a precedent for St. Louis industrial organizing was born along (relatively) egalitarian racial and gender lines, along with tactics to reach the apolitical emigres from rural Missouri and Ozark who washed up in St. Louis looking for work.
Sentner himself figures prominently – maybe too prominently – in the text. This is undoubtedly due to the availability of his papers to narrate UE8’s actions, which has not seemed to leave much of a material legacy outside of a few idle remarks here and there, likely due to its position as the black sheep of the CIO nationally (due to the preponderance of Communist Party members in leadership positions and concomitant organizational militancy). This resource, along with interviews from UE8 members, has allowed Feurer to create an incredibly detailed account of the political perambulations and pledge drives and sit-down strikes waged over the decades. Of course, there’s a heavy bias; but who cares? If Wagner Electric wanted a better showing in these pages they should have written their own history!
Underneath the minutiae, there is a fascinating throughline of “civic unionism”, roughly in the vein of Charles Payne, Staughton Lynd, and John Buckowczk. Based more or less in Sentner’s simple catechism “human rights over property rights”, civic unionism as a tactic depends on explicit outreach efforts to local groups, citizens, and workers in the city and beyond to assist in the strike, and thereby in winning union demands. The primary examples of this in UE8’s catalog are the sustained actions in Newton, Iowa – a town bought and sold by Maytag – in which UE8 not only assisted the union drive but became embroiled in a protracted war with the company, the police, and state and federal military to break the picket. They were able to win concessions by enlisting the support of nearby miners, farmers, and even Newton’s government and Chamber of Commerce. Dovetailing with this, however, is a rather complex theoretical position, expressed here as a “community wage”. Sentner is recorded speaking obliquely about the concept:
"Have you ever visited the homes of those that work for the Emerson [company?]...Did you ever go down to South Ninth or South Tenth street, to the twelve dollars a month, fourteen dollars a month houses[?] You see, it is just as much to us a civic question as a question of just the Emerson Company...[T]he wages that are established at [the] Emerson Company actually affects the wages...of the whole city"
Contained within the “community wage” is a complex combination of the “social wage” (a phrase I first encountered in Mike Davis’ Prisoners of the American Dream, used to denote services for reproduction which are provided outside the direct wage), the minimal acceptable wage rate considered locally (especially salient in St. Louis given its reputation as a sink for underpaying unskilled southern labor), and finally the historically 'sedimented' wage floor as a benchmark for establishing the contemporary terms of engagement upon which further actions may base themselves. This had, for Sentner and UE8, immediate civic and community importance – a wage increase at one plant could move the goalposts regionally, enhancing demands made in other plants and even other cities; this wage set then became the new wage floor. The ‘social wage’ element is perhaps harder to detect here, though UE8 regularly engaged in agitations for relief as a part of its more general campaigns for worker control and planning in joint councils with management.
The community importance of the community wage posture was most apparent in the “One River, One Plan” initiative adopted by the district with incredibly broad support among like unions and farmer groups, all the way up to Roosevelt himself, to develop a Missouri Valley Authority in the TVA mold. The UE8 understood the importance of developing rational regional planning along the Missouri River not just as an opportunity to win further jobs (re: Sentner’s postwar dream of managed full employment) but as the capacity to utterly remake not just the Midwest but the status of labor: “Sentner…suggested that a postwar world of 'unemployment and chaos, human misery and despair can and will be avoided' only by community-based planning that was part of national planning of postwar conversion and full employment”.
This sadly failed, in favor of the Pick-Sloan Act plan which clumsily balanced Upper Missouri large farmer irrigation interests with Lower Missouri commercial shipping ones. And shortly thereafter, both District 8 and the UE finally succumbed to reaction – another casualty of the anti-communist crusade following World War 2, itself a part of a broader revanchist onslaught of entrainment and labor control in the late 40s and early 50s. By 1955, the UE itself had folded into a new AFL local, and many of its anti-communist wing assumed similar positions in the new union, using their newfound powers to pursue conciliation with employers. At this point, industrial machining was leaving St. Louis altogether, headed to new sinks of reserve labor to exploit.